by Diana Clarke
“Growing up?”
“Yeah,” she says, lifting a forkful of noodles to her lips. The grease paints her mouth glossy. She swallows. “People grow up, fall in love, get married, move on. Things were always going to change between you two when Lily met someone.”
“What about me?” I say, but Sarah has finished her meal. Is already carrying her empty plate away, blowing ridiculous over-the-shoulder kisses. Off to find Kat, to purge it all back up.
I stand from the table. My pasta-pockets sag, weighing me down like sandbags. Drop me in the ocean and I’ll sink, quick as an anchor.
Back in my room, I send Lily a text: Starving until I see you.
I can only control my own joy.
2005 (16 years old—Lily: 130 lbs, Rose: 86 lbs)
Lily finished the year at the top of our class. She got a certificate that said her name, half mine, in an embarrassing cursive. When she stood onstage at our final assembly, people clapped. I wanted to join in with applause, I’m sure, but I was weak, my muscles eroding. By now, my diet consisted mostly of sugar-free mint gum to hide my mildewy breath.
On Christmas Day of 2005, Lily and I sat at the kitchen table, her eating soggy cereal that sounded like cellulite with every wet stir, me drinking warm water, a metabolism accelerant. I had always hated holidays, when everyone seemed to discard their regular emotional orbits in order to feel a collective feeling, be bound together by communal excitement for the upcoming celebration—they made me feel less human.
“Merry Christmas,” Lily said, lifting her bowl, tilting it to drink the milk. I had done that, too, back when I ate cereal, ate anything at all. We’d race to lick our bowls clean, happy as puppies.
“Merry Christmas,” I said to the ass of her bowl.
“Get ready for service, girls. Hurry up or the good seats will be gone,” Mum shouted from her bedroom.
Dad wasn’t coming to church. He and Mum had shouted into the night, something about his browser history, stomping, slamming, trying to scare Santa away, the ornaments on the tree trembling.
“Ah, that’s the holiday spirit,” said Lily, taking her bowl to the sink.
I didn’t say anything. For once, I was grateful that my family didn’t function like one. I thought of movie families, their tables laden with dishes, meats and potatoes, the heaviest foods, and sighed at the relief of knowing what our holiday meal would look like: takeout Chinese food in cardboard boxes that concealed how little I had eaten from them.
Our mother examined us before we left for church. Our matching white tunics, mine billowing like a bedsheet on the clothesline, Lily’s clinging to her, claustrophobic as a wet shower curtain.
Mum told Lily she was getting a little big, then pointed at me. “Look how thin your sister is!”
I smiled. For the first time, the better twin.
Panda bears commonly give birth to twins. From birth, the mother panda will begin to evaluate her offspring, compare them to one another, force them to compete for her affections, nutrients, shelter. Eventually, she will ignore the weaker twin, leaving her vulnerable to predators, refusing her any milk, in favor of the stronger cub.
On the way back to my room, I try the door to the supply cupboard. It opens, but it’s dark in there. I duck inside, close myself in. It smells so strongly of sick that it singes the back of my throat and I gag.
“Hi!”
“Kat?” I say.
“I knew you’d come.”
“I can’t see.”
“I knew you couldn’t resist.”
“I’m not gay.”
“What?”
There’s a soft click, and a buttery-yellow lights the room. Kat, top hat, pearls, smiling. She gestures to the closet’s shelves. Boxes of laxatives. A set of scales. Sugar-free gum. Cans of Diet Coke. Measuring tapes. Contraband.
“What is this?”
“Welcome to Kat’s Korner.” She gestures to a sign, written in crayon, taped to the wall behind her. “I’m Kat, and I’ll be your server today. Can I get you started with an appetizer, perhaps a laxative or two? Only fifty apiece.”
“What?”
“Or maybe this nice set of scales is more up your alley? Don’t you want to know what you really weigh?”
“Kat this is—”
“I can offer you a measuring tape for an even hundred. Ipecac will cost you a cool ninety-nine. Or a simple plastic bag, perfect for purging, just twenty bucks, for the bulimic on a budget!”
