I studied her, her broad, rounded belly, her plump arms, her well-covered neck and chin. How could he desire her? Why wasn’t he repelled, as I was, by that slovenly padding? And how could she let a man touch her—never mind (I tried to imagine) exposing that flabby flesh to his sight?
I felt for my hipbones again, beneath the newspaper on my lap. They reassured me, but not enough. Watching the couple, I felt something swell like a wave under my rib cage, ending up, damming up, at the base of my throat. I must have blacked out for a moment, because I almost missed my stop and had to scramble sideways at the last moment through the closing doors.
“Watch your step, ma’am, please,” said the bus driver.
Why was everyone always trying to tell me what to do?
“The question,” she says, “is not how to get cured, but how to live.”
“Huh?” I respond. I have no idea what she’s talking about; it sounds like a quotation. “Don’t get all existential on me now.”
Is that the question? I thought the question was whether to live, not how.
I cannot live with my family. (Nuclear winter.)
Other people cannot live with me.
I cannot (I’ll admit, but not to her) live alone. I make myself sick.
The problem seems insoluble.
Our talk is over, and she leaves for the night, for her life in the world with other people. I remain here alone in this fluorescent cube, an organism that knows only how to eat and excrete, a dead creature trapped in a dying one. Now I wish I’d consented to the tubes, to connect me with something, to fill me with something other than my own emptiness.
I have no idea what to do next. I inspect my wristbones, I caress my clavicle, I finger my iliac edges (blunted now, blurred by fat). What was it that I hoped my skeleton would tell me? I can’t seem to grasp it anymore.
Somehow I thought I could make more of myself by making less of myself. Somehow I thought I could become some body. Somehow I . . .
I: the slenderest word in the English language, the flimsiest.
I
I cannot sit here any longer.
But I can’t think what else to do.
After a long while, it occurs to me to go over to the window and look out, through the mesh. A smudged moon looks back.
17
I SHOULD HAVE REALIZED something was wrong when he failed to recognize me at the airport—after only nine months, as if in that time some other self had hatched around the thin voice on the phone. Lying about it later, he said it was because I had grown so frail. But I recognized him immediately and in that instant recalibrated my inner lens, stopping it down to accommodate the dim version of him that reality presented. After a while, he looked more like himself.
I drove him back from the airport in anxious distraction—on the dark, dizzying freeway, every car seemed aimed at me—pointing out places of interest just after we had passed them. He stared gloomily out of the window. Then I got lost trying to find the apartment he had sublet for the summer, though I’d studied the map before leaving home (as if, for once, I might be able to remember directions, street numbers, spatial relations). When I finally pulled up outside the right building, he was hunched in his seat like a hooded owl.
The apartment was a disaster, left in a state of chronic filth and acute disorder by a couple of grad students who had departed for South America—in a hurry, by the look of things. They had left their massage oil and marijuana next to the bare mattress, and, in the kitchen, a sinkful of dirty dishes, a half-eaten ham sandwich, and an entomological cookbook open at a recipe for chocolate-dipped ants. We looked around in weak dismay.
Putting his bags down in the bedroom and his briefcase by the worktable, he began, mechanically, to pick things up.
I had imagined that as soon as the door closed on us he would press me passionately against the wall, kissing me like a starving man until my knees buckled and only the pressure of his mouth and his body and his hands would keep me from sliding to the floor. Instead he opened the refrigerator and announced: “Well, at least they left some eggs in here. And”—sniffing it dubiously—“some cheese. How about if I make us an omelet?”
I hadn’t eaten in three days. After forcing down four forkfuls, I vomited—discreetly—in the tiny bathroom. For once I was grateful for his habitual inattentiveness.
Later we did make love, if that’s the word for my lying rigid and miserable while he labored over me, sweating and panting and losing his erection. Afterwards he mumbled something about jet lag and fell into a wheezing coma, while I lay wide-eyed long after my arm had grown numb beneath him.
Thus began our summer of love.
She’s asked me to explain it—sitting next to the window with me, her feet propped on a second chair, using her lap as a desk as she scrawls out forms in canary and goldenrod and the other names that stationers use to disguise the tired fact of triplicate—but I can’t. Might as well ask the somnambulist for an account of her route, the shade for an account of her day.
Fogbound, I felt I had no choice. I never asked myself why he was there, why I was there, whether anything could be changed. He was there, like a blight; I had to live blighted until he left.
We slept together every night, or rather he slept, collapsed upon me as if struck from behind, while I lay open-eyed, burning all night with a thin white light. In the morning, he would roll off me and slide out of bed, trying not to disturb the sheets, both of us maintaining the fiction that I was still asleep, that I ever slept, that I didn’t need to be warmed back to life after my vigil in deep space. Within half an hour (time for a shave, a cup of tea, a slice of toast, and a vain attempt to defecate), he would be at his desk, unspooling from his bent head the curves of supply and demand.
