by Cyndy Etler
6
OCTOBER 1987
SEVEN MONTHS OUT
Lately, when I make it to class, the other kids laugh at me. But it almost seems friendly, because they’re laughing at stuff I say, as if they think I’m funny. Like, take chemistry class. First of all, why am I in chemistry? Isn’t there some ladder of science you have to climb to get to chemistry? Because I didn’t make it up that ladder. And second, my chem teacher looks like a troll, and she hates me. But I’m trying. I look at that big grid of letters, numbers, and atoms, and I try. But my teacher whips through these complicated formulas and then, without turning around, goes, “Okay. Test on this on Friday.” Then she sits down at her desk, like, I’m done with you students. Nobody gets it, but nobody will say anything!
So this one day, in the silence before she can pull out her chair to sit, I go, “I can’t…fathom this.”
And the whole class starts rolling. Like, there are claps. I freeze, face squinched and pencil on my notes, because what did I do? Why are these kids laughing at me? Am I in trouble?
I get my answer when Jack Pilgrim, the coolest, funniest kid in tenth grade, leans over three desks to pat me on the back. I get my other answer when the teacher screeches her chair across the floor, cutting through the laughter with, “Tutoring is after school until four thirty, Miss Etler. I’ll see you then.”
But I still don’t get it. What was so funny? And what was so bad? Are we not supposed to say if we’re confused?
Then, at driver’s ed, it happens again. The driver’s ed Poindexter is getting ten kinds of excited about Rule Number One: Never Take Your Eyes Off the Road. He’s so into it, his hair is whipping around like an eggbeater. And I’m taking him seriously, especially since he showed us those slides of crushed cars with bloody arms and legs sticking out, all bent the wrong way. He’s chanting it: “You never take your eyes off the road. Never, never ever take your eyes—” when it hits me that sometimes, you can’t help it.
Before I even know I’m gonna say anything, I go, “What if you sneeze?”
His hair falls still. “What?” he asks, leaning left to see me around the big boy in front.
I lift my mug to hide from him and everybody. “If you sneeze, your eyes close,” I say. “You can’t help it. You take your eyes off the road.”
You’d think I’m the Beatles, the way the class cheers. I’m like, the conquering hero. And the poor teacher has to push the button for the next slide and wait for everyone to shut up, because you can’t send kids to the principal on a Saturday morning. I feel so bad for him! But at the same time, I feel pretty great for me. ’Cause it’s almost like they like me. Is this how Jack feels every day of his life? No wonder he says he doesn’t need drugs to have fun.
But Jack is funny. Me? I’m not funny. I’m a weirdo who talks too much. And because I talk so much, some of the stuff that comes out happens to be funny. It’s a law-of-averages thing.
The class I don’t have to try in at all, though? Polly Skinner’s English class. English is the anti-chemistry. Listen to it: Englishhh. It sounds like a baby blanket. Even the G, the one hard letter, comes out sounding wrapped in cotton. Not like chemistry, which is all bullet sounds and angles. K! ISST! EE! Chemistry is the alphabet version of a teacher rapping chalk on the board.
English, on the other hand, is whole life lip balm. For that one period a day, I feel like my clothes fit. Nothing’s too tight, and nothing’s so baggy it makes me look fatter. My brain, my body, my personality—everything—feels like it’s okay.
Maybe it’s because in English, I don’t have to think about myself. Mrs. Skinner makes learning so interesting, you disappear into it. Here’s an example. She’s teaching us to be good writers and says we have to show, not tell, what we’re talking about.
She goes, “Think about Dial soap. It’s hard and orange and rectangular. It’s heavy in your hand. Can you feel it? Now, imagine someone takes away that Dial. They replace it with a bar of Dove soap. You can smell its perfume, can’t you? Run your thumb over the Dove. It’s soft as a cashmere sweater. Its edges are round and smooth as a woman’s body. Now, feel yourself stepping into a shower and wetting the Dove. Feel the thick bubbles, the way the bar glides over your skin. Smell the perfume as it mists up into your hair. STOP! Replace the Dove with the Dial. Ouch! Your faces look like babies who got their binkies stolen!”
