When she finally returns to the table, she tells me that she refuses to stay here. “I’ll move in with Abby until you’re ready to leave. I can’t believe Mommy said all that shit in front of everyone. Like HELLO, I’m here for Christ’s sake. She is so fucking out of control. I can’t believe it. There’s no way I’m staying here.”
“She didn’t mean it,” I say. “And it will only be for a few weeks. Listen, Shelly, I feel like an asshole for what I said before.”
“Sometimes you are, Frannie.”
“Well I’m saying I’m sorry, okay? Forgive me?”
My mother places a slice of coffee cake in front of her. “Sorry, honey.” She pushes the plate in front of me. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“Would you like some more dessert, Daddy?” I ask my father, but he’s staring into space. “Dad?” He looks at me like he has no idea who I am. “Coffee?”
“Uh, no thanks,” he says dreamily. “I’ve had more than enough.” He gets up without looking at anyone. I suddenly feel really badly for him, but I don’t know what to do, so I just sit there.
My grandfather hobbles toward the bathroom. “You people are all meshugeh,” he says. “All this bickering can drive a person to the nuthouse.”
“Grandpa,” Shelly says. “This place is a nuthouse. Here, let me help you.”
My mother puts her hands on my shoulders. “Do you think I was out of line?” she asks. I shake my head. “It’s just that your father drives me crazy sometimes. I should have said something a long time ago. You understand, don’t you, honey? I am not the crazy one here.” She walks out of the kitchen, shaking her head. “I am NOT the crazy one.”
Left alone, my stomach is in knots. I look at the clock, my eyes misty. Ten forty-seven. There’s a split-second interval between the act of looking at the clock and the act of pulling out the ice cream that I can’t recall. But the next thing I know, I’m shoveling it into my mouth. The ice cream is soft and luscious and I’m filled with a gentle lift, a sweet release, and the creamy coldness slides down my throat and absorbs all my tears. I am soothed for a second so I eat another spoonful and then another, then jam my fingers into the leftover coffee cake, digging through the layers of crumby topping and flaky dough to get at the cherry filling. I stick my finger, bloodred with filling, into my mouth and suck on it. Then I cram a chunk of the cake into my mouth, but this time, I don’t taste it. Nor do I taste the baked potato or the turkey or the string beans or the milk I use to wash everything down. When I look at the clock it is ten fifty-two. Everything forgotten, I ruminate about how much I ate. Although totally stuffed, I’m not the least bit surprised that my heart flutters in my chest as if I’m as hollow as a tube.
I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. My tongue is thick in my mouth and my head feels weighted with a food hangover. I lie in bed and hug my bloated, distended rickets belly. I’m so full and so nauseous, I go into the bathroom and gulp water from the faucet. I kneel on the floor, lean over the toilet, and stick my finger down my throat, but I’m tired of fighting, and can’t resurrect the energy to make the food come up.
I crack open Shelly’s door and tiptoe into her room. “I’m sorry, Shelly, for what I said before. About you being Wonder Woman.” I wait for her to say something, but she doesn’t. There is a medicinal smell permeating the air, and it’s difficult to breathe. I don’t know where the smell is coming from until I see an open bottle of rubbing alcohol on Shelly’s nightstand. I want to put the cap back on the bottle to make the smell go away, but I can’t find it.
I walk over to the bed. Shelly’s wearing a white T-shirt and the moonlight shining through her window casts shadows of the blinds across the bed, illuminating her body. One hand is flung over her chest, as though covering her heart.
I lean in to tell her I’m sorry again when I notice a wadded paper bag. I tingle with anxiety as I uncrumple the bag that held my mother’s tranquilizers. My eye catches an empty vial on the floor and heat spreads through me, lifts me, makes my head pound and my eyesight fuzzy, and I’m perspiring as I shake my sister’s hand and listen for the sound of her breathing. But the only breathing I hear is my own panting and I start to yell for my mother, “MOM, IT’S SHELLY, COME, MOMMY, PLEASE?” and she rushes in and I point at the bed, my hand covering my mouth in horror. I can’t breathe and I can’t swallow and I watch, suspended in time, time that moves so quickly but feels like slow motion. My mother sticks her fingers into my sister’s mouth and against her neck, then bends over and presses her mouth against Shelly’s and exhales so loudly, I can hear her trying to force her own breath into my sister’s. But nothing happens, so she shakes her head, and covers her mouth with her hand, just like me, and yells, through her fingers, for my father.
