by Diana Clarke
The thin girls welcome me when I arrive at the facility to ask about Kat. They cheer like I’m a celebrity at a parade. They have no idea I faked my recovery, and, if they find out that I cheated, they’d respect me, and they’d want to know how. If they believe I’ve recovered, they’d respect me, and they’d want to know how. They are all so generous! Too generous! They are one another’s best support systems and worst enablers. This is their toxic friendship. Interdependent and cannibalistic.
“Rose,” they cry. “Rose, it’s you. Rose, you came back. Rose, you remembered us.” Their thin arms reach for me like sirens at sea. I am pulled into their huddle and drowned in their bones. Their hugs are sharp and I let them hold me, let them hold on to the hope that they, too, might be allowed back into the world one day.
“You look great,” they say. “Not any bigger at all,” they manage to splutter before the nurses hush them. No body talk is allowed in the common room, or anywhere within the facility’s white space. They are all meant to act as if they don’t have any bodies at all. Treat one another like incorporeal beings. A bunch of spirits collected in a room. Protect your own peace.
“Kat,” I whisper, when their clamoring quiets down. “What happened?”
Their eyes fall to the floor, tongues lick dry lips, they swallow. It’s a relief to call the thin girls a they instead of a we, to exclude myself from their plurality.
“She was using extra weights,” one of the girls whispers, and when I look up, it’s Sarah, her cheeks gaunt as a corpse. “More than she needed just to maintain. The nurses thought she was gaining. They cut back her CalSips. She was zeroing out.”
Zeroing out is the point thin girls get to, the goal, when they can survive on no calories at all. When air is all they consume. They become plants, hoping to photosynthesize, living off only the light.
“Sarah?”
Sarah smiles. “I missed you.”
“Sarah, you look—”
“You too,” says Sarah. She reaches for my hand, and hers is all bones. When our fingers entwine, I lose track of whose are whose. We are identical. I swallow. I look at Sarah, too thin, a dead girl. I swallow. This is not what I want.
A tiny funeral: the girls begin to compliment Kat, like tossing flowers on a grave, they decorate the dead with their words. “She was so good,” they say. “So smart and funny.” They say, “She seemed to be getting better for a while!” And “She seemed happy.” “She had such a pretty smile,” they say.
Humans are not the only species to romanticize the dead. Elephants, too, touch passed peers with their trunks, have been seen spreading leaves over bodies, a shroud of foliage and shrubbery. They stand over the corpse for days, weeping together, remembering only the good.
“I taught her,” I eventually say. “About the weights.”
“Oh.” The thin girls rest knuckles on my back. They stroke, up and down my laddered spine, vertebra by vertebra, running a stick along a xylophone. “It’s not your fault,” they whisper. “Any one of us could’ve done it,” they say. “We all taught one another that trick.”
One thin girl, a middle-aged woman who has been in the facility for many years, says, “I taught you the trick back when you were new. I will take that burden.”
I barely recognize her.
“We all would have done it,” say the girls.
“I was the one who suggested we use the weights to gain weight, rather than just maintain,” says Sarah, a whisper. “We’ve been doing it together. Zeroing out.”
I hold her fingers. A collection of toothpicks. There’s a silence as the room looks at Sarah. “It wasn’t your fault.” The support resumes. “Was not your fault,” the girls say. “It was everyone’s fault. Our fault. We. Us. Don’t feel so bad.”
And I do feel better, even though I know I shouldn’t. It’s no wonder being part of a community is so popular: no one ever has to take the full blame when your existence is part of a plural. With the thin girls offering to remove my guilt, I feel supported, lighter, like I just might be able to continue to live with the fraction of responsibility I am left to bear.
Statistically speaking, queer women are twice as likely to develop an eating disorder as straight women. We think we can exorcise desire by famine. We think we can starve that sin out.
Statistically speaking, identical twins are 33 percent more likely to develop an eating disorder than single-born children. There has never been a time when we haven’t been compared to another.
Dear YourWeigh Woman,
Thank you for joining me at a YourWeigh session last night, and congratulations on taking the first step toward loving yourself! I hope you left feeling lighter, happier, and, most important, at peace!
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Be kind to yourself today. You deserve it!
xoxo,
Lara Bax
2013 (24 years old—Lily: 277 lbs, Rose: 60 lbs)
I had already been an inpatient for months when Sarah was checked in to the facility. She was still acne-ridden, potholed as a rural road, and the youngest of us by far. Seventeen, the nurses had whispered, and we had overheard. They tutted, and we wept. Seventeen was so young to be fighting this food fight.
Sarah didn’t speak for days. In group sessions she sat on the floor in the corner instead of at the communal table; she clutched her legs to her chest as if we might steal her most precious commodities: her gnarled and knobbly knees.
“Why don’t you come sit up here with us, Sarah?” the group leader tried. “We’re learning to flirt with our food.”
Sarah’s eyes only seethed.
