by Alex McElroy
“Point to me,” he said.
“Let’s just keep watching.”
“If you see me, where am I?”
“Right there.” I rested my thumb over a pew on the top left corner of the screen.
Dyson chewed his inner cheek.
“Just show me,” I said, making my exasperation clear.
He curled forward, hit play. “You got it right.”
twelve
THE NEXT MORNING, as Dyson prepared the sheds for the men’s arrival, I strolled deeper into the woods with my phone. The light was milky and the air cool and I wanted away from the claustrophobia of the cabin. On the far side of the pond, inside a one-foot box of perfect signal—where I had spoken to Cassandra—my phone lit up with an unfamiliar chime. A California phone number had left me a voicemail overnight. The transcription preview appeared nonthreatening, even friendly. I risked listening:
Hi, this message is for Sasha Marcus. I’m Roger Handswerth; I’m calling on behalf of DAM. D-A-M. Cassandra Hanson recommended we contact you for a marketing opportunity with our company, and we would be very interested in talking to you about our team. We’d love to bring you to campus for a visit. Please give me a call back when you can.
I listened a second and third time and tried to shoo away the delight of being wanted. By the fifth listen, though, I felt drenched in Cassandra’s pity and deleted the message.
* * *
I dreamed Lucas Devry and I sat across from each other at his kitchen table. I knew the surroundings from his video: striped blue wallpaper, family pictures hanging askew, a cross, the plastic tablecloth patterned with flowers. He wore the same dingy white button-down shirt he’d worn in his suicide video. His handgun lay on the table next to a paper plate draped in slices of ham. “You made me do this, Sasha,” he said.
I clutched a mug of coffee in both hands but couldn’t lift it to my lips. Thousands of people had crammed into his dining room. They held phones over their faces so their eyes and mouths didn’t show. They snapped photos. They took videos. They snorted, chortled, gasped, stomped their feet on the floor as Lucas Devry delivered his speech.
“This is your fault,” he said.
I tried to dissuade him—though my words came out as panicky grunts. The people surrounding us tightened around the table. They dragged my chair backwards. They leaned closer to Lucas Devry as I was swept to the back of the crowd.
“You want a beautiful world?” He lifted the handgun to his mouth. The dream veered into memory. “Here is your beautiful world.” He thunked forward onto his plate. From the back of his head flowed a fountain of rose petals—red roses, white, pink, yellow, and purple. Everyone in the room—even me—grabbed at the rose petals as if they were currency. But every petal we touched transformed into a roach. We continued grabbing nonetheless, until the entire room was in motion, roaches crawling over the table and floor, climbing the walls, sneaking into our mouths and under the lids of our eyes.
* * *
I woke up alone to the sound of gagging rising out of the bathroom. Dyson, I could’ve said. Are you okay? I could’ve climbed down the ladder and laid a hand on his back, could’ve told him to stop, told him he did not need to do this. He was not, after all, sick, not sick in the conventional way, and knowing this made me sticky with guilt. It hurt to listen to him. I popped a melatonin and plugged my ears, told myself he was simply nervous about the men arriving tomorrow.
All day the next day we rehearsed the arrival. We practiced our lines and a range of facial expressions, tested out different tones to take when we spoke. After walking through our “blocking”—Dyson’s word—we built a small, lopsided trough behind the barn that the men could use as a urinal. Dyson punched a hole into one end. We worked in relative silence, trading words only to give each other directions. I could have broken our silence to ask about the gagging. Instead, I shoveled beneath the hole in the trough, creating a divot for the runoff to flow. When I finished, we rehearsed the arrival again, repeating every action, every word, every breath and gesture, until it was too dark to see.
II.
the seasons of hunger
IMAGINE A FATHER. Imagine the father is firm-fleshed and grim, gripping a steering wheel as he drives to work at two in the morning. Imagine the father has been called in on a weekend—to the pharmaceutical plant where he sweeps floors and changes lightbulbs five nights a week—to fix a steam-leaking pipe, a leak that could wait until Monday. Imagine the father has made this hour-long drive thousands of times. Imagine he is accustomed to working nights, accustomed to being called in, and really shouldn’t be any more tired than the normal person. Imagine the father is not tired in the heavy-lidded physical way but tired in ways that don’t have names. Imagine tiredness as a characteristic. Imagine tiredness as an outfit the father cannot unzip. Imagine a father so angry for having to wear this outfit every day of his life. He spends his rare hours at home taking out his anger by lifting weights in a basement. Imagine a father so unaccustomed to love that he considers mocking his son’s belly fat an expression of paternal care. Imagine a father incapable of loving his son how he is. Imagine a father who pressures his son to lift weights and eat fewer softening foods, who pulls the boy’s plate away at the table and grumbles, That’s enough of that. Imagine this father, still at the wheel, now nearly three in the morning. Imagine this father driving to work on a weekend to fix a leak that doesn’t need fixing—it’s not a dangerous leak. Imagine the highway’s free of debris—a dry night in the first week of June—and imagine this father, angry and exhausted, unintentionally loses control of the wheel around a familiar turn, imagine his truck pummels through a guardrail, imagine his head webs the windshield on impact, killing him if not instantly then quickly. Imagine this is an accident.
