Why Visit America

by Matthew Baker

  She was trying to seem upbeat. I could tell she was rattled. I left shortly after, slipping on my sandals to walk home. Madison was firing her longbow at a target behind the pool house, refusing to speak to her parents, scowling as arrows skewered the bullseye. Her parents were collecting empty lemonade glasses from the poolside, having a hushed discussion. “Goodbye, dear,” her mother said to me, smiling tightly.

  In the end what made the pool party fateful was its failure. Her parents had truly believed the pool party would improve her standing. Its failure didn’t discourage them, however; instead, its failure only emboldened them. They had learned that ordinary gestures were inadequate—that what they wanted would require drastic measures.

  The week after the pool party, over a dinner of spinach and seared tuna, her parents announced that their family would be changing their “consumption habits.”

  Madison nearly choked on what she was chewing. She was outraged, and that was when she thought “changing” meant they would be buying fewer things; when she was told that “changing” also meant they would be giving things away, she was dumbstruck.

  Her parents aimed to scale down to a ratio of 100:1.

  Over the next few days, as her parents began boxing their belongings, Madison fluctuated between different tactics: vowing, at any cost, to resist the new policy; desperately begging her parents to spare her room; questioning their fairness; questioning their resolve; questioning their sanity; tirelessly reminiscing about the origins of prized spatulas and beloved socks; pleading for some deferral, postponement, anything; boycotting family activities; denouncing humanity; threatening to run away; barricading her door; ranting; babbling; weeping; and periodically disowning her parents. I was her only ally. She made me come over to her house every day, “just to be here,” like a witness she might someday need to testify in court.

  This must have been difficult for her parents, of course. They had to give up heirloom china, handcrafted globes, antique mirrors, astonishingly expensive colognes. But for her prosperity, her parents seemed willing to sacrifice anything. Even her love. Thus, they drifted grimly through the great room, tagging furniture with stickers, bright colorful dots meaning “this one goes,” as beyond the windows their daughter pretended to be floating dead in the swimming pool.

  Inadvertently, I was the one who brought about her surrender.

  One twilight, lighting handfuls of sparklers with her on the roof of the pool house, I mused, “Maybe Cody will fall for you, now that you’ll have less stuff.”

  Madison never reacted, just stared as her sparklers burned down toward her fist.

  But that next day found her wielding sheets of those stickers, wildly tagging objects in her bedroom. That adventurer spirit—bottled ships, model carriages—had finally been roused. She may have been afraid to let go, but seemed simultaneously elated, thrilled at the prospect of overcoming some unbearable task to win her one true love. “What?” Madison said, shrugging at me. Then tagged my forehead with a sticker, grinning.

  I will never forget, the morning the movers were coming to haul everything away, she kicked over a stickered jewelry box. Laughed, triumphantly. Said, “Look at all of this junk!”

  She offered me a silk ribbon with a gold locket shaped like an egg. I took it, and she frowned, as if disappointed. I took nothing else.

  We sat on the porch together, sharing a can of ginger ale, watching movers in tan uniforms load stickered furniture into a semi. The pinball machine left the movers panting; the billiard table left the movers cursing; the jukebox the movers nearly dropped. And then there were boxes, seemingly endless boxes, brimming with pillows, her father’s vintage rangefinder cameras, her mother’s gleaming track trophies, her own unused bowling shoes and unworn pumps. There were a dozen boxes of towels alone.

  After the movers had driven off, Madison galloped through the rooms with her longbow strapped to her back and an arrow clutched in each hand, whooping with pleasure at the freedom, the absence of obstacles, while in the parlor her father plunked chords on the grand piano, playing a ragtime song, and her mother watered a potted sunflower in the solarium, smiling with a look of satisfaction. I stood backed into a corner of the great room like a lamp the movers had forgotten to take away. I hadn’t realized until that moment, but that house had come to feel as much mine as theirs. My home away from home. I felt shaken by the loss of so very many things. Still, I could see that there was something chillingly beautiful about the house now. An elegant starkness. A breathtaking austerity. In the context of so much empty space, the remaining belongings were striking, each item seeming somehow remarkable. The mantel of the fireplace had been swept bare except for a single object, a nondescript photograph of their family in a silver frame. I recall staring. I had never noticed that photograph before.

