by Nora Price
“House rules,” she said. “Everything on your plate.”
Once again I looked at the others, desperately seeking an understanding of some kind. Devon was clearly the enemy, but Victoria, with her small gesture of alliance—the eye roll—seemed like a potential friend. She didn’t notice my glance, however, and I watched helplessly as she compressed a piece of bread into the smallest ball possible, squeezing until it was perfectly spherical. She then put the ball into her mouth and swallowed it down with water, like a boa constrictor.
Devon spoke again. “You can take as long as you like,” she said. “But you need to eat everything.” I watched as she speared a golden raisin from the pilaf, dipped it in squash, and conveyed the massive bite into her mouth. She chewed with relish, her ponytail bobbing.
“It’s not negotiable,” she added, her mouth full.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” I said, “but—”
“It has nothing to do with rudeness,” Devon interjected. She swallowd her bite. “Rules are rules.”
Was I being force-fed?
Gazing around the room, I took stock of the ways in which the other girls were dealing with the menace of dinner. Caroline had not touched her food, but the scene unfolding next to her was a different picture entirely: Brooke, sitting a foot or so to Caroline’s right, was shoveling food into her mouth as quickly as possible. On Caroline’s other side was pale, bird-like Jane, who bent over her meal like a test-taker shielding answers from a nearby cheater. It dawned on me slowly that of all the sentient beings in the room, Devon was the only one who consumed her food in a way that most humans would recognize as normal. Zesty “mmms” and “yummys” escaped from her lips as she forked fluffy bites of pilaf and slices of tofu into her mouth. She swiped a piece of bread over her plate, catching every drop of olive oil, and closed her eyes with relish as she chewed it up.
With its cargo of miserable diners, the dining room had transformed itself from a decadent stage set to a tomblike enclosure. Candlelight, which is ordinarily so reliable at casting a flattering light, instead deepened Victoria’s gaunt cheeks and turned Brooke’s under-eye circles from beige to lilac-blue. In the low light, the Oriental rug underfoot looked like an ocean of spilled spaghetti sauce. Indeed, with its shadows and the stillness of its surroundings, the dining room at Twin Birch was imbued with a silence more complete than anything I’ve ever experienced. It was possible to hear every sniffle, swallow, and bite. Every tearing of bread and clinking of ice. Every moan of discomfort.
Perhaps this was intentional, I thought. Perhaps we’re supposed to focus on the act of eating, with everything else blocked out. It’s impossible to know. I can discern almost nothing about the rules of Twin Birch except that they are detailed and strict, and I would not be surprised to learn that every element of this place has been researched and engineered with a hidden purpose in mind. But what purpose, I had no idea.
Having no choice, I ate my food. But it is hard to eat when you’re nearly choking with anger. I’m of the mind that no one should be forced to eat food they dislike—that it violates a basic human principle. It’s the worst thing, in my opinion, that you can do to another person.
As I chased each grain of rice around my plate, Devon told me about yet another house rule. Each girl, she told me, was required to stay in the dining room until everyone else has finished her meal. I stared at her when she told me this, unable to imagine the consequences of the injunction. What if one girl refused to eat? What if I refused to eat? To prohibit us from leaving the room was unthinkable—it was as though we were a group of hostages roped together. I made a mental note to write the rule down in my journal.
After dinner Devon brought out a couple of containers of Tahitian vanilla ice cream and a basket of fruit from the garden. One girl disemboweled an apricot, but nobody touched the ice cream except for Devon, who conspicuously enjoyed a heaping bowlful. The candles on each table, I noticed, extinguished themselves after exactly one hour. By the time everyone finished eating, none of them remained lit. We sat in the near dark, digesting our unwanted food.
The atmosphere of the room made me think of school, where I first saw girls linger over sparse plates of lettuce dressed in vinegar. Girls clutching cups of hot tea and avoiding the bread basket as though its contents were sprinkled with arsenic. Only girls notice these things, not boys. Boys never see it. After a certain point of thinness, a girl simply disappears from their sightlines.
