by Diana Clarke
“Sorry.”
“It feels really good to be loved, Rosie. In the way he loves me, I mean. It’s so complete. Does that make sense? He’s all I think about. He’s, our relationship is, it’s everything. It’s nice to be consumed like that, you know? Nice to have something so all-consuming. It’s like, this sounds stupid, but it’s like something I can drown in. Does that make sense?”
It does. I drop the bloodied towel into the sink, retreat to my bed, close my eyes, and let the fatigue in. I know how to live underwater.
Weeds compete with flowers and grasses and vegetables for resources. They can also be allelopathic to neighboring plants, hindering their growth further. As a result, the more desirable plants lose valuable phosphorous, nitrogen, and potassium, leaving them weak, and, sometimes, dead.
30
2012 (23 years old—Lily: 251 lbs, Rose: 63 lbs)
The pro-ana girls gave me a nickname. Riz.
“It sounds thinner, don’t you think?” said Lin, stirring her overpriced green tea.
“What does that mean?” I said. I had taken French in high school and I wasn’t sure how being named Rice was thinner than being named Rose.
“You can just hear it in the sounds of the letters,” said Lin. “None of us are allowed an o in our names. Too fat.”
“Okay,” I said. “I guess. Riz.”
“Yeah, see, it suits you.” Lin’s teeth were yellowed, her gums browned, the inside of her mouth, autumn. “Just like Lin suits me. Mim suits her. Flee. Thin girls need thin names.”
I nodded. “Sure,” I said. We paused to watch a group of four girls sit down at the table beside ours. They had a single plate of cake to share and, before touching it, they took turns photographing it from above, twisting the plate, shifting the cutlery. Once documented, they took turns mining the slice, each with their own fork.
“It’s so good,” one said.
“We’re so bad,” said another.
“I’d better get back on that treadmill,” said a third.
The women spent a long time on each mouthful, savoring. We watched their sin, hungry. Watching others eat had a way of reaffirming our hunger. We loved it.
The girls left the last bite, the way women do, and each took a turn describing how full the quartered cake had made them, the way women do. A ritual. Then they stood, hugged, promised to see one another again soon. Us pro-ana girls, we stared at that last bite. We each, in turn, imagined plucking it between our fingers and swallowing. I looked at Mim who looked at Flee who looked at Lin who looked at me. We looked back at the mouthful of cake. Finally, a server came to clear the table. He bussed the plate and tipped it into a trash can without giving that last morsel a second glance. Free from temptation, we returned our attention to one another.
“Anyone got any new tips or tricks?” said Flee. “I’ve plateaued, but I’ve got like five pounds to go before I reach my goal weight.”
“Tips or tricks,” I said.
“Tips and tricks,” said Mim. “You’ll have to contribute at some point.”
“Tips and tricks for?”
“Staying thin,” said Mim, lighting a cigarette despite the coffee shop’s no smoking sign. “Getting thinner.”
“Ah,” I said. “I’m not sure that I have any tricks.”
“For example, last week I shared with the group that I went to a psychiatrist and got a prescription for Prozac. It stunts the appetite.”
“Prozac?”
She unclasped her purse and foraged around inside, took out numerous canisters of pills before finding the one she was looking for. “Prozac,” she said. “Prescribed as an antidepressant. Weight loss is a side effect.”
“Are you sure you should be—”
“Take it.” She slipped the bottle into my hand. “I can get more. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. We just share information. It’s cool. So, what do you do when you’re hungry? Or if you feel faint?”
“A Tic Tac. I eat a Tic Tac.”
“There you go!” Mim clapped my back and her bones rattled against mine. “That’s a good one. Take notes, ladies.”
“I broke last week, and I ate so much of the shelter’s powdered mashed potato that I got my period for the first time in two years,” said Flee. She slumped over the table. Distraught at her body’s display of recovery.
“But that’s a good thing,” I said. “You’re getting better.”
Flee’s glare was immediate.
“Be supportive or fucking leave,” said Mim, turning to me with embering eyes. I backed off.
