Being afraid, she lets them-“for no other reason than to buy time.” When the scene concludes, the narrator remains as featureless as she was at the start. Evidently practiced in the language of the Hollywood femme fatale, these girlfriends and mistresses tell the narrator what they themselves long to hear, pitching Ida Lupino, Gloria Grahame, Veronica Lake, Jane Greer, Lizabeth Scott, Ann Todd, Gene Tierney, Jean Simmons, and Alida Valli as equal likenesses. We are one-third of the way through the novel and this is the first we are hearing of the narrator’s appearance. They admire her hair and delight in her cheekbones. They offer her lipstick and chewing gum-and then they offer her flattery: “You look like Joan Bennett in that film Woman in the Window,” they tell her. The women are “paramilitary groupies,” sexual attachments to the nameless Northern Irish city’s “terrorist-renouncers,” and the eddy of local gossip has led them to mistake the narrator for one of their own for being, like them, aroused by “the sound of breaking glass.” The encircling is an overture of friendship. In one of these scenes, the narrator finds herself in the bathroom of a popular club. Some of the most vivid set pieces in Anna Burns’s darkly comic novel Milkman take place in the ladies’ room, those sites of respite and esprit de corps.
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