by Diana Clarke
“About it?”
“About leaving her for me.”
“Oh, about leaving her. Do you think you should be talking about this right now? With, you know, her here?” I tilt my head toward Diamond, who is sitting on my floor squashing termites with her fingers.
“She’s five. She doesn’t understand any of it,” says Lily. “It’s fine.”
“I’m five and a half,” says Diamond, not bothering to look up from her bug massacre.
“What was the question?” I say.
“I just wish he’d float the idea of leaving her so I could tell him not to.”
“Right.”
“That doesn’t make me crazy, right? That’s normal, isn’t it?”
“Sleeping with a married man?”
“Don’t be a bitch, Rose.” Lily watches her hands as she speaks, twisting her decorative rings around her knuckles. She’s lost weight. The rings twirl with a new looseness, spin on her fingers like an abacus. “You know what I mean.”
“Do I think it’s normal that you don’t want your lover to leave his wife so much that he actually leaves her, but you do want him to want to leave his wife enough to have the conversation with you about it?”
“You’re oversimplifying it.”
“Am I?”
A nurse arrives with my afternoon CalSip and leaves again.
“Can you not be so judgmental for just a minute?” says Lily. “Please. I’m asking for your advice here.”
“Well, I think you’re asking the wrong question.”
“What?”
“I think you should ask me whether I approve of the affair in the first place.”
“I know you don’t approve of it,” she says “Obviously. It tastes like I’m sucking on a bar of soap, idiot.” She pokes out her tongue as if I could see the lather of an impossible taste: the bubbles of disappointment. “But it’s happening whether you approve of it or not.” She shrugs. “So, tell me, should I talk to him about leaving his wife?”
I sigh. “But you don’t want him to leave his wife,” I say.
“No,” she says. “But I want him to want to.”
“What?”
“I want him to want to.”
“No,” I say, “I heard you. It’s just ridiculous. Consider the outcomes, Lil. If you bring it up, then either he agrees with you and leaves his wife or he disagrees with you, thinks you’re becoming too attached, and ends things, right?”
Lily lights a new cigarette, and I watch her inhale easily. She’s a natural by now. “Maybe I do want him to leave her.”
“That’s going to give you cancer,” I say.
“It’s not permanent, baby sister. Just a few more pounds.” She smiles. “This YourWeigh diet really works, you know. Yesterday, Phil told me I was beautiful.”
“Why are you doing this for him? Why him? Because he’s charming? So what!”
“I love him,” she says, and it’s true, she does. I can taste it, feel it. The taste, something almond-based, vanilla-laced, a sweet comfort. The feeling? It feels as if my heart is growing branches, a tree in my chest, growing each day, reaching sunward.
“And anyway, I’m not doing it for him, I’m doing it for me,” she says, but her cheeks are touched red and I can taste the lie, sour. She clears her throat. “No one has ever called me beautiful before.”
“You are beautiful.”
Lily rolls her eyes. “You know what I mean. Skinny.”
People often think us thin girls are starving to be pretty, and maybe it started that way for many of us, but we know we don’t look good. I was never one of those body dysmorphic types who saw an inflated version of herself in the mirror. No. I saw the bones. I saw an inside-out girl—skeleton worn over her skin, like a jacket.
It was hard to explain the specific why of it. Why I was doing this to myself. People always asked, Why are you doing this to yourself?
The truth is, I didn’t believe I was doing it. When my lips refused to budge, rusted gates, it was not me holding them closed. I was on the sidelines with my family, the doctors. I was helping them cheer, joining in the mantra: Eat! Eat! Eat!
The truth is, even if there was a why at the beginning, there’s a point where any form of reason is lost.
The truth is, why I was doing it didn’t matter; what mattered was that I couldn’t stop.