That was the problem with us thin girls. We would agree to anything. Support any cause just because it asked us to. We hadn’t learned how to be ourselves because we were born with voices in our heads. Voices that told us what to do and when. Voices that told us what others wanted, what the world wanted, that kept us from being selves.
What I had not learned yet: unconditional support is not the same as unconditional love, even if it might look similar.
Elvis Presley was said to be a fan of the sleeping beauty diet. This involved sedating oneself for long periods of time. You can’t eat if you’re unconscious.
Lily and I are woken by a phone call in the night. Lily stumbles out of her bedroom just as I am sitting up on the couch. She takes her cell phone off its charger and rasps, “Hello?” But the ringing continues.
“Is it your cell?” she says. But no one has my number.
Eventually, our eyes settle on the landline, hanging on the wall like some ignored insect. Lily grimaces, says, “I don’t think I’ve ever answered that.”
I’m certain it’s Mim, returning my call. My teeth feel cold. We let the phone fall silent. Sigh into the quiet. I check the clock: six a.m. Not the middle of the night, after all. I yawn and the ringing starts up again.
“What?” says Lily, taking the phone off the wall and holding it away from her ear, suspicious of its intent. There’s a mumbling on the other end and Lily’s expression falls. “Yes? Oh. Okay,” she says. “Thank you.” She hangs up and stares at the phone, as if it might continue talking from its cradle.
“What is it?” I say. “What happened?”
Lily blinks her way over to the couch and falls onto the cushion beside me.
“Ah,” she says, pulling her lip into her mouth, chewing. “Your friend,” she says. “Your friend from the center?”
“Jram?”
“What?”
“Who are you talking about?” I say. “Which friend?”
“Kat?” says Lily.
“What about her?”
“She died last night.” Lily is looking, examining, waiting.
“Oh.”
“She wasn’t eating,” says Lily. “She was, ah, she was somehow cheating the weighing system and the nurses thought she was gaining weight, but I guess she was actually losing it. The nurses wanted you to know. They said you were close.”
“Oh,” I say. Then, “I have to go.”
I walk to the facility slowly, body trembling, hands numb with cold despite the rising sun. I vomit behind a bus stop, but all that comes out is a glob of yellow. It’s too yellow, too bright to have been inside this shadow of a body. I pause to think, I just coughed up my last bit of hope.
Kat Mitchells. Gone. No one ever survives.
I laugh. The melodrama!
2012 (23 years old—Lily: 264 lbs, Rose: 62 lbs)
Flee fainted at her job as a grocery store cashier. Split her face open on the register. She was hospitalized for dehydration, and the doctor kept her in for malnourishment.
When Mim and I arrived at the hospital, Lin was already there, lying beside Flee, both fitting easily on the thin hospital bed.
“Hi,” Mim whispered. “Is she okay?”
Lin opened her eyes. “Hey,” she said. “She’s asleep. A stitch in her lip and a pretty bad concussion, the doctors think. And she’s way, way underweight. She’s scared they’re going to check her in.”
“Check h
er in?” I said.
“To a facility,” Mim said. “Recovery.”
Lin shuddered at the thought.
I looked at Flee, lying still and nearly dead. Tubes threaded through her nose and throat, more in her arms, her hand. I wanted to turn and run and never stop running. I wanted to run until my skin became translucent, until my bones ground into the road, until I was only a pile of dust and the wind could sweep me away, weightless.
Dr. Oliver Di Pietro developed the KE Diet, which involves having a feeding tube inserted through the nose, down the esophagus, and surviving for ten days on a solution of proteins, fats, and micronutrients, which is pumped through the tube. Laxatives are given to patients to ease constipation.
One night, the same night, I would later learn, that Lily ended things with Tony, I got a shooting pain in my stomach. An electric shock that woke me from even the dark depths of a sedative-induced coma. I yelped awake, my hands pressed to my stomach, and groaned.
I took my phone from the nightstand and called Lily. “Are you okay?” I said.
She was crying. I could taste the tears.
“Are you okay?”