  Their ratio wasn’t as low as 100:1. By their estimate, they had only managed to come down to 391:1. But that was healthy, indisputably healthy. The excessive size of their house wasn’t, but that only emphasized their new proportions, like visible ribs under shrunken flesh.

  I had imagined the summer before high school going very differently. We spent the rest of that summer trying to establish new patterns. What had once been our favorite pastime, shopping, was now awkward for both of us. With the ruthless finality of bankers long accustomed to following through—foreclosing buildings, repossessing vehicles—her parents had scissored her credit cards to slivers of plastic. Madison did sometimes tag along with me to the shopping mall, but she could merely spectate, now. I would offer to buy things for her, but she would only shrug. “I’d have to give up something else to keep it, and there’s really nothing left that isn’t essential,” Madison would say. We had bonded together over the fanatical pleasure we took in shopping; now, shopping bored her. At her house, too, our traditional entertainments had vanished. Her television was gone. Her karaoke machine was gone. Her disco ball was gone. The swimming pool remained, but the pool toys: gone. Without inflatables, I had nothing to float around the pool on. I was too feeble for sustained swimming—lacked the muscles for paddling and kicking, the lung capacity for deep exhales, deep inhales, held breaths—now could only sit slouched on the diving board, watching as she swam about underwater, trailed by a stream of bubbles. We didn’t know what to do with each other. At my house, she looked uneasy, like a rehabilitated alcoholic visiting a home with a wine cellar, a pantry stocked with gins and rums.

  “So you’ve cut back,” my father boomed, standing among the fireflies in our driveway one night toward the end of summer that her parents had driven over to fetch her. Her parents looked embarrassed—that their family had cut back so effortlessly, that their family had cut back so drastically, that their family had cut back at all. Humble as always. “A healthy choice,” my father nodded, his face plastered with a rigid fake smile that was probably as painful for him to wear as for me to see. Madison glanced at him from the backseat with a hopeful look. “Are y’all going to cut back too?” Madison asked. My father hesitated. “Us, well, we’ll probably always be big spenders,” my father admitted, then patted the roof of their car, and bellowed goodnight.

  By the time that high school began that autumn, all of the other kids had heard about her new ratio. Madison wore the same pair of jeans every day that first week. She volunteered to hang posters for the clothing swap happening that month. Once she had scoffed at spiritual education activities like prayer and meditation, but now she tackled the exercises in class with a genuine vigor. To the other students she suddenly seemed attractive. I saw her talking with other girls waiting in line for chicken nuggets in the cafeteria, smiling nervously, and when she turned to wave at me, the other girls all nodded at me too. I dared to hope that this would be the beginning of a new life for us. That high school would be different. That her new cachet would finally win us the acceptance of the rest of the grade. Our community. I truly believed that. I was that naive.

  One brisk autumn morning, I slipped out of geometry to fe
tch some homework. Rounding the corner, I discovered a gang of girls gathered in the hallway. Whispering conspiratorially, taping dollar bills to the door of my locker. Scarlett, Reagan, Emmylou, Jasmine. That puny waif, Dolly. Madison was standing there too, but instead of the burst of warmth the sight of her face usually gave me, I felt a sinking horror. As she pressed a thumb to a strip of tape, smoothing the edges, she glanced over toward me, then saw me, and she froze. For a moment we both were motionless. Then the other girls burst into laughter. I fled to a bathroom, locked myself in a stall, and cried.

  Earlier, I withheld certain details about my nickname, “Her Highness.” I will just tell you. The nickname did have a diminutive form, which was used rather frequently, and in especially disparaging tones of voice: “Her Heinie.”

  Well, after that Her Heinie was alone.

