Skin

by Adrienne Maria Vrettos

  He doesn’t even look at me; his eyes are set on Mom, who hasn’t moved from the table. She’s sipping her tea. Karen is straight-backed in her chair, watching Dad. Finally Karen says, “Dad, can’t you make your own sandwich? Why are you waiting for Mom to make it? I’m sure you make lots of sandwiches at your apartment.”

  I back away from the table in the moments before Dad answers. I’m practically in the living room when he says, “Karen, I don’t think the question is whether or not I can make a sandwich. I think the question is whether or not you’ll eat a sandwich.”

  I get under the front-hall table and peek out from under the edge of the tablecloth so I can see Karen turn pale and look at Mom with wide eyes.

  “What?” Her voice is quivering.

  Dad has satisfaction in his voice. “Your mom says you’re still not eating. She says Marie told her you’ve stopped talking during your sessions. Mom told me what Donnie found in the bathroom.”

  Mom reaches over and strokes Karen’s arm, all the while glowering at Dad.

  “Joseph, can I talk to you for a minute?” Mom stands up and motions with her head toward the living room. Dad doesn’t move. He keeps Karen frozen in her seat with his words.

  “They’re waiting for you up there, Karen. They have your old bed all ready. And this time you are going to listen to what those doctors say.”

  I whisper, “Asshole, asshole, asshole.”

  “Joseph!” Mom’s got him by the arm and is trying to pull him out of his chair. Karen’s come unglued from her chair and is backed up against the counter, gripping the edge behind her.

  “Your mom is taking you there this weekend.”

  Karen gives Mom an openmouthed gaze. Mom shakes her head and says, “Karen.”

  “I’m not going . . .”—Karen’s voice is defiant, shaky—“. . . anywhere.” I can see her knuckles turning white where she’s got the counter.

  “Diane? You didn’t even tell her?”

  Mom shakes her head, still looking at Karen.

  “Karen,” Dad says, standing up, “get your coat. I’m here, I’ll take care of this. I’ll take you now.”

  It is noise and motion after that. Chairs knocked to the ground, teacups tipped over, rolling off the table and shattering. Mom pleading. Dad’s weird, low growl. Karen’s shrieks. The fight comes into the living room, Karen diving under the table with me, smacking her forehead against my chin. She’s got her arms around my chest, she’s squeezing me, and I can smell her sweat. I hold on to her. Dad grabs me too when he reaches under, dragging us both out. He’s grunting and cursing. Mom’s behind him, pressing her shaking hands against her face. Karen’s still got me, and I’m saying, “No, no, no, no,” trying to hold onto her arms as Dad pulls her away. I can’t. I can’t hold on tight enough and in a second he’s got her in his arms cradled like a baby. He opens the front door with the hand under her legs and tries to step through. I don’t think she breaks his nose, but some blood comes out when she cracks it with her knees, jumping out of his arms, and spreading herself in the doorjamb, one hand gripping each side. She’s facing Mom and me, her fingers turning white on the doorjamb as Dad tries to pull her outside.

  He is a small man. I know this now, after watching him try to pull Karen out of the house. After seeing how when he spreads his hands over hers, trying to pull them away from the doorjamb, their hands are almost the same size. He’s not a bear like Amanda’s dad at all; he’s a little man, like me. He dodges a back kick from Karen, growling “Son of a—”

  “LEAVE ME ALONE!” I never knew my sister could sound like that, like the words are being scraped out of her. “DADDY, PLEASE! PLEEEEASE!” She jerks her head from side to side, her hair damp with sweat and sticking to her ruby face.

  Mom stands next to me, we’ve both gone still.

  Dad’s taken a break, standing behind Karen on the front steps, arms akimbo, panting. He moves to her side, where her flailing legs can’t reach him. He leans toward her, laying his right hand on top of hers. Karen’s stopped screaming now. He takes his left hand and slowly moves across her shoulders, down her arm, and on top of her left hand, so his body is like an echo of hers. We watch him work his fingers between the doorjamb and Karen’s palms, finally pulling her clawed hands away, pulling her back toward him so he can pin her arms to her sides. Karen’s head hangs in front of her, she lets her knees buckle, lets her weight fall, so Dad is holding her up. It’s all very, very quiet.

