by Chris Baron
and I don’t see what I want to see.
I like myself, sometimes,
but it feels like the person
in the mirror isn’t me anymore.
I stare,
close my eyes,
remember …
a New York schoolyard.
The dodgeball
hits me squarely
in the chest.
I fall back.
My shirt pulls up,
and the innocent laughter
of other kids
and my own laughter
to cover it all up.
Or my father, at a fancy dinner,
before he says anything else, introduces
me to his business partner as husky.
I tell people I’m naturally a bigger person.
The mirror is slightly tilted.
That’s why I look this way. I tell myself
the mirror is tilted and warped.
Then I catch myself.
I grab the sink,
hold tight.
I won’t let myself lie.
Not now.
No lie.
Not now.
I hear my mother and Pick
moving in the gallery,
the sounds of morning conversations,
cereal boxes and fruit bowls.
I let go of the sink,
slide my hands to my sides,
grab my love handles
where they spill
over my pajama pants.
I can’t stop looking at my body,
and for the first time, the way I look
becomes me
all the way.
I feel horrible. Heavy.
Stagnant water in a bucket.
In seventh grade
we learned about heavy water.
Regular water has a single proton
in each nucleus of its hydrogen atom.
In heavy water, each hydrogen atom
has a neutron too.
Neutrons, unstable, lonely,
do everything they can to stick to the proton,
make the water more dense, heavy.
My body is filled with heavy water.
Unstable, I place my hands
around my love handles
and get a good, strong grip,
sandwich the flesh between
my thumb and fingers
until my fat fills my palms.
Why does it have to be like this?
Most people will tell me that it’s my fault.
I want to feel something other
than sorry for myself.
I tighten my grip,
and even as I do, I hear
Pick’s voice saying
he wants to help me,
and for a moment
I think about getting help,
but I don’t. Instead, in the wet air,
in the quiet,
I just
squeeze.
I squeeze,
feeling the thumbs
dig into my body.
Press,
press.
It hurts.
I let up a bit.
My sides throb in redness,
my fingers flushed
and pushed in,
and already
a small amount
of blood.
I think about Pick saying,
Who are you?
I think of the night before and the voice of the stranger.
Get ’em next time, Fatboy.
I remember more now,
images of jeans too tight
and shirts poking out in weird places
and names that I must have pushed far away.
I remember New York
and the grandparents always declaring
how skinny my cousins are.
I think about how
this is summer,
and we are at the beach.
And everyone sees me as fat.
Teeth gritting,
I feel it like a burn,
my hands to my sides,
the thumbnails now
pushing down
on the same spot
push
press
until the ache is overwhelming.
I feel the control of it,
the pain
working its way into my blood.
I watch myself do this
in the old mirror.
press
my face sweating
skin pale
I do this
until the blood comes
over my fingernails,
and I don’t stop
until it hurts so much
I scream.
I hear the others hearing me.
I want them to.
I squeeze harder.
press
push
squeeze
I feel my face flush with tears
that fill my eyes until
the mirror fades into mist,
the sky dark.
I am falling,
I think,
falling down.
I feel my shirtless body scrape
along the wood door,
I feel the sudden relief of pain stopping.
Sometime later,
I open my eyes
and I am on
top of my sleeping bag.
I see Pick sitting by the counter.
My mother is holding my hand,
and her face is wet with tears.
I feel an ache in my sides.
When I look down, I see
the pain has turned purple.
What happened? I ask.
My mother looks at me,
grips my hand.
She doesn’t answer.
Doctor
Sometime after the incident,
as my mother now refers to it,
she takes me to the doctor,
a psychiatrist.
We drop off Pick,
make plans to see him soon,
and drive from Marin
back to San Francisco.
The car is silent the rest of the way.
I don’t know what to say,
but she tries to fill the quiet
with plans and questions.
We are going on a diet,
she says. It’s time, she says.
She tells me about
how she used to take a pill,
no bigger than a pin,
that kept her
from getting hungry,
kept her awake,
helped her see things
in a whole new way.
I painted all night, she says.
I don’t even remember how it happened.
She tells me about
filling galleries
with paintings,
department stores
with hand-painted dresses.
But first, she says,
we need to talk about what happened.
We climb up and down
San Francisco streets
until we get there.
The doctor’s office
is like an apartment.
We wait in stinky chairs,
watch two little boys
destroy a puzzle,
their mom deep
in the world of her phone.
The doctor is kind and old.
He says my whole name,
Ari … Samuel … Rosensweig,
asks me if I like my name.
I don’t know? Yes?
At first I don’t like
his one-sided voice,
the words coming
out of just the left side.
He talks to me about school,
asks me questions about girls.
I don’t really know what to say.
He expects something from me.
He asks me directly about what happened,
and I
feel my side ache.
You know, Ari, sometimes
we harm ourselves
because we don’t know
what else to do.
I stare at him.
I think I need to talk about this.
My thoughts and my words
swirl around, and I’m not sure
if I’m thinking or speaking.
I start talking about feeling distracted,
about how my body
seems like a different place
than it’s ever been,
like sometimes it’s on fire.
He seems good at listening.
Finally, he asks
if my mother
will leave.
When she does,
the doctor smiles,
asks me about puberty.
I fold my arms across my body,
look at the books on the shelf.
I want to say
I don’t know anything,
but I think about the time
when I was eight,
and tell him about when
my friends and me
saw something on the computer
we shouldn’t have seen.
We acted like
we understood
the confusing scenes,
the awful voices,
the inhuman sounds.
We all felt sick.
I tell the doctor that
it doesn’t feel like that anymore,
that it just makes me scared.
