by Rita Ciresi
“I’m in massive pain.”
“What, your brain finally explode or what?”
“I got a wart removed from my foot and I ran out of ice cubes.”
“Pack of peas,” Al said.
“What?”
“You got a pack of frozen peas? Carol sat on ’em after her episiotomy. Doctor’s screwball idea. He goes to her, ‘Forget the ice, a pack of peas fits just right down there.’ ”
“This is my foot we’re talking about, Al, not my crotch.” I frowned. “Did you eat those peas afterward?”
“Your mother did. They were wrapped in a Ziploc bag; still, I think she went a little too far—”
“Lemme talk to Carol. Now.”
“She’s at your mother’s.” Al must have taken the mute off the Zenith, because the roar of Monday Night Football suddenly filled the air. “Mondays she clears out and lets me watch the game.”
“Who’s playing?”
“Jets and the Cowboys.”
“Who you for?”
“You gotta ask?”
“What’s the score?”
“Why don’t you turn it on and see for yourself? Lotta good butt shots on the guys, Lise.”
“Oh, yeah?” I asked. “What’s the station?”
I turned on the game and found Al had spoken true: The huddle provided more than enough excitement to keep me watching into overtime. The Jets got clobbered and I was sure Al felt beaten too, because I already knew—straight from the source’s mouth—that after being banished from the house on Monday evenings, Carol refused to perform her conjugal duties. “Runs me out of the house,” she complained, “totally stinks of Old Milwaukee, and then he expects me to put out? Dream on, big dummy.”
Two sick days and a bottle of aspirin later, I returned to work with a bloody gauze bandage on my foot, which shriveled and constricted as the skin on my sole dried and hardened. During the two—week period when I couldn’t work out at the gym, I strictly monitored my caloric intake. For breakfast I cut the amount of cereal I poured into the bowl in half I delayed—or skipped—lunch. I didn’t visit the break room because I’d have to pass by the vending machines, where the smashed white sticky buns hung next to the cheerful yellow and orange bags of nacho-cheese chips and the bright blue-and-white Nestlé’s Crunch bars seemed to beckon me to drop my quarters into the slot. For dinner I ate a pack of melba toast and two hard-boiled eggs washed down with a one—calorie root beer. I gnawed on more raw vegetables than Peter Rabbit ate on his ill—fated trip to Mr. McGregor’s garden. Unlike Peter, I did not lose my new blue jacket in pursuit of cabbages and potatoes—but I did find what I considered a compelling story:
After her painful breakup with Thomas Akins, Donna Dilano went on a diet. She found starvation—even more than exercise—a very effective weight—loss method. At first it was a game she played with herself—how many hours could go by before food passed her lips? Then not eating—denying herself meals—became an overwhelming interest. Just looking at food made her sick. The employee cafeteria—with its smell of bacon bits and fried potatoes and fish sticks—disgusted her to the point where she didn’t want to show her face there anymore. At home she sucked on pretzels so slowly she could make a single Rold Gold Thinnee last for over an hour. A celery stick could take her through the afternoon and the entire evening. If she truly got ravenous—began to cry at the thought of food, but not want to consume any—she went into the kitchen and took down the kosher salt. Following the advice of several women’s magazines (which she publicly professed to scorn but secretly read religiously), Donna formerly had used kosher salt mixed with olive oil as an economical substitute for expensive beauty-counter exfoliants. Now she found that just a spoonful of said kosher salt, plunged into her mouth until she gagged and spit it into the sink, was an effective dietary aid. She slept with her forefinger tucked between her lips and woke in the morning with her cuticle torn and red. This was all the nourishment she would allow her sorry self. The fat dripped off her body like wax from a candle. Her Pappagallo pumps became loose at the ankle. She had to use a matte knife to puncture another hole in her leather belt (which already was stamped in gold: EXTRA SMALL). She used a yellow measuring tape to get the numbers on her forearm and her calves and her stomach and her neck.…
Donna lost twenty-five pounds. I shed seven. But what a seven! My thighs no longer touched. My kneecaps and elbows hardened. I felt my rib cage as I showered. For the first time in my life I started to see some cheekbones—the kind for which some women paid plastic surgeons thousands—and I was determined not to bury them beneath fat ever again.
