“Those are for the guys,” she said, “for later.”
“I know,” I said.
Her mother, who’d had her back turned, rinsing radishes at the sink, looked over and said, “It’s nice to be slender, dear.”
“I know,” I said, shrugging, a hot tunnel of dismay opening up in me. Until I had violated it, I hadn’t realized that there was a rule: women prepare the food but mustn’t eat it. Why hadn’t my mother taught me this?
Delight him, but don’t undo your diet.
How?
Pack a bilateral lunch.
His
2 slices baked ham: 290
1 cup barbecue beans: 220
1 dill pickle wedge: 15
2 tablespoons creamy mustard sauce: 115
½ cup coleslaw: 55
1 buttered roll: 125
3 spiced crab apples: 85
8 ounces lime soda: 105
Total calories: 1,010
Hers
1 slice baked ham: 145
2 dill pickle wedges: 30
2 teaspoons mustard: 20
½ cup coleslaw: 55
1 7-inch bread stick: 50
8 ounces diet soda: 1
Total calories: 301
Back in the ward, I’m torn between the desire to flop down on the bed, yielding to seasickness (motion, glucose, needles, blood), and the desire to pace endlessly, to use up the excess, to fill the head with one thought only: the next step, the next count. I’m still on an hourly watch, but in fifty-nine minutes I can pace a few miles (I think—my calculations may be wrong, I’m having a hard time keeping track of things, fixing my mind on a single thought). Every time I think of the glucose, a chilly panic speeds over me: how many calories could I have swallowed? More than a milk shake maybe (350 calories), more perhaps than a plate of fettuccine Alfredo (650 calories), more even than a—it’s hard for me even to think the words—a huge hot fudge sundae, slathered with whipped cream (cold, sweet, dark, hot, melting, orgiastic).
She had become cool and self-contained.
On the beach, she wore a large straw hat, as did her mother, who was sensitive to the sun and sat fully clothed under a beach umbrella, custodian of the lunch cooler. (Pâté, shrimp, grapes). I wanted to irradiate my pimples, so I lay face up, frying my skin in its own grease, with a white dab, clownish, on my nose.
Amanda Jane wore a pale blue bikini that was much more demure than my one-piece (which required a constant pubic hair watch and a quick dash out of the water, where it became rudely transparent). She read, much of the time, beneath her shady hat; I lay all day in a sun-drugged stupor, visited by vague erotic dreams.
She shaved her legs every morning. “It doesn’t take long,” she said, eyeing my slothful black stubble.
She washed her silky underwear each evening by hand.
She read Vogue, not Seventeen.
She didn’t “date” but was assembling a hope chest. She had already decided to marry her younger brother’s best friend.
She never, ever ate dessert.
Dessert was “for the men,” as well I knew, but at every meal that summer I held out my plate anyway, blankly. I stuffed in everything, whether I wanted it or not—apple pie with heavy cream, pineapple upside-down, vanilla custard, waffles doused with syrup, chocolate mousse, cookies of every kind (especially the tender shortbread that was served with tea), rum raisin ice cream, which I hated; something foamy and orangey, made with chunks of pure ginger, which I hated, too. The more I hated it, the richer and more sickly it was, the grimmer the pleasure with which I consumed it, silently, dourly, defiantly.
Naturally, I grew plumper and more hideous by the day.
“You’ve grown,” he said. “You’re becoming a big girl.”
Buttering my bread, I didn’t reply. What was there to say?
“It must be the sea air,” said my mother.
“And the good food,” said my father. “Those people certainly know how to live.”
“Well, they can afford it,” she said, a little sharply. He looked up briefly from his pork chop, eyebrows raised, his knife poised where it had been paring off the gelatinous rind.
I folded my slice of bread in half and stuffed most of it into my mouth. That should exempt me from further conversation. Hadn’t I been told never to talk with my mouth full?
