by JoAnna Novak
I gathered my Polaroids and ran into my room. I shoved everything except the baggie inside my desk drawer. The heroin, I held tight.
I moved the mouse at my computer. “You’ve got mail,” said the invisible man who welcomed me to AOL. There was nothing from Lisa. Only:
RoHo1984: can I tell you the breakfast how bout bacon just bacon ok???????
I shut off the monitor and went downstairs.
“I get dressed. I go to Lisa’s. No, yeah, bundle up. It’s negative ten. I walk over. Knock, knock, ‘oh, Lisa, oh, how are you dooooing,’ nothing about Junior Carlos. Very smooth. I say, ‘hey, you still wanna get high,’ like, marijuana or whatever, duh, yes, she’ll say, oh my god, Elliot’s like down? Chill. And then I’ll be like, ‘well, wanna supersize that high, chica?’ ‘You have balls?’ ‘Loser,’ I’ll say, ‘whatever heroin is.’”
I zipped my puffy black coat. I put up my hood. Coyote fur sealed me in an Elliot bubble. I grabbed my keys from the brass hook, on the side of the closet with my dad’s jackets (they smelled like him: cigars, coffee, brown sugar).
Outside, snow surfed on the wind. Even bundled up, I was cold but I felt warm, just picturing Lisa and me, finding veins in each other’s arms, tapping the flesh, using old Scrunchies for tourniquets. I skipped the injecting and imagined the aftermath: we’d nod off under the snow leopard fleece blanket, drift to sleep in each other’s tresses, Herbal Essences deluging our dreams.
3 ·· LISA
VITALS
“I’M THIRSTY,” I SAY TO the nurse hovering at the foot of my bed. Her maroon hair is corrugated with a bad crimp, her expression is pinched in her face’s bloat: you know she just works here to torture pretty girls. She’s cracked open the door, and EDP’s sodium fluorescence spits into my room. Am I dreaming? My head aches, thick and congested, from last night’s fried chicken. Leave it to my mom to bring me to hospy in time for dinner.
“Weight and blood pressure. No liquids until, Lisa. You know the drill.” She consults her clipboard. “Right?”
The nurse walks to the window and pulls a cord that raises the blinds. The sky is as blue as Easter egg dye and snow falls by the fistful. The nurse’s body is a cobbler, lumpy and bubbled, poured into an old-school uniform dress, white and tight, like Jenny McCarthy might wear. Her butt, Junior Carlos would call a badonk—ew. I wish he were popping out from the shitty tack-board bureau next to the one stiff-backed wooden chair, reaching a hand under her skirt, mouthing, Watch this, Lee. Hey: watch. I wonder if this vision is a sign that he’s read my note. Yesterday, with LeeLEE_69, the AOL screen name I made solely for him, I messaged RotTheCasbahJr, right before my mom grabbed my elbow and tugged me down the hall, down the stairs, down the driveway, into the van: “She’s psychoer than we think. Back to Carousel Gardens. SAVE ME, SEXXXY!! `_` Rescue ur bb girrrrrrrl!!”
“Have you seen my chart?” I try affecting chummy. “I’m not even supposed to be—PHP, intake told my mom. Day—IP is unnecessary. You should have, like, a sticky note, all caps: PATIENT’S MOM INSANE. BE GENTLE W/ HER.”
The nurse stops at the foot of my bed. Her hair is the maroon-black that makes women look Wiccan. With daylight, her orangey foundation, a bad match for her dye job, is visible. Ugh. In another circumstance, I really might pity her, but here I hate her smug, queenly attitude. If Elliot wore makeup, I bet it would be equally hoochie.
“Hello? Are you listening to me? How long have you worked here? Protocol is, ‘well, sweetie, I hear you but …’ So what’s your but? Why can’t I have water?”
“Noncompliance?” the nurse asks, her tone flat. “Early start. But, I suppose, when you’re only in for a week, you’ve got to make the most of it.”
I clutch the thin blue blanket to my chest. I sleep naked—someday, Junior Carlos will appreciate this, I think. Even in the hospital, I do what I want.
SHOWER
“Count or flush,” says the woman who’s introduced herself as Marjorie, not the skank vitals-snatcher from fifteen minutes ago, but an older woman in kitten-gray slacks and lace-up black leather slippers, like tap shoes without the taps. Marjorie has white, Bill Gates hair, and she’s whatever’s not a nurse and not a doctor: the toe wedged inside my bathroom door.
