by Diana Clarke
The man across the courtyard, the way his eyebrows, thick and dark, frame his eyes like awnings, he and I could eat celery sticks and drink lemon water on date night, curl up on the couch, all bones and sinew, tough body wound around tough body, like an old rope tied into a knot. I imagine our thin wedding. Like someone had drawn the occasion using stick figures.
We would drink herbal tea for the rest of our lives, the thin man and I. We would sit on our porch in rocking chairs, him reading the newspaper, me knitting, our hair falling out in clumps, our stomachs twisted into tight, constipated fists. A love for the ages!
Everyone would point at us as we strolled down the street, hand in hand, counting expended calories beneath our shallow breaths.
Look! they’d say. Look, she finally found a man to spend her life with.
Kat is already sitting at breakfast with Sarah, my Sarah. They’re sitting in the seats Sarah and I always sit in. Our seats! They look as if they’ve been friends forever. The table is full of thin girls who want to be near Kat. Our brand-new celebrity.
My hands, fists.
What our group leader would say: The only thing you can control is your own joy. She thinks I have a problem with control. She thinks we all have problems with control. They think that’s why we do it, starve, so that we can be in control of something in this world. They might be right. Or at least, that might be how it starts, but us thin girls, we lost control long ago. She’s at the wheel now, anorexia is, and us? We’re held hostage in the back of our brains, arms and legs bound, tape over our mouths, we’ve stopped our thrashing. It’s dark back here, and quiet, and no one can hear us over the boom of her presence.
The group leader always says, Let go. She says, It’s okay to let things happen.
Once, as kids, five years old or maybe six, Lily and I switched places, a cliché of our twinness. She brushed my hair out, Lily-like, and left hers in a matted knot. She rolled matching frilled socks up my ankles and dressed her own feet in my ratty sneakers.
At school, I watched as she shared crayons with a girl I hated, as she handed a drawing of our family, so unrealistic—they didn’t even have feet—to the teacher, my name scrawled in the bottom corner. It was like watching myself from a distance, like watching myself do all these things I didn’t want to be doing, unable to control her, me, unable to speak.
Not even our parents realized we’d switched, even when, at dinner, Lily ate every vegetable off her plate. Our mother: “Good girl, Rose! You’re learning to like vegetables!”
I left my green beans untouched. Our mother: “Eat up, Lily. Be more like your sister.”
She was always saying it. Be more like your sister.
I climbed into my own bed, thinking the swap was over, but Lily joined me.
“That was fun,” she said to the nape of my neck, her stomach pressed against my back. Sometime, late that night, in the depths of a dream, I pushed her matching body out, onto the floor.
I breathe. Smile. “Hi,” I say, pulling up a chair on the other side of the table. It’s okay.
“Hi,” Sarah and Kat say in near-perfect synchronization.
Sitting across from them, I feel strange. An audience. Watching this relationship begin from the outside. I miss the warmth of Sarah at my side, and she’s hardly even warm!
Kat is wearing a different top hat today. It’s sequined pink. She has a long pearl necklace on, and, for a glimpse of a moment, I imagine pulling on it until she clutched at the beads, cried my name.
Breakfast is peanut butter on toast—an easy one—I make sure the supervising nurses are preoccupied and peel off a section of bread, lift my T-shirt, let the condiment act as glue, and stick each piece to my stomach, mosaic my torso with toast.
I want to recover, I just hate to eat.
French philosopher Simone Weil died from anorexia at age thirty-four. For her, bodily hunger signified a void in the self in which god could reside, but I don’t want god inside me, either. The weight of omnipotence—imagine!
I look up to see whether Sarah is copying my mosaicking, the way she always does, but she isn’t. Instead, she and Kat are whispering.
“I’ll teach you how, baby,” Kat says.
“I’ve never been able to,” says Sarah. “It grosses me out.”
“I’ll teach you. It’s so easy. And it means you get to eat something.”
“What’s so easy?” I say. “What’re you teaching her?”
“Never you mind, Slim!” Kat says, lifting a slice of toast, inspecting it, inhaling, then taking a large bite.