When I got back from my trip, after my mother had waved off Amanda Jane and her parents with effusions of thanks (I was surly, lumpen), she had taken me aside. The last time she had drawn me into her bedroom like this, with an air of abashed secrecy, with the yellow afternoon light filtering through the shades, it had been to inform me of “the facts of life”—which Amanda Jane had been trying to get me to believe for years. Surely there weren’t more of them?
“Jo, I have something to tell you.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s about your father: he’s decided to quit his job.”
“Oh?”
“Well, you know, since the merger, he really hasn’t been happy working for AmInCor. They’ve been messing him around with this . . . you know, management restructuring and stuff.”
I nodded.
“So he decided to leave.”
“Does he have another job?”
“Not yet, but they’ve given him . . . I mean, he’s taking three months’ pay . . . in lieu of . . . well, he’ll have three months’ pay when he leaves, so that should give him plenty of time to look around.”
I shrugged. Three months seemed like a long time. I didn’t really know what my father did anyway—“management” conjured no image except that of his deserted, gray-carpeted office in a glass tower downtown, which, as a child, I had occasionally visited on weekends, entertaining myself with the magnetic paper clip holder. Since I didn’t really know what he did, it didn’t make any difference to me if he did something else.
I sensed a presence behind me and swiveled around.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he stammered, “I didn’t know you were here.”
“Try knocking next time,” I said, as I reached, too late, for a towel, shoulders bare, eyes smarting and blinded, the water still hissing and pounding, a violent wet din.
Some time later (a gap: I somehow found myself on the floor again), she comes in with a bowl of tiger lilies, adorned with an orange bow.
“For you,” she says. “They just arrived.”
I have absolutely no interest in these alarmingly vivid blooms, these alien, freckled creatures crowded menacingly in a glass tube.
“Here’s the card, Josie. Don’t you want to know who they’re from?”
“No. What difference does it make?”
“Come on, Josie, they’re lovely.”
“I don’t want them. They’ll just die.”
“But—”
“Take them away. They’re only going to die.”
“Aren’t you being a little unreasonable, Josephine?”
“Take them away, they’ll die, they’ll die, they’ll die, they’ll die,” I find myself repeating, with increasing desperation, my voice rising out of control, breaking and croaking.
She says nothing, but after a few seconds carries them out, her eyebrows raised significantly (except I’m not looking, I’m not reading her). I lie on the bed, rigid, with my eyes shut and my heart pounding, trying to control my breathing, which seems blocked by something at the back of my throat, so I can’t get a lungful of air.
When I can inhale again—hours later, it seems—I pick up the little envelope she left, with its elegant gray florist’s insignia. I rip it open. A small white card, inscribed in an unfamiliar hand, reads: “To our darling daughter— Hoping you’ll soon be well and strong again. With love from Mum and Dad.” Ordered over the phone, evidently. “Our darling daughter”? Don’t make me puke.
Lunch: Half a salad (with the egg slices and raw onion hidden at the bottom; dressing, since she insists, sprinkled on with a fork). Lettuce, tomato, green pepper, carrot, a few drops of oil (50 calories). On
e quarter of a roll (25 calories). One sliver of a wedge of Cheddar (25 calories). About half a glass of apple juice, diluted with water (50 calories). There are also two oatmeal raisin cookies (100 calories), but, new regime or no new regime, I can’t bring myself to take a bite. Cookies, cake, chocolate, and other sweets—avoid them like Satan! She refuses to remove the tray until I do, so I just break them into smaller and smaller pieces, hoping I’ll arrive at one tiny enough to put into my mouth without tasting. To a sugarholic, even a taste can start a binge.
Looking up from her newspaper, she says: “Don’t play with it, Josie, just eat it.”
“Cookies are unhealthy,” I say. “Sugar, fat, white flour. This nutritionist doesn’t seem to know much about nutrition.”
No response.
“I said, this nutritionist doesn’t know shit about nutrition.”
She ignores me. I look down at the tray, suppressing a wild urge to hurl it across the room. The longer it stays here, the more powerfully it works on me, compelling me to yield and cram myself full.
