Skin

by Adrienne Maria Vrettos

  21

  Mom and Karen are still at the table in the kitchen. An hour ago I could tell by the way Karen kept rearranging the rice on her plate that they’d end up sitting like this, Mom’s plate empty and Karen’s heavy with cold food. When she first got back from the hospital, I felt like I was part of a football team made up of all the people set on keeping her well. Her nutritionist. Her doctor. Her therapist. Mom. Dad. And me—the one that no one had asked to join the team, but who kept showing up to practice. I pictured us all in team jerseys standing firmly with arms crossed in front of us, daring Karen’s sickness to try to get past. I thought we’d be strong enough.

  I’ve put all the dishes in the dishwasher except for Karen’s, which I left in front of her. I washed all the pots and wiped down the counters and the table, working around Karen’s plate and glass and napkin. I clean as long as I can, not wanting to leave, wanting to see if Mom will find a way to get her to eat. Finally, when I start to empty the crumbs out of the toaster, Mom says, “Donnie, please go do your homework.”

  I leave because if I argue, it might give Karen a chance to escape upstairs and lock herself in her room. Keeping the attention on her is really important. I go to the den, where I can look over the back of the couch and listen to them and watch their reflections against the dark outside in the sliding glass door.

  Neither one of them says anything for a long time. And then Mom says, “Oh, Karen.” And I can hear she’s crying.

  “Mom.” Karen’s annoyed voice.

  “It just hurts me, Karen, to see you like this.”

  “So don’t look at me, then. Leave me alone.”

  “You know I can’t do that. You’re my daughter, it hurts me so much, watching you do this to yourself.”

  “So don’t watch.”

  “Do you want to hurt your family, is that what it is? You want to make us suffer right along with you?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Mom, not everything is about you.”

  “Just tell me what I can do, tell me how to make you better, and I’ll do it.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Your brother is terrified. You see the way he watches you? If you’re not home after school, he asks me if you’ve gone back, if we had to take you back to that place.”

  That’s true, I do ask that.

  Karen doesn’t have an answer for that.

  “He loves you so much, Karen. We all love you so much, but this is tearing us apart. I need you to help us help you, tell us how to help you. Just eat ten bites, eat ten bites so your poor mother can get some sleep tonight.”

  Karen snorts at the “poor mother” part. I agree, it’s a little over the top.

  “Please, Karen, ten bites. For Donnie.”

  There’s a pause, a small sound of a fork against a plate.

  “Good girl. That’s a girl.”

  22

  Karen’s spinning me around, wrapping the scarf all the way up my neck and over my face. It’s the day after Christmas, which means it’s time for Karen to dress me up in every piece of clothing we got for presents. I’m already wearing jeans, pajamas, four shirts, and the ugly orange anorak Aunt Janice sent. It actually wasn’t a bad Christmas. Dad came home Christmas eve, and there haven’t been any big fights. I think everyone needed to be okay, at least for a few days. Karen’s working on pulling a hat down over my scarf-covered head when Mom comes stomping into the den with Dad.

  “Karen!” I can see through the knit of the scarf that Mom’s got her hands on her hips. Bad sign. “I just got a call from Amanda’s dad. He wanted to make sure we knew what time to pick Amanda up at the airport tomorrow.”

  My mouth drops open. Dad and I both look at Karen. She laughs because I’m still wrapped up in the scarf, and then looks at Mom and Dad, annoyed. I pull the scarf off my face.

  “What? I told you that,” she snaps.

  “No you did not, young lady. You most certainly did not. You told us she couldn’t come to visit, that she wanted to be in Chicago for New Year’s.”

  “Sorry.” Karen couldn’t be more bored with the conversation. “Amanda’s coming to visit. She needs us to pick her up tomorrow.”

  Mom and Dad stare at her; the holler is building up inside them. Karen cuts them off with a curt, “Shut up.”

  They don’t. In fact, they open up with all their words and their volume, and Karen answers back with hers. I rise above the noise, rise right out of the den and up to my room. She’s coming to visit, and things will be like they were before.

  We’re in the living room. Mom’s decided this is where we should sit to catch up with Amanda. I sit between Mom and Dad on the couch. Amanda and Karen sit in armchairs, not looking at each other. Mom made us all giant Santa Claus mugs of hot chocolate “Just like you girls like it.” Amanda sips at hers, and Karen just leaves hers on the end table. Mom’s keeping up appearances, except she forgets what our appearance was. Amanda gave me a hug when she came in. I can’t even act disinterested. I can’t not look at her. I want to pull words out of her mouth; I want to hear her say something, because even though she’s talking, she’s not saying anything at all.

  “How’s your dad, Amanda?” Mom asks.

  “He’s fine. He’s the contractor for a new mini-mall, so . . .”

  “Oh, that’s good.”

  “Does he still have the truck?” Dad asks.

  “Um, actually, I drive it now.” Her eyes flick over to Karen, who couldn’t be less impressed. “He bought himself a sedan.” Dad loses interest and looks out the window at the Christmas lights on our bushes.

