“If your therapist wants to see the notebook, I can show it to her,” he offered.
“Thanks. I’ll ask. I think it can just be our thing, though. I know you probably don’t want anyone else to hold it.”
“I didn’t mean the actual notebook. I meant a copy. But maybe you won’t need the notebook now that you have a therapist,” Matt said. It hadn’t occurred to him until he said it. Maybe Matt wouldn’t get to record Abby’s breaths and smiles and laughs and calories anymore. Maybe he’d have to find something else to record. He had his license back, and his new red truck. He could go out in the world and find data. But he had grown to prefer his safe, quiet, sunny window. And Abby sitting beside him.
“I don’t mind the notebook,” she said. She chewed her last carrot and gestured for Matt to record it. He smiled and wrote it down.
Abby drank her water and set the glass on the window ledge, empty except for the last piece of ice, quickly melting within. The sun cut through the glass and cast rainbows all around her. He wished he’d gotten her milk instead of water. Then he’d have more calories and protein to list. But the rainbows were beautiful, and maybe a drained milk glass wouldn’t have been clean enough for those.
“You’re Rainbow Girl,” Matt said. He gestured toward the rainbows on the carpet and Abby’s calves, but she didn’t look down. She tipped her head back and laughed, her old birdlike giggle, and Matt had to make a note of it, so he didn’t have time to explain the prism effect of the glass.
When Lana came in she’d complain about the water glass on the windowsill. It was sweating moisture and would leave a ring on the white paint of the sill. Matt was torn between removing the glass to spare the paint and leaving it there to keep the rainbows. He decided the best thing would be to take a picture to remember the rainbows, then move the glass. He got out his phone and tried to see them through the camera, but it didn’t work. The feeling in the narrow box of the photo was all wrong: flat and dark. It felt small in the picture, and much bigger here in the room with Abby. He tried different angles, but none of them worked.
“Let me see,” Abby said. She held her hand out for his phone. Matt never gave his phone to anyone else. He saw how Lana let the kids use hers, and they’d already broken one of them: Byron, by dropping it on the concrete front steps. Matt held the phone halfway out to Abby, but he knew he couldn’t let it go. He changed his mind, started to pull it back toward himself, and just then Abby leaned toward him, very nearly touching her cheek to his, and grasped the phone, still in his fingers, pressing the camera button. The screen filled with a photo of the two of them. Matt realized they looked alike: same fair skin, same light hair, same narrow jaw, same round eyes.
“Rainbow Girl and Notebook Man,” Abby said, smiling. “Send it to me, okay?”
Matt nodded, fumbling with the phone. He wasn’t sure how to send a photo. He’d never done it before. His pictures were his. He also needed to record the smiles, two since his last note. He looked from the notebook to the phone to the glass. He still needed to move the glass. And the breaths. He was losing track of the breaths. It was too much to do all at once. The calm feeling was gone and his hands and cheeks were tingling. He couldn’t do all of it, which meant he couldn’t do any of it. His anxiety was rising, his heartbeat picking up, the rainbows still beckoning to be caught on camera, the notebook waiting for the smiles, the glass sweating on the ledge, the phone heavy in his hand.
“I can do it,” Abby said. “Is it okay if I hold your phone?”
“Your mom won’t like the glass there. The water. The condensation is getting on the windowsill. But the rainbows . . .” He was having trouble breathing, and Abby’s smiles and breaths, he was losing track of them.
Abby jumped up and left the room, left him alone with the rainbows and the notes and the phone still in his hand. She came back with a paper towel, which she folded neatly into a small square and placed beneath the glass. The rainbows disappeared as she lifted the glass, but they returned once she’d set it down.
“Better?” Abby asked.
Matt nodded. “Three,” he said. “Three smiles.”
“Okay, but I can’t write in your book, right?”
Matt nodded. Abby was waiting. He couldn’t think clearly. He looked at the three pens in his hand.
“Blue. Blue for smiles,” Abby said.
Matt uncapped the blue pen and made the note. He sighed once that was done. He’d stopped counting her breaths and now he’d never know. “I’ve lost track of the breaths, though. They’re gone forever.”
