by Diana Clarke
“Jemima?” I said, when my slurry mind recognized her, all cheekbones and jawline, sharp angles, straight lines. Her eyebrows were so dark they looked like crevices in her skin.
“I need a tampon,” she said so loudly I blushed. She drummed her acrylics on my desk, ta-ta-ta-ta, the percussion of her very own theme song. Jemima Gates was the sort of girl with signature behaviors—things that made her, her, separated her from the herd. The way she punctuated her sentences with a wink, how she smoothed her eyebrows with her index fingers. I couldn’t have pointed to my eyebrow if I wanted to, unfamiliar with the geography of my own face. I’d never been close with my body.
“What?”
“Tampon.”
I rummaged through my bottom drawer, where the office management made me keep tampons for this very purpose, and slapped a regular into her palm, raised my eyebrows.
“Why are you here?” I said.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what it’s for?” she stormed. “The tampon?” Her voice was so fierce and flat and defiant it felt like my own.
“No,” I said.
“Why?”
“Um, because I know what tampons are for,” I said, although I’d never used one.
“Not this one,” she said. “Not this tampon.”
“No, really, I attended health class.”
“No, you didn’t,” she snorted. “And anyway, this trick wasn’t taught in fucking health class.”
I sat back in my office chair and crossed my arms over my chest, swiveled on the chair’s axle and let its wheels roll across the fake wood floor. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll bite. What’s it for?”
Jemima smirked and beckoned for me to follow her. I looked around at the reception area, wondering whether I should put up a sign and deciding not to. I might have been trying to get fired. It was a terrible job and I would have much preferred to lie home on the couch, deep in a hungry slumber all day every day.
I followed her into the women’s bathroom, where she quickly lifted her leather skirt to reveal that she wasn’t wearing any underwear. Then, she took a flask out of her purse, unscrewed the top, and held the tampon to the bottle’s lips as she tipped it upside down. Liquid spilled out of the flask, splashed onto the bathroom tile, but the tampon caught most of it, growing, swelling. The smell of cheap whiskey caught in my throat like a lost bug and I coughed.
Jemima set the flask down and bent into a bad plié before shoving the tampon, too roughly, inside herself. “There,” she said, spreading her hands in a ta-da!
I shrugged. I was unimpressed. I had no energy to be impressed those days. I didn’t even have a CalSip keeping me going. Back then I had only a carton of Tic Tacs, and I took them like pills, one an hour, and another every time I almost blacked out, just to keep myself half-conscious.
“Wanna try?” she said. “It gets you pretty drunk pretty quick.”
“No thanks.”
“Oh, come on. No calories, I promise. I learned it from my model friends.”
“None?”
She made a circle with her thumb and index finger. Zero.
“Fine,” I said, and went to retrieve another tampon from my desk.
Once we were both plugged with whiskey, we sat on the fire exit steps, her smoking, me not, both smiling as our limbs became listless, our minds twirling into a vertigo abyss. She showed me how a wispy fur grew over every one of her limbs. I showed her how the corners of my mouth were perpetually split, even though I never remembered smiling so wide. We were children, comparing bruises, a contest of injuries, marveling at how our bodies could take such severe blows and keep living. These were just some of the symptoms of our shared sickness.
After a while I stopped asking why she came back, why she was at my work, and we settled into past versions of ourselves easily.
“I missed you, Jemima,” I told her. She grinned, took my hand, flipped my arm, and kissed the inside of my wrist, her lips chapped and rough against my skin.
“I go by Mim now,” she said.
“Jim?”
“Mim. With an M.”
“Mim?”
“Yeah. Jemima. Mim.”
“Mim. People don’t usually use the middle section of their name as the nickname.”
“What?”
“Like someone called Andrew would go by Andy or Drew. The start or the end of the word. He wouldn’t go by Ndr. Probably. Right?” And then she kissed me, really kissed me, and her tongue tasted of silence.
