by Kit Reed
“Fat isn’t the problem!”
“I’d move along if I were you.”
Startled, she leaps back. “What? What!!!”
The night watchman pats his holster, saying in a low, RoboCop tone, “Move along, please.”
“Is this the home office?”
“It don’t matter, it’s closed.”
“I have to talk to the Dedicated Mother.”
“No time for that now, Ma’am.”
“Just tell me whether this is the mother ship.”
“This is the Administration Building.”
“I have to talk to them.”
“This is private property, Ma’am, so if you’ll just move along …”
“They have my daughter!”
“Sorry, you’re too late.”
Her heart lurches. “She can’t be dead!”
“It’s after seven, lady. They’re all closed.”
Through the glass doors she can see a lobby light burning. She sees tall figures moving back and forth behind the frosted glass at the rear. “They have to see me, it’s urgent.”
“Come back in the morning.”
“I have to get in. I’ve come all this way.”
“Not today.” He takes her elbow to hurry her along.
Angry, she jerks her arm away. Drawing on inner resources she’s used to silence lecture halls, Marg squares her shoulders and lifts her chin. Anybody watching would swear she was taller. “That’s not yours to decide,” she says with a sharp, imperious chop of the hand. “Now get on the intercom and tell them I’m here.”
What is it about her tone? The night watchman backs away. “Yes Ma’am.”
“Their patient is my daughter. I have a right.” Hard, she thinks. This is going to be very hard.
“Ma’am, I don’t think you—”
“Now, don’t make them fire you for holding me up.”
“Yes Ma’am.” Nodding, he touches the mike hanging from the leather diagonal on his shiny Sam Browne belt. “They’ll let you in OK,” he tells her, and in a spasm of confidentiality he probably says more than he should. “They generally do.” As the mike crackles to life he finds it necessary to warn Marg. “You’ll only be sorry,” he says.
11
This is awful, Annie thinks, shivering on the portable scales as the infirmarian checks the hem of her flowered hospital gown for concealed weights. Nobody cares about me.
“Hold still,” Dedicated Leticia says crossly, giving her a little shove.
If they cared they would at least write. Hard to hold still when you are overturned by what they just did to you. “I’m trying!” Annie’s heart is rubbed raw; she is terrified and still reeling from the Naked Face-off and nobody cares. She could die in here and the parents wouldn’t give a fuck, like, the minute the van doors closed on her she was dead to them.
They said gravely, “You ought to be ashamed,” but their sad eyes and stitched-up faces were spring-loaded.
They meant, We’re so ashamed.
Exiled, by her very own parents. Exiled and despised. And as far as she knows, the twins despise her too and the worst part is, for what? She spent two years setting the parameters and purifying herself until she fit into this part of the pattern, at least, and now they despise her for it and what’s worse, she’s losing even that purity of design. She’s getting fat!
Is it that awful, what I did? All I did was lose the flab! Oh God this is so awful, she is gaining it back.
“Excellent. Up by half a pound!” The infirmarian pries open Annie’s tight fists to make sure she isn’t hiding any weights in there either. “You can break ninety by the end of the week, if you’ll only try, won’t that be wonderful?”
No! Annie notes the LCD readout and thinks, Shit! Even discounting the water she drank before the weigh-in to fool old Leticia here, she’s really packing it on. Because the infirmarian won’t leave until she agrees it’s wonderful she says weakly, “I guess.”
“And we know what happens when we break ninety, don’t we?” Her least favorite Dedicated Sister, Leticia, asks with that phony, motivational lilt. “We get TV privileges, and do we remember what happens when we break a hundred?”
I’d rather die. “We’re officially fat?”
There is a long, fine, distracting hair waving in the bulge on Leticia’s chin. “Did you learn nothing from the Naked Face-off?”
“Yeah,” Annie says bitterly.
The Dedicated’s chin is wide and white. The hair is thin and black. “Yeah you did, or yeah you didn’t?”