“This isn’t funny, Kat.”
“Wow,” she says. “A hard sell. I can offer you a spare key to the supply closet for some after-hours fun. If you have the key, you can binge or purge in secret, but it’ll cost you.”
“Is this where you’ve been purging?” I’m pinching my nose, and my voice is high. Just days ago, I’d sat, touched myself, listening to what I’d thought were the gasps of an orgasm.
“Okay,” Kat says, holding her palms up. “I have one final offer.”
I wait. She reaches to the back of a shelf, forages among the cleaning supplies, and pulls out a book. Pink. Hardcover.
“YourWeigh, by Lara Bax,” she says. “The hottest diet guide out there right now. All yours for just eighty-five.”
I take the book, the book that Lily is using to skinny herself for Phil.
“I knew you’d be interested in that one.” Kat smiles. “No one leaves Kat’s Korner empty-handed.”
I open to the first page. Do you hate your body? Want to lose some weight? Lara Bax’s holistic health guide makes getting thin fun and easy! Find happiness today and join me on your weight-loss journey!
“Why do they always say ‘weight-loss journey’? Like losing weight is a trip to Paris, or something?”
“Okay, fine,” says Kat. “Eighty.”
I hand her the book. “I thought the rumor was that girls were fooling around in here.”
“Sadly, no,” she says. Then smiles. “But we can change that.”
I swallow. Kat’s eyes dance.
My phone buzzes with a text from Lily: Don’t be an idiot. Eat your meals. Be there tomorrow.
“And look!” says Kat, leafing through the pages quickly. “Look at this!” She opens the book, baring its innards, holds it out for me to see. “A celebrity appearance!” The page she is pointing to is titled LOSE WEIGHT BUT FIND YOURSELF, and, beneath the terrible title, is a pair of pictures of Kat Mitchells. One from her late teens, when she, to the paparazzi’s delight, gained 20 lbs and made the mistake of wearing the new weight in public. The other looks as if it could have been taken today. Her cheeks concave, her eyes wide, her collarbones growing out of her chest like eaves. They are captioned with the words: BEFORE and AFTER. As if Kat’s new figure is all thanks to this fad diet. “It’s me!” Kat says, as if I mightn’t have been able to tell.
“No thanks,” I say to Kat, backing out of the closet. “No thank you.”
I go back to my room. I can only control my own joy.
During the nineteenth century, German psychiatrist Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing prescribed men who were experiencing homosexual feelings a few field trips to the brothel and intensive alcohol consumption. Women experiencing the same feelings were simply referred back to their husbands.
I dress up for Jram. This is what women do for the men they love: they wear dresses and high heels and lipstick. Look how feminine I can be! Sexuality is a choice, and I am making it right now! See how much estrogen is coursing through my veins?
I don’t have any dresses at the facility, but I take the sheet off my bed and wrap it around my body, tug one of its corners over my shoulder and tie it to itself. I feel like a Grecian goddess. I stand on my toes and smile. I use ketchup to paint my lips red, careful not to let any touch my tongue. I pace my room, smiling at him, for him, and he applauds and applauds from across the courtyard.
14
The next day, I manage to slip my breakfast waffle into the waistband of my leggings, cover it with my sweater. Not even a single mouthf
ul. Back in my room, when a nurse hands me my morning CalSip, I show her my finger, still bloodied from my carnivorous night, and empty the CalSip onto my mattress while she’s off getting a Band-Aid. Cover it with my comforter. Not even a single sip. What do I have to eat for, if I don’t have Lily?
My anorexia smiles her most seductive smile.
2006 (17 years old—Lily: 140 lbs, Rose: 84 lbs)
Jemima decided that the popular girls needed nose piercings. Puncture our skin to pledge our loyalty. We swarmed into the only parlor that would pierce underagers and slapped cash on the counter.
“Who’s first?” The man who would be piercing us looked like Santa if Santa were from Florida and into hentai porn.
