Thin Girls

by Diana Clarke

  Our sisterhood is made up of disagreement and forgiveness. The disagreements are by choice; the forgiveness runs through our veins. We know we can push the other, shove her as far from us as we can, and we know she will pull herself back, reeled in by a strand of DNA.

  We visited Mum only once after she left. The invitation to her fiftieth birthday party came in the mail, pink and rose-scented with a curly font that said CELEBRATE.

  She lived in a townhouse that was attached to about ten other identical townhouses. There was a doormat that said family, and it was the only point of difference between this house and its neighbors.

  Mum opened the door with a flourish but stopped dead upon seeing us standing there, on the porch of her new life. She dropped the doorknob and visibly winced. She had her hair done up in a spidery bun, and her makeup was too heavy, as if painted at a carnival. She’d put on weight, maybe 40 pounds, maybe even 60. She looked good.

  “You came!” she cried, in a voice too high for itself. “Ted!” she shouted over her shoulder. “Ted, come here! Look who came!”

  A short, bearded man came hopping over, his hands clasped and wringing together. “Girls, you made it!” His excitement was genuine, his eyes glinting, cheeks high and stretched in a smile. It was clear who had sent the invitation. “I’m so glad you made it! We’re so glad!” All of the exclamation was making me dizzy. I held Lily’s shoulder.

  “Where’s your father?” said Mum, peering around us as if he might have been crouching behind our backs, waiting to jump out—Surprise!

  “He couldn’t make it,” said Lily.

  “Couldn’t make it,” I echoed.

  “A shame,” said Mum, looking unashamed.

  “Come in, girls,” said Ted, taking my arm, taking Lily’s, guiding us into the house. “You’re every bit as gorgeous as I imagined. Come in. Come in and sit, sit.” He lowered us onto a pair of stools at the kitchen island, set a champagne flute before each of us. “Cheers!” he said. “Mingle!” he said, before backing away. “Make yourselves comfortable!” he called as he was absorbed into the crowd. Somewhere in the commute from the front door to the kitchen, our mother had found a way to disappear. We were not comfortable.

  No one came to speak to us. Lily chugged her glass of champagne and then mine and then another that she found, half-empty and decorated with a crescent of old lipstick. About an hour into the night, our mother came over wearing a tight smile.

  “Girls.” She nodded, as if to an acquaintance in the office.

  “Hey, Mum,” said Lily. “So, how’re things?”

  “Good!” said Mum. “Good, thanks. Things are good. How’re things with you?”

  “Good,” we said with symmetry.

  “Good, great,” said Mum. “Great, great. Anyway, I was just coming over for a refill.” She leaned between Lily and me to take a pair of champagne glasses, then clinked them together with a giggle. “Cheers!” she said. “Oh, and there are snacks over there, Lily,” she said, already retreating. “Don’t snooze on the wontons!”

  It’s the last thing she ever said to us. Don’t snooze on the wontons.

  “She seems happy,” said Lily, a wonton in hand.

  “How can she be happy when Dad is, well . . .”

  “She doesn’t have to suffer with him,” said Lily.

  “She could,” I said. “At least a little.”

  “No,” said Lily, a shake of her head. “She’s choosing happiness. Dad is making the choice to be sad.”

  “No, he isn’t. Why would anyone choose to be sad?”

  Lily shrugged. “Things are complicated.”

  “Wow, Lily,” I said. “Profound.”

  “I just mean that he could be dating. He could get himself a boyfriend, get married, do the happy family thing. He could, if he really wanted to.”

  “If he’s gay, that is. We don’t know.”

  Lily cleared her throat and stood, gestured to the door. “Yes, well,” she said. “Like I said, things are complicated.”

  We left our mother’s party, unnoticed.

