How do you climb Everest? One step at a time, bitches. I give the middle finger to my fridge, guzzle some water, eat three carrots and pull on my sneakers, struggling to reach my feet. That alone makes me breathless, but it’s okay. Time to go outside and start my new life.
I bet you run, Other Emerson. I can picture it so clearly—you look awesome in those tight designer workout clothes, your ponytail swings, and your strides are long and loose and easy. I can be like you, Other Emerson. I will be. I’m starting today.
I do this from time to time. Start a new life. Clean out the fridge. Lose weight. Gain it back. But this time, it’s going to stick.
I inherited my mother’s house and all the money she got from Grampy when she died. Before that, I lived in an apartment nearby. Once, I imagined that Georgia and Marley and I would share a place in Manhattan, like Rachel, Phoebe and Monica on Friends. But I live in Delaware, and they live in New York. Not in the city, but close to it, which is pretty cool. And they aren’t as bad as I am. They’re normal-fat. Me, I’m about three times what I should be.
Anyway. I love my house. I moved in when Mama’s cancer was diagnosed, and I’ve never left. I redecorated a little after she died, trying to distract myself from that howling, bottomless grief. I took off the wallpaper, painted in fresh springtime colors, trying to make it mine, so I wasn’t just another fat person who lived in her parents’ house. The living room has pale blue walls, and there are plants in the sunny kitchen. My grandmother’s old enamel-topped table is where I sit every day, eating off sturdy Fiestaware. Georgia and Marley visited me just after that, and they thought it was great.
I do, too. I just wish no one knew me. I wish I’d moved here as a stranger. I think that might’ve been easier. Instead, Mrs. Eckhart, who once told me I didn’t need Halloween candy (I was six), always stares at me as I lug in groceries, mentally assessing what I’ve got in my bags. (I double-bag the Coke and ice cream and anything else I don’t want her to see.) Billy Patterson, one of the kids I used to babysit, ignores me. When he was six, he told me I was his best friend. Now, ten years later, he stares through me, afraid that one of his friends might realize he knows the fat freak.
I loved babysitting. I wish I could still do it. Kids liked me because I actually spent time with them and didn’t just talk on the phone. Parents loved me, too, because I was so responsible. Sometimes they’d leave me pizza money or brownies. Sometimes carrot and celery sticks. Hint, hint.
Some of the happiest days of my life were babysitting, before the kids realized that fat was something to be disgusted by, to make fun of. Before they learned to be afraid that they’d turn out like me. I mean, maybe I’m projecting, Other Emerson, but I remember the cuddles Billy would give me, how he’d beg me to read another book. Once, he told me he was scared a skeleton lived in the toilet tank, and he was so grateful when I took off the top and showed him there was nothing there.
I miss being loved. I miss my parents so much, especially my mom. We were best friends. Those nights where we’d get in our pajamas and bust out the treats and watch TV . . . those were the best.
I can’t think about that stuff, though. It’ll make me too sad, and when I’m sad, I eat. Today is a new day. New day. New day. That’s my mantra.
Outside, it’s beautiful. Springtime in Delaware, cherry and crab apple blossoms so dreamy and soft, birds twittering, a dog barking down the street. I start walking briskly (ish) down the sidewalk. I don’t have a sports bra in my current size—most stores don’t carry my size, and Amazon was out of stock. You, Other Emerson, can probably shop anywhere. Anyway, I’m bouncing and wobbling, despite the two tight T-shirts I wore. My thighs are slip-sliding past each other because of the nylon shorts. (Don’t worry, I’m wearing a superlong T-shirt to hide as much of myself as possible.) My back fat is jiggling, and my arms chafe against my sides.
Sometimes I see girls running in their sports bras and tiny pairs of shorts, their stomachs flat, their breasts high and snug, and it’s like they’re another species.
Look at this! I’m already down the block! This is kind of great, really, being outside. Walking is fun, aching knees aside. Mr. Duncan is cutting his grass. I wave. He waves back. He doesn’t even hate me. There’s the eyesore house, as Mama used to call it—it was vacant until recently. The roof needs repairs, the house needs painting, and at least three windows are cracked. But someone put a little pot of flowers on the porch. Maybe it’s a nice family. Or a single guy. You never know.
