Thin Girls

by Diana Clarke

  “Good,” says the group leader, a parabolic smile. “Now,” she says. “Now, open your mouths wide, girls.”

  Everyone does. Too many teeth are rotten, given our ages, which are mostly twentysomething. Our smiles are expired corncobs. Every fourth tooth, blackened.

  I turned twenty-four a week ago. On my birthday, there was cake. I blew out the candles, laughed when they sang to me, then took a slice of chocolate gâteau. Someone had made it with such care, as if the only thing keeping me from recovering was a decadent sweet. The right recipe, the proper ratio of sugar to cocoa, flour to butter, and see how I would wolf it down! Cured!

  While the others played party games, I snuck morsels of cake into the neck of my sock. Trafficked the whole slice out of my own party, unnoticed. Happy birthday to me!

  “Great!” says the group leader. She thinks she can exclaim us into eating. “Take a big bite of that sandwich, girls!” she says, taking a big bite of hers. She thinks this is so easy! I hate her. Her face. I hate how her cheeks are always dusted red, boasting her healthy blood flow. I hate how when she talks, she chews on her words, as if her consonants are especially sticky, syllables gluing to her teeth, toffee.

  This accumulation of negativity is unproductive is what the group leader would tell me if she weren’t so insistent on pre-eating. I close my eyes and breathe. Negativity is unproductive, I say to my own self. Negativity is unproductive. I open my eyes, all negative thoughts banished.

  “Follow me,” says the group leader, and I want to! I want to follow her! Following is the easiest thing to do!

  But, sitting in that skinny circle, holding my air sandwich, I’m afraid of the space between my bracketed hands. I worry that calories have grown there, that I’ve conjured them up like some spell between my palms. Of course, I know better. Air is air is air. I look at the others for support, but they, too, are looking around, nervous.

  Kat is the only one not holding a sandwich. Instead of semicircling her hands, she’s examining her wrists, running long fingers along each scar, tracing their paths like a maze in an activity book. Under the table, she shifts her leg, rests her thigh against mine. Her skin is cold and soft. Have you ever felt the icy suede of a snake sliding over your skin? She’s reptilian, this new girl.

  “Did you hear?” Sarah, on the other side of me, hisses, breath hot, rough lips against my ear. Grateful for the distraction, I turn to her. Her eyes flash with conspiracy and she whispers, “There’s a lesbian in our midst.”

  In high school, we were taught about the USA’s Founding Fathers. About how, in 1779, Thomas Jefferson’s suggested punishment for lesbianism included cutting a hole in the perpetrator’s nose cartilage, at least a half inch in diameter.

  The next day, every popular girl’s nose piercing had been removed.

  No lesbians here, said their unstudded nostrils.

  “What do you mean?” I say to Sarah, a whisper. “What do you mean a lesbian?”

  “Did you say lesbians?” Kat leans across me, ignoring my clutched sandwich. “Are you talking about me, darling?”

  “What? No?” says Sarah. “There have been moans coming from the supply closet. Everyone’s talking about it.”

  “Well, this place just got a little more interesting,” says Kat, taking a tube of lipstick from her breast pocket and crayoning her mouth a shouting red. “Thank god, I’m already bored. Who’s the dyke, then?”

  I swallow and look around at the group. Try to see them as individuals, try to remember their names, but it is so hard to tell human skeletons apart. I give up and return to my not-meal.

  Scientists can easily tell an anorectic’s skeleton. Saw any bone in two and see how it is porous as honeycomb. Cannibalistic mandible, the jaw has eaten only itself.

  “You’re so close, pumpkin,” the group leader says to Sarah, who is about to not-eat. She is! And thank god, I feel like I’ve been here, here holding this not-sandwich, for hours! My arms ache!

  Sarah’s lips are nearly touching the space between her hands by now, and I hold my breath. Others do the same. It’s a habit among us. Breath holding. We love to feel in control.

  “That’s it,” says the group leader. “Nearly there, honey. Nearly there, sugar.” They like to call us food nouns, as if they think that hearing the words might make us want to eat them. That we might absorb the calories aurally.

