Skinny

  To be clear, Bennett had never told me that he lived this way, never indicated to me that his life was some deranged homage to Christmas. Nor had he given me any indication that he hoped I would bear his children. And yet.

  “I won’t always be in my best shape,” I said.

  “You’ll always be hot.”

  “One day I’ll be forty.”

  “First you’ll be twenty-eight.”

  “Forty. Then fifty. Then sixty. If I live to sixty. My father didn’t make it to sixty.”

  “I’m in the best shape of my life at forty-one. You just have to work at it all the time. You just have to commit to never letting go of it.”

  “Everyone lets go eventually.”

  “Think positive.”

  “One day I’ll be lumpy. One day I’ll be shriveled. One day I’ll be pregnant. One day I’ll be pregnant and craving Nutella. I’ll eat ten jars of it.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  I laughed. “You don’t know me.”

  “I don’t think that’s true at all.”

  “I’d eat twenty jars.”

  “Hogwash.”

  “You know nothing about my genetic makeup.”

  “Your what?”

  “And you don’t seem to understand that there’s more to life than bodies.”

  “Hey. Thanks a lot.”

  “I feel like my body has to be perfect for you.”

  “Are you picking one of your fights?”

  “I’m not my body,” I said, but even as I said it, I knew that it was nonsense—meaningless jargon. Like when people talked about toxins. Or vibes. Or bad things happening in threes. What the hell did any of it mean? We absolutely were our bodies. To deny that was to court disaster: to wind up in labor, cluelessly pregnant; to become infected by a forgotten, moldy hamburger.

  “You want to test me?” Bennett said. “Go ahead. Get fat. I’d still throw you up against the wall and have my way with you. Go eat a cheesecake.”

  “Gladly.”

  “And a loaf of bread.”

  “With butter.”

  “I’ll roll you through the streets. I’ll tell everyone, ‘This is my girl. She’s fatter than Albert, but she’s a top-shelf lay.’ ” He whispered, “That’ll be us,” and he pointed to a couple walking by. They were both covered scalp to toenails in tattoos. The man, in lace-up board shorts, was scrawny and couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. The woman towered over him in a purple tankini; she must have weighed at least three hundred pounds. They held hands, soaking wet, wearing inflated inner tubes around their waists like misplaced halos, leaving water droplets in their wake.

  I sat up. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  “You and your mood swings.”

  “It’s just that you don’t mean it.”

  “I was just playing. I thought we were playing. Don’t be like that, Angeline.”

  I crossed one leg over the other, making myself small, remembering taking the N train deep into Brooklyn with Mikey every year for all-day Easter dinner at his parents’ house, where his uncles called us “yous guys,” and his father called me Yellow or Purple or Pink, and his mother leaned out the bathroom window, pinning laundry to a clothesline, and his aunts smoked Virginia Slims while they glazed the ham with paintbrushes and fought over which knife to use to cut fresh mozzarella for the antipasti. I remembered the time Mikey bought me a car air freshener even though I didn’t have a car, just because the word “sexy” was printed on it in block letters. I remembered when we first started dating and he asked if he could wash my hair. (“It’s just so pretty. I just want to do something for it.”)

  My fingers moved to my scalp, searching out my bald spot. I pulled my hair out of its elastic and tried for a new ponytail, one that covered all the naked parts of my head. I squinted in the flat light at clouds the color of harbor water.

  “You know,” Bennett said, “if you loved your boyfriend, you’d be with him now. You wouldn’t have left him for two months. It’s not my business, but I can see he doesn’t make you happy.”

  “Sometimes we’re happy.”

  “Anyway, you don’t have kids with him. What do you owe the guy?”

  “Please don’t call him ‘the guy.’ We’ve been through a lot together. I love him,” I said, remembering that day in the diner, when I’d said those words to my father. Back then, they’d meant something so different—that I was starry-eyed about some aspiring comedian I’d met on some West Village street.

  At that moment, Eden came barreling down the Death Drop, her body like a corpse in a coffin—her ankles crossed, her forearms folded into an X on her chest. She cried out as she dropped through the air, momentarily weightless, and I pictured Mikey thoughtlessly eating chips from the bag, getting crumbs on his shirt while he watched television. The image created an unbearable stretching inside my chest. I did love Mikey. I did. Now that I was thin, maybe I could return to New York, healthy, and we could start from scratch. Maybe we could go back to being the kids we’d been when we met.

  Pudge came down the Death Drop next, screaming, his arms and legs coming uncrossed and splaying wide open. When he hit the pool, the splash was a geyser.

  “I guess we’ll see, won’t we?” Bennett sighed. “I guess we’ll see what happens in a week. I hope for your sake that you do what’s right for you.”

  “Nine days.”

  “Huh?”

  “We still have nine days. Why are you trying to speed the summer up?”

  “Nine days. I just hope you find happiness, Angeline. I mean that.”

  Brendan came shooting down the Death Drop.

  I knew what Bennett was saying: that he wished me all the best, and that he wasn’t going to know me.

