“Your hair, honeybun.” (Why is she so chipper this morning?) “The stylist is coming by, she can give you a manicure too.”
These dead strands: what’s she going to do, pick them off the pillowcase and make a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey? Manicure—on these gnawed stumps?
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about. We discussed it with the doctor yesterday.”
Yes, but I wasn’t there. I may have been in the room, but I wasn’t there. “Discussed what?”
“Ah, don’t start this again, Josie.”
“I can’t,” I say.
“Sure you can,” she says. “It’ll be fun.”
She puts down the tray, but I refuse to pour syrup— pure sugar, 100 calories an ounce—on my pancakes. We argue about this for a while till I end up drizzling on a few drops and then slowly, mechanically, masticate my way through the stack. I drink all my juice and two cups of tea; pancakes make me thirsty because they’re so high in sodium. I’ll bloat. But what do I care; what does it matter, after all, how much decaying flesh I cart around with me?
We walk to the weighing room, but no thrill of anticipation leavens me as I step up, my back obediently to the scale. I feel leaden in a way no numbers could compute. Then I take a shower and look down at my bulging gut; yes, I’m grotesque, so what?
“What a lovely face,” the stylist lies, combing out what’s left of my long wet hair.
“Please,” I respond, staring at the pig head in the mirror. She lifts up my hair, pulls it over to one side, then the other, bunches it up, tilts her head appraisingly, lets it drop.
“So what are we in the mood for?” she asks, busy with her comb again.
“That hurts,” I say.
“Sorry!”
There’s a long, empty moment.
“We’re not really in the mood for anything,” I say. She meets the nurse’s eyes in the mirror over my head.
“Well, if you don’t want anything drastic, we could keep the length but put in some layers, to give you some volume,” she suggests.
“I don’t want any volume.”
Her comb falters, but the poor creature, over-made-up and aggressively coiffed with a fashionable cut that doesn’t suit her, perseveres: she’s obviously taken a course (probably a “workshop”) in Dealing with Difficult Patients. “OK,” she says, verbally shrugging. “Why don’t I just take half an inch off the bottom to clean up those ends and then blow-dry it for a bit of pizzazz.”
Pizzazz. I don’t say anything but just sit there while she snips busily, stopping every now and then to pull two limp strands for symmetry. It doesn’t look any different after she’s done, but then she gets out a blow dryer, like a sawed-off shotgun, and starts blasting away. By the end, I look as if I’ve emerged from a wind tunnel. Once, I would have thought this glamorous; now an unraveling bird’s nest seems to have landed on my head. I stare at my reflection with perverse gratification.
Even she has to admit that nothing much can be done with my nails. They’re too short to file and the cuticles survive only as ravaged scabs. She has me soak my fingertips in a half-moon dish filled with warm, soapy liquid, then gently pats them dry. Rubs cream into them. That’s my manicure.
“A little make-up?” she asks Suzanne, as if I’m not even there.
“No!” I say. I want to look as horrible as possible.
She packs up her pink imitation-leather vanity case, gives my hair a final flip, tells me I look lovely, and takes off.
“You do look good,” says the nurse. “You’ve got some color back.”
It’s true. My lips aren’t blue anymore. They’re a kind of cracked brownish mauve, like everyone else’s. I wish they were indigo with livid scabs. I wish all my hair had fallen out. I wish I looked ghoulish instead of absurd.
It’s visiting day.
I’m expecting only Mr. and Mrs., but they’ve brought Anthony along, too, surprisingly tall and adult in a navy blazer just like my father’s, with a slicked-back forelock springing defiantly forward. He’s loitering by the window, the tilt of his shoulders disclaiming any kinship with us. He keeps putting his hands into his pockets and taking them out again. He’s probably become a smoker since he’s been at college—hell, since prep school, how would I know. He could be anything, this good-looking stranger, my brother.
Mr. and Mrs. are sitting side by side on a pair of vinyl-covered chairs in this “visitors’ lounge,” as if in an airport. The nurse’s warm hand between my shoulder blades propels me through the door, as if she senses my shrinking, my urge to turn and run, shrieking. But once I’m in, she pats my arm, nods to the audience, and abandons me.
