by Diana Clarke
Sarah circles an arm around my waist and pulls me close. Her breath smells of sick, and I wonder how she managed to purge when every bathroom visit is supervised by a nurse. Kat must have a secret spot, but I’m not worried. She’ll be found out. They always are, the purgers. Vomiting into their own shoes or the suitcase they brought here. You can only hide the tang of sour sick for so long.
“Listen,” Sarah says. “Focus on you for now. Your sister will be okay. You need to figure out your own stuff before you think about hers.”
She rests her head in the crook of my neck. She’s right, and I thought that Lily and I had come to that very agreement, although never explicitly: that we would focus on my health until I was better and then our lives could be taken off hold. But now she’s dating. Moving on. Without me.
“She’s so lucky to have you,” says Sarah. “I wish I had someone like you.”
Her hair is soft against my cheek, and, as I rest my chin on the crown of her head, the vomit becomes something softer, still bitter and fermented, but in a way not unlike a glass of wine. Maybe a chardonnay.
“You do,” I say. “You have me.”
The window is so clean now that if I squint, I can see the blur of our outline, me and Sarah. We look similar.
“Hey,” comes a shout from the door. “You two want to get a room? I can’t offer a penthouse at the Four Seasons, but my room could do with a good old-fashioned christening.”
I turn, we turn, Kat, standing smug, leaning against the door frame, latex up to her elbows, elegant as opera gloves on her skinny arms. She smiles. Her teeth hemmed brown from her own barf.
Kat. So determined to disrupt our ecosystem, this carefully curated boredom we inhabit. Do you see how slowly time passes in here? Minutes drool. We like it. Everything is predictable, and we can watch life pass, like sitting at the window and seeing how the day turns dark.
“It’s not like that,” Sarah whispers, too quietly.
“Shut up, Kat,” I say, too loudly.
I once read about a science professor at a prestigious university who suffered from a depersonalization disorder. One morning, he woke up and he didn’t recognize himself in the mirror. He thought his reflection was an intruder and punched the glass. Then, once his hand stopped bleeding, he decided that his estranged reflection must have been a version of himself in a different dimension. He wrote a long academic paper and had it published in esteemed journals. He won a big award. It took months for anyone to realize that his groundbreaking research was based on a personality disorder rather than multidimensional physics.
Our group leader is teaching us how to pre-drink.
You lose your identity in the facility. Your I and me, your my and mine. You become a we and an us.
It is important to be part of something bigger than you is what the group leader tells us.
We sit in our room, surrounded by pictures of mountains and forests and lakes, words that say dream and hope and love, these things that are meant to inspire us, meant to make us feel something other than hungry. We focus on the drinking glasses in front of us.
The group leader takes a carafe of water and drops two slices of lemon into it. She fills our glasses halfway then sits at the head of the circle. Circles, if drawn properly, should not have a clear summit, but they all do. In every circle, there is a leader. Ours is lifting a glass to her purple-painted lips.
“Just let the liquid touch your lips, girls,” she says. “Don’t open your mouths. Just tip, don’t sip, and release.” She sets the glass back down. There is a purple smear where her lipstick has stained the glass. “Now you try!”
As I wait for someone else to go first, I look out the window, the only one our room has, and see that the thin men, too, are in a group session. They, too, have glasses filled with water and lemon wedges, and their leader, too, is lifting a glass to his lips. I scan their circle and spot my handkerchief-waving lover, staring at his glass of water as if, if he were to stare hard enough, it might shatter into nothing.
I wave discreetly while the rest of the thin girls focus on their glasses.
“Everything okay, Rose?” the group leader says.
I nod. Lift my glass. “Yes,” I say. “I am!”
“Are you, darling?” Kat says. “Are you really okay? You seem a little, I don’t know, wound up.”
I say nothing.
“You sure you don’t need a little something to help take the edge off? You don’t want to just let loose? Lose control for a bit? Because you know I can help with that, baby.” She licks her top lip and her tongue removes a layer of lipstick, pink peeking out from beneath the scarlet.
