Jersey Tomatoes are the Best

by Maria Padian

  Because she’s getting better. Two and a half months of treatment have pushed the protruding bones back into her body, forced the teeth back into her face, and restored the light in her eyes. Her hair, she tells me, has finally stopped disappearing down the shower drain. Her pulse has climbed back to normal. And her weight …

  “I’m trying not to think about that,” she said. It was sometime during the first month, and I had arrived for Friday-night visiting hours. The evening air was damp, and she was dressed in sweatpants and a big, loose hoodie. We sat outside in molded plastic chairs, on the patio of the residence hall. Patients and their guests kept passing through the glass double doors, as visitors signed in with the aides on duty and handed over their bags for inspection.

  “No contraband,” Eva explained. “No magazines. No drugs. No diuretics. No gum or mints. No sharps …”

  “Sharps?” I asked her.

  “Tweezers. Nail scissors. Anything you might use to injure yourself.” I gasped.

  “Yeah,” Eva sighed, “at least I only have one problem: I don’t eat. For some of these gals? That’s only the half of it.” She shook her head sadly, no irony in her voice. She was one of the few, she told me, who wasn’t on an antidepressant or sleeping pill or some psychopharmacological brew.

  “Just a fiber pill and laxative for me,” she said, almost smugly. “I didn’t poop for the first ten days. That’s how screwed up my system was.”

  It’s taken me a while to get used to those sorts of comments. The new expression on her face. It comes over when she’s deep in her own thoughts, staring into some inner reality that pinches her lips into a hard line, pulls her forehead into a determined frown. She’s heard a lot at this place, and tends to make these surprising, soul-baring observations, sometimes with a hard little edge in her voice. Gone is the relentlessly bright girl who told me you could patch any hole in your heart with a little Pink Decadence.

  Of course, she never really believed that. Not for one minute. And maybe, I’m thinking, it’s actually a huge relief to her that she doesn’t have to pretend to believe it anymore.

  As we enter the rehab center parking lot, yellow-green iguanas race-step-slither between low, shell-pink buildings. There’s a cleared central space on the campus, with an assortment of plants, benches and colorful totems. A “healing garden,” Eva calls it. She and I will hang out there while Yoly runs some errands. Then we three will drive to this club just north of Miami, where David is playing in one of those minor pro tournaments that never makes it onto network television. Win or lose, the four of us will meet Enrique at La Cubana for dinner tonight.

  As I walk toward the garden, I see her sitting by herself on a wooden bench. She’s cross-legged, her back poker-straight, and her hands rest on her knees. If she had her eyes closed, you’d swear she was in deep meditation, but she’s watching me approach and smiles widely as my feet crunch over the stones of the garden path.

  “Did anybody ever tell you that you walk like a jock?” she says, grinning. I flop beside her on the bench, dropping the pack at my feet.

  “How does a jock walk?” I say. She jumps up. She tries to lift the backpack.

  “What’d you stuff in here, rocks?” she exclaims. She manages to heft it onto one shoulder. She takes a few steps back, then begins this swaggering, head-bobbing lurch toward me. She swings her free arm and scuffs a few stones for effect.

  “I do not walk like a thug!” I laugh. She exaggerates the motion until it borders on gorillalike, then, giggling, drops the pack and returns lightly to the bench beside me. She drapes her arms around my shoulders and gives me a soft squeeze. I squeeze back.

  “How are ya?” I ask.

  She smiles, but does this pseudotremble, as if she’s cold.

  “Good, but nervous, you know? I mean, I haven’t been off campus for more than a couple of hours in … well, ever!” I nod, but say nothing. Today is big for her: she’ll be off grounds for almost ten straight hours, a privilege earned only by the patients at the top end of the recovery ladder. Patients who can be counted on to make healthy choices. Like eating.

  I know that the menu at La Cubana, with all its oily fried food, is scary to her. Even scarier than meeting Yoly and David for the first time. But she says she’s ready. She tells me she has to do this. And I’m so proud of her, I could bust.

  “You’ll do great,” I tell her emphatically. Her eyes slip from mine and land on the pack.

  “Did you bring me … things?” she asks mischievously. I zip it open. She squeals in glee over the rosemary mint shampoo I bought her at this Aveda salon near Greenlake.

  “You are the best, Henry! Thank you so much!” she exclaims. We stuff everything back in the bag after she’s seen it; the aides at the front desk have to okay each item. Then she sits back with this look of anticipation on her face.