She wouldn’t answer, so I waited, listened to her breath until it deepened. I finally hung up the phone to go to the bathroom, and there, between my legs, blood.
Mim reached for Lin’s hand and I watched their fingers entwine. She climbed up onto the bed, her head at Flee’s feet, and then patted the spot beside her. I followed, slipping myself, a puzzle piece, into this strange jigsaw of thin girls in bed. I took Flee’s fingers. We lay, head to toe to head to toe, and cried long into the night. Eventually, Lin nodded off, snoring lightly into our tangle of limbs. A knot of girls.
“Want to hear a joke?” I said to Mim, wanting to relieve her tears.
“Sure.”
“Okay, so a piece of string walks into a bar—”
“Oh, I don’t really like this kind of joke,” said Mim. “Tell it anyway.”
“Okay, so a piece of string walks into a bar and orders a drink. The bartender says, ‘We don’t serve string in here.’ So the string—”
“This is so stupid.”
“What?”
“This talking fucking string joke.” She wrapped her pinkie in a strand of hair and pulled tight. I watched as her finger purpled and bulged.
“It’s actually funny once you get to the—”
“Okay, keep going.”
“So the string goes away from the bar and messes up his hair.”
“Hair?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a fucking string.” She released her finger and it returned to its usual color slowly. “String doesn’t have hair.”
“Just—”
“Okay, sorry.”
“I don’t have to tell it.”
“No, I’m sorry, babe. I’m sorry. Keep going.”
“Okay, are you sure? Okay, and so his hair is all messed up and when he comes back to the bar he orders another drink and the bartender goes, ‘Hey aren’t you that string from before?’ and the string goes, ‘No I’m a frayed knot.’”
Mim didn’t laugh. She wound a new strand of hair around the same finger. “I don’t really get it,” she said.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I think I want to get better.”
Mim rolled her eyes. “You don’t want to recover, Riz, you fucking idiot. You don’t. Or you would have.”
“I think I do,” I whispered. “I just don’t know how.”
“Yeah? Well, go turn yourself in, then. Go get help. I’ll watch from the sidelines like your cheerleading girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend?” I said, and if Lily were there she would have said that my hope tasted fresh as spring apples.
“Calm your tits,” said Mim. “I meant platonically. Christ.”
I stood. “Even if I don’t get help. Even if I stay like this, I’m not going to end up like Flee. I’m not dying of this, Mim.” And I meant it. I didn’t want to die. “I’m gonna be late for work,” I said. “I’m not coming back.” And I meant that, too. Even if it meant leaving Mim.
It was that day, when I got home from the CHIC offices, that Lily was waiting with my father. An intervention. And I let them intervene.
When a banana matures, it secretes ethylene gas, a substance that accelerates the ripening of any surrounding fruit, spreads toward them, seeps through their skin, catalyzes their rot. A murder suicide.
31
2012 (23 years old—Lily: 269 lbs, Rose: 61 lbs)
It was Lily who eventually convinced my father, who didn’t know how to deal with my disorder or didn’t care or else was so hopelessly inattentive that he hadn’t noticed how I tucked every dinner up my sweater sleeves to later flush down the toilet, that my thinness was no longer merely dieting, but a bigger problem.
I came home from the hospital where Flee was being kept and where Mim and Lin had set up their camp of support to find Lily already sitting in the kitchen, only it wasn’t a weekend, and she should have been back at university, in class.
“What?” I said, staring at her, unable to read her for the first time in my life as she sat next to Dad, the pair of them looking at me.
“Rose,” she said.
“What?” I said, cruel with hunger.
“Baby sister,” said Lily, and my mouth tasted of seawater, which meant she’d been crying. I had become a connoisseur of my sister’s emotions from a young age. I tasted everything she went through. It was only a matter of refining the palate. “Rose, you need help.”
“What?”
Lily looked to our father, on her left, who kept his mouth shut except when he needed to take a long swig of Budweiser. Then she sighed. “You have a problem, an eating problem. You need help.”