What would happen if I just yanked it out? “Mpf.” Annie covers her mouth so the woman won’t know which.
Even the most dedicated of the Dedicated Sisters knows when this is as good as it’s going to get. Sighing, Dedicated Leticia folds the scales with a snap, scowls at her and goes.
The only thing worse than talking to Leticia is being alone. She would cry to heaven but who can hear a girl crying at the bottom of a black hole?
Forget the flowered curtains and pillows and the pink stuffed toys, that’s exactly what this is. Although the room is bright, with perky rural scenes stenciled on the shades, all the windows are sealed. The Dedicateds have replaced the leaded glass with flocked chipboard. There is no way of telling where she is. The Dedicated Sisters’ establishment could be at the top of Mount Washington or Kingman’s Notch or in the Mississippi delta for all she knows, it could even be in the next town over from home. The place is locked down so tight that there’s no knowing. Elsewhere in the ersatz Gothic convent, it must be visiting day; she can hear laughter spiraling up the stone steps, but it is deathly still and mortally lonely in Annie Abercrombie’s room. The rule of treatment here is that you don’t get to meet the others until you make the weight. The electronic collar keeps her from going out, and except for the Dedicateds Darva and Leticia and the nameless, inexorable dietitian, nobody comes in.
And for Annie, at least, visitors don’t come.
Where is everybody? Where are they anyway? They haven’t called. They don’t even write.
They don’t care, Annie thinks dismally. Nobody gives a fuck about me. Not even Dave. Does he not miss her, or what? When she had her wisdom teeth pulled sweet Dave ran out into some field and came back with violets. He mashed them flat in an envelope and FedExed them to her in the hospital, S.W.A.K. it said on the envelope. Sealed With A Kiss. It’s been weeks and he hasn’t even bothered to go down to the card shop and pick out a get-well card. Unless.
Unless, God, Wellmont really is a black hole. No letters come for her, no cautionary packets of clippings from Dad, she would eat a fruitcake to get the pointedly selected Girl Dies of Malnutrition. Weight Loss Effort Blamed headlines with one of his notes added in black Magic Marker, in case she doesn’t get it: THIS COULD BE YOU. Zero calorie-laden CARE packages from Mom. As far as the twins are concerned she might as well be dead, they are that tied up with their selfish little lives. She could walk into the TV room this minute, sobbing out her story to some track from MTV and Betz or Danny would say, would you mind moving, you’re blocking the screen. Well so what, they can go to hell. When Annie breaks out of here the first thing she’ll do when she gets home is move all of Betz’s stuff out of the damn bedroom, let her sleep in the TV room, Annie is over her.
As of this morning she’s pretty much over living, if you want to know the truth. Everything she stood for is being destroyed.
You bet she is depressed. When the Dedicated Darva ran at her with this morning’s oatmeal, Annie totally snapped. “Don’t!”
Big old Darva acted all hurt, the way she does. “What’s the matter?”
Annie made a mistake. She let herself cry—let herself, she couldn’t help it! She could not stop the tears and between sobs she shouted, “You’re making me fat.” God, it’s true. What she sees in the mirror now makes her want to puke. When you have learned to love the crystal purity of water and iceberg lettuce, when you have set your parameters and refined your personal aes
thetic to cultivate the delicate, finely drawn lines of your own long, uncluttered bones, every mouthful they force on you is an outrage and every ounce a desecration of the purity of this temple you have worked so hard to create. Pounding her expanding belly she wailed, “I’m fat and I hate it, I hate myself!”
“Annie, don’t say that.”
“I’m disgusting.”
Darva’s tone changed. “Abercrombie, I’m warning you.”
“I hate it.”
Annie should have paid closer attention. For the first time ever, Darva scowled. “Last warning.”
“I hate myself.”
“That does it,” Darva said. In the weeks since they took Annie’s particulars and signed her in, the Dedicated neophyte has gotten brusquer and more confident, maybe because having Annie to push around makes her feel competent for a change, and either the sadism component or being stronger than someone gets her all psyched. “Get up.”