“Me,” said Jemima. “Nose. Left nostril. A hoop.” Confidence, she had told us on the way to the mall, is key.
He gestured to a stool and Jemima sat. When he shot the gun into her nose, she barely winced, and when he held up a mirror to let her see the piercing, she smiled. It looked so natural, as if she’d been born with it.
“Rose?” she said. “You next.”
I looked at Lily. I had always copied her. At restaurants, I ordered my meals after she did. At clothing stores, I spoke to the salesperson after she did. At salons, I got my hair cut after she did. All I had to say was, The exact same, please.
“You’re not backing out, are you?” said Jemima, and it was a threat.
“Nose,” I said to Florida Santa. “Left nostril. A hoop.”
I bit my tongue when the needle punctured me through. Lily grimaced at the pain. Santa positioned the mirror to show me my new nose: a loop of silver, like a price tag. I looked like Jemima.
“You next, big girl?” Santa said to Lily.
She perched on the stool, reluctant.
“What do you want?” He used his sleeve to wipe the sweat that decorated his upper lip.
“The exact same, please?” she said, looking at me. “Right?”
When he held the mirror for Lily to see, I crouched beside her, looked at her reflection. The piercing looked new and raw and sore. The swelling on my nose had already retreated. The redness paled. For the first time, it was Lily who looked like me.
There’s another letter on the floor of my room.
R—
It wasn’t until after I sent that last letter that I realized my mistake. I said that you could choose the code words, but if you choose them, I won’t know the code, will I? You could say asparagus or something, and I wouldn’t know if that meant talk or be quiet or jump off a building, would I? I’m an idiot.
I hope recovery is going okay. If anyone can come back from this, it’s you, Rose. Once, you told me that Lily was better than you at everything, and that you didn’t see a reason for yourself to exist. But you’re not like Lily. You’re like you. And the world is so much better with a Rose in it.
Call me? But only if you want to.
—M
I want to call and I want to say asparagus. I want us to repeat asparagus back to each other until the word blurs into meaningless sound. Asparagus asparagus asparagusaspa ragusa sparag usas para gusa spar agus asp a rag us.
Calories are measured by a bomb calorimeter, a small chamber in which food is burned to heat water. The calorie count is determined based on how hot the food burns, how much it raises the water’s temperature. The calorie itself weighs nothing at all; it’s a measurement of energy. The most frightening things are the things we cannot see.
2006 (17 years old—Lily: 143 lbs, Rose: 83 lbs)
One day, after school, I was walking with Jemima and the girls in our usual paper-doll chain, ponytails swinging unabashedly behind us, people moved the hell out of our way. You’ve never felt power unless you’ve been a popular girl. Boys stared, girls gawked, even the teachers wanted to be us. People fucking cowered.
We were synchronous that day, step-step, swish-swish, our arms linked, move or be flattened. Striding down the hall, gorgeous, superior, when I caught a glimpse of Lily, lip-locked with a senior in an empty science lab, leaning up against the granite counter, kissing with fury. His hands grabbed her flesh so hard they looked like they’d leave prints; like pressing palms into wet concrete, his mark would be there long after he left her.
I rubbed my chin, the scratch of his almost-beard itchy against our skin.
My pace barely wavered. I was afraid to cause a glitch in the programmed-perfect life of the popular girls, but Jemima noticed the falter.
“What’s up, babe?” she said.
“Nothing,” I said. “Cramps.”
I never got my period, but the rest of the girls had them, or at least pretended to, so I did, too. I pretended.
“Such a bitch, right?” said Jemima, dropping our linked arms and catching hold of my hand. She lifted my arm to her lips and kissed the white flesh of my wrist. Her lip gloss left a little pink heart. It felt like a tattoo.
After the popular girls dispersed at the gate, catching one another’s air kisses, vying for Jemima’s last goodbye, which I won, I wondered the whole way home whether I had just witnessed Lily’s first kiss. The way she had her arms vined around his torso, her pelvis tilted against his groin, made me think she’d done it many times before. Times she’d never told me about. My body ached.