  Dad leans forward, whispering in Karen’s ear.

  “Shh. It’s all right now. You’re all right. We’ll get you better. I promise. We’ll get you better.”

  His look at Mom is triumphant. Her look at him is stone.

  “Stay here with Donnie.”

  Karen lets him scoop her up. I’m glad to know that if she were normal, if she were a normal weight, he’d be struggling. It’s just her being so small that makes him look strong. He leaves the front door open behind him and keeps purring to Karen as he carries her down the steps. He peels out when he drives away. Mom stays staring at the front door, like she could stay standing there forever. Then she gives her head a shake, like she’s rousing herself awake, and says, “I’ll call the clinic.”

  27

  Karen might come home early from the hospital. Here’s a secret: I hope she doesn’t. I’m not ready for her yet. A lot of things happen when she leaves. There’s stuff that I try not to notice, like how good it feels to eat a meal without keeping one eye on how many bites Karen takes or wondering how Mom is going to get her to eat something. And it feels good not to eat in front of her. When she’s here and we all eat together, every bite is like your teeth don’t just cut into the food, they cut into everything that’s wrong in this house, and the taste can choke you. Food disgusts her. And when we eat, she watches us like we watch her. She looks fascinated and repulsed at the same time. It’s hard to eat a meal like that. And when she’s here, there’s a lot of stuff we just don’t eat: pizza, Chinese food, anything that tastes really good. Just the smell of it will send her flying out of the house yelling an excuse about going to the library or a school play or over to the house of a friend we’ve never heard of. With her gone, we get really good food delivered almost every night. And the nights we don’t order in, Mom gets out her cookbooks, or Dad makes chili or barbecue. Dad is the other thing that happens when she’s gone. He’s been home almost the whole time. Somehow the long drive to work doesn’t bother him anymore. He and Mom still fight, but before it really heats up and I have to go outside, they sigh and then talk about something else.

  Here’s something else that happens when Karen’s gone: Me. I happen. Without her to absorb all the energy, there’s some left for me. They don’t even really talk about her, at least to me. The most they say is something like “When your sister gets back.” Instead they ask me questions about what my day was like and if I can handle how hot the chili is. What’s hard is that even though this would be the time for me to tell them everything, I don’t. I tell them school is fine. I tell them cool stories that I overhear at school, except I tell them they happened to me. I don’t tell the truth because things are too far gone. I can’t tell them how things are now because I’d have to explain how they got this way, and the truth is, I have no idea. It’s better to play along.

  When Karen’s gone, she’s not the only one recovering. The truth is we need the rest. She leaves and we sleep well. When she’s not here, there’s no reason to fight about food, there’s no one to scream at Mom, there’s no one to ask Dad why he even bothers coming home, there’s no reason to watch what you say and what you do, because God forbid we piss Karen off and she leaves before dinner. It’s not like she leaves and everything gets better. We just take a break and pretend everything’s okay. We just need a break.

  28

  I have an evil nemesis. Two of them. Somehow they’ve found out my invisibility plan. Every day they wait until I’ve gone through all of school without anyone saying a word to me. They let me p
ass through each period unnoticed and untouched. We ride the same bus together. They wait till it’s my stop, till I’ve gotten up and am down the aisle, and then right when I pass them, they say, “Good-bye.” And I appear.

  Twins. A guy and a girl. “From India, by way of first London, then Virginia,” they said on their first day of school, standing up at the front of the class, watching us all look at them. They’re unpopular. It was obvious they would be. They wear clothes no one has heard of, and they’re polite to the teachers. We watch each other in the halls.

  They’re going to ruin my life.

  29

  “Donnie, come in here.”

