by Diana Clarke
The boys say, Why are we here? and we only smile secret smiles and we each find a patch of earth, ungrassed. We slip our toes from stilettos and bury our feet. Stand in the soil. We say to the boys, each of them, respectively, we say, Now bury us! Bury our bodies in earth!
The boys laugh because they think we are joking but sex is no joke, not to us, we have been warned about gifting our flowers from birth. We have been spat at, sneered at, we have been called slut skank hoe whore hooker and we have been warned of the terrible diseases, the most terrible of all, of course, being fertilization. It is so important not to give birth until one is allowed to give birth.
But now, we know, it is time. Bury us, we tell the boys, we are so ready to grow.
The boys shrug, their sex drive higher than their suspicions, and they cup their palms into bad little shovels and they begin to scoop, the world’s worst machinery, they scoop tiny piles of soil around our feet, ankles, calves. The day is fiery, and the work is slow. The boys are sweating, and we are hot. We are buried up to our knees when our favorite brave idiot says, Enough! She says, Stop!
But they don’t, the boys, they don’t, and we have already begun to bloom. Sugars run up and down our trunks, groin to lip and back again, xylem and phloem, we are so sweet with our own made-in-house syrup. Leaves are sprouting from our biceps; buds are forming on our fingertips.
The boys watch in wonder. This is not what they were taught in health class, that’s for sure. This is what we were taught in poetry. The words of men have made us this way. Fruit grows heavy from our limbs. Pears and apples. The boys are so amazed, but we have been compared to fruit all our lives.
It is when the buds break, split open wide like crude exhibitionists, bear their innards for all to see, it is then that the boys’ erections return. They want so badly to taste our sap, they want so much to finger our florets, fuck our flowers. But we don’t want them anymore. We shake our heads, but our leaves only rustle, as if disrupted by a light breeze.
We try to push the boys away, but fruit only falls from our fingertips.
We say nothing as they prepare themselves for penetration. We cannot speak, for our mouths have hardened with bark and our bodies are wood and we can only wait. We wait as our limbs grow, gnarled and knobbed, our arms branch off into twigs. We grow into one another, the way close-standing trees do. Our branches wind, twirl, twist around sister branches and we are entwined and all of our arm-linking was training for this. Now, we are helixed as genetics and we are together and one. We are the strongest jungle.
By the time we feel phalluses against us, we are only flora. All of us, together, this small and lush forest, we have made this garden beautiful.
But, already, we can feel the termites moving in, scuttling up our thighs, torsos, necks. We can feel their sharp little teeth beginning to gnaw, chew, feast on our parts. Even the strongest trees can be destroyed from within, even the most fertile flesh will rot. These bodies cannot last.
From the first sentence, it is clear that Lily wrote the story. The words feel like my own, like someone scraped them, letter by letter, from my tongue while I slept. Their arrangement is familiar as a childhood song.
Diamond shoulder-taps me out of my thoughts, and I smile at her. “Hello, Diamond,” I say. “How are you today?”
“I’m good.”
“Well,” I say. “You are well.”
“Well what?” says Diamond.
“You’re doing well, not good.”
“I am doing good.”
I shake my head. “Superman does good,” I tell her. “You are doing well.”
“What?”
“If you say you’re doing good, it means you’re doing good things. If you say you’re doing well, it means you’re fine.”
“I am doing good,” says Diamond. “Good things, I mean. Look.” She hands me a drawing of three people, smiling, holding hands. “It’s good,” she assures me.
“It is,” I tell her. It isn’t. Each character’s fingers reach all the way to their shoes. Impossible. “Is that your mother and your father and you?” I point to the drawings in turn.
“No,” says Diamond. “Silly. It’s me and Daddy and Miss Winters. See? You can tell because she’s fat. Not like Mummy. She’s skinny.” Lily’s body, in the picture, is a ball on sticks.
“Miss Winters? Your teacher?” I look up at Lily, crouched beside a boy who is coloring with a fist so clenched I’m surprised the crayon doesn’t combust into a blue dust.