What followed dinner is almost too gruesome to put in writing. Despite the fact that nobody is reading this, I feel shaky about recording it on paper. If I don’t rid myself of the thought, however, I am sure that I will have bad dreams about it, and I do not want bad dreams tonight.
As I brought the last frill of broccoli to my mouth, I became aware of a sound underpinning the scrape of forks and tinkling of ice in the dining room. The sound was low at first, barely perceptible, as though it were emanating from beneath a blanket. When Devon brought out the dessert, she mentioned nothing about the noise, although it was loud enough at that point for everyone to hear it. I swept my eyes from one end of the room to the other, but the noise, it seemed, was directionless. What was it? Where was it coming from? Some inner censor prevented me from asking any questions.
Devon passed around the basket of fruit, which sagged with apricots, plums, and peaches. An overripe scent trailed the basket as I passed it quickly along to Victoria, who took nothing.
The noise grew louder. It was the sound of crabs scuttling along a rocky beach. A dry, hurried sound of tiny claws skittering over tide-washed pebbles.
After the unused dessert plates had been cleared, Devon stood and did her hand-clap again.
“Time to warm up,” she announced. Even in the room’s obscurity, her skin shone with a reflective layer of oil.
Warm up? I thought. She must be kidding. A vision of the five skinny girls (and me) doing calisthenics and light aerobics made me pinch my fingers together. I knew that I, for one, would not be able to move a muscle after ingesting such a great quantity of food. The idea was dangerous. It had to be a joke, I decided—but Devon had not thus far shown herself to be a joker.
We were, at least, allowed to leave the dining room at last. Despite the absence of dinner plates, the smell of food still hung thickly in the air. Devon blew out the two remaining candles, and we got up to follow her, Girl Scout–style, through a pair of French doors that opened into a den abutting the dining area. The candlelight was replaced with art deco lamps that revealed a handful of couches arranged around a hearth, where Devon swiftly began preparations for a fire. She crumpled newspapers, stacked kindling, and positioned a log over the grate, while I watched, baffled by the idea that we would sit before a roaring fire during the middle of summer. Darkness notwithstanding, it was seventy-five degrees out.
The room contained tall cabinets, tall bookshelves, spindly wall mirrors, and a grandfather clock. Victoria was the first person to gravitate toward a cabinet and open it, retrieving from within an armload of white afghan blankets. She passed them out to the other girls, each an eager recipient. Should I take one? I wondered. It was awfully hot for a blanket. Why afghans? And why white?
Victoria took the seat nearest to the fire—a fact which I filed away in my mind with a mental asterisk. The seat closest to the fire was the warmest and lightest seat, as well as the only chair outfitted with a matching ottoman. It was the best seat in the room, by far, and Victoria had assumed it confidently, without hesitating to see if anyone else wanted to sit there. Interesting—and decidedly not the action of a person who was insecure about her status in the household. I had a few more things to add to my notes.
Victoria
Southern accent, curly hair. Appears to be an alpha type/dominant personality. Gravitates toward the position of highest power in any given setting.
Watch out for her.
Anyhow, as the fire crackled and grew, a smell of woodsmoke began to mingle with the faint lavender sc
ent of the blankets. The clock struck nine, and when the chime ceased, I noticed, once more, the strange noise I’d first perceived over pilaf and butternut squash. Crab claws roaming over loose stones. For a second I wondered if I was hallucinating, but when each of the girls had finally gotten her blanket and curled up on a chair or sofa, I saw what I’d failed to perceive for the last hour.
It was not the sound of crabs.
With fire licking the ceiling of the hearth, each girl around me had swaddled herself tightly in an afghan and adopted a hunched position. There were five egg-shaped mounds in total, and from each mound came the sound of chattering teeth.
Despite the heat of summer, each patient at Twin Birch was chilled to the bone.
Caroline sat numbly across from Victoria, thumb hovering near her mouth as she stared into the fire. The collar of her shirt cast knifelike shadows across her collarbones, slicing them into geometric shapes. A pair of thick, grungy rope bracelets encircled her left wrist, and my first anxious thought was that the bracelets performed a concealing function. Was I being paranoid? Maybe so. Chances were I’d find out soon enough.
