Thin Girls

by Diana Clarke

  Lily’s smile widens. I have never seen her happiness so tangible. “A surprise?”

  Phil winks at me, a conspiracy. I feel like part of his secret even though I know nothing of the surprise. “I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again soon, Rose,” he says. “It was so nice to meet you.”

  “Bye, baby sister,” says Lily, standing to hug me. As she does, she hisses, “So?” in my ear. I like to be consulted on matters of importance.

  “Approved,” I whisper back.

  When Phil shakes my hand, he lifts my knuckles to his lips and kisses them as light as a miracle.

  In America, there’s a divorce every thirteen seconds. That’s 554 divorces over the running time of an average romantic comedy. How’s that for love?

  2004 (15 years old—Lily: 108 lbs, Rose: 95 lbs)

  Lily was asked on a date, (our first date!) and I could taste the trace of ripening stone fruit at the back of my throat. Her excitement tasted of plums, but she said mine was more nectarine. Most of our other tastes matched up.

  After finishing the Apple-a-Day Diet, I took it upon myself to read about weight loss on the internet. I learned about calorie tallying and tracking kilojoules. I learned about metabolism catalysts, and I learned that fasting can slow your metabolism to the point where your weight plateaus. It’s important to eat intermittently, the internet told me, to keep the body working, to keep your digestion from falling dormant. I allowed myself two bites of every meal. Two spoonfuls of cornflakes for breakfast. Two bites of a sandwich at lunch. Two mouthfuls of macaroni at dinner. I kept a pack of Tic Tacs in my pocket, popped one any time my stomach growled.

  We watched romantic comedy after romantic comedy in preparation for Lily’s big night. Filled ourselves with Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks and Heath Ledger and Meg Ryan and Hugh Grant. One of the movies starred Kat Mitchells, who tried and failed to make the segue into acting. She played a straight girl in love with the high school quarterback, who doesn’t date her until after the makeover montage. Until after she takes off her glasses, has her braces removed, straightens her hair, learns how to apply lipstick.

  Lily, her eyes lit up with the reflection of those huge romances. The type of love she was seeking: Monogamy. I wanted to take her face in my hands. I’m right here!

  After we exhausted the romance section of the video store, I held her hands, walked backward, a couple at an ice-skating rink, as Lily practiced teetering around the living room in a pair of our mother’s heels.

  The boy was Robbie Newton, and the girls at school told me he was hot. I didn’t see it. There was something embarrassing about the way his chin shied away from the world, slunk back into his neck like a scolded child. I told Lily she was the luckiest girl on the planet.

  The day of the big date, we got home from school, went straight to our parents’ en suite, and stayed there for hours. Lily perched on the toilet as I crouched before her, smearing foundation, laughing when it made her skin glow a deep orange. Lily laughed, too, sighed, whined, “Can you stop messing around and do it good?” she kept saying. But I didn’t want to rush our afternoon. We hadn’t felt like ourselves in a while.

  Eventually, I painted her face in a way she liked. A dusting of powder. A light rouge on the cheekbones. A gold smear on her eyelids. A red shout on her lips.

  “I look like Julia Roberts,” she said, when I finished swiping mascara through her lashes.

  I stepped back, held her at arm’s length. She didn’t look like any famous actress. She looked like me, like us, in ten years. Grown-up and adult, and I knew we’d be beautiful.

  Lily wanted to wear one of my skirts, one that was two sizes too big for me now, but when she zipped it closed it pinched her stomach in tight. A fold of skin slunk over the waistband.

  “Is it too small?” I said.

  “It fits.”

  She put on our mother’s pussy-bow blouse and a pair of her own sandals because she’d never managed to perfect the stilettos. Then she sat on the stairs, waiting for seven p.m., which was the time Robbie promised to pull up in his new car. Or, new-old car. It was a shitty Corolla with rusted doors and a busted bumper, but owning something with an engine made him a hotter commodity than most of the other guys at our school.

  Lily looked like a real woman, sitting, legs crossed at the knees, on our wooden staircase. I squatted beside her and tucked a strand of flat-ironed hair, still warm from its treatment, behind her ear.