I might garden this year. Last year, I was too depressed, but that would be great exercise, digging and planting and communing with nature and all that. I imagine my new neighbor stopping by—he’s fixing up the eyesore, and he’ll say what a beautiful garden I have. “Pretty girl, pretty house.” I’ll hand him some fresh herbs or a flower and flirt right back, and we’ll get married a year later. We’ll have children, and I’ll cuddle them so much. My husband, too. We’ll fall asleep entwined together. I won’t need the CPAP anymore.
I can smell garlic, and my stomach rumbles. What I wouldn’t give for a giant bowl of pasta with butter and garlic and Parmesan cheese! My favorite meal! Well, one of them. I can’t be unfair to eggplant Parm. Or fried chicken. Or peanut butter and Fluff, which Mama used to make me when I couldn’t sleep. A couple of weeks ago, I made three of those sandwiches as a bedtime snack. On white bread, too, which is basically poison.
Two blocks now. Sweat is streaming down my back, but hey, that’s the point. Heart rate up, and I’m still going. I want to be healthy. I want to be normal.
I can do this.
When I get to the third block, I’ll turn around and head back. I probably burned a thousand calories. Hefting this weight around is not easy.
“Watch out, piggy.” A kid zooms past on a bike. He’s maybe ten, already a snot. “You’re gross,” he calls over his shoulder.
“Your parents regret having you,” I yell back.
He laughs. It was kind of funny. And I’m so used to being mocked that it doesn’t really matter.
Besides, when I lose weight, I won’t have to put up with it anymore.
I can do this. Slow and steady wins the race. I walk another block before turning around, just to show I can. Eight blocks, all in all, four blocks up the street, four blocks back. That is a very respectable workout. My knees are burning with pain, my back feels like someone hit me with a baseball bat, my left foot throbs, and I could probably start a fire from the friction between my thighs. I’m officially drenched in sweat, but it’s all good.
I want to be normal. I just want to be normal.
CHAPTER 7
Marley
Eat dessert in public. (Nailed it yet again.)
“Thank you for seeing us,” Mom said, clenching my hand in a death grip. Hers was shaking. “We’re so excited. This is Marley, my daughter, short for Marlena, she’s the sister, you see. The twin who didn’t die.”
Maybe I’ll get that phrase on a T-shirt. Kind of like The Boy Who Lived, but slightly more pathetic.
“Hi,” I said to the psychic. She was a fake; I had experience in this. Way too much experience. “Nice to meet you.”
“I’m Deirdre. You’re not a believer. It’s fine,” she said. “Come in, come in.”
Deirdre’s living room was decorated all in purple. There was a purple wall hanging depicting a Hindu goddess with four hands, a purple neon crucifix, a statue of a purple Buddha in one corner, and a poster of Prince from Purple Rain over the fireplace.
“You come highly recommended,” Mom said. “My friend Judy? Her cousin? Their daughter came to you. Ellen. Do you remember her?” Mom clenched my hand even harder, grinding the bones together in her desperate, sad excitement. “Do you know the Long Island Medium? On TV? She’s so talented, isn’t she? Such a gift! A blessing to families who . . .” Mom’s voice choked off, and I patted her arm.
“Let’s set
the mood,” Deirdre said. She lit some incense, which immediately began to tickle the back of my throat. Mom and I sank into the soft purple couch as if swallowed. “Someone is coming through. A child.”
“It’s Frankie!” Mom blurted. “My baby!”
“Yes . . . Frankie. A little boy.”
“Girl,” I corrected.
“Yes, a girl, I see that now.” I suppressed a sigh. “A girl. Very pretty.”
“She was,” Mom said. “She was beautiful. Frankie was short for Francesca.”
“Frankie has a special connection to you both,” Deirdre said.
“No kidding,” I said. My mother had already told this fraud everything she’d need to bilk my parents for a couple hundred bucks. Daughter, twin, dead.
“She wants you to know she didn’t suffer,” Deirdre said.