“Okay,” said the group leader with a shrug. “Stay down there if you want. But feel free to join us at any time. The only thing you can control is your own joy. Now, girls.” She turned to us. “Try winking at your food.”
My food of the day had been an orange. The pucker of its pedicel made me gag. I hadn’t liked oranges even before I grew to fear them. I hated their bitter, leathery exterior. Didn’t trust them. What did they have to hide with that gross skin? As the other thin girls seduced their food, I took my orange and crouched next to Sarah.
“Look,” I said, taking a pen from my pocket, one I had been using to underline difficult words in my Insects book, and drew a pair of eyes above the fruit’s hole. I drew a nose, eyebrows, ears, even. “Look,” I said again, sticking my finger into what was now the orange’s mouth. Sarah smirked. I took the slight break from her fury as a win.
That night, she was forced to drink her first CalSip. I heard her shouting, retching, slapping skin, the nurse’s, and I knocked on her door. “Hello?” I said.
“Get out,” she hissed.
“I’ll help her,” I said to the nurse, who eyed me suspiciously, but also cradled the already blooming hit spot on her cheek. Sarah had broken skin and a little drool of blood dripped from the nurse’s chin. “I’ll make sure she drinks it while you go sort that out,” I said. “You can trust me.”
The nurse nodded and said, “I’ll be back in two minutes and it had better be finished. The whole thing. You hear?”
I nodded. Sarah smirked and kept her lips so closed they might as well have been sewn. “You drink half and I’ll drink half,” I told her when the nurse closed the door behind her.
“What?”
“Drink half of it and I’ll drink the other half.”
Sarah stared at my bones, glaringly obviou
s, overhanging cliffs. “Why would you do that for me?” she said.
“Because I want to get better,” I said. “And I want you to get better.”
“Why?”
I had never told anyone about Flee. About Mim and the pro-ana girls. Just remembering those days in the café, sharing starving techniques, left my gut ripe with nausea. But something about Sarah was desperate. If she had been Lily, I would have been able to taste her despair, a clinical fizz on the tongue like a pill dissolving. “I watched a girl nearly die,” I said. “I watched a girl starve herself almost to death not too long ago. She was admitted to the hospital. Her organs started to shut down and she was all alone. Do you want that?”
“No,” said Sarah, her voice falling flat.
“No one visited her,” I said. “In the hospital. The nurses wanted to call her family, but there was no one to call. She didn’t have a family anymore. She didn’t have friends. She had no one. She was nearly dead, and no one even cared. Do you want that?” My voice creaked and broke. I wiped wet from my eyes and answered my own question. “No,” I whispered.
“I don’t,” Sarah barely managed. “I don’t.”
“Good,” I said, clearing my throat of a swollen ache. “Now drink half before the nurse comes back. If you don’t finish the CalSip, they’ll just inject the calories intravenously.”
Sarah swallowed, inhaled, chugged her share of the drink, before passing it to me. I squeezed my eyes shut as I finished the rest, trying to think of anything but the extra calories.
“There,” I said, passing the empty container back to her. “Tomorrow you do three-quarters and I’ll do a quarter.”
“No fair,” said Sarah.
“Then do the whole thing yourself,” I said.
“No,” she said. “Sorry, I just . . . Okay. Thank you. Thank you.”
I dropped a handful of shower curtain weights into her hand. “Tie these into your hair,” I said. “For when you next get weighed. They’ll help you maintain.”
Sarah looked up at me, her eyes aglow, as if she were looking at something divine. “What’s your name?”
“Riz,” I said. “I mean Rose,” I said. And I left her playing with the weights, my stomach distended.
I wave goodbye to the thin girls, and Sarah walks me out.
“You have to stop,” I whisper when she hugs me goodbye. “Don’t do this to yourself.”
“I’ll stop when you do,” she whispers back. We separate and stare at each other. One girl and her reflection.
“I’ll stop,” I say. “I’ll stop. We’re not going to end up like Kat. I can stop. I’ll do it.” I mean it. “I’ll do it.”
Sarah nods. “We’ll do it,” she says.
When I kiss her cheek, it tastes of bare bone. The only options that exist for us thin girls. Die or be let go. Die or let go.
In the garden, where I spent so many morning walks, I catch sight of the thin men pacing the track that circles the perimeter. I take the metal bars that keep the garden private, or that keep thin people inside, pull a handful of ivy aside. Jram is walking with another thin man. He is talking animatedly. Gesturing wildly. He is talking about the most exciting thing in the world.
“Jram!” I shout, plunging my hand through the bars, through the ivy, waving. “Jram!”
He frowns at the dismembered arm poking through the fence. His expression is one of recognition that becomes one of dread. The pause in his monologue is fleeting. He returns to his conversation and walks past my now-limp arm as if he hasn’t seen me at all.
There is only one thing left to do. I walk to Lara Bax’s house.
“I want to get better,” I tell no one. The confession is frightening. No, I shout down to my body from where I am floating, my place in the heavens. You have no idea what you’re doing!
