Thin Girls

by Diana Clarke

  I was well rested, but I was unhappy. It wasn’t that my work was unfulfilling. I never wanted to be filled. But it’s difficult to feel any kind of hope when you’re raising a void inside yourself, supporting its growth like a pregnancy.

  The job was boring, but the people were not. The models were thin and violent-looking. They walked with a scary rigidity, a forward pressure, like if they were to stop they might melt into the ground, their layers liquefying, until they became nothing more than a puddle.

  The editors, all men, were always a little aroused. Their sneers were puppeteered by their penises. Their low drawls always suggestive of sex. The writers, mostly women, were tired and frustrated. They looked like rusted cogs, coming to work with liters of coffee to rewrite the same article on mind-blowing blow jobs, day in, day in, day in.

  The reason I could get away with sleeping through the working day at my receptionist job was because, in all my years of working there, I had never once taken a lunch break. My lunch was a Tic Tac, once an hour, on the hour. No matter the time, if anyone needed me, I was at my desk. All they had to do was wake me.

  At the end of each day, I went home. Dad would get in an hour later, order dinner for one, sit on the couch. When I heard his key in the door, I’d retreat to my bedroom. We didn’t understand each other, didn’t understand how to be around each other without Lily to mediate. Talking to him was like talking to an instruction manual, the prescriptive steps (How are you? Good. How are you? Good.). We danced around each other like this, in silence, not wanting to ask or be asked. We were luxuriating in our own separate miseries, and we wanted it to stay that way.

  I grew. I grew thinner. I grew sicker.

  Hi, YourWeigh Woman!

  Welcome to the YourWeigh community. My name is Lara Bax, and I’ll be your guide, your guru, your friend throughout your journey. I founded YourWeigh just a year ago, but already it has grown into a powerful movement, with nearly a million online followers, all of them strong, beautiful women like you! We are so excited you’ve decided to join us.

  YourWeigh isn’t just a weight-loss program. It is a holistic health experience dedicated to helping each brave woman find self-acceptance, self-love, and peace.

  To get started on your journey, why not come to a YourWeigh session? The evenings are held twice weekly in my personal home. It is important to me that you feel welcomed into my growing family. Your first YourWeigh session is free, my little gift to you for taking the first step to loving yourself. Click here to be redirected to my website, where you’ll find details about the sessions.

  If you’re a faraway YourWeigh woman and can’t make it in person, I livestream each session on my Instagram, and you can watch for free from your own home! Click here to add me on Insta!

  If you’re here for Lara Bax products, click here to be redirected to my online store, where you can purchase SkinnyTea, SkinnyBars, SkinnyGurt, and more! All of my products are zero calorie but full delicious! If you’re a first-time buyer, you can use the code NEWWOMAN when you check out for 10 percent off your entire order!

  Well, that’s about it for now. It’s my pleasure to have you in my YourWeigh family. I thank you, your body thanks you, and your soul thanks you.

  xoxo,

  Lara Bax

  26

  After school, we sit on my bed, the couch, Lily crunching on a zero-calorie SkinnyBar in the hope that Phil might be wooed by a slightly thinner version of her. The logic of exclusive deals and designer brands: Maybe he’ll want me more if there’s less of me!

  Lily also seems to have forgotten that I’m meant to drink two CalSips a day, or forgotten that she’s meant to be looking after me. She isn’t making me eat real food, so I’m surviving on one CalSip, three hundred calories. Not enough to maintain. There’s a hum in my head. I see through a haze, like looking at the road ahead on a hot summer day, waves wafting up from the asphalt like a mirage.

  I ask Lily if she ever goes to the YourWeigh meetings.

  “No,” she says. “That would be too weird. Being in her house, you know? Why?”

  “I think I want to go to one,” I say. “She invited me today.”

  Lily wipes a brown crumb, so like soil, from her mouth, before speaking. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Rosie.”

  “Would it be too awkward? For you, I mean?”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s just, I don’t think you should be signing up for YourWeigh any time soon. Give yourself some time to focus on your recovery. Just relax.”