I can’t remember when, exactly, the paranoia started. I must have been very thin, because it was when people would comment, would let their eyes widen, let their hands float up to their open mouths. Look how much weight you’ve lost, they would say. At first, I believed them. It was later that I became suspicious. The way calling to the absence of something only reminds us of the existence of it. For example, if I were to compliment you on your hairless stomach, the immediate image in your mind is a hairy one.
Another, similar trick, is to call attention to something so accepted as indisputable fact that it is rarely named aloud for the redundancy of it. Like, if I were to point out your two arms (Look at both your arms!), you would imagine that I had noticed something abnormal about them. That’s the way I felt when someone would say, Look how thin you are! It was so obvious I became skeptical. How thin was I?
In 1892, neurologist Graeme M. Hammond recommended that anyone experiencing homosexuality should ride those urges away on a bicycle. He reasoned that the desires were rooted in nervous exhaustion and that extensive biking would help restore heterosexuality.
I rode my bike to school each day, even though walking or taking the bus was cooler. I rode and rode and rode.
Lily puts out her second cigarette. She’s smoked all the way to the yellowed butt this time. I am so tired of tasting the love she is feeling.
What I don’t say: This man doesn’t care about you like I do.
What I don’t say: Why are you hurting yourself like this?
What I don’t say: You are worthy of a true love.
What I don’t say: You have to be the healthy one.
What I say: “Lily.”
Lily crosses her arms. They flatten her chest, and I want to touch. To feel what it is to have breasts, large and soft, hanging from me. I want to feel what Lily feels. It would be so much easier if we were one.
“What?” Her voice is a challenge. “Go on, say whatever you need to say.”
I say nothing. I don’t need to. She already knows, so I only stand, watching my thinning sister reach for the hand of her married lover’s daughter. There’s a buzzing sound, a humming, and Lily takes her purse, digs around for her phone.
The screen is alight with notifications. Fifteen text messages. All from Phil.
“That’s a lot,” I say. “Is everything okay?”
She opens the messages, each one its own essay. She frowns as she reads.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Phil just likes to know where I am. He worries if I don’t reply to his messages.” She types as she talks. “I should go,” she says.
“Lil.”
But Lily, suddenly restless, stressed, zips her jacket and beckons Diamond up off the floor. She’s nervous, bitter.
“Just be careful,” I say. “Take care of yourself. Maybe try to cut back on the smoking. Protect your own peace.”
She laughs, melody-less. “You’re giving me health advice,” she says.
When she tries to hug me with her new corroding body, I stand still, feeling punched, and I’m not sure whether the feeling is concern or betrayal. She’s so much thinner. Of course she should be allowed to diet. People diet every day.
I can’t help but feel that Lily has taken something from me.
Crocodiles have been known to swallow stones to make themselves feel fuller. The stones also add weight to the beasts, helping them swim lower in the water, making them less visible to their prey.
If I dropped Lily in a lake, she would float, empty but for cigarette smoke, visible to everyone, predators and prey alike.
Some nights, I broke. I’d lie in bed, praying for sleep, knowing t
hat the only thing keeping me from the looming binge was unconsciousness. But a hungry gut is a night watchdog. She growls as the sky darkens, howls at the winking moon.
I’d grimace my way down the hall and ease the refrigerator open with bated breath.
Then I was animal. I pulled toppings off slices of week-old pizza and swallowed without chewing. I took tubs of ice cream from the freezer and scooped with my hands, anesthetised my throat with the chill, clawed until my fingers ached, my teeth stung, my mind, numb.
Still, I ate. How I ate! How could I have an eating disorder if I was capable of this? If, in the night, I could gulp down calories enough to feed a family?
I drank cream from the carton, gnawed on hunks of cheese. I went to the trash can and rescued the pizza crust I’d tossed. Dusted off old coffee grounds and potato peelings and ate. I only stopped when my stomach, a balloon too inflated, threatened to burst.
Then I closed the refrigerator, my mind high on nutrition, and bent myself over the sink, deep-throated my fingers, brought everything back up before my body could digest. Like a scene rewound, see how this eater uneats.
