by JoAnna Novak
“So, more. Take me to that rodeo.”
I snicker, get serious, stare at my red Converse; they’re floppy on my feet without shoestrings. I miss the flat laces, Sharpied JC<3LB, JC<3LB, JC<3LB, JC<3LB, JC<3LB, JC<3LB, JC<3LB, JC<3LB, 4EVAEVA. I didn’t do that doodling. Junior Carlos did, at Brookfield Zoo the night after Thanksgiving. Our second date. We were at Holiday Magic, and we skipped the Christmas lights on the cages and the Clydesdale carriage rides to drink watery hot cocoa on a sticky gray boulder in South America, the first room in Tropic World. We didn’t even talk; we just sat there, with my legs in his lap. Above, the quetzals and cockatoos wove under vines and misting nozzles, cawing at the gibbons hooting like primate carolers. I was wearing my leopard print earmuffs, my leopard print polar fleece vest, my mom’s nerdy Isotoner gloves, my Converse—and I was covered with goosebumps, totally in love.
“I’m going back and forth around these girls,” I say, heaving the words so I don’t wuss out. “I’m jealous, even for my G-tube, that phantom limb thing? I’m feeling it. I—I miss the feeling of being the worst one. The best one. You know that thing. And at the same time, you know, the … stuff with Junior Carlos is very good for me, despite what you say about um … our sexual activities or whatever. He’s kinda, he’s like the person that makes me love my body. I feel gorgeous around him.”
Dr. Ogbaa nods, ever so slightly, and interlaces her hands in her lap, over the mustardy suede skirt. “Mmm,” she murmurs, meaning: go on.
“And … what else? I’m, so there’s the fence of this place, you know? You have to decide where you are in relation to it.”
“What’s the fence?”
“The fence is ah, like, um, your will. Your choice. Or—wait. One side’s the eating disorder, the other side’s recovery or just, like, not having behaviors if you don’t want to commit.”
“Do you not want to commit?”
“I didn’t say that. I want to normalize without becoming boring. Can I have that? I wanna be okay enough that I still look skinny, but I’m not thinking like a crazy-skinny person. I want to be the sort of girl who someone … say, Junior Carlos … would, like … love.”
“Verified. And that’s what I wanted to hear, Lisa, because I wouldn’t want you to take this—maybe less-than-thought-out move by your mother—as a punitive gesture.”
“Like a punishment?”
“Exactly. I’m tremendously pleased with your progress. And retribution would be a fool’s motive for relapse.”
“Like getting back at Elliot?”
“Your mother was the person to whom I was referring. What about Elliot?”
“That’s how come I had the diet pills,” I say, louder. “Like, seriously, what the hell. I mean, whatever, I’ll be here, probably when my grandma dies and yah know, weirdly, I could see a benefit to that, this, here instead of home, but at the same time, c’mon! Effing Elliot! I don’t mean to be paranoid, but it’s like she’s … she rigged me to get caught or something, like so I’d get sent back here.”
“That is a little unfounded. I’m not quite sure you’ve the evidence to, well that’s not exactly probable. She’s you’re friend,” Dr. Ogbaa says gently. “Don’t you think?”
“Seriously? No. Did I tell you—yeah, the Ouija board thing, all the times we were dialing each other’s numbers at the same time, we’d wear the same … whatever, she’s ESP enough that it’s like, c’mon: she’s the person who needs a lesson. Puny … punit—sorry, vocab blanking. Punition?”
My heart thunders under my bra. The red marker in my mind appears again: I want to make Elliot pay.
Dr. Ogbaa twists her fingers in front of her chest, like she’s shielding her heart from my malice. The room is hot, stuffy, an incubator. She meets my eyes.
“Now you’re lassoing octopi, Lisa. Reel it in.”
SNACK: A HAIKU
Goldfish crackers mush
On my tongue like Communion
Why why why no fins?
OT EXPRESSIONS
I’m scribbling red crayon over the body on the coloring page in the art room, at same long table where I’ve colored this same empty body twice before, when I remember a random thing with Georgette.
Here’s an in-patient perk: no one cares if you space out. Being here healthy-ish reminds me of CCD at 9:15 on Sundays: easy worksheets, like “________ and _________ were expelled from the Garden of Eden,” or “create a Godly design for Joseph’s coat” (while Donny Osmond sings).