“Yeah,” says Diamond. “She’s special friends with Daddy. I’m giving it to Mum for her birthday.”
“That’s nice,” I say. “Here,” I tell her. “Let’s draw something different.”
“Why?”
“Well . . .” I find a piece of bright pink card and a red marker. “Because this one’s just drawn on white paper, but wouldn’t your mum prefer this nice pink card?”
Diamond looks upset. “Pink used to be my favorite color,” she says. “But now I don’t like it.”
“Why’s that?”
“Just seems like everything’s pink these days,” she says, rocking back in her chair. I half expect to see a stick of straw between her lips, a tattoo on her bicep. “Too much pink around here.”
“Okay,” I say, looking around, finding a yellow piece of cardboard. “What about this one instead?”
Diamond closes her eyes, perhaps trying to channel her mother, then slowly nods. “I think she would like yellow,” she says, solemn and measured. Diamond knows what she wants. She is logical and reasonable even though her name is Diamond and even though she is five years old. I feel underdeveloped. “I definitely think yellow,” she says.
“Here,” I say, offering Diamond my chair and opting to crouch on the floor instead. “Do you have a pet?”
“Yes. Jingles.”
“Jingles?”
“Our dog, Jingles.” Diamond laughs, as if it’s ridiculous that I don’t know more about her family pet.
“Does your mother like Jingles?”
“We love Jingles. I’m five and a half.”
“That’s a great age.” I take the lid from the red marker and hand it to Diamond. “Why don’t you draw Jingles?”
“Yeah!” Diamond is already scratching away at the card, her tongue peering out from the corner of her lips in concentration, other drawing forgotten. I carefully fold the page and tuck it into my breast pocket.
In the summer before Lily left for college, she woke me one night by pressing her hand over my mouth. I snapped awake and she held a finger to her lips.
“What?” I hissed into the dark.
She shushed me and gestured to her ear. Listen. A clatter and a bump. A masculine voice. A laugh. I sat up. She eased the door of our bedroom open, peered out into the hall.
“What is it?” I whispered. “Who’s there?”
She closed the door again, quiet.
“What’s happening?” I said.
“It’s just Dad,” she said.
“Is he with someone?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Does he have someone over?”
“Go back to sleep, Rosie.”
In the morning, he hummed “Sweet Caroline” as he dropped bread into the toaster. He smiled for the first time since our mother left. This was the first and only time he would bring someone, a lover, into our house. He would later use this night, this simple one-night stand that brought him such fleeting joy, to blame himself for everything that was to come.
“Who was here last night, Dad?” I asked, filling a mug with warm water.
“Toast?” he said.
When the bell rings for the end of the day, Diamond runs up to me with her drawing of Jingles, panting and wild, and says, “Quick, hurry, before my mum gets here, can you write happy birthday?”
“How about I help you write it?” I say. “So that your mum will know it’s from you?”
“I can’t,” says Diamond. “I don’t know how to spell it.”
“I’ll help,” I tell her. “Start with an H.”
We are up to the h in birthday when my light is eclipsed. I look up. A lean woman, with long, disheveled black hair and big round glasses that make her eyes gape wide, is standing over me. She looks familiar, and I wonder whether she might be a celebrity.
“Hello?” I say. “Do I know you?”
“Oh, hello, dear,” says the woman, ignoring my query.
“Mummy!” says Diamond, shielding her page. “Don’t look yet!”
“Add a y,” I tell Diamond. Then, “Oops, you’ve done the d around the wrong way. It says Happy birthbay. Just switch that b into a d.”
And then, to the woman, I say, “I hear a happy birthday is in order?”
“Oh yes,” she says with a rasped chuckle and a shake of her head, which makes the many thin chains circling her neck jangle and chime. She is shiny, this woman. “Silly, isn’t it? Time. So arbitrary and contrived at the same time.”
I find myself nodding with her. Agreeing with her. Believing her. “Totally,” I say. “It doesn’t really mean anything. I don’t believe in the linearity of time.” And suddenly, it’s true. I don’t.
