Skinny

  I sent e-mails to every friend I had who might tell Mikey about my car accident. Friends sent cards and flowers, called to check on me, and sent e-mails urging me to hurry back to New York. But I never heard from Mikey.

  Each morning, I thought, Today I’ll get back on track. I’ll go for three runs. I’ll order those infomercial diet pills. I made pot after pot of dark-roast coffee, hoping to re-create the energy I’d had at camp. But a switch had been flipped. The old hunger blazed inside me, stronger than ever. I couldn’t even remember what it had felt like to need so little. I remembered how loose my clothes had been. I remembered feeling small and pretty. But how had I gotten through all those days barely thinking of food?

  Bennett called.

  “Soon as you’re better,” he said, “I’ll fly you down here. I’d like to see your beautiful face.”

  While we talked, I stuffed my beautiful face with cookies and muffins and corn chips, remembering how at one time Bennett had made me full.

  “What are you eating?”

  “Celery.”

  Bennett sighed. “I can’t wait to touch your body again.”

  My body. My tan was fading. My hair kept shedding. My waist, within two weeks, had begun to lose its sucked-in-cheeks shape. I didn’t want to see Bennett. I didn’t want Bennett to see me.

  One night, I mustered unprecedented energy and accepted a dinner invitation from an old friend. We’d lost touch after high school and she’d married young. Her husband shared her name: Micah. They had a baby, and they lived nearby, in a house like the ones in which we’d been raised.

  I sat at their kitchen table and observed their grown-up life. A perfect circle of a clock hung on the wall. No one else I knew would have bothered with a wall clock, would have lived beneath the ticking of its steady, predictable hands. I pictured Husband Micah, a dermatology resident, standing on a stool, hanging the clock, while Wife Micah stood back, tapping her lips with her index finger, deciding whether it was straight. She was fatter than she’d once been, and didn’t seem to care. Her body resembled her husband’s. I wondered if I was missing something. I wondered if they were.

  Pictures of the two of them covered the walls. In some, they were thin and young. They’d met in college. They seemed to have taken many ski vacations. In other pictures, they held the baby between them like a trophy.

  I asked Husband Micah, “Can you tell me what’s happening to my hair?”

  He got up from the table and came to stand behind me. He tugged gently at my hair. I closed my eyes. His hands felt like cool rocks. I resisted leaning into his touch. He said, “You’re not going bald.”

  “I think I am.”

  He inspected my part. “Take vitamins. Do yoga. Remind yourself to breathe.”

  “I breathe every three to four seconds,” I said, a factoid I’d learned from Spider.

  “Could just be that we’re getting older.”

  “Twenty-seven?”

  “Sometimes hair gets thinner.”

  “And then grows back?”

  “Or not. But no matter what happens, you’ll adjust.”

  I scheduled blood tests anyway. I held out my arm and let the needle in. I didn’t flinch. I felt briefly hopeful. A few days later, when the results came back negative, I hung up the phone and put my face in my hands. I wanted a deficiency. I wanted to ingest supplements to restore whatever was missing.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  One night I pulled a box of old pictures out of the attic and asked my mother to tell me stories. I lifted the lid and extracted the pile. At the top, the pictures were from my prom. My high school graduation. But then came the older pictures. My father holding me on his shoulders by the ocean. Me as an infant, asleep on his chest.

  “I always forget,” I said. “Dad used to be thinner.”

  “He was svelte.”

  “He wasn’t svelte.”

  We were lying on our stomachs, side by side on the living-room floor, eating peanut M&M’s from an oversize yellow bag. This was a new thing—my mother snacking. And while I knew it was an unhealthy habit of mine, it seemed a healthy one for her. She was still skinny, but she had more color in her face. And she looked taller, as if her year as a widow had strengthened her vertebrae.

  “When I married him, he looked like a movie star.”