There are six of us in the art room. The blinds are down; the light is shuttered and low. Staff is another woman whose name I’ve forgotten, whose most prominent feature is a bristly head of gray hair shaped like a broom. When you can’t see the snow, the room is warmer: with this placebo, the thinnest shiver less. Phoebe and two other girls were pulled for appointments. I’m disappointed, kinda; I want to talk to Phoebe. I want to talk to someone, anyone, who’s not being paid to help me. Instead, we listen to a Beethoven sonata. The task: scribble inside the body, where you feel the most stress.
(I’ve worn through the paper on the humanoid’s chest, the spot where I used to place my hand to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.)
I’m remembering being here over the summer and my friend who died, Georgette. The week before her final transformation—emaciated body to emaciated corpse, flat-lining heart monitor—she was as fine as anyone with an NG tube. Then, I was thirteen, the youngest in the unit (now, the record is nine: regular nine-year-olds munch boogers—EDP girls puke in pencil pouches). I was decapitating Teddy Grahams when I saw Georgette’s red head of curls on the floor.
Big girl, little hair, she always said. Staff hated her sarcasm, but I bet they were jealous: her Neiman Marcus nose, her French blue eyes, her creamy skin dappled with tawny freckles, her family’s chalet in Davos. She would’ve inherited a shampoo fortune.
I went over to her. What are you doing? I asked. Her forehead was on the carpet, like she was all ready to be buried. You should get up.
Less than a year ago, I sucked. I was orderly, by the book, ruled by the same bullshit that constituted my sickness. You can’t recover if you’re not willing to shake those principles: try hardest, be the best.
Georgette didn’t move. If I hadn’t been watching her vertebrae through her pink sweater, I’d have thought she’d fainted. The more emaciated a girl, the more insistent her skeleton. Georgette’s bones breathed through cashmere.
She turned her head, the way we did neck and shoulder stretches in Movement Therapy, twisting to detoxify our systems. She hooked a finger at me. Secret, baby?
I leaned in. Sucked the headless torso of a Teddy.
Georgette smelled like brown iceberg lettuce and rancid peppermint tea. She doll-winked. I’m doing what I want.
I raise my hand, holding the red crayon.
“Liesel?” the woman with broomstick hair says. “May I help you?”
Through their bangs and patchy hair, the other girls eye me as I walk to the front of the room. I would eye me too. That’s the ED unit. Whose body can you use? Whose thighs would you want? (Trick question: no one’s. Legs would be better if they were all calf.) Whose body is so hardy that you have to speculate on the hidden magnitude of her behaviors’ fucked-up-ness? Broomstick knits a long green sock into her lap and guards a short stack of manila folders. I crouch, so our faces are together, like family.
“My grandma is really sick,” I whisper. “I’m waiting to hear, like, an update on her condition. Can I go to the nurses’ station? Marjorie told me they’d have messages there. And I—I need to call my mom. I haven’t heard. Anything—and. I want to check.”
“You need a chaperone.” That information comes out like a boast: newbie.
“Ooh, okay. Can you get, like, the nurse? Bethany?”
The woman presses a doorbell in the wall and a minute later, Skank is at the door. The white collar of her dress is streaked with foundation, like Tang. I smile.
“Dr. Ogbaa said I have phone privileges
. This is an—”
“I know how phone privileges go. You already had a caller. So. Here’s the message.” Bethany hands me a pink slip of paper. “Looks like one of your little friends. I’m sorry it’s not about your grandma. But maybe it’s a no news is good news sitch?”
I nod. I fight the urge to squeal and shriek and sing happy happy joy joy, to backflip down the hall. “JC visit this afternoon.” It’s hard to read such sweet words in ugly penmanship. Her handwriting is so predictable: round and ugly, like a row of swollen grapes.
4 ·· ELLIOT
WIND SHRIEKED THROUGH THE RIVER birch, its branches bare, its bark Dalmatian velvet. Three-week-old snow frosted our lawn, and sheets of ice pleated the roots of the oak at the edge of our driveway. The sidewalk was a skating rink. I concentrated on my abs, steadying myself, trying not to be a wimp, as I walked the block to Lisa’s house.
The air smelled bleachy, sharp, like inhaling swimming pool water. I’d forgotten my gloves—but I didn’t need gloves! I warmed my hands in my pockets, squeezing my mom’s heroin. I was dangerous, powerful, stronger than the tasering windchill. I could demand anything of Lisa.