That may or may not have been true. I was too young to know. Eva, my older sister, didn’t talk about Frankie, and Dante had been born three years after her death.
Mom was weeping into one of Dad’s handkerchiefs. I rubbed her back. She glanced at me with wet, grateful eyes.
This was our thing, Mom and me. Our mother/daughter/dead daughter thing. Forgive the black humor. Trying to contact my dead four-year-old twin once a month was wearing. Maybe on Frankie, too. Sorry to yank you out of heaven, sis, I thought. Hope you’re okay.
“She’s showing me an ‘M,’” Deirdre said. “Whose name starts with an ‘M’?”
“Mine does, as I believe you were just told,” I said. “Also, ‘M’ could be for ‘Mom.’ Just tossing that out there.”
Deirdre cut me a look and droned on, giving vague messages about love and not our fault and happiness and watching over. All good, don’t get me wrong.
When I thought of my sister, there was nothing real, no clear memories. Just the shrine in my parents’ living room—three corner shelves made by my father, which held eleven pictures of Frankie, the bracelet she had as a newborn, the bracelet she’d worn during her last trip to the hospital, a lock of her hair tied in a pink ribbon and framed, and Ebbers, the penguin stuffed animal she’d slept with every night. Four white votive candles, one for every year of her life.
I didn’t so much remember Frankie as I envisioned my mother’s memories of her. Any scrap of memory I had myself had long been drowned by Mom’s reminiscing, each retelling of a Frankie story wearing down my own recollections bit by bit, till all I had left was as flat and faded as the photos.
I’d been nine pounds, fourteen ounces at birth. Francesca was four pounds, three ounces. She never really recovered from our time in utero, where it seems my food issues began. Pictures showed a slight, pale child, the only one of us to have the Northern Italian genes from Dad’s side. She was blond and blue-eyed; Dante, Eva and I all had curly dark hair and brown eyes. Sometimes, I envied Dante. He never knew Frankie. He never lost her.
“She was a sweet, sweet child,” Deirdre said.
“She was,” Mom whispered. I nodded for her sake.
Family lore said that Frankie was my opposite in everything. She never cried; I had tantrums. She was tired all the time; I was affectionately called the Tornado. She had trouble eating—dairy, peanuts, gluten were all life-threatening. Even with my mom’s obsessive attention to feeding her, she just didn’t like food, something my mother still puzzled over. How could a person not like food? Any food? Look at Marley. She eats everything not nailed to the floor! Once, the stories went, I’d even eaten an entire stick of butter.
Apparently, I slept with Frankie from the day I was old enough to crawl out of my crib and into hers. Mom was terrified I’d roll on top of her and smother her. After all, I was the Henry VIII of toddlers, tall for my age, heavy for my size, bursting with energy. Frankie’s diagnosis was mysteriously called failure to thrive.
Clearly, she got the shantytown side of the womb. No one ever guessed we were twins.
Then one day, Mom took Frankie to the doctor’s office, then to the hospital. Three days later, our parents sat Eva and me down and, barely able to speak the words, told us Frankie was in heaven. Seven-year-old Eva didn’t come out of her room for a week.
I got my pillow and started putting it next to me where my sister had been. That was the only real memory I had, carved into my heart when my father understood what I was doing and, sobbing and heartbroken, took the pillow away.
“Can she tell me what heaven’s like?” Mom asked, jerking me back into the present.
“She says it’s very beautiful. So much light. Like nothing we’ve ever seen,” Deirdre answered in something of a monotone. “You’ll all be together again.”
“How soon?” Mom asked. “Can she tell me?” Twenty years ago, my mom found a lump in her breast that turned out to be a cyst, but being the good Catholic she was, she had believed it was a sign that her death was imminent. Still did.
“She doesn’t say,” Deirdre said. “But she says time is different there.”
“Okay. I think that covers everything,” I said. “Any other platitudes, Deirdre?”
“She’s fine, not in any pain,” she said. “And she loves you very much.”
That broke my mom. She buried her face in her hands, sobbing, and I suppressed the urge to kick Deirdre. “I’m sorry,” Mom said. “My husband and I, we’ve been so blessed. Three healthy children, we know we’re lucky. It’s just . . .”