  “You look beautiful, Lil,” I told her.

  She blushed and I felt my own cheeks redden. We waited. Waited.

  At eight p.m., she stood from her waiting spot, walked downstairs, opened the freezer door, and retrieved a pint of double chocolate chip. She took two spoons and led the way back to our room, sat on the foot of my bed. She opened the ice cream and took a mouthful. Then another. The other spoon, my spoon, lay untouched on the duvet. She had made her way through half the container, four hundred calories, when I decided to say something.

  “Are you okay?” I said as she excavated more ice cream. “Lil?”

  She said nothing, finished the container, licked the spoon, and then stood. She didn’t even cry as she stripped the blouse, wriggled my skirt down her hips, which were embarking on a puberty I hadn’t yet met, then wound her hair into a bun.

  I sat on my bed, beneath my Kat Mitchells poster, cross-legged and weeping as Lily wiped layer after layer from her face. Then she pulled on a T-shirt, her own, and climbed into bed beside me. We hadn’t slept together since we were much younger, and she took up more of the mattress now. The only way I could fit was to curl up tight into the arc of her body like a ball in a socket.

  “It was Jemima, wasn’t it?” she whispered into the crown of my head. “Was this whole thing a dare?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t!” I turned to face Lily, hoping that she might see my honesty somewhere on my face. She knew I was telling the truth. She could taste it.

  “I know,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, Rosie, I’m just. Nothing, I’m sorry.”

  “At least today was fun,” I said. “It felt like—”

  “Yeah, it did. And yeah, it was. Until.”

  “Yeah,” I sighed. “Until.”

  “Have you ever thought about dating anyone?” Lily said.

  “I’m not really into any of the guys at school.”

  “I said ‘anyone.’”

  “You mean, like, guys at different schools?”

  Lily said nothing, just kissed my bare shoulder and slept.

  I dream of eating. I often do. I dream of ordering a steak, the biggest one, and holding it in my palms, letting its blood seep through my fingers. I dream of biting it, chewing.

  There are girls who do that, too. Girls who buy cartfuls of groceries, potato chips (10 per chip), chocolates (30–100, depending on size), candy (at least 10 apiece), breads (79 per slice) and cheeses (113 per slice), the most frightening stuff, and they sit at home and chew and spit and chew and spit and just the flavor satisfies them. They don’t account for the calories in flavor. I account for every calorie. I count every calorie. I know the caloric value of every food, and I can spit those numbers out between my lips like watermelon seeds. I can calculate, add and subtract them, too. I can do all kinds of tricks, like tying the stem of a cherry with my tongue. I can tell you that a cherry has five calories but the skin only has one single calorie in it, so if you use your teeth to peel back the purpled epidermis to reveal the fruit’s flesh, if you chew that thin, filmy layer, swallow, by that time you’ve expended more calories than you’ve consumed. Almost exercise. You then, of course, have to throw away the rest of that grotesque, flayed fruit. It contains too much.

  In my dream, I chew the steak. I chew and chew until the meat is inedible as an eraser. I try to keep chewing, but this food doesn’t want to be eaten.

  I wake, shivering and nauseated, my fist pressed to my lips. My finger bleeding, my chin wet with blood.
This is not the first time I have been carnivorous in the night. I’ve been self-cannibalizing for years. Stop eating and the body learns to eat itself.

  Pressing my thumb to the wound, I flip my bedside light on and sit up. Across the courtyard, my lover’s room is also aglow. He’s been waiting for me all this time! Standing in the window, watching me sleep. It’s a true love, ours.

  He smiles, waves, then points at his bare chest, which looks like an X-ray, striped with ribs in a way that would alarm most, but not me. Then he starts forming shapes with his body. Angling his arms and legs. The shapes are letters, and they are difficult to make out, but I nod encouragingly, a supportive relationship.

  He twists and morphs, stretches and contorts, as if he were made of dough. He reaches his arms up, a tall letter. J or I, followed by R or K. Eventually, I have JRAM, and I applaud his efforts.

  I whisper, “Hi, Jram.”

  I spell my name for him. R-O-S-E; my limbs are thin as letters.