  I walk into Karen’s room. She sitting cross-legged on her bed, looking at the photo album Amanda made her before she moved. She’s been back from the hospital for two weeks, since the beginning of February, and even though none of us says it out loud, she actually looks like she might be getting better. Mom hasn’t made her go back to school yet, though. I understand. It might push her off an edge we didn’t know was there. A tutor comes every couple of days to go over the work Karen’s teachers send. That way, when she’s ready to go back, she’ll be caught up.

  “Sit down.”

  I sit next to her on the bed. I think, Ask me how my day was, ask me how my day was, ask me how my day . . .

  “I’m anorexic.”

  I laugh, and it surprises both of us.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  I laugh harder. She socks me in my arm.

  “It’s not funny, Donnie, I have a disease! How is that funny?”

  “It’s funny,” I say, “because you’ve been anorexic for a fucking year, you’ve been in the fucking hospital twice, and this is the first time that anybody, you or Mom or Dad or anybody, has said a word about it to me.” I’m not laughing any more. I’m fucking furious.

  I hear footsteps in the hall.

  “Hey, Mom!” I yell. “Karen has anorexia, did you know that?”

  The footsteps quicken and Mom stands in the doorway. “Donnie,” she says.

  “What? Am I not supposed to know? Did Karen tell little baby brother a big, bad secret?”

  “Donnie, you knew Karen was ill.”

  “Yeah, I knew, but not because you told me. I knew because I pay attention to things. I pay attention to what people say! Guess what else? Dad left us! Oh, sure, he stayed here when Karen was in the hospital, but he’s not here now, is he? When he comes here, he’s a visitor because he moved the fuck out!”

  “Donnie.”

  I get up from the bed and turn to my sister.

  “Karen, I’m glad we had this talk. I was actually wondering why we weren’t allowed to have butter in the house and why every second of my life has been about making sure your neck bones don’t stick out too much. It all makes sense now. Let’s do this again sometime.” I shove past Mom, go into my room, slam the door, open it, and yell, “This is happening to me too, you know!”

  I slam the door again and feel really alive.

  30

  “Okay. This will be fun.” Karen’s lying on her stomach in her bed, her arms dangling over the side, holding the coloring book she found in the attic. It’s called The Book About Me! I sit on the floor, leaning against the bed. She opens the book.

  “Okay. Question one. What’s your name?”

  “Finish your drink first,” I say.

  Karen picks up the can of weird nutritional liquid she has to drink and gulps down the last of it, and gives an enthusiastic but fake burp. She drops the can in my lap and says, “There. Now what’s your name?”

  “You know my name.”

  She flicks my ear.

  “This is serious. This is the book about you. I’ll fill in the first one about you. Your name is Donnie.” She fills in the space in the book with neat, block letters. “Okay, next question. What’s your favorite color?”

  I shrug. “I dunno.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? How can you not know your favorite color?” She looks at me with mock concern. “What are they teaching you in school?”

  I shrug again.

  “Okay. When you were little, it was green, so we’ll put green. Favorite food?”

  I stand up. “I have homework.”

  “Go get it and do it in here. Least favorite food?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t be a brat. Sauerkraut. Now, that’s a nasty food. How do you spell that? And if you were an animal, what would be?”

  I sigh.

  “Let me guess. You’d be an endangered North American Wild Idontknow, native to Missouri.”

  “That’s such a Dad joke.”

  “Dad’s not as funny as me. Donnie, why won’t you answer this stuff?”

  “Because it’s stupid.”

  “Well, yeah, but what else are we going to do?”

  I go into my room and get my backpack. When I come back in, Karen says matter-of-factly, “Donnie, I think you need to go on a journey of self-discovery.”

  “What?” I dump my books out on the floor and give my math book a light kick before I sit next to it and open it up.

  “Seriously. You should drop out of school and hitchhike cross-country”—she sweeps her hand in the air, looks into the distance, and says in a dreamy voice—“discovering what your favorite color is.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s important!” she snaps, the dreamy voice gone. She’s earnest now. “You can’t not know these things about yourself, Donnie, because that’s just . . . a waste.”

