Thinner Than Thou

by Kit Reed

  Betz elbows Danny. “How can they go around looking like that when everybody’s supposed to …” She doesn’t know how to frame it.

  Danny says, “Beats the hell out of me.”

  “They get away with it because they can afford it,” somebody says. It’s a cute cowboy-looking guy who falls in step with them because in a town like Aspen, when you see a girl who looks like Betz Abercrombie, you try to pick her up.

  “What?”

  “Aspen Institute,” he says. “Used to be a think tank for intellectuals. Now it’s a thin tank, like it really matters how those people look. So,” he says to Betz, “are you doing anything later?”

  “She’s going to Snowmass,” Dave says out of nowhere, clamping those electric fingers on her elbow and turning her so they are both heading where he wants to go.

  The cute guy follows. “I know a place where we can dance all night.”

  “Come on, it’s too late to reach Snowmass tonight.” Betz tugs but Dave isn’t about to let go. When she feints for the street Danny moves into place like a cutting horse.

  Moving Betz along like it or not, Dave glowers at the cowboy-looking guy until he goes away. “We’ll talk about that in the car.”

  “OK, Dave, let go!” She is secretly thrilled but it’s important to complain. “You’re just pissed at me because you’re tired.”

  He’s been driving all day; his voice has deteriorated to a testy rasp. “Don’t go telling me who’s tired.”

  It’s getting late, they can’t front for a motel and still have money for gas but they might be able to manage cut-rate sleeping bags. When Betz raises it Dave shakes his head without taking his eyes off the road. By this time they are heading out of town. Like an ice sculpture, Dave is clamped to the wheel, hands and jaw rigid, back straight. Since the Saturn first broached the Rockies, he’s refused to turn over the wheel. If their ice driver keeps going all night he will melt down, and then what? Betz is worried about him, but there’s no talking to Dave tonight, not the way he is.

  But the way he took her arm back there made her think Annie isn’t the only thing in his life. She tries. “Snowmass will still be there tomorrow, and so will this place.”

  “Tomorrow could be too late.”

  “It’ll go better if you sleep. You want to go in strong and right now you don’t have enough voice left to yell.”

  “I’m not quitting now. Not now, when we’re so close.”

  “So, ah, this place in Snowmass,” she says. “How are we supposed to find it in the dark?”

  “If she’s there, we’ll find it,” Dave says so firmly that Betz gives a little sob and then is glad it’s too dark in the car for him to see her face.

  “What if she isn’t?”

  “Let’s don’t go there,” Dave says gently. Then to her astonishment, he touches her hand. His hand fingers. “OK?”

  “OK,” she says, rolling into a whole new place. Danny is in back, sleeping off the jalapeños, which no amount of ice cream could quench. They are as good as alone. This is the kind of privacy that leads to long, searching conversations, the exchange of secrets, maybe more. Anything can happen between here and Snowmass. Something will happen, she is sure of it. Resistance melts. “OK, Dave. Anything you say.”

  She’s been waiting for this ever since they started the trip. This definitely is the kind of privacy that leads to great conversations but Dave doesn’t want to talk. After that single, soft moment, he clicked into mechanical mode, dealing with the unexpected rises and dips and hairpin turns in the mountain road. Now that he has bought her off with a moment of sweetness, he seems to have forgotten Betz.

  “Dave.”

  “M.”

  They have been driving for what seems like hours. “Are we going to know this monastery thingy when we get there?”

  “It’s a Dedicated convent thingy now.”

  “Is there a big sign on the highway or what?” She is waiting for him to say he doesn’t know, at which point she’ll pitch the overnight stop.

  “I checked it out on the Web. Spire sticking up, I think. There’s gotta be a sign.”

  “You’re going to be able to find it in the dark?”

  There is that crazed, gallant tone again. “I could find it if I was blind.”

  Grief hurtles into Betz and knocks the breath out of her. “Oh shit, Dave. Oh, shit.”

