by Diana Clarke
Sappho, an Archaic Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, wrote about her love for women. The majority of her work is lost to time, but one fragment reads, When I look on you a moment, then I can speak no more, but my tongue falls silent, and at once a delicate flame courses beneath my skin, and with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears hum, and a wet sweat bathes me and a trembling seizes me all over.
Jemima and I, we held each other’s hands and ran from the fire, silent and aflame, unseeing in the night, ears ringing electric, sweating and shivering, we ran.
At school the next day, the field was a scorched brown, brittle and dead. The area was cordoned off by yellow tape.
When an anglerfish finds a mate, he fuses with her, their bodies morph into one. A shared circulatory system. Their hearts beating in time.
Isn’t that all love is, anyway?
I read the last page of Animal Behaviors very slowly. I pause after each word, and after every punctuation mark, I take a long, slow breath. Still, the end comes. I close the cover and open my suitcase and stare into its hollowness. It’s time to start packing. To go back to life. The suitcase is small. Me-sized, I think, quickly calculating its mass. I step inside, sit, curl, tuck, squeeze. I lie on my side, fetal, and reach for the lid. I tug the case closed and all goes dark, quiet.
Something I will never tell is that I like living in the facility. There’s comfort in its structure. So long as I keep skipping meals but drinking my CalSips, I will stay alive. I will maintain my weight. My body will not grow. Everything, my life, in here, is paused.
Boredom is the emptiest emotion; there’s no weight to it. I’m just waiting out my life.
The thought of existing outside of the facility’s schedule makes my teeth ache. In here, food is served in the dining hall, the same space every day. Out there, food is everywhere, and you never know when someone might offer you a slice of their cake.
I breathe into my tiny space. Finger the fabric that lines the bag. There is a ridge, an embroidered name. I trace the letters, and they’re not mine, they’re hers. Lily’s. I push the suitcase open and blink into the bright, unravel my limbs, climb back into the world.
Lily needs me. So I start packing, folding clothes, stacking books, ready to be discharged from the facility. I take the letters from under my mattress and swallow. Then I take one, hold it to my chest, and tear it down the middle, again, again. I shred my letters into little strips of themselves, then I put them in the trash can, cover them with an empty CalSip box. Lily needs me! My lungs ache. I swallow and continue packing. The books on animal behaviors and linguistics, and the one on insects, which, ironically, is now nude, its cover eaten away by termites.
Animals, unlike humans, are not capable of evil. They kill to eat, they fight to protect, they chase to mark territory, they survive. No animal has any sense of morality, and so they cannot act immorally. Humans are capable of evil because we created it. We burdened ourselves with right and wrong, with good and evil. And it is in knowing this evil that we can be.
21
Us thin girls stand, rattling around in our too-big dresses, nursing glasses of ice water with cocktail umbrellas, and swaying to some bad ’60s disco, waiting for the boys to arrive. The long dining hall tables are pushed up against the walls, covered in cheap plastic tablecloths and offering glasses of water and punch and sliced fruit. Streamers in clearance colors, browns and grays, hang limp from the ceilings, and there are pockets of half-inflated balloons, not full enough to distract us from how each one contains someone’s expired breath, clinging to the room’s corners. The disco ball, though, sends silver diamonds twisting, twirling about the floor, the walls, and that is enough to get us girls giddy.
My breath keeps catching in my throat.
“How are you feeling?” asks Sarah, her basset hound eyes agape. “About meeting Jram and everything?”
I stir my water with the umbrella, letting the tinkle of ice on glass, both light and clear, translucent and empty, ring. Such reminders of emptiness make me calm. How am I feeling? I am feeling like soda, shaken and opened, all of my fizz is rising up my throat.
“They’re here, ladies,” says Kat, and she’s staring at the far door of our dining hall. My back straightens itself without my command, and I close my eyes, hold my breath, count, release. I do it over and over, waiting for Jram to approach.