“Neither?”
I can’t pee. Every time I try, my urethra squints shut. Going to the bathroom while someone monitors you—I didn’t even get used to that during my sixty days here last summer. Then I was the Unit envy: along with multi-vites and SSRIs, I got laxatives.
“I can barely hear with the shower, honey,” says Marjorie. “I know it’s hard. Think waterfalls. Lakes. Rushing rapids. Puddles. Melting glaciers and polar ice caps. A monsoon. Raindrops on roses, whiskers on … Hon. You drank all that water, and right after Bethany recorded you, those numbers. We figure out whose system’s working diuretics, you know. Right as rain, and there’s another drop in the bucket. Count or flush? Either I flush the toilet for you or you count so I know you’re not purg—”
“Obviously, Marjorie.”
“Is that a tinkle? Count or flush, hon. Otherwise, I’m coming in.”
Steam rolls out of the shower stall. I squeeze my eyes, trying not to feel self-conscious. I imagine my soul, gaseous, evaporating from my body, the way the weasels die in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Except, in my vision, I don’t die. Soul Lisa (in a white baby-doll dress instead of her speech team sweats with the drawstring locked up at the nurses’ station) swirls like a vortex over Body Lisa’s head; Soul Lisa’s nighty starts clinging to her cleavage, the silkiness crumpling with sweat. Soul Lisa swishes her blonde hair in Body Lisa’s face and says, get your ass out of here.
I don’t have to pee. The white toilet seat, chipped on the part of the circle I can see between my legs (Exhibit A for some previous patient’s purge-and-pass-out), is freezing. My bedroom, its private bathroom is freezing. The unit, the snack room like a White Hen for fattening frail girls, a fridge full of Vanilla Ensure, cabinets of grahams and pumpkin-orange cheese-and-peanut-butter six-packs, classrooms A and B, like Park without Señora Lurke’s cardboard sombrero border stapled above the blackboard, with two Caboodles full of glue sticks, without scissors (sharps—our collages are hand-torn triangles and trapezoids from Highlights and Scientific American and other magazines that remind you of your smallness in the universe’s hugeness while trying to make you forget Portia di Rossi and Calista Flockhart are dieting-to-the-death on Ally McBeal), the clanking stand-scale where Skank Bethany led me and spun me backwards and slid the fifty-pound incremental and the one-pound incremental and bared her incisors (brandywine lip liner on her teeth—someone missed Cindy Crawford’s Basic Face), her stethoscope pressed to my chest and her pointy violet nails on my wrist: freezing.
I’m too cold for more protests. I count. I try to sound as bored as the cousin tallying McAllisters in Home Alone. “Two, four, six, eight, eleven, fourteen, thirty-two.”
“Hooray!” Marjorie calls. I’m waiting for her or another EDP staff member to says, “Phone,” to curl an arm around my shoulders as I lose hold of the receiver as the news of my grandma is relayed. I want her death over with. I want to be one tragedy closer to adulthood. Too bad my grandma hadn’t decided to die in the suburbs, I think, wiping. I could’ve gotten a pass to the next-door hospital, if she was in ICU. Instead, I have Marjorie, humming “My Favorite Things,” her shoe’s black toe taptaptapping.
BREAKFAST
Two proteins.
Two grains.
One fruit.
One milk.
Two fats.
I’m the last one in the cafeteria, which isn’t even a for-real cafeteria. It’s like a gym or something. The tables are circles. In the middle of each, like a bull’s-eye, is a red basket of paper napkins. FYI if I wanted a napkin, I’d need to ask permission, even though the only people sitting here are me and Connie, a Marjorie in-training, wearing a purple fleece zip-up.
“Lisa, what are you doing with that packet of peanut butter?” she says.
I don’t feel like eating and I don’t feel like talking.
“Hello.” Connie waves at me and juts out her head. “Still not seeing it.”
The peanut butter is in my hand. I scratch my torso like I did when I had a feeding tube. (They itch.) I scratch, scratch, lower, lower, and let the peanut butter fall.
“Not buying that Kitchen short-changed you. Don’t think Kitchen does much skimping in EDP. As much as—What’s that?” Connie ducks under the table and comes up with the packet of peanut butter.
I shrug. “Fell?”
“How come ‘fell’ seems an awful lot like ‘was tucked in hoodie’—what’s that—COCC on the back? You know, no zippers, no ties, no drawstrings, no triggering depictions: that calls up to your DP, but sounds like food-code to me.”