  2007 (18 years old—Lily: 191 lbs, Rose: 73 lbs)

  Jemima Gates started bringing me to the mall instead of her other popular friends. Being friends with Jemima Gates made it easier to be human. Her requirements for personality traits in a best friend were so specific and comprehensive that there was no room for any ad-libbing, no room for any Old Rose to show through. Even in private, it helped if I imagined that Jemima was watching me. Alone in my bedroom, I’d flip my hair. I’d roll my eyes at cheesy moments on television shows, raise my eyebrows at Lily’s raised fork. In the back seat of the car, I’d look out the window like a girl from the movies. It was all performative, but I was sure that if I performed Jemima for long enough, the wind might change. I crossed my fingers for a southerly. I’d never felt more normal in my life.

  Lily would watch with a furrowed brow as Jemima shoulder-tapped me during lunch and bent over my shoulder, slim and flimsy as a designer scarf, she whispered invitations in my ear, her lips tacky against my lobes, her cherry gloss sifting up my nose.

  Jemima and I rushed past the food court, breaths held, so afraid of caving, and dipped into stores for grown women to try on dresses we would never buy. Admired our thinness in velvet-curtained changing rooms. She looked good in everything, moved like a liquid. Jemima’s body, which, like mine, had changed lately, her fad diets taking their toll on her chest, her ass. Now, she craned her neck to inspect every angle of herself, all straight lines and sharp angles, it made my own body hurt. And I couldn’t tell whether it was the sting of jealousy or want.

  “Stare much?”

  “Ego much?” It was our little routine, now.

  I counted my day’s calories. Popped a Tic Tac, my drug of choice. Their calories kept me conscious when my body threatened to close up shop. Sometimes I could last on one an hour—that’s a twenty-four-calorie day. Not bad!

  The shop assistants would ooh and aah, thinking we had money to spend. People often mistook our lean figures for wealthy ones. The wealthy are so often thin, are so careful about what they eat, as if they want to be mistaken for hungry. Only some forms of excess are fashionable.

  “I love your arms,” said Jemima, as we examined our bodies in the changing room. “They’re so tiny. And your collarbones!” She ran her fingertips down the ramp of them, loving the parts of me I couldn’t. I clenched my teeth to keep from trembling.

  I would have invited Lily along if we had been speaking. But every time Lily talked to me those days, it was only as an attempt to force some sort of food on me, so I stopped talking to her at all, meeting her questions with silence, her greetings with mere nods.

  We went days without speaking, weeks, and the silence felt permanent. I replaced her companionship with Jemima. She replaced mine with a series of boys.

  Sometimes I locked myself in the bathroom and ran the shower as I spoke to the mirror.

  “Hi,” I would say, facing one way. Then I’d turn to face the other way. “Hi,” I’d say. “How are you?” “Good, how are you?” I’d say. “I miss you.” And I’d say, “I miss you, too.” And it was good to hear the words from Lily’s face, in Lily’s voice.

  During one of our window-shopping excursions, Jemima got caught stealing a snakeskin purse from Gucci. We were taken to mall prison, which was a supply closet with a gate that rolled down as if the jail were just a shut store. A moustached man asked us for our names and our addresses. Jemima said her name was Lindsay Lohan, and the mall cop scribbled it down without an accent of suspicion. I said my name was Lily Winters, because those syllables were all I could muster, like a game of word association, her name was more familiar to me than my own. I hardly introduced myself, but I talked to Lily a million times a day. The problem was that we shared an address, and I reeled that off, too, the world’s worst criminal.

  When I presented my father with the shoplifting ticket, he sighed. My punishment was no dessert for a week. He seemed to have forgo
tten that I had a problem. Forgotten that I wasn’t naturally thin. Forgotten that Lily and I were supposed to be identical. He seemed to forget almost everything but for the exact number of cans of cheap beer in the fridge—that he knew by heart.

  He had picked up a new accounting job and was working long days and going out for longer nights. He would stop home between work and bar, usually, just to remind us he existed, and then disappear again, sometimes until the morning.

  Did I miss my mother? Not really; she’d never been much of one. Did I resent my father? Not really; we all deal with pain in different ways. Eating, starving, drinking. When the pain is too much for the mind, we take it out on the body.

  Long after I had been released from mall jail and banished to bed by my father, Lily got home from school and headed straight for our room and sat on the foot of my bed as I pretended to sleep. She knew, of course, by the taste in her mouth that I was faking it. The flavors of each other dulled when we were unconscious and dreaming.

