by Diana Clarke
He had no way of knowing that a typical dose of ejaculate contains less than a single calorie, about the same nutritional value as a can of Diet Coke. I could survive on semen. I could!
I take the letters from under my mattress and open the envelopes, one by one. It’s too dark to read, but the words are so purposefully written, their shapes etched into the paper. I trace each one with my finger, whisper love letters aloud to myself.
I set them in a stack on my nightstand and see a termite scuttling away. I pluck the bug. It’s tiny and its little legs flail. I set it on my tongue and swallow. The calories will be worth the results. I wish to be as empty as this house. Nothing more than skin, puddled on the floor.
16
On Garden Day, we’re allowed to walk in the courtyard. It’s a beautiful morning. The sun stings my tired eyes, parched from a night of fearing for Lily’s health, listening to Kat’s screams, recalling Jram’s aroused and emaciated figure.
2006 (17 years old—Lily: 165 lbs, Rose: 79 lbs)
When concerned teachers confronted my father about my not-eating, he didn’t speak to me about it. He and Lily had grown close via their midnight meals, their cocktails in front of some cop show that played consistently on channel four. I was invited to both events, but the calories. I shook my head—Too tired, I was always telling them. Instead, he sent me to a therapist.
Her name was Paula, and she was in her fifties, smelled of lavender, and always had a hyphen of red lipstick dashed across her two front teeth. She called me Rosey Posey and hugged me so tight to her chest I thought I might get stuck there, between her breasts.
One day, Paula asked me to bring Lily along to my session. She held up ink blots and asked both Lily and me to write our answers to the Rorschach test on separate sheets of paper. When the test was over, our answers were different for every single shape. I saw fleas where Lily saw stars. I saw an apple core where Lily saw a kissing couple.
“Interesting,” said Paula, licking her top teeth but somehow missing the lipstick that resided there. “Very interesting.” She sifted through our answers and then frowned. She held up a new ink blot. “Rose, can you write down what you think Lily sees here?”
The image was of a feminine mouth. I wrote the word mountains.
“What do you see in this blot, Lily?” asked Paula.
“Mountains,” said Lily. We went through the rest of the ink blots this way. Me guessing every image on Lily’s behalf. I didn’t miss a single answer.
“Very interesting,” said Paula. “Very, very interesting.”
“What’s interesting?” said Lily.
“Well,” said Paula. “Every set of twins I’ve run this test on has seen the same shapes as each other.”
Lily and I said nothing. This was not interesting to us.
“But twins also usually share sexuality.”
“Share sexuality?” I said.
“Yes,” said Paula. “You know, if one’s gay, usually they’re both gay.”
“But . . .” I said. Only before I could correct Paula, Lily’s hand gripped mine, and that meant I should stop talking.
What I was going to say: Lily and I do share the same sexuality.
What I was going to say: Both Lily and I are normal.
I didn’t go back to Paula after that day. Dad couldn’t afford weekly therapy appointments, and, as he said, I wasn’t even eating more than I had been before therapy, anyway.
In seminary school, in order to become an ordained priest, one has to complete a Rorschach test. Ink blots are held before the seminarian, and he is asked to interpret the shape. This test, the seminarian’s answers, are meant to determine whether or not the potential priest is at risk of same-sex attraction.
The garden is gorgeous but so carefully cultivated, manicured, that it feels more like walking through art than nature. Ivy climbs our brick prison, dressing the walls in a layer of leaves and vines. The body, too, grows a layer of insulation if it isn’t cared for. My arms are warmed by a coarse coat of my own hair.
The plants wind around and around a wooden pergola’s ceilings, aiming to suffocate, they don’t know that the wood is already dead, killed and crafted into such a pretty roof.
White flowers hang low and are only just waking as we walk our morning walk. We brush them aside to keep to the path. There’s a rose garden. Roses of every color, reds and pinks, whites and yellows, some sunset gradients and garish greens. Even a pocket of pitch-black roses grows at the center of the garden like a pupil to an eye. Reminding us of our surveillance.
