awakening by jacqui hodder
Six months since the split, a year since I learnt the truth.
My body is no longer a temple to youth, and yet it still yearns for the touch of hands that say with gentle, persistent strokes, you’re worthy, you’re beautiful. Tony’s hands said that once, until it was someone else’s body under his calloused hands.
I don’t know what I resent most: the actual betrayal or the stereotype of an older man with a younger woman played out for all the world to see. I can’t help wondering what the sex is like—is he revitalized by a fresh young body? And her? How can she not be repelled when his rough hands caress her breasts, kneading them with his dirt-rimmed nails. Is the love-making, punctilious, routine? Or was that just with me? I admit I put limits on the sex; there were things I would not do, places I would not go. Is this what he likes about her, a limitless future?
I’ve spent hours trying to make sense of why he left, untangling the knot that bound me to him, him to me, finding in that long slow search for meaning, hints of a deeper truth—that my body was defined by his erratic touch, by his finding me desirable. And how, without it, I’ve plundered depths of doubt I did not know existed. It’s easy to say I won’t be defined by a man, but the doing is a far harder thing.
“We’re vanishing,” Sheila bemoans as we emerge from Linda’s Lingerie on Main Street and are nearly barreled over by a man who shoulders past, looking through us to his companion, waiting by a sports car, lipstick red, dressed in a white mini skirt. ‘No one notices us anymore.”
“Women over 50 shouldn’t wear black,” the owner of SoYou Boutique tells me while Sheila squirms behind.
“Don’t listen,” she says while the owner zeroes in on another customer, “you look fabulous.”
“You should think about a pixie cut,” Brianna, the newest young hairdresser says, as I sit, lassoed in a black cloak, stuck in the chair while she brandishes the scissors, ready to slice.
At home, I gaze in the mirror at the pixie cut lying flat. My attempts to emulate Brianna’s magic blow wave have failed and I am bereft, again. I have no defining features left, they’ve melded into a 50-year old’s patina of yellowing teeth, thinning grey hair, pockmarks and double chins. The Pixie Cut was supposed to be youth-defying. Then why do I still look so old?
I bring my hands back up my body, feeling the weight of the flesh, I turn to the side in the mirror, drawing in my tummy and rolling my shoulders, but try as I might, my body trends forward, unable to find a posture other than this bowed, betrayed woman.
I spin around, a music box dancer pinned to the top of a vanishing stage and see myself as he saw me: breasts sagging, deflated punctured water balloons, hanging loose. Cellulite dimples my thighs, and a tuft of golden pubic hair peeks out, half hidden under the folds of a stomach sunk low from carrying his children. Is this why he left? There’s nothing left here of who I used to be. I am indeed generic—a middle-aged woman positioned into the background, a life track fading out.
Behind me, on the bed that used to be ours, lie my new lace knickers and bra and, as I slide on the black knickers, the mirage of who I was dissolves. I’m no longer married. I’m no longer tied to old fashioned rights and wrongs, not when it comes to my body. The knickers sit flush against my skin, tickling my inner thigh. The lingerie was expensive but I’m glad I allowed myself this luxury. Putting on the black mascara and blush feels redundant but it’s a habit I can’t break. I take the ‘Si’ by Georgio Armani and squirt the sweet essence behind my ears, on the insides of my wrists and between my legs before slipping on the SoYou black dress. It highlights my every curve, but I don’t mind. For once, it feels right.
I run my hands down my body. There’s a unique comfort in knowing who I am under this dress, the sunspots and moles, the sponge-like waistline, the cracks and creases. Knowing myself is power. Tonight I reclaim that power. Tonight I hunger for a touch. There’s a knock at the door. I glance once more in the mirror and see someone I know smiling back. Someone not defined by another. Someone no longer vanishing but appearing. I smooth the dress down, surveying this new woman I have awakened. Then I answer the door.
Jacqueline Hodder is a writer and teacher living in Melbourne, Australia. She has won or placed in numerous short story competitions including the Odyssey House, Nillumbik, and Peter Carey Short Story Awards. Her story 'The Butterfly Effect' was published in the Newcastle Short Story Award Anthology in 2025. More recently Jacqueline was invited to participate in the Melbourne City of Literature's international partnership with Leeuwarden City of Literature to create a chain poem celebrating the flight of the Bar-tailed Godwit