Water glass in hand, Lara Bax points me toward a room labeled yourweigh, and tells me to join the group. I open the door to find a large space filled with women. The room is a bad advertisement for the spiritual. Black feathers hang, heavy as plumage, from the ceiling. Stand on your tiptoes and one might tickle your scalp. A crystal ball in the corner, shining a slow orange glow, but there’s the electrical cord, and it’s plugged into an outlet. Is the divine allowed to run on electricity? Old, hardcover books line the room. Titles like Be Your You and Fearless Female and Light Your Peace and Dream of Hope. From the titles, I cannot determine what even one of them might be about.
I join the circle of women all sitting on the floor, cross-legged and eager as children in class, their diet books open on their laps, and they look so young and afraid sitting there like that, just waiting for something to happen to them.
The women, in their circle, are talking about Lara Bax with such an open adoration it’s almost religious, worshipping, their mouths wide in prayer.
“So,” I say to the room, from outside of the circle, interrupting their odes to the leader. “What exactly do you do here?”
“We mostly just support one another,” says a woman with wild red hair. “We learn to love ourselves, love each other. Lara Bax is amazing; you’re really going to love her. She’s so empowering.”
There’s a poster on the wall. An advertisement for YourWeigh. Lara Bax is standing, wearing too-big pants, and pulling the waistband away from herself to show how much room is left. I presume they’re a pair of her own old pants, and I presume she’s showing us how much smaller her waistline has become since starting the diet, but nowhere on the page does it say that. It only says: yourweigh: way more you. sign up today.
“Good evening, my lovelies,” says Lara Bax, entering the room through a back door, the world’s least impressive miracle. Her words are projected as if through a microphone; I search her person for a cord that might suggest she’s wired up, but there’s nothing. Her voice, a natural megaphone. “We have a new face here today,” she says, smiling in my direction. “Wonderful. Everyone is welcome,” she says. “Join the circle and we will begin.”
Lara Bax paces the perimeter of our ring, then stands, arms outstretched and sacrificial in the center of the circle. “Who wants to love themselves?” she shouts up into the air. “Who wants to find self-love?”
There is a cheer. The circle applauds, Lara Bax is spot lit.
“Who wants to find their worth within?” she cries. “Who wants to be happy in their body? Who wants to embrace their physical form?”
I want to love myself! Of course I do! What else is there to do?
“Do you?” says Lara Bax, pointing at a woman, who nods, eager as a child. “Do you!” Lara Bax shouts at another.
“I do!” the chosen woman calls.
Lara Bax stands before me. She reaches out a hand, sets her palm flat on my shoulder. “Do you, Rose? Do you want to love yourself?”
“Yes!” I cry up into the feathered ceiling. “I do!” The woman beside me takes my hand, squeezes my fingers so hard I know exactly where I am. Back in my body. Here on this planet.
“I do!” the woman screams at me.
“I do, too!” I scream back. Our open mouths each consuming the other’s words.
I once read about a cult started by an ex-marine-turned-trapeze-artist who thought that the world was going to end when the clocks struck midnight of the year 2000, and the only survivors would be clones. He dedicated his li
fe to cloning in the hope that he might save the human race, and, in 1999, he eventually succeeded in cloning a person.
People joined his movement by the hundreds. New Year’s Eve was approaching, and everyone wanted to be cloned. It cost thousands of dollars just to add one’s name to his wait list.
Over ten thousand people had joined his cause by the time his cloning experiment was debunked. He had used the identical twins from his circus and called one of them a clone. He spent the money on a state-of-the-art bomb shelter for his backyard. No one’s sign-up fees were refunded.
Lara Bax asks us women to take selfies and then share them with the rest of the room, pointing out our favorite parts about ourselves. She wants us to upload our selfies to Instagram with the hashtags #LaraBax and #YourWeigh.
“I want you to look at that photo, really look at it, and I want you to learn to love it. Learn to love yourself! Weight gain is usually to do with a lack of self-love. Depression? Lack of self-love. Even physical illnesses, the flu, asthma, even”—she pauses—“some cancers result from a lack of self-love. So look at that selfie, girls. Love that selfie! Love yourself! And, if you use the hashtags, you can go in to win three free group sessions, a month’s supply of SkinnyTea, and an extra copy of my YourWeigh holistic health guide to give to a friend!”