To make her take it away, I pick up a cookie crumb (less than one calorie, surely?) and place it on the middle of my tongue, away from the sugar receptors. Then, terrified, I start adding up the calories I’ve consumed.
Grand total: at least 200. Total time: 53 minutes. That’s it: I’m not eating again today.
I feel bloated, sickened, miserable, my belly bulging tightly.
Suddenly, in a panic, I ask her, “Tell me the truth: am I fatter than the normal person?”
8
“STEP RIGHT UP,” she says. “Uh-uh,” she says, “facing me.”
I turn around on the platform, more like a drunk than a dancer, and confront my audience (of one). Something is fizzing through me: stage fright. I try to step down, but she blocks my exit, stranding me there, visible, alone.
Something is going on behind my back.
Dr. Frog has decreed that I am to be weighed facing away from the scale; they’ll tell me, he says, when I have reached the middle of the “target weight range.”
“What’s that?” I bleat.
But they won’t say. “Trust us,” they say.
So I stand here paralyzed, blind to the news behind me, my bare feet cadaveric on the metal slab. I’m shivering; I hug myself and dig my fingers between the ribs, reassured by how bare they feel, as if there were nothing but bone beneath this robe.
Then I hear the nurse slide the marker along the scale. Fear ascends hydraulically in my throat and, without planning to, I spin around. Too late: anticipating me, she’s already pushing it back toward zero. Then she makes an annotation on a chart, shielding the file with her writing arm (she’s left-handed, a crab writer, I notice for the first time).
“Tell me,” I say.
“Josie,” she says, “you just have to trust us.”
“But I don’t,” I say. “Why should I? You’re a total stranger, like everyone else. Tell me,” I whine. “Tell me.”
But she won’t. I start to whimper. What right do they have to withhold this vital information: how much space I take up in the world?
I used to know: from weighing myself twenty times a day, from measuring myself in the morning and at night, from the mirrors at home, in the ballet studio, at the gym. At the gym, we all—men and women alike—moved mesmerized among our multiple mirrored selves. We stared at our reflected images with equal longing and despair. The only difference was that, on one side of the room, where the free weights were, the men were striving to make themselves bigger; on the other—where the racks and iron maidens were, the bicycles and stairs leading nowhere—the women struggled to become smaller.
They towered above me, the overextended adolescent boys, and when they asked me to dance they stared out over my head, as if scanning the room for a better deal. Was this because I was a “dog,” as I had overheard them call another (plumper) girl? Or would I ever be like my friend Carol, sexy and thin, in a glossy, athletic way, with limbs as hard and well turned as Barbie’s? I tried to read their gaze, to tell me where I stood.
At first they seemed interchangeably tall, sweaty, blotchy, loud. But then one of them began to detach himself from the others in my mind, take up residence there. He was more compact, less knobbly, than the rest of them, his clothes dark or faded or baggy in interesting ways. His expression was one of chronic ennui, and he never asked anyone to dance, alternating between bored lounging and cryptic, snorting conversations with some of the rougher guys.
I began to find him intriguing.
He had oily dark hair and ice blue eyes, penetratingly cold. At odd times (walking around, sitting at my desk at school, just before sleep), those eyes would visit me, causing a strange pang somewhere in the solar plexus, similar to the sensation of stepping on pebbly ground with tender bare feet.
On the way to the bathroom, walking haltingly along with the nurse, who is humming something that sounds like “Que Será, Será” (who does she think she is, Doris Day?), we pass an open door, which I recognize as the same one that was open a few days? weeks? ago. The beautiful honey-haired girl is there, exquisitely made-up as before, with the TV blaring and her attention flickering between it and a magazine. She’s alone: the skeletal Asian girl, whom I’m interested in seeing again, is gone.
We pass the door, and then the nurse does a quick double take, stops, and touches my arm (I cringe instinctively, imagining the flab she must feel). “Hang on a sec, Josie.” She turns to the door and says, “Cathy, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
Cat eyes look up.
“Cathy, this is Josie. Josie, Cathy.”