  “Rosie,” she said. “I’m worried about you, you know. You’re not being yourself.”

  I said nothing.

  “Are you . . .” Lily swallowed, which was my move, not hers. “You’re not, like . . .”

  I already knew what the question would be. Like the world’s most pointless future teller, I always knew what Lily was going to say an instant before she said it.

  “You’re not in love with Jemima Gates, are you?” she whispered, her eyes on my duvet.

  “What?”

  “No one would judge you,” she went on. “For being, you know, like, into girls, I mean. I wouldn’t care.” She wiped her eyes. “And if what you’re doing, the starving thing, is, like, a punishment, you know, you don’t have to punish yourself for being gay.”

  I laughed a cold laugh in the hopes of hiding my hot cheeks, then swallowed her sadness, sour as a winter plum, and said, “You’re just bitter because I’m the better one now.”

  “The better one?” said Lily.

  “You know exactly what I mean.” I turned away from her. “You can’t have two things without comparing them.”

  20

  The group leader is teaching us how to confront our food, but none of us thin girls are paying much attention. We’re all hazy with romantic daydreams of slow dances and tongue kisses. The dance!

  “Come on, girls,” says the leader in her lowest, slowest vocal fry. “Let’s focus.”

  We each hold a single slice of bread, one of the scariest foods. Girls are taught to avoid carbohydrates more than anything. More than strangers on the streets, more than men who let wandering fingers linger on bare shoulders, more than bosses with bulging crotches and office doors that lock.

  “Take your bread,” says our leader, “And give it a pair of eyes. Just like this.” She lifts her slice and jabs her index finger through the bread, one, two, a couple of holes, side by side. “See?” she says. “Confrontation is much easier when you can look them in the eye.”

  We look at one another with superior smirks. Tonight is our night, and we are women. Women going to balls did not make faces from bread!

  “Do we have to?” says Sarah, whose face is already painted in heavy layers of foundation despite the morning hour. It’s too much makeup. Kat did it. She’s been doing girls’ faces all day.

  “Yes,” says the group leader. “Anyone who fails to complete the activity will be uninvited to tonight’s dance.”

  We poke holes in the bread.

  “Now,” says the leader, “lift your bread to meet your eye.”

  We do. She smiles at our obedience. We stare our bread straight in the eyes. Unafraid, then afraid.

  “Now I want you to confront your food,” says the leader.

  “Confront?” Kat says, her face still bare.

  “Yes, confront,” says the leader. “Like this.” She brings the bread closer to her face, closer, closer, and us thin girls hold our breath, for we are sure she is going to take a bite. But then the bread stops, nose to nose with the leader. And the leader says, “Bread. We need to talk.”

  She breaks eye contact with the slice to turn to the group of us. We sit, silent, unmoving.

  Smell the yeast, the bakedness of it. Calories smell like hunger, and my stomach writhes like churning waters, but I need to get out of this facility. I have a greater plan.

  “Bread,” I say to my slice’s eye holes. “We need to talk.” Saliva thickens, lips chap, I fear my mouth, my tongue, that it might attempt to eat. I drop the bread and look at the leader, who is nodding at me, grinning, applauding. As the others confront their bread, I ball mine into a fist.

  At my worst, I wouldn’t use lip balm for fear of accidentally ingesting a lick of it. I quit taking any pills except diet ones, suspecting pharmacies of sneaking calories into their drugs. I couldn’t even brush my teeth in case toothpaste had nutritional content.

  I couldn’t concentrate at school, and my grades plummeted. We went to a school where they had decided to stop using the word fail. After all, it was a public school; we didn’t need any further discouragement from education.

  Instead of letter grades they used thriving, arriving, striving. They equated to A, B, and C. If we ever failed an assignment—that is, if we didn’t make an arriving—we were allowed to repeat the project until we did. The change in terminology did not affect grades in any way. I achieved strivings in every class while Lily, fully nourished and without the distraction of friends, was thriving. Calling something another thing does not make it so. The signifier is not the sign. A duck is not a cat. I was not Lily.