Here we all are, captive, waiting for our flight to be called.
“Josephine!” says my mother, rising clumsily. “You look so much better.” I know what she means: fat.
“Jo, darling,” says my father, also rising. He looks old.
Neither of them makes any move to touch me: my giant belly keeps them away.
“Hi, Josie,” Anthony mumbles, with a shrug.
We all sit down again, except Anthony, who stays slouching by the window, staring out at the hospital lawn. I’m facing them, filling up my chair, bulging over the edges, hovering ominously like one of those looming balloon creatures in the Thanksgiving Day parade. I cannot think of a single thing to say.
“Doesn’t she look better, Michael?” my mother insists.
“She looks great,” he replies, nodding and widening his eyes to convey alert sincerity.
I don’t say anything, I just sit there, sullen, lumpen in my gray sweats. My mother snaps open her purse, which she’s holding like a shield across her lap, and starts ferreting around in it. “We brought you something . . . now where’s it got to?”
She presents me with a small, elegant box, heart-shaped, held together with a blood-red bow. I untie the ribbon and pry off the lid to reveal ranks of dark truffles. A dense rich acrid aroma. I look at them as if I don’t know what they are.
“The doctor said . . .” she says, helplessly. “They’re handmade . . .”
“You know I never eat chocolate.”
Her face crumples, and she glances at my father, whose hand, autonomous after all these years, reaches over to pat her arm.
“Here, you have one,” I say, and she does. My father takes one too but forgets to eat it, keeping it poised between forefinger and thumb. My brother shakes his head when I gesture in his direction with the depleted heart.
We seem to have exhausted this topic of conversation. I stick one of my fingers crosswise in my mouth, but it tastes soapy so I stop chewing.
“Doctor says . . .” my mother begins.
“We hear from the doctor . . .” my father says, simultaneously. They both stop.
Catching her eye, he resumes. “The doctor tells us, Jo, that it won’t be too long before you can leave here.”
So that’s it. I must be near the target weight range.
I’ve tried, over and over, to predict what they would consider “normal” for my height. They probably use the same “ideal weight” charts that I’ve studied obsessively for years—recognizing them, with their absurdly inflated figures, as propaganda for obesity. (Who publishes them, I wonder? The medical profession, to create more customers?) Even in the column for “petite” frame, which I always consult, though Suzanne told me I shouldn’t (something to do with the width of the elbow), the minimum for my height is 107 pounds.
One hundred and seven pounds! Is it possible that I weigh that much? Instinctively, I grasp my belly with both hands. I don’t think so—today—but on other days I feel as if I could weigh two hundred. People do; I have no way of knowing.
I have to get out of here.
“About fucking time,” I say.
Anthony exhales loudly and shifts so he’s leaning on the windowsill with his back to us. My father continues, speaking very deliberately, as if to the dull-witted.
“W
hat we’re wondering about, Jo, is where you’re planning to go. For the outpatient phase. Naturally, we want to help in any way we can—”
“Back to my apartment, where do you think?”
He hesitates; the bunny rabbit look is imminent. “Well, no . . . that’s not going to be possible. Jane has indicated—”
“Jane has indicated what?” I ask, though, in a surge of cold rage, I already know.
“Jane has indicated that she’d rather not go on with the roommate arrangement, that it’s too much of a strain on her. In fact, I think she has another roommate already lined up.” Turning his hand over, wrist flexed, he looks helplessly at the now melting truffle.
If I’d ever thought about it, I could have anticipated this. But I never did. I thought I was going to stay here forever, that Suzanne would always take care of me.
She sits quietly by the bed waiting for my wailing to subside. I’m vomiting up all the loud black emptiness inside me, retching it out in funnel-shaped roars. It hurts. I’d forgotten how much.
I must look a mess.
After a while the weeping exhausts itself, except for the occasional dry spasm. I roll over on to my back, and she smooths the hair out of my eyes, continuing her calm, even stroking even when the damp tangles have been straightened out. (So much for the hairdo.)
“Josie,” she says.