  She looks hard at me.

  I say, “Okay.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Seriously, Donnie.”

  I laugh, and say loudly, “Okay! What do you want me to do about it now?”

  Karen gives me a self-satisfied nod. “A journey of self-discovery. ‘Know thyself.’ Know who said that?”

  “No,” I answer.

  “Me either. It’s not important. What’s important is that you know yourself. It’s time,” she says, taking the math book from my hands, “that you write the Book of Donnie.”

  31

  I really think that someone needs to explain the concept of being a loser to the twins. Because at the rate they’re going, saying hello to me every day, it’s only going to be so long before some of my loser stink rubs off on them. Don’t they have losers in London? Maybe high school in London is the way that grown-ups say the “rest of your life” is here. As in, “Those popular kids are peaking now, and you and the rest of the late bloomers have the rest of your life to shine.” Maybe in London everyone shines at the same time. Or maybe it’s just like here, where there doesn’t seem to be room enough for everyone to be happy at once. I’ll be happy. As soon as Karen’s better, as soon as Mom and Dad are back together, and as soon as I stop being such a dork. That’ll be my time to shine.

  For now, though, I’m sticking to the invisibility plan. It’s the reason that I can stand here unnoticed, around the corner from where the twins are sitting in front of their open lockers. We’re all late to class. Together, but not together. Sheila is crying, “We have names you know? How hard is it to say ‘Sheila’ and ‘Rodney’? Are they so lazy that they can’t spare the extra syllables? They can only say ‘the twins, the twins, the twins.’”

  Rodney starts to answer, but Sheila is on a roll. “And have they never met someone who isn’t white before? How could Dad move us to the one school in the whole ‘celebrate diversity’ United States that had never seen a person of color that wasn’t on the telly? Our school in Virginia was much more diverse than this one!”

  I hear them both stand and close their lockers and begin to walk away. I peek around the corner and watch them, Sheila’s angry voice bouncing off the lockers. “I can’t tell if they’re terrified or repulsed by us! You realize that the one person we’ve tried to talk to has never even talked back to us? What is wrong with these people? They should be fascinated by us! We’re from London, for Christ’s sake! There’s not a
city in this bloody country that comes close to London! Ask us what it’s like to live there! Ask us if we miss it! These are not hard questions! But these are stupid, stupid people.”

  I laugh out loud and have to duck back behind the corner as they turn around and look in my direction. Karen’s going to love this.

  32

  “Donnie, come in here.”

  I stick my head in Karen’s room and say, “You’re anorexic.”

  “Very funny. Shut up and come in.”

  I go in.

  “How was school?”

  I shrug and flop down on her bed.

  “It was fine.”

  She hits me with her pillow.

  “Donnie, I’ve been home with Mom all day. I’m going out of my mind. You have to tell me how your day was. Tell me a story.”

  “I told you, it was fine.”

  “Don’t make me hurt you.”

  Before, when she was well, I would have made her try. Now, even though I whisper to myself that she’s getting better, I am afraid I’ll hurt her.

  “It was good. The twins waited till I was off the bus and then they yelled at me out the window.”

  I’ve told Karen about the twins. I told her a lot of things.

  “No shit! Really? What was it today?”

  “They said, ‘Cheerio pip pip!”

  Karen laughs. “They sound awesome! You should be friends with them.”

  I shrug. “I’ve never even talked to them.”

  “Whatever. You have that whole ‘good-bye’ game thing. That’s good for at least one conversation.”

  I shrug.

  “Donnie, only assholes disappear.”

  33

  Karen’s teddy bear lands on my head.

  “Donnie, it’s seven thirty. Get up. I don’t want Mom to come in and yell.”

  I open my eyes and sit up, curving my back to stretch out the soreness from sleeping on her floor again. I give a big, gasping yawn, and Karen tries to stick her toes in my mouth from where she lies in her bed. I swat her foot away and stand up, tossing the bear on the bed.