A couple of hours later, I too would crawl out from under the covers, avoiding any motion that might draw his attention (unwashed, unmade-up, I was a blotchy, oily monster that no one could look at), and shuffle into the bathroom to begin my long ablutions. Again I hoped that his self-absorption would save me, that he would think only ten minutes had passed when it had been two hours. Then, gathering my belongings (wallet, keys, notepad, pills, lipstick, laxatives, library card), I would leave for the day, pecking him on the scalp in exchange for a grunt.
The story was that I spent the day in the library, doing research. In fact I headed straight for the campus coffeehouse, where I breakfasted on hot chocolate and cheesecake, piling both high with whipped cream. When I had read the entire newspaper, including the classifieds, and had reached the right degree of nausea by ordering a second hot chocolate, I would make my way at last to the library.
There I wandered stupefied through the stacks, filled with vague lust, looking for something without knowing what. Perhaps I was hoping that a book would, quite literally, leap off the shelf and save me. Instead of staying safely within the HB 3717 section, I found myself drawn to the RC 537’s, and spent most of the day in a cramped carrel near those shelves, which I ravaged numbly and randomly.
This was my research. I can’t say I learned much.
I didn’t allow myself to leave the building because if I did, I would eat (eat: stuff myself with everything I could find that was chewy and creamy, gagging as I forced down ever more, blocking in the only way I knew how the banshee wail that inhabited me). I couldn’t eat because by 10 A.M. I had already blown the caloric budget for the day— and for many days to come, but I tried not to think about that: it was the next hour, the next half hour that I had to live through.
It never occurred to me that I might go out and do something else. It never occurred to me that I had a choice. It never occurred to me that I was in despair. Since the day he arrived, I had lost the ability to activate myself, even to exercise. All I could do was wander around the stacks, suffocating in the fog of my own stupefaction.
Belatedly—I’ve been thinking about something else, about how I think I can feel my thighs rubbing together when I walk, though I’m not sure if it’s my
thighs or these sweatpants—I realize we haven’t made our usual right turn to Physical Therapy.
“Where’re we going now?” I ask, not intending the teakettle squeal that escapes me. My voice sounds shrill, as if I’m alarmed.
“You’ll see,” she says, with the fake cheeriness that means trouble. “It’s a new phase of the therapy.”
I grab a handful of hair above my left temple and begin dragging my fingers through it. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I whine. “Why didn’t you tell me we were doing something different?”
“It’s no big deal, Josie, you’ll see.”
“Yes but why didn’t you tell me?”
The room she leads me to looks like a small classroom, where all the chairs, save one, have been stacked against a wall. The lone survivor sits in the middle of the floor, facing a blackboard and a video camera. On the rear wall, huge sheets of kindergarten-quality drawing paper, torn from a roll, have been pinned, overlapping, to mask the entire surface.
Like a dog on a leash, I balk at the door.
“No,” I say.
“No what?” she says. “You don’t even know what we’re going to do. It’ll be fun.”
“No,” I say.
I should have known I couldn’t trust her. (Other people: bodies you can’t control.)
“What stupid little game is this?”
“It’s not a game, Josie. It’s Body Image Awareness. The doctor should be here in a minute to explain it to you.”
“Body-what Bullshit? Get me out of here.”
But it’s too late: Dr. Frog arrives, hustling and harried as ever, a few files stuffed fanwise under his arm, his pouched eyes swiveling apologetically toward the nurse.
“Josephine!” he says. “Good to see you.”
I say nothing.
“Looking well,” he continues. “I take it,” he perseveres, “that the nurse has explained our procedure for today.”
“No she hasn’t,” I say, “and I’m not doing it, whatever it is.”
He begins to open his hands, palms forward, in a gesture of intervention but forgets the files under his arm, which fall to the floor, spewing an arc of graphs and charts and forms. My last name is on most of them, as PATIENT.
But I’m not: my patience, it seems, has run out. I’m here in the room, the room is real, and everything makes itself present to me: the toppling stack of plastic chairs, the pulpy strips misaligned on the wall, the blind camera tilted attentively on its three thin legs, the scuffed floor where the nurse kneels, gathering forms.
What am I doing here?
After a few weeks, I feared that if I had to spend another evening on the broken-down couch watching him read, I would go into the kitchen, fetch the heavy marble pestle (what those graduate students ground with it, I don’t know), and beat his head ecstatically into a pulp. I had imagined it many times: his absent gaze finally taking me in as I approached, swinging the pestle pendulum-style to warm up, my face calm and intent as I grasped what was left of his hair, and, mocking his faint puzzlement, swung at his skull with all my force, back and forth, side to side, again and again, grunting with pleasure and exertion, sobs of abandon escaping my clamped teeth.
Instead I’d say, “Should we go to a movie tonight? If you want—”
“Which one?”
“Well, what do you want to see?”
“I don’t really know. . . . What’s playing?”
By the time he had studied the listings and I had told him, often for the third or fourth time, what each one was about, it would be too late to make the 7:30 show and the evening was effectively over because he needed eight hours of sleep so he could rise refreshed in the morning to spin out his slender, elegant equations.
