by Diana Clarke
We released hands and sank back onto the couch. I turned up the volume and we watched the cooking show together. It had been a long time since we had acted as one, and it felt good to fall back into our most natural roles.
“Hi,” I say when I arrive in the bathroom to find Jram, pants open, penis pointing at me. Choosing me. I try to feel flattered among the nerves.
“Did you know that there’s a type of penguin who press their bellies together and dance before they mate?” I say, making small talk.
“Put your mouth on it,” says Jram, and he means his penis, and he doesn’t seem surprised when I shake my head. I’m not about to risk those milky calories. “Fine,” he says. “Then give me your hand.”
I do. Jram in the bathroom is different from Jram in the dining hall. No. Jram with his penis in his hand is different from Jram without it. He’s more assertive, more like the other men I know.
His penis feels like any other limb. A finger or an arm. Only its skin doesn’t fit as well. When I move my hand, the skin moves with it. I ask him if I’m doing okay, and he tells me my grip is limp. I tighten my hold, and he winces. I let go.
“That’s enough,” I say, hoping that my insecurity might come across as sexy aggression. It works, because he takes me by the shoulders, twists me abruptly, and shoves my stomach against the sink. I double over the porcelain, and my cheek slaps against the wall. It is only then, with my face pressed against the cold, hard tile, that I realize we could have gone to my bedroom instead.
Jram lifts my dress and shifts my underwear to the side. Then there is a rough jabbing between my legs. I know there’s no chance of entry long before Jram gives up. I’m dry and uninviting. Unwanting. He might as well have been trying to stick it in my ear.
He eventually sighs and stops trying.
“Well, see you back out there, Eope,” he says, tucking his dick into his pants and smiling. Penis-less Jram is back. He is human again. He waves, a wiggly-fingered wave, and lets the bathroom door swing closed behind him.
Alone, I fix the hem of my skirt and long for a mirror. I feel exerted. Like I should be flushed, hair distressed. I try to force some reflection out of the tiled walls, but my only echo is blurred motion in the varnished surface. There’s makeup smeared where my face had been—mine. Lipstick instead of lips. Mascara instead of eyes. My cosmetic doppelgänger. I give up and go back to the dance, feeling hardly any more woman than before.
22
Jram’s room is dark for eight nights in a row. I stay up late, later than I have in a long time, there’s not much to stay up for in here. But tonight, over a week since our moment of passion in the bathroom, I look out across the courtyard, crossing my fingers for a flicker. Nothing. I wonder whether I’m the only girl in the world to have ever been broken up with via light. No, via darkness.
More than once, I empty my trash can onto the carpet, hoping that one shred of one letter might have been saved, a snippet of a past love, but the nurses empty them every morning, and mine is so hollow it looks starved.
Our group leader is showing us how to flatter our food.
“Did you say fatter?” says Sarah.
“No, I said fatter,” says the group leader. “I mean flatter. I said flatter. Flatter.”
“With an l?” I say.
“No,” says the group leader. “With an f.”
“Obviously,” says Sarah. “Rose meant f, l, a—”
“Yes,” says the group leader. “Flatter. Flatter. Compliment. Praise.”
Sarah winks at me, and I smile at our tiny rebellion.
“So,” says the group leader, “flattering our foods. Can anyone tell me why flattering our foods is important?”
“It isn’t,” Kat whispers under her breath.
“Nobody?” says the group leader. “Well, flattery is an important part of friendship. It’s a love language: words of affirmation, and we’re learning to become friends with our food.”
I lift the tomato from the table in front of me and examine its surface. Not even one blemish.
“Studies show,” says the group leader, “that plants actually grow quicker and are healthier when they’re spoken to kindly. A group of scientists did an experiment, and the gardeners who complimented their plants each day ended up with bigger, better plants than those who said nothing at all.”
I press my thumb against the tomato’s skin, and the flesh is soft as an infant’s thigh.
