by Diana Clarke
She doesn’t look like me, exactly. I don’t have the loose skin, and no part of me wobbles or shakes. I’m tight all over, my skin clings to me, an abused pet, hanging on for dear life, pleading, begging me not to mistreat it the way I do every other part of me.
Lily’s new body isn’t like mine, but it’s closer than her old, bigger body. Now we’re like one of those holographic images, tilt it one way to see Lily, tilt it the other to see me, and right now she’s somewhere in the middle, a blurry distorted picture, on her way to becoming one or the other. She hisses into my face, showering me with saliva, and then I am looking at the closed door.
27
I am awake, coffee in hand, watching the door to Lily’s bedroom, when I start to hear movement. I have been holding my body in a natural-looking position for a long time, waiting for this moment. One leg is crossed over the other, and the dangling foot has long been numb. I take a breath, count, release. The door finally whispers open.
“Fuck,” Lily hisses when she sees me sitting, waiting. “I thought you’d still be asleep.”
I smile.
“Rose, you remember Phil? Phil, you know Rose.”
“Rose, so nice to see you again,” says Phil, his grin wide, his teeth so bleached they look luminous. “You look just as lovely as ever.”
His hair seems grayer than before, or more silver, perhaps dyed that way, because every strand is the same metallic shade. The result is eerie. Hair sculpted from steel. He reaches to shake my hand, and I stare at it, the palm that I had watched slap my sister across the face just hours ago. I’ve never been so close to a weapon. I look at Lily, expecting her cheek to be shadowed with bruise, but she’s smiling, her eyes on Phil and adoring.
Phil drops his hand. “I’m sorry you had to see that last night, Rose,” he says. “We should’ve gone back to my place. I’m so embarrassed.” He is smiling. He is never not smiling.
I say nothing.
“I hope you can forgive me.” He looks at Lily. “Well, us,” he says. His eyes are this hard blue.
I smile. It is important to support the ones we love. “Hello, Phil,” I say. “Nice to see you.” I reach to shake his hand. He frowns at my outstretched fingers. Frowns at me. I smile. I smile. I can play his game. I am a seasoned game player and I can beat him at this duel.
Lily watches our civilized battle, a bewildered audience.
Phil clears his throat and takes my handshake, his grip too tight to not be compensating for something. We pump our arms twice and release. “Always a pleasure,” he says.
“It’s all mine,” I say. “The pleasure.”
“We’re so proud of you,” Phil says, and he’s saying it to me. “Everything you’ve been through. You’re so strong. And, if I might say so, you really do look beautiful.” When he compliments me, my tongue sings sour because Lily feels betrayed, or jealous, the two are hard to differentiate. I can see myself, my reflection, in Lily’s living room window. I look like I’m meant to be dead. A beautiful, beautiful carcass.
It’s quiet. Lily claps her hands. “Okay,” she says. “Great. Phil, you’d probably better be getting home before. Well. What time does she get back?”
“Do you mean his wife?” I say. “Lara Bax?”
Phil clears his throat again.
I say, “Does she know you’re here?”
“Rose,” says Lily.
Phil coughs, and Lily flinches.
“Do you have an open marriage?” I say.
Phil tenses his jaw and his cheek shifts. He does it again. Again.
“That’s enough,” says Lily.
I smile. “I’m just getting to know him better, Lil. I’m just making small talk. Just shooting the shit.”
“I’d better be going.”
I nod. “Back to your wife,” I say. “Lara Bax. I met her, you know.”
Phil’s smile falters and I feel energized. I could run a marathon! I could run laps around this chump all day long!
“She invited me to one of her YourWeigh sessions. She said she thought we were meant to spend time together.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes,” I smile. “Do you think I should take her up on that offer? Imagine all the talking we could do. Imagine all the things we could discuss.”
“Rose,” Lily nearly shouts. “It’s okay, Phil. Rose isn’t going to the session. She’s not saying anything to Lara.”