I ignore her. Turn away. Touch the rim of the glass to my lips, and, across the way, in the other window, my handkerchief waver does the same. Almost as if we’re reflections of each other. Or like we are sitting across a candlelit table, a cheers (to love!), our first sip.
Heterosexuality! Me and my lover, a real live man!
“Well done, Rose!” Our group leader claps and claps. “You did it!”
I did. My lips make no mark on the glass. It looks untouched when I set it back down.
Back before I was admitted to the facility, walking down the sidewalk, sitting in the park, I’d see homeless people, cardboard signs gripped tight in calloused fingers. They always read: hungry. I’d watch them from my bench, fresh espresso (zero calories) warming my palms, and I’d tell myself, See, Rose, that’s what real hunger looks like. I’d tell myself, See, Rose, you’re hungry by choice.
10
There’s another envelope on my floor. I open it.
R—
I know I only just wrote, but I’ve been thinking about you lately. I hope this isn’t intrusive, me writing you like this. If you want me to stop, maybe you could call me again? I won’t pick up. Or I will, but I won’t say anything unless you want me to. If you want me to, you could say the word phalange, or something. I’ll know what it means. Or if you don’t want me to say anything, you could maybe say asthmatic. I just chose those words. You can use different ones. I don’t want our relationship to be on my terms. I think it probably has been, in the past, I mean. I really am trying to change, Rose. I hope you are, too.
I miss you very much, for what it’s worth.
—M
I run my thumb over the handwriting, the grooves in the paper. Phalange, I think. Phalange, phalange, phalange. I close my eyes, put the letter away, and look out across the courtyard.
2003 (14 years old—Lily: 105 lbs, Rose: 99 lbs)
At school, Lily was good at doing almost everything, but to diet isn’t to do, it’s to refrain from doing. Refrain from eating. I was good at not doing. I was good at dieting. I ate a slice of apple for breakfast, half for lunch, and the rest for dinner. Lily ate the food from my plate.
Jemima and the other girls lasted two days on the diet, but I kept going, in love with, in awe of the new control I had over my body.
To be a twin is to relinquish power over the self. Lily and I had always been a single entity more than we were individuals. We were referred to as “the twins,” and we referred to ourselves as “we” and “us” and “our,” and we were always aware of what the other was doing and where and why. Lily and I played a constant game of controlling the other and ceding our control to the other. It was a game of self-protection and sister protection. A tiny, consensual war. But this diet was mine. Consumption was something I could dictate on my very own.
Each morning, I saw a difference: flatter stomach, leaner thighs. It felt like progress. If only that goalkeeper could see me now.
Jemima Gates said I looked hot, like a supermodel, and I swallowed her compliments with a hunger I barely recognized. “Look at you, babe!” she shrieked, a week after the start of my diet, when I showed her the gap between my jeans and my hips. “Guys, look at Rose! Look how skinny she’s getting!”
She made the table watch as I pulled my waistband away from my body, an advertisement for the diet.
/> “I don’t know how you’re still doing it.” She spooned yogurt into her mouth, licked the corners of her lips. She was trying a different diet by now. Plain Greek yogurt for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I liked to watch her lick the stomach of the spoon. “I got so hangry.”
Jemima Gates knew every new word before anyone else. I wrote them down and recited them like multiplication tables, etching them to memory. I wanted to learn her language. Friggin’. Peace out. Muffin top. Catfight. Shit happens. Ride or die. Right on. Player hater. Hangry.
As the other girls marveled at commitment to the diet that had made Kat Mitchells look the way she did, pixie-like, fragile, I sliced a sliver of apple, rested the fruit on my tongue. Skinny celebrity. Of course I was hungry. I was starving! What the girls didn’t see as they eyed my new bones with envy, was me eyeing their lunches with the same.
Lily slid my lunch over to herself and took the cucumber sandwich we had packed together that morning, unwrapped the plastic, and bit into the bread with a crunch. She had already eaten her own.
