Zoe Letting Go

by Nora Price

  “Can I ask you something?”

  It was Caroline. The lights were out, and the moon threw a pool of milk-hued light onto the bedroom floor. Curled in a fetal position beneath her bedding, she had appeared to be asleep. Not a single word had been spoken since our bewildering encounter outside the bathroom. What time was it?

  “Sorry?” I said. (What I really wanted to ask: How did you know I was awake?)

  Part of me was relieved that she’d started a conversation with me, even if it was in the dead of night. Perhaps she wasn’t afraid of me after all—perhaps our earlier experience was a fluke.

  Caroline, however, had no intention of following up on that subject.

  “This is a question with no judgment implied,” she said, barely whispering the words. Her body didn’t move beneath the sheets.

  “Okay,” I replied.

  “Why are you here?”

  The words met my mind with a thud. They were not what I expected.

  “It’s a simple question,” Caroline added.

  We lay in our respective beds, facing each other like parentheses in the dimness.

  “Well?” Caroline persisted, her feeble voice growing agitated. The question—combined with the fact that she’d never spoken so much at one time before—momentarily baffled me. Then I almost started to laugh. My first reaction, when attacked, is to laugh. I don’t know why.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” I began, smothering the nervous giggle that threatened to escape.

  That much was true: I have no idea what I’m doing here, and at the time I had no clue what her question was supposed to mean. Was it literal? Figurative? Clinical? Or simply designed to make me feel weird? She waited, still as a lizard, for a more satisfying answer.

  “You weigh more than Jane,” Caroline continued. “I’m trying to understand why someone who clearly isn’t at risk of an eating disorder is at a treatment center for anorexics.”

  I squinted to see her face, but it was too dark. I could only see outlines. Now I knew why she’d waited until the middle of the night to interrogate me. It’s much easier to attack a person when you can’t see her.

  “I’m sorry to be blunt,” she went on, still motionless, “but this isn’t a personal issue. So don’t take it as a personal issue. I don’t understand why you’re here, and it’s starting to bother me.”

  “Join the goddamn club,” I whispered back. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I have no clue why I’m here either.”

  “I asked Alexandra.”

  “About me?” I asked.

  “She wouldn’t tell me anything,” Caroline said.

  Me either, I thought. She wouldn’t tell me anything either. Caroline’s questions were evoking in me what must be every rational person’s worst fear, which is being asked to justify your existence.

  “You must have done something,” Caroline said. “I sleep two feet away from you every night—I deserve to know.”

  Her words turned to bile inside of me. I must have done something.

  But what? What had I done?

  “I’m sorry,” I said, swallowing the acid in my throat. “You’re not the only one without a clue what I’m doing here.”

  Silence.

  “Believe me,” I added more forcefully. “I want to know more than you do.”

  “I doubt that,” Caroline said, flipping over so that her back faced me. The conversation, I gathered, was over.

  [Day Eight]

  One week at Twin Birch is done. Finished.

  Crickets scream from the trees outside as I write. The summer bullfrogs sound like a hundred boys burping in chorus, and my stomach echoes the animal din with its own sonic protests from breakfast, which I forced down after spending a restless night grappling with Caroline’s inquiries—it was impossible, of course, to sleep after our conversation. Our seating arrangements at mealtimes have been flexible until now, with Haley sometimes sitting at Jane’s table and Caroline taking the seat next to Victoria occasionally. Last night’s exchange was a line drawn in the sand—from the moment Caroline turned away, I knew that the factions at Twin Birch were set in stone. On one side is me, Victoria, and Haley. On the other side is Brooke, Jane, and Caroline. From now on, there are no neutral parties.

  The only area in which this proves to be a problem is cooking class. To wit: Victoria and Haley are roommates, so they automatically partner up. Brooke and Jane are also roommates, so they automatically partner up. Which leaves—you guessed it—Caroline and me to chop plums and chiffonade basil in acrimonious silence. That’s what happened today, and unless somebody dies or disappears, I don’t see how it will change.

