Skinny

by Diana Spechler

  My first summer as a comedy club booker, I was so preoccupied, so sleep-deprived, so driven, I’d unwittingly let my armpit hair grow out until Mikey had intervened. “You’re regressing, Gray,” he’d told me. “You’re becoming early man.”

  And there was a news segment I’d seen on obesity—a six-hundred-pound woman rushed to the hospital with a fever. Weeks before, she’d stuck a hamburger under one of her breasts, saving it for later. Forgotten, it had molded, causing a nearly lethal infection.

  And then there was my father, eating a slice of pizza in two bites; smoking cigars; drinking scotch; letting sweat roll down his face, unnoticed, while he sat watching television in the wintertime.

  “We can get so out of touch,” I told Mikey, running my fingertips over the birthmarks on his naked back. I knew every single one of those birthmarks—all the possible constellations. “It scares me,” I said. “Don’t you find that scary?”

  We were sitting on my childhood bed, beside my stuffed stegosaurus that was missing an eye. As a child, I’d shoved that thing under my shirt and pretended to nurse it at my nipple. “Your baby looks just like you,” my father used to say.

  Mikey turned around and took me in his arms. I felt him this time—the blazing warmth of life just under his skin, his heart beating inside his chest, pounding down walls to reach me. I worried that he would make a joke. I thought I could hold myself together forever if he didn’t make a fucking joke. He squeezed me until it hurt to breathe and said, “Gray, I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I snapped awake to the sound of my door swinging hard on its hinges. When I opened my eyes, Sheena was sitting on my feet. “Well, someone’s red-eyed and bushy-tongued. Girl, you told me you had the flu!” She was grinning, distractedly fingering the white scars beneath her lower lip, her cheeks splotched pink. “Bennett looks like hell.” She bounced up and down on the bed and the springs squeaked absurdly. “Were you two doing the jiggery-pokery?”

  “My feet, Sheena.”

  She got up and crossed the room to the full-length mirror that stood propped against the wall, and then gripped the frame to angle it so she could see her whole body. “You’re so short,” she said, smoothing her T-shirt over her hips, which had visibly narrowed. She spun around a few times and then leaned an elbow on my dresser, stretching her thick ponytail to one side to inspect the ends. Sheena was the first person I’d met in twenty years who owned and used a crimping iron. “He’s not bad for an old man. Built like a brick shithouse.”

  I closed my eyes. “You have it wrong.”

  “Hmm.”

  “We drank too much last night. We’re practically the only people here who can drink legally. That’s all.”

  “The girls today! Spider’s like one of those scratch-and-sniff stickers. She scratches herself raw. And sucks that EpiPen necklace. Eden hasn’t stopped talking all morning. All. Morning. I could kick her. You know what your lying around in bed means? It means I have to listen to Spider and Eden. Come back from the dead, Lazarus!”

  I opened my eyes. “What’s for lunch?”

  “Tacos. With textured vegetable protein.”

  Nausea slithered up through my chest.

  “Can we just agree that you get Spider and Eden and I get Whitney and Miss?”

  “What do you mean ‘get’?”

  “Whitney and Miss are my campers, and Spider and Eden are yours. And Harriet can be her own smelly island. Deal?”

  “I have to sleep just a little more.” I wanted to stay in the cocoon of my bed, remembering each muscle of Bennett’s back, the clipped wings of his shoulder blades. I closed my eyes again, pulling the blanket over my face. “Please, Sheena. I’m sorry. Tomorrow I’ll cover for you during my free period. Then you’ll have two free periods. Okay?”

  “Did you and Bennett do it? You know I’ll find out.”

  Under the blanket, I opened my eyes, and the weight of Bennett’s body, his hipbones on my hipbones, filled my head, threatening to spill out of my mouth. I had slept with a man! We weren’t even in love! We had just gotten drunk and done it, and he was handsome! A brick shithouse. I wanted to feel the shape of those words in the air, to watch Sheena’s face switch on like a lamp.

  “Okay, fine, we had a little sex.”