I frown at her. Doesn’t she know that our ecosystem is fixed? Sarah is mine; she is under my wing. She is not in the market for another mentor. Kat catches my gaze and raises an eyebrow. A something wrong? eyebrow. I add another segment of toast to the artwork on my stomach.
“Oh my god,” says Sarah, and, when I look up, she’s chewing. I’ve never seen her chew before, and it’s all wrong. “Oh my god, it’s so good,” Sarah says.
I swallow nothing but my own saliva and frown at Kat, who has finished every crumb of bread and is now busy licking peanut butter off her plate.
Finished with my process, I push back my chair and stand, leave the cafeteria alone, but not before I hear Sarah ask, “So is it true that you’re, like, a celebrity?” She’s too young to understand that Kat Mitchells is irrelevant.
“Mouth,” says a nurse as I exit the dining hall.
I open wide. Lift my tongue. Show her the insides of my cheeks.
“Hands.”
I lift my fists, unfurl. My fingernails have left tiny red smiles on my palms. The nurse, satisfied with my empty-handedness, waves me through.
I walk back to my room gently, so as not to disrupt the toast, tiptoe past the supply closet. Its door is ajar.
5
Lily visits, wearing yellow. She wears so much yellow that her body shouts its existence. People often tell her she’s brave for wearing such bright hues, or that they wish they could be as confident as she, and she takes it as a compliment, but what they mean is that fat bodies shouldn’t wear bright colors. I’ve learned to absorb the verbal slap for both of us.
Today her yellow is a floor-length dress. She bought it from a store that specializes in dressing very big bodies. It’s sleeveless. Her arms wave like flags.
We were once identical, Lily and I, both with loose brown curls and too-big noses. We were identical until I stopped eating and she started. After that, I seemed to lose whatever weight she gained, an exact trade, as if, perhaps, what she was eating were me.
“My baby sister!” Lily calls, before perching on my bed, taking me into her arms. Her hug is like being swaddled and I am safe in her bright embrace. “Did I see that singer in the hallway? The girl who sung that old ‘Girls on Girls’ song? Remember that? You had that poster of her in our room. Is it her?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t know. No. Why?”
“A lookalike, then.” Lily smiles. “Anyway, how are you?”
“Balmy,” I say.
Her eyes peruse my body as she checks off a mental list: cheeks, chest, biceps, hands. These are the only parts of me showing. I am drenched in gray. A gray T-shirt, gray yoga pants, gray socks that hide my protruding anklebones. I would have worn sleeves, but we’re not allowed. Sleeves can hide smuggled food, untaken pills, attempts to raze the body from the outside in.
“Weight?”
“I weigh exactly the same as I did yesterday,” I tell her. It’s true. I’m surviving.
“Good. Hey, do you know what I feel like?” She sits, her body corrugates, and she adjusts her dress so none of the fabric is tucked into her skin’s folds. “A cake frosted in gravy!”
I laugh. This game has always been our sanctuary. “Do you know what I feel like?” I scrunch my nose, sifting through menus. “Pickle pie!”
2003 (14 years old—Lily: 99 lbs, Rose: 99 lbs)
The popular girls would sit, before classes started each morning, in a coven in the
corner of the classroom. They made lists. The ten hottest actors. The ten hottest pop stars. The ten hottest boys in our class. The ten grossest. Lily was sometimes allowed to join the circle, and they tolerated me sitting just behind Lily. If I sucked in my breath, deflated myself, I might be able to wedge my body between my twin and the next girl, able to fit into the closed shape.
Jemima Gates was the leader of the popular pack. She was rich. Her grandmother was the founder of Absolute Abs, a fad workout from the ’90s, and Jemima got a healthy cut of the royalty checks.
Jemima was the sort of girl who swished her blond hair over her shoulder like an expensive satin scarf. The sort of girl whose mascara-dressed eyelashes seemed to grow, floral, toward the sun. Who varnished her long legs in an oil that smelled of Pacific islands and then slipped like a fish, brushed up against any bare-skinned boy like an eel, just to show that she could. She looked like Scarlett fucking Johansson, and she slathered on lip gloss, thick as frosting, and called herself sweet. It shone red and smelled of fake cherry, the gloss, and she liked to kiss the soft inner wrists of her chosen few friends, stamp them with her own sticky red seal.