  We get report cards at the facility. Mine says:

  Finishing Meals: Working Toward.

  Cooperating with Nurses: Working Toward.

  Positive Attitude: Working Toward.

  I don’t know what the grade above working toward is.

  Instead of anorectics, they call us survivors; they say we are surviving as if calling it that will make it be, as if we’re not all actively working toward dying.

  A doctor visits as I’m wiping a layer of dust from my desk.

  Dust, says my linguistics book, is a contronym.

  Contronyms are words that have two or more contradictory meanings. For example, dust refers to both the noun and the verb. One, the particles of matter; the other, to discard of those same particles. Another example is the word fast, which can mean both to move quickly, to run fast, or to remain still, stuck fast. Fast can also mean to quit eating. For me, to fast is to move backward. To deteriorate. This means that the word fast is a three-way contronym.

  “Rose, hi,” says the doctor. His name is Dr. Windham, and he is fat. “You’ve been gaining. Haven’t you?”

  I nod.

  “That’s great, honey. Keep this up and we’ll be talking about a discharge date in no time. How does that sound?”

  I smile up at him.

  “Good girl,” he says with a tap of my nose. “See you later, alligator.”

  2007 (18 years old—Lily: 192 lbs, Rose: 72 lbs)

  Jemima Gates was suspended from school for the shoplifting incident. I was excused because I came clean. It wasn’t that I had turned Jemima in; the store had surveillance cameras and Jemima, tiny and miniskirt-clad, stolen purse peeking out from her backpack, was framed in perfect, headshot lighting. Still, she was disappointed in my weakness.

  “I thought you were cool, Rose,” she hissed over the phone. Both of our cell phones had been confiscated, as suggested by the school, but not before we arranged midnight landline check-ins.

  “I am cool.”

  “You told!”

  “They already knew.”

  “You still told.”

  I said nothing.

  She sighed. “Well,” she said, “you know you’re going to have to make it up to me.”

  I held my breath.

  “Aren’t you going to ask how?” she whispered.

  “How?”

  “Meet me in two hours on the school field,” s
he said. “Bring rags.”

  “Bags?”

  “Rags. Like cloth.”

  “How many?”

  “As many as you can,” she hissed. “Gotta go.”

  Jemima stood, dramatic in the center of our school’s shadowed field when I arrived with a laundry sack of old dishrags slung over my shoulder. She chuckled when I approached. The question itched like cheap fabric against my tongue, but I wouldn’t ask. I was proving I could be cool, which meant not needing to know what we were doing here.

  “You came,” she said, and her eyes shone with the moon, which was full tonight, and held captive in the green of Jemima’s irises. “Here,” she said. “We’ve gotta be quick.”

  She took a rag from my sack and dunked it in a bucket that sat at her feet, then she set the cloth carefully on the ground, shaped into an arc. “You gonna make me do all the work?” she said.

  I took a rag, dipped it, and the smell of gasoline hijacked my breath. “Oh god,” I said, the smell catching in my throat like an unwelcome fly. I coughed.

  “Shut the fuck up,” said Jemima. “And give that to me.” She took the rag and laid it down, its nose touching the end of the first. We worked quickly, making a circle from the cloth, and, when the loop’s ends met, Jemima took a cigarette from her pocket, a lighter from her other, and lit the tip. She inhaled, sighed, and offered me a drag. I accepted. Breathing in, letting the smoke fill me. I smiled as I exhaled.

  “You look so pretty in the moonlight,” Jemima said, taking the cigarette from my lips.

  I shrugged. Then she leaned in and kissed me. Her lips were soft, and I wanted to keep them. She stepped away again. Winked. Then, seemingly, forgot.

  She paced the circle, flicking her lighter, and every time the flame sparked, her teeth shone aglow. “Ready?” she said. Then she bent over, flicked the lighter, and pressed the flame to a saturated rag. The fire was immediate, moved so quickly that even Jemima jumped back. Without a word, we turned and sprinted. Flames soared behind us, cracking like bones, the heat so fierce that even we, the least insulated girls in the world, felt hot.