  Sheena yanked the blanket down to my chin. Her eyes glistened. She was a dog awaiting a treat.

  “Sheena,” I said. “You can’t tell a soul.”

  “Is he hung?”

  “Is he what? I don’t know.”

  “How can you not know?”

  I rubbed my fists into my eyes. “Sure, he’s hung.”

  “You’re a cheater!” Sheena said, her tone light with dark edges.

  I stopped rubbing my eyes. As my vision cleared, her face came into sharp focus—the lacing of white scars underlining her mouth, her eyes like black scopes. It occurred to me with some discomfort that Sheena was a stranger.

  “Sheena, it wasn’t anything,” I said. “Really. Nothing has changed.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Lunch passed without me, and then rest hour, and then, finally, I rose on wobbly legs like a colt and checked my voice-mail messages.

  Mikey.

  “I’m worried about you. I dreamt that you were eating ham. And then I woke up and thought, Something’s wrong if Gray’s eating ham. Even if it’s just in my dream. Is that what you’re doing down there? All these Christmases you wouldn’t touch my mother’s ham . . . Does it sound like I’m coming on to you? ‘Touch my mother’s ham.’ Maybe I should fly down there.” I heard static. And then, “You’d better not be eating pork without me.”

  I deleted the message, my limbs so heavy I had to sit on the edge of the bed. I sent him a text message: “I’m fine! Just busy. No ham. Love you.”

  Then I put on sunglasses first, clothes second, and walked with my campers to the soccer field. The oldest boys were there with Bennett, who was wearing a faded tie-dye T-shirt and setting up orange cones as goal posts.

  When he saw us coming, he yelled, “Ladies, you want to play boys against girls or mixed?”

  I wanted to run into his arms. I wanted him to lift me off the ground so my feet dangled, so the grass blades had to reach for my toes.

  “Mixed!” Whitney yelled back. “But put me and Miss on the same team.” To Miss, she said, “I’m so sick of females.”

  “Girls can do anything boys can do,” Spider said.

  I tugged Spider’s bushy ponytail. “You would have been a great feminist fifteen years ago.”

  “I was just being born,” she said. “But know what? I was named after Emily Davidson. She was killed by the king’s horse while trying to attach a suffragette flag to it.”

  “Your real name is Emily?”

  “No, it’s Davidson.”

  “Really?”

  “No. It’s Emily.” Spider bumped her hip against mine. “You’re so serious, Gray. You’re like a soldier.”

  Harriet, dressed in yesterday’s black outfit, grumbled, “It’s too hot for soccer.” I was beginning to think she slept in her clothes. She always looked like something thrown away. “I’ll faint,” she said.

  I, too, felt deliciously faint. I hadn’t eaten in twenty-one hours. My head still ached, but the throbbing was muted. Watching Bennett, I felt scooped out like a seashell. I saw him see me, and through his eyes, I saw a thin girl, a girl whose bracelets would fall off her wrists.

  But when we reached the field, he said, “Gray, why don’t you split the teams up?” and although he was wearing sunglasses, I could tell he was looking past my shoulder.

  “Since when do you call me Gray?”

  Above us, a fat cloud passed over the sun. Bennett kicked a soccer ball into the air and bounced it off the front of his head.

  “Count off by twos,” I told the kids weakly, and then nausea pushed me to the bleachers to sit. There was a wet-washcloth heat in the air, the rain ready to be wrung out. I touched my
stomach and counted two rolls. If I sat up straight, they unfurled partway, but no position my body could take would make them disappear.

  The kids played soccer, fell down, cried theatrically, limped away, rested on laurels, drank water, missed goals. I watched from the sidelines. Bennett blew his whistle, pumped his fist, yelled “Man on!” and “Breakaway!” He patted tops of heads, clapped his hands, pantomimed outside curve kicks. I thought of Mikey lying on top of me, pressing into me, his forehead against my forehead, his palms cupping my face. Over and over, I remembered slurring to Bennett, “What if I seduced you . . . seduced you . . . seduced you?”