I too longed for the night. Not because I would sleep but because I could endure it, and if I endured it, it would end, and when it ended, I could have my hot chocolate with cream. That morning sip was the only happiness I knew.
(But the first sip only: with the second came fear and sickness and misery, like an inner drizzle that never lifted.)
“Let me be clear about this,” I say. “You want to videotape me in the dramatic act of pulling down the window shade?”
He exhales audibly but otherwise manages to mask his irritation. “As I’ve explained, Josephine, we’re going to ask you to perform a series of everyday movements— walking to the window, sitting down, turning around and such—while the camera’s on, and then afterwards the three of us will watch the tape and talk about it.”
“What, are you going to give me notes on my performance,” I ask, “make sure it’s up to Oscar quality?”
They exchange glances and I imagine the next entry in one of those files, reassembled now and tapped into alignment: “Patient hostile and uncooperative, resists Body Image Treatment; suggest we medicate.”
“Josie,” the nurse pipes up, in that wheedling tone I’m beginning to distrust, “none of us really sees ourselves the way we are. We all could use a little help in seeing ourselves objectively.”
“Fine,” I say, “videotape yourself. Also,” I add, as this occurs to me, “it wouldn’t be objective. I’d be comparing myself to every actress I’d ever seen on TV.”
And, I don’t say, This is where I bow out. Something is wrong with this picture—not the picture that the camera, neck craned, is waiting to capture, not even the outline of myself I’m supposed to crayon on the wall. Something is wrong with the picture of a twenty-five-year-old woman who has given her body over to strangers.
Instructions to patient:
Please perform the following motions slowly and deliberately but in a natural and unforced manner. The camera operator will take full-length and close-up shots in each position, focusing on problem areas of the body (legs, hips, buttocks, stomach, face, etc.).
• Walk to the window, turn your back to the camera, reach up, and pull down the shade. (If there is no window, or no shade, please mime this motion.)
• Turn around, walk to the chair, and sit down. Cross your legs and smile.
• Turn sideways in the chair, presenting your left profile to the camera. Now do the same with the right profile.
• Face front again, rise from the chair, and walk across the room. Make one complete turn, holding your arms at a forty-five-degree angle from your sides.
• Bend over as if to pick something off the floor. Straighten up.
• Walk to the door as if you were going to open it (but don’t). Look over your shoulder and wave.
I don’t need a video camera. I don’t need a crayon to define the edges of my being. I don’t even need a mirror. I know what I am: a twenty-five-year-old female body, emaciated still in the clavicle and calves, with spindly shanks but a smooth coating of baby fat everywhere else (the back of my neck, the underside of my chin, the upper arms, the finger joints) and a large, unsightly, tirelike deposit around the middle. My skin is dry, mottled, and erupting; my hair is limp and scant. I do not look beautiful. I would not look good in a bikini. But I’m going to get out of here.
In the middle of August, he left. Watching him scurry through the boarding gate, with his briefcase clutched under his arm and an anxious tilt to his head—was he afraid the plane would dematerialize before he emerged from the tube?—a sole thought presented itself to me: now I can go home and eat anything I want because there’s no one to look at me.
So I did, for several days—perhaps it was weeks. I’m not sure anymore.
I left the house only to do the rounds, by car. Sometimes I would consume everything I’d bought before I got home again and would have to keep driving, making what began to feel like an endless loop. Money was running low: my next scholarship check wasn’t due until school started in a month’s time, but I kept going, anxiety about each vanishing dollar spiking the stew of dread and lust in which I drove and spent and consumed and drove and spent and consumed.
I wore the same clothes every day (drawstring-waist sweatpants and an oversized man’s shirt) beca
use nothing else would fit. I didn’t wash my hair or even comb it because I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. I stopped showering because I refused to bare my flesh. If I never looked directly at myself, I had no way of recognizing this being who gnawed away, pupal in some dark, thick dream.
I ate until I slept and then, waking with a blurred cry on a cushion damp with drool, ate again. Then I slept again —at eleven in the morning or through the afternoon heat —cramped and sweaty, awakening rank with the sofa’s rough weave imprinted on my cheek.
One evening the telephone rang, shocking me out of a shallow doze. A baby crocodile had been nibbling at my hand, which, when I tried to push myself off the couch, I realized was paralyzed with pins and needles. At first I thought the smoke detector had gone off, but, as the terrifying trills continued, I saw that they came from a black device under some chip bags and an empty ice cream carton on the coffee table.
The telephone.
My heart was hammering so violently, and it had been so long since I used my voice, that my “Hello?” came out as a creak. There was silence, so I tried again, this time achieving a croak.
A hesitant voice on the other end, recovering rapidly, inquired if I might be interested in subscribing to the daily paper at a special thirteen-week introductory rate.
I looked around the small, airless room, at the shag carpeting littered with torn cellophane and cookie packages and pizza boxes and soda cans and yogurt cups and the silver foil from Hershey’s kisses, with magazines open and trampled next to the couch, with weeks’ worth of newspapers splayed three-deep on every surface, and I imagined the day’s news arriving neatly bundled at my door every morning, and I laughed.
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