“Eope?” says a low voice, which I know, immediately, is Jram’s. The word is beautiful. Ee-oh-pee. I wonder whether it’s a greeting in his native tongue, Greek or German, and I turn to face him, utterly charmed from the first stretched syllable.
“Jram,” I say, and he frowns.
“Eope,” he says.
“Hello to you, too?” I guess.
“Hi,” he says, in an accent that is not a foreign one, not even at all. “It’s so nice to finally meet you in person, Eope.” He pauses. “Your name is Eope, right?”
“Oh,” I say, understanding the confusion. But I don’t want to ruin our romance, so I nod. “Yes,” I say. “Okay. I am Eope. And you’re Jram?”
“Sure,” he says. “Okay. I mean yes.”
We reach for each other, hands meeting between our bodies, our fingers entwining, and we have made a little limb swing bridge. We smile from shore to shore, and our bridge sways between us. “Hello, Jram,” I say.
“Hi, Eope,” says Jram.
“It’s nice to meet you, Jram,” I say.
“It’s nice to meet you, Eope,” he says.
These are the times I wish most to be Lily. Lily who knows how to interact, how to talk about the menial as if it is interesting, how to ease into a conversation like climbing into a hot bath, aah, she is so easy to be around.
“Um,” I say. “I liked your penis the other night.”
“Oh, okay,” says Jram, his cheeks searing. “Thank you.”
“For liking it or for telling you?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Okay.” My hands are slippery in his, or his in mine, and I don’t know how to end this swing-bridge grip. “I like your handkerchief, too.”
“Oh, thank you,” he says. “Um, which one?”
“The purple one,” I say. “The lilac one.”
“Okay, thanks,” he says.
We stand, our bridge slowing to a stop.
“But it’s nice that you have more than one,” I say. “Handkerchief, I mean. You have handkerchiefs. Plural.”
He nods. “Sure,” he says. “I think I have about five or maybe six of them.”
“Handkerchiefs?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Five or six handkerchiefs, probably.”
“I sometimes think they should be called handkerchieves.”
“With a v?”
I nod. “Like thief and thieves. Knife and knives, you know?”
“Sure, that would make sense.”
I keep my mouth closed through a yawn, and it makes my eyes water. I don’t want Jram to think I’m crying about his handkerchief collection. Or that I’m bored. “Um,” I say, smiling, demonstrating how not-crying I am. “Here’s something. I bet handkerchief is probably the only word with the letters ndk all in a row.”
Jram says nothing.
“Don’t you think so?”
“Probably,” says Jram, looking over my shoulder, around the room. He wants to leave, I know it. He wants to go talk to some other thin girl. He’s not interested in my conversation about penises and handkerchiefs and linguistics. I follow his gaze, and it’s fixed on Kat.
Desperate, I say, “Let’s dance,” so that I won’t have to think up any more topics, and, thankfully, Jram nods.
He sets his hands on the juts of my hips and then withdraws them quickly. “That’s not a trigger for you, is it? Me touching you like that?”
I shake my head. “You can put your hands there,” I say. “It’s okay.”
He replaces his hands, and his fingers are warm on my bones. I say, “Your fingers are warm on my bones.”
“Wha
t?”
“Oh, nothing,” I say.
“Are you sure?’
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
We sway, and I let my fingers trace the ladder of his spine, each rung prominent through his skin, and the thinness might have been off-putting if only it weren’t so familiar. Like dancing with myself.
“There are fruit slices over there, Jram,” I say to Jram, who ignores me and rests his forehead against mine. When our faces are this close, his eyes merge into one, a big cyclops eye, and I smile and he must take the smile to be more about my affection for him than my appreciation of his cyclops eye situation because he tilts his mouth toward mine. I let him press chapped lips against my red-painted mouth, and the kiss is dry and brief, like a tap on the shoulder when a kind stranger notices you’ve dropped your wallet: nice but impersonal. Heterosexuality!
Behind Jram, Kat is surrounded by men but standing at the center of them, alone, watching us, watching me, her eyes shadowed with eye shadow and maybe a touch of jealousy.