Dr. Matthew Anderson’s Prayer Diet insists that one might pray themselves into losing weight. There is a prayer for weight loss, a prayer for resisting cravings, a prayer for keeping the shed weight off. God counts calories, too.
Every hour, someone in the world dies as the direct result of an eating disorder. The way I swallowed Tic Tacs on the o’clock. This tiny tribute to those who starved themselves into nothing at all.
32
Despite walking slowly, I’m panting, my body aching, when I arrive at Lara Bax’s house. I knock, try to catch my breath. Lara Bax greets me with a hug. A patterned silk scarf tickles my cheek.
“You left last night,” she says. “I was worried about you!”
“I had to,” I say. “Sorry.”
“Are you okay, Rose?” Lara Bax frowns. “Your aura, it’s wilting.”
“Wilting.”
“Would you like to come in?”
I nod.
“Would you like a SkinnyGurt?”
I shake my head. I can’t eat until Lily lets me.
“Would you like a glass of water?”
I nod. I need to sit.
Lara Bax leads me to the kitchen, points to a bar stool, fills a glass from the faucet. I take it from her and sip. The water is good.
“Are you sure you don’t want a snack? You look . . . well, you’re shivering. It might be your blood pressure.”
I shake my head again.
“You don’t eat well, do you, Rose?”
I say nothing.
“Are you punishing yourself for something? Are you punishing your body?”
I say nothing.
“Have you tried going gluten-free?”
I could laugh. “That’s not the problem,” I say instead.
What I want to say: Your diet is dangerous.
What I want to say: You are the problem.
But something keeps me from confronting Lara Bax, from telling her what she is, what she’s doing to people like me. I had a whole speech prepared, one I’d recited and recited on the walk here, keeping myself conscious with the repetition. I was going to tell her about the harm her little faux-feminist Ponzi scheme was inflicting on the world, all the hashtags and the promotions and the zero-calorie everything and the diet facading as self-love. But being here, in her house, her hand covering mine with such tenderness, she looks so human in person.
“Is your husband home?” I say, redirecting.
“No. He’s at work. Why?”
“I need to talk to you. It’s about him. Phil.”
“He’s having an affair,” says Lara. “Yes. I suspected.”
“Yes.”
“I suspected,” she repeats.
“With my sister. With Lily.”
“I suspected that, too.”
“He hits her.”
Lara Bax nods. “Yes,” she says. “He can be . . . well, he has a temper.” That’s what we say when a man habitually inflicts physical harm on others. A temper, we say. A bit of a temper.
“Does he hit you?”
Lara Bax smiles. She tightens the knot of her scarf. “Let’s not make this about me,” she says, taking the empty glass from my grip and setting it in the sink. “This is about you. It’s so important that you learn to love yourself.”
I want to tug on the silk around her neck. I’m certain that, if I did, I’d find bruises in the very shape of Phil’s fingers.
“I’d like to read your chart,” says Lara Bax.
“What?”
“Your chart,” she says, clarifying nothing.
“When were you born?”
Whoever was meant to be born first wasn’t ready to be in the world yet. The smaller of the two bodies twisted herself sideways in the womb, blocked the exit, then moved to the side, letting the bigger baby pass. I’m sure that was Lily, barging into the world headfirst. Once she had taken her turn, I was left upside down. It’s called a breech, which always struck me as funny. As if I’d broken a contract with my mother by flipping around in the womb. I took a long time to emerge. I didn’t want to be here, in the world. I wasn’t ready.
“You’re a cancer,” Lara Bax says.
“That’s r
eally rude.”
“No,” says Lara Bax. “Your sun sign.”
“Oh, a Cancer,” I say. “Yeah.”
“It means you’re sensitive and nurturing. Deeply emotional. Committed to your relationships.”
“Sure.”
“Your moon is in Gemini,” Lara Bax says, her eyes skimming the chart quickly, her nose scrunching just slightly.
“Is that bad?”
“None of this makes you inherently bad,” says Lara Bax. “Astrology is a way of better understanding yourself. It doesn’t have to dictate anything you do, or anything you are.”
“Okay, I get it.” I pause. “But it’s a bit bad?”
Lara Bax laughs. “There is no bad,” she says. “That word means nothing here. Your moon being in Gemini means you’re often emotionally unsettled. It also means you want to create. You love creating meaning, significance. Art.”
“Art?”
“Do you draw?”
“No,” I say. “Not at all. Not even a bit.”
“Write?”
“No.”
“Well, maybe you just haven’t found your creative side yet. Let’s work on that. Why don’t you paint something right there?” Lara Bax points at a blank wall.
“But I’ve never—”
Lara Bax has already found a number of tubes of paint. Brushes. Even a palette.
“I’ve never painted.” But, even looking at that wall. At the colors Lara Bax has set up. At the brushes, all brand-new and lined in a row along the kitchen counter. I do want to paint. My fingertips itch. I want to make something big and important. “Okay,” I say. “Okay, I’ll do it.”