She crouches to join me at Diamond’s level. “I’m Lara Bax,” she says. Of course she is! If she is Diamond’s mother, then she is also Phil’s wife, which means she is also the woman Lily is competing with. She looks older than her photograph on the book jacket, but not less beautiful. I glance at Lily, who is collecting homework and waving goodbye to her students. She can be such an idiot.
I consider telling Lara Bax that her name sounds like a laxative brand and then decide against it. For some reason, I want to impress this woman. The woman to Lily’s other. There’s something about her, the way she stands, her shoulders thrust back, her neck elongated, reaching. The way her sweater falls from her shoulder, baring her clavicle. She smells like the color magenta might, floral and musty all at once. Women are witches, all of them, enchanted and enchanting. Each one has her own magic, and Lara Bax’s is all-consuming. I introduce myself. “Rose Winters. I’m Lily’s sister.”
“I can tell,” says Lara Bax. “I mean, your energy is entirely different. Opposite, really. Green versus red. But your eyes.”
I nod. “We get that a lot. The eyes thing, not the energy thing.”
“Twins, aren’t you?” says Lara Bax. “You’re just a moment younger.”
I nod, in awe. Lily and I haven’t been recognized as related in a long time. I want so badly to hate this woman who refuses to be hated. “Yes,” I whisper. “We are, and I am. How?”
“Oh”—she shrugs—“I’m a seer.”
“A sear? Like cooking?”
“No, I’m a seer. I see.”
“Oh, a seer. I see.”
She smiles. “Was that a joke?”
“I don’t think it was meant to be,” I say.
Lara Bax only nods. Her earrings, tiny crystals, pirouette beneath her earlobes, send little light rays dancing about the ceiling. This woman can create light. Can carry brightness around like an accessory.
“Mum, I’m done now. Happy birthday, I made this for you. It’s Jingles.”
Diamond hands the page to Lara Bax and promptly curls herself around her mother’s thin leg, which is dressed in a brightly patterned legging.
“I love it, Diamond, thank you, dear,” says Lara Bax, stroking the crown of Diamond’s head with ringed fingers. My scalp itches, and I want that jeweled hand to touch me, too.
“Are you training to be a teacher?” says Lara Bax.
“Oh no,” I say. “No, I’m just recovering from . . .” I swallow. “A long-term illness. I don’t have a job right now.”
“You should come to one of my YourWeigh evenings,” says Lara Bax. “I hold them twice a week. They’re all about learning to love yourself. Finding your worth and sharing it with the world.”
“What?”
“I have an instinct about you. We are meant to spend time together. Let me help you find your peace. Here, sign up for my mailing list. You’ll get exclusive Lara Bax offers right to your inbox.”
I laugh at the advertisement. Lara Bax doesn’t. She has no idea that she has, in the last moment, become nothing more than a commercial for herself.
“I don’t have an email,” I say. “I’ve been protecting my own peace.”
“Ah.” She nods, as sage as her daughter. “It’s smart to log off every once in a while. Go off-grid. Reconnect with reality.”
“What?”
“But that can’t last forever, hon. Internet is reality now. Reality is the internet. If you’re not online, then you hardly exist. Here, give me your phone. I’ll make you an account.”
“I only have a flip phone.”
Lara Bax frowns, then sets her purse, a burlap bag, on a table, starts to sift through its contents. She retrieves a rectangular box and hands it to me.
“Here,” she says. “For you.”
I open the box. The phone looks like something from space. “Why are you giving this to me?” I say, running my fingers over the screen.
“How else would you become a YourWeigh woman?” She presses to turn the phone on and a start-up tune rings out. “Anyway, it’s one I got sent for free. I’m an ambassador for the brand, and I already promoted it on my Insta. It’s all yours.”
As she tells me all of this, she tap-tap-taps the screen. “What’s your name again?” she says.
“Rose.”
“Rose Winters?”
I nod. She passes the phone over. It’s light in my hand.
“RoseWinters11 is your email. I’ve already added you to the Lara Bax mailing list. I also downloaded Instagram and made you a profile. You’re following me. I have a YourWeigh session tomorrow night. Will you come? Learn to love yourself?”