  After a pleasant morning spent batting gnats away and turning our fingernails into filthy crescents in the garden, we gathered in the kitchen to prepare tonight’s dessert: a plum galette.

  “A galette is meant to be rough around the edges,” Devon instructed us as we sliced fruit. “It doesn’t need to be perfect.”

  I rolled out an almond crust while Caroline tossed plums in sugar, standing as far as possible away from me. In the past week, I’ve learned that girls with eating disorders tend toward fanatical precision when it comes to food. This applies double to baking, which—unlike cooking—is a precise science. Girls with a history of disordered eating excel, in general, at tasks that require precision. What seems like a behavioral defect in one context becomes an asset in the other: Every ounce of flour must be portioned out, every drop of vanilla extract budgeted correctly. Victoria would be a shoo-in pastry chef hire at any four-star restaurant, given that she can eyeball the difference between two and three ounces of sugar at fifty yards. Whenever we work alone rather than in partners, my baked goods turn out poorly. Yesterday’s class yielded five perfect onion tarts and one that resembled a chewed frisbee. Guess which one was mine.

  Practically everywhere I look, I see evidence that I don’t belong here.

  In the mirror, I see that I’m thin but not ghastly thin like the other girls.

  In the living room, I digest my meals without wrapping myself in a blanket.

  In the kitchen, I level a cup of flour without spending ten minutes on the process.

  As we assembled our galette today, I thought about what I would tell Alexandra about Caroline. “I tried,” I imagined myself telling her during our session. “First she shrunk, and then, later that night, she attacked me. She said that I didn’t belong here. She won’t talk to me at all—what am I supposed to do?”

  Yes, that’s what I would tell Alexandra. I had been right about Caroline all along: She wasn’t somebody I could trust or talk to. Alexandra would have to admit that she was wrong. That, at least, was going to be satisfying.

  I was almost excited for today’s therapy session.

  While I patched the sticky almond dough together, Caroline focused neurotically on arranging her slices in concentric circles. Her hands were splashed in red plum juice, and the galette looked murderously unappetizing.

  Caroline sprinkled sugar over the plums with her fingertips. She paused, bit a red-stained nail, and adjusted one plum by five degrees. Our galette was so symmetrical it looked computer-generated. (I hate the word galette, by the way. What’s wrong with tart? Galette sounds like a French-Canadian team sport.) It was awful to sit next to Caroline, imagining the mean thoughts she was having about me. Spite was written all over her taut, sour face. She’d even scraped her hair into a tight bun that mirrored her expression.

  The ovens beeped, signaling that they had preheated to the proper temperature. Ours was ready to bake, but no one else had finished arranging, so we waited like a pair of statuettes. Torture. I fidgeted, tugged on my cuffs, picked lint from my leggings. I licked my finger, picked up a crumb of crust, and touched it to my tongue. The morsel filled my mouth with a buttery taste, and I regretted it immediately.

  Devon clapped for attention. “Everyone ready to bake?” she asked.

  “Yes,” everyone said, in that deadpan drone that kindergarte
ners use for performing rote memorization tasks.

  “Neato,” she said. “It’s time to put our little fruity friends in the oven. Follow me.”

  Caroline lifted our galette and slid from her stool while the others mobilized to deposit their creations and clean up their workstations. I stayed put, watching as four frail wrists wrapped unused butter sticks and replaced them in the refrigerator, followed by four skinny arms sweeping nude plum pits into the compost bin.

  “Pretty,” Devon said, commenting on Caroline’s plum arrangement.

  There was sugar all over our table, which I desultorily gathered into a tidy pile. My impulse was to lick my finger again and have a taste, but I resisted. When Caroline returned, she shifted her stool so that her back was to my face. That’s me: the perennial social leper. The knife-sharp blades of her shoulders poked right through the Lilly Pulitzer dress she wore.

  I stared at the pile of sugar, noting that it resembled a burial mound I’d once seen in National Geographic. I wished I could shrink to the size of an ant, burrow inside the sugar mountain, and disappear from sight.

  A sudden presence at my elbow made me flinch.

  “Zoe! Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.” It was Devon.