  We smile at each other’s titles. This is our silent love. It is so easy to be with a man! We blow good-night kisses and shut off our lights.

  I barely think about the love letters beneath my head. I barely think about them all night long.

  11

  In the facility, genders are separated most of the time, including at meals. For many thin girls, their disorder is triggered by men. For some, it’s their mother. And for most, it’s nothing at all, or, not nothing, but everything. It’s having to exist in this world, with this body that everyone can see. There is no privacy here!

  I wonder whether Jram might take me to dinner one day. If we’re ever released, he might take me to the fanciest restaurant in town. We would both sit, smiling, smuggling food under the napkins on our laps. Or perhaps we could go to dinner with Lily and Phil. A double date! Phil and I would talk about books. Lily and Jram would find a common love (of me?), and how we’d laugh. We’d laugh!

  Today, lunch is Mexican themed. The nurses like to make our meals occasions; they think they can cure us with cultural appropriation. They slap straw sombreros atop our heads as we enter the dining hall. The meal is refried beans and rice. I use my sombrero as a trash can, scooping piles of food into its well. Sarah notices my trick, winks, removes her own hat, and joins in.

  “I met Phil,” I tell her as we work. “Lily’s new boyfriend.”

  “And?”

  “He seems . . .” I pause. It is important not to jump to conclusions. I won’t fall headfirst into this relationship the way Lily did. It’s true, he made a good first impression. Took interest in me, in what I was interested in. A feminist, probably, with the comment about women taking the fall for men, and he seemed genuinely fond of Lily, the way he let her sit on his lap, held her with such affection. His visit had me reassessing my former criticism. Maybe his encouragement of Lily’s weight loss is simply a healthy form of support. Maybe her recent smoking habit is her own fault more than his. “He seems fine,” I say to Sarah, who nods.

  Kat, as usual, comes in to inhale her meal. “My plan is in action, bunnies,” she says, a stage whisper. “All systems are go. Come by the supply closet sometime. I’ll give you a good price.”

  “A good price?” I say.

  “For what?” Sarah says.

  Kat only winks, then picks up her empty plate and leaves, in search of a place to throw up. Only this time, when she leaves, she isn’t alone. A choir of thin girls follows her, starry-eyed. They sit, eat a meal for the first time in days, weeks, months, then chase Kat out of the cafeteria. A bulk barf session. Imagine the smell. I take comfort in knowing they won’t be able to keep their secret for long. There is nothing subtle about the stench of rotting vomit.

  Animals love to follow one another. Their collective is often named for the verb they enact. A group of bees is a swarm. Crocodiles, a bask. A group of elephants, a parade. Flamingos, a stand. A family of hippopotami is a bloat. Lemurs make up a conspiracy. A leap of leopards. A crash of rhinoceroses. A knot of toads. Parrots are a pandemonium. Skunks are a stench. A group of thin girls, in recovery, we are surviving.

  Sarah and I smile across the table from each other as we escape the meal in our own way. She isn’t quite a Kat convert yet, but I’m clinging on with my fingernails. I see the way she yearns to be part of that new plurality. She watches them the way Lily always watched romantic comedies. With this great hunger.

  “I’m having a love affair,” I whisper, hoping to redirect Sarah’s attention.

  It works. Sarah turns away from Kat and her cronies, her attention back on me. Eyes fat. “In here?”

  I nod.

  “Wow.” She stashes the last of her meal in her hat. “How?”

  I smile in a way that I hope is coy.

  “Wait, are you gay?” she says. “Hold on, are you the lesbian? From the supply closet?”

  “Why would you ask that?”

  “I don’t know. Because we’re only allowed to interact with other women in here. Who else could you be having an affair with?”

  “Oh.” I clear my throat. “I see. No. It’s not a woman.”

  “Who, then?”

  “Jram.”

  “Jam?”

  “No, Jram.”

  “Jeromy?”

  “Jram.”

  “I don’t know what you’re saying. I can’t tell which word is coming out of your mouth.”

  “J. R. A. M. Jram.”

  “Jram. Weird name.”

  “I like it,” I say, defensive. “I think it’s German.”