I once read about a man who had the same depersonalization disorder as the university professor. His life was ruined by a set of plastic fruit. One Christmas, when he was middle-aged with a job and a wife and two children, they all went to his parents’ house for dinner. Hungry, the man took an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter and bit into it—only to find that it was plastic. The bowl had been there all his life, and he had never tried to eat a piece.
He turned to his wife, who was wearing an apron and red lipstick, and taking the ham from the oven; a movie wife. His children were sitting on the floor, stacking blocks, being too entirely childlike. His wife and kids were actors, his life a lie. In the fleeting pivot from familiar to alien, the sudden and complete unraveling of recognition, he attacked his family. Kept attacking them. The man pled guilty but refused to plea insanity; he was sorry for his actions and certain of his mind. Bodies are fickle, we know, but we refuse to believe that our minds might fail us, because without them, we are just hopeless meat.
Oftentimes, on Garden Day, I pause my exercise to pluck a petal or leaf from a plant, just to test whether it’s synthetic. But the flowers always fall apart in my hands, their colors bruised from my grip, and the garden is either real, or a very convincing replica of real. Some twisted simulacrum made just for us thin girls.
Kat is sitting on a bench when I arrive. She’s not wearing her hat, and her scattering of hair is awry. She’s still, her legs and arms crossed, all limb and appendage, pointed and angular as an asterisk.
“Hi,” I say, slowing my power walk to greet her.
She looks up, her eyes wet and empty. Her lips bare, her complexion so pale it looks overexposed.
“I can teach you how to maintain,” I say, marching on the spot. We’re not allowed to run. One foot on the ground at all times is the rule. “So they never do that to you again.”
“You’ve been injected with it, too?” Kat’s voice trembles like it’s walking a beam. The act dropped.
I nod. “It’s important not to lose or they’ll force you to gain. But if you can figure out how to maintain, then they’ll leave you alone, mostly.”
“How?”
“Walk with me.” I gesture to the path. “I need to walk.”
She nods and stands. “I gained this morning,” she whispers. “The stuff they put into me. I gained overnight.” She skipped to keep up with me. “What is that stuff?”
I shrug. “We don’t know. Something. Calories. But we all gained, too. All you have to do now is maintain the weight you are today and they’ll never do it again.”
“How do you?”
“How do I what?”
“Maintain?”
“Oh.” We pass a nurse, who nods at my march, my adherence to the rules. Once we’re out of earshot, I say, “Weights.”
“Weights?”
“I’ll show you at tomorrow’s weigh-in.”
Kat asks more things, but I have my eye trained on Jram’s window. We’re about to pass it, and I suck in my stomach, aiming for two-dimensionality, try to relax my expression into something serene, carefree. Last night, the way he had shown me his whole self, the way he had stroked himself for me. Jram had ruined our fairy tale, but I had imposed that fairy tale upon our relationship. I hadn’t considered that my fairy-tale projection was met with one of a sordid affair from him. One of lust, raw, animalistic sex. An affair doesn’t sound so bad. It’s so boring in this place.
>
Time moves like traffic here, doesn’t it?
Jram’s room is empty. His bed unmade. His desk piled with books. His closet open, clothes strewn about. We keep walking.
“I’m having a love affair,” I say.
“In the supply closet?”
My cheeks warm, and I swallow.
“No,” I say. “With a man.”
“A man?”
“Jram.”
“Who?”
“Jram.”
“Jerome?”
“Jram.”
“Really weird name,” she says.
“We’re in love,” I tell her. “We’ll probably get married.”
“Sure,” says Kat. “Sure you will, Slim.”
I can hear the doubt in her tone. I want to shout at her. Shake her. I am not a lesbian, I want to cry. I am nothing, nothing like you.