At Sarah Lawrence, girls had dieted until they stopped their periods. I wondered how much I’d have to lose to put an end to my curse. That would be a happy day, I thought, and imagined tossing all my tampons and minipads and Midol and that blasted pack of Trojans I’d purchased on the way home from the public health clinic—which of course I hadn’t used, but still felt compelled to hang on to in case some fortuitous encounter with a romantic hero transpired. Fat chance. My period came and went, with its usual share of cramps, tears, and bloated bitchiness. I was tired and short-tempered at work.
Dropping seven pounds had its downside. My bras didn’t fit me right. My feet and hands felt numb from cold—iron-poor blood had set in again—and I couldn’t wear enough layers against the frigid weather. My fingernails looked ridged and yellow, which I disguised with pale pink polish. I found myself rooting through the boxes in my closet to rediscover some of my college outfits, which I never had the heart to throw out.
This was how sick Donna became: Into the trash went all the ice cream and meat-loaf dinners from her freezer, the stale crackers and cans of pâté she did not want to tempt herself to eat, the expired food coupons she clipped from the Sunday paper, the panty hose that no longer hugged her thin thighs, the makeup that no longer matched her wan skin, the antiperspirant that no longer masked her body odor—because suddenly Donna seemed to be giving off a different kind of smell, which she knew resembled mold on sweet potatoes and was not pleasant. Her winter coat, two sizes too big, looked like a maternity garment. She couldn’t bring herself to wear gauze; the wind might have blown her away.
“Lisa, you’re skinny enough to see through,” my secretary told me. “Hardly a heavyweight,” the nurse remarked when I stood on the scale at the gynecologist’s and barely tipped one hundred and three. “Great muscle definition,” one of the trainers at the gym commented, which only made me spend ten more strenuous minutes with the Pacer.
I thought I looked good. I thought of myself as another person. I was Lisa, but I was also Donna—the girl who had whittled away her body and her friends and her lover, who put her sore feet on the treadmill and jogged until she practically heard her bones clack together like a mallet on a xylophone, her stomach shaking like a seed within a dried gourd, her dull, strawlike hair soaked with sweat, and her heart ready to stop.
At the end of November, three months after I learned my first ELISA was negative, I cheated and got another test. When I got the second negative, I decided to go to church. But I didn’t even know where the Catholic church was in Ossining, and I was forced to look it up—like it was an appliance store or a Midas Muffler station—in the phone book.
The Church of the Archangel Gabriel was off a secluded road, hidden behind fir trees. Only the white spire and a too tasteful wooden sign with gold lettering gave its presence away, a subtle reminder that I was miles from my childhood parish. My mother’s church, situated on a busy street corner, smelled of incense and beeswax and floor polish, and on holidays it reeked of mothballs from the furs the ladies wore and (supposedly to cover up that evil smell) the even more noxious smell of their Jungle Gardenia perfume.
I parked in the small lot—empty on this Wednesday evening except for a beat—up Ford that probably belonged to the rectory housekeeper. The carved wooden doors thudded behind me when I stepped into the hushed vestibule. I dipped my first finger into the glass
font and tried to feel the healing power of the holy water come over me as I made the sign of the cross. Only then did I feel fit to enter the church. My feet were shod in low pumps that made a soft padding sound on the red carpet. I sat in one of the back pews. I didn’t go so far as to kneel, but I bowed my head, remembering the part of mass when the parishioners say, Lord, I am not worthy … but only say the word and I shall be healed. Then I lifted my eyes. The altar was dim, lit only by the flicker of votives. Outside, darkness already had fallen; the stained-glass windows were a dull plum and deep green; the tabernacle glowed; the crucifix was illuminated from below.