Darva didn’t let her stop for a bathrobe; she didn’t even get to stop for the paper slippers. Knuckling her in the back, Darva rushed her out of the room.
Unshelled for the first time since she hit Wellmont, exposed and blushing in her flimsy hospital gown, Annie felt like a released parade balloon, bopping along the hall with her cheeks filling out and fat puffing out on all her beautiful bones.
“You think you’re fat?” Sister Darva said, ushering her into a mirrored examining room bisected by a curtain. “I’ll show you fat.”
“Where are we?”
“You’ll see.”
“What is this?”
“Face-off room,” Darva gestured to the hospital curtain that separated them from whatever waited on the far side, anchored top and bottom to a curving metal track. As she tapped the fabric, something stirred. “Now, lose the gown.”
“Never.”
“Take it off or I will.”
“Please don’t.” Shrinking from her own hideous reflection, Annie bunched the hospital gown in front of her as if a yard of fabric printed with pandas would cover her grotesquely bloated self. In spite of her best efforts she’s really packed it on. At first she skated by, hiding entire meals under her mattress until the smell gave her away, which was just about the time Darva found the weights she’d sewed into the sleeves of her hospital gown. When it was clear the honor system wasn’t working, the Dedicated practically moved in with her. Now she spoon-feeds Annie every night and she doesn’t quit until the gunk is gone and then she follows her into the bathroom to make sure she doesn’t yack it up before the calories sink in. “It’s too embarrassing.”
“I warned you.” Lining her up in front of the mirror, the Dedicated Darva ripped off the gown.
Appalled, Annie shrank from her reflected self. “Ugh. Fat!” That isn’t me.
“You think that’s fat?”
“Fatter than shit!” On the far side of the curtain that divided the room something big drew in a sharp breath, but Annie was too angry and distracted to hear. She was raging at Darva, shouting, “Just look at me!”
“That isn’t fat …” With a flourish, Darva rattled the curtain chain.
Somewhere, some unseen person moaned.
“This is fat,” Darva said in triumph. Then out of nowhere she said in someone else’s voice, “Look on my works ye mighty and despair,” and pulled the chain.
Rattling along the metal track like a runaway express, the dense fabric slipped back into a wall recess and the other half of the room was exposed. The floor-to-ceiling mirror confronting Annie extended the width of the room, giving back the reflection of the figure standing on the other side of the canvas.
Deep in her own misery, Annie cried, “Oh, no!”
At the same time another voice rose in a wail, “Ooooh, no!”
Naked Annie and the other naked person—person?—the pink blob was so big that at first it was hard to tell … Annie and the other were lined up in front of the mirror, both naked, both in the same attitude, with their hands spread, one high, one low, to cover whatever they could.
“My God.”
“Look at that, Annie Abercrombie. Look at that and then tell me you’re fat.”
Two girls pleaded, “Don’t let her see!”
Annie grunted in shock. There is no describing what she saw. Both girls shrank from their reflected images but the Dedicateds in charge of these special cases clamped strong hands on their shoulders and held them in place—two for the distended, miserable human being on the far side of the curving curtain track. Huge and humiliated at being seen in her naked amplitude, she was weeping so pathetically that Annie burst into sympathetic tears.
Trying to cover herself, the big patient wailed, “Noooooo.”
“Don’t!”
“Now, look at that,” Darva said in that amped voice.
“Oh, this is terrible.”
“Oh, that poor girl!”
“Look at that and tell me you still think you’re fat.”
The silence was even worse than the sobbing.
“That’s better,” Darva said. Then the Dedicated-in-training explained—rather nicely, in fact—“We don’t only deal with your kind of disorder here.”
While on the other side of the curtain track that bisected the room the tremendous girl just about Annie’s age heaved in gigantic pink ripples of grief.
Annie watched until she couldn’t watch any more. When she could speak she said with surprising dignity, “Let her get dressed.”