It is so dark tonight. Screams score my wait for Jram. Nurses storm the rooms of girls who have lost weight since their last weigh-in and thread tubes around their ears, into their noses, down their throats. The tube is attached to a bag of translucent yellow sludge, so much like lard in appearance that one had to laugh at the cruelty of it. The formula, apparently nutritious, oozes through the tubes, into the body; they feed us this way, unconsensually.
This is the way they keep us corporeal. Just as you feel that helium haze in the brain, that too-light-for-this-life, that near-weightlessness that makes your fingertips hum like a caffeine overdose, blood turned bee, veins vibrating, every organ gutted of its substance, that purgatory between living and dead, that’s when they come. The nurses, to anchor us to this earth.
They set the machines at a constant clip, and we can do nothing but watch as the fat seeps into us, slow and definite as a change in the weather. Some girls try to tear the tubes from their throats, but that only results in a nurse spending the night, eyes alert, watching us sleep.
Tonight, it’s Kat. I can tell by her rasping yelps. It’s the first time she’s lost weight, and her screams last well into the night.
Tomorrow, I will teach her how to maintain her weight like the rest of us. I don’t like her, Kat, but no girl deserves to be filled like that.
2006 (17 years old—Lily: 158 lbs, Rose: 80 lbs)
Our mother left. Packed a single shopping bag with clothes and shoes and money and moved out one day while we were at school, while Dad was at work.
Lily and I got home to find the note:
Jim: Fuck you. Rose: Eat something. Lily: Look after Rose. It’s for the best. Mum.
Lily shredded the page before Dad could see it.
“It’ll be hard enough for him as it is,” she said.
Dad got home while I was doing my nightly sit-ups—an even hundred before bed to tone the stomach. When he saw her car gone, their room ransacked, us alone, he took a beer from the fridge, cracked the can open, and sat on the couch. Football.
“Dad,” said Lily. But he only kicked his slacks down his legs, sat in his underwear.
I reached the halfway point—fifty to go. He took the remote and turned the volume up higher than we were allowed it.
“Dad!” Lily, shouting to be heard.
He picked up his phone.
Thank god, I thought, we thought. He’s going to ring her. Tell her to come home.
But instead, “I’ll order a pizza, yeah, girls?” He looked at me, curling and unfurling on the floor, then frowned. “Maybe two.”
One night, my mind was droopy with hunger and sleep, and I didn’t notice that Lily wasn’t in her bed when I got up and tiptoed to the kitchen to binge. Our house was old and wooden and had a way of cracking and groaning with every step, its own way of making us feel heavy.
“Lil?” I yawned when I reached the kitchen. She was wedged into the refrigerator, her face lit only by the fridge’s blue glow, her body keeping the door from swinging shut, scooping shredded cheese, forcing handfuls between her lips.
She startled when I said her name and she tossed the bag of cheese back onto its shelf.
“I was just . . .” But Lily didn’t bother to finish the sentence. “Why are you out here?”
“Water,” I said, stepping past her, both of us light on our feet to keep from waking the house.
“Remember when we used to come out here for midnight snacks?” said Lily.
I nodded. As kids we’d hide our Halloween candy from our parents, a pile in the always-vacant bread box, a handful in the gap between the microwave and the counter, and we’d set our alarms for eleven p.m. and tiptoe into the kitchen, find our candy too quickly, and eat it long before midnight reared its head. Sometimes we’d nod off in the kitchen, slumped over on the linoleum, heads resting against the fridge’s gentle hum.
“Sure,” I said. “When we were kids.” We were in our senior year now, and I felt like an old woman, so weathered and exhausted.
“It was like two years ago,” said Lily.
“Yeah,” I said. “Kids. We were kids.”
“It’s weird that one of those times would have been our last time and I didn’t even know it.”
“What?”
“Like, if I knew the last time we’d done it would have been the last ever, our last midnight snack, I would have made a better effort to remember it, you know?”