  “So … did I tell you what Mom sent in the mail last week?” I shake my head. I’m still not used to hearing Eva refer to her mother as anything besides “Rhonda.” But part of her therapy has been to knock that off. “Too distancing. Objectifying,” Eva explained to me. “And we have some serious healing to do.” No kidding.

  “Three guesses,” she prompts me.

  “A case of Dinty Moore stew?” I suggest. Eva shrieks and slaps my arm.

  “Jeez, Eva, I don’t know … Body lotion? A good book? Free weights?”

  “My pointe shoes,” she says. My mind stutter-stops.

  “For dancing?” I say, stupidly. Eva nods. She beams.

  “They’ve been letting me dance again. One hour a day, in the exercise room. There’s no barre, so I use the window ledge. Mom sent the shoes so I can do some center work as well.”

  I don’t know what to say. Ballet, and what it has meant to, done to, Eva, has been such a huge part of the discussion here. Even when her body returned to health, would she return to dance? On the one hand, she was dying to move again. On the other hand … she was so afraid of where it might take her.

  “Is this … good?” I manage to ask. She nods, vigorously.

  “Better than good. Amazing. I feel like a gift has been returned to me. You know why?” I shake my head.

  “No mirror,” she says. “At some point I had stopped feeling my body when I danced and just kept looking at my body. I became obsessed with the reflection, with relying on the mirror to tell me whether I was doing it perfectly. And you know what? There’s no mirror on the stage. There’s no mirror during a performance. If you want to dance, really dance, you have to just cut loose and feel it. So the fact that there’s no barre here? No mirror? No Madame DuPres? Just me and the music coming from some crummy CD player? It’s been … pure.”

  I reach over and squeeze her hand.

  “Kind of like dancing in your basement playroom? With your best friend, the Mouse King?” I say. Eva smiles broadly.

  “It’s exactly like dancing in my basement playroom!” she says excitedly. “Henry, I want to get well. I want to get out of here, so I can dance again.”

  “You will,” I tell her quietly. She smiles at me, squeezes my hand back.

  From the corner of my eye, I see a girl walking toward us from the parking lot. Long, determined steps. Yoly’s heels bite the sidewalk with every stride.

  “Here comes Yoly,” I say. Eva follows my gaze and breaks into this bright laugh.

  “Oh my god. It must be a tennis thing. She walks like you!” Eva jumps up and goes out to meet her halfway. I watch her walk: splay-footed, a bit ducklike. Years of working on her turnout have permanently twisted her limbs in a direction unimaginable to most humans. But it’s normal for her. Desirable. Joyful, even. Because it’s who she is: a dancer.

  I stay put and treat myself to the sight of my two awesome friends meeting for the first time. It’s amazing. It’s a miracle, really. And I’m probably in for some really intense teasing today, as they combine forces. But I don’t care. Bring it on. Because if there’s one thing I know for sure, about the three of us?


  We own this day.

  Acknowledgments

  Although I am an avid tennis player as well as a great lover of ballet, I could not have brought Henry’s and Eva’s worlds to life without generous advice from: Cece Carey-Snow, who patiently answered the most mundane questions about ballet and told me things I never knew about dance; tennis pro Kevin Vincent of Maine Pines Racquet & Fitness in Brunswick, Maine; and Loretto Vella of the Evert Tennis Academy in Boca Raton, Florida, who gave me a firsthand look at a world-class tennis academy and also shared valuable insights about training young players.

  My husband, Conrad Schneider, and daughter, Madsy Schneider, were encouraging, honest readers throughout the process of writing this book. My wonderful agent, Edite Kroll, who in another life must have been a lumberjack or a hairdresser, because she’s that fond of cutting, delivered tough but always spot-on criticism of my manuscript, and for that I heartily thank her. I am especially indebted to Edite for introducing me to my editor at Knopf, Nancy Hinkel. I cannot imagine a more intelligent, insightful reader, and my books are always better because of her. Associate editor Allison Wortche and copy editor Janet Frick also offered excellent suggestions.

  There are angels in this world, and we meet them unexpectedly. I believe one answers the phone at the Renfrew Center for eating disorders in Coconut Creek, Florida, where every day women’s and girls’ lives are saved by caring professionals. I am grateful for my chance encounter with her.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Maria Padian is the author of Brett McCarthy: Work in Progress, which was chosen by the ALA and YALSA as one of the Best Books for Young Adults in 2009 and also received a Maine Literary Award and a Maine Lupine Honor Award. A graduate of Middlebury College and the University of Virginia, she has also attended Oxford University and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Born in New York but raised in New Jersey, she currently lives in Maine with her family and their Australian shepherd. To learn more about her, visit mariapadian.com.