  Sarah’s mouth rests, closed, on the crust of the nonbread. We stare. See how things move in slow motion in here?

  Kat snorts. She takes an imaginary sandwich from the table in front of her, a giant sub. Look at it! Eight inches long! She inspects its fillings, licks her lips, opens her mouth, wide as the night, and bites down on the air between her palms. She chews, chews, swallows, and then shows us her clean pink tongue, its silver stud rusted orange.

  Sarah, who was so close, puts her sandwich down.

  Kat’s done it. She’s not-eaten. We applaud, forgetting our held sandwiches, which must fall to the ground as we clap and clap for this new thin girl.

  “Well done, honey!” says the group leader.

  Kat stands, takes an elaborate bow. The neckline of her T-shirt hangs open, and I see all the way through, a tunnel of cotton. She’s not wearing a bra and her nipples are raisined with cold. I look away.

  “Oops, pick up your sandwiches, girls,” says the group leader.

  We do, dusting them off—five-second rule. “Now everyone try it! Everyone take a big bite. Ready?”

  I am. We are. We bite the air, chew the oxygen, swallow the nothing, and we are victorious. We raise our fists into the air, sandwiches forgotten, and we celebrate. We will recover, we know it. If we can eat not-sandwiches, then we can eat not-anything.

  “Now,” says the group leader. “It’s time for lunch, ladies. Who’s hungry?”

  “Oh,” says our favorite brave idiot, Kat, her eyes alight and pretty. “I couldn’t possibly, darling. I’m so full from all of this pre-eating.”

  I nod. We nod. We agree. We, too, are full from pre-eating.

  2

  This facility—us thin girls lovingly call it The Facility—feels like white space. White walls white floors white. I feel like a single dark letter in the center of a blank page. I am so lonely!

  In the daytime, we’re meant to socialize with one another, all crowded together in our hollow common room. It’s called a common room not because it’s a room we have in common but because we all have hollow in common: us girls and the space.

  Numerous studies have been done on the collective behaviors of animals. A tiger cub added to a litter of puppies will teach itself to bark. An orphaned lamb among piglets will learn to nose the ground, snoutless. It’s nature versus nurture. We behave like those around us. As anorectics among anorectics, we starve.

  We sit in a tangle, stringy limbs knotted together. This is our brand of support. We gather; we flock. People often come to see us thin girls. New patients. Loved ones. Not mine. They stand in the hall and peer through the glass like watching an attraction at the zoo, hands cupped over eyes, squinting into our darkness, they say, “Is she that one?” and, “Look, that other one just moved.”

  They’re parents, they’re families, and they don’t recognize us anymore. We watch the watchers, our eyes wide in loose sockets, hair erect, teeth bared, but the snarls come from our stomachs.

  The other girls look like freeze-dried humans. Like sacks of flesh once bloated with liquids and solids and gases, now punctured, deflated, their skin falls limp and flaccid, empty but for slow-eroding skeletons. I know I must look like that, too, but we’re not allowed access to mirrors in the facility, so I can’t know for sure. We’re the same, all of us thin girls. Birds of a feather forced together. Community is not always a choice.

  Birds flock when they fly for two main reasons. The first is that it’s easier for everyone except the bird flying at the front of the V formation. The leader flaps its wings and creates uplift for those behind it, the followers are buoyant in their front-run
ner’s wake. The second reason is that flocking makes it more difficult for predators to concentrate on a single victim. It’s the logic of girls moving in groups: there’s safety in numbers, even in the sky.

  For anorectics, though, flocking is futile. We stare as others starve. We cheer as others purge. We are a supportive suicide squad, and we don’t care about anything but for our own thinness.

  A man, surrounded by nurses, passes by our common room. We stop to stare from inside our enclosure, watch his plank-walk down our glass-lined hall. He walks with his head down, as if expecting there to be cracks in the carpet. We can only see his profile; he’s almost two-dimensional. He’s beautiful. Less a person than a sketch of one.

