Everything showed.
Jeremiah swept his gaze over them. “You came here for help you couldn’t find yourself. See who you truly are.”
They stared at themselves and one another in the mirrors. A line of stout women in stretchy jumpsuits of a color that suited nobody. Beautiful Hania’s Indian skin appeared jaundiced. Lauretta’s golden perfection turned ashy; Alice’s glow curdled. Susannah’s face resembled skim milk. Seung’s now tallow-colored cast clashed with the purple hair. The mottled orange depressed Jennifer’s deep brown, in direct opposition to how her bright orange glasses flattered.
Daphne appeared porcine. Her colorless lashes and mottled pink skin resembled a pig’s face. Had she any object in her hand, the temptation to pulverize her image might have been impossible to resist.
How did Sam bear waking each morning and seeing her?
“When I call your name, go where I point. Seung, over there.” He pointed toward Coleen. “Jennifer, Lauretta, follow her.”
He waited a few beats for them to reach Coleen and then turned. “Susannah, Daphne, Alice, Hania, to Valentina.”
“What fresh hell . . .” Daphne muttered.
“Shot,” Coleen said, pointing at her. “You’re skating now.”
“Watch yourself,” said Valentina when they reached her. “You mess up, and the whole team suffers. Susannah, you are a lucky person. You are only with this group sometimes. You are the one who will switch back and forth.”
• • •
Valentina opened a door and ushered Daphne and the others into a chilled room.
“This is our medical office. You’ll be examined by a doctor in a few minutes and then—”
“Will we have dinner?” Susannah pointed to the clock. “It’s past seven. We’ve been traveling—”
“We eat continental style tonight. I think the doctor will agree there is little chance of anyone starving to death. But if you cannot take it, there you go.” She tipped her chin at a mammoth glass bowl filled with M&M’s sitting on a low table on the other side of the room. Bowls of celery, carrots, and slices of hard-boiled eggs competed for attention.
“Help yourself. Only one rule. Sit there and face that mirror.” She gestured at short stools with tiny backs where they’d be forced to watch themselves squashed into positions that would double their fat rolls. Susannah’s thighs and ass would eat those child-sized pieces of wood.
“Here is the story, ladies. You are here to lose weight. I am here to help you, and I will do anything to make you meet your goals. We have two teams. Susannah goes back and forth as told. We built a formula that you don’t have to consider. It has been done for you.
“You will see the doctor, and he will tell you every disease facing you if you continue down this road of obesity. And he will suggest you eat twelve hundred calories a day.”
Daphne exhaled. Twelve hundred calories. Unquestionably, she’d subsisted on less with one diet or another. The trick here would be adding in hours of exercise. Pounds would disappear. She touched the thick roll at her middle and imagined it gone. Imagined being one with her sisters. Slipping on a simple dress without tugging and adjusting. No more ponchos. No more gymnastics to cover every hated part of her body.
Valentina snapped her fingers. “Do not look so happy. My news will be different. If you want to win and you want to please me, you will never eat that much. Eight hundred calories. Maximum. But I expect less.”
They were called into the exam room alphabetically. While waiting, they picked at the eggs and vegetables. First Hania and then Susannah snuck a few lone M&M’s. Finally, Daphne’s turn for the doctor came.
She walked into a small, blindingly clean room. Glass-fronted hung cabinets showed stacks of medical supplies, paper gowns, and table liners. A deep-blue leather-topped stool offered the sole spot of color.
“Dr. William Ash. Pleased to meet you . . .”—he glanced at the paper on the counter—“. . . Daphne.”
Central casting couldn’t have provided a man less likely to induce comfort in overweight women. Even Daphne’s slinky sisters would feel squeamish undressing in front of Dr. Ash, who’d fit better on a soap opera than in a hospital, with his thick, prematurely white hair, square-shouldered stance, and even features.
“Here.” He handed Daphne a paper gown. “Everything must be taken off. Opening in the back.”
“Am I allowed privacy?” she asked.