“We don’t need the breaths anymore,” Abby said. “I’m eating again. Back on your plan. Only foods I like. No spitting it out in napkins. Is that enough data? The smiles and laughs and food and birds?”
Matt nodded, relaxing. It was plenty of data. He could let the breaths go. He’d rather record the calories and smiles. He recapped his blue pen, slid it into the coil of the notebook. All that was left was the photo on the phone.
“Never mind the picture. I’m sorry I touched you. I forgot.” Abby leaned back and sighed, folding her hands in her lap.
Matt set the phone down. He still felt overwhelmed. He didn’t know what to do.
“I think I’d rather be Rainbow Girl than the Vizsla, if that’s okay with you,” Abby said.
Matt nodded. He’d forgotten that she was the new Vizsla. He’d lost them both for a little while. The runner must have found a new route. He never saw the Vizsla anymore.
“You can just be Abby,” Matt said.
Abby extended her thin, pale arm until one of the rainbows rested in the palm of her hand. Matt picked up the phone, switched it back to camera mode, and captured it. It worked. The darkness was gone. The fairness of Abby’s skin and the brilliance of the rainbow brought the calm feeling back. Abby was smiling again.
Matt held the phone out to her. She gently took it, careful not to touch his fingers as she did so. While she dealt with the pictures, he noted the smile in the notebook. It was a very good day for data.
27
* * *
Abby
Lana took Abby to her first therapy appointment, but Abby would be going in solo. That’s what the therapist, Jennifer Powell, had suggested. Abby wasn’t nervous until they sat in the tiny waiting room, just a hallway with a few chairs in a big old converted house. Every step in the dark-paneled house creaked under worn Persian rugs, and the windows were covered in heavy drapes. It was a horror-movie house. A door opened and a young, bubbly, pretty girl, with big green eyes, dark reddish brown hair, and fair skin, appeared. Abby half expected her to have an Irish accent.
“Abby?” she asked. She didn’t have a fancy accent. Abby nodded and stood. She was trembling all over. “I’m Jenny,” she said, shaking Abby’s cold hand. “Come on in and have a seat.” Jenny whispered something to Lana as Abby entered the room.
Jenny didn’t have one of those long shrink couches for lying on, she just had an ordinary brown IKEA love seat, like the one Abby’s dad bought when he moved out. The room smelled faintly of incense, but Abby couldn’t find the source. Jenny sat across from Abby and smiled. She was a bit overweight, which seemed strange. Could someone overweight counsel anorexics?
“Would you like to start out with why you’re here?” Jenny asked.
Abby shrugged. She wasn’t sure what to say. “I don’t like to eat,” she said lamely. “I mean, I have trouble eating. I guess I have an eating disorder?” She didn’t know why she made it a question. She felt like she was being tested, only she’d forgotten to study for the exam. There were blinds in Jenny’s office, open to reveal slats of light across the whole room, like jail bars. The room was stuffy and Abby took off her sweater, then felt self-conscious about her body. Lana had made a big deal about Abby’s arms, saying there was no meat there at all. Abby thought they were a little bit flabby. She focused on her stomach and legs in her workouts. Not her arms. She put an orange throw pillow in her lap and tucked her arms under it.
/> “One thing about me,” Jenny said. “I’ve struggled with an eating disorder myself. Obviously not anorexia.” Jenny laughed and Abby felt forced to laugh even though it wasn’t funny. “It’s been a lifelong battle,” Jenny went on. “I always wanted to fit some ideal, obtain an unhealthy body type that fashion magazines planted in my head when I was your age. You know the pictures I mean?”
Jenny opened a folder and removed a picture of a supermodel. There was nothing special about it. Jenny watched Abby closely. She pulled out another picture. The same picture, only different. She handed both photos to Abby. In the second one the model wasn’t quite so tall, and she had shadows under her eyes and lines around her mouth. She had bigger thighs and meatier upper arms.
“The magic of Photoshop,” Jenny said. “You see, that one is the real girl, untouched. This one”—she pointed to the first image—“is what she looked like after they erased every ounce of fat. The ideal that I was chasing? Turns out it didn’t even exist.”