In the 1960s, psychologist I. Oswald thought that homosexuality could be cured by overdosing on it. He gave gay men nausea-inducing drugs and sat them in small rooms, where they were surrounded by glasses of urine and videos of men having sex with other men, playing at full volume on a loop.
Kat hops over a worm carcass, splayed and tragic on the path, and is immediately reprimanded by a nurse, who tells her to keep one foot on the ground at all times. She rolls her eyes and falls back into our march.
“Why are there so many worms?” Kat scrunches her nose. “It’s grotesque. You’d think they could pay someone to deal with that!”
“The rain,” I say. I tell her what I know about worms, which is a decent amount. The previous occupant of my room left a book about insects on the shelf. It was the only book I had for the first month, until I found a second book on linguistics, a third on mental health conditions, and then a fourth on animal behaviors. But the first month, the month in which no one came to visit, I had only my insects book, called Insects. My father didn’t understand, or didn’t know how to care. Even Lily didn’t visit for those first weeks, maybe too afraid I might infect her with my illness, the way I always had.
Growing up, I was always the one getting sick first. I got a cold and then Lily did. I got the flu and then Lily did. I got lice and then Lily did. I got chicken pox and then Lily did. I’m the weak one, the one who succumbs to any illness that approaches, hand outstretched. I take the hand of any offering stranger without asking questions. I’m a sucker for affection.
“Worms,” I tell Kat, “absorb rain through their skin. Like sponges. Usually soil has a combination of air and water, which keeps the worms hydrated and lets them breathe. But, when it rains, the pores in the soil fill with water instead of air and the worms can’t breathe. Instead of taking in air, they just keep absorbing water.”
Kat grimaces, shudders, and I know she’s thinking of the IV last night, the way the bag of lard emptied into her body, filling her, filling her, a worm caught out in the rain.
I go on. “So the worms have to crawl to the surface to breathe.”
Kat’s eyes, wide, her palm pressed to her mouth in horror. I’m enjoying horrifying her.
“Then what?” she says.
“Worms can’t control how much they absorb. Any bit of moisture that touches them, they consume it, so, if they’re out in the rain for too long, they just bloat and swell, filling up with rain, and then, pop.”
“Pop?”
“They explode.”
“Time’s up, ladies,” shouts a nurse.
There are tears in Kat Mitchells’s eyes. I should feel bad about lying to her, skewing the end of the fact into fiction, but I like that I’ve had an effect on her. Made her drop her little performance, even if just briefly.
“Back inside!’” shouts the nurse.
One week. Seven days. One hundred and sixty-eight hours until we’re allowed outside again.
When I get back to my room, there’s a missed call on my cell from a number that isn’t Lily’s. I press to call back.
“Bright,” says Phil’s voice.
“Phil?”
“Yes.”
“Phil Bright?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Rose.”
“I know,” he says. “I called you.”
“I know,” I say. “I called you back.”
There’s a silence.
“So, why did you call me?”
“I just wanted to apologize,” says Phil. “For changing your relationship with Lily. I know it must be hard.”
The nerve! “You haven’t changed anything,” I say. I hope I sound smug. I think about British people and hope that it might inflect my tone.
“Well, okay, sure, but I know she’s spending less time with you now. Less time at the facility. Visiting, I mean. I just, you know, I really think that Lily should focus on herself for a change. Should focus on her own health, physical, mental, spiritual, all of it. I can help her with that. I can help her grow and change, but I can’t help her if she has you influencing her the way you do.”
“The way I do?”
“Yes.” He sighs. “You two are so connected, it’s difficult to help Lily when she has you in the other ear.”
“She doesn’t need help.”
“She’s not well.” I could laugh. Lily? She’s always been the well one!
“You’re not well.”
“What?”