  I caught sight of Eden hanging back, off to the side, eyeing the soccer ball as it flitted from person to person, sneaker to sneaker, and suddenly I missed my father so much, the missing shook my vision fuzzy. Not the man who had tried to crush Mikey to dust, but the man who used to touch my nose and tell me, “When you’re asking for something, make eye contact,” the man who shuttled me around not on his shoulders like the other fathers did, but perched on just one shoulder, my legs draped down his chest. “This is the dangerous shoulder ride,” he would say in his monster voice, and I would cling with all my fingers to the top of his warm head.

  Once, my father and I drove all over the North Shore of Massachusetts in search of the perfect clam chowder.

  Once, he shielded my eyes when we walked by a church. “Read Maimonides,” he told me. “We aren’t supposed to look at crosses.”

  Then, some rainy Sunday, he took me to a Baptist church in Mattapan just for the music. Afterward, we ate lunch at a soul food restaurant, where he sighed, his mouth full of croquettes, and then swallowed and said, “We should have been born Southern Baptist.”

  My father—barefoot behind the barbecue, enormous in American flag swim trunks and a floppy white chef hat, saying, “Come here, Gray, I’ll show you how to make a burger do a double back flip.”

  My father—smoking cigars with my uncles, making them laugh until they turned weak; making me, again and again, refill the peanut bowl and crack them new beers.

  My father—tossing my mother into the air like confetti, yelling, “Gray, catch!”

  My father—singing “I Can’t Quit You Baby”—holding his arm out to me for a dance.

  Bennett blew his whistle, and our night together, the distraction of it, felt ridiculous—the ponchos decorating the restaurant walls, the dorm room sex, the drunk driving.

  I stood and cupped my hands around my mouth. “Get in there, Eden!”

  She spun around to face me, her nostrils flared, her lips cinched up like the knot of a balloon. “What the hell do you want from me?” she cried, accomplishing, in the space of a second, the thing I’d thought only my father could accomplish. Who but immediate family could load words with deadly bullets? My breath caught in my chest. I lowered myself back onto the bleachers.

  Eden threw her arms up and stomped off the field, and I felt a loosening inside me, as if something tight was unfurling, rolling dangerously out of my reach.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Fine, I’ll admit that there were precedents. My father’s death did not mark the first time I lost control. There was the time in college when I fell down the stairs and spent a month and a half on crutches. There was the first argument I ever had with Mikey, when we didn’t talk for eight days. There were other binges, too, some without identifiable catalysts. Why enumerate them? Why wax nostalgic for them? They happened and then they stopped.

  Each binge began without consulting me. It was outside, like a fly I distractedly swatted away. I had nothing to do with the hands paying the delivery guy, with the teeth coming together and separating, coming together and separating, with the exhaustion in the jaw, with the fingertips pushing open the front door of the bakery.

  I’ll admit there was something relaxing in it—relaxing the way ugly, loose-fitting clothes are relaxing, the way the certainty of one’s own death is relaxing. As long as a binge lasted, I rarely answered my phone. I blew through deadlines. I attended no parties. I was busy. I was sick. I was consumed and consuming and unfit for public consumption. The things that normally moved me—love, money, a yearning to be remembered, a fear of exposing my self-absorption—were muted by the deafening call of ice cream and stuffed wantons and Cracker Jacks. The world would have to wait, or else trample me like a panicked crowd.

  I knew better than to complain. Why be the rich person whining about wanting, the famous person jealous of the more famous person? Why be the toothache patient crying to the cancer patient? So I never said it aloud, but I understood what it was to be fat. As I ate and ate and stared at the wall, I knew what it meant to disown one’s body, to survey it with disgust.

  So after my father’s death, I started telling almost-truths, frequently sidling up to the truth, but stopping short of getting behind it and shoving it into the spotlight. I told people, “I don’t know why I’m so depressed.”

  “This is a rough year,” they would say, squeezing my hand. “You lost a parent. Give yourself time.”

  Sometimes I could almost believe that I’d heal if I just gave it time.

  Sometimes I told Mikey, “I’m scared I’m drinking too much.”