My own neighborhood looked changed, suburban but whack. I saw all the weird stuff that other days I missed: The branches of the Valenta’s magnolia capped with jade-green bowling balls. The vine of bronze garland swinging from the Novak’s gutter. A nondescript black mailbox that had once belonged to a woman who’d given me and my dad king-size Hershey’s with Almonds the Halloween I went as Strawberry Shortcake. Another mailbox wrapped with a rainbow-bright plastic lei. A brown deer, paused like a cake topper, in the street. Lisa and I used to spot families of them—does and fawns—in her backyard, in sixth grade, when her mom wasn’t home. We’d take the Ouija board (demons, according Kim Orlowski-Breit) out to the garden, spread the snow leopard blanket a few feet from the Melrose peppers, near a petrified alder that supposedly marked the grave of a pioneer child. We’d lay our hands, mine on top of hers, the pads of my fingers kissing her sky-blue nail polish, icicles, on the planchette:
Is your soul in purgatory?
(F-R-O-M B-A-B-Y J-E-D-E-D-I-A-H I D-O N-O-T K-N-O-W)
Who’s your best friend?
(E-L-L-I-O-T)
When will I die?
(4-3)
When will I die?
(F-O-R S-P-I-R-I-T T-O D-E-C-I-D-E)
Why is Hanson so popular?
(M-M-M-B-O-P)
A thunderous revving startled me. The deer paused and then bounded, the spade of its tail vanishing into a snowy grove of evergreens. A heavy bad feeling came over me: where would the deer go and who would take care of it, and who did it have? And what if that was the last deer I ever saw?
The source of the sound was a red blur. The Jeep sped by, its tires slicking slush. The driver was going too fast for our neighborhood, where streets canted and forked, and on weekends parents led toddlers in their snowsuits to coned-off blocks that were prime for sledding. But I would have recognized that car at Oakbrook Mall on Black Friday. In my subdivision, if they didn’t have sedans, people drove Land Rovers, the spare tire covers decorated with a line drawing of a pachyderm. This was a salsa-red Jeep sponsored by Tabasco Sauce: a green-and-white decal flanked the gas cap. I knew just where that car was headed. From a million visits to Lisa’s, I knew her dad’s license plate by heart: WBEZ769.
I walked up their driveway. Their garage door was open like a yawn. Inside was the Jeep, parked next to a soot-colored lawn mower and a barrel of croquet mallets. Lisa’s mom wasn’t home. I was relieved. Ever since she sent me the note stuck to Lisa’s calculations of our proportions, I’d been a moving target for Mrs. Orlowski-Breit. Your mom hates me, I’d said to Lisa. She always replied the same: You’re right. It blows. She does.
Diamonds of sandstone led to the front porch. They glimmered with blue melting salt. It was weird not punching in the garage security code with Lisa, hefting our backpacks loaded with textbooks and binders and diet pills. We’d go to her room, swallow a Fen-Phen each to be festive, light a brownie batter votive, flip between Q101 and B96, making fun of Will Smith—he rhymed Miami with Miami!, stressing about equations, jiggling our ankles, messy buns drooping, Lisa’s Urban Decay speckling the tender skin under her mantis-green eyes with Smog. I missed all of it. Without Lisa, I was friendless. Other than the night of Terrible Twos, I hadn’t even been to her house since Thanksgiving, when Junior Carlos had asked Lisa out or proposed or whatever.
I rang the doorbell. Trick-or-treat! Drugs! I thought. I cracked myself up.
Mr. Breit opened the door. His status quo was pretty rough, and today he looked downright wretched. Maybe, one parent at a time, the adult world was disintegrating, the first pebbles of America’s own Beachy Head: jobs vanishing, gas prices skyrocketing, Chicago crime bleeding into the suburbs, moms hoarding smack. Lisa’s dad’s facial hair seemed to be scrambling off his skin, like it was ashamed that it comprised a patchy chinstrap. Low-grade merkin, Lisa called it. Deep purple circles half-mooned his eyes. A mysterious tooth-pasty substance had dried in his philtrum. He had the long, lean body of the skinny-fat: a population of girls I would never reach. (One day, though, they’d be Twinkie-tubby women, Larry Breit’s age, who’d need me to whittle away their postpartum pounds.) He was wearing a red flannel. He was tall, but he had hips—the kind that, on women, guys called phat.
“Would you look at this? Girl of the moment!” he said. He was holding a highball of sludge. His voice was deep and easy, like sliding your feet into slippers.