Abby looked back and forth until she got it, then she looked up at Jenny. Jenny was waiting for her to say something, Abby was pretty sure, but Abby had nothing.
“It makes me mad,” Jenny said. “That they set young girls up to hate their bodies to sell some product that nobody needs.”
She handed Abby a whole stack of them: before-and-after-being-Photoshopped pictures of models and celebrities. Sure enough, the ones Abby had spread all over her desk in her room, the magazines full of women with flawless skin and perfect bodies, were fake. They’d been stretched like taffy, wrinkles smoothed out, blemishes lightened, thighs and arms carved away until they were nonexistent, breasts enlarged and lifted. The women themselves were erased, leaving some imaginary girl behind. Abby cared and didn’t care. She guessed she had fallen for it, just like Jenny. But that wasn’t why she didn’t eat.
She looked up and nodded. “I’m sure a lot of girls feel like they have to look like this. And that’s too bad.”
“But not you?” Jenny asked. She had her head tilted to the side like she could see Abby better from an angle.
“I don’t know,” Abby said. “Sure, I’d like to be perfect. I mean, who wouldn’t, right? But the truth is, I just don’t like food. I hate certain textures and smells and anything with a lot of grease. I can barely make myself swallow it.”
“What is food?” Jenny asked.
Abby laughed, but Jenny looked serious. “It’s, um, calories?”
Jenny collected the photos of the fake supermodels. “Anything else?” Abby shrugged. “How about nutrients? How about vitamins, minerals, protein, fiber, the resources we need to have the strongest, healthiest bodies possible?”
Of course Jenny was right. Abby had messed up on her answer. She needed to think before responding. “Yeah, sure. That, too.”
“I hear you’re quite the athlete,” Jenny said. Abby shrugged. It wasn’t like she was going to brag. “Why would you rather run during lunch than eat? Why would you work yourself to the point of fainting? Just because you don’t like food?”
The only way Jenny could know about the fainting and lunch-skipping running was if Lana knew. Which meant someone had told on Abby. Abby was mortified.
“I just . . . I’m trying to keep in shape.”
Jenny gave her a sympathetic smile. “Sometimes, when people have a lot of change going on, hard things, things they can’t control, they find other outlets for their fears, their anxieties. Other means of asserting control over their lives. Exercising as much as possible, eating as little as possible, does it make you feel in control?” She did this for a living. She already knew the answer. Abby saw no point in playing dumb.
“It takes discipline.”
“And without this discipline, what might happen?”
Suddenly Abby felt angry. She wasn’t sure why. “Everything would go to hell.” Except everything already had gone to hell, hadn’t it?
“And what would that mean? How would it change your life if you ate more, exercised less, gained weight, actually liked food?”
“I’d get fat. I’d be made fun of. I’d be even uglier than I am now. I’d be a failure. I’d be ruined.” But of course she was already ruined. Only she didn’t want to talk about that. Abby took the pillow by opposite corners and spun it forward and backward.
“Do you think your food aversion might have something to do with the fact that you only see food as calories?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you see when you look at your body?”
Abby looked down at her thighs, the fat nobody seemed able to see but her. She shook her head. She was done sharing. She wanted to leave.
“I see nothing,” she said. Abby stopped spinning the pillow and set it neatly aside. She felt a swell of anger and she sighed it away, but it didn’t quite leave, not all of it.
“It seems to me that you try very hard to be perfect. Perfect student, perfect athlete, perfect daughter. You have very high standards for yourself. Maybe impossible standards.”
Abby clenched her teeth. It was all she could do not to start her thigh-clenching exercises right there in front of the eating disorder specialist. She wondered if she could get away with it. A feeling of defiance rose up inside her. She slowly tightened up every muscle in her body, just for the thrill of pulling one over on good old Jenny.
“Perfectionist tendencies frequently accompany anorexia. This belief that achieving perfection will finally bring happiness. That you can’t be happy unless you are perfect. Do you ever feel like that?”
Abby relaxed her body, took a breath, tightened it up again.