“Speaking of,” Jemima Gates said. “Hey, Lil. Don’t you think you’re looking a little, I dunno, bigger these days?”
The other girls giggled. I felt Lily’s embarrassment, hot in my mouth, and kept my eyes locked on the empty table before me, refusing to acknowledge her blush. The truth was, she was looking a little bigger, her breasts swelling, her stomach folding like laundry when she sat, or was it my new smallness making her appear that way? I couldn’t tell.
Humans desire most things in excess. We are creatures of consumption and products of capitalism, but weight is something we prefer to lack.
To me, Jemima said, “You’re so pretty, babe.” She took my wrist, flipped it, and leaned in. Her kiss lingered against the blue veins, my wiring. Her lips left a heart-shaped stencil, and I fought the desire to see if my mouth fit there.
Some things about the body can be controlled: One’s fitness level. One’s fingernail length.
Some things about the body cannot be controlled: One’s height. One’s blood type.
Some things about the body we have found ways to control: One’s eye color. One’s hair shade.
Some things about the body I learned to control: My sexuality. My appetite.
When Lily visits, she isn’t alone. She is arm in arm with an unremarkable man. If he weren’t called Phil, he would be called John, Mark, Joe. He is so boring that I wonder whether Lily is playing a prank. This is the man for whom she ended her celibacy? This is the man for whom she cast aside her morals? He looks like his favorite topic of conversation is the weather. Like his main love language would be reminding his beloveds to get their oil changed. Like he would refuse to rub in the sunscreen on his nose and like he would say, Let’s blow this popsicle stand, as a funny bit before leaving a restaurant. The type of person who did these things did not cheat on his wife with his daughter’s schoolteacher.
“You must be Rose,” says the unremarkable man. He’s more quiet than men usually are. “I’ve been so wanting to meet you. I’ve been nagging Lily for a while now. This might sound strange, but I sort of felt like I couldn’t really get to know Lily without at least meeting you.” He holds out his hand to shake, and I stare at the gesture. No one has tried to shake my hand in a long time. It is difficult to take me seriously.
“Hello,” I say, accepting my new role as a sophisticate, a hand shaker. I remember to keep my fingers stiff, wrist straight, to squeeze but not squelch. “And that doesn’t sound strange at all.”
“Good grip,” Phil says with a smile of approval. How I love to be loved!
“Yours, too,” I say, because people like to be complimented.
“You know, though,” Phil says, “in a way, I feel like I already know you. Lily talks about you all the time.” He speaks softly, as if his tongue is wrapped in cotton. His smile reaches all the way to his eyes.
“Not all the time,” says Lily, taking the spot at the foot of my bed. I check to make sure my pillow is covering the letters. It is. I can only imagine what she would do. Maybe shred them into tiny scraps right before my eyes!
“So,” says Phil, choosing to stand, to lean against the wall like one of the smokers at school, too cool to stand unassisted. “Lily tells me you’ve been in here awhile now.”
I wave my arms about, my very own palace. Welcome to my humble abode!
“I like what you’ve done with the place. You’ve really made it feel like home.” He sounds so sincere that, when I look around to see what he must be seeing, I expect my room to be miraculously ornate, paved with photographs, maybe a decorative cushion or two. But, no. The walls, blank but for my tally chart and the hole I had poked in the wood.
“There’s a hole in my wall.”
“I can do something about that,” says Phil. He looks at the hole, then back at me. “Only if you want me to, that is.”
I gesture for him to go ahead, and Phil leans over my bed to inspect the puncture wound. “I’ll be right back,” he says.
When we’re alone, Lily grimaces. “So?”
“So?”
“What do you think?”
“Of?”
“Phil. Obviously.”
“Oh, Phil,” I say. “He seems nice.”
“He seems nice? That’s it?”
“I only just met him, Lil! I’m not about to espouse my love for a stranger.”