Suddenly all the lights are on and my father, who is so weak when it comes to opening jars, actually lifts my sister from her bed and rushes her down the stairs. We should call 911, I say or I think I say, but my father says, “NO, girls, there’s no time, we have to go NOW.” David, my mother keeps calling his name, over and over, David, David, David, what is happening? Is she breathing? David? Why isn’t she breathing? My mother is actually talking to him, addressing my father in a frantic, plaintive voice I’ve never heard before. David, David. Help her, David. And suddenly he’s the strongest man I’ve ever seen.
My mother follows close behind, but for one split second, and it is this split second that I will always remember, she turns to me and without any warning, my mother, my mother, who is so self-controlled with her perfect nails and perfect hair, opens her mouth and lets out a howl so full of anguish that I feel it travel through me. I force her down the stairs, saying softly, “Come on, Mom. We can do this. One step at a time. Hold on.” Shelly is slack in my father’s arms. This, I will learn, is one of the very last images I have of my sister alive. Her head is thrown back and her parted lips form a gaping hole, but Shelly, unlike my mother, has no sound at all coming out of her mouth.
PART TWO
THE DANCING STAR
13
When my grandmother died, it was very sudden. She had a heart attack at the kitchen table. The story became very undignified as it was passed around the family, and we all had a nervous laugh when we told it. Apparently the attack hit just as she swallowed, so the paramedics had to fish a piece of bran muffin out of her mouth, which for some reason, my grandfather saved. He rode in the ambulance with the muffin chunk wrapped in a paper towel that was soggy with her saliva, and refused to give it to anyone except my mother, whose flight from New York to Florida was delayed, and who didn’t arrive until hours later. The funeral was sad, certainly, but it was altogether different from Shelly’s. There was nothing funny about Shelly’s funeral. My sister was twenty-four, ninety-eight pounds, and buried by her parents.
“Frannie, honey, wake up,” my father calls from the bottom of the stairs. “I’m going shopping. Do you want anything?”
I curl up carefully on my side. When I made my bed, I pinned the sheets so I won’t kick off the covers when I thrash in my sleep. If I move too quickly, the pins snap open and stick me, so I sleep with my arms close to my body. My sheets are faded and soft and when I lie here, I feel like I’m carpeted in flower petals. I’m trapped in my bed, but I like it this way.
“Frannie, answer me. I’m leaving.”
Two months ago, my mother put my grandfather in a nursing home and moved into her own apartment. Ever since then, I’ve had a fantasy. My father and I are on the golf course. I bend my knees, pull back, and drive the ball into the fairway. We both shield our eyes as we watch the ball sail through the air. But the best part is when I get home. My father had a queen-sized bed delivered that is so big, it takes up half my room. I lie in it spread-eagle, and realize that someone is in it with me. “Frannie?” Shelly whispers. “It’s me. I’m here.”
“Answer me, please. I’ve got a million things to do today.”
I don’t know why I fantasize about golf. I’ve never played in
my life, but I wish my father would teach me. I brought up an ancient set of clubs from the basement. He didn’t say anything, so now they’re propped against the refrigerator, and I’m sure they’ll just stay there until the cleaning lady moves them. If she didn’t come once a week, my father and I would just sit in our own shit until the Board of Health came to cart us away.
I pick up my phone and dial the line downstairs. From my bedroom, I can hear my dad rush through the kitchen. I hear a loud bang. “Hello?” He breathes heavily into the phone.
“What fell?” I ask, knowing.
“I banged into the damn clubs. Why are they here?”
“I want to learn how to play,” I mutter.
“It’s really not a good idea to leave them in the middle of the kitchen, honey. Someone could break their necks. Hey, Frannie.” He brightens as if the thought just occurred. “It’s a beautiful day out. Why don’t you come take a ride with me?”
“And sit in the car like some kind of dog? I don’t think so.”