  I can’t wait till Amanda and Karen go to bed. Because then, when Karen goes to brush her teeth, she’ll leave her bedroom door open and I’ll stick my head in and talk to Amanda. She’ll ask how Karen is and I’ll tell her. Then maybe she’ll ask about me and I’ll tell her the truth. I’ll tell her that I’m about to disappear. Then maybe we’ll make out.

  Mom runs out of questions, and sends us all upstairs with, “Well, you must be tired. We made up the spare bed in Karen’s room for you.”

  “Hi,” I say, sticking my head into Karen’s room. Amanda is sitting on the rollaway bed, a yearbook open on her lap.

  “Hi,” she says. “How are things?”

  “All right. What’s Chicago like?”

  “It’s all right. The school’s, like, four times the size of this one.”

  “Are you on the soccer team?’

  “Not this year,” she says quietly, looking back at the yearbook.

  “Oh.” I can’t think of anything else to say. Nothing happens the way it should.

  “Well,” I say, “see you tomorrow.”

  “Okay. See you tomorrow.” I take a step, and stop when she says, “Donnie.”

  Ask me to make out, ask me to make out, ask me to make out. I step back through the door.

  “Last summer was fun, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “It was the best.”

  She grins at me, a real, wide smile. Karen’s out of the bathroom.

  “Donnie, what are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” I say, and walk out of her room.

  Amanda calls, “Good night!” after me.

  It’s so quiet in Karen’s room. I can’t believe they’ve fallen asleep. When I came back from the bathroom, I stood outside Karen’s door and heard them say low good-nights to each other. I watched as the sliver of light under their door disappeared, and stood there listening to them not say anything for a long, long time. Nothing is the way it was. They should be up for hours, laughing, screeching, rearranging Karen’s furniture, dyeing their hair, and going downstairs to make snacks. Instead there’s just silence.

  I get into bed and debate kicking the wall really hard to wake them up, but fall asleep instead. I wake up, barely hearing Amanda say, “I did it,” through the wall.

  I press the water glass I brought upstairs with me against the wall, and put my ear against it.

  “What?” Karen asks, sounding w
ide awake. I can hear them perfectly through the glass.

  “Rio slipped me the hot beef injection.” She and Karen explode into laughter. “No way,” I whisper.

  “No way!” Karen gasps. “Really?” She sounds equally surprised and impressed.

  “Yep.”

  “How . . . I don’t know . . . How was it?”

  “It was . . . weird. Good.”

  They laugh at that. I can hear the creak of their beds, and guess that they’ve turned over on their sides to face each other. I picture them trying to make out each other’s faces through the darkness in the room. I hate them both.

  “He said he’d wait as long as I wanted. And then . . . I didn’t want to wait anymore.”

  “Does your dad know?”

  “Apparently,” Amanda says. “He actually keeps track of the condoms in his drawer.”

  “No way! What’d he do?”

  “He called Rio and told him if he got me pregnant, he’d kill him.”

  Karen snorts. “Your dad’s so macho.”

  “I know. It drives me insane.”

  I take the glass away from the wall and flop back on my bed. I can feel every drop of blood pushing through my veins. I can hear my heartbeat in my ears and there’s a hollow-feeling space in my head. I put the glass back up to the wall.

  “. . . Dad wouldn’t even look at me for three days. So I finally wrote him a letter and taped it to his dashboard.”

  “Really? What did it say?” Why did Karen have to sound so excited?

  “Well . . .” There’s a sound of shuffling paper and then laughter.

  “You brought it with you?” Karen’s obviously impressed.

  “I don’t know, it worked so well for me, I thought maybe you could use it.”

  More laughter. I make a plan to sneak into the room tomorrow and find the note.

  “Dear Dad.”

  “Ooh, good start. I’ll use that.” Karen giggles.

  I take the glass away from the wall for a second to give my ear a rest and wait for them to stop laughing.

  “Okay . . . ‘Dear Dad, It’s been three days since I told you about Rio and me, and you still haven’t looked me in the eye. I know you think I’m your little girl, but I’m not. I’m my own woman, my own person—’”

  “Oooh, that’s good,” Karen whispers, and then rushes out with a laugh. “Okay, okay, keep going.”

  “Thanks. Okay, so . . . ‘I’m my own woman, my own person, and you don’t own me or my sexuality. Me having sex wasn’t an act against you, it was something I did for me. It has nothing to do with you. If you really loved me, you wouldn’t treat me like I disgust you. My virginity was not yours to protect, it was mine. My body, my life, my choices. If you can’t love me now because I’m not “pure,” then that’s your problem, and I hope you get over it. Love, Panda.’”

  “Holy shit, you gave that to him?” I can hear Karen sit up in bed. “Amanda, that’s incredible. That really worked?”

  “No, it sort of pissed him off more. He’s not ready to admit he doesn’t own me, body and mind. At least he looked me in the eyes to yell at me, though. We’re talking again, but it’s weird. Something’s totally changed.”

  There’s a silence as we all think about this. I picture Amanda and her father in their Chicago kitchen eating pancakes and not looking at each other.

  “I wish you still lived here,” Karen says. “You could have talked to Mom about it.”

  There’s a long pause.

