Skinny

  “Seemed all right to me, Angeline.”

  “Just all right?”

  “No. Terrific. I told you terrific.”

  “Terrific,” I said like an echo.

  “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  We sat quietly for a few seconds, our hips touching, my hips shrinking. Then I said, “Maybe we can just have fun?”

  Right. Go ahead, make use of my body. I’ll affect stoicism. What was fun about that? When I was in new love with Mikey, I could have fun with the men in the street who bought my comedy club tickets. I could have fun with the other comedians. I could flirt and laugh and watch their pupils dilate like spots of watercolor.

  But when my father died, when Mikey and I began to deteriorate, I could no longer talk with a man at a party without either imagining us old in matching rocking chairs, or feeling repulsed by the crumbs between his teeth, his bad posture, the burp he’d tried to hide by puffing out his cheeks.

  I could see that Bennett would keep me busy. I would spend the rest of the summer scheming.

  “I’m all for fun, Angeline,” Bennett said.

  I stuck out my hand for him to shake. “Then here’s to a summer of fun.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Bennett’s room was an apartment of sorts, twice the size of the campers’ dorm rooms, attached to the boys’ dorm. To get to him, I had to walk across camp, one-half of the loop. I never made the trip by daylight when campers would have seen me. Nights were tricky, too, because unless we were on duty—either as Head O.D. or on dorm patrol—all counselors had a midnight curfew. With the exceptions of our one free period a day, the few free hours we got every other night, and the long Sunday mornings when we could do as we pleased, we were supposed to be watching the campers.

  Although the cafeteria was locked at night, if Sheena and I were absent from our dorm rooms, untold disasters could have transpired: unsupervised late night skinny-dipping in the swimming pool, a dash to the gas station convenience store for sugary snacks with unspeakable shelf lives, a date behind the gym for unauthorized, perilous sex. We were told to be on guard.

  And so I had to sneak out.

  I knew it wasn’t right. But lots of things at Camp Carolina weren’t right. For example, I taught water aerobics, even though I wasn’t a lifeguard, had never done water aerobics, and knew nothing about CPR. It wasn’t right that the personal trainer, the nurse, and the nutritionist weren’t certified in their fields. It wasn’t right that Lewis played therapist and wrote the menus, ignoring Mia’s advice.

  “Where the hell is the fiber?” she often complained to me. “The salad bar, fine. But that’s not enough. The kids just pick at their salads anyway. And what about protein? There’s all this sugar-free crap, white-flour tortillas . . . these kids are learning some ugly habits. What the hell did he make me the nutritionist for? A once-a-week nutrition lesson? That isn’t anything,” she said. “That isn’t enough.”

  Sure, the kids were losing weight, but that was simple math: For the first time in their lives, they were expending more calories than they were consuming. But what about nutrients and vitamins? Even the vegetables in the salad bar looked old and bleached and sad.

  What about roping in the parents, who hid their own fat in fat-people fabrics and said “Taste this, taste that,” and asked “Is it good?” and “Does it need more sugar?” while smoothing the hair back from their children’s foreheads.

  Why should I have taken my job seriously? Camp Carolina was not a serious place.

  Was I rationalizing? Yes. I was an expert at dispelling my psychological discomfort.

  Each night, I waited until the kids were in bed, and then ran, under the Light Bright board of North Carolina sky, stars puncturing black, to Bennett’s apartment. Each time I touched his door and found it unlocked, I wanted to fall to my knees in gratitude.

  Within days, a whole year vanished (although “vanished” might be misleading; it was more like a nasty stain on the rug was now covered by a giant couch). Where had I been since my father’s death, while my body grew softer and wider and pastier? Where had I been while my leg hair grew long and the hair on my head grew a permanent indent from the elastic that secured my bun?

  Where had Mikey been? How could Mikey have watched as I ate and cried, as I moved away from myself as if from a foul odor?

  Here is what he should have said: “You’ve let yourself go.”

