A girl isn’t supposed to gain the freshman fifteen until she’s actually a college freshman, Sethie thought. And a girl like me isn’t supposed to gain it at all.
Her mother was in the room, of course. That’s the policy at pediatricians’ offices. That night, Sethie began to notice the way that her mother watched her, eyeing the way a certain tank top creased around her stomach, the way her legs looked sticking out from the bottom of a pair of the boxer shorts she slept in, as though Rebecca had been surprised at the number on the scale and was looking closely to see exactly how that had happened.
But then, Sethie thought, maybe she had always been watching. Sethie imagined Rebecca’s eyes, all that time, watching her eat pizza for dinner after she’d come home from SAT tutoring at the coffee shop, where she’d had hot chocolate with whipped cream. Because of Rebecca’s long hours at work, she never cooked dinner; they always ordered in. Rebecca wouldn’t have had hot chocolate, and she would order her pizza without pepperoni. Surely, Rebecca’s hawk eyes had noticed every single pound she had gained after every yearbook meeting and every tutoring session.
Rebecca watched almost all the same shows that Sethie did, and after dinner, they would leave their dirty plates in the sink and watch TV on Rebecca’s bed with the lights out. Sethie would lie on her side; at her heaviest, she felt how shallow the crook of her waist had become. During commercial breaks, she would press on it with her thumb. As she lost weight, she felt the crook deepen. She could fit the heel of her hand in it, and then her palm. But by then, she hated watching TV in Rebecca’s room. By then, she could see that Rebecca thought, as she did, that she was still at fault for having gained the weight in the first place.
For her birthday this past summer, Sethie asked for a TV in her room.
Sethie bought a scale at the pharmacy around the corner a few weeks after seeing that 132. She’d already begun forcing back down the numbers that had crept so far up. Now, Sethie keeps the scale under her bed like contraband; Rebecca never knew she bought it. She steps on it every day, first thing in the morning, before taking her shower. She hasn’t wanted to get on it today; she’s sure that after last night, even with the vomiting, the number will be too high.
Rebecca doesn’t need to keep a scale in the house. Rebecca is the type of woman who has never had to worry about gaining weight. Naturally thin, she would never understand how hard it is for Sethie to stop eating something delicious even when she’s full. Sethie’s mother is beautiful; beautiful, that is, for her age, which is 49. Beautiful in that way that 49-year-old women are beautiful, so that you know that once they were undeniably desirable girls. Sethie’s mother’s body has softened since she was younger; surely she’s put on weight since her twenties and thirties. But still, there doesn’t seem to be any fat on her. Sethie has seen pictures of Rebecca when she was in high school, her stomach taut in a two-piece. Sethie tries to imagine what it would be like to allow someone to take a picture of her with a bikini on. She tries to imagine wearing a bikini when there was anyone holding a camera in her sight line.
Now, Sethie closes her books and piles them together, picks them up.
“All done?” Rebecca asks, barely looking up from her papers.
“Yup,” Sethie says, standing. She’s lying; she’s decided to finish her work in her room. Rebecca stretches her legs out in front of her, pointing and then flexing her toes. Her feet look, Sethie thinks, as perfect as a doll’s.
9.
BOYS LIKE SHAW never say “I love you,” but Sethie doesn’t know if that means that Shaw loves her but doesn’t like to talk about it, or if it means that he doesn’t love her, because he’s not the type to fall in love. She wonders what he would say if she told him she loved him. She wonders whether she does, in fact, love him. Since even the word boyfriend seems off-limits, she can only imagine how off-limits the word love is.
They’re in her bedroom. Her mother is out for the evening, one of those law firm dinners. So Sethie’s bedroom door is defiantly open.
Shaw is on the bed watching TV, and Sethie is sitting on the floor, leaning on the bed, drinking her liter of water. She’s almost finished it, and she has to pee so badly she thinks she might burst. One more gulp, she promises herself, and you’ll be done, and then you can go.