“What is this, some kind of intervention?” I looked only at Lily, who had known about me, my problem, for so long. “Why now?”
“We’ve found a facility,” Lily continued without answering. But she must have felt it, the hospital, Flee’s sickness, or a change in me, maybe. Maybe she tasted that the time to intervene was now, when I was softened, vulnerable. “It’s not a fancy place, but it’s only a half hour from here and it’s within our price range.”
“Wait,” I said, shrinking into a chair. “Wait, wait. Wait. You’re sending me away?”
“We’re trying to help.”
“By sending me away?”
“Well, you’re not getting better here.”
My father burped, but, to his credit, he did cover his mouth with his palm. Then he said, “We just want you to be happy.”
“I’d be happy if you didn’t send me away,” I said.
Lily threw her arms in the air, as if trying to get rid of her hands. “How are you meant to get better here?”
“I will,” I said. “I’ll eat.”
“You won’t,” said Lily. She knew I was bluffing. She could taste the citric. “You’ve been battling this for years now. People like you don’t just get better. Don’t just start eating.”
“I can.”
“You can’t.”
“I can try.”
“You won’t.”
I sighed. “So, what? You’ve already made the decision? You’re sending me away and that’s that? Well, guess what? I’m an adult. I don’t have to do anything.” It wasn’t me talking. It was her, the thing inside me had taken over. Seized control, made me so thin and angry.
Lily looked at my father, then she said, “Well, if you don’t go to the facility, you can’t live here anymore.”
“What?” I stood, but vertigo shoved me back into my seat with a heavy hand.
“Right, Dad?” said Lily.
He nodded. “That’s right.”
I crossed my arms. Swallowed empty saliva. “Are you fucking serious?”
“We only want you to be healthy, girlie,” said my father.
Lily crouched on the floor, her hands on my knees, tried to look me in the eye. It once felt like looking in the mirror, to
look into my sister’s eyes. But now I was insect-like, all angles, and she was heavy and soft. We were opposites. “Baby sister,” she said, her voice gentle as a breeze, “I am so worried about you.”
I swallowed spiked tears, held my breath, counted, released. There was a new taste on my tongue. An awful, frightening taste. Like chewing on ice, my throat flooded cold, and the taste was terror, and it was my sister’s. My own twin feared me. Flee, I realized, had no one to be afraid for her, to care about her, to intervene even when she was on the precipice of death. I still had one person. I still had Lily. I whispered, “Okay.” I nodded. “Okay. I’ll do it.”
I had decided to recover before. I’d made the decision so many times, the way alcoholics decide to quit drinking, or how smokers decide that this one would be their last. My first days in the facility were lonely, but I was focused, determined, to get better. I would be normal again. I would live again.
The other thin girls watched me from a distance at first. Seeing how I spooned food into my mouth at mealtimes. Amazed by my eager participation in group sessions. When we were asked to shake hands with our foods, I thrust my arm out, took my banana by its head, and shook.
I was doing well. Eating well. I had never felt so hungry, or, I had never felt so empty. Every night, I lay in bed, wanting Mim, missing Mim. Her snorting laugh, her snide insults, the way she walked headfirst. I felt homesick, not for my house, with my father, who barely cared, but for Mim, who felt more like a place I belonged than any place I’d ever been.
It wasn’t a breakup, of course. There can’t be a breakup if there was never a relationship. But the hole in my stomach, my sad, wet heart, the way I could eat, mechanical, machine, the food no longer disgusted me, it just was.
Something felt broken. Me. I did.
Things changed at my first weigh-in. I’d gained two kilograms, and I managed to smile my way out of the room, down the hall, and back to my bedroom before I forced my fingers down my throat and threw up everything I had consumed into my trash can. The cleaners, of course, noticed, and told the nurses. That night was my first intravenous intake. I thrashed my way through it, and, the next day, the thin girls accepted me as one of their own. One of them handed me my own collection of shower curtain weights and a ball of twine. I was welcomed in with open arms, and it was nice to feel like part of a community again. Being alone is a lot of responsibility.
