by Diana Clarke
I ran from the dance floor, from Jason and Lily, their eddying bodies, into the kitchen, and I purged the sixty-calorie vodka soda into the faux–champagne bucket before fainting on the linoleum. My head hit the floor, blood spread quick as a spilled drink. The party, Lily would later tell me, had stopped soon after my demise.
The next day, when I was vulnerable and soft as a newborn, the way a hangover tends to bruise, Lily told me she wouldn’t eat until I did.
“It’s my last resort,” she said. “I don’t know what else to do.”
A final effort to help me be well. A hunger strike, protesting my very personhood.
“Don’t,” I whispered, delighting in the nausea that made me feel as if I could never eat again. “You’re being ridiculous.”
“I’m so scared for you,” she said. “I have to do something. This is all I can think of.”
She stuck to her fast for three days, a valiant effort, before passing out in the shower and splitting her scalp wide open on the ledge that held our shampoo. I whispered her awake, wrapped her sweet bloody head in her towel, and her big naked body in mine.
When she finally woke, my mouth stung with cold. I was used to tasting her emotions by now, and my palate was refined, a Lily connoisseur. This chill on my tongue was fear, and it was as cold as I had ever felt.
“What happened?” she said. “Did you pass out? Are you okay?”
“No, you passed out,” I said. “Your stupid hunger strike. You have to eat something, Lil.”
“Did you eat?” she said. “Have you eaten?”
I said nothing.
“Then I won’t.” And her tone was final.
My gums were numb from cold.
“Okay, okay,” I said. My teeth clacked together like a wind-up toy as I promised her I would seek recovery. I promised and promised and promised. And I meant it, but even as I swore my oath I was tucking my fingers under my rib cage, seeing how far I could bury myself in myself.
“Look,” I say to Kat at the morning’s weigh-in. I hold my hand open, showing her the black disks in my palm, and then I thread each weight onto a string, knot the string into a loop, and use it to ponytail my hair. “See?”
“Where do you get them from?” Kat says, reaching to touch my weighted hairdo.
“Shower curtains,” I whisper, although we’re alone in her room.
“Do you have extras?” she asks, and from my pocket I pull two weights I took, yesterday, from a new curtain.
“Quick,” I say. “We’ve only got five minutes until weigh-in.” Being late to weigh-in results in a body search. The nurses haven’t found the weights in our hair during a search yet, but they’ve discovered our other tricks. Holding balls of rolled bread in our mouths, packing bras with socks like self-conscious pre-teens, chugging water until it sloshes, tidal, inside us.
“Why do you only use them to maintain?” says Kat. “Why don’t you use them to gain, darling, to get out of here?” She says the words easily, and I feel myself blush, as if caught out in a lie. I feel exposed. But, of course, it’s a natural question, it just seems uncanny given my formulation of that very plan just last night.
I watch my shoes to keep my rosiness from her, to keep suspicions at bay.
If I’m really going to do this, I can’t tell any of the others. I don’t want them to follow me. I won’t be responsible for their discharge from this place that is meant to help them survive. Won’t be responsible for their death by starvation on the outside. “Because we do want to recover in the end. We’re just maintaining until we learn how to gain. How to be okay with gaining.”
“Why are you being so nice to me all of a sudden?” Kat asks.
I shrug. “You remind me of someone I used to know.”
She nods. Smiles. “She must’ve been just fabulous.”
“How do you want to be loved?” I say.
“Entirely,” she says.
I nod. Me too.
“I wasn’t always this way, you know, darling.” Kat sighs. “I remember being happy. I remember being healthy. There really was a time when I was worthy of love. The world made me like this. The way I am now. You did.”
“Me?”
“You. My fans. The media. They watched my figure so closely. No one should be that aware of their own body.”
I nod. I know. “The group leader tells us, Your body is only your own.”
Kat blinks. “Do you really believe that?”
I say nothing.
“Do you really think you’ll ever be okay with gaining?” Her voice is so hopeful.