  I found some pictures of my parents from before I was born—posing in front of some statue, kissing in some park, feeding baby goats. My father looked nothing like a movie star. But it was undeniable: Although he’d always been big, he’d been nowhere near obese.

  “Maybe you had your love goggles on,” I said.

  “Do you?” My mother bumped me with her shoulder.

  When I had told her that Mikey and I were finished, she’d asked, “Did you have a fling with that gorgeous man from the camp?”

  I thought about Bennett now, about our faces almost touching on a shared pillow, the way we’d stared at each other, and the things we’d said in the dark of his bedroom, hidden away from the campers.

  I moved a picture of my parents slow-dancing to the bottom of the pile. “I’m wondering,” I said, “how it’s possible to love someone for years, and then meet a total stranger and suddenly love him instead. I’m wondering what love even means if it’s so fluid.”

  “Some say love, it is a river,” my mother said, and we both giggled. This was new, too—my mother making jokes. Whenever she made one, she looked at me right away, nervous, as if she expected me to tell her she had no business trying to be funny.

  “Or is it that if you learn love once, in a particular way, you’ll just repeat that version of love again and again for the rest of your life, pinning it on different people wherever you go?”

  “You know what your father would say. You’re too young to be cynical.”

  “But doesn’t it seem too easy that I could pack love into my car with my clothes, and then drive awhile, and then arrive somewhere and rummage through my trunk and pull the love out and give it to someone else?”

  My mother picked lint from my sleeve. “You think that’s what happened?”

  “I don’t know.” I set my chin in my hands. “I don’t trust anything I’ve thought for at least a year. I haven’t made good decisions in a while. Seems like I keep thinking the wrong things.”

  My mother straightened the edges of a pile of her honeymoon pictures. “Everyone’s been telling me not to trust myself. ‘Don’t sell the house yet,’ ‘Don’t date too seriously,’ ‘Don’t make any decisions.’ But I want to make decisions.”

  “Well, then you should.”

  My mother ran a hand through my ponytail, and I thought about how one day, she would love another man. Perhaps he would be timid. Perhaps he would be a vegan. A violinist. The kind of man who would cry. Perhaps it would be one of her customers, who loved to watch the bones of her hands whipping up perfect bouquets.

  “You know why your father got fat? He started eating that way after that man killed himself. Your father was very sensitive. Like you.”

  “Ha.”

  “You are, Gray. You’re very sensitive.”

  I wanted to rest my cheek on the carpet and sob. I wished I could see what my mother saw—a sensitive, innocent child. Instead I saw a grown woman afflicted with questionable judgment.

  “Ask Mikey. I’m not sensitive.”

  “Mikey doesn’t know you like your mother does.”

  “Mikey hates me.”

  “He has to hate you until he stops loving you.”

  “I don’t want him to stop loving me.”

  “Eventually, when he heals a bit, he’ll love you in a different way. He’ll love you the way people love youth. Forgetting the bad parts.”

  She flipped through a few pictures and paused at one from her wedding. It was a formal picture, everyone posed and young. She tapped it with her fingernail. “I watched what happened to Dad. He started self-medicating with food. I read books about it. He thought those rabbis were showing him the way.
But it was food he always turned to. If that woman . . . Azalea . . . if that woman had just told him she forgave him . . . But she never forgave him. She said she recognized his apologies, but she would never forgive him. What the hell kind of a thing is that to say? So he ate until he had a heart attack.”

  I plunged my hand into the yellow bag, extracting a fistful of peanut M&M’s.

  “I kept telling him, ‘Let it go, Alan. Let. It. Go.’ But he couldn’t. Wouldn’t.” She paused. “I guess I shouldn’t blame that woman. She’s been through the wringer.”

  I chewed and swallowed. “Do you blame Dad?”