  “But you said it was about wellness.”

  “What?”

  “You said YourWeigh was about wellness. Holistic health. I want to be well.”

  “Sure.” Lily nods. “Yeah. And it is! About wellness, I mean.”

  “But?”

  “You were right,” said Lily. “It’s the awkward thing. It’d be too awkward for me.” My tongue, citric.

  “Lil.”

  “End of discussion, Rose.”

  She rubs her finger across her front teeth. “Slippery,” she says, referring to the strange texture left by the bar. She’s taunting me, waiting for me to criticize her diet, but I don’t. And even if I did, the bubbly taste of my disapproval would have become lost in her lather.

  The next story in Lily’s WE collection:

  We Get Pregnant: Secondly, we grow too big. Too big for our house, our legs poking out of windows, our arms out of doors, and our mountainous stomachs have popped the roof off like a soda lid and our navels are the ceiling now.

  We receive phone calls inviting us to the ocean (a beach day!), but, of course, we can no longer fit in the sea. We are too big for open waters. Our friends say, Oh, come on, you’re not even that big. And we say, If we bellied into the ocean, like a toddler fallen into a puddle, the water would splash out, tidal wave spill, we would flood cities. Our friends say, Oh, please, you’ve just got to get your summer beach body! And we stroke our expectant bulges and we say, Go without us this time.

  That all happens secondly, but firstly we vomit. Everything inside us leaves for good, like mothers packing bags in the night or boyfriends upon spying a broken condom. Every liquid leaves us, stampeding through lips that fight to remain locked, we groan our goodbyes and wipe tears from our eyes and sob into the toilet bowl and the only response is the echo of our own woes, ricocheting off porcelain and fading like retreating footsteps. Soon we are left to our own silence.

  Then we are hungry. Our stomachs are empty as churches; the space is so open that gut grumbles sound holy. We eat everything. Eggs, shells and all, and the crunch sounds like walking on gravel but the yolks slip down our throats like fine silk. We claw butter from wax paper and fill our mouths with fat. We chug milk like partygoers; we squirt mustard straight down into the void. The hunger, though, is eternal. And it isn’t even ours.

  Later, we feel movement. Intestines turned snake, old machines spluttering to life, everything inside writhes. We feel concerned that we will give birth to something slimier than human. Worm children, slug babies. Their fathers, after all, seemed unhuman, inhumane.

  Don’t worry, says our leader as we fold into contractions. Our insides, clenched fists. These babies are their fathers’ babies, violent and heartless. They want us dead.

  We weep and wail, scratch at our stomachs, wanting to excavate, wanting to extricate. To exorcise. One of us, the leader, tells us all to lie down, and we do, in rows so we feel like categories.

  She apologizes as she stomps, a beast invading a village, she uses our bloated bellies as stepping-stones she is hoping to crush.

  Once our leader is exhausted, the movement inside us has slowed, sure, but a good huntsman ensures death. An extra bullet or a bat to the skull, we stand, cradling our aching guts, and we shove one another, apologizing and apologizing all the while, we shove and punch and push. This is how we get our revenge. We didn’t ask for these babies and these babies will not be born.

  The we in the stories feels so familiar. Like
I’m part of the character. Like the character is part of me.

  Lily prepares for a date with Phil. She says things like “Do I look fat in this?” and “Does this one make my arms look huge?” My hatred for Phil burns slow, grows brighter with every insecurity. She’s never worn much makeup, but now her bathroom counter is blooming with pots of lotion and bottles of foundation and tubes of mascara and palettes of shadows and pencils in every shade. She puts so many layers on her skin, I expect her head to loll forward, front-heavy from all the new weight.

  “I’ve been dressing wrong,” she explains, leafing through her closet. “My whole life.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Phil taught me about dressing for my body type,” she says. “How to flatter my figure with the clothes I wear. I’m an apple.”

  “An apple?”