“My write-up, my conclusions, will be based on what I see. That report is, of course, under patient confidentiality. Trust me. This is part of the plan for your recovery.”
Trust me. Words she never trusted.
He sat on the stool, pen and notebook in hand, and gave no further guidance. Daphne pulled off the orange horror. The fabric spread like a mangy tabby cat when she threw it on the floor, not wanting to cross the room in front of the man and hang it on the hook. Let him write up that. She slipped on the just-inadequate gown and faced him.
“Sit, please.”
She perched at the end of the cold table, paper rustling under her bare behind. As Ash peered into her ears and throat, sweet-winey fumes rose from him. Daphne had spent enough hours close to people’s faces to immediately recognize the smell. His clammy hands disgusted her when he took her wrist to check her pulse.
He placed the cold stethoscope on her bare back. “You know what sensible weight loss is? Getting it the heck off your body as fast as possible, before you choke. That’s what makes sense.”
He held up a fist, opened it a small bit and then closed it shut. “See? Your heart, encased in fat, trying to beat.”
It sounded like bullshit, but Daphne sat rigid and silent. Naked except for the paper drape. Concentrating on the blindingly white medical jacket covering his light blue shirt and rep tie.
“Lie down, please.”
The doctor’s hands on her breasts felt less like an exam and more as though her breasts were oranges being squeezed for juice. When he stuck the speculum in for a Pap smear—a test that made no sense, but she kept her mouth shut—he used none of the chatter doctors typically employ to break the extreme discomfort of the moment. Dr. Ash stood between her dimpled thighs as though she were a piece of pork on display.
The oddest part of the horrid minutes Daphne spent with Ash was that he never weighed her, though he acknowledged the shiny scale. “No need to step on that today. We’ll let you be surprised.”
• • •
“I hate burpees,” Alice announced two days later. “Of all the exercises, I hate burpees the most.”
Daphne was prone on the floor as she listened to Alice’s declaration. The three of them—Daphne, Alice, and Hania—lay in a row, face up, too close, resembling tired, panting sardines. None of them wanted to waste a moment of precious rest time.
“I wish I still thought of Burpees as seeds.” Hania groaned. “My mother devours the catalogs all winter. Now it will always seem like she’s reading about torture.”
“We grew up calling them squat thrusts. Either name, they’re wretched, but rope climbing is my horror.” Daphne thought for a moment, weighing the horrors of the various exercises. “My sister will probably need to operate on the scars I’ll have from sliding down.”
“Burns from the ropes might be the worst,” Alice said, “but this one is torture, plus confusing. I never get the order right. Stand. Squat. Hands on the floor. Flip to push-up position. Do a push-up. Magically bring legs forward, back to squatting position. Jump up. Repeat. Too many damn steps. And why that stupid name?”
“Some guy named Burpee invented the exercise,” Hania said.
“How do you even know that?” Daphne asked.
“I collect weird facts.”
“Weird hobby.” Alice groaned. “My back is killing me.”
“Burpees. Rope climbing. All of it makes me feel as though I’ve gone back in time to seventh-grade gym class. The worst humiliation and—” Daphne stopped.
“My mother got a note from our doctor sa
ying I couldn’t do gym.” Hania snorted. “So they put me in a modern-dance class, and I had to wear a leotard. I went from wearing an awful pair of shorts and a box of a tee shirt to having skintight material showing every lump on my body.”
“What kind of note kept you from gym but made you do dance class?” Alice asked.
“Something about sinuses and pressure from certain exercises. My uncle wrote the note.”
Alice turned to face Daphne. “What happened to you in gym?”
Daphne kept quiet. She hadn’t remembered the incident for years, and now that she had, she wanted to jam the memories back into whichever closet of traumas she’d locked them.
“Sometimes saying aloud the stuff that makes you crazy helps the pain go away, right?” Sympathy suffused soft-hearted Hania’s words.
“So like a spoonful of sugar making the medicine go down?” Daphne asked.