I once read about the study that the group leader is referencing. She’s nearly right. The scientists divided a group of sixty pea plants into three groups. The group that was complimented by growers performed equally as well as the group that was actively insulted by growers. It was the group that was left to grow in silence that didn’t perform as well. Plants don’t care what you say to them, so long as you’re there. Living beings don’t care how you treat them. We just don’t want to be alone.
“This shows,” says the group leader, “that our food likes being spoken to. Likes being flattered. So, in order to befriend our food, we should compliment it.” The group leader looks around, collecting the room in her gaze. “So,” she says. “Take your food items from the table.”
We do.
“And now say something kind to it. Tell the food what you like about it.”
There is a scramble of uncertainty. A rumble of mumbling. Finally, one of the thin girls, maybe called Laura or Lisa, says to her avocado, “Your thick skin is, uh, it’s admirable.”
“Yes!” says the group leader.
My grip breaks through the tomato’s thin epidermis and finds a slippery wetness inside. My thumb is coated in its sticky juices.
“You,” Kat says to her carrot, “look like a penis.” And it does!
2007 (18 years old—Lily: 195 lbs, Rose: 71 lbs)
When I told Jemima of the rumors about us, she shrugged.
“All boys have lesbian fantasies,” she said. We were in her bedroom, and I was watching her stand before a mirror, clutch her waist with her hands, a belt made of her long fingers, straining to touch fingertip to fingertip. “It’s because we’re the hottest girls in school.”
I wanted to hold her waist like that. Wanted to feel what it was to hold a body that wasn’t my own.
“You think so?” I said. “You think that’s all it is?”
Jemima turned away from the mirror to face me. “What do you mean?”
I swallowed. Shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing, probably.” I picked up a magazine from her nightstand, and the cover story was about Kat Mitchells. CHILD STAR FLAUNTS NEW CURVES IN CROATIA.
“Here,” she said. “I have an idea. Come here.”
I stood, obedient, from the foot of her bed. The everyday vertigo swallowed me for only a second. I had grown used to staving off fainting multiple times a day.
She took a yellow measuring tape from her desk and held it out to me. “Hold this,” she said, letting her fingers linger on my palm. I smiled at the touch, the highlight of my day every day. I lived for the brief moments she’d let her body whisper against mine.
Jemima lifted her blouse over her head. Unzipped her skirt and let it fall. I’d seen her so many times by now, after all the window-shopping, but this time she watched me, eyes wide, as she undressed. I looked her in the eye, too afraid to let my gaze wander.
She reached behind her back and unclasped her bra. Then ran a finger around the elastic of her underwear. Out of the haze of my peripherals, I saw the fabric fall.
“What are you doing?” I said, my voice a husk of itself.
“Measure me,” she said, holding her arms out wide, legs spread.
I swallowed and stepped toward her, measuring tape slick with my sweat. My hands trembled as I strung the tape around her chest, across her hardened nipples, pink and puckered, and pulled the rope tight.
I told her the number, and Jemima nodded. “My hips,” she said.
I let the tape fall to her waist, then lower. She was clean shaven, which didn’t sur
prise me. She was so good at knowing what to do with her body, what was expected from a girl our age. I pressed my thumb against the top of her pubis, the skin pebbled with the heads of dark hairs not yet surfaced. She shivered, or I did, and I waited for the tape to stop quaking before I read her the digit.
“Do the rumors bother you?” Jemima said in response to the measurement. “I can tell Joel to put a stop to them.”
Joel Banff was on the rugby team, and his ears curled into themselves like roses in the morning, scrummed into submission. He was Jemima’s boyfriend. Her boyfriend. She had a boyfriend who was a boy. Joel Banff was at the bottom of our class. An idiot!
I stepped away from her nudity and dropped the tape on her bed. “They don’t bother me,” I said, bothered. “Rumors are rumors.”
Jemima smiled and went back to examining her bones in the mirror. What I minded more than the rumors was that rumors were all they were. I wanted to tell Jemima that we could just be together in secret. That I wasn’t gay, I just wanted her. Just her. Just one girl. That other than her, I was probably, no, I was, straight. We could kiss without anyone knowing! I’d do anything for her.