  She knelt. She is always kneeling.

  “How’re you doing?” she asked.

  “Fine.”

  “You look a little down.”

  I made a noncommital noise.

  “Wanna chat?” she asked, ponytail bobbing. Sometimes it bobs on its own, like a prehensile monkey tail. If I stare at the ponytail long enough, I develop an urge to snip it off with a pair of scissors.

  “No thanks. I’m seeing Alexandra after lunch.”

  “Alrighty. Totally understand. Just yank me aside if you wanna talk about anything during lunch, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She returned to the front of the class, where she continued to look a bit too often in my direction while talking about the therapeutic value of cooking. I did my best to ignore her glances.

  “The goal is to overcome our fears and aversions,” Devon was saying, as though rolling marzipan were an FDA-approved prescription. I thought of the cooking class passage I’d memorized from the Twin Birch memo:

  Cooking class is the Twin Birch way of encouraging girls with eating disorders to spend time around food: touching it, smelling it, preparing it, honoring and savoring it.

  I’ve been returning to the bathroom almost nightly to read through the memo. When I initially read the cooking section, the first thing that came to mind was a phrase asserting the opposite effect: Familiarity breeds contempt.

  Part of cooking therapy involves “Mindfulness exercises,” like the episode with the apricot. These exercises happen every other day, and they are so meditative (read: excruciatingly boring) that I can’t even bring myself to document them in this journal. It’s the same deal each time, but with different foods: Devon narrates while we spend ten minutes eating a small morsel and waiting for the experience to become profound.

  It doesn’t. Not for me.

  The smell of baked almond crust began to spread throughout the kitchen, stirring involuntary murmurs from my stomach. I traced the gaudy whirls of Caroline’s dress with my eyes in soft focus, as though a Magic Eye pattern might emerge. I felt like I didn’t belong, and that it was somehow my fault. I felt as though I were about to break in half.

  How will I survive? I barely made it through freshman year alive, and then I had Elise to lean on.

  At Twin Birch, I’m on my own.

  Plum Galette for Solitary Girls

  Pastry dough for a pie

  7 tbsp. granulated sugar

  1 tsp. cinnamon

  ¼ tsp. nutmeg

  Zest of one lemon

  6 plums, cut into wedges

  Heat oven to 375 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment. Form the dough into a 12-inch circle and put it on the baking sheet. Toss the plums with sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and lemon zest. Arrange the plums over the dough. Sprinkle a little more sugar on top. Fold the edges of the dough over about an inch to cover the outer edge of plums. Crimp the edges with your fingers to make it look like an illustration in a children’s book. Cover the whole thing loosely with foil, bake 40 minutes, remove the foil, and bake a few more minutes. Take the galette out, let it cool, and serve with a glug of cold heavy cream.

  This recipe tastes best if you make and eat it by yourself.

  Today’s meals:

  Breakfast

  Apple-cucumber juice (8 oz.)

  Steel-cut oatmeal with almonds and dates

  Lunch

  Avocado-grapefruit salad with cilantro lime dressing (1 cup)

  Linguine (1 cup) with sauteéd zucchini, garlic, and olive oil

  Sourdough bread (1 piece)

  Dinner

  Smoky pumpkin soup with white beans (2 cups)

  Lentil salad with garden herbs (½ cup)

  Grilled peaches with fromage blanc and basil (*didn’t eat)

  [Day Nine]

  I felt a dash of righteous indignation during therapy yesterday when I told Alexandra about my interactions with Caroline. She was surprised, though I can’t imagine why she thought Caroline would be nice to me. “I can read people,” I told her. “From the day I got here, I knew Caroline didn’t like me.” Alexandra wasn’t satisfied with this, but I was eager to address another topic during our fifty-minute session, and she reluctantly agreed to move on. What I wanted to talk about had happened only an hour earlier, at lunch.

  Until midday, nothing unusual had occurred. At a place like this, where routines are paramount and every minute of every hour is allotted for a specific purpose, aberrations are rare. When they happen, they are viewed as bloopers to be smoothed over as speedily as possible. But what happened last night—and what we learned about this afternoon—will not be so easily erased from the record.