I wanted to give God thanks, but I no longer knew how. I went down on my knees, clasped my hands against my forehead, and was reduced to a guilty litany. I pray, I pray, I whispered inside myself, as if the assertion were equivalent to the act, and as if I knew who or what I could possibly be praying for. My knuckles were white and wet from my weeping when I rose, blew my nose, and walked up the right aisle to the transept. I wanted to light a candle for Dodie. But when I reached into my purse, I realized I hadn’t swung by the bank in days. I had a twenty, no change, and I needed gas on the way home. My penitence—my resolution—was short-lived. I hoped God loved a thief I took a thin stick from the metal box of cinders, held it to a burning candle, and lit all the votives, from the small to the large—fifty, maybe a hundred bucks’ worth—for Dodie. Then I slunk from the church like a criminal.
“How very Genet,” Dodie said when he came to spend the weekend and to celebrate—in advance—Christmas and New Year’s. I picked up Dodie at the Ossining train station not in my Toyota with a lobotomized, inflatable man in the backseat, but in a brand-new set of wheels I had purchased—on a wild impulse—the previous weekend.
That Saturday I had received through the mail my summons to the Boorman holiday party. The wording—You and your guest are cordially invited—had made my stomach gnaw with loneliness. But as I went to tack the invitation on my refrigerator door, I spied the Toyota salesman’s card still hanging beneath the MONEY STINKS magnet. Well, I thought, why else had I kept it there, if not for what my mother called the day that rains? A moment later I was on the phone with the salesman. He was there. On the lot. Until seven-thirty that evening.
I went shopping for a man and ended up buying a Jeep.
• • •
I walked into the dealership, strode up to my gentleman of the hour, and held out my hand. His name was Bill—Bill Walker, a handle that sounded so bland I wondered if it was an alias. I reintroduced myself, giving him a smile that led him to say, “Sure, I remember you. What’d you have in mind this afternoon?”
“I just thought it was time for a look around.”
“Corolla still treatin’ you right?”
“It’s done the trick.”
“Looking to upgrade now?”
“Maybe,” I said, and when he went into his office to get his coat, I spied the back of a picture frame on his desk. When he came out, I tried to spot if he wore a wedding ring, but he pulled on his left glove first.
Bill and I went onto the lot. It was a mild day. Although the trees were lined with white, patches of grass shone through the snow on the ground, and the sun glinted off the smooth, waxy hoods of the new cars. Bill walked me up and down the rows. He talked horsepower and power steering and list price. He gave me the bit about the floor mats and the radio and the various option packages.
“See anything you want to test drive?” he asked, and as I pointed toward a light-blue Celica—clearly way beyond my price range—I saw over his shoulder a row of Jeeps, cute and silly as the amusement cars that Carol and I used to ride at Lighthouse Beach. I was sure their horns made a funny sound: a-whoogga-a-whoogga.
When Bill went back into the showroom to get a license plate to fix on the Celica, I hustled over and peered into the bright blue Jeep on the end. It was utterly impractical: seated only two, and the wind probably whistled through the doors, but I imagined a girl could feel like King of the Road sitting up so high. The big wide tires looked like they’d really grip the road, which had been icy of late. From this standpoint, the Jeep suddenly seemed the very thing I needed: It was exceptionally safe.
“I’ve changed my mind,” I said when Bill came out. “I want to take this little thing for a spin.”
He looked surprised. But when he saw how dead-set I was on climbing in, he opened the door for me, fixed the license plates on the back and front, and went back into the dealership to fetch the key. He got in beside me, already starting to talk serious—some shit about the engine, which I didn’t listen to—as if I gave a damn about the inner workings of this all-terrain vehicle, when I was having so much fun tooling it down the street, pretending I was an archaeologist, a safari hunter, a desert explorer, an anthropologist in the wilds, a regular Margaret Mead or Jane Goodall, who was practically on the verge of singing the theme song from Born Free.
When we got back to the lot, I test—drove the Celica and a couple of low-range vehicles just for show, then asked for the literature on the Jeep. Bill wouldn’t leave me alone in his office even though I told him I needed fifteen minutes or so to look over the manufacturer’s material. As I browsed through the pages, I chatted with him about his job before I started flirting him down on the price—first seven-fifty, then a thousand, and then another five hundred on top of that—and once I got him that low, I knew I couldn’t cocktease him any lower without walking off the lot, and I asked what he’d take on a trade. My heart in my mouth, I signed on for yet another round of monthly payments, and as I drove off the lot I thought: Why would a girl need a man named Bill Walker or Ibby Strauss or any other guy for that matter, when she could drive a Jeep?