  “Actually, I did.”

  “You talked to Mom? When?” There’s ice in Karen’s voice.

  “A couple weeks ago.” Amanda heard the chill too. She’s measuring out her words. “I called and she said you weren’t home. I could tell you were, though. She said I sounded upset and she asked me what was wrong, so I told her. She was really cool about it.”

  Karen doesn’t answer. After a long while Amanda says, “What about you? Are you seeing anybody?”

  I know that things are bad between them, for Amanda to have to ask that. They’re strangers now.

  “No, I’m not.” Karen’s words clack together, falling out of her mouth. “You know. I was out of school, and then it was weird when I went back. I couldn’t even get my driver’s license because I was out so much.”

  There’s another long pause and Amanda asks, “What was it like in that place? I mean, we’ve never really talked about what it was . . .” Amanda trails off and then says, “Sorry. Never mind. I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “No, it’s fine,” Karen says. “No one here asks about it. Not that I’d answer if they did. It was weird, Amanda. All these girls, all of them screwed up the same way I am. You know how we used to read those disease-of-the-week books?”

  “The ones like about drug abuse and that girl that got pregnant by her dad?”

  “Yeah, those. And remember the one about the girl who would only eat lettuce leaves and licorice?”

  “You must be referring to the classic, Dying to Be Thin.”

  They both laugh.

  “Yeah. That one.”

  Silence.

  “Well, what about it?”

  “Oh. Well, I don’t know. I thought it would be like that.”

  “Like that how?”

  “Well, you know how at the end of the book, after Elsie’s roommate dies of a heart attack, and that night all of her friends on the ward break into the kitchen and eat ice cream to honor her because it was her favorite food before she got sick?”

  Amanda laughs. “Okay, you obviously remember that book much better than I do.”

  “We had a copy on the ward and we used to act it out at night between bed checks,” Karen says matter-of-factly.

  Amanda says, “Oh.”

  I close my eyes and press my ear harder against the glass.

  “Anyway,” Karen continues, “in the book all the girls go to group the next day and Elsie has this huge epiphany. She decides she doesn’t want to end up like her roommate, and for the first time when it comes her turn to speak, instead of passing she says, ‘My name is Elsie, and my grandpa molested me when I was three. And that is why I do this to myself.’ And everyone else in group claps, and then one by one all of her friends stand up and say things like, ‘My name is Sarah, my parents got divorced, and that is why I do this to myself.’ Or ‘My name is Candy, and I was a really fat kid, and that’s why I do this to myself,” and everyone ends up crying and hugging and the therapist does this victory fist into the air, and then the next chapter takes place two weeks later and Elsie is getting ready to check out, and as she’s leaving, this new girl is on her way in, and Elsie looks deep into the new girl’s eyes and says, ‘You’re gonna make it, sweetie. I promise.’”

  What the fuck is she talking about?

  After a second Amanda says, “I guess I remember some of that.”

  “Well, it wasn’t like that at all,” Karen grumbles.

  “Well, no shit, Karen, that was a book.” Amanda half-laughs, half-yells.

  I nod. Yeah, no shit, Sherlock.

  Karen laughs. “I know! I know it was just a book, but . . .”

  There’s a long silence. I wonder for a second if they know I’m listening and have started passing notes instead. But then Karen says, her voice sounding more tired than before, “There wasn’t anyone clear-cut reason why anyone was there. We all just had different pieces of each other’s stories. Being in there, you find out there’s nothing special about you. The doctors know everything that happened to you and everything that is going to happen to you. We all stopped getting our periods. Lots of girls were losing the hair on their heads but having it sprout out like down all over their bodies. We all had moments when it felt like our hearts were beating out the wrong rhythm. We all had weird pains all the time. And all of us were trying to figure out how to get out of there without getting better. The doctors try and convince us that we’re not in control of it, and we try to remember that we are. There’s nothing unique about it when you’re i
n there. It’s different out here. And what that stupid book doesn’t talk about is that after you dig down to find out the things that make you this way, after you flick out the seed that everything grew from, there’s still a hole there where the seed was. You still have to do something about the hole.”

  I wait for Amanda to say something. I bet she can’t breathe either. I try to catch my breath, and think, Shell get better, shell get better, shell get better.

  “I’ll tell you something about it, though,” Karen starts talking again, “that even the doctors there don’t know. There was this sweater. Ages and ages ago some girl brought it to the ward, and it’s been passed from girl to girl ever since. It’s cable knit, one of those Irish fisherman sweaters. And it’s small, almost a little-kid size. Since they tried to keep us from knowing how much we weighed, how small we were, we’d use the sweater. Only the very smallest person on the ward got to wear it. It was like a prize.”

  After a long moment I hear Amanda squeak out, “Karen, that’s so scary. That makes me want to cry.” That’s a lie, I can tell she’s already crying.

  “Well, relax, because I never got to wear it. I got better instead,” Karen says sharply.

  I hear Amanda turn over. She’d be facing the wall now, facing me, just three feet away. I lie down on my bed and move the glass so I can be lying down and listening at the same time. I imagine her voice vibrating the glass against my fingers.