“That’s not an apt analogy, is it?” Alice lifted her leg a few inches. “But I could use the sugar.”
“I’ve never talked about this to anyone.” Daphne gathered her courage. If she couldn’t tell the story here, where shame had become their daily companion, then where could she? “When it happened, my parents were sending me to an all-girls private school. One where phys ed was a big deal. They chose the place because sports was the holy grail. If I’d known they made exercise the centerpiece here, believe me, I’d never have come.”
“I doubt any of us would have come if we had a clue to what goes on here,” Alice said.
Hania swiveled into crisscross position. “What happened?”
“Lots. The top two horrors? Swimming—competitive swimming, no less—was a big deal. And to make it fair”—here Daphne made air quotes—“they made us wear official school swimsuits with sizes marked by color.”
Alice gasped. “That’s cruel!”
“Yup. My mother loved the color coding. When I complained, she said, ‘Maybe this will finally make you lose weight.’ ”
“Did it?” Hania asked.
“Are you kidding? On days that we had swimming, I ate twice as much. Especially the day I moved from red to purple. Blue was small, green was average, red was large. And purple? Purple meant you were a whale, and only I got that honor. There I was, in a sea of blues and greens, a big, fat, purple Barney the Dinosaur.”
“Did the girls make fun of you?” Hania asked.
“Worse. They moved away from me as though I had a disease. I became invisible. And then, to make it truly gruesome, the softball coach started weighing us on the field.”
“On the field?” Alice shook her head. “Why? How?”
“Probably to make it worse for us. The coach lived to teach us how to toughen up. She kept a square piece of wood by the bleachers. And a scale in the equipment shed that she dragged out before the games. She’d call us up to the scale in alphabetical order.”
“Was your last name Sorkin then?”
“No. Bernays. I took Sam’s last name when I got married.” She sent Alice an embarrassed grin. “You kept your birth name, right? I was behind the times.”
“Or ahead of it,” Alice said. “Seems now everyone is taking their husband’s name. But I knew my mother would give me quite a hard time if I took Clancy’s name.”
“But she took your father’s name?” Hania asked.
“Yes. She says everybody did it then—which, despite her swearing to it, judging by her friends, wasn’t always the case in the seventies. She wanted to become one with my father. I think her feeling was that if she was gonna marry a black man and put them both in line for constant judgment and jeopardy, then she wanted to totally merge with him, name and all. Somehow, when I married Clancy, she believed the opposite. At least for me. Though I made the decision to stay Alice Thompson, not her. I couldn’t take on one more identity. I’m black. I’m white. I’m Jewish. I’m Southern Baptist. If I became a Rivera, everyone would assume I was Puerto Rican, and then I’d have one more layer to reveal.”
“Did Clancy mind?”
“No. But his father minded. Clancy’s an only child, and it became my job to preserve his family name. Argh. Old stuff. So, what happened when you got weighed, Daphne?”
Daphne stared at the metal beams running along the gym ceiling. Something lifted as Alice led them past the shibboleths of discussing race and culture. Why did they avoid the topic, as though it were something shameful? Weighing down issues with forbidden hot zones made it impossible to become the truest of friends. Like, how Daphne had never told Ivy the thing that bothered her most in the world, despite working side-by-side for years.
“With the name Bernays, I was usually first or second in line. Anyway, when they weighed me, I learned the art of dissociation. I shut down my ears. There were people already in the stands. My teammates. And on the worst day, my parents, who’d come to watch a game, were there.
“The coach would announce everyone’s weight twice. Like this: ‘A hundred sixty-eight. Bernays. One hundred and sixty-eight.’ I was fourteen. Most of the girls weighed between a hundred four and one twenty-four. I wanted to die. I swear, the coach screamed the number loud enough for everyone in Massachusetts to hear. She emblazoned 168 in skywriting. When I got home, my mother began insanely lecturing me about losing weight—mainly, I think, because she’d been so embarrassed. I went to my room, got under the covers, and wouldn’t come out of my room until they agreed to let me switch to public school. For a week, I just kept repeating, ‘I’m never going back.’ My sisters snuck food to me.”