“Do you remember having sex?” says Jram, when the song ends. I tear my stare away from Kat.
“With you?” I say.
“No,” says Jram. “We haven’t—”
“Yeah, I know,” I say. “That’s why I was confused.”
“Oh, I meant just, like . . .” Jram scratches his chin, and the sound is a relaxing static. “I meant just sex in general.”
“Um.” I look at Jram, who seems to be remembering sex, and then I nod. This is my first lie to Jram. The first mislaid brick in the foundation of our relationship. “Sure,” I say. “I remember having sex.” I will go on to regret the lie, and wish I had disclosed my virginity, but it’s important to have things in common, and so I let him believe me a deflowered woman.
“Do you want to?” says Jram.
“Want to?”
“Have sex?”
“Oh,” I say. “Sure, yeah, someday.” It’s true. I do want to have sex someday.
“What about today?” says Jram. “Do you want to have sex today?”
“Like right now?”
“Sure, like, nowish.”
I swallow and nod, not wanting to upset, wanting only to please, to be liked, to be loved. “Sure,” I say. “I want to. But we can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Where would we go?”
“To the bathroom,” says Jram. “We would go to the bathroom.”
“But escorts,” I say, thankful for the excuse. We can’t have sex in the bathroom because all bathroom trips are escorted by nurses.
“I don’t get escorted,” says Jram. “I’m on recovery privileges.” I scan Jram’s bones, my eyes trained to see the extent of thinness, a specialty X-ray. He is too thin to be on recovery privileges. His hip bones make a bridge of pubis, and his rib cage is prominent as an insect’s thorax. I wonder which trick he’s using to fool the scales. His hair is long, but it isn’t long enough to tie into a weighted ponytail.
“Oh, cool,” I say. “That’s nice, congratulations.”
“Thanks, Eope,” says Jram, looking proud. “So, bathroom?”
“I still need an escort.”
“Then tell the nurse you’re going to your bedroom,” says Jram. “To change shoes or something.” Jram has thought this plan through, I realize. While I have been imagining our love, our old age together, he has been planning this bathroom affair. Still, I nod, and lift the hem of my dress.
“See you soon,” I say, and I go to ask a nurse for permission to change my shoes.
It’s not that I don’t want to have sex with Jram, because I’ve always wondered what it’s like. Sex. It’s more that I don’t want Jram to know my virgin status. Don’t want Jram to find out that I am a twenty-four-year-old virgin. It isn’t by choice, of course; most men just aren’t into us thin girls. And even when we do get invited on a date by some man mistaking us for models, those evenings are just hopeless consumption events. Men take you out for dinner, dessert, a drink. It’s when we make excuses, when the fear hijacks our eyes, it’s then that the men know something is up. When the ovation in their jeans slackens into surrender.
“Excuse me.” I clutch my fingers behind my back as I speak to a nurse. “Could I please go change shoes in my room? I’ll just be a second. These ones are hurting my toes.”
The nurse nods. “Five minutes,” she says. “I’m timing.”
I thank her and leave the cafeteria to go lose my virginity. On the way out, I make eye contact with Kat, wiggle my eyebrows in the way she does.
I don’t even really agree with the concept of virginity. Is there any other instance in life where one takes on a title for having not done something? I collect a few examples in my mouth, but they turn sour. Off. If you haven’t had sex, you’re a virgin. If you don’t drink, you’re sober. If you don’t eat, you’re anorectic.
In the 1930s, a dieting trend emerged in the media. Slimming soaps, which professed to wash away extra weight by simply working up a lather in the shower. See all those women, in the midst of the depression, still desperately scouring their skin, scrubbing themselves skinny.
2007 (18 years old—Lily: 193 lbs, Rose: 71 lbs)
Jemima was still grounded. Her parents heard of the fire from afar, somewhere European and pretend-sounding, their fairy-tale life, and they put Jemima under house arrest, paid the maid overtime to keep watch outside her bedroom door. I was spending my afternoons with the television. I watched the cooking channel compulsively.