  “It’s OK, Betzy, OK?” He doesn’t explain this, he just goes on in a lighter tone, as though he knows it’s his job to distract her because she’s bumming and it’s his fault, “We turn in at the sign and we follow the road to the dormitory or whatever it is and then we wake these Dedicated Sisters up and make them bring her out.”

  “You think they have a dormitory?”

  “Convent. Whatever. It looks like a lot of little buildings, from what I saw. Chapel, big place with picture windows where the monks used to eat. Cabins in the woods. It’s small. Maybe we can just go up to Annie’s window and sneak her out.”

  He wants it so badly that she says, “Maybe we can. Maybe we—” “We’re here!” Dave hits the brakes hard and the car grinds to a stop. His headlights pick out the sign. “My God.”

  “Not exactly,” Betz said. Where the incised Gothic letters in sign used to say ST. BENEDICT’S MONASTERY the letters have been spray-painted out. Now it bears the mark of the Dedicated Sisters, which Betz (thanks, Bo) recognizes as a more sophisticated version of the logo on her shoes. “But this is it.”

  “Annie!” Crazed, Dave calls. “Come on out, Annie, this is it.”

  It is, but it isn’t. The trees are too dense for them to see where the buildings are much less where Annie is, and it is too dark for them to know what lies ahead.

  As Dave kicks the Saturn back to life and noses farther into the Dedicated Sisters property, they become aware that this is nothing like what the monks used to have when the place was still called St. Benedict’s. If there were cabins lodged in the woods around a chapel, they have been razed, along with the retreat house and the dining hall Dave expected to find. There are no monks and no traces of monks. It is as if they were never here. The only sign that they might have been present—might still be present—is the vestigial cross still visible underneath the Dedicated Sisters logo above the door. The only opening that they can see, the riveted metal door is a slit in the base of the white brick monolith.

  14

  “It’s me,” Kelly whispers. It’s night again and she’s simply materialized in Annie’s room, never mind the hall cameras, never mind the surveillance camera above the bed. How could a person that big move this silently? The room goes dark as, ever so slowly, the door swings shut behind her.

  “Don’t do that, we’ll get caught!”

  “Nope, we’re cool.”

  “Domnita’s got me on camera three.”

  “Not any more.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll see. Come on, let’s go.”

  Sitting in lotus position on her bed, Annie finds it hard to move. She could unfold herself and get down, she supposes, but what for? “How did you get in?”

  “How do you think I got in last time? Same deal. Now are you coming, or what?”

  “Where?”

  “Out.”

  “We can’t. The collars.” Her first day here Annie tried to run and the jolt almost fried her ears.

  The huge girl finds Annie’s hand in the dark and slips something into it. “Clip this on your neck.”

  She snaps it on. “This really works?”

  “I took care of it.”

  Kelly smells of Milk of Magnesia tonight, or is this really Kelly? The new IV has knocked Annie off-center. She’s having a hard time making her bed quit rocking and hold still. “OK, how?”

  “Neutralizes.”

  “And you, like, neutralized all the cameras too?”

  Kelly sighs. “Didn’t I just say I took care of it?”

  “What do you mean, you took care of it?”

  �
��The usual. You know, like in the movies. Dedicated Domnita is out there watching the whole corridor on a loop.”

  “You know how to do that?”

  “I know a lot of things,” Kelly says.

  “Like putting a whole bank of cameras on a loop?”

  “No prob.”

  “How did you …”

  “I watch a lot of movies,” Kelly says.

  “But that’s soooo techy.”

  Kelly giggles. “The best techies happen to be shaped just like me.”

  “You mean, um …”

  “Just go ahead and say it,” Kelly says. “Fat. When you’re as big as me you sit around a lot, you have a lot of time to think. Like, when there’s nothing to do but think, you think a lot. Why do you think pigs are so smart?”

  “You’re not a pig.”

  “You haven’t seen me.”

  Embarrassed, Annie says, “That one time.”

  “Oh, that,” she says without explaining. “That wasn’t me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The giggle really is delightful. “That was only what you saw. Come on, babe, we don’t have much time here. Are you coming or what?”