“You can cry, Mommy,” I said. “It’s okay. We understand.”
With that, I helped my mom up and guided her out to the car.
Next stop was the cemetery, which we visited at least once a month.
Frankie’s gravestone was made of white marble. When she had died, Mom and Dad bought the plots on either side of her, for themselves. The statue of a little girl angel was carved into the headstone. When I was little, I thought it was a fairy, which made me happy. Frankie had been a little fairy child herself, pale skin and big eyes, thin and delicate.
There was a bouquet of apricot-colored roses. “Oh, how nice,” Mom said, kneeling to examine them. “These must be from Dante. He’s such a good boy.”
“Yes, he is,” I said. “Perfect in every way.”
“All three of you are. Frankie was, too.” Her voice was thick with tears. She brushed a few blades of grass off the base of the headstone. “We’re here, honey. Praying for you.”
I never got that, despite twelve years of Catholic school. I mean, Frankie was in heaven. She didn’t need our prayers—she was already enjoying the afterlife. I used to picture heaven as a place where you got to do whatever you wanted . . . a divine amusement park, more or less, where you could fly, swim with dolphins, visit other planets and have soft-serve ice cream with rainbow shots every day.
My mother’s hair, black and curly like mine, had more and more gray these days. I put my hand on her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. I envied her the memories she had of my little twin. All I had was the lack of her. The Frankie-shaped space that the pillow hadn’t been able to replace.
“You want to have lunch?” I asked.
“Sure. Let’s stop by the diner, get a little cheesecake. I could eat.”
We could always eat. “Sure, Mommy,” I said. We’d sit and eat way too many calories apiece and Mom would tell me stories of my sister I’d heard a hundred times before. “I’d love to.”
CHAPTER 8
Georgia
Tell off the people who judged you when you were fat.
(I don’t really see that happening. Ever.)
On Thursday I donned my mental armor and went to my brother’s house for dinner. I’d had to enlist my mother’s help, because if I’d just called Hunter and said, “Hey, can I come for dinner one night?” the answer would’ve been no, didn’t I know how busy he was, he was an engineer, not some dumb nursery school teacher who got to play with stuffed animals all day long.
But Big Kitty
and Evil Brother had an unholy alliance, the same one that allowed her to look the other way when he tormented me as a kid. Hunter was her precious firstborn—the child she wanted, unlike me, the child of perimenopause. He was good-looking, fit and athletic; I was not. She could take him to the Cambry-on-Hudson Lawn Club and show him off; once, when we were going to an Easter brunch there and I was about twelve, I remember her tugging the zipper of the too-small dress she insisted I wear, saying, “What will people say when they see I have a fat daughter?”
At any rate, I’d called her, made some noises about how I was thinking about inviting everyone to dinner—her, Mason, Hunter, Dad, Cherish and the girls—and she played right into my hands.
“Let me talk to Hunter.” An hour later, my brother texted me a warm and lovely invitation.
Mom said you want to come for dinner Thursday. Be here at 5 and pick Mom up first. Don’t even think about asking Dad and his new family, because I’ll slam the door in their fucking faces.
He could always work writing greeting cards if the chemical engineering didn’t work out.
Hunter was seven years older than I was. We had never been close. We rarely played together, and if we did, it could turn ugly in an instant. One time, for example, we were at our grandparents’ summer place in the Adirondacks—a beautiful old cottage on a lake where we’d spend every July before summer camps were part of our lives. Hunter and I were standing on the dock fishing, and it had been lovely, really; me about five, him twelve. We stood there in the shade of an old maple that overhung the lake, catching nothing, saying little.
Then, to my surprise, he cast his line and handed me the pole. “Turn the reel, nice and slow,” he said, and I did, thrilled that my big brother was teaching me something.
Then the line hummed and pulled. “I caught something!” I exclaimed. A fish leaped out of the water, and it was big, at least to my five-year-old self.
“Give it to me!” Hunter snapped, grabbing the pole from my hands. He yanked upward, and the line broke. The fish splashed away. Also lost was the shiny lure Hunter had been using.
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