She was the alpha, and, those mornings before class, she was the one with the pen and paper. The rest of us could only watch as she wrote down the social law.
“Obviously Justin,” said Jemima.
“He was the hottest guy last week,” said Jemima’s favorite minion, Lauren, who was a draft of Jemima gone wrong. She was blond, too, but her hair was more yellow than gold. She wore lip gloss, too, but she always colored outside the line of her mouth, leaving her face sticky, as if she’d just mauled a mango.
“Yeah, well, he didn’t get uglier,” said Jemima, applying a new layer of Cherry Chap, pouting, kissing the air.
“This game is boring if we keep the same order every time,” said Lauren.
“Be supportive or leave, Lauren,” said Jemima. “Maybe Lily can take your spot at our table.”
Offended by the threat of social demotion, Lauren scowled at Lily, but Lily didn’t notice. She was busy staring up at Jemima, her eyes hopeful and glassy with affection for our leader.
“And anyway,” Jemima was saying, “Justin and I are a thing now, which gives him extra hot points.” We watched as she etched Justin’s name at the top of the list. She drew a heart over the i. That was the kind of girl she was.
“Who’s next?” she said when she finished writing. “Who’s second hottest? Lil?”
“Nick Lawrence?” Lily tried.
“Yes,” I said. “Totally. Nick Lawrence. He’s so cute.”
Jemima wrote the name in the second slot. “Okay then, Twin Two,” she said. “If you have so many ideas. Who’s third?”
I swallowed. Looked at Lily. Her eyes were wide on mine. I didn’t know how to tally a boy’s features like these other girls did. Their game always seemed more raffle than reason to me, but I understood that, if I ever wanted to be liked, it was important to play the game.
My problem was that I made people uncomfortable. Strangers could only meet my eye for moments at a time, and even then their gazes skated over mine, too afraid to look too deep. Scared of what they might find in there. I was intense. I considered small talk to be a barrier to productive discussion. Niceties a distraction from what really mattered. Manners a Band-Aid over our very humanity. Everyone, I told Lily when she suggested I bring up the weather with strangers instead of polling for opinions on abortion rights, already knows that it’s sunny outside. Why would we talk about it?
I just mean that you could lighten up. Lily was always telling me, Lighten up a little.
Another reason I made people uncomfortable was because I was not quite Lily. So like her in so many ways, but not quite her. I was her stunt double, her stand-in, her understudy. People looked at me and saw almost Lily, her in every way but for her air, her demeanor, our main differentiating feature, something intangible. Like an artist had painted a perfect portrait of my sister, but in the wrong color scheme, too dark to capture her properly. I was her wax replica in one of those museums. I made people question themselves, and people don’t like to be questioned, especially by themselves.
“Um,” I said. “Hm, let me think.” I tapped a finger against my chin as I scanned the classroom, searching for any hint of attraction. Two girls, Fiona and Freya, sat at the front of the room. They were best friends, and they wore matching clothes most days. Jemima called them freaks, but I admired their attempt at twinship.
“George,” Lily’s voice in my ear, a life raft, barely a breath. I turned to her. She widened her eyes. I turned back to the group.
“I think George is third,” I said.
Jemima only shrugged. “Not bad,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, high on the affirmation. “George Bailey is so hot.”
Lily groaned. Jemima snorted. I swallowed.
“Wait,” said Jemima, clutching at her throat. “George Bailey? Oh my god. You think George Bailey is hot? I thought you meant George Setter! George Bailey is a total troll.”
I closed my eyes.
“Lil,” said Jemima. “Do you think George Bailey’s hot? Is this some kind of weird twin crush?”
I looked at Lily, hopeful, asking for her hand, for her to join me on my social descent, but she refused to meet my eye. “No,” she whispered. “I don’t think George Bailey is hot. I think George Setter is, though.” Treason.
“I know, right!” Jemima added George Setter’s name to the list. “George Bailey.” She tutted, shook her head. “Gross. At least one of the twins has some taste in men.”
Lily wouldn’t even let her eyes blink in my direction. Embarrassment burned my cheeks. Lily, too, was flushed, but I couldn’t tell whether the humiliation was her own or just the overflow of mine.