The women lift their phones, tilt their chins, turn and twist, finding their angles. I want to join in, but I’m distracted by an icy cold on my gums. I run my tongue over the chill, and it, too, is freezing. The taste is so strong that Lily must be close. Closer than she can possibly be.
“Rose,” says Lara Bax. “Are you going to take a photo?”
“I have to pee,” I say, standing, retreating from the reading room. The chill in my mouth grows colder. Colder. My teeth start to chatter like a cheap toy, and I hold my arms around myself. Marco Polo. Sister Missed-Her. The bathroom door is ajar, a light on. I knock.
Lily’s voice calls, “Occupied!”
My whole body is ice. I push the door wide, and there is Lily, back pressed up against a floor-length mirror, which is shattered, the glass turned spiderweb with cracks. I can only imagine the force with which Lily’s body hit it. I wince. The way the Waist Tamer is the only thing she is wearing. The way her legs are wrapped around Phil Bright’s waist, their bodies folded together, origami, both of them naked, wet with sweat, moaning like wild creatures.
Lily cries out in orgasm or terror.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” I say.
Then, before Lily can respond, before she can even remove Phil’s dick from herself, I am gliding down Lara Bax’s pastel-colored hallway, head light, helium-filled, out into this symmetrical suburbia, away, into the evening, alone.
I watch from up here, I watch as I walk, my body is so small, so small down there.
2011 (22 years old—Lily: 230 lbs, Rose: 65 lbs)
Jemima, who was Mim now, ate, vomited, and flushed. That was her latest method of thinness. She liked flavors too much to quit food, she told me. And she was addicted to chewing, she said. But she hated the feeling of any weight in her gut, and she was a talented purger. She didn’t even need to use fingers; just a single unsanitary thought was enough to fold her over the toilet bowl.
“Don’t start,” she said, as we sat outside the office, smoking lazily, faces to the sun in the hopes of feeling some kind of warmth. “It’s not worth it.”
“Purging?”
“My throat hurts all the time. My mouth always tastes of sick. And, because I purge so often, because my body is so used to it, sometimes food comes up even when I don’t want it to.”
“Why don’t you stop?” When I realized what I’d said, I laughed. “Sorry,” I said. “That was stupid.”
“It’s kind of like porn, you know?”
I shook my head.
“Like, right before you watch, it’s exciting. And while you’re masturbating to it, it’s great. But afterward, after you’ve come, and the porn stars suddenly look hideous and the sex becomes feral and the sounds are too loud and too awful. You know?”
I didn’t. I nodded.
She smiled. She loved to be understood. “Who are you?” she said, running a fingertip down my cheek like a tear.
“Who am I? What do you mean?”
“I want to know you. I’m trying to know you. You’re hard to know. I mean, it’s hard to know who you are.”
I felt the blush rising, filling me. I couldn’t answer the question. I didn’t know, either. Instead, I redirected. “Who are you?” I said, but it wasn’t the same thing. She was so Jemima Gates, there was no question about it. Like someone pretending not to recognize George Clooney. Everyone knows George Clooney is George Clooney. Jemima Gates was Jemima Gates.
In 1903, Horace Fletcher’s diet gained traction after he lost forty pounds by simply chewing his food more than normal. He called it Fletcherizing, the act of chewing each bite until it became a liquid and then swallowing it in sips. The diet was followed by celebrities, including John D. Rockefeller and Mark Twain. Fletcher became a millionaire off its prominence.
His advertisement: Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate!
Mim was a part-time model, but she didn’t need to be. Her grandmother’s ’90s workout, Absolute Abs: A Workout for Women, paid serious royalties. Women everywhere had the Absolute Abs VHS, wore neon-colored leotards in front of their television sets as they watched Mim’s grandmother squeeze a hundred crunches and a hundred push-ups and a hundred bicycles into just fifteen minutes. “Get abs like these in just thirty days or your money back!” she said at the start of the video. She knew no one could keep up with her for thirty days. She was selling an unreachable dream.