People obsessed with food either become chefs or anorectics. I watched shows about making elaborate cakes and cooking school shows and game shows that made two food trucks compete to see which one could churn the most meals out of its tiny van kitchen. Something about watching food on a screen comforted me. It reminded me of my hunger, almost satisfied a desire to taste. Food at a safe distance.
I was sucking a Tic Tac, watching a speed cooking show, a gossip magazine opened to a page about Kat Mitchells’s eating disorder recovery open on my lap, pictures of her before and after body, when I heard my voice.
“Hey, Rosie.”
I turned to find Lily, greeting me. We hadn’t spoken in a long time and had taken to treating each other like shadows of ourselves. Something to be acknowledged and then ignored.
She was with a boy. Robbie Newton. The same one who had stood her up all those years ago. I frowned at her, communicating my distaste, even as I said, “Hey, Lil. Hey, Robbie.”
“Mind if we join you?”
I did mind, but I could taste a light chill that made my teeth ache with cold, and it was clear that Lily did not want to be alone with this boy. Was afraid of being alone with him, even, and the extent of that fear was proven by how she was willing to lay down her pride and speak to me, be around me, for the first time in months.
“Sure,” I said, scooting to one end of the couch.
“How’s it going, Rosie?” said Robbie, his chin as absent as ever.
“Rose,” Lily and I both corrected him at once. I had never let anyone other than her call me Rosie. We refused to exchange glances. Refused to acknowledge how good it felt to connect on our own little frequency again.
“I’m fine,” I added. “What’s up?”
“So you made that fire, huh?”
I shrugged.
“Are you and Jemima Gates, like, a thing?”
I snorted.
“Hey,” said Robbie, hands up in surrender. “I didn’t start the rumor.”
“There’s a rumor that Jemima and I are together?” I said, turning on him. “Did you know about this, Lily?”
Lily shrugged. I felt the lemony lie bleed into my mouth.
“Whatever,” I said.
“Have you, like, made out?” said Robbie.
“Shut up, Robbie,” said Lily.
I looked at her, then back at Robbie, said nothing, settled into the couch, arms crossed, tried to focus on the show.
“People are taking bets, you know,” sai
d Robbie. “About you two.”
I said nothing.
“My money’s on lesbians.”
“Fuck off,” Lily and I said, at once. Or maybe just one of us said it.
“Maybe you should go home, Rob,” said Lily.
“Babe,” said Robbie.
“Babe?” I asked.
Lily gave me a look that said not now. Then she stood, tried to pull Robbie off the couch, but he wouldn’t move, a slimy grin painted on his face.
“I mean it,” said Lily. “You need to leave.”
“Oh, don’t be like that, babe,” he said. “I was just having some fun.”
“I don’t care what you were doing,” said Lily.
“Jeez,” he said. “What’s got you all riled up? You a dyke, too? It a twin thing?”
“You heard her, asshole. Get the fuck out of our house,” I said, pushing his back, hoping to lever him from the couch, but he was heavy.
“Or what?” he said.
“Or we’ll hex you,” I said, looking at Lily, who nodded.
Robbie laughed.
Lily and I took each other’s hands. It was a trick we hadn’t done since a number of Halloweens ago, when we went as witches and threatened to hex everyone who wouldn’t give us candy. We pressed our palms together, and to any outsider we looked like a single girl looking at her reflection, or we used to, now we were too dissimilar, but our minds still worked the same.
Lily started speaking in gibberish, and I followed, saying the same sounds she was, a barely audible moment later. I heard her before anyone else in the world could, it seemed, and the result was Lily’s voice having an almost echo. We chanted louder, louder, until our voices strained.
“Okay, stop,” said Robbie. “Stop, stop, jeez.” He was pretending not to be afraid, but his cheeks were pale, and we smiled as we continued. “Okay, shit, I’ll go,” he said, but we didn’t stop our song until he was gone and the front door was safely shut.
