by Diana Clarke
I mark another notch on my tally: 369 days. The wall, eaten away, bows to my touch. All that’s left supporting this house is paper and paste.
I lie in bed with my phone. My fingers find Lily’s number easily, as if that’s all they were ever made for. She answers on the first ring, in silence. She isn’t at dinner, isn’t with Phil. She’s home, and mine.
“You didn’t visit.”
“I know.”
I wait.
“Phil thinks . . .” She pauses. “Phil thinks I should see less of you.”
“Less of me?”
“He thinks you’re bad for me.”
“I’m bad?”
“He thinks that our relationship is unhealthy.”
“Unhealthy? Where the hell did he get that from?” I think back to our meeting, Phil’s and mine. It went so well. We charmed each other, didn’t we? “What made him think that?”
“There was that animal thing,” she says.
“I know,” I say, recalling. “Swans. What’s so unhealthy about swans?”
Lily says nothing. We sit in our moonlit quiet, as if our silence might preserve the phone’s battery, until, at some point, I dissolve into sleep.
Given their size, swans have few natural predators. In England, the Crown owns all unmarked mute swans, and it is illegal to kill or injure one of the Queen’s birds. In most other countries, the swan’s main predator is man.
I wake around midnight, furious at Phil, taking Lily away from me. How dare he! Unhealthy? Me? I think of Phil, how he smiled, how he agreed (Good point, he’d said!), how he shook my hand and looked me in the eye. All that, a farce! I’d show him. Lily and I are family—no, closer, we’re twins. We’re a whisper away from being the same person. What would Phil know about sisterhood?
I yelp when a hangnail pulls too far. I’ve undressed my finger against its will. Protect my own peace. I divert my thought. Draw my blinds. But Jram’s room is dark. Out my window, the leather sky is embroidered with stars. I love the night. It lets me feel small enough to mean almost nothing. I look for the constellations I know. The Southern Cross. Cancer. Hydra.
A binary star, I once read, is a system of two stars in which one revolves around the other. This is unexciting. It is simply a sisterhood.
So Phil misread the room. That’s okay. I have plenty of time to convince him that I am Lily’s most avid sporter, her most loyal watchdog, her best friend. Next time, I’ll show him how Lily and I are not simply siblings, not like the girls at school who could forget about their older brothers, their younger sisters, for days on end, could go whole conversations without ever surfacing the name of their womb-mate. Lily and I were made for each other, I’ll show him. How he’ll apologize. How he’ll accept me with open arms!
Sleep dawdles further away, almost out of sight, an outgoing tide. I yawn, stand, open my door, and peer out into the hall. Empty. I ease the door closed behind me and head toward the supply closet. Someone is in there, rustling, shifting. I press my ear to the door, attempt to discern voices, but no one is talking.
I try the handle, and it opens. Only, in the shadow of the closet there is no lesbian lovemaking, no solo masturbator riding a dildo, no. Instead, there is Kat, no top hat to cover her dry, bald scalp. She is crouched over a bag of potato chips. Mouth full. Her neck snaps up, and her eyes are wild on mine, a feral creature caught in the night.
“Get out,” she seethes.
I swallow and apologize, back away from the room and let the door swing closed on its own. Oh, how every mighty does fall!
12
Lily doesn’t come to see me for a week. I want to call her. I want to say, Sister says, come visit me. But Phil might see that as unhealthy. See what he has done? Lily has never gone a whole week without stopping in. A whole week of watching the other thin girls start to wear top hats and bow ties and pearls. I’m not sure how they’re smuggling the costumes into the facility. Kat might be doing it, dressing her army as imitations of her. She’s a celebrity, after all, and she probably has whole spools of strings to pull. A week of watching former anorectics, including Sarah, suddenly start to consume before rushing off to regurgitate. A week of watching Kat Mitchells become the facility’s favorite thin girl. A week of watching Sarah watch Kat with her wide and adoring eyes. A week of feeling more termite than thin girl—I exist in the walls here now, watching the others change from the perimeter. The world is happening around me.