That feeling, she says, is what we need to bring to our writing. We need to make our readers feel as sexy—she said it!—as we did with Dove and as angry as we did with Dial.
Even when she has us do bookwork and vocabulary, with gourmet words like lachrymose and hackneyed, Mrs. Skinner’s English class is paradise. My English homework doesn’t even feel like work. It feels like eating candy. I get 100% on my vocab quizzes every time.
Mrs. Skinner gave us a writing assignment over the weekend. It was simple: describe a person you’re seeing for the first time. That’s it. When we have to pass our papers forward, I see other people’s, and they all begin, like, “He is a tall man wearing a tie,” then a couple more paragraphs like that. Mrs. Skinner is flipping through the stack, walking to her desk, when she goes, “Oh.” She stops, and then she turns. “Class,” she says. “Listen to this one.” Then she reads it out loud.
Blue
Quick smile.
No words.
Black hair.
Two braids.
She doesn’t wear makeup
But if she did
She’d still be beautiful.
It’s about this girl I saw at my favorite CoDa meeting. I don’t know her name. I don’t even know why I called my paper “Blue.” Or even what the blue means. So it’s really kind of stupid. But Mrs. Skinner reads it out loud. And when she finishes, the class sits there, silent. Then Mia Esposito goes, “Wow.” And then the other kids do too.
“Whose is it?” Whitney Lambourne asks.
Before I can stop her with my eyes, Mrs. Skinner goes, “Cyndy’s.”
They’re all looking. At me. No Dunkin’ mug’s big enough to hide me from them all. Do they—do they like it?!
“Cyndy Etler?” says a guy’s voice, and I internally combust.
“Indeed,” says Mrs. Skinner.
And she puts down her stack of papers and picks up her teacher edition vocab book. And I sit there, wrapped in flames.
7
FEBRUARY 1988
ELEVEN MONTHS OUT
Okay, you won’t believe what happened over Christmas vacation. I got a whole new life! And it’s all thanks to Bitsy.
Bitsy is this lady at my Trumbull AA meetings. Everyone knows a Bitsy: She’s got that haircut and body that mean she’s super into tennis. She’s tan all the time. And she never smiles, but always looks like she’s smiling. That’s Bitsy.
Anyway, one night I’m at my meeting, telling everyone how I know I’m an alcoholic even though I only drank that one time. How grateful I am to be sixteen years old with two and a half years of sobriety. Bitsy is listening really hard, I can tell. After the meeting she comes over and grabs my hand, then rocket launches into all these questions like, Did I really only drink one time? Did I do any drugs? Where was this place I got sober?
I’m honest with her, but it’s a little scary, ’cause those creases in her face are getting deeper as I talk. I tell her what every Straightling knows: drugs don’t make the druggie. But that’s not the part she’s interested in.
She’s pulling a pad out of her purse and talking to herself, almost, like, “I would like to speak to your mother.” Then she looks at me extra hard. “Did your mother make this decision? To place you in this—rehab?”
I nod and start to say how Straight saved my life, but Bitsy cuts me off.
“Okay, Cyndy.” She anger-scribbles something on her pad, then rips off the page and hands it to me. “This is my number,” she says, tapping one tan finger on h
er name. “You don’t hesitate to call me. Night or day. I live nearby.”
I wish there were words written on those lines on her face. I want to understand what she’s really saying. We sit there kind of staring at each other for a sec; then she gets up and leaves.
Next time I see her, Bitsy seems pretty excited. She comes right up to me and says, “I want to tell you about another meeting I attend. It’s called Overeaters Anonymous. OA. I find the meetings to be very supportive.”
I sit there with my jaw dropped, because I just shared how I’m basically living on saltines, since the fridge is all moldy and it grosses me out.
Bitsy keeps talking. I’ll never forget her words, because it’s like she’s a fairy godmother.
“My husband makes money. I can afford to do something nice for you. Would you be interested in seeing a nutritionist? A doctor who can tell you what you should be eating, to be healthy?”