Next to Caroline were Jane and Brooke, though their positions made it nearly impossible to tell them apart. Each had pulled her legs up tight and was resting her head, face downward, on her knees, revealing only a circle of dark hair to the rest of the group. The only difference was textural: Brooke’s hair was fuzzy, and Jane’s was slick.
My eye continued clockwise, coming to rest upon the girl who had selected the seat next to me. Haley. I observed her for a moment, taking in the snub nose and brittle, rust-colored hair. Her shins were speckled with bruises.
When she finished laying the fire, Devon came over and sat down next to me.
“Not cold?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “It’s the middle of June.”
A skeptical look crossed her face, as though she suspected me of lying. I saw it, even if it only lasted for a half-second before being replaced with manufactured cheer. I know what she was thinking about me.
“It’s common to feel cold,” Devon said. “When your body isn’t used to digesting that much food.”
I stared at her, uncomprehending. I’d eaten large amounts of food before—Thanksgiving, for instance—without needing to wrap myself in thick blankets and roast next to a fire. She was making zero sense.
“When you finally get some nourishment in you,” Devon went on, “all of your body’s energy goes toward digesting it, and there’s nothing left for the rest of your body. Like I said, it’s very common, and not something to be afraid of.”
I began to understand.
“Zoe,” she continued, her face too close to mine. “It’s not something to deny, either.”
Suddenly, it made sense. As I looked around at the other girls, everything I’d seen so far combined to form a strangely rational conclusion. The cooking classes. The force-fed meals. The frail, stick-like condition of the patients: Twin Birch isn’t a hospital, spa, or institution. It is a treatment center for girls who are anorexic.
But I’m not anorexic, I wanted to say. This is a mistake. You’ve misdiagnosed me. But the words lost traction in my throat. I could tell that Devon thought I was lying.
The chattering noise grew softer as the fire’s blaze radiated throughout the room.
I needed to escape Devon’s scrutiny, so I nodded my head at her second offer of a blanket and shrunk down into the sofa, trying to make sense of my predicament. No matter how scientifically I viewed the facts, however, it boiled down to the same mystifying reality: I’m at a treatment center to cure a disease that I do not have.
Anyone looking at me can tell you that I exhibit none of the characteristics of an eating disorder. The veins do not bulge from my hands, and my hipbones don’t jut. The blanket was stifling, and the food rumbled uncomfortably in my stomach. Each of the girls around me weighed dramatically less. How had I found myself at such a place? Who had thought to put me here? Why was my mother in on it?
As I chewed over these questions, I became aware that the sofa beneath me had dipped slightly with the addition of new weight. Lost in my thoughts, I’d barely noticed Victoria sitting down next to me, relinquishing her position at the fire for a spot at my side. A flush of self-consciousness bloomed in my chest as she leaned closer.
“First dinner is the worst dinner,” she whispered, extending a hand. “I’m Victoria.”
The loud crackle of the fire masked her whispered words from eavesdroppers, creating a shell of privacy. I shook her hand and introduced myself, cautiously pleased to be making a potential ally.
“How long have you been here?”
“I was the first to arrive. So, four days. All the way from New Orleans.”
That explained the Southern accent.
“You’re from New York, right?” she asked.
“How’d you know?”
“Please. You might as well have the Yankees logo tattooed on your forehead.”
I giggled for the first time in several days. “Mets, actually,” I said.
Victoria pointed to the other end of the couch, where Haley sat folded inwards like a collapsible chair. “That’s my roommate,” Victoria said. “She’s solid.”
I nodded. “And the others—?”
“Still up for debate,” Victoria said, taking in the room with a sweep of her eyes. “Anyway, it’s nice to meet you.”
“You too,” I said, watching as she returned to her original seat. My instincts told me to be careful about interacting with the other girls here, but Victoria’s warmth had felt genuine. It was too late to reject it, anyhow. I leaned into the sofa cushion and closed my eyes, dizzy with the effort of thinking. The heavy food must have acted as a sedative because I fell asleep and woke to the grandfather clock chiming the quarter hour and Devon announcing bedtime. As I stood to follow the rest of the girls back to our bedrooms, I saw that someone had tucked a second blanket around my shoulders.