Phil looks between Lily and me, and his hand, at his side, it’s clenched into a tight ball. Lily is looking at it. He notices our gazes, fixed on his fist, and loosens his grip. “Okay, then,” he says, wiping his hand on his slacks. “Okay, then. I’ll see you later, Lily,” he says, but he won’t meet her eye. “Nice to see you again, Rose. I’m sure we’ll meet again soon.”
Have you ever fought and won? This feeling is why war exists.
Hi YourWeigh Woman,
It’s Tuesday, and you know what that means! I’ll be hosting a YourWeigh session tonight! Tonight, we’re all about getting offline and getting back in touch with ourselves. It can be hard, in this day and age, to keep from comparing yourself to others, so tonight we’ll be focusing on finding ourselves, understanding ourselves, and loving ourselves, and I’d love for you to join us! Click here to reserve your spot at the class, or here to watch the event live on my Instagram. Follow me while you’re at it!
As a little thanks for being such a loyal member of my YourWeigh family, I’d like to extend an exclusive offer of two-for-the-price-of-one Lara Bax SkinnyGurt packs until five p.m.! That’s right, that’s sixty SkinnyGurts for the price of thirty! Get in quick, while the offer lasts!
See you tonight, my strong, beautiful woman.
xoxo,
Lara Bax
Lily eats a tub of Lara Bax SkinnyGurt for breakfast. It smells overwhelmingly of sunscreen.
I say, “Is that sunscreen?”
“Zero-cal yogurt.”
“Are we going to talk about last night?” I say. “About Phil slapping you, I mean?”
“No,” says Lily. “No, we are not.”
“Lily,” I say.
“Rose.”
“He slapped you.”
“Stop being so close-minded.”
“About abuse?”
“About sex!” she says. “What do you even know about sex, anyway?”
I think of Jram in the bathroom. I think of Lily sitting atop Phil in bed last night. I don’t know much about sex, but what I do know is that it certainly isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
“Watching you hurt yourself like that is triggering for me,” I say. “Watching you harm yourself makes me want to harm myself, too. I don’t want to relapse, Lil.”
“I’m not ending things with Phil,” says Lily. “I can’t put my life on pause for you anymore, Rosie. And it’s not harming me! BDSM is a widely practiced culture. It dates all the way back to the early 1800s. There’s nothing wrong with what we’re doing, so I need you to stop judging me for it.”
“But—”
“You know I’d do anything for you, Rosie, but not this. It’s the best relationship I’ve been in for a long time.”
I say nothing. I stroke my stomach. “So what you’re saying is that you wouldn’t do anything for me.”
“Jesus Christ,” says Lily, tossing the empty yogurt container in the trash. “I’ve got to get ready for school.” She takes a CalSip from the fridge and tosses it to me. “Drink this.”
I catch it, nod, and Lily leaves to get ready. As soon as I hear the shower running, I empty the contents of the CalSip into the sink. It’s white and thick as ice cream. I’ve always starved my revenge. She always surrenders. Lily can’t live without me.
Freud coined the terms sadism and masochism in his Three Papers on Sexual Theory. He saw sadism to be a distortion of masculine aggression and masochism to be a form of sadism against the self. The desire to inflict and receive pain during sex, he claimed, can be ascribed to incomplete or aberrant psychological development
in one’s childhood.
Practicers of BDSM reject the theory, arguing that Freud, a psychologist, was primarily researching unhealthy cases of sadomasochism, and that, in consensual situations, BDSM could be healthy.
The question, then, is whether Lily’s situation is consensual, or whether she is responding to some long-standing trauma. My stomach aches. And it aches with the suspicion that I might be that trauma.
2010 (21 years old—Lily: 202 lbs, Rose: 69 lbs)
Every time Lily came home to visit, she was a little different. It wasn’t an unfamiliar difference, more of an exaggeration of herself. She was becoming more like Lily, Lily-like, with every semester. Each one of her traits, the parts that made her Lily instead of me, seemed to grow, bloom, flourish, as if she were only watering, only tending to the parts that helped to differentiate herself from me.