  “An apple,” she says. It’s as if we’re reading a children’s book together, one of those ones that runs through the alphabet. “There are apples and pears and strawberries and a couple of other types, too.”

  “Bananas?”

  “Not really.”

  “I’m not following.”

  She sighs. “Well, I’m an apple because I don’t have a defined waist, see? I’m bigger around the middle, but I’ve got these nice legs, see?” She held up a leg. If someone were to take a photograph of us right now, it might look as if my sister were about to kick me.

  “Nice,” I say. “It is nice.”

  “Thank you,” says Lily. “So I’m meant to draw attention to my legs and away from my middle.”

  “Like rerouting traffic.”

  “More like an illusion.”

  “Give me an example.”

  Lily pulls out a pair of shiny black jeans. They look as if they are made from trash bags. “Skinny jeans,” she says. “See!”

  “They’re so shiny.”

  “Thank you.” She pulls a large beige poncho from its hanger. “And this!”

  “Oh!” I say. “Look at that.”

  “A tunic,” she says, pronouncing it like tyu-nic. Like those people who say tyu-na or tyu-lip. Those people who usually think they’re better than the rest of us, the too-na and too-lip people. “So, it’s beige,” Lily is saying, “which means that attention will be drawn away from this area and toward the shimmer of the jeans.”

  “And what does this have to do with apples?”

  “That’s the shape I am?”

  “You don’t look like an apple to me.”

  “Well, I am.”

  “What’s the best shape to be?”

  “That’s not really what this is about. You can’t really compare them.”

  “So what you’re saying is—”

  “Don’t.”

  “It’s like apples to oranges?”

  “Shut up.”

  The first use of a form of the phrase apples to oranges was in John Ray’s proverb collection released in 1670. In his book, the meaning of the proverb was the same, but the wording was apples to oysters, which makes much more sense.

  “Phil bought me this dress,” Lily says, holding up a tiny black slip. “It’s the perfect dress for an apple, and, Rose, look, it’s designer!”

  I take the coat hanger and let the satin drool over my forearm. The tag still dangling from its label tells me that the piece was over a thousand dollars and it’s a size small. “Lil, this is a small,” I say.

  “It’s a goal dress!”

  “A goal dress?”

  “I’ll fit it once I reach my goal weight.”

  I hate him.

  Lily chooses to wear a silver dress that dips deep below her cleavage, which is still abundant despite the diet, and embarrassing to me in the way a sibling’s sex appeal always is. She wears heels that make her feet look wrong and a lipstick so wholeheartedly red I can’t see the rest of her face without the awful scarlet distraction looming in my peripherals.

  There’s a bruise on her arm, half-hidden beneath a cap sleeve. “What’s that?” I say.

  She tugs the sleeve farther down her bicep.

  “Did Phil do that?”

  “It’s nothing. No, he didn’t.”

  “If he didn’t do it, then why are you hiding it?”

  “Because.” Lily throws up her hands. “I’m sick and tired of this third degree!”

  “Fine,” I say, backing off.

  “Can I wear your necklace?” she says, pointing at my chest.

  I finger the silver chain that Jemima Gates gave me back in high school. It was one of the first wearable items that I owned and Lily didn’t.

  “Don’t be weird about it, Rosie. It’ll look so good with this dress.” She’s already behind me, her fingers working against the nape of my neck. “I want to look nice for Phil.” When she pulls the chain away, I feel bare, and I replace the metal with my own hands.

  “You’re obsessed with him,” I say.

  “Why do you have to be like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “Cruel.”

  She fastens the chain around her own neck, and it looks different there, decorating a chest without having to climb a mountainous clavicle or settle in the hollow between ribs.

  “How do I look?” she says, on her way out the door.

  I look up from my book, her book, only long enough to say, “Terrible. Yuck.”

  She smiles her way into the night. Sometimes it feels like she smiles no matter what I do. The only thing I can control is my own joy.