“Hey, gimme some of that,” Shaw says, and before Sethie even realizes what he’s doing, Shaw’s taken the bottle out of her hand and drunk the last of the water. Sethie freezes; does this mean she can get up to pee? Should she get more water, try to approximate the amount Shaw drank, try to finish her task? She feels like she’s trying to get away with something, like Shaw’s just finished her homework for her, and she can’t quite go through with handing in his work to the teacher.
But now Shaw rolls over to the edge of the bed, letting his arms hang down over her sides. His fingers trace shapes on Sethie’s upper arms, and Sethie leans her head back. She tries to picture the shapes he’s making; maybe he’s writing words.
Then Shaw’s fingers suddenly grab her, and he’s pulling her up onto the bed with him. As he leans down over her, Sethie thinks the words, “Hold on one second” and “Let me just get up for a minute,” but she can’t make them come out of her mouth. What if she stops him, and when she comes back, he doesn’t want her anymore? Sometimes Sethie thinks that the part of sex she most enjoys is that it proves Shaw wants her; she is scared that stopping him now will stop him wanting her later. So she lies there beneath him, even though her bladder feels like it’s going to burst. When he’s inside her, she thinks she can actually feel the liquid sloshing around. It hurts, and Sethie bites her lip to keep from crying. It’s not Shaw’s fault that it hurts; if he knew, he would stop. The first few times they slept together, he was so scared of hurting her. They had sex carefully, like each one thought they might break the other. It took them a while to realize the things they could do, the little pains that don’t matter later. But even now, Shaw is gentle; he holds her face between his hands, he lifts her up carefully, he begins slowly. When they finish, he pulls the covers over her, because he knows she’s always cold. Once, he joked that she must be the only girl whom sex made colder, not warmer. He doesn’t know that’s just from having his cold skin all over her. Sethie waits until Shaw is dozing, and then scrambles off the bed and into the bathroom.
Shaw doesn’t leave until after ten. Once he’s gone, Sethie washes her face and brushes her teeth. She carefully applies skin creams intended for much older women: anti-wrinkle cream for her eyes and her forehead, a special lip treatment to keep her lips plump and soft.
She changes into boxer shorts and a tank top and climbs into bed. She thinks she should sleep with long sleeves and long pants. Maybe that would prevent her current acrobatics. She has to fold the sheets between her legs, so that she won’t feel the fat on her inner thighs rubbing together. She has to wrap her arms around a pillow, so that she won’t feel the fat on her upper arms pressing into her sides. And she has to rest her cheek on that pillow the way she might rest it on Shaw’s chest, if he were still here. She kisses the pillow where Shaw’s cheek would be. Only then can she fall asleep.
10.
SETHIE HAS BEGUN helping Janey with her English homework. Janey is determined to bring up her GPA this semester.
“You get straight As,” Sethie protests at first. “Not in English,” Janey insists. She has to bring out old report cards before Sethie believes her.
Sethie teases Janey that her new interest in GPAs has to do with getting into Columbia, to be close to Doug.
“Shut up,” Janey says, laughing, but Sethie notices she looks embarrassed and promises not to bring it up again, and when she promises, Janey looks grateful.
“English lit is not my strong suit,” Janey complains, but Sethie spends at least one evening a week convincing Janey that it could be her strong suit if she wanted it to be. After a few weeks, Janey comes home with an A on a paper. She shows it to Sethie the way that most kids would show it to their parents.
“How did you do that?” Janey laughs, shoving the paper with the bright red A in Sethie’s face.
“I didn’t write the paper,” Sethie says. “You did.”
“Yeah, but I couldn’t have done it without you. You’re the kind of girl who always gets As.”
“Not always. My B in art class pulled my whole GPA down last year.”
Janey shakes her head and puts her arm around Sethie. “You make me feel like I can actually get As in English class.”
“Well, obviously you can,” Sethie says, laughing.
“Yeah, but I never thought so before.”
In November, Janey says Sethie should come over for Thanksgiving.
“I mean, you’ve already had a sampling of the Thanksgiving food at my house,” she says, “so you know it’s good.”
Sethie is poring over a Chinese food menu in Janey’s living room. Janey’s parents are away again, or maybe still away is more accurate, though Janey says they came home for two days last week. Which has more calories, Sethie thinks, wonton soup or a spring roll?