We were fast friends, this new Mim and me. Which is to say, we fasted together. Every day, as soon as five o’clock seeped in, she appeared at my desk, dinged the bell like a customer, and held her palm out flat for a tampon. I would take two from the drawer, one for me, one for her, and we’d store ourselves in the bathroom’s disability stall, dousing the tampons in whichever liquor she’d siphoned into her flask that day.
Once we were happy and drunk, she’d take me dancing. It was early evening, but she knew places that were good and dirty in the daytime. Strip clubs and sports bars, mostly, where men became their most feral selves given one of two vices, naked women or ball sports. We took to the floor even when the place was empty, and she twirled me, I held her, she rocked me, I pressed against her, she kissed me, I kissed her.
We danced until a manager saw us as the centerpiece of his bar, entertaining the men, spiking sales, and he would turn the music up as loud as it would go. We wound around and around each other, Mim and me, climbing plants, clinging and weaving and spinning, twisting, binding ourselves together like neighboring ivy. We were one on the dance floor. A we and an us.
We tired quickly, of course, given our malnourishment. As soon as the liquor haze sharpened into reality, we grew bored of the tacky floor sticking to our stilettos, the men whose gazes were Velcroed to our very fabrics. Mim’s helmet of dark hair stuck to her wet-hot face like a cartoon and mine, long and scraggly, matted. We leaned against each other on our clumsy limp home, delirious with the slow burn of hunger and dancing. When I caught sight of us in shop windows, I could hardly tell who was who.
After work, one day, Mim brought me to her support group. “Come,” she told me as we both slipped vodka-wet tampons inside ourselves during lunch. “You’ll love it, babe. It’s such a community feel. You know?”
I didn’t know. At that point, I was almost entirely alone. My father barely noticed me, his diminishing daughter. My twin was at university, earning friends and learning how to be human. I didn’t have any people of my own.
I agreed to go to the support group, despite not knowing what, exactly, was being supported, because I missed belonging to something, someone. Twins were not made to be alone.
Mim’s group wasn’t so much a group as it was two girls who also had severe
eating disorders and clung onto Mim like lint. We met at a coffee shop and ordered peppermint tea in the hopes of taking a shit.
The girls turned when Mim and I walked in. They were stick-figure thin and hunched over the table like a couple of scarecrows on a coffee date. They waved us over, grinning, manic.
“Mim!” said one, her eyes bulging like bubble wrap against her shrunken face. “And Rose Winters? Hey, girl, it’s been a while.”
My judgment eased into recognition. Lauren, Mim’s lead minion from high school, looked terrible, a neglected tire, shrunken, flattened, a dead version of the preppy girl I had known.
“Lauren,” I said. “Wow, hi.”
“Lin,” said Lauren. “I go by Lin now.”
I nodded and turned to the second girl, said, “Hi, I’m Rose.”
Her eyes were closed and she was slumped in her chair, but I could see the slow rise and fall of her thorax-like rib cage.
“That’s Flee,” said Mim. “She’s mid-fast. Excuse her.”
“Last night I was so hungry, and I really thought I was gonna cave,” said Lauren. No, Lin. It seemed that she was talking to me. “But then I looked at Mim’s latest campaign, that beach photo shoot,” she winked at Mim. “And I didn’t do it. I just took one of my mum’s sleeping pills and . . .” She clicked her fingers to show suddenness. “Out like a light. I wasn’t even hungry when I woke up.”
“I had a hard week, too,” said Flee, suddenly wide awake. Her voice was just the outline of one. Weak and perforated. “My parents wanted to check me into some kind of crazy clinic, so I ran away from home. Ended up at this gross women’s shelter. It’s disgusting, so dirty, but, like, there’s a bed and there aren’t any rules. No one watches what I eat, and you should see the food they serve. Powdered mashed potatoes and sausages every night. It’s easy to keep ana in there.”