  * * *

  I became quite familiar with that bathroom stall over the course of that autumn. I was too insecure, too ashamed of having no friends, to eat alone in the cafeteria. Each table was big enough to fit a dozen students—which drastically emphasized your lack of company when eating alone—and worse, was circular, forcing you to face every single space that could have been a friend, should have, and wasn’t. Without Madison, I didn’t dare. Instead, I ate in the bathroom across from the gymnasium, sitting on a toilet in a locked stall. I always hid in the stall furthest from the door to the hallway. Graffiti had been scrawled across the walls of the stall in vivid streaks of nail polish. Cryptic messages. Arcane drawings. Chewing the carrots my mother had packed, the rye sandwich, the oatmeal cookie, I would contemplate the bizarre graffiti, along with my own hideous nature. I fantasized about somehow getting sent into the past, into those eras that my father had spoken of, when somebody like me would have been considered desirable. I longed so desperately to live in a society like that, my fantasies often left me blinking back tears. Simply put: I had reached a previously unimaginable low. However pitiful that my social status had been before, I had always had Madison. Anything I had suffered, she had suffered; anything she had suffered, I had suffered; we had suffered together. I wasn’t mad at her—I couldn’t blame her for wanting to be accepted—I missed her though, and also was terrified that all of my secrets were now circulating the school. Hiding there in the stall, I sometimes heard a shuffle of boat shoes and penny loafers as girls entered the bathroom. I would sit very stilly to avoid detection, afraid even to chew or swallow, as the girls jabbered together at the sinks, agonizing over their ratios. “I should scale back somehow.” “You should? Please, I just had a birthday! I made my parents swear not to get me anything, and what do they do? Get me a bunch of stuff anyway!” “How could they do that?” “It’s like they don’t even care!” Hand dryers would whoosh, and then those girls would shuffle out of the bathroom, only to be replaced moments later by another pair, these girls with husky whispers: “You’re getting a hot tub?” “But look, you don’t think people are going to think that we’re rich now, do you?” “Of course that’s what people will think.” “I swear, it’s not a splurge, it’s essential, my doctor is practically forcing my parents to get it for me for my fibromyalgia. Plus it’s not even that big. It’s barely bigger than a bathtub.” “That doesn’t matter. That doesn’t matter. Seriously, do you know anybody who cracks as many rich-girl jokes as Nick? Unless for some reason you want to break up, you’d better donate some shit, like, tonight.” “I know, I know, you’re totally right.” In retrospect, overhearing those conversations must have had an effect on me. Because, along with eavesdropping, that was the other thing I spent that autumn doing: purging.

  The purging always felt strangely exhilarating. Instinctively, I did not want my family to know about the habit, and there was what can only be described as a pleasurable terror, being engaged in a secret undertaking that felt simultaneously both so very right and so very wrong. Once a week my parents would go out on a date together, to the symphony usually, my father dressed in a seersucker suit, my mother wearing a gown and pearls. Ostensibly, I was expected to babysit my sister, but by then my sister was nearly a teenager herself and required no supervision. Typically she spent date nights watching movies about star-crossed vampires. I spent date nights purging. After verifying that my sister was occupied, I would sneak a garbage bag from the kitchen to my bedroom, frantically hurl belongings into the garbage bag—crystal balls, chintzy necklaces, fanny packs, snow globes, feathery boas, costume wigs—then creep back down the spiral staircase, through the kitchen, into the garage, and lift the lid of the waste receptacle, standing on tiptoes, dangling in headfirst, cramming the garbage bag beneath the other garbage bags already there, where nobody would notice. Some evenings, I would dare to repeat the whole procedure, throwing out belongings multiple times a single night. Afterward, I always felt lighter, becoming dizzy, almost giddy, at the thought of what had been accomplished. I bought absolutely nothing during these purging phases, determined to keep shedding belongings until my ratio was healthy. Afternoons that my family stopped at the shopping mall, I wouldn’t even touch the merchandise. If my parents became insistent, urging me to try on new cardigans, new windpants, new crewnecks, new scarves, I would feign a stomachache, heartburn, anything to excuse myself from having to participate. I could go on like this for weeks.