“Are you talking about me?” Phil says as he knocks his knuckles on my open door. “Or am I safe to come back in?”
“We are,” I say. “But you are.”
He proudly displays a roll of strapping tape, meant to keep the IV stuck in a thin arm. I move aside and he gets to work, peeling strips from the roll and biting them free, taping them over the gap in the wall. He covers the hole twice before stepping back to admire his work. “What do you think?”
“Better, I guess,” I say.
“It’s perfect,” says Lily.
“Is that what you’re reading?” Phil plucks the science anthology atop the pile of books that towers on my nightstand and opens the cover. “A science buff?”
“I like almost everything,” I say, which is true. I don’t make many distinctions.
“That’s a relief.” He lowers the book to smile. “I was afraid you wouldn’t like me.”
“Me too.”
He laughs. “You’re a hard case.”
“That’s what they tell me.”
He laughs harder. Lily’s gaze is switching between Phil and me. Phil and me. She’s spectating our tiny tennis match.
“You know,” he says after skimming a page, “I heard the other day that Johannes Kepler’s mother was accused of witchcraft when he published his theory on orbits. He published it as fiction because he knew it’d be seen as heretic, but it didn’t help.”
I nod.
“It happened all the time, apparently,” he says. Flipping the book in his hands. “Mothers stoned at the stake for the discoveries their sons made.”
I look at Lily. She’s watching Phil with what could only be called hunger.
“We owe them everything, don’t we? Those mothers. Sacrificing themselves for science.”
“Maybe they didn’t do it voluntarily,” I say, taking the book back and setting it into its place.
“That’s a good point, Rose,” says Phil, nodding, solemn. He settles into the chair in the corner of my room. Crosses his legs at the ankle. “I’m sure many of them didn’t. Women are always taking the fall for men.”
I smile. “I’m reading about animal behaviors right now.”
“Fascinating,” says Phil. “How are you enjoying it?”
“It’s funny,” I say. “I can tell you a human anecdote for almost every passage about an obscure animal behavior.”
“We’re all just animal,” says Phil. “At heart, I think.”
“I think so, too,” I say. “Sometimes I think about what kind of animal I am.”
“And what kind of animal do you think y
ou are?”
“I’m not sure.” I look at Lily. “But whichever animal I am, Lily must be that, too.”
“I think we’re different animals,” says Lily. “Maybe similar animals, but not the same.”
“Of course we’re the same,” I say with a laugh. “Don’t be stupid, Lil. Look at us.” And Phil is looking at us. He’s frowning, his jaw set, calculating. He reaches for Lily’s hand and the two lace fingers. I braid my left hand and my right.
“Well, I think . . .” Phil takes a pair of glasses out of his breast pocket and puts them on. They make him look like a professor and maybe I can see what Lily sees in him, after all. “I think you two are like a pair of swans. One black, one white. All beauty and grace, but with that twin synchrony.”
I smile. Lily smiles, too.
“I think you’re a bear,” says Lily. “Strong but loving.” She stands from the foot of my bed and lowers herself onto his lap. Her body is bigger than his, but he wraps his arms around her and takes the weight of her on his knee. Her skin is bright, her eyes dancing, and her joy tastes of butter, a slick coat of fat on my palate.
Jemima Gates was a fad diet guinea pig. She read about them in her mother’s magazines and committed immediately. The Atkins Diet, the Baby Food Diet, the Lemon Detox Diet, the Cabbage Soup Diet. Once she tried an all-fat diet. At lunch, she’d gnaw through a stick of butter. Something about fighting fat with fat. We watched her swallow it with a smile.
She was already thin, Jemima Gates, but it was never enough. If she wasn’t on some extreme diet, she was lost. She needed each meal dictated to her by some greater, more feminine power. This will make you better, the rules of every regime promised. This will make you happy.
“Anyway,” says Phil, kissing Lily’s bare shoulder with such affection I could pout, but I won’t! We can only control our own joy. “We should get going. I have a little surprise planned for your sister.”