  Miss came down the slide next, shrieking unmistakably for her mommy before splashing into the pool. And then Harriet’s body filled the platform in the sky. She walked to the edge, then turned and walked away, walked to the edge, then walked away.

  “No way,” I said, making a visor with my hand. “Harriet? No way.”

  “She fits,” Bennett said. “She’s lost a lot of weight.” He squinted. “She’s smaller now. It’s really noticeable.”

  “And she showers on occasion.”

  “She ran part of the loop yesterday.”

  “She hasn’t told me she hates me in a while. At least a week.”

  And down she came. A streak of black like a cannonball. A sound from deep inside her like a dying, braying donkey.

  Then the rain began, as if the crash of Harriet’s body had jolted it out of the sky. I held my palm up to the drizzle.

  “I told Lewis it was going to rain all day. We’re supposed to get thunderstorms.” Bennett looked up. “I guess this means we’ll go back to camp and watch Bugsy Malone.”

  “What is it with Lewis and that movie?”

  “I can try to veto it, but . . .”

  “We should watch a real classic. Like Dirty Dancing.”

  “The little kids can’t watch Dirty Dancing.”

  “Why not? He’s shown Bugsy Malone three times. Dirty Dancing is beautiful. It’s an important film. I think I was eight when I first saw it.”

  “Eight!”

  “Nine?”

  “This has to be a Yankee thing.”

  The rain began to gather strength. And when I looked up, I saw Whitney. If I hadn’t looked at precisely that second, I would have missed it—she didn’t make a sound. Her body landed with hardly a splash, drilling cleanly, gracefully, through the surface, as if, just as she’d suspected, the water had been waiting to swallow her.

  The campers had assembled near our bench, dripping puddles from their bathing suits onto the pavement.

  “Was that Whitney?” Brendan said. He turned to Miss, who was holding his elbow. “I can’t believe it! Whitney in the water!”

  Bennett and I stood at the first crash of thunder. We would have to find Lewis and receive instructions.

  A few minu
tes later, when Whitney made her way back to the group, soaked, baptized, stunned, she stood before us with a blankness in her eyes as if she’d had a revelation.

  Miss momentarily separated from Brendan to hug her.

  We all looked at Whitney. She was wearing a black one-piece bathing suit. It was pilled and sagging, a few sizes too big. Her hips looked whittled down. It occurred to me that she hadn’t necessarily been suffering from fear of water, from posttraumatic stress, but from the agony of how she looked in a bathing suit, the fear of wearing a bathing suit in front of members of the opposite sex. I understood: It was less mortifying to be naked than it was to wear a bathing suit, that relentless antagonist of the imperfect body.

  I wished I had known. I would have told her it wasn’t so bad. She looked better than Miss, better than Harriet. And who would have judged her anyway?

  “I want to do the Death Drop again,” she said.

  And why not? When you’ve finally come through something, when everything’s changed, the last thing you want is to get on a bus and ride back to where you were.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  On the bus back to camp, Lewis sat beside me. “I’ve made a decision,” he told me. “I’ve spoken with my wife about it. But I haven’t told anyone else. Can you keep a secret?”

  I’d been looking out the window, watching the rain. I turned to him. “That’s one of my specialties.”

  “At the end of the summer, I’m going to save Pudge.”

  “Pudge?” I twisted in my seat and looked to the back of the bus, where Pudge and Whitney were kissing industriously, holding each other’s faces, her leg slung over his. Across the aisle from them, Brendan sat massaging Miss’s shoulders. Her eyes were closed in ecstasy. I turned back around.

  “He and his mother are going to move in with me in Durham. Pudge has only finished ninth grade. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “He’s going to be eighteen in a few months. Eighteen with a ninth-grade education. I’m going to enroll him at my kids’ high school. I’m going to save him.”

  “For how long?”

  “What?”

  “For how long are you going to save him? Won’t it get expensive?”

  “His mother will have to get a job.” He counted on his fingers. “Six months? I’ll give her six months to find work. I’ll support them until then. Like family. And then they’ll have a new life. Where they live . . .” He whistled. “They could die out there. In that trailer. If Pudge keeps getting fatter and fatter, he’ll die. He’s been hospitalized a few times now. One time a priest came to his hospital bed and did last rites.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Pudge.”

  I looked at Lewis’s face, where the skin sagged at his jawline, where the bags under his eyes were the color of bruises. I saw him, for just a second, the way he might have been as a child—the one whose clothes were too tight, the one who was either invisible or too visible, maybe the one who carried around an unwieldy black instrument case and a filthy backpack; or the one who once, while wearing sweatpants, got a hard-on in math class that everyone discussed for a year.

  “That’s really nice of you,” I told him.

  Lewis smacked his thighs. “Lewis Teller is the nicest guy in the world,” he said. “If anyone needs help, I help them.”

  It was pouring when we drove through the entrance past the Carolina Academy sign. It wasn’t even noon yet. The kids would need lunch. And then there would be rest hour. And then a movie, or a game of dodgeball in the gym. A day of laziness and bad hair. The campers filed out of the bus and ran, screaming, for the dorms, their arms wrapped uselessly over their heads.

  “See you in a bit?” Bennett said before we hurried in opposite directions.