“Not really,” I yawned. “I’m gonna go back to—”
“I’m not going to ask why,” said Lily, a new confidence in her voice. “Because I don’t think you even know why. But I just want you to know”—she swallowed—“that you’re putting me through this, too.”
“What?”
“You hating your body is you hating my body, so yeah.”
“I don’t hate your body.”
“Well,” said Lily. “At one point, not so long ago, we had exactly the same body. And you’ve done almost everything you can to destroy it.”
I looked at my sister. She had grown big. I didn’t hate bigness, and I didn’t think she looked bad. She looked unhappy a lot of the time, sure, like when she caught her reflection and one of her hands darted to her stomach as if she’d discovered a sudden pregnancy, or when she saw photographs of herself and immediately averted her eyes, flipped the photo facedown. But her body didn’t look bad. She just looked like Lily, my sister, who I loved.
“I don’t hate your body,” I said to Lily. “I love you.”
“Do you understand how that’s hard for me to believe?”
I nodded. Swallowed.
“This isn’t just affecting you.”
“Okay,” I whispered. I knew she was right. Lily frowned almost all the time now, and even my teachers at school had pulled me aside to have a word about dieting. There was nothing I could do. I wasn’t in control anymore.
Lily’s sadness was soap in my mouth, and I spat the lather into the sink. I had no way of knowing whether her feelings were calorie-free.
“What’re you two doing up?” Dad, who had taken to sleeping in front of the television since Mum left, muted the set and stood, the room’s only light coming from the open fridge, the silent TV. “It’s way past your bedtime.”
“I was hungry,” said Lily.
“How about I fix us a snack?” he said. “We could have a midnight picnic. Junk night.”
Lily started to forage around in the fridge, a can of whipped cream, a bottle of chocolate sauce. Dad got a pint of ice cream from the freezer, vanilla bean. I got a packet of pink wafers from the pantry. Each movement, the gathering of ingredients, the collation of foods on the counter, it all felt weighed down with the significance of tradition.
Lily scooped three scoops into Dad’s bowl, then just one into her own.
“Give yourself another, girlie,” he said. “You’re a growing girl.”<
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Lily was so used to our mother’s constant criticism, the judgmental looks at her full plate, her full stomach. She rolled another scoop.
“Rose?” Dad said.
“No thank you,” I said. “I’m just out here for a glass of water.”
“No ice cream?”
“No thank you.”
“It’ll make you feel better,” he said, his tone teasing.
“I don’t need to feel better,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong.”
When I left them to their feast, they were laughing. I could hear their wounds healing over without me.
As Kat screams from the room over, I show Jram how to pre-eat. He picks it up quickly. We alternate bites out of our air sandwiches: a romantic meal for two. A man and a woman, sharing a meal, a relationship.
When we’re done, he pulls his shirt over his head. I shouldn’t be so surprised. We’ve been seeing each other awhile now, after all. Still, I hold my palm against the glass, meaning stop, but it must come across as a lustful yearning, because he only reaches for his fly.
Jram’s naked body is skeletal. I can see all of his bones, and I feel embarrassed. Like witnessing a building’s scaffolding stages, his foundations are on show. He strokes his flaccid penis at me, and how strange that a body so emaciated can spare a chubby cock. It grows and grows as I watch his show. It fattens and bloats and I only sigh.
I say, “Please stop, Jram. Please stop,” but he doesn’t. I tighten the knot of my robe and finger its fabric and watch as his body swells and inflates until, eventually, he gives up. He doesn’t say my name or wave a lilac handkerchief. It’s my fault, of course. He took me to dinner, albeit a hypothetical one, and I’ve read enough romance novels to know what a dinner date means. Nothing ever really survives.
In 1830, Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister, spread word that people were gaining weight from having too much sex. He was a vegetarian, Graham was, and believed that optimal health could be achieved through a diet of abstinence, vegetables, and whole-grain bread. He later invented the graham cracker, one of which contains about sixty calories.