“Listen, Phil,” I say. “Lily and I are forever. You’re a brief interruption in the lifetime of my relationship with her. Men come and go, the way they always have, always will, but I am Lily’s forever. You think you’ve changed our relationship? You couldn’t change our relationship in a million years. And the joke’s on you, Phil. Lily’s been visiting me even though you told her not to. She was here just yesterday. That’s right. You’re nothing.” I hang up the phone, panting, exhausted from all of the confrontation.
17
At lunch, the nurse who spoons undercooked, swampy rice onto our plates and claims it’s a risotto also hands us a pamphlet. I open mine as I carry my tray to a crowded table. We work better in herds, us thin girls; we use the buddy system. One is more likely to get away with hiding her food if she is sandwiched between other girls.
“A dance,” says a girl whose name I don’t know. “We’re seriously going to be allowed to dance?” Her voice spills over, yellow with glee.
The pamphlet announces a social. An evening of dancing, fruit punch, music, and snacks. It announces that we will be allowed to interact with the men from the ward across the courtyard. I read the words so closely I accidentally swallow a mouthful of rice. I keep reading as I scoop the rest of the meal into my palm and drop it down my underwear. It sags like a dirty diaper.
“Hey,” Kat says, taking the seat across from me. “This means you’ll get to see Jerome! How fabulous. It’ll be a ball!”
“Jram,” I say. This could be it, the night Jram and I profess our love for each other. Cold suddenly, I pull the hood of my sweatshirt over my head and tighten the drawstrings, a cave around my face.
“Who’s Jerome?” says a thin girl.
“Jram.”
“Germ?”
“Jram, with a J.”
“Jerm?”
“J. R. A. M. Jram.”
“Oh, Jram,” says a thin girl. “Jram. Never heard that before.”
“Who is he?” asks another thin girl.
“Rose’s lover,” says Sarah, beside me, peeling her fingernails off in slim crescents. “He’s German, darling.”
I blush and feel my groin warm with excitement, reheating the rice that resides there.
“Lover?” The thin girls lean in. It’s usually so dull in here. We can find a speck of excitement in anything that isn’t just another mealtime. “You have a lover? But how?”
I smile, my face still humid with embarrassment. “He lives across the courtyard from me. We’ve been spending nights together.”
“Wow,” say the thin girls, chins in palms, eyes slick with lust. “Romantic,” they whisper.
“You could
meet people, too,” I say, feeling maternal and important. “You could all meet people at the dance.”
“Thin men, darling?” says Kat, her lip raised in disapproval. “No offense,” she assures me, the way people do when something is irrefutably offensive. “But, like, thin men? Really?”
“That’s really sexist,” says Sarah.
I smile at their disagreement. I want them to disagree forever. I want them to throw chairs! Chip each other’s rotting teeth with cutlery hurled like spears. Claw at each other’s eyes with those gag-trigger fingers.
“Women can’t be sexist against men,” says someone.
“Of course they can, baby,” says Sarah.
“It’s just, girls are meant to, like, diet and be thin,” says a thin girl. “Men aren’t. So how did those thin men even get that way?”
I tune out. My moment of fame is over. I waddle back to my room with a crotch full of rice and await Lily’s visit.
2006 (17 years old—Lily: 174 lbs, Rose: 78 lbs)
Lily was doing the grocery shopping with Mum gone. She’d buy candy and chips, chocolates and crackers and cheese. She ate and ate. She grew and grew.
Jemima Gates told Lily she shouldn’t sit with us, the popular girls, because you had to be thin to be popular. Lily took the news well, lifted both her packed lunch and mine, left the cafeteria, her head high. I wanted to say something, to stand up for Lily, but instead of doing those things, I didn’t. I sat in my hunger, curled up in it comfortably. Complicity is so easy. I let everything wash over me like some useless seaside shell, hollow of any creature, picked up, carried by the waves. There was nothing left to me.
I got home after school to find Lily, standing at the stove, stirring yet another edible thing, dinner, she was the mother now, and weeping huge wet tears into the pot. Her overwhelming sadness tasted of seawater, noncommittally salty, watery, weak.