I hiccough.
“Josie, Josie, Josie,” she murmurs, singsong.
“I can’t,” I say, a wail ballooning in my throat again.
“I know,” she says.
“I can’t live with them. It’ll kill me.”
“The doctor doesn’t think it’s advisable, either.”
“I want to live by myself.”
“The doctor . . . well, I don’t think that’s such a great idea, do you?”
“Why not?” I whimper.
“Do I need to remind you?”
I didn’t want to go to grad school because it would mean being separated from the man I thought of as my lover (once a week, for almost an hour). He was my only point of reference, my only reason to be in one place rather than another. But what were my options?
CAREERS FOR BARBIE
1959: Fashion Model
1961: Ballerina
1961–64: Stewardess, American Airlines
1964: Candy Striper
1965: Fashion Editor
1966: Stewardess, Pan American
1973–75: Flight Attendant, American Airlines
1973: Medical Doctor
1976: Olympic Athlete
1978: Aerobics Instructor
1979: TV News Reporter
1980: Fashion Designer
1981: Corporate Executive
1981: Perfume Designer
1983: Animal Rights Volunteer
Animal Rights Volunteer? What would Barbie wear?
Don’t worry, he said, if you go, I could get a grant and spend the summer with you. So, cataleptic on the conveyor belt, I accepted a scholarship at a place I’d never seen, a name on the map.
Economics, why not.
I made a one-day reconnaissance trip and took the first apartment I saw, a “studio” in a cement shoe box near campus. It had royal blue shag carpeting, no windows (save one, painted shut, showing a sealed air shaft), and no kitchen, just a waist-high refrigerator with a hot plate on top. That’s why I chose it.
We made our farewells in my echoing room. Everything but the mattress was packed, and we used it one last time, its bare buttons boring into my bones.
“I’m sad,” he said afterwards, sounding surprised.
As I drove across the country, space shimmered and sucked me in. With eyes fixed on the horizon, with the radio’s static at full blast—why wouldn’t it stay tuned? —I concentrated hard and thought about nothing. (At first, yes, there was pain, but then I bought an air cushion to protect my ischia from the seat.) An oily rainbow led me on; I drank Tab to stay awake and ate an orange when I felt faint.
Nine days later, a fugue-like gap, I arrived.
Other people were also moving into my apartment block that day, usurping three parking spaces outside the front door. As I wedged my car into a semilegal half space, a bright yellow van disgorged a man and a woman carrying a couch, lopsided, laughing helplessly the way people do when they try together to lift something too heavy. A person alone doesn’t laugh, just grunts and grits her teeth.
After carrying everything up to the second floor (eighteen trips in all, at, conservatively, twenty-five calories a trip), I unwrapped the scale and weighed myself. I had lost so much weight, six and a half pounds, that for a moment I was frightened—just a flicker, before elation set in, followed by determination to keep it off. I wouldn’t buy any food, I decided; I would never have food in the house, so if I wanted to eat something, I would have to go out and get it, thereby giving myself plenty of time to reconsider. I stocked the little fridge with Tab and seltzer water, plus a lemon, presliced. (A precaution: once I watched myself cram an entire lime into my mouth and then observed, in slow motion, as my esophagus convulsed.)
I was so afraid of regaining the weight that, for the first time, I started taking diet pills (pheno-something-or-other, propane, I think), adhering for a few days to the stated dose, but soon increasing it to two and then four pills a day. They kept me in a constant state of agitation, so that the instant I sat down I had to spring up again. The skin on my scalp crept and tingled as if, chilled, it had become too tight; an electric thrill ran through my limbs while something wormlike drilled away at my diaphragm. Eating was out of the question because I had become a hologram, unreal and radioactive and empty at the core.
It was wonderful. Why had I never thought of this before, instead of relying for so long on fallible will?
The city I now lived in was strange—windy and spacious and blue—so I spent most of my time in my room. It smelled of mildew, overlaid with scouring powder, and the rug’s ancient dust, deep in the pile. After a while I couldn’t breathe, so I went out and walked the streets. People stared at me oddly, envious of my fine, naked bones.