I sigh. I don’t want the yogurt, the peanut butter, the Cheerios, or the banana. I want Junior Carlos. A syrupy make-out session. Whatever goes into the drink called Sex on the Beach.
“Why are we here?” I say, sneering at the empty gym. Talk about triggering: off in one corner, there’s an old exercycle, the kind with a fan in the front wheel.
“Why we’re in the rehab room isn’t relevant right now.”
“It sucks. Carpet?”
“I don’t care if you don’t like it.”
I ask some questions; Connie answers them:
“No, you can’t go underneath and see if Georgette’s signature is still there. I doubt it. Our facility’s staff is very thorough.”
“No, I don’t think it’s weird to have breakfast in a room with a stationary bike.”
“You can talk about that with Dr. Ogbaa when she gets in.”
“No, that doesn’t mean fat.”
“I don’t know if it implies that.”
“Lisa, my tone was no such—”
“If you’re an expert because you’ve won some speech team, then I’m Mrs. George Clooney because I worked in the ER.”
I smirk. “I’d like to be Mrs. Clooney. Or, like, the babysitter. The sexy one. The one George drives home and—”
“Inappropriate.”
“What am I supposed to talk about?” I say. “I’m a sexual being.”
“Lisa, we’re not here to talk about anything when there’s still a yogurt, a banana, a box of Cheerios, juice, one packet of peanut butter on your tray and no evidence of eating.”
“When in Romania.”
“I think you mean when in Rome.”
“Romans eat and puke.” I take a swig of juice, gargle it around in my mouth, and spit it back in its Styrofoam cup.
“Inappropriate.”
“And you’re who—my mother?”
“Someone’s Mary Melodrama today.”
I bang my fist on the table. The yogurt jumps. “Is your grandmother dying?”
“I’m sorry to hear about your grandmother. As soon as you finish up, I’m, uh, I’ll, the nurse’s station would have any messages. And I’ll check. In the meantime, I suggest you stop scratching your initials into that cup and—”
“Isn’t it your job to, like, be nice?”
“No. Your grandmother isn’t an excuse either, and I’m sorry this interaction has come to this, but you’ve got, I have to make sure you—”
“Fuck you, fuck Elliot Eggleston, fuck everything,” I say. I drum my fingers at my temple. Even though the room is empty, it feels swarming. I don’t think doctors get how being in the hospital, EDP, unleashes a hive of killer bees for girls like me.
“I don’t know who Elliot Eggs is—”
“Stupid shemale.”
“Well, I’m sure he doesn’t deserve your curse words.”
“Do you even have any idea why I’m here?” I say.
Not-Marjorie fiddles with the zipper on her fleece. “I think you should talk about this in Group.”
STRATEGY
Marjorie presses pause on the cassette player in the center of a ring of chairs. The silence is wooly without Chumbawamba. Skank sits in a folding chair next to the entertainment center. Her knees are wimpled with thigh flesh. She fans herself with a clipboard, and it whooshes the air. The room is what you’d expect: ceiling popcorned with pasty bird-turd kernels; carpet like TV static.
Our circle is nine patients. If the group is a clock, I’m at eight forty-five.
“All right. So what does this song bring up for you all?” Marjorie says, nodding her beaming face at all of us. Skank scribbles something.
I lean back in my folding chair, until the legs tilt and I teeter. Then I let my weight go forward and come down with a clang. I hold up my hand, like the Loser sign.
“Pissin’ the night away?” I say. “Drink a whisky drink, a vodka drink, a cider—”
A birdy woman, at 7:35, in black leggings and a hunter green sweatshirt giggles. She has plain gold rings on three of her eight fingers, a steely rock glommed to her left nostril. Phoebe, she said, a few minutes ago, during lightning round introductions, which turned into how long you’d been at Carousel Gardens. Lisa, one day. Phoebe, four weeks.
Marjorie’s eyes crinkle like accordion folders. “Perceptive, Lisa. Anyone else?”
Without Marjorie or Skank, all of us combined probably don’t weigh six hundred pounds. I size up their silence: Brown hair, tulle-bowed headband, gray circles and teeth too big for a mouth too weak to speak. At three o’clock, a girl with Pepto-pink blush and gold body glitter dandruffing her hair closes her eyelids in a languorous curtsey. At six, a blue pointer finger slides a white ID bracelet up and down a furry jaundiced wrist. I’d forgotten how beautiful a broken body can be, like an oil-slicked seal or a pelican wearing a soda-ring choker, hurt and wild. I’m envious. For the first time since I’ve been in eighth grade, I ignore Dr. Ogbaa’s cognitive reframing jabber. In my mind’s eye I bubble-letter: I FEEL FAT.