* * *
Dyson’s body at age seventeen: Cola-colored hair hangs to his eyes. He stands a sliver under six feet, just tall enough to peer over a fence. His fingers are slender but short. A stove burn shaped like a sickle marks the back of his left wrist. His skin is the color of apricot flesh. Freckles bloom lily-pad-like under his eyes. His cheeks are as round and pitted as the rind of a cantaloupe. Acne marches across his shoulders like ants. Pimples prick his collarbone. There’re some on his thighs, the small of his back, in the places he sweats where the sun doesn’t dare shine. In the center of his body is a stomach—cushy and round—which he doesn’t consider his own: it belongs to whoever’s itching to see it. For laughs, he lifts his shirt on command. Other kids bury pencils and keys and half-eaten muffins into the flab. The red mark of a hand fades on his skin. For a long time, Dyson doesn’t object.
* * *
A week after his father died, on a hot, slurping Sunday morning in June, Dyson waited outside my front door wearing blue mesh shorts a smidgeon too short—his boxers peeked out the bottom—and a long-sleeved T-shirt with the name of our high school printed across the front. A white headband flattened his hair to his forehead. I blew into my hands, swung my legs to warm up. I want you to show me how to do it, he said.
You know how to run, I said.
To show me how to have a body like yours.
* * *
My body wasn’t much of a body. I was flat chested and tall, I felt all angles and elbows, a body inherited from my mother. My eyes rested unevenly on my face. My ears flapped out through drags of paint-straight hair that stretched past my shoulders. I hated my forearms, for reasons I cannot explain. I hated my fingers for reasons I can explain: they were long and elegant and men loved using this as an excuse to take hold of my fingers, to ask if I played piano. I didn’t. My mouth was packed with bright, prominent teeth. I had a faun-like, porcelain beauty, the type that made older men eager and nervous. I never polished my nails. I wore makeup only for the most funereal or joyous occasions. Though my skin wasn’t perfect, compared to Dyson—and compared to the rest of our school, a parade of misfiring hormones—it glowed as if it had never been touched. I’d lucked into my mother’s skin
, olive colored and flawless, no need to apply or avoid or rinse the way other people applied and avoided and rinsed.
My mother modeled before I was born. Not in the types of magazines people imagine when they hear the word model; she posed for Sears and J. C. Penney catalogues wearing matronly smocks patterned with cartoon irons and kittens and babies. She was forced out of the job after becoming pregnant with me. Her stunted career soured her on “The Beauty Industrial Complex,” as she called it. She distrusted beauty the way people distrust politicians or exes. Whenever shampoo or makeup commercials came on TV, she would change the channel and scoff, Someday we’ll look back on these poisons the way we do cigarettes and DDT. She considered herself one of those women who didn’t care about looks; she intended to let herself age organically, and gracefully, to become whatever nature decided. However, she couldn’t abstain from using beauty products. You buy the product to become the product, she would mutter, as she led me through cosmetics aisles loading her basket with lipsticks and eyeliners and serums. She worked as a receptionist at a day spa, a job she hated but took, I suspect, to punish herself for never having made it as a model. The spa kept a shallow wicker bowl full of sample shampoos and cleansers and masks on her desk. At the start of each shift, she emptied the bowl into her purse—to protect our clients from poisons—only to later transfer the samples to a bowl on our kitchen counter. Someday I’ll grow a spine, she would tell me, as she plucked out packets of pricy bronzer, and throw this trash in the trash. She was among those rare people who were just as tragic as they believed themselves to be.
Despite her best intentions and bitterness, she couldn’t withstand the expectations imposed on her appearance. And in doing so she taught me a valuable lesson in the inevitability of concession. The world encouraged me to see myself as an object of men’s desires. And for years I conceded. I shaped myself to the demands made on my body—kept it slender and pretty and fit—because I feared what would happen to me if I didn’t. I’d heard stories about the women who didn’t. When Dyson said, Show me how to have a body like yours, what I heard was: Show me how to internalize the expectations of magazines and commercials and lip-licking men in the street. Show me how to obsess over myself. To hate myself. To see my body as something both valuable and worthless, something constantly under construction. That was, I believed, what he wanted from me, and, regrettably, that’s what I taught him.
* * *
Breakfast is simple, I said. One cup of blueberries. One cup of frozen spinach. Three seconds of skim milk. A banana. Blend until everything’s liquid, drink half, then pour the rest down the sink. It is undignified to finish a meal.
* * *
Lunch shouldn’t exceed five hundred calories. An apple is nearly a hundred. Half a granola bar is another hundred. Add to that half a sandwich—one slice of turkey, no mayo, no cheese—and one Hershey Kiss and you’re safe.
* * *
Never drink your calories: Water is fine. Soda water is fine. Coke if it’s Diet.