I ignored them, these phantoms, finding it harder and harder to make sense of anything they said or did. In the grocery store one evening, for instance, I was waiting with a six-pack of Tab behind a woman buying what looked like a year’s worth of food, when the bag boy, slinging the last few items, announced, “Chilly.”
It wasn’t at all—it was midsummer—and evidently she didn’t think so either, for she didn’t respond. But almost a minute later, counting out her cash, she replied, “Enchiladas.”
“What?” he asked, startled (he’d been picking a scab on his hand).
“I thought you said ‘chilly,’” said the woman, over her shoulder. “I said ‘enchiladas.’”
“Oh!” he said, some kind of light dawning on his pimply face.
Every now and then, fellow students herding somewhere after class would ask me along (from pity, I knew), but how could I join them for dinner or beer? Even the movies weren’t safe, so I had to decline. (The margaritas, a sick, saline memory, were my sole mistake.) Let them waste their time talking and eating and getting silly with drink; I preferred to stay home. My abs needed work.
My neighbor across the hall glared at me as if I had done something to offend him, though I could never think what, and the attractive woman downstairs was clearly a call girl. I would catch her in her bathrobe at midday, getting her mail; she said she was a bartender who worked nights. Upstairs was a drag queen—or someone who sounded like one, giggling and tottering about—and in the basement, a lumpy lesbian who stared lustfully at me. At night, I’d hear my name whispered through the walls.
“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” I say, though I do. “I like living alone. It’s the best arrangement for me.”
“It’s the best arrangement for you if you want to persist in this pathology, you mean.”
“Persist in this pathology! Well, excuuuuse me.”
She chuckles
and yanks a strand of my hair, softly. “You must be feeling better now, Miss Sarcastic.”
“Ms. Sarcastic, if you don’t mind.”
But an undertow of fear tugs me back to the topic. “I’m much happier when I live alone, really.”
In China, only someone living alone and in abject poverty would sit down to a solitary meal.
“Just one?” said the hostess at the café, as if she had never seated a lone customer before.
“Are you waiting for someone or should I go ahead and take your order?” asked the waitress, sweeping the previous diner’s crumbs into her hand. He had, it appeared, partaken with abandon of a buttered brioche.
“Just an iced tea,” I mumbled, then hesitated. “Do you make it yourself or is it from a mix?” (a mix might contain sugar).
“Oh, no”—aghast—“we make it ourselves.”
Everyone in the café was staring at me as I hunched over my newspaper, awaiting my tea. Whispering and pointing, they were wondering what I had ordered, hoping, I know, to see me gorge myself on gateau Saint-Honoré. In a camisole that displayed the fine architecture of my neck and arms, I felt suddenly naked, X-rayed, and pulled on a sweatshirt though it was hot. But then, after a few minutes, I took it off again. Take a look, everyone: the bare bones.
A loud party of five arrived and milled around at the next table. After a minute or two, one of the men approached and I froze: what was he going to say, this stranger, to me? But he only indicated the chair facing me (even emptier than mine) and asked, “Is anyone sitting there?” —as if I might have an invisible friend.
I looked over, hopefully. When I didn’t respond, he bore it away.
Without even a chair-back between me and the world, I couldn’t finish my tea; my throat closed up and I fled, leaving a handful of dollars so I wouldn’t have to ask for the bill. Across the street, cool, anonymous darkness invited me in. On that late-summer Sunday, there were only three patrons at the first matinee: myself, and a sepulchral couple who dozed, in shifts, through Funny Face. Emerging disoriented into the light, demoralized by Audrey Hepburn’s hipbones (I kept fingering my own), I yielded to sloth and took the bus home.
It soon filled up and, without meaning to, I found myself staring at a young couple who’d obviously just climbed out of bed, sensuality still strong, compulsive, around them. She was leaning against a pole and he was leaning into her, facing her, his mouth in her hair. Her hands were under his T-shirt at the back, but he didn’t have that sheepish, hunted look men get when pressed by their women for a public display of affection. He looked as if he really wanted to touch her, hold her gently against him on the bus.
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