“Come on. It’ll be fun.” His voice is loud and overbearing as though I’m a potential client. If he didn’t sound so gleeful, I might consider spending some time with him if only to be with another living person, but I can’t stomach his false happiness. I cannot be with him when he’s yapping about how great business is, how tan he got, and how good it feels to be alive. I don’t care how good he feels. The only thing I care about is Shelly.
“Come on. I’ll buy you lunch. A turkey sandwich for my favorite roommate?”
I flinch. “Shelly loved turkey sandwiches, Daddy, not me.”
He’s quiet a second. “Well, then, I’ll buy you whatever you want.”
“No, thanks. I’m not hungry. Daddy, do you realize that it’s almost been a year since Shelly checked herself into St. Mary’s?” I know what I’m doing, how awful I sound, but I can’t help myself.
“Frannie, I don’t have time to stand around.” He’s getting edgy which makes me know that it’s working. “Just get out of bed and take a ride with me. It’s glorious out.”
“You’ve already given the weather report. I’m staying here. I have things I need to do.”
“But you’ll be home for dinner?” he asks anxiously. “You have to eat, Frannie.”
“I know, Daddy,” I say as if he’s the biggest fucking idiot. “I eat.” Neither of us says anything for a few long seconds.
Finally he tells me he has to go. “Frannie,” he says. “Have a great day. Ciao, honey.”
Daddy, I tell him silently, wishing he hadn’t said “Ciao” like a geriatric Italian playboy, go fuck yourself. Lying back, I can hear the sound of the garage door opening, his car roaring out of the driveway, and his two honks of goodbye. I nestle my nose into the pillow and sigh heavily. I love my bed. Thank God I have somewhere to be all day.
It’s been five months since Shelly died. I try to deal with her death as something final, but I can’t. Every time I think about her, gaunt and hunched over, inspecting a string bean, tears cloud in my eyes like filmy contact lenses. The only way I can comfort myself is to imagine that she’s on a tropical island, baking in the sun, planning to come home as soon as she runs out of money.
Her last few days were excruciating. We rushed her to the emergency room at Northside, the hospital closest to Lindsey Point. They pumped her stomach, but her weight was so low, she lapsed into a coma and they had to move her into intensive care. We gathered outside the glass. Chubby came to visit and stood with my mother for hours at a time, looking at my sister hooked up to tubes and machines. “She’s young,” Chubby said, taking my mother’s arm. “She’ll fight.” I couldn’t look at her, so I focused on everything else in the room: the feeding tube, the blinking lights, the monitors above her bed. I don’t remember what I thought during that time, but I do know that it never occurred to me that she was going to die. If I had thought that even once, I wouldn’t have been able to look at her. The entire scene was very intimidating, and it gave me respect for Bryan Thompson. I guess when you’re forced to deal with this type of thing all day long, you have to be an asshole in real life. For most of the week, I wished he was around. I even tried to call him from a pay phone in the lobby. I didn’t know what I was going to say, but I needed to hear some random guy’s voice, pretending he cared. But the second I heard his voice, I started to cry and hung up. He knew it was me, I’m sure, but for once, I didn’t care.
My mother slept in the hospital in a chair next to Shelly’s bed. My father came every day with my grandfather, who spent most of his time in the cafeteria. I sat with Grandpa Max and held his hands while he ate bowls of tapioca pudding. “She’s such a beautiful girl,” he kept repeating. “Why does this happen to such beautiful girls?”
“She’ll get better, Grandpa,” I said. “She’s just resting to give her body strength. Shelly’s a fighter, Grandpa. She’s just too thin.”
“Ach,” he said, swallowing his pudding. “Fat, skinny, fat, skinny, girls girls girls. What does it matter?” Spittle formed on his lips. “Your grandma…Grandma wasn’t all skin and bones. She had meat on her. But she was beautiful, kiddo.” He started choking. I patted his back until he caught his breath. “But no one asked how much she weighed. No one. ‘Adoring wife, loving mother.’ Not her weight, not ‘too fat.’” At first, I didn’t know what he was talking about. And then I realized he was referring to the engraving on her headstone.