“Oh, a spring roll, definitely.” Sethie looks up; she hadn’t realized she was thinking out loud. Janey continues, “And we’ll order all the main courses with the sauce on the side. And brown rice, not white. Better for you.”
Sethie nods, watching Janey stretch her arms over her head as she reaches for the phone next to the couch. A stripe of Janey’s white belly is visible between the bottom of her tank top and the top of her shorts. Sethie is trying to decide whether Janey has the type of body that could be described with words like svelte and lithe. Sethie has written those words on the full-length mirror in her bedroom with dry-erase marker. They are her two new favorite words; words that sound almost foreign; words whose meaning is obvious just from the shape of them in her mouth. The mirror is on the back of her door, so she doesn’t have to worry about her mother seeing it; Rebecca would never be in Sethie’s room with the door closed behind her. Usually, she stands just in the doorway without even coming inside at all. Sethie had also written Don’t Eat and Bones Are Beautiful; but she erased those in favor of svelte and lithe a couple of weeks ago.
As Janey twists her body to pick up the phone, Sethie is frustrated because she didn’t know that you could ask for Chinese food with the sauce on the side, and she’s never eaten brown rice. She didn’t even know that a spring roll was worse for her than soup; though when she thinks about it, of course it is. It’s fried dough, after all. But then, soup sounds like so much more food than a spring roll. Sethie closes the menu angrily, like the Chinese-food people were trying to trick her.
“How did you know that, anyway—wonton soup versus spring roll?” Sethie asks, sighing. “You don’t even count calories.”
Janey shrugs. “Every girl goes through that phase, doesn’t she?” She says it like it’s no big deal, like she’s been there and now it’s just Sethie’s turn. Sethie does not like that Janey has just boiled the central preoccupation of her life down to a phase. A girl like Janey, Sethie thinks, has the luxury of it just being a phase; a girl like Janey is naturally thin, a girl like Janey can eat whatever she wants and never get fat. But Sethie knows that if she ever stops keeping track of what she eats, she will be fat. Not like Janey, born to be thin; Janey won the genetic lottery, and Sethie lost. This thought makes Sethie so angry that she is even hungrier.
Sethie concentrates on the way Janey knows the Chinese restaurant’s number by heart, the way Janey orders expertly, and even seems to flirt with the guy on the other end of the line. When their food comes, there’s a free order of spare ribs in there, a present for Janey’s flirting. Sethie wishes Janey hadn’t flirted; the spare ribs mean there is another food to contend with.
Before Sethie leaves, Janey says, “Don’t forget about Thanksgiving. You can meet my parents.” Janey laughs, like the concept of a friend meeting her parents is a joke. “And Doug will be there, so we won’t be the only kids.”
“Doug will be there?” Sethie asks.
“Yeah. His family lives in Virginia, and that’s a little far for him to go just for the weekend. So he’s coming here.”
“His parents must miss him, though.”
“Yeah, well, I think they were happy to hear he had a girlfriend.” The word girlfriend comes out of Janey’s mouth like a laugh. Sethie thinks, That was fast.
“Anyway,” Janey says, “I’d like to have my real family with me for a change.”
Sethie smiles, but she’s thinking of the food that they’ll have at Janey’s Thanksgiving. She thinks about the stuffing and the gravy and the pie. She and her mother normally go to her mother’s friend’s house, since they don’t do it at home, and there’s not always traditional Thanksgiving food. There’s only stuffing half the time and there’s never pie. Thanksgiving at Janey’s would definitely be more fattening, if more fun.
Sethie tries to imagine Shaw spending the holiday with them, like Doug is with Janey’s family. Sethie can’t picture him: passing the potatoes, sitting next to her, in a button-down and khakis or maybe just nice jeans, being polite to the grown-ups. Shaw would insist they sneak out early; he’d want to get stoned first so they could really enjoy the food.