  She wants to go, she’s afraid to go. When an institution devotes enough time to invalidizing a person, it turns that person into an … invalid. Keep anybody in bed for long enough and you can put her to bed for the rest of her life. Annie spent two whole years establishing control over her body and lost it just like that. Now the Dedicated Sisters have moved into her head and taken the helm, and if they don’t control her body, quite, they have corroded her thoughts. For instance, Kelly here. Is this really the real Kelly in the room with her, or is it some kind of Dedicated Sisters trick to gain her confidence so they can get her into their clutches for keeps? Have they sent in some novice who sounds like Kelly but isn’t, to trap her into making a stupid’s lip that will entitle them to cut her open and insert the stomach tube?

  “Well, are you?”

  “What?”

  “Coming!”

  She doesn’t know. If it really is the real Kelly fuming here in the darkened room, is she, Annie, strong enough to make it to the exit Kelly claims she’s found? She feels exposed in the flimsy hospital gown, incompetent and slightly drunk on whatever they put into the new IV. In spite of all the running in place she is shaky and weak in the legs, so limp that her ankles would probably wobble like an amateur skater’s if she tried to cut and run. What if some Dedicated grabbed her and she had to yell for help, would her voice come out like some poor, weak old lady’s, quavery and thin? Shit, when her voice finally does come out she sounds exactly like Mom’s Gramma the day she gave up on everything and totally died. “I don’t know.”

  “Look.” Sighing, Kelly sits down on the end of the bed. Annie’s end rises just the way it did before, so, yep, it’s really her. “Let me tell you a couple of things. First. You didn’t come here on your own, did you.” It isn’t a question.

  “Hell no. Did you?”

  Kelly brushes this aside, like, totally QED. “Nobody does. So you totally don’t love it.”

  “Nope. My parents do. They sold me down the river.”

  “So did mine.”

  “You mean you didn’t want to …” Annie gulps politely. You see something Kelly’s size coming and you make assumptions. “You didn’t want to …”

  “Go ahead and say it. Get thin? Why does everybody assume the only thing a girl who looks like me wants in the world is to get thin? Like, you, they just tell you that you’re sick, poor unfortunate girl, and me? They tell me I’m disgusting. So, like, did I go along with it because I wanted to get thin? I did but I didn’t, you know?”

  “Not really.”

  “OK.” All the light goes out of Kelly’s beautiful voice. “Sure I wanted to be thin and beautiful like everybody says normal girls are supposed to be, hell, everybody wants to be thin and beautiful, but when you get down to the truth of it, the real truth? What I really wanted? I just wanted them to leave me the fuck alone.”

  “That’s all I wanted too.”

  “It’s all anybody wants, but with all the ads and shit, they won’t let us be! Listen. My mom had me at Weight Watchers by the time I was six years old.”

  Annie says thoughtfully, “My mom is into the Reverend Earl.”

  “That’s another thing … What’s that?” At the clatter in the hall Kelly starts so violently that the whole bed shakes.

  “Oh, that? That’s nothing,” Annie says. Most nights the metallic rattle makes her tremble and she sinks deeper into the mattress, trying to disappear as it approaches, flattening and staying flat until it passes her door and rolls away, but this is all new to Kelly and she is disrupted and jittering. A rolling cart, Annie thinks, but carrying what and rolling where? “Chill, it’s just the cart.”

  “The cart.”

  “Yeah, the cart. You know.”

  “Sure,” Kelly says politely: the Girl from Another Floor. It’s clear she doesn’t have a clue.