  Yet inevitably my resolve would falter; I could suppress my appetite for objects only so long. Eventually my cravings would overwhelm me; every purge ultimately led to a binge that resulted in me owning even more than before. Frenzied, ravenous, I begged my parents for things at random, wildly filling shopping carts, desperate to fill the empty spaces left by the latest purge. I bought a dreamcatcher, a kaleidoscope, an aquarium, a kazoo, a kitten calendar, a mermaid calendar, a gnome calendar, an astronaut pen, a set of poker chips, junk that there was never any chance of me actually using. After having denied my cravings for so long, these binges would leave me feeling intense relief. An amplified ecstasy. I bought clutches. I bought satchels. I bought capris, pinafores, leotards, turtlenecks, miniskirts, bomber jackets, crop tops, leather pants. Back home, I would stagger into my bedroom lugging heaps of shopping bags. Afterward, surveying the shredded packages and ripped wrappers and snipped price tags scattered across my bedspread, I would feel sick. I was hopeless. I was disgusting.

  Psychologically, swinging back and forth between periods of strict denial and rampant excess was just hell. I couldn’t stand to look at myself. During purges, I hated myself for the binges. During binges, I hated myself for the purges. Being rich seemed like a curse. I fantasized about being born poor, jealous of the kids at school who had low ratios simply by virtue of not having enough money to buy surplus belongings, rather than any form of goodwill. Being born rich required actual self-control. I had the resources to buy nearly any object that caught my attention. I didn’t have enough self-restraint to resist the constant temptation, and even if it might have helped me at school, it would have alienated me at home. My family wasn’t close, but my parents and my sister were the only people in the world who cared about me, and shopping was our family pastime. Nothing made my father so excited. Nothing made my mother as euphoric. Buying junk with my sister was how we bonded, the only mutual interest that we had, the only time that we genuinely connected. It was at the heart of every relationship in our family. I drifted through the mansion with an afflicted expression, a mess of conflicting urges: intense cravings to shop, a desire to be healthy, a longing to be seen as beautiful instead of revolting, a desperate yearning to be accepted at school, still wanting to fit in at home. I honestly think my family never knew about the purging and the binging. My parents rarely visited my bedroom in the turret, my sister even less, and even then would only peek through the door, asking some question. The wild fluctuations in my ratio wouldn’t have been obvious anyway, with that many belongings in my bedroom to keep track of. My parents never showed any signs of concern, probably assuming that my tormented demeanor was just typical teenage behavior. I had always been moodier
than my sister. I was probably just hormonal. My father tried to cheer me up, relieving tension with jokes and chatter. My mother expressed affection with hugs and caresses, drawing me in to cuddle. My sister cheered ecstatically at reality shows on the television and told me to smile more, saying nobody liked a sourpuss. Nobody in my family ever actually talked about emotions, or admitted having problems, or revealed any vulnerability. (Even watching television together was an exercise in denial. My parents never changed the channel when something uncomfortable came on—that would have acknowledged that there was something making us uncomfortable. Instead we always suffered through the moment in silence. A music video for a popular hip-hop song that was notorious for a line that dissed a rival rapper as rich. A sitcom about a rich doctor whose ludicrous excesses were a recurring gag on every episode. A cartoon about a group of kids who were constantly lampooning the rich industrialist in town. A commercial for a glossy lifestyle magazine with beaming celebrities on the covers, surrounded by colorful captions promising tips on how to cut back, scale down. My entire body would go stiff until the moment had passed.)

  I still remember, after a particularly brutal cycle of purging and binging that winter, spending an evening with my mother on the love seat in the great room. My father had taken my sister to a concert, some teenybop band, leaving my mother and me home alone. We were sprawled across both cushions of the love seat, snuggled together to fit. I had spent the afternoon locked in my bedroom, secretly weeping into a pillow, and now took a profound comfort in being held. My mother had a spool of that punched tape from the department store, running her fingers over the holes. Gazing out between her arms, I stared through the spotty panes of a window, looking at what she couldn’t. The twilight was a pale violet color; in that light the blades of grass, already coated with frost, were shades of blue. “Were you rich when you were a kid too?” I asked suddenly.