  Lunchtime. We sat grimly before watermelon-fennel salad and lentil tamales, the air quiet except for the sound of knives scraping reluctantly against plates. Lunch is the hardest meal of the day for me; somehow, when I go to bed each night, I make myself believe that the next day will be a new start. That I’ll wake up in my own bed, with my own walls surrounding me, and my phone within reach. That I’ll pop up and shower for as long as I want, brew my own cup of English Breakfast just the way I like it—nice and strong, tiny splash of skim milk, no sugar. When I open my eyes each day to the racket of Devon banging her wake-up bell, therefore, it is not only disheartening but shocking. At breakfast, I’m still too sleep-dazed to think clearly. By lunchtime, the realization has truly sunk in.

  The midday meal is correspondingly grueling. Lunchtime is when I resign myself to the reality of a day spent feeling like a foie gras duck: stuffed, caged, and disgusting. Dinner is manageable only because I know that I’ll be unconscious soon, and therefore incapable of regretting every bite.

  Today I was delighted to find an element of the meal that I could actually—gasp!—enjoy. The watermelon had been chilled and carved into precise cubes, and the rectilinearity of the fruit was appealing to me in the same way that plastic sushi is appealing. Even piled up in a big bowl, I could tell that the melon cubes were all the same size, and a cube is much easier to eat than a big pile of mush. The mint was from the garden. I finished mine in less than twenty minutes, which is a record around here. After I finished, I sat with my glass of iced tea and suffered through the spiteful rumbles and moans of my stomach. My tablemates ate slowly: Victoria stabbed her tamale à la Norman Bates in Psycho; Haley palpated hers like a doctor checking for tumors. There were complaints.

  “This is revolting,” Victoria said, holding a glob of lentil paste up to the light. “I want saltines with apple jelly. That’s all I want to eat.”

  Apple jelly is a Southern thing. Victoria talks about it a lot.

  “We’re eating a corn pouch stuffed with pulverized beans,” she went on. “If that isn’t gross, I don’t know what is.”

&
nbsp; “Mayonnaise?” Haley suggested.

  “Mayonnaise is gross, too.”

  “And lobster?” Haley added. “Did you know that lobsters are technically insects? Giant insects from the sea that people eat?”

  We were hashing out this point when Angela showed up in the doorway. This was unexpected—her rare appearances in the dining room always coincided with breakfast, when she occasionally checked in with Devon. Devon seemed equally surprised to see the head administrator upstairs at lunch, and she hurried over with an anxious look, brushing tamale crumbs from her shorts.

  Devon didn’t even bother to clap for attention before making the announcement.

  “Lunch is over,” she announced, after whispering with Angela. “Everyone into the living room.”

  Victoria, Haley, and I glanced at one another with eyebrows raised. Something was up.

  At the next table, Caroline smiled triumphantly. When I looked at her plate, I could see why: She hadn’t eaten one bite of her meal, and now she wouldn’t have to consume even a token crumb.

  We filed into the living room, where Angela now stood by the unlit fire, her hands folded stiffly across her chest. Next to her sat Brooke, whose eyes were red with tears behind the wire-rimmed glasses. Brooke, I now realized, had been absent at lunch. I wondered why I had been slightly more relaxed than usual.

  We found seats and arranged ourselves in a semicircle. Brooke, wearing a black dress flecked with bits of her breakfast, simmered in her chair, eyes flickering between me, Victoria, and Haley. Before Angela could begin, Brooke stood up and addressed the three of us.

  “One of you did it,” she said. “I know it was one of you.”

  My first impulse was to laugh. I stifled it as Angela put a firm hand on Brooke’s shoulder, imploring her to sit back down.

  Brooke sat, her thin arms crossed tight over her chest, like a self-imposed straitjacket.

  “An item of clothing has gone missing from Brooke’s suitcase,” Angela explained. “It was brought to my attention this morning, and after conducting a thorough search of Brooke’s bedroom and the laundry facilities to no avail, I see no recourse but to bring the issue up in a meeting.”