“Come here, Lil,” said Jemima, beckoning Lily toward her. I watched, my stomach a well. “Here,” Jemima said, taking Lily’s arm and flipping it, vein up.
Have you ever heard a kiss happen to someone else? The sound is lonelier than silence.
The deal was done. Jemima winked. Lily shone. I tugged the sleeve of my cardigan up to my elbow, held my arm out for a matching kiss, but Jemima only smirked and took her pen. “Freddie Weiss is next,” she said. My forearm throbbed with lack.
Our teacher started roll call, and Jemima rolled her eyes at the interruption. She went to take her seat, ponytail swaying.
“Here,” said Lily, taking my arm and pressing hers, lip gloss side down, onto my skin. The stamp of cherry felt a shadow of the way I thought it would, like nearly being chosen, nearly being liked.
Lily smiled when she saw that the kiss had transferred onto my skin. “There,” she said. “Now we’re the same again.”
“Lil,” shouted Jemima, from her seat at the back of the class. “Come sit with me!”
There was one seat available. The other free desk was at the very front of the room.
Lily shrugged. “Sorry,” she whispered, but I was already licking the pad of my thumb, rubbing the kiss from my flesh.
Before Lily left to take her seat at the back, I hissed in her ear, “Traitor.”
At lunch that day, I went and sat in the library.
Lily and I usually sat at our own table, close to the popular girls, just the table over, but not with them. Theirs was always full, and we were the most dispensable members of the group.
We were not popular, Lily and I, but we were popular adjacent. As in, if it weren’t for my existence, Lily would have been popular, but, as it was, I was there, clinging to her, a blemish that kept her from being invited into the club of pale, ponytailed, thin things who already kissed boys and threw secret parties on Friday nights.
I was too quiet to be popular, too shy, too something. If we were all walking down the sidewalk and the path narrowed, I would be the one to drop back, to walk behind the bunch. If we had to get into groups of five in class, I was the sixth. I didn’t mind. I preferred to live in Lily’s shade. Lily was the one wh
o knew how to smile, when to laugh. Lily was the one unafraid to speak her thoughts and joke with others.
Lily was always one notch better. I was smart, but Lily was smarter. I was pretty, but she was prettier. She was sportier. Cooler. Friendlier. When people asked how she was, she said, Living the dream. Lily learned how to form opinions from a young age. Whenever someone brought up a topic, Lily would have ideas about it. I had trouble forming opinions. I took in information like a spill, absorbing every new liquid it comes across, but I could never take a stance on anything. When people asked how I was, I said, Fine. Anyway, Lily’s ideas always sounded good to me, and I didn’t mind being the follower, her double, her shadow. I was good at agreeing. Be more like your sister.
Lily spoke in plurals so that I didn’t have to. She said, “We love the Spice Girls” and “We’re not good at math” and “We’d love to come for a sleepover.” I watched her, in awe. She was so human.
I didn’t hate Lily for being the better one, and I wasn’t jealous. I didn’t exactly love her, either, or I did, but in the way you love one of your own limbs or the air you breathe. Ours was such a self-sustaining love that it never had to be said. Or maybe it wasn’t a love as much as it was a need; there was no one of us without the other.
But that day, I sat on my own, curled into a corner of the library, reading a romance in the hopes of feeling something like desire. I tried to concentrate on the boy meeting the girl, but a small smile of vengeance hijacked my lips every time I pictured Lily sitting there, eating all alone.
“So, I met this guy,” says Lily from her seat at the end of my bed.
I can taste her joy, butter bubbling in my mouth. I have nearly gathered my response, which is to say Me too and tell her about my handkerchief waver, but Lily continues, “And, Rosie, I think I might really like him.”
Lily hasn’t dated anyone in a long time. She used to date men the same way I starved, consistently and determinedly. She is a sommelier of love. She can recite every rom-com monologue, voices and everything. She reads Mills & Boon and cries until the ink of each page swims. She examines every man she meets with the critical gaze of a job interviewer, and she doesn’t think there’s any point in singing if it’s not a love song. All she wants is to be loved. What else is there to be?