I resented her for it. The way she was leaning away, growing toward the sun, a plant trying to free itself from its stake. I was the stake.
Of course, I knew my sickness had been the first distance between us, but Lily, now almost unrecognizable, more confident, more opinionated, louder and more outgoing, she was growing and learning and changing while I was stuck in my life, a starving receptionist with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Lily was making friends at college, learning, sleeping with boys, bringing them home to meet her emaciated twin.
“You said you were identical,” the boys would say, eyeing up my angles.
“We were,” I told them.
Initially, Lily had a type. Boys with bad facial hair and a liberal outlook. She swooned when they smoked their blunts and tucked too-long hair behind their ears, maybe unveiled some bad tattoo of a quirky food item—taco, avocado—or a roman numeral, talked about the environment as if it were their true love and then dropped cigarette butts on the street. Most of them played the acoustic guitar despite not knowing how. Most of them acted as if they were doing Lily some sort of favor by dating her. Look how much of a feminist I am, their proud smirks announced. I support women so much I’ll even date a fat one!
I hated them all.
We Bleed: The blood comes slowly and slowly and then so quickly so fast so all at once that we’re all just sitting in our own personal blood pools like some fancy spa day: We’ll take a blood spa, thanks.
I’ve heard it’s good for the skin, says our leader, and we all nod with her, for we’ve heard similar genres of the same story. Feeling productive now, given that we are not simply sitting in pools of death, but that we are, in actual fact, undergoing a rigorous homemade skin treatment, we smile at one another as we sit, our underwear stained scarlet and the pools continuing to grow.
Eventually, when the blood is up around our waists and we can’t see the lower halves of our bodies when we look down, we decide to start cleaning. We don’t have any sanitary products, of course—we haven’t needed tampons for months—but we do have a number of absorbent materials in the house. Towels, for one. Cotton balls, for two. Socks, for three.
We find everything we own, we empty drawers, we ransack cupboards. Our leader says, How about this whole-grain loaf, and we all say, Yes, yes, bread is very absorbent, after all, consider eggs and soldiers.
We have thrown everything we own into the blood pool, but still, the blood flows. The pool laps at our breasts and, had everything been different and nothing the same, this might be our first attempt at breastfeeding.
The problem is that we are absorbing the red at the same pace as we are bleeding, and so the mess seems to stagnate. Like bailing water from a leaking boat, we can keep up, but there is no way to plug the flow.
Then there is a knock on our door and we stop our frantic cleaning and drop whichever absorbent object we are holding and we watch the door tiptoe open. Hello, says a voice, anyone home?
It’s us, we say, we’re home, who is it?
It’s your neighbors, say two women who look only vaguely familiar. We are from the apartment beneath yours, they say, and our roof is raining red.
We nod. Gesture around ourselves by way of explanation.
It’s a bloodbath in here, says one of the women.
Yes, says our leader, it is a spa day. Blood has incredible healing, antiaging qualities.
The women share a look and they say, Can we join you?
We nod, nod nod nod, Of course, we say, of course. And our leader says, But it’ll cost you a hundred dollars to come in. After all, this blood belongs to us.
The women laugh and they say, A hundred bucks, it’s a bargain, and they each hand us a bill and we usher them inside.
The women remove their clothing and lower themselves into the red. They say, This is great, and then they say, Why is there a loaf of whole-grain floating in it?
It’s to eat, we tell them. And suddenly it is. Suddenly what we feel is empty. Does an unhaunted house ever miss its ghosts?
2010 (21 years old—Lily: 210 lbs, Rose: 68 lbs)
Something changed in Lily’s third year of college. It was hard to pinpoint, exactly, what was different, but her shift in romantic interests was drastic. Suddenly she was bringing home strays. Overt racists. Blatant misogynists. As if she took the hand of any old passerby and dragged him back to her dorm room. As if she wanted to be treated badly. Her weight skyrocketed. She had a hole in her stomach—her appetite, a well never filled.
