The Appetites of Girls

by Pamela Moses

  “Ruthie—” Mama smiled at the medal around my neck in a way that made me feel suddenly silly for having worn it. “If this diet is so effective, don’t you think you would see, well, other results?” And though she said no more, I knew what she meant. But I would get other medals—seconds and even firsts! I had only been improving! And as Mama reached a hand to brush my cheek, I quickly ducked my head and began pulling at a thread hanging from my shirt cuff, afraid the tears I felt choking my throat would spill out at the first stroke of her fingers.

  • • •

  In January, the culminating event of our swim season was scheduled to take place, the final championships in which every team in our league would be competing. This was the final push, Coach Hadley said, the time for us to show what we were truly made of. He assigned me to swim the one-hundred-meter backstroke, a race I had swum before, but in this meet I would have many more than my usual number of competitors.

  For days preceding the competition, my stomach clenched with a nervous excitement I couldn’t seem to quell, even with the deep-breathing exercises Coach Hadley had taught us. And in the mornings, I found I could swallow no more than teaspoon-sized bites of oatmeal or boiled egg. Coach Hadley extended our weekday practices an extra twenty minutes, and, for three Saturdays in a row, we were required to attend morning practices, as well. Then, several days before the competition, Mama did something she hadn’t done before.

  “I have boots to drop after work at the shoe repair just two blocks from your school. So maybe while I’m in the neighborhood, I’ll stop by your practice. You wouldn’t mind, would you?”

  “No, Ma.” I shrugged my shoulders, but I couldn’t help hoping she would change her mind or somehow forget. Other parents occasionally arrived at the very end of practice to pick up sons and daughters, but none of them ever stayed for any length of time as Mama seemed to want to do.

  “Is that someone’s mother?” “Whose mother is that?” My teammates turned their heads as we filed onto the pool deck for our warm-up. Mama was seated at the center of the top bleacher between two lavender plastic shopping bags, her camel coat belted tightly. When she spotted me, she curled her finger in a tiny wave. I responded with the same small gesture, wondering how many on my team had noticed.

  As Cole Freeman led us through our usual series of stretches, I could see Mama from the corner of my eye. So once we dove into the pool to begin our drills, I attempted to concentrate only on Coach Hadley’s directions, but I could not help stealing quick glimpses upward toward the bleachers. Then “One hundred back!” Coach called, signaling the practice for my championship race. “Leiser, take lane four,” he directed. A center lane meant he expected my time to be one of the best! Gillian was in the water to my left. I had outswum her earlier in the week. Mandy Robb was to my right, but she was not normally a backstroker. I will win, I thought as I pulled myself close to the starting block, high out of the water. With Mama here, too—I will win.

  Out I flung, far, far, arching and back, kicking under the water, two beats and then breaking the surface. I could not see the others, only the spray from my arms and legs, but I thought—yes?—perhaps I was leading. I knew what to do—ignore everything but my own fluttering feet. But, for the briefest moment, toward the end of the first lap, my eyes wandered to Mama where she sat, her shoulders forward—watching. I needed to regain my focus, but before I could turn to find my place in the pool, I felt a sudden crack-crack in my arm and then my head. Pain fired from my elbow to my fingertips and down my neck. How had I missed the string of flags that hung over the pool marking the approach to the wall! Blinking water from my eyes, clinging to the side with my uninjured arm, I shook my head to stop the room from reeling. Within moments, Coach Hadley and most of my teammates had reached me. They offered their arms to lift me from the pool and walked me to one of the benches behind the diving board.

  “Excuse me! Allow me through, please! I’m her mother!” Mama was struggling through the crowd to get to me, her coat streaked with patches of wet from the dripping bathing suits and limbs she had pushed past.

  “Looks like nothing’s broken. Just a couple of bad bumps,” Coach Hadley told her. “She may have some tenderness for a while, but she’ll mend.”

  “Thank you.” Mama nodded but without turning to him, so I knew she had dismissed his words, that this was something she would determine for herself.

  Instead of walking, Mama, using the school’s pay phone, called for a taxi, a splurge she and Poppy made only on occasion. She ordered the driver to go slowly, reprimanded him when he failed to avoid two potholes.