“Hi,” she says, “I’m bulimic. What are you?”
“Oh,” I say. “I’m a . . . I’m a grad student in economics.”
She looks me frankly up and down, the way women do. I try to imagine what she must see; I still haven’t been able to see myself whole, only that same sickly face under the same stark bulb. I haven’t washed my hair in a couple of days because the nurse said I was washing it “compulsively,” making it fall out even more. My skin is red and scaly from scrubbing (since I’ve been eating so much, I never feel clean), my arms covered with bruises and pinpricks, my legs like twigs in hospital-issue scuffs: turquoise terry cloth, ludicrously festive, as if for the beach.
“Shouldn’t she be on hyperal?” Cathy asks the nurse, as if I weren’t even there.
“That’s really none of your business, Cathy,” the nurse says briskly but with a phony professional kindness. “That’s for us to decide.”
“Yeah, well, maybe if Amy had gone on hyperal sooner . . .”
There’s a charged silence, which I try to decipher. A thrill rises in me, but I play dumb, look blank.
“That’s enough now, Cathy, don’t try to second-guess the medical team.”
“So how long have you been here?” she asks me.
I begin to answer, then realize I have no idea. “A . . . a while,” I improvise, shrugging as if to suggest that time is no big deal to me.
“I’ve been here for two months already,” she says, almost proudly.
“But why?” She looks fine to me. A little too much flesh by my standards, perhaps, but otherwise perfect.
“Oh, they can’t let me out. I just eat everything in sight and barf it up. Once I spent two hundred and fifty dollars on food in a single day,” she tells me, and I realize she is bragging. How can she? How can she admit to appetite, name that insatiable, ravening urge—not only name it but boast of it?
Never. I could admit to anything but that. Unthinkable: to say, in public, the words “I eat.”
I say nothing because my throat is too tight. I look at the nurse. She looks at me, seems to sense my distress, takes my arm (very gently this time), and says, “Well, Cathy, we should be on our way. Maybe you’ll see more of Josie in the dayroom, when she’s a little further along.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
He was leaving the party: the rest of the evenin
g immediately drained away, holding no further interest for me (except, perhaps, the bowl of potato chips). But as they straggled out—about five or six of them, loud, dark, leather-clad—one of the lesser members of the group, a blubbery hanger-on whose name I didn’t know, turned back to me and said, “Hey you? Come with us.” One of the other guys made a face, but Sweaty Fatso said something to him sotto voce that made him nod, guffawing. A rictus seized me, leporine in their collective gaze.
“Where’re you going?”
A snort. “Are you coming or aren’t you?”
I stood up, obedient, looking around to see if any of my friends had noticed. They hadn’t, so I followed the disappearing group into the suburban dark.
Their motorcycles waited in a haphazard row by the hedge—on the hedge, actually, crushing it (the gardener would have to deal with it the next day: I had a mental flash of him in a vindictive rage, hacking it into a topiary horror show). I had never been on a motorcycle before and hoped there was no technique other than hanging on like hell.
The guys were paying me no attention, engaged with zipping up their jackets, kicking down kickstands, and such; I stood to one side, wondering whose bike I was supposed to climb on and what I was going to do with my ankle-length skirt. They all mounted their machines and began revving and roaring, while I stood with my hands behind my back, picking frantically at a hangnail.
“Get on then, idiot,” yelled Sweatso, over the roar.
Awkwardly, I complied, hitching up my skirt and clambering over the back of the bike, feeling for a moment the hot breath of exhaust. There seemed nothing to hold on to, so I gripped the seat behind me as tightly as I could. As the bike took off, a whack of backward momentum sent me lurching and I grabbed the leather-upholstered waist in front of me. I thought I heard him laugh.
We ended up at another, smaller party, where Pink Floyd was playing and people were passing joints around. When a joint got to me, I just passed it on to the next person. Nobody said anything. A few couples were dancing, but most of the others were sitting on the floor, stoned. Like them, I leaned against the wall and stared in front of me, wondering what I was supposed to be feeling.
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