Doesn’t Diet Coke give people cancer? he asked.
How much are you planning to drink?
* * *
Avoid restaurants. If you must eat out, order a salad. Dressing on the side. Dip your fork in the dressing before spearing the lettuce. Dressing never goes over the top. Not even vinaigrettes.
* * *
If there are no salads, order the chicken. Grilled. Hold all sauces and cheeses. Substitute veggies for fries. Never finish the meal. To-go boxes are your friend. They shout, I’m gonna finish this later! Nobody checks.
* * *
Years ago, Dyson promised himself never to comply with his father’s cruelty. He refused to lose weight while the man was alive. His father would take it as proof he’d been right to mock and pressure his son all those years, and he didn’t deserve such vindication.
You don’t think of what we’re doing now as a way of honoring him? I asked on a run.
He wanted me to be muscular, tough But I hope to become nothing. Slim as a pin.
* * *
Perhaps I should have been more concerned.
* * *
Lift your legs even higher, and slower. It’s not supposed to not hurt. It’s supposed to sculpt.
* * *
This is for toning. This is for shaping. When it feels like you can’t do any more do five more and imagine how much better you’ll look when it’s over.
Link: 5 EXERCISES TO BEAT BELLY JIGGLE IN FIVE MINUTES!
Link: 3 SEXY DANCE MOVES YOU NEED TO BE DOING TODAY!
Link: 7 WAYS TO FIRM YOUR THIGHS BEFORE BREAKFAST!
Dyson called this summer the Summer of Hunger. It’s a new day in the Summer of Hunger, he’d say every morning as we started a run.
* * *
Gum. Crushed ice. The cap of a pen. Keep your mouth occupied. Keep it calorie-free.
* * *
At a party, vodka is your friend. Diet cranberry cocktail is your friend. Gin is your friend so long as you drink it with club soda—or if the tonic is diet.
* * *
Beer is nobody’s friend.
* * *
Part of me took a wicked pleasure in subjecting Dyson to what seemed, at the time, like fairly innocuous mantras of everyday feminine life. I invited him into a world of self-doubt and surveillance. I was surviving this life, as was half the globe’s population. He had no reason to stay here. For him, this was a vacation. Once he shed the weight, he would return home to the safe shores of masculinity, abandoning me.
What comes after the Summer of Hunger? I asked him one day.
What do you think? he said. The Autumn of Hunger.
* * *
After years of hiding his frame beneath baggy sweatshirts and parachute khakis, Dyson had no idea how to dress his thinning, unfamiliar body. I dreamed of designing clothes at that age (an unconscious drive to get back at my mother) and guided Dyson through clothing stores at the mall. He made me the executor of his fashion decisions. I advised him on distressed T-shirts and jeans, advised him against khakis, insisted on sweaters that would flatter his figure, suggested he splurge on a watch. Think of these clothes as investments in your future, I told him.
What does that mean? he asked.
It means you should buy them two sizes too small.
* * *
And then there’s celery: negative calories. The effort of chewing a stalk burns more calories than there are in a stalk. Amazing!
* * *
It was Dyson who told me. Though of course I already knew.
* * *
Dyson’s body at the end of the Summer of Hunger: Thirty-one pounds lighter, no taller, his old clothes flapping on his figure, bags under his eyes. His cheeks deflate. His jawline hardens—no, it arrives. He buzzes his hair to the scalp. He hates his calves for being too stumpy and thick. His thighs jiggle less often—though still more than he would like—and from his biceps hang maddening bat flaps. At certain angles, under rigid lighting conditions obtainable only in his downstairs bathroom, a pair of abdominal muscles can be seen bubbling out at the crown of his stomach. He spends hours in this bathroom. When he thinks no one is looking, he drags two fingers over his belly button, checking for flab. There is always too much.
* * *
Dyson showed up at school expecting waves of approving nods and congratulations: a makeover show kind of reception, streamers and classmates applauding, boys and girls pawing his shoulders, telling him how handsome he looked, how fucking hot. Very few people noticed or cared. What happened to you? those very few people asked. What did you do with your stomach?
* * *
At home, Dyson grazed the acne pitting his cheeks and the acne dotting his shoulders and chest, all of which had worsened due to the sweaty intensity of the Summer of Hunger.
* * *
The Family Dinners began that autumn. After delivering the toast, Dyson would pour himself a half glass of red wine, fill the rest with club soda, then crunch through a raw cucumber as the rest
of us ate. Afterward, once everyone left, I encouraged him to snack on the leftovers.
I don’t like eating in front of people, he said. I’ll finish it after you leave.
* * *
Nobody checks.
* * *
It was my turn to drive to the mall. When he didn’t think I was looking, Dyson slipped a hand under his collar and squeezed a pimple on his collarbone.
Picking will just make it worse, I told him, channeling my mother’s advice.
He took his hand out, embarrassed. A tiny spot of blood colored his white T-shirt. He said nothing for the rest of the drive.