  At home that night, Mama applied ice packs to my bruises and a heating pad to my neck to counteract the cold. When Sarah and Valerie approached with questions about my injury, she directed them to the kitchen. “Turn on the water for rice, will you, girls? What your sister needs more than anything is rest and a decent meal.” And so I knew what Mama implied: that I should have listened, that all along she had known better. That if I’d only been feeding myself properly, I might not have done something so careless.

  • • •

  At the beginning of the swim season, Coach Hadley had taught us what he called “visualization techniques.” We could use them to picture ourselves swimming with greater endurance, increased speed. If we employed them often enough, he claimed, they would enhance our performance. So over the next two days, while I rested at home, I tried to envision my energy returning, my body free of aching. I imagined myself finishing my race in record time. But on the second evening, the Thursday before the final swim competition, Mama knocked on my door. She held a paper in her hand. My French quiz on passive verbs. I must have left it on the living room desk, the red C+ visible through the back side of the sheet.

  “It was just one quiz, Ma! My other grades have been fine!”

  “One thing leads to another, though, doesn’t it? And besides, even if you hadn’t been injured, how much do you think you should be giving up for this? It’s a sport, Ruthie. It’s not your future. Especially if you’re not—”

  “Not what, Ma?”

  “Find things you will succeed in, Ruth. Give your time to those. Doesn’t that make the most sense?”

  But what could she mean? I had won medals, and I was getting better. I knew I was. Then, for some reason, I thought of the gold spelling bee trophy on the shelf beside Sarah’s bed. And I remembered the two certificates Mama still kept in her top bureau drawer: Judith Feldman: First Place Entry, Science Fair and Judith Feldman: Junior Math Contest Winner. Third out of six. It wasn’t winning, was it? It was only the middle.

  “But, Mama, on the day you came to see me, that day I was first, wasn’t I?”

  Mama slid her tongue slowly along her front teeth as though thinking how to answer. And then she shook her head. Silently at first, and then the word smacked out like the slap of a hand: “No.” No! She had come to watch me and I hadn’t been leading, hadn’t even finished the race.

  • • •

  On the Saturday of the league championships, Mama, dressed for services in her tweed skirt and olive chiffon blouse, offered me a mug of tea. “Are you coming?” she asked.

  “No, not today, Mama. Everything still aches.” Ached too much for going to temple. Or for studying my Cahier d’Exercices for the next week’s French test. Too much for cheering on my teammates at the championship meet. Too much for racing one hundred meters of backstroke.

  Swim season ended. The remainder of my freshman year seemed to drag toward summer. And then suddenly it was September again. Now we were sophomores, and was I imagining this, or had the other girls in my grade returned from the vacation even slimmer than they had been the year before? Some were taking exercise dance classes in the afternoons at the studio on Broadway, and toted to school their leotards and leg warmers in canvas bags slung over their shoulders. And there was excitement over the announcement that aerobics would be added to this semester’s after-school offerings. Thin Is In! proclaimed
the slick covers of the magazines my classmates read in the hallways and cafeteria during free periods.

  Mama, I knew, would never agree to aerobics classes; she thought them frivolous, a ridiculous excuse for women to parade around in skin-tight clothes. So, instead, with a little leftover bat mitzvah money, I bought from the bookstore near school a paperback entitled The Ultimate You, full of step-by-step color photos of callisthenic exercises. If I followed the techniques provided, it promised, my body would quickly transform until it resembled those of the girls in all of the pictures. So, night after night, in the secrecy of my bedroom, I twisted and lifted and lunged until my muscles cramped.

  But the pounds that had crept back over the summer did not melt away. And when I was sent home once again with a notice giving my choices for extracurricular activities, Mama checked the box marked Chess Club on my slip as well as on Sarah’s.

  “You did say you wanted to try chess instead this year, right, Pea?” Mama leaned over the chair where I was working to brush hair from my brow, and as she bent close, I could smell the sweet orange tang of her perfume.