  We touched hands briefly. And then I ran toward the rest of my life. Not that I knew that. How could I have known? But as I ran through that rain, I thought (really, I thought this; it’s not rosy hindsight), Rain is cool and magnificent. I lifted my face to it. I also thought other things, like, This sucks, I wanted to go for at least one more run today. And, I might really kill myself if I have to watch Bugsy Malone. But I did enjoy those last few seconds. I did. I loved that rain.

  I ran to the side door of the dorm because it was closest. But if I hadn’t, if I’d gone through the front, what happened would have happened differently. I get hung up on that sometimes, even now: thinking about all the various ways in which many things could have been different.

  Inside, at the base of the stairwell, in the dim light, on the gray linoleum, I saw him. He was sitting on a step. He was wearing a windbreaker I’d never seen. That was my first thought: I’ve never seen that windbreaker. It was black and blue, like something hurt.

  “Mikey.”

  He stood. He reached for me. Looked hard at my face. Then he pulled his hand back like I’d bitten it. And then he started to cry.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Mikey was addressing me with his back. He kicked the wall. The sound echoed, and the sole of his sneaker made a little black streak on the plaster. When he turned around, he had stopped crying, but his eyes were wet, laced with red squiggles. I reached for him, wanting to hug him, not because I was glad he had come, but so that I could hide my face.

  The hall where the youngest girls lived was filled with noise. From where I stood, I saw several of them dancing outside their rooms. Music was blaring: “My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard . . .”

  I winced. “Is something wrong?” I tried to swallow, but my mouth was dry.

  Mikey’s lips turned up for a second, as if he might smile or grab my throat. He looked the same. He looked like Mikey. He needed a haircut. I could see whiskers on the spot under his chin that he often missed when he shaved. But he also looked different to me. Had he always had the posture of a dying flower? Had his face always been so ashen, his eyes so dull, as if he hadn’t had a glass of water in months? I looked at his jeans, where they sagged in the back. Had he never had an ass? Had he always been so out of shape?

  I knew he wasn’t the one who had changed. But he just looked so unhealthy. He leaned on the banister now, as if even standing up straight were too much exercise.

  “I thought I would see you and I would know right away that it wasn’t true. I thought I would see you and you’d be so happy to see me, the way you used to be happy to see me.”

  “I’m happy to see you.” My voice sounded like an automated recording, echoing in the stairwell.

  For a moment, Mikey pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and index finger. Then he let go and locked his eyes onto mine. “I thought I’d see you and you would be the old Gray and I’d know it was all a lie.”

  “Know what was a lie?”

  “But I saw you and I knew.” He snapped his fingers. “Right away.” He pushed his hands over his hair. “Jesus Christ. Of all the things. I thought this was the thing we would never do to each other. But it happens to every couple. Eventually. Right? No reason our relationship should be different. We’re just like everyone, in the end.”

  “How . . .”

  “How what? You thought I wouldn’t find out?”

  “Um. How did you get here?”

  “This whole year I’ve been so patient with you. Yeah, your dad died. I get it. That’s hard. And you have all your daddy issues. But a year with hardly any sex? What guy would put up with that? But I did.” He flattened his hand over his chest. “I put up with it. I gave you your space. I didn’t say anything. And when girls came up to me after shows, I didn’t even flinch. I swear to God, I hardly ever even glanced at any of them. And then I’d go home to you, and you’d look right through me.”

  “Mikey.”

  “You never used to be so wrapped up in yourself. This whole year . . . I’d come home and maybe I’d have things I wanted to tell you, but you’d look right through me. You’d be reading that dumb, life-affirming crap. It was like everything that used to be cool about you was gone.
And I was left with this person who read self-help books and didn’t want me around. And then you’d go to sleep without even saying good night.”

  “I said good night.”

  Mikey stared at me. He stood up straight, towering over me. Outside, I could hear the rain subsiding. Nearby, I heard one of the little girls say, “I’m going to lie on my back and you should put pennies all over my face and then take a picture.”

  “Was this some kind of game for you?”

  “Was what—”

  “Was it fun? Telling everyone here about me. Telling them my name. Directing them to my website? While everyone here knows you’re fucking someone else. Was I the joke? Everyone could laugh at your boyfriend back home while they watched you cheat with some douche bag personal trainer?”

  I held my head in my hands. “What are you—”

  “I thought it was some kind of joke. I was like, ‘It’s camp. The kids can’t use the Internet at camp.’ ”

  I held my stomach. “What kids?”

  Mikey didn’t understand that this wasn’t a real camp. The kids, those who didn’t have Internet access on their phones, used the computers in the library.

  “Sheena? Wasn’t Sheena the girl He-Man?”

  “No, that’s—” I sucked in air. It made a sharp sound. The rain grew louder outside—an exclamation point—and then slowed again.

  “So you’re fucking a personal trainer.”

  “Sheena told you that?”

  “You fucked him in the arts and crafts building. I was like, ‘What in God’s name is an arts and crafts building?’ I mean . . . you and I are not the kinds of people whose lives include arts and crafts buildings.”