“How horrible.” Hania appeared teary at Daphne’s story.
“I held out, and I won. I started going to public school after Christmas vacation.”
“I guess my mother told the truth,” Alice said. “ ‘What doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger.’ ”
“Maybe we’ll leave here being able to lift the world off our shoulders.” Daphne poked at her emotional self, trying to figure out if telling the story helped or made her sore, but at the moment, she simply felt numb.
CHAPTER 13
* * *
DAPHNE
By day six of what would be four weeks in the mansion, Daphne, Hania, and Alice resembled prisoners looking to break rules, hating and continually watching their guards.
Above all other humiliations stood the daily afternoon weigh-ins.
Stripped to her underwear, barefaced, and sweaty from exercise, Daphne tried to balance having dropped ten pounds against the horror of standing almost naked, with the Waisted camera whirring, while being stared at by Jeremiah, Mike the cameraman, Dr. Ash, and the trainers. And seen, though never peered at, by the other six women.
Sam would have been horrified by everything here, with the two-pound-a-day weight loss topping his list. It’s just water, she told him in her mind. Don’t worry.
More like “Don’t ask, don’t tell” would be how she shared information with him. Even with his asking, most of it she’d never tell.
Eating under Valentina’s nonstop watch wearied them—especially at breakfast, a meal that managed to be awful and too small simultaneously. Daphne found herself wasting hours staring at and thinking about Valentina.
She pushed the last bits of mealy egg yolk on her fork. “Have you noticed that Valentina paces in a square?”
“Congratulations,” Alice said. “You’re partaking in the tradition of all enslaved people: studying the masters and thus knowing them far better than the dominators know the subjugated. We win in the end.”
Valentina whipped her head around from where she drank coffee. With milk. Not black like theirs. “Win? Are you talking about winning? You lard butts want to win, you stop stuffing your mouths. You eat like animals.”
“Perhaps she thinks we’re going to slip carvings of our flesh into our bowls.” Daphne spoke low, as by now she was convinced that Valentina had the hearing range of a greater wax moth.
Years ago, when Audrey had chosen the five senses as her sixth-grade class project, she subjected th
e entire family to rambling discourses, complete with visual aids, about the extraordinary hearing power of the greater wax moth. After days of staring, Daphne saw the resemblance between the bulging, shiny eyes that overpowered Valentina and that creature.
“At this point, I’m ready to go full Alive,” Alice said.
“What’s that?” Hania cut her egg into microscopic pieces. Each used different methods for pretending their poorly prepared, tasteless meals were larger. They all wrestled one egg for breakfast, brought to the table still resting in the old Teflon pans in which they were fried, offering them poison along with utter dullness. No salt. No pepper. Not one sprig of an herb.
When asked why the lack of flavor, wondering why they weren’t learning how to prepare spicy, exciting meals on a dime of calories, Valentina threw the party line: “Crutches. All you want are crutches.”
By now, they realized the cook, who was also the housekeeper, didn’t give a damn how their food tasted.
“Alive is a story—decades old, but true—of plane crash survivors in the Andes Mountains,” Daphne explained. “The passengers who lived survived by eating the flesh of the dead.”
A week ago, Hania would have groaned in disgust. Now she looked as though she understood cannibalism.
Meals were served in the barest-of-bones former servants’ area. The other group ate in a basement kitchen. She learned this while whispering to Seung during a rare break after a run, both sprawled on their backs in the cold, leafy grass.
The rough-splintered table was either raw wood or the finish had been worn away during the last century. The jagged edges of the brown earthenware dishes appeared gnawed. Alice suspected rats. Daphne guessed Valentina—that she stayed skinny by eating shards of old pottery. Hania thought they’d filed the plates. Perhaps ugly plates discouraged eating.
TIP: Control your appetite by using red crockery. Researchers theorize that red is associated with “danger and prohibition.”
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