  Coach Hadley had asked if he could count on my returning to the team, but I knew the answer. “Yes, Ma,” I nodded.

  Mama signed our permission slips and tucked them into our backpacks. “I’m glad you’ll both be playing, girls. You can practice together. It’s a wonderful game! Some of the finest minds in the world are chess players. Let me see if I can find my old set. And maybe I still have that book of pointers—all the tricks I used to use when Uncle Jacob and I played together!”

  As Mama rummaged through the closets, Sarah and I smoothed wrinkles from the kitchen tablecloth, creating a flat surface on which to play. And when Mama unfolded the checkered board on the table and placed the pieces, one by one, on the black and ivory squares, explaining their various roles—the pawns and rooks, knights and bishops, king and queen—I nodded to prove I was interested, hoping the disappointment I felt, heavy as wet sand, did not show on my face.

  For days before the first club meeting, Mama taught us the many rules of the game. Then, once the season began, she devoted time in the evenings, after our homework was done, to giving us what she termed “Special Tips and Hints.”

  “This move Uncle Jacob and I used to call The Double Hit. Next week maybe I’ll show you The Diagonal Knockdown!”

  But I seemed to have no memory for Mama’s strategies. When she whispered suggestions in my ear, minutes later I would forget them.

  I extended my nighttime routine of toning exercises by ten minutes, but there was no change to the roundness of my waist and thighs, the old softness of my upper arms. So I began to wear loose sweaters over my collared shirts. In school I made multiple trips to the girls’ room, readjusting my skirts to cover my knees. I took consolation in the fact that the weather was getting colder. Soon everyone would be bundled in padded jackets and turtlenecks. Who would even notice my bulkier clothes? But word began to circulate that in the spring the miniskirt would be returning. Even the other girls on the chess team—far from the school’s most daring dressers—began to talk of buying these leg-baring hemlines.

  Perhaps the spring would be a good time to start a new diet. And this time I would stick with it. This time I would see something through to completion. Mama often said diets doomed people to failure. They were designed by advertisers to keep people hungering for things that would never satisfy. When she and Aunt Helena and Aunt Bernice were young women, just before Aunt Helena’s wedding and when they all still lived at home, a saleslady had knocked on their door hawking carbonated drinks for suppressing appetite. Despite Mama’s warnings, Aunt Helena had bought two box loads. And what was the result? On the day of her wedding Helena had felt too sick to dance and looked pale as flour.

  But that was long ago, Mama! I wanted to tell her. On my new diet I will be fine! Because maybe Mama was wrong about me. After all, she couldn’t be right about everything.

  So maybe in the spring—yes, the spring!—my new diet would begin.

  SEXY GIRL

  (Opal’s Story)

  • 1982 •

  At the Passionflower, the bar-restaurant of our hotel, the men outnumbered the women. Especially after nine o’clock, when most of the married couples had disappeared to their rooms and the young lovers down the beach, strolling barefoot through the lapping water. Then Mother would smile at the men straddling whalebone bar stools who winked and raised glasses in her direction. We knew all of the regulars—the black island natives as well as the transplants from Europe and America, some with sun-parched wives or girlfriends, most bachelors.

  At the hotel, there were few children my age (I was eleven), and those I met stayed only a week or two, on holiday with their parents. During the day, they vanished on boating excursions or hikes through the botanical gardens.

  “Make the best of it, Opal,” Mother said when I complained. “As soon as school resumes, you’ll be surrounded by a hundred boys and girls. Promise, promise.” And what freedom I had here. What child wouldn’t envy my carefree hours in the sand or floating on the turquoise sea? she asked. Didn’t I like swinging in the hammock in the courtyard palm grove, breathing the frangipani, watching the tropic birds soar overhead?

  Yes, I nodded.

  Wasn’t this much prettier than faded blue town houses, the only view from our San Francisco apartment?

  “Yes, much prettier.”