I feel like he is actually listening.
Somehow this doctor knows my questions
Without me even asking them.
One by one,
he tells me things I need to hear,
lights turning on,
pieces of puzzles
that seemed lost
suddenly fitting into
unexpected places.
Sometimes, he says,
you may feel afraid when lots
of changes happen
in your home environment.
It’s normal to feel this way, Ari.
At the end
of the hour,
he settles deep into his chair,
smiles, and takes a long breath.
So, he says.
Will you tell me what happened in the bathroom?
I don’t know. I look down,
pull my socks up higher.
It won’t happen again, I say.
He looks at me,
smiles.
It won’t, I say.
He puts an unexpected hand
on my shoulder.
Apartment Doctor
I convince my mom
I don’t need
to go to the apartment doctor again,
even though he helped me.
I should have gone back.
It’s just that
I don’t want
to think about
what happened
or talk it over.
I wish I could take
the memory,
throw it into the bay,
watch it slowly sink
into the salt water,
down and down,
washed away forever
into the cold darkness.
Another Kind of Doctor
The paper
on this doctor’s table
crumples beneath
my weight.
Food pyramids
cover the walls,
mostly green,
the vegetables and fruits
delicious in the posters.
Deep-red apples
where the bite taken out
is white like cartoon apples.
The broccoli pleads
with giant eyes
to be eaten two to four times daily.
There are dancing grapes
and carrot sticks
and breads pushed to the back,
near a lonely triangle
of forgotten pizza.
The doctor comes in.
His skin is made
of glossy magazine pages
and his hair is brown paper.
He has me step on the scale.
He has me stand against the wall.
He has me try to touch my toes.
From this position,
he takes an instrument
like thin pliers
and presses them gently
to my sides. Cold, I flinch,
not from the pain
but from the memory of the pain.
When he sees the sores,
deep purple and black,
his breathing changes,
and he whispers
in a doctor’s voice,
How did this happen?
I answer by holding up my hands,
pushing my thumbs into my fingertips.
He nods.
He is careful to avoid
the sores,
the huge purple bruises.
He moves me from the bench to a chair,
goes to a drawer,
removes a package
of folded papers,
some glossy plastic and cardboard wheels,
and other packages full of colors.
He asks my mom into the room
and for the next thirty minutes
she nods and writes stuff down.
The doctor spins the wheel,
which is actually five wheels,
each a different color,
talks about points,
and colors meaning points,
and points meaning gaining
or losing weight.
He talks about targets
and colors that are pie pieces.
Spins the wheels
in different directions
to where a whole pie
filled with mostly green slices
sits at the center.
Thirty pounds, he says.
I need you to lose at least thirty pounds.
I hold the wheel, spin the different sections.
It smells like paint
and plastic,
a mutated rainbow,
an impossible request.
My arms out,
he fills them up with posters
and a button with the mutated rainbow on it.
On the way to the nursery,
my mother hatches plans.
We’ll buy a juicer, she says.
Broken Promise
We never buy a juicer.
The Answer?
She stands over the bed,
cradles a book in her arms,
rocks it like a baby.
I have it, she says. I’ve got it.
She holds up a yellow book.
There’s a man in a suit on the cover
sitting at a desk.
I knew this doctor in the sixties
in New York. I did a portrait
of his wife.
This doctor wrote a diet book!
It really works!
She uncradles the book,
looks at the cover,
and spins it onto the bed.
I lift it,
hold it in both hands,
feel the compact weight
of the book.
When my feet hit the floor,
she explains how it works.
She talks about carbohydrates
and how evil sugar is.
The more she tells me
the more I realize that this diet
isn’t like any other.
It’s the end of bread,
potato chips, cookies,
cereal, and even pizza.
But maybe it’s a chance for real change.
We Need to Get Lisa
The next morning, starving,
I walk into the kitchen. My mother is
muttering, tapping furious
texts on her phone.
Something’s happened. We need to get Lisa.
I remember the quiver of Lisa’s voice
when she told me about her mom.
I unwrap a piece
of cheese,
open Mysterious World,
nervously read about Bigfoot.
We need to get her, my mother mutters again.
She may need to stay with us for a while.
I think about Lisa.
1. She looks like a superhero in the comics we read.
2. She’s kind.
3. She plays Dungeons & Dragons with me.
4. She’s an amazing artist.
5. She writes stories.
6. She likes me for who I am.
7. She punched Rick Casterol in the nose when he said something he shouldn’t have.
8. She always sticks up for me.
I fold the book down onto the table.
My mother paces back and forth,
then suddenly stops
and looks me in the eyes.
Something’s happened, Ari.
Lisa’s mom needs to go away
for a little while. She’s sick,
and she needs time to get well.
On Our Way
We pass Shoreline Highway,
our usual route onto Miller Avenue,
the bike path on my right,
the one I ride from the Dolan house,
from Pick’s house.
I watch for snowy egrets
in the fog,
and in the distance
I see the middle school
on my left.
I unwrap another cheese stick,
imagine the faces of classmates.
I picture the first day of next year,
walking on campus,
the lighter steps,
the better clothes,
the hope of feeling more free.
I watch myself walking
up the stairs before the first bell,
no one staring.
No extra layers of me,
just another boy.
Sometimes the silence of others
is better than attention.
Twenty-Three Steps
We pass the depot
in the heart of downtown,
turn on
Throckmorton Avenue
toward Old Mill Park.
On the right are the long
stone steps of Lisa’s house.
Twenty-three steps.
I count them every time.
Wait here, my mother says.
I wait in the car,