Then I realized that I hadn’t called State Farm. I wondered if I was driving an uninsured vehicle down an icy street. Of more immediate concern: I was cold. Really cold. I fiddled with the buttons on the dashboard and thought: Lisa, you are so stupid—in the dead of summer you buy a car without air—conditioning, and at the start of winter, a vehicle that has no fucking heat!
Dodie stopped dead in his tracks when he saw my Jeep sitting in the parking lot of the Ossining train station. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said, when I slipped the key into the driver’s door to prove my ownership. “What is this? You hate Hemingway.”
“Yeah, but I always loved watching that safari show, Daktari.”
Dodie climbed into the passenger seat. He cupped his hands around his mouth and blared into his mock trumpet the first few bars of the music that opened the National Geographic series, ending with a couple of spitty fart sounds blasted against the palm of his hand. “You gotta wonder about people who play brass instruments,” he said, and I laughed, remembering how far from lighthearted we both felt the last time we were in my car together. Then I knew why I got rid of my Toyota—it was nothing but a reminder of that morning when everything seemed to change for the worse, and a memory of that drive so long ago with Security Man mocking us in the backseat.
“What possessed you?” Dodie asked, as we started for my place.
“I wanted the car dealer to take me to the office Christmas party.”
“Did you get your date?”
“I think he’s married now.”
“So as a reaction, you went out and bought this butchbuggy?”
I squinted my eyes at him. “What’d you call my Jeep?”
Dodie held his head in his hands. “Lise, Lise, you’re so naive! I mean, this is like me driving the Oscar Mayer wienermobile down the street—”
“I don’t get what you’re saying.”
“A Jeep is a statement. That you’re on the dyke squad—”
“Bullshit, Dodie.”
“This is bullshit you’d better believe, sweetie.”
“It’s not like I’m wearing combat boots,” I said. “Or a bunch of keys on my belt loop.”
“I don’t know,” Dodie said, shaking his head in a nifty imitation of my mother. “Your hair, it�
��s kinda short. You got the muscles. And no boyfriend.”
I fell quiet.
“Still a sore spot?” Dodie asked.
“Let’s not talk about it,” I said.
So of course, it was one of the first things to come up while we made dinner—baked eggplant and risotto with basil and tomato chunks—and while we were chilling the champagne that Dodie matter-of-factly announced he brought as a way of celebrating the results of my second test, inconclusive as it still was. Tears came to my eyes when he slipped the champagne bottle in my refrigerator. Dodie also had cheated and taken a second test before his six-month mark. His was positive again.
Dodie sliced the eggplant; I chopped the tomatoes. Out of the corner of his eye, Dodie gave me the once-over.
“You’d better eat most of this,” he said.
“No, you’d better eat most of it,” I said, because Dodie’s doctor had ordered him to keep up his weight.
“You’ve really gotten skinny,” Dodie said.
“I only lost seven pounds.”
“Looks closer to ten or fifteen to me.”
“Great.”
“You aren’t making yourself throw up or anything, like those Sarah Lawrence princesses?”
“Yeah, last week I got an invitation to my reunion, and I’m such a dedicated alum—so loyal to my alma mater—that I’ve been riding the porcelain bus ever since.”
Dodie laughed and opened my cabinet. “What’s with this kosher salt?”
“Part of a feminine beauty ritual.”
“I thought you might be converting.”
“I think it’s safe to say I’m not.”
I shoved the kosher salt aside and pulled down the Morton’s. My mother always had bought store-brand salt, and I had vowed that when I grew up, I would pay the extra five cents just to get the midnight-blue container that offered in delicate cursive script this melancholy reminder: When it rains, it pours.
Dodie examined the bob-haired Morton’s salt girl sheltered beneath her big umbrella. He fell quiet as he sprinkled salt on the eggplant slices, and I knew I was in for a serious chat. I got out an onion, hacked off the wrong end—the crying end—and dug my nails under the skin, peeling back the brown papery wrapper.