I nod, nod, nod. “That sounds wonderful,” I say. And it does! To love oneself.
2008 (19 years old—Lily: 200 lbs, Rose: 70 lbs)
My first and last job, before I was admitted to the facility, was as a receptionist.
Lily graduated high school with top grades and went off to college. I was going to live at home, with Dad, and work until I had enough money for a place of my own.
“Don’t go,” I pleaded as she filled out her dorm application. “Please don’t go.”
“I’m going,” said Lily. “I can’t put my life on hold for you anymore.”
“Please,” I said. “I need you. Lil, I’m sick. I need you. I’m sick!” It was the first time I’d admitted to it, and she closed her eyes upon the confession.
“I know, Rosie.”
“No,” I said. “No, you don’t. I sometimes go for days without eating a single thing. When I do eat, when I finally eat something, I usually pull on my tongue until I throw it all up. I don’t even fit kids’ clothes. Lily, I’m starving.”
Lily kept her eyes shut the whole time, seeing a child dive into a too-deep pool and looking away to keep from seeing the mess.
“Lily!” I yelled at her twitching eyelids. “Lily! Lily!”
“Do you understand what you’re asking me to do?”
“If you’re gone, I won’t eat. Not even a little bit. I’ll starve to death without you here. You’re the only one who makes me eat anything, Lil. Without you, there’s no one to care.”
“You can make yourself eat, Rose.”
“I can’t. I’ll starve,” I said. “I’ll die. And it’ll be your fault.”
She finally opened her eyes, reached for me, lifted my knuckles to her lips, kissed each one, one, two, three, then she dropped my hand and walked away from me, me, me, the drowning child.
She went.
Everyone in our grade dispersed like leaves in the wind, off to find their real lives. Even Jemima Gates got into some fancy liberal arts school that accepted students based on their attitudes rather than their grades. Jemima’s attitude was a million-dollar donation paid by her grandmother’s Absolute Abs fortune. She moved to the other end of the count
ry.
I overcame mediocre grades with my thin frame and scored a gig behind the front desk of the CHIC magazine headquarters.
I fielded calls and sent company-wide emails about the arrival of food trucks. I checked models in to see casting directors, sent hopeful interns to job interviews, and signed for packages. Mostly, I read. I read every women’s magazine, cover to cover. I read about every fad diet. Soup diets, smoothie diets, celery diets, cigarette diets.
One diet, started by Instagram guru CLEANTEEN19, claimed to cure cancer. CLEANTEEN19 herself had been diagnosed with leukemia, and, through a regime of spinach-based smoothies and fruit juices, she had cured herself of the cancer. Her diet handbook was only $200 plus shipping and handling. She had accumulated three million followers in just a year of Instagramming.
It was later discovered that CLEANTEEN19 had diagnosed herself with leukemia, and then cured her perfectly healthy self with her homemade meal plan. No one received refunds.
I read about workout routines that promised to make you better in bed. About which lingerie you should wear based on your horoscope. About how to match your furniture to your most flattering lipstick shade.
I read about Kat Mitchells, whose drastic weight loss made the front page of CHIC despite her dwindling relevance. CHILD STAR BARES BONES IN BERMUDA.
I was lonely. Lonely!
Sometimes I thumbed Jemima’s number into my phone before hanging up again. We had stayed in contact for a bit. Late-night phone calls. She talked about all her new friends. Cool types. Artists with ironic moustaches and nicotine addictions who wrote music and smoked pot and boasted about their insomnia. Something had shifted after she kissed me, after I left her room that night. After a while, she stopped picking up. After a little while longer, I stopped calling.
I slept during my shifts. Since it was a fashion office, no one questioned my insistence on wearing large dark sunglasses to work, heavy moons over my eyes. I was tall and thin and pretty enough that they thought it was a fashion statement, a personal style, and so I wore my glasses and slept through many hours of my day, my mind wilting with hunger, my tongue lolling in my mouth.