I close my mouth and nod without exactly understanding what I’m agreeing to. I’m still stuck on “money…do something nice for you.” I’ve never even imagined words like those.
“Would your mother take you?” she asks. “I’ll pay for the appointment ahead of time, but I can’t risk the liability of driving you myself.”
“Ummm…I’ll ask her?” I say.
“Great!” Bitsy says, like she’s pumped to spend her money on me. And then she’s gone, before I can even say thank you.
That was the beginning of my new life. I’ve basically switched to all OA meetings, but don’t think I’m not still a druggie and alcoholic. I’m just a food addict too. I got on the eating plan from this really tough food rehab in Florida, so it’s awesome. I know exactly what I’m allowed to eat and exactly what I can’t ever touch again in my life. Here’s how it goes:
Breakfast:
1 cup puffed rice OR ½ cup plain cooked oatmeal
1 cup skim milk
Lunch:
4 ounces plain meat
2 cups plain cooked vegetables OR 3 cups raw mixed salad
1 teaspoon margarine OR 1 tablespoon fat-free dressing
Dinner:
4 ounces plain meat
2 cups plain cooked vegetables OR 3 cups raw mixed salad
1 teaspoon margarine OR 1 tablespoon fat-free dressing
Plus I get as much plain tea or coffee and as much Sweet’N Low as I want. And that’s it. Easy, right? I have to be careful with salad dressings, because they can’t have sugar in the first five ingredients. And I can’t have any corn, peas, or potatoes. And of course no bread, crackers, cookies, cakes, ice cream, or candy. That stuff is a total drug for me.
The nutritionist gave me a way longer list of food I could eat, but I like the food rehab plan better, because it’s so obvious. It’s like riding on railroad tracks: all of the rules are set out for me in strong, hard lines. I can’t steer wrong and lose my food sobriety when there’re basically only three things I’m allowed to eat.
My druggie, foodie self still tries to win, though. Every day. Like, I’ll shake my puffed rice out of the bag into the measuring cup, and every time, when I look at the cup from the side, I’ve humped the rice too high. I have to dump it out and repour it, making sure it scoops inward, so I’m getting a little less than a cup. That’ll teach my druggie self to try to cheat.
The hard part is, my mother won’t buy food for me anymore, which she announces the night before Christmas vacation ends. She’s sitting at the table eating dinner when I go over to the grody fridge, which I have to use now, because my food plan has meat. I’m about to open it when she says, “I finished the hamburger.” You can hear the clock ticking because she knows, and I know, that what I say next had better be careful.
“But…that was for my dinners.”
“I’m aware of that, Cyndy. But you’re so self-sufficient now, with your OA meetings and your weight loss, I’ve decided to let you be in charge of your own groceries as well.”
There’s this movie called Mommie Dearest I saw back before Straight. It’s about an olden-days movie star who adopted a little girl and did really weird, cruel things to her. That movie pops back into my head as I stand there, paralyzed, with my hand on the open door of the fridge. I don’t have any meat to eat, and there’s only like a cup of lettuce left. But I’m starving! I gotta eat! Am I—am I going to lose my food sobriety? Maybe I could pick the noodles out of chicken noodle—
“Close that refrigerator door, young lady, unless you plan on paying the electric bill.”
The sickest part was when the movie star went in the girl’s closet and found her dresses on wire hangers instead of wood ones. She threw the dresses everywhere and beat that little girl with a hanger. My mother never hit me with a hanger, but still. I was hyperventilating as I fast-forwarded that scene.
Thank God, when my mother goes to bed, I find an old bag of green beans in the back of the freezer. I eat three cups of cooked vegetables instead of two that night, which is fucking scary. Talk about a slippery slope! But I tell myself that extra cup makes up for not eating any meat. And I get back at myself by not having any margarine.
Overall, though, our new system is working out okay. Here’s the deal: my mother gives me twenty-five dollars a month for groceries, so I can’t eat any of her food, but she can’t eat mine, either. And she lets me ride with her when she goes to the grocery store. I just pray that we get there before someone else snatches up the meat with the orange mark-down sticker. It’s gray instead of pink, and it smells funny, but it tastes okay after I fry it up with PAM. Otherwise, as long as I can find deep-discount generic frozen veggies and we go on double-coupon day, I can make the $6.50 a week cover everything.