“Marsha,” my father said to my mother at one point, “come sit down, you look exhausted.” Like a dutiful child, she sat in a chair next to him and he put his arm around her. Then she buried her face in the crook of his arm. Without saying anything, I sat in the chair next to her and she put her arm around me. I cried until I was gasping, thinking that this was the closest we’d ever come to being a real-life family.
Lonny and Mavis stayed close to my parents all week. It was weird at first since they’d never been a foursome before, but Aunt Lillian, Uncle Monte, and my cousin Beth carried on like they were at some primitive satanic spirit-raising, so it was a blessing that my parents had the Friedmans around. Mavis kept saying that our two families should take a vacation together next summer. “It will be fun. Maybe we’ll go to the Bahamas, just to get away.” Chubby came every day, too, and for a few fleeting hours, I thought she was a really great person. I loved everyone during those three days, and I kept telling people over and over until I guess I got annoying and my father asked me to please stop.
It scared me how everything was suddenly reduced. Shelly was in a little room in a little bed, being kept alive by machines. At the foot of the bed, there was a chart that gave her vital signs. It didn’t say how sincere she looked when she smiled, how much she loved turkey sandwiches with onions, that she could have gone to Harvard. She, too, was reduced to a temperature, a heart rate, and a pulse that got fainter by the day.
My mother looked bad—her hair was never combed, her gray roots grew out, and her face was stripped of makeup. I tried to make her change out of her warm-up suit, but she wouldn’t. She spent time reading aloud to Shelly, talking to Johnny Bennet at her office, and making lists. And taking a lot of medication. I tried to be around her as much as I could, but it seemed impossible for her to focus on anything, even me. Or maybe especially me.
“She looks so cold,” my mother said to me when we were alone in Shelly’s room. “Do you think she’s cold? I’ll get another blanket for her.”
Left alone with my sister, I placed a hand on her ashen face, careful not to touch the tube in her mouth. I waited for her to open her eyes and apologize for sleeping so long. I have been a bad sister, I thought. I should have come to St. Mary’s more, I should have talked to you more. And you were right: I don’t know you. You never did tell me what happened with Therman. Or when you lost your virginity. It was with that fat guy with the curly hair, wasn’t it? The guy from Camp Galaxy you were so embarrassed about. “You shouldn’t have been embarrassed even if he was a Rat Boy,” I said out loud. “I’m your
sister. Sisters don’t care.”
Shelly’s doctors said that they wouldn’t have worried about her pulling through, but she’d destroyed her resistance. “She would have been fine,” one told us quietly. “We got the pills out of her system in time, but she’s only ninety-eight pounds. She doesn’t have much to fight with. When she gets out of here, she needs to go right back into St. Mary’s and finish her treatment.”
“Her insurance ran out. And I’ll be damned if I send her back to that place,” my mother said sharply.
The doctor flipped through Shelly’s chart and shook his head. “She needs to go somewhere.” His voice softened. “This is the anorexia, Mrs. Hunter. It’s not the pills.” When my mother and I were alone, she told me the doctor was afraid of the damage Shelly may have done to her heart, to her kidneys, as well as to her brain. “He treated another girl with anorexia last week,” my mother explained. “She weighed sixty-two pounds. Sixty-two pounds!” I asked my mother what happened to her. “She had complete organ failure,” my mother rasped, her voice thick. “She died in her sleep.”
God, you fucked yourself over, Shelly, I thought, pulling the sheet up. But I couldn’t shake a nagging feeling that all of this had something to do with me. “Shelly, listen, about dinner, you know, the Wonder Woman crack I made. Well I didn’t mean it. I never mean half the shit I say. I’m just jealous, okay? You know that, don’t you? I’ve always been jealous. I mean you’re smarter than me, you’re so much prettier, you can be anything. I’m just a loser. Once you get out of here, we’re going to start over. We’re going to spend all of our time together and really get to know each other. But if you could just forgive me, I think I’d feel better. Just give me a sign. Here.” I grabbed her hand. “Press my hand.” She didn’t move. “Shelly, I can’t stand to feel these things without you saying it’s okay. Shelly, God, I’m going crazy. I…I…you know.” I started to choke. “I love you.” There was no sound but the hum of the machines. “Just say it, for Christ’s sake, Shelly. Come on, just fucking forgive me already!”
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