But maybe Shaw will invite her to his place; his family is the type who does a big spread—very “the more the merrier.” So Sethie doesn’t ask her mother if she can go to Janey’s, not for days. She’s giving Shaw time to invite her to his place first, because if she’s going to ask her mother to spend Thanksgiving with someone else, she’d like it to be Shaw. But then, it’s the weekend before Thanksgiving, and Shaw hasn’t asked, and Janey is still prompting her for an answer. Sethie lies and says she’s already asked her mom. She says that her mother needs time to think about it; that her mother’s being a pain in the ass, not letting her do her own thing.
The truth is, Sethie would be surprised if her mother didn’t let her go. It’s not like Thanksgiving is a big deal in their family. They don’t dress up, and they take a cab to Rebecca’s friend’s house downtown. So when Sethie finally does ask, she’s surprised at her mother’s answer.
“Absolutely not.”
Rebecca is sitting on the couch watching Jeopardy! Sethie waited until it went to commercial to ask.
“What?”
“No. Marcia’s already ordered the food.”
It takes Sethie a moment to understand her mother’s logic. Marcia has already ordered the food she’ll be serving on Thursday. It would be rude not to go when Marcia’s already ordered Sethie her allotted amount. Sethie practically laughs. If only Marcia knew the trouble Sethie would go to to avoid eating her carefully ordered portion.
Sethie’s mother would never think about limiting her portion. Sometimes Sethie wonders what her body would have ended up like if she’d never started messing with it; maybe she’d have ended up like Rebecca.
Even now, Sethie thinks, Rebecca would look better in a bathing suit than I would.
“I don’t think food for one person really makes that big of a difference,” Sethie says. She recalls that once, when it was snowing, they blew off Thanksgiving altogether. Sethie must have been eleven. Neither of them wanted to go out in the snow; Sethie’s mother certainly didn’t care about the food Marcia’d ordered then. They ordered in Chinese food and ate it on the couch, sharing a blanket. Sethie remembers that her mother was terrible with the chopsticks and dropped food on the couch. She’d laughed. “Isn’t the kid supposed to be the sloppy one?” she’d said.
“It makes a difference to Marcia,” Rebecca says, and Sethie thinks even her mother knows how lame her reasons sound, especially when she adds, “If it means that much to you, why don’t you invite Janey to join us at Marcia’s,” which totally contradicts her point about the food Marcia’s ordered.
Sethie can’t figure out why her mother is so insistent that she spend this day with her, but she finally shrugs and goes back into her own room. She doesn’t want to have to tell Janey; what a lame, childish thing it
is to be kept from your friends by your mother. Janey’s mother would never do that.
11.
SETHIE IS LYING on the floor of her bedroom in her underwear, trying to figure out whether she is pretty. She holds a magnified mirror—the kind her mother keeps in the bathroom to put on her makeup—above her face and bends and straightens and shifts her arms so that she can see her face from every angle, every distance. Her pores are huge, but then, her lips look thick; her teeth are crooked, but her eyelashes are long. When she holds the mirror this close, she can just barely see her dark hair outlining her face, and her eyes look pale gray. She isn’t sure whether her eyes are pretty, but she does conclude finally that they’re striking, maybe even the kind of eyes that people talk about when you leave the room.
Sethie’s room is a square. Her bed is in the corner, under the window; on the floor, Sethie lies parallel to it. She wouldn’t even have to straighten her arms above her head to reach the nightstand above her while also touching the dresser on the other side of the room with her feet.
She resents any interruptions; the phone should not ring, homework does not need to be done. She is very busy lying on her back, enjoying the pain of her shoulders on the floor (that means she’s bony), holding a mirror above her face. There are circles underneath her eyes. Are those ugly or mysterious? Heroin chic is out, so she decides they count as ugly. She presses down on the bump in her nose, a souvenir from a childhood accident. That makes her profile interesting, so she counts that as pretty. I should make a list, she thinks: pretty on one side, ugly on the other. Add it all up, and the column with more items wins. But then, some items should be worth more than just one point, she thinks. Like fat should be worth at least ten. Twenty, maybe. Maybe if there were some sort of scale that assigned value to each of the items, so that pretty could be objective like a math problem.
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