  The “evil twin” trope might grow out of the Zurvanite branch of Zoroastrianism, whose creation story goes as follows: In the beginning, God, Zurvan, existed alone. Desiring family, offspring that would “create heaven and hell and everything in between,” Zurvan executed the first of many sacrifices. The sacrifices were fruitless until the very moment that Zurvan began to doubt their worth, and, in that moment, a set of twins was conceived: Ohrmuzd, born of the sacrifice, and Ahriman, born of the doubt. Upon realizing that the offspring would be twins, Zurvan resolved to grant sovereignty to the firstborn. Ohrmuzd, still a fetus, learned of this promise and informed his brother. Ahriman then proceeded to tear open the womb in order to emerge first and rule.

  The twins are considered to be opposites. One good, one evil. A distinction that is made in Zurvanite writings, though, is that both twins are capable of good, but that Ahriman chose, chooses, is still choosing, to be evil.

  Lily’s apartment is so quiet without her here. I’m surrounded by her dead plants. Ungrateful creatures. If I could survive on nothing but sunlight, I’d live forever. I fill a glass with water and soak each pot, watch the gray soil brown. There’s no point—I’m feeding a dead thing.

  In Lily’s bedroom, splayed across her mattress, body-like, is a contraption made of leather. There seems to be a muzzle attached. A spiked dog collar. I back away slowly. I imagine Lily’s date, her new strange and violent lovemaking. A carousel of chains and leather. Things darken. As a Thought Diversion, I pick up the phone, scroll through the numbers Lily has saved in its memory.

  “Dad?” I say, when the dial tone becomes a rasping breath.

  “Who?”

  “Rose,” I say.

  “Rose?”

  “Your daughter.”

  “Right, right.”

  I hold the phone tight. “I’m out of the facility. I was discharged.”

  “The what?”

  “The clinic you checked me into, remember?”

  “Right, right.” His words bleed into one another, ink smeared on the page.

  “Are you doing okay, Dad?”

  “I’m doing fine, Lil.”

  “Rose,” I whisper.

  “Righto.”

  “Are you dating anyone?”

  “What?”

  “I said are you dating anyone?”

  “No, no. I don’t think so. No.”

  “You can, though. You know that, right?”

  “I don’t think so, kiddo. I don’t think so.”

  There i
s a long silence. Then I hang up, listen to the beep of the severed call for a long time. After a while, it becomes music, a lullaby. I sleep. In my dreams, Phil Bright, who looks a lot like Dr. Windham, but is my father, is twirling me beneath one arm, twirling Lily beneath the other.

  I wake to a dull thumping, which is normal for me. Hollow bodies echo, and my heart is beating its persistent percussion against all odds. Only, as I learn how to be awake, the way I have to every morning, and my senses settle into place, I realize that this sound, this drumming, is an external one. It’s not yet morning—no, it’s still the middle of the night, the way nights always are.

  Then the steady drumming filling Lily’s apartment is punctuated with a moan, and the realization comes, sudden as a sneeze.

  Without thinking, because I can’t, because my tongue tastes of gin, and Lily’s moans are like sirens, too deep in my ears, I charge toward her bedroom and shove the door open and stand, watching the new, collapsed version of my sister gyrating atop a sweaty stomach.

  A hand extends into the air, his, and makes a loud, meaty thwack when it slaps Lily, hard and cruel, across the cheek. “Don’t!” I cry, clutching my own cheek, stinging from the smack.

  The bodies still, then they turn.

  I should leave, but I’m stuck watching this terrible thing. Like craning your neck to see the collateral of a car accident or ogling a fainted body, I can’t look away. Or maybe, maybe it has more to do with how, in the navy shadows of Lily’s bedroom, slick with someone’s sweat, it looks like me up there, having sex with that man.

  “Get out!” Lily’s scream is nasal. She heaves herself off Phil’s silhouette and stampedes. “Oh my god. Get out, you crazy bitch!”

  She marches toward me. Her stomach doesn’t seem to fit her anymore, and her breasts swing low and sad, half-empty. My necklace looms above them, and it’s the only item of clothing she is still wearing.