I tried laughing. It came out like a neigh.
“Is Lisa home?”
“Elliot.”
My name hung between us, a loud fly hovering over a puddle of honey. Bansheeing at my back, wind flicked snowflakes that pricked through my black jeans.
Mr. Breit raised an eyebrow. His nostrils were chalked with that same stuff as his lip. Mucus or dry skin or drugs: I couldn’t tell the difference.
“Elliot, Elliot, Elliot.”
“Don’t wear it out,” I said. My teeth chattered. I could see the Breit’s foyer, where heat radiated up through the floorboards. I looked down. Lisa’s dad was barefoot. His hairy toes were as long as millipedes.
“You want to come in.” Mr. Breit shook his glass. Ice rattled. “Don’t I have any friggin’ manners?”
“I don’t know. I mean, about. Not your manners. I could come in—”
“We’ll talk like adults, Elliot. Enough with the yadda yadda.”
I followed him through the family room to the kitchen. Something felt wrong. The lights over the island were off and the television was dark. The radio, which typically droned WBEZ all day long, was silent. Something smelled like toast.
Mr. Breit pulled out a stool. I didn’t recognize the cushions: winey and mulled pink, upholstered sunsets. I patted my pocket. Even if everything had changed since I last saw Lisa, I could do it, I told myself. I unzipped my coat and hopped up.
“I just wanted to see if Lisa was home.” I balled my hands in my lap. “She wasn’t in school yesterday. You, so you know that. And I figured she might still be sick today. She’s usually—she gets sick for a while.”
I waited for Mr. Breit to interrupt me. I didn’t know why he’d be home if Lisa wasn’t sick; even if she was, his presence didn’t make sense. Three a.m. to three a.m. shifts—means sometimes you shower at the station, he’d told me the first time I met him, when I asked what he did. He’d talked to me like he was reading Richard Scarry to a tyke. Now he stood across the island, staring. I was someone new.
“Lisa’s not here.” He spat out the words like a bad mouthful. “Do you want something to drink? Coffee, tea? Hot cocoa? Scotch?”
“Ha-ha. If Lisa’s not—”
“What’s so funny? I was thirteen when I had my first drink. At my Papouli’s cabin in Michigan. The UP. Beautiful country. Makes you see the truly fungal nature of Chicago. Anyhow, I loved that place when I was a boy. And we’re camping, fishing.
All my uncles, my cousins. And the thing to do was, real slick, you go to Canada to get—cheaper. I don’t know, someone has a sixty-pounder of LCBO. Just annihilate-your-mother, piss-poor rum. And my uncle Vick is like, here, hands me a bottle of Green River, tells me ‘take a swig,’ and then he fills it up with booze. He puts his thumb over the top, shakes her up … next thing you know, I’m puking a leprechaun.”
“That sounds revolting,” I said.
“You girls need to lighten up. You and my daughter—enough with the rules. Be kids. Fuck up.”
“Very funny.”
“Who’s laughing? You’ll all be dead by thirty if you don’t learn how to relax into the screwed-upedness of life.”
I shrugged. “How many calories in Scotch?”
Mr. Breit smirked and peered into his sludge. “How many calories in who cares?”
I liked the wolfishness in his eyes. I saw the magenta lips from the “Macarena” music video in my mind; they lip-synched that robo-femme voice: “I am not trying to seduce you.” Was Lisa’s dad flirting with me? If she wouldn’t be my friend, was this the next best thing?
“Fine,” I said. I hadn’t eaten anything yet. Usually by this lunch I was two hundred calories. “A little.”
He left his glass on the island and opened a cabinet above the sink. He turned to look at me. His eyes glistened.
“You seem like a neat girl. Am I right?”
“Um … yes?”
He handed me a shot of amber liquid. I could smell it, like nail polish remover or the fixative spray we used in Art that we had to go outside to deploy. It was thick in my throat before I opened my mouth.
“Cheers,” he said, retrieving his sludge. He stood at the other end of the island, his glass raised, like we were royalty commencing a banquet. “To Lisa.”
“To Lisa.”
I took a sip. The Scotch burned my lips, cracked from the cold; it burned my gums, pink and tender; it burned a canker sore I couldn’t shake; it stung my tongue and numbed my heart. I let out a choked eughhh.
“Thoughts?”
“Honestly, Mr. Breit, I don’t know if I can finish—.”