“Are you happy?” Jenny asked. It was a stupid question. Happy people didn’t end up in therapy. Abby snorted. Relaxed her body. Tightened up again. “Right now, exercising in front of me, are you happy?”
Abby felt like she’d been punched in the stomach, and her body went slack in response. “No.”
“How do you feel?”
“I feel . . .” Abby felt a swell of tears, laced with rage. She felt humiliated and exposed and like the biggest failure in the world. She looked for one word to sum all of that up, but there wasn’t one. “I feel everything. Everything but happy.”
“Well, that’s a start,” Jenny said.
“Of what?” Abby asked.
“A process. Next we let those feelings out. We let go of all of the sadness and shame and self-pity and doubt and rage. Everything that gets in the way of us loving ourselves.”
“How?”
“We scream it out, of course.” Jenny smiled and Abby smiled back, sure she was joking. Jenny pointed to the pillow at Abby’s side. “That’ll do. Pretend that pillow is everyone who ever made you doubt yourself. Make a list. Start with the worst person. Who is it?”
“Caitlin,” Abby said without thinking.
“Caitlin. And what did Caitlin do to you?”
Tears welled in Abby’s eyes and she shook her head to clear them. “She’s just your typical popular mean girl. She kind of has it in for me.”
“What did she do?” Jenny was nearly whispering, Abby figured to make her feel safe confessing. But there was nothing safe about it. Abby put her sweater back on.
“She started rumors about me. About me and a teacher. They weren’t true.”
Jenny nodded, her face smooth with sympathy. She pointed to the pillow. “Tell her how much she hurt you. Tell her how furious you are. Tell her you aren’t taking it anymore. Yell at her. Scream at her if you can.”
Abby laughed, but Jenny was dead serious. Abby couldn’t do it. “I’m not really a yeller.”
“I’ll show you how it’s done,” Jenny said. She sat facing the pillow, leaned in close with an angry face, her hands on her thighs. “I hate how you made me feel,” she hissed. “You called me fat. You made me feel ugly. Worthless. I don’t deserve to be treated like that, Mom!”
Abby wasn’t sure if Jenny was putting on an act just to set an example, or if her mother had really said those thin
gs. Abby wanted to give Jenny a hug. But then it was her turn. Abby stared down the pillow, but her anger was very far away.
“Hit it,” Jenny said.
Abby gave the pillow a light-handed smack. It absorbed the blow like Abby was merely air. Invisible. Insignificant. She hit it again, with the side of her fist, hard enough to make a sound, a quiet gust of air leaving the pillow. She tried once more. And again, with both hands. The sound was probably similar to the sound Caitlin would make if Abby hit her in the stomach. Her soft, flabby, stupid, rumor-starting stomach. Abby didn’t feel as strong as she used to, physically or emotionally, but she was stronger than this, she was pretty sure. She pulled the pillow closer, raised her fists like a boxer, and let loose a steady stream of punches: left, right, left, right. She was training, just warming up. She thought of Caitlin, chem, the rumors, the years she had left enduring the hell that was high school. And Gabe, whom she still loved even though he was maybe the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She leaned over the pillow, pummeled it with everything she had. Her arms were getting tired but she couldn’t stop. She grunted as she punched, found hidden energy reserves in guttural sounds. She was almost out of strength, out of energy, out of will, when she felt a welling inside her, a bottomless anguish for everything that she’d had and lost: happiness, laughter, peace, hope. She hit Caitlin, the rumor-spreading kids, her dad for leaving, her mom for taking so long to notice her again. She even hit herself, for all the ways she’d failed herself. A sob rose to the surface and Abby blocked it with a scream, a primal sound that came from her toes. She stopped hitting the pillow and screamed herself empty at it.
“It’s not fair!” she shouted at the pillow, just a stupid orange square that cared nothing for her, just like everyone else in her life. “I always do everything right. I never cause any trouble. I never ask for anything. And for what? None of you care about me! None of you see me! None of you love me! I never hurt anyone! Why do you all want to hurt me? Why can’t you just leave me alone? Why can’t you just like me? Why don’t any of you care how I feel?”
The Art of Adapting Page 26