  “Newbie,” says one girl.

  “Not many men in here,” says another.

  He stops as if he heard us—surely not, still, he turns toward the glass. I stand to face him, and there we are, nose to nose, like looking in a mirror. He pushes his hair back, rubs his eyes with balled fists. I push my hair back, rub my eyes with balled fists, smile. He cocks his head, smiles. A nurse puts her arm around his shoulders, ushers him off, down the hall, away.

  “Have I just not seen a man in a while or was he, like, really hot?” says Sarah.

  “Men, shmen,” says Kat. “So what do you ladies do all the time? Measure each other’s waists with strings of pearls? Drink champagne and barf it all back up again? Suck one another’s clits and call it eating out?” She’s lying on her back on the floor of the common room, watching the blades of the ceiling fan chase one another, her hip bones reaching skyward. She’s an exaggerated version of us. Maybe that’s what celebrities are. Human hyperboles.

  “We just hang out,” says Sarah, taking her knuckles and pulling each one, pop, pop, pop. I want to take her hands and hold them in mine. Keep her safe from herself.

  “Why are you here?” I say to Kat, who frowns.

  “Same reason as you, I’d imagine, baby.” She sounds like an expensive engine. “We’re all just learning how to be human, aren’t we?”

  “This is such a shitty facility. Why aren’t you at some fancy place?”

  “Ah. So you do recognize me. Bravo.”

  I say nothing.

  Kat waves her hand. “Oh, please. Everyone knows about this place. Everyone knows that this is the recovery center to go to if you don’t want to recover. It’s infamous, darling. It’s the worst-run clinic this side of the equator. No one comes out of here healthy.”

  She’s right. It is a badly run facility, this one. Poorly funded by the government, who want to say they support mental illness institutions more than they want to support mental illness institutions. The other main problem with the facility’s function is that the nurses don’t understand us. Most of them have never needed thinness the way we do. They don’t know the lengths to which we will go. Sometimes they pick up on our tricks, sure, but they don’t understand our minds. They don’t understand how we will do anything to vanish.

  “I do want to recover,” I say.

  “Sure you do, baby.”

  I say nothing. I don’t believe me, either.

  “Plus, I mean, it was one song. It’s not like the cash could last forever, darling. Not with my lifestyle. Designer pills. Designer shoes. Designer designer. It all adds up.” Kat straightens her bow tie. Clears her throat. “I make most of my money off cheap endorsement deals now.”

  I want to grab her. I want to say, Be normal!

  “It’s good to have you here,” says Sarah. She’s smiling at Kat, and I don’t like the smile. The way it makes her eyes shine hopeful.

  “So, how often do you have to do that pretend-eating shit?” Kat asks.

  “Pre-eating,” I say. “We do group sessions once a day.”

  “Sounds fucking tedious.” Kat strokes her hip bones. Pets them like pets.

  “It’s not that bad,” I say. “You get used to it.”

  Kat sighs. “My god, this is boring. I’m bored! Let’s go check out the supply closet. Maybe a little voyeurism will lighten the mood.” She rolls onto her stomach, clambers to her knees, her bones clacking together like a wind-up toy. “Didn’t you say that’s where the excitement’s happening, Sarah, baby? The supply closet?” When she wiggles her eyebrows, they disappear beneath the brim of her hat.

  A bell sounds, and I stand, relieved. “It’s the bedtime bell,” I say, when the ringing gradients out.

  Disappointed, Kat’s body concaves.

  “Oh well.” I smile, then reach to help Sarah off the floor, pull her upward and groan from the effort. I give her a half hug, like embracing a flagpole. “Good night.” I kiss her temple. Her skin, dry. “Protect your own peace,” I say. This is the facility’s mantra. Protect your own peace. It means almost nothing, but it’s nice to say. Rolls about on the tongue, soothes the throat, like a lozenge.

  “Protect your own peace,” she replies.

  Kat reaches for me, and I take her hands, help her off the floor, too. This is what us thin girls do for one another. This is our supportive environment.