My chair in the dining hall starts to feel like home. I am a landmark of this room by now. I am the Egyptian pyramid of this cafeteria. Take my photograph! Here I am, sitting in the same chair, slumped over a full plate, stirring gluggy rice or pasta that still has its raw crunch.
You’d think that they’d try to woo us thin girls into eating with half-decent food, but instead they seem to have hired high schoolers taking their first home economics class. Not the good students, either.
I once read that George H. W. Bush banned broccoli in the White House because he didn’t like it. If I were the president, I would ban food in the White House. The place would be so clean. Everything would smell fresh as linen. We would all drink sparkling water, my presidential staff and me, and we would sit around, insides bright and bubbling, discussing real world issues. We would solve the world’s problems so quickly without breaking for every meal.
When I call Lily, on my slowly dying, battery-dwindling phone, she tells me she’s sorry.
“I miss you,” I say.
“I know.”
“I know Phil doesn’t want you to see me as often, but it’s been a week.” I breathe. See how healthy I am, Phil? See how reasonable and understanding? “You could just stop in for a minute?”
“I’ll try, baby sister.” Lily does sound sorry, her voice wilting, old vegetables. “I’m sorry. But I’m in love! I really am! Do I sound happy?”
“Happy?” I say. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t be a brat.” But I can hear the smile beneath the scold. “What about thin? Do I sound thin? I’ve lost about ten pounds. This diet’s really working, and it helps that Phil’s so supportive. He showed me this calorie-counting app. I can log my day’s calories so I don’t lose track of how much I’ve eaten. He’s so great, Rosie. He took me away for the weekend. To the coast! We swam!”
As if swimming were a miracle. As if she’s the first person to have ever swum.
What I want to say: People swim every day, Lily. I know exactly what he’s doing. Phil. I know his game. Tricking me into liking him just for long enough to give Lily my approval, then pulling the rug. Taking her away from me. It’s smart but futile. Lily can’t live without me.
I say nothing. This is how to be mature. This is how to support your sister. Support, support, support! I can only control my own joy.
2004 (15 years old—Lily: 116 lbs, Rose: 90 lbs)
Without any conversation or agreement, Lily started to eat everything I wouldn’t. She started eating breakfast enough for two, taking my packed lunch for herself, eating from my dinner plate while our parents were distracted. I wasn’t sure if she was covering for me or just hungry. Her breasts were growing quickly. They began to hang heavy from her front. Sometimes, at dinner, they perched on the table’s surface. I tried not to stare.
One night, I came down to the dinner table to find my meal already eaten, to find Lily leaning back in her chair, holding her distended stomach.
“Don’t you get full?” I said. Trying to be gentle.
“No,” said Lily. “I feel hungry. I feel hungry all the time.”
In a way, I felt closer to her than ever, it was as if we were a single body, my hunger became hers. In a way, I felt further from her than ever. Loneliness occurs when we cannot see ourselves, our selves, in the ones we love.
The tongue-eating louse is a parasite that enters its host, a fish, through the gills. The female louse severs the blood vessels in the fish’s tongue, causing the muscle to atrophy and fall off, and then attaches itself to the remaining
nub, taking the tongue’s former place and acting as a prosthetic. The fish can still eat with its parasitic tongue. The louse feeds mostly on the fish’s mucus and blood left in the mouth area. Scientists have found that most fish infected with the louse are underweight.
Our parents didn’t notice Lily’s new hunger or my sudden lack thereof. They were too busy fighting. They had always argued. About money, about us, about themselves. Our father stayed late at the office, and even though we didn’t know what that meant, our mother did.
“Am I not good enough for you?” she’d cry when he finally came home, too late, tie already loosened, only to be accosted in the foyer, slapped with whichever junk mail was piled nearest the door. “Am I not pretty enough for you? Am I too ugly? Too old? Too fat? Used up?”
He’d shake his head. “Not now, please, Mon. I’m exhausted. I need to sit.”
“Really? What’re you so tired from? Who is it this time? Tell me it wasn’t the fucking mailman again, Bill. Don’t be such a goddamn cliché.”