  No, I know, he wasn’t allowed. The feminists would have lined up in a row and barked at him like a Red Rover chain. “Send Mikey right over!” they would have cackled, their tight fists awaiting his gut. But couldn’t he at least have shaken my shoulders and shouted, “We’ve hardly had sex in months”? Sex had become tangential to me—skin-to-skin contact, perfunctory orgasms. It seemed like a game for hyperactive children, not a pastime for thinking adults.

  But now, with Bennett, I remembered—how beautiful it was, how vital it was, to keep in touch with the flesh.

  By the fourth week of camp, I was barely eating. My heartbeat was a constant vibration, my mouth as dry as a gravel pit. At mealtime, I would have preferred to scream than to eat—to jump up on top of the picnic table, beat my chest, and scream.

  Nurse told me, “You can’t just stop eating. You have to set an example. You have to eat and take healthy shits.”

  “I what?”

  “Doll baby, you know me. Always plain talkin’.” She swatted my shoulder with the back of her hand. “People are so squeamish. But there’s nothing more beautiful on God’s emerald earth than the functions of the body.”

  “I just haven’t been feeling well,” I said, but that was a lie! A lie! A lie! I was glowing and quaking with life.

  “You’re losing too much,” she said, and I almost laughed. Was I supposed to believe that Nurse was some expert on loss? Besides, what did I care what Nurse thought? Bennett loved my shrinking body. He encircled my waist with his fingers and said, “Look at you, thin as a pole.”

  I spent my free periods doing important things: folding Crest Whitestrips over my teeth, rubbing self-tanner into my breasts, trying on my jeans that were now too big, rolling the waistband down to admire the jut of my hipbones. I shaved my legs daily with scented hair conditioner. Now and then I drove to the mall in Melrose and bought smaller bras from the Victoria’s Secret clearance bin, or size zero denim miniskirts from stores with pubescent names like Rave. I pored over my campers’ discarded magazines, magazines I hadn’t read since high school. The August issue of Cosmo had a special insert: “100 New Sex Positions.”

  Angry Butterfly.

  London Bridge.

  The Dictator.

  Reverse Tornado.

  I carefully tore the pages out and slid them into my pillowcase.

  At night, Bennett touched my ribs, kissed my wrists, ran his tongue from my ankle up the inside of my leg. He liked to tell me in his southern drawl, “You are the most gorgeous creature I’ve ever seen.”

  And I was! I was the most gorgeous creature I’d ever seen! I would stand in front of my full-length mirror, comb my hair until it twinkled, and think, You are so lucky to be gorgeous.

  These were, to be clear, exceptional delusions, and likely the product of sleep deprivation. In Bennett’s bed, the sleeping I did was more like napping—active, athletic sleep that followed sex for which we could have won medals.

  When I did sleep, I dreamt of eating—dipping a long spoon into an ice cream sundae, pouring syrup on a stack of waffles. I dreamt of the nearly forgotten sensation of filling my stomach to bursting. On waking, I would exhale long spools of relief, touching my stomach and finding it flat. Then I would roll over onto Bennett’s sleeping body and whisper, “Once more before I go.”

  How had I forgotten the sheer ecstasy of fucking? All those years with Mikey, how had I survived without this bodies-only, mind-blowing fucking?

  Bennett’s body fat was 8 percent. “Unpinchable,” he said of his skin. He pinched his stomach to prove it,
a bit of skin the size of an eyelid. I would straddle him, kneeling, holding the handles of his ears. Or I would lean all the way back, my spine arched, my hair spreading over his feet. Or I would lie supine as he knelt above me, his legs as sturdy as Corinthian columns, my head hanging off the edge of the bed, a heel on each of his shoulders.

  “Do they teach you this stuff up north?” Bennett asked.

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Where did you learn to fuck like this?”

  “Cosmo.”

  And though during the day I was cheering for my campers if they ran a quarter mile, if they lost two pounds, if they fit into shorts that were size sixteen, at night, with Bennett, the fat disappeared, the fake injuries and tears and sad volleyball games disappeared. Nothing was wrong! Life was flawless! Nothing could ever harm us or our beautiful, thin, lean bodies.

  Holy God, we were in good shape!