“You okay, babe?”
The looming confession was heavy on my tongue, the weight of honesty, like a doctor with a popsicle stick telling me to open up and say ah.
“Do you think I’ve lost weight again?” she said, stroking her pelvis. “My hips look kind of different.”
“Yeah,” I said. “They look good.” And that was enough honesty for the day.
After breakfast, on the day I trick the scales into thinking I’m heavy enough to be released, I pass the supply closet and, as I do, there is a loud gasp. I stop and look at the closed door. I try the handle, unlocked, open the door into the dark. There are two people in there. One is Kat. I’m sure of it. I can make out the tall rectangle of a top hat, even in this overwhelming shadow. The other . . . I swallow.
“Sarah?”
They’re crouched on the floor like something primate, buckets on the ground at their feet, hands buried in their mouths. The smell hits before I see it. The spiced scent of sick. The buckets are filled with chunky liquid.
The two bodies are still, statues. Sarah looks up at me, tears in her eyes. Kat retches. I slam the door closed and go back to my room. I can’t wait to get out of this rotten place.
Honeybees drink flower nectar and barf it back up as honey. We buy it in bulk, eat that sick off the blunt blade of a butter knife, spread it on toast. Some thin girls like to drop a dollop in a cup of herbal tea during a fast to keep them vertical. It’s a sugar boost, that vomit.
We encourage their disorder, too. Buzzy little bulimics.
Dr. Windham glows an iridescent red when he tells me I can be released in two days if I keep improving. I’m wearing four layers of clothing. Four pairs of leggings. Four shirts. Trying to give myself some breadth.
“I’m proud of you, sugar,” he says. “Honestly, when girls have been in here as long as you, we usually give up hope that they’ll ever really recover.” He scratches the bald summit of his head. “But you’re doing great.”
I smile and he says, “We’ll miss you in here, you know.”
Dr. Windham might be in love with me.
I’m still smiling when there’s a knock at the door and Lily’s voice says, “Knock, knock, it’s me!” She is already in the room when she says, “Am I interrupting something, Doctor?” She says his name in italics, and I frown at her finger, which is slowly coiling its way around and around a strand of brunette. There’s something different about her hair, something that makes it look less like human hair and more like a woman from a shampoo commercials’ hair. She’s got highlights. Her boring brown, identical to mine, has new streaks of honey slashed through it at curated intervals, just enough to make it look like the sun is always shining on her, just enough to ruin my whole life.
“You got highlights,” I say.
“Hi, Dr. Windham!” Lily is the sun today. “Hi! How are you?”
“Why did you get stupid highlights?”
“You look great,” she says to my doctor with a smile. I know this Lily. This is flirting Lily, seducing Lily, alluring Lily. She transforms into a lighter version of herself.
“Lily!” says Dr. Windham, who calls healthy people their real names instead of food nouns. “Look at you! You’ve lost so much weight! Congratulations. You two are like two peas!”
Lily grins and hooks her arm through mine. I seethe at the hypocrisy.
“Oh, I’ve only lost a little,” says Lily, ducking her head underneath his compliment and smiling. The scab on her lip strains. She’s almost healed from Phil’s abuse. “It’s this health guide I’m following. It’s called YourWeigh.”
“It’s working for you; you look great,” says Dr. Windham, heterosexually. “Like a supermodel! Stunning.”
I look at him, his ruddy cheeks, scrunched eyes. I could have growled for all of my building anger.
“I was just telling my favorite cupcake that she can be released in a couple of days if she’s got someone to care for her while she’s in remission.”
“Of course I’ll be caring for her,” says Lily. Our former fight forgotten overnight, as they always are; our cruelness dissolves at dusk. Each day is a new chance, a chance to be a more graceful sibling. We both know it isn’t how the world works, of course, but our twinship has always functioned that way. We will never stop forgiving and that knowledge is comforting.