That’s when the next step came to me.
[Day Two]
Did someone win the lottery? Was there a pot of gold in the attic that I didn’t know about? A chest of treasure buried beneath the basement floor? I ask because, personally, I’ve never encountered even a hint of wealth downstairs in the laundry room of our building. Just cockroaches, dust bunnies, and lonesome socks. But someone is paying for me to be at Twin Birch, and last time I checked, my mother’s job as a museum curator didn’t exactly make it rain on her bank account.
After the panic of last night, I’m starting to calm down and ask practical questions. Sensible, reasonable questions, beginning with this one: How is my mother paying for me to be here?
Let us review the facts of my family’s financial situation.
Fact: We live in a rent-controlled apartment the size of a shoebox.
Fact: I’ve never been allowed to order any drink but water when we go out to restaurants. (Which is rare.)
Fact: I’ve taken fewer than five taxi cabs in my life.
Fact: When I think of home, I don’t think of Broadway shows, sushi dinners, and SoHo strolls. I think of crazy people on the D train, grease-sodden pizza, and sprinting to get on line for discount museum exhibits.
Given these figures, it is somewhat odd to find myself secreted away at an estate lifted directly from a Grimm fairy tale, gilded scrollwork and all. I have to concentrate hard to convince myself that such a place as this exists. I bend down when nobody’s looking and run a finger along the parquet floor; I touch the glass of the French doors in the dining room, leaving smudged fingerprints as proof of my being. I am like Hansel and Gretel scattering a trail of bread crumbs behind me, just in case I get lost in this cavernous place.
This is not to say I plan on staying here for long. That would be unthinkable. I am not like the other girls here—not in need of help, not a danger to myself. The only items I’ve unpacked from my suitcase so far are a pair of leggings (to sleep in last night), a photograph of me and Elise, and
my toothbrush. Everything else remains folded and zipped away. If necessary, I can be ready to leave Twin Birch in five minutes.
Therapy. The word sounds like the name of a Greek goddess—the patron goddess of whiners, perhaps. There could be a yearly festival in honor of Therapy, if the idea catches on. A date upon which individuals cry, flop around on modular leather sofas, and burn finger-paintings of their parents in effigy.
I read that the high cost of therapy is actually a part of the therapy itself. It works like this: If you pay a lot of money to spend an hour on a stranger’s couch, then you will, in theory, place a high value on that hour and make the best possible use out of it. It makes sense, but it also makes me feel dreary about the human condition to think that we’re so simple.
Alexandra is not the average therapist. Most shrinks are frumpy—defiantly frumpy. Why? I don’t know. Maybe they think that patients will respect the fact that they’ve disavowed superficial embellishments. The therapist at school is a spherical woman given to pairing animal-print turtlenecks with denim jumpers. I took one look at her on the first day and thought, This is not someone I should ever take advice from.
But Alexandra is different. I was following Caroline to breakfast this morning when Angela intercepted my trajectory. She skipped the small talk. “I’ve set down your first session with Alexandra for eight thirty a.m. today. Do you remember where her office is?”
I did.
“After today,” Angela continued, “we’ll schedule a regular time slot in the afternoon.”
I nodded.
“You haven’t eaten breakfast,” she said.
I didn’t answer.
“We’ll make an exception for you to eat during your appointment with Alexandra,” Angela decided.
“I’m not hungry.”
Angela ignored me. “I’ll bring something down in a moment.”
She click-clacked away before I could protest, igniting a flare of irritation in my chest. Deep breath. I needed to speak with my mother, since she was the only person who could sort this out and bring me back home where I belonged. She must have been confused when she brought me here. She’d be able to tell Angela and Alexandra that this was all a mistake, and that she’d be coming to pick me up ASAP—yes, that was the solution. I’d be in the car like lightning, slamming the door and discarding the memory of Twin Birch like an old Band-Aid plastered to a skinned knee. Rip it off and throw it out. Now was not the time for hysterics.