  Every morning, I popped out of bed at five A.M., jogged back to my dorm while the world was unconscious, changed into workout clothes that hung loose on my bones, and ran six laps around the loop. And then I would shower and admire my figure, how it seemed to have shrunk in my sleep.

  And then I woke up the girls.

  “What is wrong with you?” Harriet grumbled one morning while I did jumping jacks in the hallway.

  “Nothing!” I cheered.

  “How can you possibly have energy?”

  I stopped jumping and thought about it. “I wake up with electricity coursing through my veins.”

  Yes, my veins were electric cords. Live wires. I couldn’t exercise enough. It didn’t matter that we exercised all day. My body kept shrieking, “Work me! Work me!”

  I started running during my daily free period. Sometimes Bennett ran with me, usually backward. “What do you think this is?” he would yell. “A stroll around a pond? Faster, girl! Dig, dig, dig!” I would run until I thought I’d throw up. But what could I have thrown up? Sometimes I dry-heaved into the bushes and Bennett rubbed my back. Then I would stand and stagger, dizzy and grinning.

  “I can’t wait to fuck you later,” Bennett would whisper, slapping my ass like a coach.

  Even when we weren’t together, I could have pointed to him at any second—his face tucked into sunglasses, his hair coarse and sun-kissed and cut close to his head. I never let him too far out of my sight.

  Mia and I spent most rest hours in the gym feasting on stomach crunches, cherry pickers, push-ups, and isolations. I would lie on my back on the dusty gym floor while she stood behind me, her feet at my head. Holding her ankles for support, I would tighten my stomach to lift my legs. Once my feet reached her, she would push them down. I would lift them again and she would push them back down. Lift, push, lift, push. How I grunted with glee and exertion.

  O Sisyphus! They were wrong about you! Your fate was an homage to the body!

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  When I finally got caught, it was Eden who caught me, Eden who was awake at five in the morning, having left her room to sprawl on the hallway floor in an odd, splayed shape, like a body that had fallen from a window.

  “What are you doing?” we asked in unison.

  “Going for a run,” I said, which, though true, made no sense because for one thing, I was coming in from outside, and for another thing, I was wearing a dress. “Do you . . . want to come?”

  “Running at five in the morning?” Eden snorted. She was sucking on her Jewish star, the gold chain making an arrow over her chin to point to some place inside her.

  “Why are you lying on the floor?” I asked, glancing nervously at all the closed doors. “Here, come into my room. You can lie in my bed while I’m out running.”

  “Why would I lie in your bed?”

  “Changing beds might help you sleep.”

  “I don’t want to sleep.”

  “You’ll feel better,” I said.

  “If I sleep, I’ll have to wake up. And if I wake up, I’ll have to have another day. And I’m sick of the days here. I’m sick of life. No way I’m staying here the rest of the summer.”

  I skimmed over her words, rejecting their gravity, the way I skimmed over bombs in foreign countries when I read the morning news.

  Eden sat up, then stood. She was wearing a long T-shirt that said APPLE-BOBBING FOR A CURE! Two leaves surrounded an apple’s stem. It was an image of an apple that the world had agreed on, though it looked different from an actual apple.

  She followed me into my room, where I changed quickly into running clothes. Eden flopped onto my bed and crossed her arms over her face.

  “You’ve lost a lot,” I pointed out. “What, twelve pounds?”

  “Fourteen and a half.”

  “So that’s really fantastic.”

  “Whatever.”

  “You can’t leave while you’re on such a roll!”

  “I thought you’re supposed to quit while you’re ahead.” Eden uncovered her eyes and looked at me, and I wished I could call my mother and tell her: I was looking at my father’s eyes.

  “Gray?”

  “Eden?”

  “Did you have sex with Bennett in the arts and crafts building?”

  “What?” I stood, crossed the room to the window, and opened it, exposing a sky that was starting to lighten—a strangled, shamed pink. I turned on the window fan.

  “It’s what everyone’s saying. That you guys are having sex. But isn’t he, like, forty-something? And aren’t you, like, twenty-something?”