I take Kat’s hand and we start off toward the weigh stations. “I hope so,” I say. “Don’t you?”
Sometimes I wake in the morning, brighter than usual, and I think, Today, I will eat. I think, Others eat every day, every meal. I think, I’ll just do it. I’ll eat today. Sometimes the feeling lasts as long as it takes for a dream to disappear from the mind. Sometimes all the way until breakfast, when the nurses ladle soupy scrambled eggs onto my plate. My new resolution ripples like water in the wind.
I can eat this, I tell myself. I can eat this? I ask myself.
I can’t.
We’re never allowed to know our weights, of course. We’re too fragile to bear that knowledge. The screen that calculates our worth is always turned toward the nurse in charge. She tells us only: gained X pounds, lost X pounds, or maintained. It’s okay, it doesn’t matter that they don’t tell us. Us thin girls measure ourselves in different ways. We measure in hands, like horses. How close are our fingers to circling our thighs? Are our biceps still slight enough to be clutched in a single fist? Can we grip our waists with fingers clasped like a lover’s? We can!
There is an envelope waiting in my room.
R—
I won’t contact you again. I’m so sorry if these letters have been harmful in any way. I know I’ll never be able to apologize enough for how I was, but I really have been trying to change. I miss you and I love you. Maybe I’ll see you again one day.
—M
We heard from Mum just twice a year after she moved out. A Christmas card and a birthday card. One for us to share. Happy birthday, girls. You must be getting big, I’d imagine. Mum.
She friended us on Facebook, which might have been a virtual olive branch, but it felt like a renunciation of her motherhood. We can still be friends is what that notification felt like.
Her Facebook was active. Photos of a new family, complete with children, two little blond girls with tiny button noses and clear skin. She posted photos of them together, smiling, a family portrait, one girl on her knee and one on her new partner’s. They went overseas, to Disneyland, to the Eiffel Tower, to Rome. Happy Family at the Colosseum, said her caption. They were at the Colosseum. They did look happy. I wasn’t mad at her for leaving us behind. She deserved a chance at happiness. A life without the buts.
Lily let me keep them, the cards, tucked into my pillowcase, as if I had the kind of mother who hushed me to sleep at night.
19
The group leader is showing us how to greet our food.
“Eat it?” says Sarah, eyeing up her banana nervously.
“Greet it,” says the group leader, holding an orange at eye level.
“Greet it?” says Kat, who managed to happily gain a half pound at the weigh-in.
“Yes, greet it, like this,” says the leader. “Hello, orange.”
Us thin girls look at one another, our fruit still on the surface of the table.
“Do we have to, darling?” says Kat. “It seems a little—”
“Yes,” says the group leader. “Part of having a healthy relationship with food is learning to converse with it. Interact with your meals.”
“Interact with meals?” I say.
“Yes,” says the leader. “Think about your relationships in life—”
“With humans or fruit?” says Sarah. Then she stops to crack her knuckles, right on three p.m.
“With humans,” says th
e leader. “You would always greet a person, wouldn’t you? If you wanted to have a healthy relationship with them.”
“Of course,” I say, and I’m rewarded with a smile. “Greet people,” I say.
“Exactly, Rose,” says the leader. “And you want a healthy relationship with food, don’t you?”
“I do,” I say. “I do, that’s for sure!”
“Good girl!” says the leader. “So then, you must greet your food.”
I take my peach, hold its fuzzy face in my palms, and lift it to meet my eye. I hold it tight in my fist, and its shape gives. It’s so hard not to feel powerful.
I have to at least give the illusion of improving, recovering, if I’m ever going to con my way out of this place. And so, despite the hungry eyes watching me, I clear my throat, look at my peach, and say, “Hello, peach.”
“Yes!” the leader leaps from her seat, a standing ovation, and I grin up at her, feeling triumphant. She kisses the crown of my head, and I smile and whisper, “Hello, peach. Hello, peach.” It isn’t so hard, having a healthy relationship with food.