Boys loved Lily, I knew that. They loved her breasts, which swelled like a liquid with every step, her laugh that was true and deep. They loved the way her ass spread, a cushion, when she sat. They loved the way she wasn’t one of us, Jemima’s girls.
Boys didn’t love me, understandably. My figure looked just like theirs. I didn’t care.
When Lily got home that day, I confronted her.
“You never told me you had a boyfriend,” I said. She was still shedding her coat, and she paused, the jacket halfway off.
“You never asked.”
“We tell each other everything.”
“Do we?”
She shrugged the coat free and hung it on a hook. Her T-shirt bunched around the waistband of her jeans.
“You’re acting weird,” I said.
“Am I?”
“Yeah. Different. Not like yourself.”
“Maybe I’m changing,” she said. “Growing up.”
“Are you saying I’m immature?”
“I’m saying we don’t have to be the same, Rose.”
“Are you dating boys because you feel like you don’t have me anymore?”
“What?”
“Are you replacing me with them?”
“Rose—”
“Because I have Jemima now?”
Lily sighed. “It’s okay for us to be different, Rose. You’ve been looking for a way to fit in for such a long time and now look at you. It really seems like you’ve found yourself.”
“But I don’t want to be myself,” I said, reaching for her hand. Her fingers were always warm, but now they had a comfy layer on them. “I’ve never wanted that.”
She nodded. Her smile was not the happy kind.
Pigs root the ground for a number of reasons. For comfort, to cool off, to find food. I think they do it for another reason, too. Pigs are smart creatures, third after humans and chimpanzees, but they can’t look up. Something to do with their anatomical structure; no pig can look directly up at the sky. I think they know there must be something else to the world, pigs. Something they’re not seeing. I think they’re looking for it—what’s up there—they’re just looking in the wrong place.
15
Lily finally visits, and I feel relief. Now I can go back to two CalSips. Now I can go back to surviving.
She has one of her students in tow, which is unusual. Many inpatients have only a single regular visitor, and many have none at all. Eating disorders are not social illnesses. We’ve lied to those who loved us. We’ve thrashed, shoved, isolated ourselves from anyone who pushed us to eat; we live on a lonely island, and there’s no food source here in our secluded paradise.
My visitors’ log has only one name scrawled over
and over again, like a naughty child had written lines: Lily Winters, Lily Winters, Lily Winters.
The child clutching Lily’s hand is called Diamond, and she looks like a child. As in, if someone were to ask me to imagine a child, I would picture Diamond’s face.
Diamond has large dark eyes, such a deep brown they seem to have their own echo. She keeps pushing bangs out of them. Big-eyed people must experience more object-in-eye issues. I ask Diamond if she often gets things in her eye.
“You’re, like, really skinny,” Diamond says in response.
“Yeah?” I say. “Well, your name is Diamond.” It doesn’t do the intended damage.
“Are you on a diet?”
I don’t dignify her with a response.
Lily tells me that Diamond is Phil’s daughter, and I nod because I already guessed it. She tells me that she offered to bring Diamond home from school since she, after all, is Diamond’s teacher. I’m considering telling Lily about Jram when she takes a cigarette from her purse. “Diamond’s mother is so thin,” says Lily, as if that were explanation enough for her new habit. “Just a few more pounds.”
“Lil, you’re not really meant to smoke in here.”
She lights up and inhales, swallows the smoke, then coughs. “This is different,” she says. “It’s for my health. I’m starving. I’m controlling my own joy,” she says.
I want to tell her, So eat something, but the hypocrisy twists my tongue.
She makes it about halfway through the cigarette before giving up and extinguishing it on my windowsill.
“I need some advice,” Lily says, and I gesture for her to go on.
“I know Phil’s not going to leave his wife,” Lily says. “And I don’t necessarily want him to leave her; I mean, they have a kid. I just, you know, it’d be nice to have the conversation. It’d be nice to at least know that he was thinking about it.”