  “German?”

  “Yeah like, Jghchram,” I say, from the throat.

  “Oh yeah.” She nods. “Probably German. Is he hot?”

  “He’s handsome,” I say, smiling.

  “He’s in here?”

  “On the other side,” I say. “Obviously. The men’s side.”

  “That’s wonderful, darling.”

  I frown at her new pet name. It’s wrong out of her mouth. Like an infant saying fuck. She pulls on her fingers, one after the other, as if a miracle could happen, and maybe that light cracking of knuckles finding air inside her is a miracle for Sarah, but to me it sounds like the ticking of a clock.

  We leave the hall with hatfuls of carbohydrates. We wear them on our heads. One thin girl gets stopped at the exit, she’s holding her hat like a purse, thoughtless. The nurse in charge of checking us out of the dining hall takes the girl by the arm, leads her away to be punished. The rest of us sneak away, unnoticed.

  2004 (15 years old—Lily: 112 lbs, Rose: 94 lbs)

  Jemima Gates introduced me to laxatives. Little blue capsules that promised to empty me. We clutched them in clenched fists in the school cafeteria. We cheersed them like champagne. We washed them down with Diet Coke, giggling. We were children, and shit was still funny.

  There is nothing funny about laxatives in effect. The way they take the torso, grip the gut like a strong man’s hands, wring your body out dry. The way they scrunch your insides into a balled-up bad draft. The way they grab and squeeze, a toothpaste tube being milked for its last dregs.

  The sprint to the bathroom, the collapse, the cry. The way emptying yourself aches. The way it makes you feel bloodied and raw. The way giving birth might feel, as if you’ve pushed out more than you’re meant to. After the first few times, there’s flesh in there, with your waste.

  I ignored the bloodied stool and flushed. This was the emptiness I craved.

  On the way back to my room, my sombrero heavy with rice and beans, I knock on the supply closet door.

  “Hello?” I hiss. “Anyone in there?”

  I try the handle, but it stops, locked.

  Freud believed all humans to be born bisexual, and that the libido was distributed between the sexes, either in a manifest or latent form.

  Latency is easy. Stop eating and your appetite dwindles with your weight, only to be rediscovered, brought out of its latent slumber, by a sudden whiff of freshly baked bread. What Freud didn’t address is that la
tent is a verb. You, too, can latent! I’ve been latenting parts of me my whole life!

  2004 (15 years old—Lily: 115 lbs, Rose: 93 lbs)

  Fiona and Freya, the girls who wanted so badly to be twins they wore matching outfits, as if similar cardigans could overcome their mismatched genetic codes. Freya wore foundation two shades too light, vampired herself in an attempt to be as pale as Fiona. Fiona ironed her curly hair so flat it hung around her face, her own personal rainfall.

  The rumors were so repeated they became fact. Fiona and Freya were lesbians. People told stories of them spreading their legs and fitting themselves together, tessellating their bodies, cunt to cunt.

  “Hey,” Fiona said, taking the chair beside me in biology. It was one of the few classes Freya wasn’t in with her. “Can I sit here?”

  My jaw tensed, muscles ached. I swallowed. The stares from the class stuck to me.

  What I wanted to say: No.

  What I wanted to say: Why are you doing this to me?

  What I wanted to say: Why are you making me do this to you?

  What I said: “What makes you think you can talk to me, dyke?”

  There was silence. And then Jemima Gates, perched upon her usual throne at the back of the class, laughed. And then everyone laughed. Fame!

  Everyone except Fiona, who pinkened and closed her eyes. She left the class that day and switched to economics, never returned, never spoke to me again.

  Lily doesn’t visit after lunch, the way she usually does. She doesn’t visit before dinner. She doesn’t visit. I imagine her with Phil, at dinner, perhaps. Phil ordering something embarrassingly lavish, caviar and coq au vin, Lily ordering a side salad, undressed, and when the server set it down before her, she would gasp, she would say, Oh, I can’t possibly eat all of this, the way us girls are taught to. I imagine her skipping out on dessert in favor of her hundredth cigarette of the day.

  I can only control my own joy.