As the other girls greet their fruit, I hold mine tight. Then too tight. My nails break the peach’s thin skin, my fingers sink into its guts, and then I’m squeezing and the fruit is destroyed and I’m gripping its pit with all of my might.
“This is an unhealthy relationship,” says the group leader, and she is pointing at me.
Dad wore his sadness like sunscreen, you couldn’t see it, but the odor of it wafted off him in waves. His loneliness was selfish—maybe all loneliness is.
It’s easy to be consumed by one’s suffering. How can I possibly live this day? is how it feels. How can I possibly pretend everything, anything, is normal? That’s what it feels like, too, to smile in the presence of others, to have a conversation, to shower. Pretending. Here I am, you lie to the world, a bad actor in a B-grade indie film: Here I am, human and everything.
Dad wasn’t good at pretending so he stopped. Stopped smiling in the presence of others, having conversations, showering. He seemed smaller.
“We should set him up,” said Lily.
“Set him up?”
“Like on a date.” She was gesturing with her whole body, the way she tended to. “Imagine!” she said, her eyes too wide, smile too wide, too wide, too wide. “Imagine being able to introduce people to both our dads. Two dads! Like a celebrity family, Rosie. Like Neil Patrick Harris and his husband!”
“I don’t think he’s gay,” I said. “He was married to Mum all those years. You think all that was a lie?”
“Well. Not a lie, exactly.”
“Then what?”
Lily was quiet. She raked her fingers through her hair. “You know how we used to go to Sunday school and everyone believed in god, so we believed in god as well?” She spoke quickly. “And how it wasn’t until we looked around at other options, other ideas, until more and more people around us seemed to be atheists, how it wasn’t really until then that we even questioned our beliefs, that we realized that maybe we didn’t believe in god at all, we’d just been surrounded by that idea for so long that it felt like the truth? Like a fact?”
I waited.
“Well, I think it’s like that. Kind of.”
“Being gay is like not believing in god?”
“No. No, just like. Like being a certain way because the people around you are that way even if you’re not really that way. I’m not explaining it well. I just think it’s much easier to be like the people around you.”
The dance is tomorrow night, and us thin girls are allowed to take a bus into town to buy new dresses to wear. Clothes shopping is triggering for many thin girls, so the facility has closed down a shop for us, and they have asked the staff to cover all mirrors.
We are allowed to try on clothing in sizes ten and up, so that nothing can be too small, and we are not allowed to comment on one another’s choices. A girls’ day out!
That morning, I had carefully gained a pound. I stuffed socks into my bra and filled my cheeks with air, an imitation of health. I’d also added an extra weight, hoping to raise my number, but when the nurse said the word: gained, a smile strung across her face, a congratulatory banner, I had to keep from crying.
Back in my bedroom, I unwound my ponytail, slipped the shower curtain weights from the string, and tucked them beneath my mattress. I imagined my sister’s bruised face, whispered, “Lily needs me,” and “Lily needs me,” and “Lily needs me.” And it was a chant and I could do this. I would gain on alternate days, just a pound or half of one, I decided, to keep from being too obvious. I would be released in a matter of days. Lily needs me.
We pull dresses from hangers and inspect their sizes. They needn’t have taken away the small ones, for us thin girls always choose clothing that saturates us. We like to feel like stick-figure girls beneath baggy layers. With so much excess fabric swathed around our bodies, it’s hard to tell whether there’s a body beneath there at all.
Sarah chooses a dress that is tiered as a sport stadium, and when she spins, like a movie girl, air catches under the skirt and fills the fabric and it almost looks as if she is an average teenager, filling out dresses on a shopping day.
Kat opts for a silver suit, so oversized it makes her look childish.
I choose a charcoal sack-like number that flows all the way to the floor. It’s made of satin, and when I move, I feel like molten metal, my body soldered from steel.