  “So, ah, you were at Weight Watchers and it didn’t take?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice,” Kelly says in leaden tones. “The thing is, they put all these fucking hormones in your milk and vitamins in the baby food and all before you’re big enough to know what’s going on. You eat up all your dinner like a good girl and so you grow up kind of big for your age, like, before you know the rules? Then there’s your mom, making sure you eat all your whatever, lick the platter so people will think she’s a good mom, plus the moms are all bent about which percentile are you in, height/weight for your age, like, when you’re little they are so proud. Congratulations, you’re the leader of the pack and then all of a sudden bingo, zot! You go in for your checkup and the chart says you’re too big. Like, sur-prise. Mom freaks, like she wanted you to get nice and big, but not this big, and the next thing you know …”

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  “You need to see where I’m coming from, OK? The next thing you know you’ve crossed the line. So first it’s like your mom is all, baby fat and then it’s pleasingly plump and the next thing you know, she starts dressing you in vertical stripes. Like, fool the people so when they see you they’ll think you look smaller, which you don’t, because you can’t stop packing it on? I mean, I don’t eat enough to feed a bird, I don’t know where it comes from but it just keeps piling on. After a while your mom’s shoving you behind pillars at the club because you’re worse and it’s OK for people to see you, just not all of you, in spite of which you keep gaining the weight, Dad doesn’t want his golf buddies to see how big you really are, and you’re still putting it on and in the end they start locking you in the house whenever they go out because they don’t want anybody to see you at all. Then pretty soon even they can’t stand to look at you, your own mom and dad so they stick you in here, like out of sight—”

  Annie finishes for her. “Out of mind.”

  “It totally sucks!”

  “I know.”

  “You couldn’t possibly. Then there are the bribes.”

  “Right,” Annie says, because she wants Kelly to understand that she does know, and firsthand. “Mine were all, gain five pounds and we’ll buy you a ruby ring.”

  “It’s a little different when they want you to lose fifty and fuck it, I tried. Hey, have you got any food?”

  “Fig bar from dinner. They think I ate it. Here.”

  “So.” There is a gnarly, growling sound as Kelly devours it. She swallows. “Got any more?”

  “That’s as good as it gets.”

  “OK. Anyway, they promised me a fur coat if I would lose the weight, they promised me trips to Europe, they even promised me a car if I would just not eat like this, you know? It’s like, hold your nose and just stop breathing, OK? but I tried. I tried, I even lost a couple of pounds, which is, OK like the teaspoon of sand you take off a dune when you’re me, but … Hey, wasn’t that a start? Look, I did it. I managed even though M
om was all ‘it’s OK honey, today’s your birthday’ and ‘just one little bite won’t hurt,’ so maybe deep down inside her, some part of my mom was kind of the Wicked Stepmother, like, ‘I am the fairest in the land,’ and she really wanted it to stay that way.”

  Wicked stepmother. Thinking about it makes Annie feel sick to her stomach. “Maybe that’s what mothers really want.”

  “But hey, I lost a little in spite of her. I managed, it almost killed me but I lost ten pounds; and my celebration was supposed to be a whole new outfit and they would take me to a party at the club. I was way psyched, it’s hard to explain. Anyway, I picked out this pretty, um, slenderizing black outfit at the Plus Size store so I would look just right for the Special Members Dinner at the club. It’s really stupid, what you set store by.” The bed jiggles and Kelly’s voice shoots up. “What’s that? Is it that cart?”

  Come to think of it, maybe the cart is a little creepy. “It’s just the IV trolley. I think.”

  “IV. They sure don’t have those on my floor. Laxative cart. Enemas.”

  “Eeeeewww!”

  “Anyway, it was the day of the big club party and I got all done up in my new outfit and patent leather shoes to show off my tiny feet and a nice black coat to go with. I even did makeup, it took me almost an hour! By the time I’m ready, Mom and Dad are already out front in the car and she and I are talking and laughing all the way to the club and she doesn’t so much look at me until Daddy stops the car and lets us out at the front door and I do this little twirl because I am so excited, and I open the coat so my skirts fly out a little bit and I go, ‘Mommy, look!’ and she says …”

  What’s scary at this point is that right here in her room, Kelly groans out loud. Annie says softly, “Ooooh maaaaan …”

  There is a silence while Kelly pulls herself together. Finally she goes on. “And she says—OK, you need to know that this is the last time I ever went out with them. I can see all the pissy thoughts going across my mother’s face when she touches my cheeks with eye shadow, you know, to make me look thinner, and I hear the sigh that comes out of her and she says, my mom, my very own mother says to me, ‘Just promise to keep your coat on, dear.”