  I sat on the windowsill, letting the air hit my back. “In any closed environment, you’re going to hear a lot of rumors,” I said. “I used to work with comedians, and you wouldn’t have believed the rumors. Really vicious, life-destroying rumors. I guess it was because they were all in competition, but it was also because they were together so much. Every night, they’re all hanging out at the same clubs, trying to get onstage. They’re spending all this time together. They can’t get away from one another. So they become overly interested in one another’s lives. It’s this really amazing phenomenon that—”

  “So you didn’t have sex with Bennett in the arts and crafts building?”

  I splayed my fingers in front of me and inspected the mess of my nails, the tiny crescents of dirt beneath the white, the fringes of peeling cuticles.

  “Because I think it’s poisonous to get that close to spilled paint and all that other stuff. You shouldn’t be naked around spilled paint.”

  I curled my fingernails into my fists. “You don’t have to be naked to have sex.”

  “I know. But—”

  “Just kidding,” I said. I bit my lip. “I have a boyfriend back home. He’s a comedian.”

  “Is he funny?”

  “He’s funny. Anyway, that’s how I started working with comedians. We’ve been together for years.”

  “Okay.”

  “Rumors are terrible.” I saw myself on a picket line, with a sign on a stick that read RUMORS ARE TERRIBLE. “People like to judge when they don’t know the whole story. It’s a good thing to remember—not to judge when you don’t know the whole story.”

  “You sound like a Sunday school teacher.”

  “You sound like my mother! You’re interrogating me like I missed curfew.”

  Eden smiled. I had come to love her smile, how it swallowed up her eyes, consumed her whole face. “My mother made me come to camp,” she said.

  I stood.

  “I told her, fine, I’d go, just not to one in Virginia because if anyone ever found out, I would die. And now . . . I hate Kimmy.”

  “What’s she going to do, tell your whole high school?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then they’ll know she was here, too.”

  “So? Kimmy doesn’t care. She probably had a going-away party. Bon voyage, fatty! A theme party. That’s so Kimmy. Or at least, it’s something Lily would do. Their family’s, like, rich. Lily gets professional massages. And facials. And she has one of those dads who brings her chocolates on Vale
ntine’s Day.”

  “My dad banned Valentine’s Day,” I said. I waited. Eden said nothing. I waited until it became difficult to draw a breath. I added, “Because it’s a saint’s holiday.”

  “And nothing embarrasses the Jackson girls,” Eden said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Everyone was probably like, ‘That’s so adorable that Kimmy’s going to fat camp!’ I’m sure Lily’s told everyone in our whole grade that I’m here. It’s fine if Kimmy goes to fat camp. But me? Not so much. Now everyone will call me fat, which they probably already do. And they’ll call me a liar because I said I was going to my grandmother’s for the summer.”

  “Your grandmother?”

  My father’s parents were long dead. His mother had died of ovarian cancer when I was a child. Many years before that, when my father was only six years old, his father, having suffered all his life from depression, wrote a letter to his wife and sons, and then swan-dove two hundred feet off a suspension bridge. (At my lowest point that winter, I’d thought of him, of the freedom of his demise. Oh, to be airborne, weightless, then gone!)

  “Is your grandmother your mother’s mother?”

  “It was a lie, Gray,” Eden said. “I told you, I made it up. Anyway, they’ll also call me all the other really nice stuff they’ve been calling me all year.”

  “What have they been calling you?”

  Eden pulled her eyelashes and turned her eyelids momentarily inside out. She looked dead.

  “Did you ask Kimmy not to tell anyone that you’re here?”

  She blinked her eyes back to normal. “Gray. That’s really dumb. If you tell someone not to say something, then they’ll know you’re hiding things.”

  “True, true, sorry.”

  “And then they’re more likely to tell the whole universe.” Eden crossed her arms over her face again. “Too late anyway. She told. God, I did something so stupid last year. Stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life. And everyone found out about it. I mean, part of why it was so stupid was that everyone was obviously going to find out.”

  “What was it?”

  “I can’t wait until I’m a chef. I can’t wait to get out of Bridger and go to culinary arts school.” Eden sat up. “No one asked me why I did it.”