“Did I look stupid in it?” Sarah asks as we line up to make our purchases.
“You looked gorgeous, darling,” I say. “I mean, Sarah.”
“I gained a pound,” I tell Lily when she comes to visit. “This morning, a whole pound.”
She’s smoking as I talk, her cigarette noncommittally out the window, its tip spewing ash onto the sill. I watch the embers fall, sometimes caught by the faintest breath of air that sends them skyward, lighter than dust.
“That’s great, baby sister,” says Lily, but her voice slouches. “I lost three.” She stubs her cigarette on the glass pane, leaving a ring of black, and tosses the butt into the garden beneath my room. “Look at us.” She wiggles her finger between our bodies. “We’re gonna be identical again in no time.”
I inhale, count, exhale. “Lily,” I start. “Your dieting—”
“No,” she says. “Don’t say anything. It’s not forever, Rosie. I’m much happier now; I really am.” She folds her hands. “Let’s just have a nice visit, okay?”
Her bruises are fading; they’re an expired green now. I sigh, nod. Soon. I will be discharged soon, helping her in the real world. Feeding her. Saving her. Bringing her back to me. So, instead of protesting further, I open my closet. “Look,” I say. I take the hanger and hold the dress out to Lily, who looks it up and down.
“Try it on for me!” she says, and her excitement spreads like a smell. I smile at her, thinking of Jram, and how we will soon meet in person. How we will fall in love under the dining hall’s temporary disco ball, slow dancing and kissing until our tongues are tied tight together, a knot of muscle, inextricable from each other.
I unbutton my cardigan and Lily hisses through her teeth, she whispers, “Your ribs, Rose.” And I think I detect a lick of desire in her tone. A wanting, which frightens me. I dress myself quickly.
“Beautiful, baby sister,” says Lily when I smooth the gown down my body, swish its hem about my ankles. “You look beautiful.”
“Beautiful enough to make a man fall in love?”
She raises a brow. “A man?” she says. “Which man?”
“Oh.” I shrug. “Just a guy I’ve been seeing.”
“What!” Lily reaches for my hand and pulls me toward her, winding me in like a fish until we’re nose to identical nose. “Who is he?”
“His name,” I pick at my cuticles, “is Jram.”
“Did you say Sam?”
“Jram.”
“Jram?”
“That’s it. Jram.”
“What
is that, Greek?”
I shrug. “Maybe? I think it’s sexy.”
“How’d you two meet?”
“He lives here,” I say. “In the facility, like me.”
“He’s sick?”
“What?”
“I mean,” says Lily, correcting. “I mean, he has an eating disorder, too?”
“Yes.”
“Hm.” Lily sucks her lip into her mouth and begins to chew. I let her feast on herself. “Well,” she says finally. “I’m not sure that it’s such a good idea to see another, you know, another.”
“Another?”
“Someone with an eating disorder.”
“Why?”
“Just . . .” Lily kneads my knuckles with her thumb. “I just worry that you two might, you know, sort of, um, enable each other?”
“Since when has enabling each other been a bad thing in a relationship?”
“You know what I meant, Rosie. I meant enable each other in the other way, in the bad way, as in, he might encourage you to stop eating again, and vice versa. You know? I just think it might be unhealthy.”
“He wants the best for me,” I say. She’s looking at me with sympathy—no, with pity. Her eyebrows crowd together, stitched into a single row. She thinks my love is ridiculous. She thinks I am unworthy of love.
“And anyway.” My mouth is moving ahead of my mind, rolling downhill quickly, and I can’t catch up. “Who are you to give me dating advice? To talk to me about unhealthy relationships? You’re dieting for a man you barely know. You’re letting him hit you. Why would I take relationship counseling from a homewrecker who got herself addicted to smoking for some guy?”
Lily seems to swallow her lip whole. She stands and tucks her hair behind her ears. I can tell she wants to shout, to retaliate. But she won’t. Instead, she retreats from my room, letting the door close too loudly behind her.