  We were on a small island in the West Indies, and Mother’s plan was to stay for a year, possibly two. “Working as a realtor in Pacific Heights loses its charm after a time,” she’d explained, stroking her legs distractedly as she flipped through travel brochures during the months before we left. “Life should offer some excitement. Don’t you think?” Through the travel agent, she had heard about the White Heron Hotel with its attached surfside restaurant and bar. As hostess of the restaurant, Mother would be entitled to a three-room suite for a nominal fee. In May, she had found renters for our apartment, and after my school year ended, we would go. When I returned to classes in September, it would be at St. Agnes, one of the island’s two elementary schools.

  • • •

  Our first afternoon in the Caribbean, Mother had dumped, from suitcases onto the cotton spread of her bed, an array of colorful outfits I had never seen her wear—boldly printed skirts, bright sundresses, sandals with ribbon-thin straps. In the filmy mirror of our small shared bathroom, she’d shaken the ends of her orange-gold hair, which had waved in the damp heat as soon as we’d stepped from the plane. Wet strands had clung to her neck.

  “Oh, it’s a slice of heaven!” she’d said, stripping to her pink lace bra, leaning against the window frame to gaze at the ocean. “Isn’t it paradise?”

  During the day, Mother’s responsibilities were few. The lunch crowd was always light—some of the elderly hotel guests, a few islanders breaking for Hairoun beers. She was rarely required to do more than meet briefly with Ezra Dupree, the White Heron’s manager, to go over the details of the evening’s menu and seating plan. The busyness of our routine in San Francisco soon seemed a foggy dream. We spent most of the morning and afternoon hours reading in the shaded yard or sprawled across our fringed towels on the hotel beach, snacking on fried plantains and salted peanuts, sipping lemon sodas. Within a week or two, Mother’s skin darkened from cream-white to nut-brown. As we stretched in the sun, she lathered her arms and legs with milky oil from a green bottle to prevent peeling. Men on the beach twisted their necks, and I suspected, despite their tinted glasses, what their eyes followed.

  At one of the boutiques in town, Mother bought a batik bikini with yellow tropical fish and a matching one for me. Though I yanked and fussed with the ties of the suit, the material bagged and puckered at my hips and across the flat of my chest. Pretending to study the other bathers on the beach, I sneaked peeks at the fullness of Mother’s bikini top and the way she bent one leg into a vee, crossing it toward the other.

  Mother could bask on the
sand for hours, but the heat stung my paler skin, and I ran to the water every few minutes, pinching my nose and plunking beneath the surface. When cruise ships anchored at the mouth of the port, sending small boats of passengers ashore, I had company as I swam—packs of Germans or English or French. Sometimes the foreign boys glanced at me, and then I would paddle out to the raft, climb the ladder, and dive into the sea, pointing my toes “gracefully as a swan,” as Mother had taught me. But always, by the time I reemerged, they were no longer watching.

  Between four and five o’clock each day, we shook the sand from our beach towels, gathered our empty soda bottles and sunscreen, and returned to our suite. From my bedroom, which was separated from Mother’s by a peach-painted sitting area, I listened to the pattering of water as she showered. On my bed, flat on my back, I pulled down the edge of my bathing suit and examined the disappointing progression of my tan. If I splashed in the waves less and sunbathed more, as Mother did, maybe I would see more impressive results.

  When I heard the creak of the shower handle and Mother’s feet padding from the bath, I stepped in, rinsed grains of sand from my scalp and ears, scrubbed my stomach and arms and legs with the round, honey-scented cake of soap placed in our soap dish each afternoon. I dawdled in the water until the skin of my palms began to shrivel. Then, wrapped in two towels, I watched Mother from the wicker armchair in her room as she continued to dress. Before slipping on her clothes, still in her pastel underwear, she emptied the contents of her vinyl makeup bag onto the bureau. On the balls of her feet, leaning toward the bureau’s unframed mirror, she massaged her cheeks with blush and dabbed her eyelids with a silvery shadow, making the green flecks of her irises dazzle.

  “Opal, have you seen my lipstick anywhere?” she would ask, rummaging through the tubes and compacts on the dresser for her favorite bronze shade, which seemed to disappear now and then to unexpected places. If I found it for her, she would blow me a kiss. “Thank you, dearheart, thank you. Nothing is dowdier than a woman with no lipstick.”