  “So,” Kat says, her hands still in mine. “Were you a fan? A Kat Mitchells groupie? One of those tragic little girls who’d fall to their knees at my feet and beg to lick my pussy on the spot?”

  I swallow, silent, as the thin girls dwindle out of the room, calling, “Protect your own peace!” and “See you at breakfast!”

  Kat lingers, and, eventually, we are the only two left in the common room. She’s standing too close. I’ve forgotten how to move. She traces her fingers up my arm. “You know,” she says, “I could see you before breakfast, if you want?”

  I reclaim my arm and am surprised to find that her fingertips haven’t stained my skin. I swallow and step away from her touch. “I don’t think so.” I smile. “I’m not, you know. Well. Anyway. Protect your own peace, Kat!”

  “You’re not fooling anyone, Slim,” she calls after me. I say nothing, I don’t even turn around.

  3

  Each morning, I mark days on the wall of my room, despite the cliché of it. A prisoner might have counted in coal or bark. An especially obvious inmate might have used their own blood. I use ketchup from the dining hall. I like the way it tattoos my plaster wall pink.

  I’m not counting down the days; I’m counting up. I’ve given up all hope of recovery by now, and a life in the facility wouldn’t be so bad. It’s like its own little world in here. Smaller. Less frightening. Our worlds are only as big as the spaces we create for ourselves.

  It’s okay. My life won’t be a long one. I have a list of things to do and then I’ll be on my way. I’ve never wanted to outstay my welcome.

  Groceries:

  Feel what it is to be in love. Head-in-lap love, kiss-on-the-forehead love, the kind of love they write books about.

  Make sure Lily is safe and happy and well.

  Make sure Sarah is on the path to recovery.

  Finish reading Animal Behaviors. I’m not one to leave things open-ended.

  There’s no rush. My life oozes like a wet wound. Everything is fine! I don’t mind living so much. See, it’s sunny today! Warm! This world is a beautiful one, I know it. Still, the possibility of death has always felt like a pending exhale.

  Before breakfast, as I add the 367th notch to my tally, I notice a light on across the courtyard. I notice it because it’s bright out. To add to the sun, suggest its inadequacy, seems greedy. I frown out the window, furious.

  We must, the group leader always tells us, be actively grateful for life.

  This light consumer is not(!) being actively grateful for life.

  The lit room is identical to mine—bed, desk, closet, and an identical human sitting on the foot of the bed. That room has been empty for as long as I’ve been here, but now it is occupied and it is occupied by him. By him! Handsome, tall, lean, his dark hair hanging long and heavy like expensive curtains. I stare and he stares. My insides shift and I feel like a chicken ruffling her feathers. Proud? Ridiculous.


  I stand from my bed; the man stands, too. I press my hand against the glass; he does the same. I smile and he smiles. I wave and he waves. This is what we call a meet-cute.

  We wave for a long time, until our wrists ache and the gesture becomes foreign, artificial, like smiling too long for a photograph. Neither of us wants to be first to break the interaction. It’s a test. Whoever stops waving first will be responsible for the end of this relationship.

  Eventually, the man retreats into his room, opens his closet, takes a square of lilac fabric and dangles it at me. I laugh, effervescent with excitement, then take a Kleenex because I don’t own a handkerchief. I hold it up for him to see.

  We stand at our windows, waving our handkerchiefs at each other like eighteenth-century women at a parade. This, I think, elbow aching from the exercise, must be the love of my life.

  “What took you so long?” I say to the window, the man, the first item on my to-do list. “I’ve been waiting for you!”

  4

  I go to the cafeteria, giddy with daydreams of new love.

  A crush must have been named for how all-consuming the feeling is. The way new passion covers the skin like a sweat, wear it and glow. The way people say, It’s just a crush, but have you ever seen an object crushed? It’s never just.

  Normal people are frightened for us thin girls, frightened of us, and fear is no foundation for a relationship. To be with another thin person is probably my most feasible chance at love, and I want to be loved. What else is there to be?