“You’ll come home with me, won’t you, Rosie?”
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “I might.” I cross my arms.
“She will,” Lily tells Dr. Windham. “She’s just being silly. She’ll come live with me until we get her back on her feet.” She turns to me, all luminous with pride. “Baby sister, I can’t believe you gained enough to come home! Look at you! You’re glowing!”
I am. I smeared the grease from this morning’s bacon on my cheeks.
On the ceiling, my termite colony is at work, marching its procession, off to devour their next meal. I say, “There are termites in here, Dr. Windham. This place is being eaten alive.”
“Anywho,” says Lily, ignoring me again. “How can I thank you, Dr. Windham. Really, how?” And her voice is slick as a proposition. I wince at the obviousness of it. I miss Jram, our silent love, so elegant in its distant silence, separated by glass and garden.
“Oh no,” says Dr. Windham, who actually blushes. “I’m just doing my job,” he says. “And anyway, I’d imagine that Rose’s sudden improvement has more to do with the new Intellectual Eating program we’ve recently implemented than anything I’ve done.”
“Intellectual Eating?” says Lily.
“That’s right. It’s all about teaching the girls how to think about food, develop a healthy relationship with eating and such, to help them act normally.” He refuses me any eye contact.
“That’s great!” says Lily. “That sounds great, Rosie. Is that what’s been helping you?”
“This morning I had to compliment a tomato,” I say. And the two of them laugh as if I’d made a joke.
“Lily, could I have a word in the hall?” says Dr. Windham. “I want to ask you something.” He wants to ask Lily on a date, I know it. His affection for me forgotten. He can have the better, healthier, happier version. Who would ever choose the worse of two options?
But Lily frowns. She clears her throat, crosses her arms, checks her phone. Eleven texts from Phil. I watch her swallow, the gulp of it, as she reaches for her eye. Its bruise has faded pastel. “No, sorry, Dr. Windham,” she says, clearing her throat. There’s a new tremble to her voice, as if it’s walking a beam.
When the doctor leaves, I turn on Lily. “Why did you change your hair?”
“You don’t like it?”
“Did Phil make you do that?”
“He doesn’t make me do anything.”
“Just because he doesn’t explicitly tell you, ‘Lily, I am commanding you to dye your ha
ir,’ doesn’t mean he’s not manipulating you into changing yourself for him.”
“He’s not manipulating me.”
“How would you know?”
She raises her eyebrow at me, which means I’m being immature. Immature, shmimmature. I cross my arms. “Why wouldn’t you go talk to my doctor in the hall?”
“Can you just—”
“Is it because of Phil?”
She sighs. “He’s the jealous type.”
“He’s literally married to another woman,” I say. “All these reasons keep accumulating against him, Lil. Against Phil. But it’s like you can’t see them. It’s like you can only see the stuff that supports the opinion you’ve already decided to have of him. The gifts. The vacations. But the dieting, the hitting, all the changes he’s making to you. Opinions are meant to change as the facts do, Lily. And your hair looks tie-dyed.”
Jram’s room is dark, and I sit on my bed, wrapped in the night, watching his window, waiting for a lightness.
There is a light tapping sound, innocent as rain, and I don’t look up as Sarah opens my door, sets a hand on my shoulder, and then climbs into my bed. She curls her body around mine. Her breath is a whispered song against the nape of my neck, and I like lying there, beside her beautiful arrangement of bones, but her touch is so cold, her body clatters, and this is how it must feel to lie with the dead.
23
I promise to write letters to the girls, the same way every discharged thin girl does, and then I forget to ask for anyone’s names, the same way every discharged thin girl does. Kat tries to meet my eye, but we’re not friends and I want her to know it. I kiss Sarah’s cheek and tell her to contact me as soon as she gets out, and then I don’t give her my phone number, and she doesn’t give me hers. We are all so good at deceit!
As we pack my room into boxes, Lily and I, I wish for Jram to see me moving out. Cured of my illness and of him. Good riddance!