“Mission accomplished?”
Naked, she tore free, shouting, “Cover her!”
“Your gown!”
“I don’t care about the fucking gown, I’m out of here.”
The big girl’s voice followed her down the hall. “Kelly. My name is Kelly,” she sobbed.
Now it is night. It’s after Lights Out at Wellmont and two more meals have gone by like exercises in Chinese water torture, spoonful by spoonful inserted between Annie’s tight lips by intent Darva with her big square mouth open suggestively like mothers’ mouths when they are shoveling in the oatmeal, unconsciously making the mouth they want to see happening, except every time Darva does it Annie is revolted all over again by the color of her big square teeth. Two more meals over the yardarm, each one a sick combination of pleading and trickery, accommodation and deception on both sides, ending the way all Annie’s meals at Wellmont end, with one party pleased at how much food she’s purveyed and the other encouraged by how little she actually ate. There has been the usual concealment and apparent swallowing, the futile sneak barf and now, after Lights Out, the usual desperate running-in-place.
She is at it now, sprinting on the pink shag mat beside her bed, keeping her step light for fear of rousing whoever sleeps in the room below, or worse yet bringing down the wrath of Domnita, the night monitor on the Ano floor. In all her time at Wellmont, Annie hasn’t been let out of her room, but there are other girls just like her trapped in cubicles all up and down the hall she knows, she just knows.
Where she’s been padding along in the dim light from the hallway, suddenly there is darkness in the room. Someone says, “That was nice, what you did today.”
It is so dark that Annie can’t see the speaker. Whoever she is, she completely fills the door. She makes a guess. “Kelly?”
“Making them make with the gown. How did you know it was me?”
“Um,” she says, trying to figure out how to put it tactfully. Who else is fat enough to blot out the light? “Uh, like, after what they did to us this morning I’d know you anywhere.”
Kelly giggles. In the dark like this, she sounds as light and festive as Annie on a good day. “Sorry to say this cuz I know it’s embarrassing, but I’d know you too. Is that really a tattoo of a snake on your boob?”
“I kind of did it with Magic Marker, but yeah.”
“Cool.” The light changes as Kelly surges into the room. “Babe, it took forever to find you.”
“I’m not a babe.” Personally, she’d rather be a boy.
/> “To say nothing of neutralizing the E-barrier.”
“You zapped the zapper? How?”
Kelly has a delightful laugh. “If I tell you, they’ll have to kill you.”
“Shut up, she’ll hear us.”
“Actually, it was the gel from Domnita’s corn remover.”
“Shh and I mean it, who knows what they’ll do to us if we get caught!”
“They won’t catch us. All you have to do is shut the door. Do it, I came to tell you something.”
“What?”
“You’ll see. First,” Kelly hisses portentously, “the door.”
“So,” Annie says. “What?”
With the door closed, the darkness is complete. Kelly pads around the room on surprisingly light feet. “Got anything to eat?”
It takes a long time for her to get around to it even after Annie props a chair under the knob as per TV movies and empties the cache of rejected treats she’s starting under the Jeri chair. “Are you going to tell me, or what?”
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me what you came over to tell me!”
“Oh,” Kelly says, feeling around under the chair for leftovers and coming up empty. She sits down on the end of Annie’s bed. In the dark like this, she could be anyone. Or she could until the bed starts canting in Kelly’s direction and Annie had to grab the barred headboard and hang on tight to keep from sliding down like a sailor clinging to the deck of a sinking ship. “Right. That. So, are you sitting down?”
“I’m trying!”
“OK, after the Naked Face-off and all? They were truckling’me back to my room on the forklift—”
“Forklift!”
“Yep, I fooled them. They all think I’m too fat to walk.”
“Ewwwww.”
“Hey, it’s how come they never bother with bed check after they lock me down for the night. Anyway, they were truckling me back to my room on the forklift, Glorina and Desiree? Yeah, I’m so big it takes two Dedicateds to handle me.”