Lily and I, pajama-clad, hiding behind the stairs, peering through the bars.
“I just want to eat dinner and go to bed. We can talk in the morning.”
“No, we can talk right bloody now.” Mum shoved her stockinged feet into heels and beckoned for us. “Girls, we’re getting waffles,” she said. “Get in the car.”
It was always waffles. They took us to the diner down the road and tucked us into a red leather booth and used the menus, drink specials, dessert list, to make a flimsy wall between us. An attempt at healthy parenting. Then they’d hiss, venomous, about the men’s numbers in my father’s phone as Lily and I filled the grids of our waffles with syrup, poured the sweetness thick, until there were no more holes to be seen, until our plates were pooled with a layer of sucrose, enough to make us sick.
After I started dieting, though, Lily slid both plates over to herself. I ordered an orange juice and let myself drink half the glass. I tore open four sachets of zero-calorie sweetener, tipped my head back, baby bird, and poured the not-sugar down my throat.
Lily watched me consume before starting on the waffles. She waited until I wiped my mouth on the cheap napkin, then she sighed, then she ate. She fed herself because I wouldn’t. We were an hourglass. Emptying the contents of one side only filled the other. We were only identical until we weren’t.
I don’t go back to the supply closet and I avoid Kat at all costs. For now she surely thinks that I am the supply closet lesbian. Tiptoeing around at night, sneaking into the cupboard when others are in bed. I want to tell her, You’re wrong. I want to tell her, I was just investigating. But each time I think of confronting her, I picture her sneer, so familiar, it belonged to someone else before it was hers. It belonged to Jemima Gates.
Another thing Freud said is that humans have two basic drives. The first is aggression, or the fear of death. The second is procreation, or the desire to reproduce. If I do not fear death and cannot reproduce, does this make me less than human? This is something I would like to ask Freud.
Lily got her period. Woke one morning, climbed out of bed, and screamed at the sight of her murderous sheets.
“What?” I ran to her.
“Blood!”
“Your period,” I said. Most girls already had them.
She tugged her pajama shorts down and, sure enough, her underwear was soaked red.
“Did you get yours?” she said to my crotch.
I pulled my duvet back to find pristine sheets. Pulled down my underwear to find only dry cotton. “No.”
“Yes, well, you’re becoming a woman” is what our mother said, at breakfast, when Lily declared the news. “Watch what you eat. Puberty is when you’ll start gaining weight.”
Lily wept. “I don’t want to become anything.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Mum, sipping her coffee, black.
I put my arm around Lily, took the weight of her head on my shoulder. “It’s okay,” I hushed. “It’s okay.”
It was easy for me to say. I was stuck in a child’s body, ungrowing, unchanging. I wasn’t becoming anything at all.
Whenever I felt like I was going to break, I looked up at my Kat Mitchells poster, my own form of prayer. She smiled down at me, skinny.
She was biting her lip, hand on prepubescent hip. The poster excited me in a way I didn’t understand. I found myself reaching beneath the covers, beneath my underwear. I watched Kat all the while, her wide eyes, stick legs. I had my first orgasm looking up at her airbrushed body. The collapse of it, a fleeting loss of control, frightening, exhilarating.
The line between wanting her and wanting to be her, indecipherable.
During Relaxation Hour, Kat taps me on the shoulder.
“Hi?” I say, setting my book down.
“Animal Behaviors, huh?”
“It’s interesting,” I say.
“I bet it is, baby,” says Kat, shifting the beret on her head. “Animals are wild.”
I can only picture the bald scalp beneath the felt. Kat, bingeing in the closet, feral as a marsupial on garbage day.
“Are you talking to me for a reason?” I say.
“I think we got off on the wrong foot,” says Kat. “See, I think you’re quite fabulous, Rose. I think you’re just great.”
I want to tell Kat Mitchells that she is a bad caricature of herself, but I won’t. The only thing I can control is my own joy.
“I’d like to be friends,” she says. “Think of all the fun we could have.”
“Sure,” I say. “I’ll be your friend once you stop teaching Sarah to purge.”