  She pursed her lips for a second. “He was depressed. A depressive person. He couldn’t let go of things. That was just him. You aren’t like that, Gray. You are sensitive. But you know when it’s time to let go. People with obsessions . . . they let themselves get eaten alive. Pardon the pun. He even let this whole mess ruin his relationship with you. Those rabbis got it into his head that religion would absolve him. If you’d wound up with Mikey—”

  “Well, I didn’t.”

  “But if you had—”

  “I know what you’re going to say.”

  “You wouldn’t have raised Jewish children.”

  “Right.” I ate a red M&M. A green one. “There are worse crimes,” I said. I remembered how I’d once believed that green M&M’s were aphrodisiacs. That Pop Rocks and Coke could make a person explode. That Taco Bell burritos housed cockroach eggs that would hatch in the consumer’s stomach. All those childhood legends that acknowledged the power of food.

  “Well, I know there are worse crimes. But I didn’t approve of Mikey, either. I want you to have a husband with a stable job. Mikey would have been traveling all the time. And those clubs are so seedy.”

  “They’re not seedy. Just sad.”

  “Your kids wouldn’t have seen their father. And they would have been so confused!”

  “Why do you guys always say that?”

  “ ‘Are we Christian? Are we Jewish? Why do we have a Christmas tree? Or why don’t we have a Christmas tree?’ On and on.”

  “Mom.”

  “But anyway. It was different for me. If you were in love with Mikey, I wasn’t going to intervene.”

  I looked at my empty palm, now streaked faintly with candy dye. “But you never stuck up for me.”

  “I kept telling him: ‘Don’t put this kind of pressure on her.’ But you know how your father was. And those rabbis kept hammering away at him.” She spread pictures from my first birthday party in a row in front of her. “Well. What’s done is done.” She pinched a blue M&M from the bag and studied it before pushing it into her mouth. “Or maybe it’s all my fault.”

  “I didn’t say that. It’s not. Maybe I should have . . . I don’t know.”

  “You could have humored him instead of getting angry.”

  “Why was that my job? He was the parent.”

  “If you’d tolerated him, you’d feel better now. You wouldn’t be so tortured.”

  I looked down at the stack of pictures. My young, healthy father was laughing maniacally beneath the spray of a waterfall. “What’s done is done,” I said. “Right?” I curled my fingers into fists, dug my fingernails into my sticky palms. “Besides, if I’d tolerated him, I would have been agreeing with him that my life was all wrong.”

  “You’re stubborn like he was.”

  “I didn’t want to look at my life. I think that’s what stubbornness is.”

  “Well, the positive flip side to stubbornness is that you know what you want.”

  “I really don’t.”

  “You do. You will.” My mother sat up and started stacking the pictures.

  “I’ll clean up,” I said.

  “No, you need your rest.”

  “That’s the last thing I need. I need to figure out what to do.” I felt tears starting in my chest. I was thinking about blowing out that candle at Morgan Rye’s Steak House, about my obstinate refusal to wish.

  “I like having you here,” my mother said.

  “I can’t stay.”

  “Right. You’re an adult. I understand. Maybe you can be a teacher. I always wanted to be a teacher.”

  “I have nothing to teach. Except water aerobics.”

  “Not that you should do anything just because I wish I had. Maybe I should go back to school. Maybe I should be a teacher.”

  I looked at my mother, at her short ponytail drawn back and secured at the crown of her head, at the silver hairs coming in at the roots, making her temples sparkle. I remembered my father’s face more vividly than I had in months, not the face I saw in pictures, but the real, three-dimensional version, the glisten on his lips when he licked them, the way he would blink rapidly when he was arguing a point. There was a time when my parents would lean their faces together, cheekbone to cheekbone, their temples touching. I remembered how they would sigh, as if resting at a filling station.

  “I have to tell you something,” I said. I drew in a breath. And I told her the story. I recounted the last two hours of her husband’s life. I told her every detail I remembered, as if I were under oath. Maybe it was wrong of me, selfish to pick at her scabs. But I felt hot and stuffy inside my secrets.