The room is so awkwardly silent I worry my head is transparent, a fish tank for my illegal thought. I clear my throat.
“Um, also a message of triumph over the day to day,” I say, folding my hands in my lap to look earnest. “Like, you’re beaten down or something, but there’s—you’re still resilient. Slips or relapses could happen, but what they’re saying is you persevere. Ultimately. Even if you have to—”
“Drink through,” says Phoebe. She sounds old, her voice blistered and wry. “Drown your face in Everclear, I mean, blank substance. Sorry. Shit.”
One of Marjorie’s hands leaves her lap and she flashes two fingers, a peace sign, to Skank, who scratches the paper on her clipboard like a scab that’s coming off.
“Rules. A reminder, for anyone new to this circle. ‘We abstain from names and the profane. We use nurturing words to express our hurts.’ No numbers. And keep behaviors—self-deprecating thoughts included,” Marjorie says, catching my eye, “unspecified. So as not to trigger anyone. Speaking of anyone … you’re all so quiet.”
“Pancakes,” an Asian girl in a Purdue sweatshirt whispers. I frown. Suddenly, I’m thankful my stay—one week, intake conceded—will be short.
“But Phoebe and Lisa make good points,” Skank says. “So let’s defiantly note them. You guys!”
“Definitely,” I say, under my breath.
“Huh?” Skank’s eyes are two sizes: one quarter, one nickel. She compensates with catliner. She sounds too flabby for girls like us, girls with fly wrist bones, arrowhead chins, flinty noses, tiara brows. Then I remember my boobs, how Junior Carlos suckles my nipples and between my legs goes buzzy and tight, like I’m crossing my fingers to break a promise. There are reasons to embrace fat—phat—parts.
“You said defiantly,” says Phoebe, lifting her chin. “That’s a different word. Than definitely. Which is what we think you mean.”
“Common mistake. Let’s see if we can’t pick up more by listening again,” Marjorie rushes. “This time, think about what you’re struggling with. Try to relate.”
I lower my head to listen to the music. Phoebe’s ivy eyes are twin lasers pointed on me, I can tell. Moment
s like these are grommets that can be threaded with friendship. This is what I could’ve had with Georgette, what I once had with El: a partner to finish my sentences. The problem was that I was tired of being fed my lines.
APPOINTMENT
Dr. Ogbaa is from West Africa, and even though she grew up in Houston, and likes to use words like Amarillo and armadillo, there’s some something about her voice I go gaga over, no matter how many times I’ve heard it. Now it’s just me and her, sitting in a closet—seriously, Elliot’s mom’s is bigger—a school desk, a folding chair, a trash can, fancy Plus-Aloe tissues. I smell Dr. Ogbaa’s latte-breath on her accent: not British, but Joan Crawfordly quavering, powerful, dame-ish, which is the same operatic reverb produced by Eric Hudson at Park when he nails a slurve with a metal baseball bat.
“—and after four messages from your mother, each, I should say, a notch angrier than the next, I’m worried about how you’re handling this sudden reversal of fortune, if you would. Tamales in the bucket—”
“Wait, what does that even mean?”
Dr. Ogbaa’s laugh is loud, a deck of cards being shuffled. “Seeing if you’re here, Lisa. And glad you are. Very glad to have you in the room. Perked up. Tuned in.”
I sniff. “Tuned in, all right. Tuned in, turned in, turned up, turn-tailed. Like, being turned around with a blindfold for, what, pin the tail on the donkey? Except somehow I’m both the person pinning the tail and the ass. I mean, sor—”
Dr. Ogbaa covers her smile with a hand. Her nails are round and polished the color of baked plums. She flutters her eyes (tracking gaze, mascaraed lashes): the opposite of EDP girls’. Would I rather her plump apple cheeks or their cored cheekbones? Duh: I feel guilty for even thinking the F-word. I do what I want, I remind myself—not what the eating disorder wants. It’s scary to know I probably would’ve relapsed if my therapist weren’t a woman who shows me beauty is not a house of bones.
“Anyhow, I am feeling very angry,” I say.
“I bet. What else?”
“Um … triggered?”