Spring break, when she arrived with the first of the terrible boys, Lance, I opened the door and sucked my tongue to keep from gasping. She had grown. The wood of the wraparound porch winced under her weight. When she shifted, the boards creaked. She was beautiful, of course. She always was, but her light had darkened, her smile fell flat.
“Hi,” I said, but my voice sounded wrong, and Lily knew immediately. She held her arms around herself, a barrier.
Lance took a cigarette from behind his ear.
“You can’t smoke here,” hissed Lily, trying to snatch the cigarette. “My dad.” But he held on tight, lifted it to his lips. I was accustomed to people wanting to smoke around me. As if I triggered the habit in them.
“You two ever had sex with the same guy?”
“What? No,” said Lily.
“Want to?”
“What?” I said. “What did you say?”
“A threesome.” He exhaled a dawdling strand of smoke and winked at me. “I bet you’d be into it, huh? Skinny girls are always so freaky.” Lance, it turned out, was not a boy but a ridiculous caricature of one.
“Jesus Christ,” said Lily. “You should just go.”
Dad hadn’t even arrived home from work yet.
“You gave me a ride, sugar tits,” said Lance. “How’m I meant to get back to the dorm?”
“Sugar tits.” I snorted. “Scram, man. You heard her.”
Lance went. Lily took my hands and lifted them to her cheeks. The feel was familiar. I used to have the exact same cheeks. Lily’s face hadn’t gained the weight her body had, like it was protesting the change, insisting that Lily return to her former self.
“I’m so sorry,” said Lily. “About him. What a dick. I didn’t realize.”
“Why are you dating him?”
She ignored my question, but her cheeks warmed beneath my palms. “Are you okay?” she asked.
I laughed. “It’s fine,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m not some fragile fucking flower, Lil.” As I spoke, I ran my fingers over my décolletage. I liked to hook them under my collarbone, hang myself on myself.
“I know,” Lily said, barely glancing at my jutting bone. “I know that. He just, that threesome thing. And I just, I mean, you haven’t . . . you know . . . yet . . . have you?” All of her trailing ellipses dizzied me. I held her arm for support.
“Spit it out, Lil,” I said.
“I mean you haven’t . . . done it?”
“You’re having the sex talk with me?” I laughed. Of course I hadn’t lost my virginity. I was hungry and ugly.
“I didn’t mean to—”
“Just stop,” I said. I d
idn’t know why she was worrying about sex when I was clearly under seventy pounds. A child’s weight. A skeleton!
I bent to pick up Lance’s discarded cigarette, smoke still lifting from its tip. I took a drag. The smoke tasted light as air until it didn’t. Until it coated my throat in an oil slick. I swallowed and swallowed to flush the pollution. “I’ve done things that’d make you blush,” I said. She didn’t believe me. She could taste the lemony lie, in the way we could always taste each other’s business. But she needn’t know just how extravagant the lie really was.
I unbuttoned my shirt, an oversized denim from my father’s closet, and spread the lapels wide. Look, I didn’t say. Look at me.
She frowned at my body. “You look terrible,” she said. But she didn’t beg to help. She didn’t offer to make me a salad with barely any calories. She didn’t even ask how much I weighed. She only wrinkled her nose and looked away.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much.”
“What do you want me to say, Rose? I can’t keep babying you. I’ve got my own shit going on.”
Her own shit? I hugged the fabric back across my body and swallowed. What if Lily had given up on me?
Back in the facility, the group leader told us that, while we couldn’t control people, we could learn to better understand them and therefore predict their actions. The illusion of control without any of the harm. We played The Type of Person Who.
“For example,” the group leader said, as we sat in a circle. “Rachel is the type of person who twiddles her thumbs as she listens.” She nodded at a thin girl, nondescript but undeniably thumb-twiddling. “What type of person twiddles their thumbs?”
The rest of us, watching Rachel’s thumbs chase one another, cat and mouse, we clasped our fingers, began to rotate our thumbs, too. “The type of person who jiggles their leg?” says one.