“She asked me, darling,” says Kat. “She wanted it.”
I pick up my book.
“Listen,” she says. “It’s healthier than starving. Don’t you see how she’s gained?”
I do not say, Shut up.
“Why do you hate me, baby? Let me ask you that, at least,” says Kat. “Why do you despise me?”
Jemima Gates. The Apple-a-Day Diet. The poster above my bed.
“I don’t,” I say. “Just stay away from Sarah.”
“She follows me,” says Kat, hand to chest. “I never asked her to, believe it or not.”
My eyes sting. I won’t cry. “Everyone else loves you,” I say, my voice barely there. “Every other girl in here loves you. Why do you have to take Sarah, too?”
“Everyone loves me?” Kat shakes her head. “No one loves me, darling. Your sister visits you almost every day. Have you ever seen my visitors’ log? Have you ever seen a visitor in my room?”
I haven’t.
“You think it’s love, what I have?”
“Celebrity is a type of love,” I tell her.
“It’s not the type I want.”
It’s not the type she wants.
Birds, like gulls, that travel long distances to bring sustenance to their young, often swallow the food they’ve found on-site, then fly home. Back in the nest, the chick will peck at the red spot on their mother’s beak, a pressure point that stimulates regurgitation, to make her throw up the meal. The chick consumes the barf. This is how they learn to eat.
13
2004 (15 years old—Lily: 119 lbs, Rose: 88 lbs)
“It’s hurting you,” Lily said as I inspected my laddered ribs in our mirror. I touched each one with the caress of a proud parent. She didn’t understand. It was the first time we hadn’t thought the same thoughts, felt the same feelings. Every time we talked, it was like keeping a phone conversation going while one of us was driving through a tunnel, the other riding in an elevator. There was so much static. Tears made her voice soggy. “Please just eat something.”
I looked at Lily, hurting because of me. “I’ll stop,” I said. “Hey.” I stroked the tears from her cheeks and wiped them on my own. War paint. “I’ll stop. I won’t diet anymore.”
I didn’t want to diet; I wanted to starve. I didn’t want to be like Lily anymore. I wanted to be unrecognizable. To disappear. The truth was, if I wer
e to evaporate into nothing, I would still exist. The better, sweeter, kinder version of me. Without me getting in the way, Lily could be both of us.
“I’m worried about her,” I tell Sarah at dinner. She’s looking around for Kat and only half listening to me. I talk anyway. “I’m worried she’s taking this new relationship too seriously. She’s stopped visiting.”
“She’s happy, darling,” says Sarah, prodding at a pile of dry noodles that is masquerading as chow mein on the cafeteria menu. K-pop seeps through the hall’s speakers. The nurses call it Asian night. We’re all white, us thin girls, a cliché of our illness.
“She’ll get over that honeymoon phase, baby,” says Sarah. “She’ll be back.”
I scowl at her before quickly stocktaking the supervising nurses and pushing a heap of noodles onto my lap. I tuck the strands into my pockets, scanning for prying eyes all the while.
“She’s never acted like this before. She’s dieting! Have you heard of something called YourWeigh?”
Sarah perks up. “You mean the diet guide? I’ve heard it’s incredible. Why? Do you have a copy?” Her eyes, hungry.
“No,” I say. Sarah slumps.
“Maybe Kat does,” she says.
“Kat?”
“In the supply closet, I mean.”
I frown. I don’t understand. But I don’t feel like talking about Kat. She’s boring! I’m bored! “So, what should I do?” I say. “Lily’s always put me before her gross boyfriends, and now she hasn’t got time for me.”
“Maybe this one isn’t gross,” says Sarah. “Maybe he really is as great as she says.”
“No,” I say, a laugh. “No, no. She doesn’t date great guys. I know Lily.”
“Sure,” Sarah says. She isn’t mimicking my motions, isn’t shoving noodles into pockets. “Sure you do. Or, I’m sure you used to.” When my frown deepens, the offense tattooed, she holds up her hands in surrender. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s growing up, darling.”