  “Then stop drinking too much,” he would say. “And while you’re at it, stop banging your head against the wall.”

  I began to tell everyone I was drinking too much. People thought I was confiding in them. They told me, “I always tell everyone I’m fine. I envy your frankness. It must be therapeutic.”

  Look, I was drinking. At Little Mermaid, I took shot after shot with the customers. If my shift ended early, I sat on the other side of the bar with a martini and spoke to the patron beside me. “I drink way too much.”

  “Tell me about it,” strangers would sigh, raising their glasses to toast me. Or they would say, “It’s New York. Everyone’s drinking too much.” Or they would say, “If you figure out a better way to pass the time, let me know.”

  There were many ways to explain my appetite. Maybe I was just hungry because I spent so many days dieting. Maybe my willpower simply suffered lapses. I read books about bingeing, learned names like Binge Eating Disorder, Food Addict, and Compulsive Overeating—big, fat, capitalized labels, none of which seemed quite applicable.

  Other people who couldn’t stop eating claimed to know the source (“I felt so angry, I just wanted to crunch!”), or they cited physiological factors, like mutated metabolisms and gluten allergies. They cut out carbohydrates. They cut out anything processed and packaged. They weighed their lima beans. They kept their chins up, kept online food journals, went to meetings, got walking partners, bought new sneakers, and planted vegetable gardens. They talked about their feelings until talking felt better than eating.

  I didn’t understand these people. They weren’t like me at all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  That night, when Bennett finally approached me, I was sitting alone on the cafeteria steps, holding a pointless flashlight, playing Head O.D. He appeared below me, cast in shadows. When he climbed a couple of steps and came into the light, he asked, “All good out here, Angeline?” and gave me a double thumbs-up.

  What was it with men? How could they treat sex like a decadent meal—a pleasant memory with no connection to the heart? Why couldn’t I be so practical? Bennett and I didn’t know each other. So what if we had mashed our bodies together? He wasn’t the point of anything.

  But my heart started going in my ears. “I’m thinking of leaving,” I said.

  “You are?”

  No. “Yes.”

  I thought of my father saying, “Here comes Brenda Preston,” which he always said when I was being theatrical, because Brenda Preston was our neighbor who once, after fighting with her husband, walked out onto her front lawn and threw a heavy flowerpot at her own forehead, fainting while the neighborhood watched.

  Bennett climbed the steps and sat beside me. “Because of last night?”

  I look
ed away. This was a lie I wasn’t sure how to draw out. I wanted to say, “New subject!” but instead I chewed my lip and stayed quiet.

  “This was what I was worried about—that we’d sleep together and you’d hate me.”

  I looked at Bennett’s blank blue eyes. “I barely know you,” I said, but my words felt false. Camp days were like dog years. Each day was a month. In a way, already, the social circle I’d left behind in New York seemed like a group of people with whom I’d lost touch. Even my memory of my apartment was vague and shadowy, like a memory of the womb.

  “I’ve never had much luck with women.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “I don’t understand the heart of a woman. Does that sound stupid to you? It probably sounds stupid.”

  “I mean, it’s not very original.”

  Bennett tapped his leg to mine a few times. My thigh jiggled. I held it rigid. “What do you want from me?”

  “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

  “Well, today I woke up and I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. Was I supposed to act like your boyfriend?”

  “I have a boyfriend.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  I looked at Bennett. He was so strong and sure, pinned to the earth, paperweighted by the muscles of his legs, his college-athlete confidence, the bold tattoo on his arm. I encircled his wrist with my fingers and hung on. He was a Band-Aid on my hunger. What I wanted from him, I had.

  “Did you . . . like it?” I asked. “The sex?”

  Bennett curled his fist and flexed the muscles of his free arm. “I’m a man,” he said in an extra-deep voice. “A red-blooded American.” He knocked his arm against mine. “You were terrific.”

  “I was pretty drunk.”

  “Crocked and cockeyed.”

  “I don’t think I did much. I was more like a blow-up doll than a person.”