If you think about it, she’s actually, like, repeating the Straight phases, weaning me off of dependence on her for my food sobriety. So she’s actually doing me a favor.
Except I might kill her over the Sweet’N Low. Do you know how much a box of that stuff costs? Almost half my monthly food allowance. And I use a lot of it, because it’s my free food. So how is it fair for me to come downstairs and find six empty Sweet’N Low packets from my new box in front of the coffeemaker?
When my mother gets home from work, I ask her that question. Okay, I scream it. She answers by opening the front door, telling me what an ungrateful brat I am, and inviting me to find another mother who will tolerate my druggie bullshit. So now I steal handfuls of Sweet’N Low whenever I go to the diner with people after meetings.
The one thing that’s scaring me, though, is maxi pads. Are maxi pads groceries? Because I totally just used my last one.
8
APRIL 1988
ONE YEAR AND ONE MONTH OUT
So I’m on a mission to not be the ultimate loser, right? And you wouldn’t think my food sobriety would help my case. I mean, kids look at you funny when they offer you a Tic Tac and you freak, like, “Oh my God, no. I can’t! Tic Tacs have sugar in them!” But actually, people seem to like me more since I started doing my food plan.
For example, Mr. Littberger. He must have been away at Dead shows or something, because I haven’t seen him subbing at school for months. Then yesterday he’s at the pay phones when I come in from the busses. When he sees me, he drops the phone and goes, “Whoa! Do you fool around?” Which makes me feel a little weird, because is that what the custom van is for? But still. Total compliment.
And in English class too. We’re reading A Streetcar Named Desire. Mrs. Skinner teaches drama the same way she teaches writing: when you walk in her room, you have to start pulling off clothes because it is 100-percent-humidity New Orleans. Mrs. Skinner is Blanche Dubois. You could drink her drawl like a milkshake.
I get to be Stella, and Mrs. Skinner’s a frigging mind reader, because she gives Jack Pilgrim the part of Stanley. We’re doing that scene where he’s drunk and locked outside, and even though we’re only reading, not acting it out, Jack
Pilgrim is Jack Pilgrim. He pounds up from his desk yelling, “Stelllll-ahhhhh!” while ripping open his shirt. I. Swear. To. God. You can see his belly button. I’m frozen, staring, and Mrs. Skinner goes, “You cannot ignore a man’s passion, Stella! Go to your husband!”
The stage directions say that I walk to him slowly, so that’s what I do—like, for Mrs. Skinner, I mean. The stage directions also say that Stanley goes on his knees, puts his arms around Stella’s middle, and puts his face on her hip. But even Jack Pilgrim isn’t that Jack Pilgrim. At least, not with his girlfriend in the room. He puts his arms around my neck though, and his face on my shoulder. Which turns me into soft serve. No boy ever put his arms around my neck before I got on my food plan. Not one.
Not that I even come close to Jack’s girlfriend, Whitney Lambourne. She’s as tall as he is, and he’s not short. And her hair makes her even taller. You know that hair band Poison? Her hair is totally the girl version. And she is skinn-nee. Her middle is the same size as my wrist. I know I’ve gotten skinnier thanks to OA, but…
Whitney’s a totally different type of pretty from Wendi Rosini, the other prettiest girl in our grade. Wendi has the kind of face you’d see on a museum wall in a fancy gold frame. Whitney’s face is more like you see in the drugstore on a box of hair dye. I don’t know which I’d rather be, but I get why Jack chose Whitney.
At the end of class, when I’m still melted ice cream from doing that scene with her boyfriend, Whitney comes up to me. The cheerleaders stop in the doorway to listen. But Whitney doesn’t even care.
“Hey, what are you doing Saturday night?” she asks.
“I’mmm…nothing?” I say, clenching my mug handle so tight, it’s gonna crack.