  As I talked, I saw my grandfather reversing his flight, landing on both feet on that suspension bridge. I saw my father closing an open carton of ice cream, returning it to the freezer.

  “It’s okay,” my mother said, putting her skinny arms around me. “It’s going to be okay.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  Dear Fat People,

  I’d like to call a truce. If I forgive you, can I exorcise you? I thought I had bested you. I thought that for the rest of my life, I would just become thinner and thinner.

  No. Wait. I’m holding back. I’ve promised not to hold back anymore.

  I hoped that for the rest of my life, I would just become thinner and thinner.

  One problem is that no one knows what hunger is. How can we defeat what we can’t define? Try it: Define hunger. No, desire is different. Wanting is not the same as being hungry. Filling a hole inside you is not the same as filling your stomach. How will we ever learn this? How will we ever make peace?

  You wonder why we hate you? You are the visible manifestation of the parts of ourselves we hide.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

  Dear Mikey,

  I

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

  But before all that. Before I found out that Eden was fine. Before I stopped returning Bennett’s calls. Before Bennett stopped calling. Before I closed my eyes and hovered over a map. Before I opened my eyes and found my finger on Colorado. Before I bought a used car and—why not?—moved to Colorado. Before I drove to Mikey’s show at the University of Denver. Before I watched his set comprised of jokes I’d never heard. Before I waited for him outside. Before he walked out with his new girlfriend. Before his eyes settled on me. Registered me. Before I thought, I am looking at a version of Mikey that doesn’t love me. Before he hugged me stiffly. Spoke politely. Walked away. Before I met someone else. And someone else. And someone else. Before I learned that no relationship would have quite the same gravity. Before I spent three months posing nude for an artist in Breckenridge. Before I once and for all lost my beloved fat camp body. And quit nude modeling. And realized how tightly we hold on to things we lose—until sufficient time passes and we can’t hold on anymore. Before I applied to medical school. Before my hair stopped shedding (long before baldness, but not before irreversible loss). Before my grief finally broke like a fever. Before I made peace with some things. Before I made peace with the realization that I’d never make peace with some things. Before I began the rest of my life, I had to go back to camp.

  I had just been released from the hospital. Bennett drove me, his hand on my knee, my eye in a patch. I had to collect my things, box them up, and mail them to my mother’s house.

  “It’s empty,” I said when we drove in. “It’s so weird to see
it empty.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “It’s a shell. It’s a body with no life inside it. It’s like the summer never happened.”

  On my floor of the dorm, the doors were flung open. The beds were stripped. The air was silent. Only my room was full.

  “Can you believe this?” Bennett said, smiling. “I could take your clothes off right now.” He filled his arms with some of my things and walked out to his car. “With the door open,” he called over his shoulder. “Right in your dorm room!”

  He didn’t understand. I’d already left him behind. I sat on my mattress, my limbs weighted with painkillers, and saw all the life through the window. The green that had been there all summer. The trees and the grass. The intimation of mountains beyond. And for just a second, I forgot where I was. I forgot the things I always wished to forget. And I felt a remarkable lightness.

  AFTERWORD

  While I was writing Skinny, I was asked from time to time if the story was “true.” Because I, like Gray, worked at a weight-loss camp for kids in North Carolina, taught water aerobics, and spent a summer in unforgettable company, the answer to that question is complicated. My knee-jerk response used to be, “It’s fiction.” However, “fiction” and “untrue” certainly aren’t synonymous.

  I didn’t feel right including, in the pages of this book, the standard “This is a work of fiction” disclaimer, which states that any similarities between the characters and real people are coincidental. Some similarities might be coincidental, but others are not.

  With that said, although many of the characters in Skinny were inspired by real people, they are, like most fictional characters, composites—combinations of more than one person, some invented elements, and pieces of the author. It’s also worth noting that the plot, including references to dramatic deceptions, illegal activity, abuse, and violence, came entirely from my imagination.