Waisted

by Randy Susan Meyers

  If Bebe saw this, if Alice sent thought waves to her mother, Mom would have her father and Macon on the highway in ten minutes—driving under the speed limit, of course. No cops were trusted, but damn, expressly here, where, as her mother would say, “I do believe Vermont is the whitest state in the union.”

  Or was it Maine? For a moment, lost in light-headed hunger, Alice confused truth and fantasy. She turned, almost as though to see if her family were entering, but only Daphne, lips pressed together, remained in her field of vision. Poor Daph looked at the scale and Jeremiah as though she were considering a million-mile march. They locked eyes. Such an unlikely friend, Daphne. Not because she was chalk-white in that redheaded manner, or that she came from one of the wealthy towns bordering Boston, or that she spent her life transforming people. Those certainly added up to points of interest. But no, that wasn’t the source of the unlikeliness.

  Alice’s initial reading of Daphne had taken place as they stood in the great hall, still in street clothes: hair styled, jewelry on, makeup masking the true women. She might have dismissed those markers, but Daphne’s clothes, nondescript to invisibility—as though she shopped for indistinctness—told such an odd story. Her outfit made a racket of cognitive dissonance with the woman she presented above the neck: hair styled to fall in elegant waves, face buffed and lacquered to geisha-like stiffness, emerald studs gleaming from her earlobes, all topped and garnished with a thin river of gold chain—dotted with green, crystalline, and red stones—wrapping her neck.

  Emeralds, diamonds, and rubies decorated Daphne—they shined too purely to be glass or crystal. The woman arrived in Vermont wrapped in treasure yet clothed in sackcloth. At that moment, Daphne had struck her as too complicated. Alice had no spare strength to investigate the duality of personality traits the woman exhibited, but within a day, she saw how Daphne wore her makeup and jewelry as a suit of armor meant to distract eyes from her body. They quickly became close, in that way you do in the first week of college or summer camp, when, alone and friendless, you pick the girl most likely to be simpatico.

  Now, clothed in the same horrid material, with Daphne emphasized as a wide brick, and Alice revealed as overlapping circles, their constant exposure meant to break them down, they connected. Alice and Daphne tried to determine the purpose of the humiliation heaped on them. During their nightly talks, they were determined to solve the mystery, preferring to be a pair of TV Olivias—Pope from Scandal and Benson from Law & Order—more than being fat women trying to make themselves lovable to husbands and mothers.

  She didn’t know whether to grab her frozen friend’s hand and make a break for freedom or push her forward.

  “Daphne,” Jeremiah said again. “We’re waiting.”

  Her friend took one heavy step and then another, walking as though weights attached by chains dragged behind her.

  Alice shivered.

  Dear God, they might as well be putting them on a slave auction block, with Jeremiah standing there like a giant white master.

  Who was crazier, him or them?

  Daphne had rescued her when she needed the bathroom. Alice stepped forward and grabbed Daphne’s hand. “Let’s get this over. Together.”

  Daphne clutched her hand. When they reached the base of the scale, Alice squeezed Daphne’s hand twice.

  Jeremiah cocked his head and smiled as though seeing the funniest and stupidest women in the world.

  Screw him.

  “We’re not taking off one more thing.” Alice planted her legs apart and matched her crossed arms to his. “Forget it.”

  • • •

  Mystery solved. A shot meant a brutal run.

  By the seventh mile of their ten-mile race to nowhere, Alice fell to her knees. Daphne kept chugging, as Alice bent over, stitches knifing through her sides. When Daphne saw, she backed up, stood beside her, and waited, lightly touching Alice’s shoulder. Enough to comfort without adding pressure.

  “Don’t wait for her.” Valentina jogged in place. “You run. I stay with her.”

  Alice couldn’t see Daphne’s expression, but she imagined that stubborn, tight-lipped face.

  “News flash,” Daphne said. “This isn’t the army, and you’re not my sergeant.”

  But if that were true, what kept them running? What led them to obey these people? Each day, Alice became more frightened by the crap she took in her pursuit of this overwhelming desire to be thin. Before taking off on this hideous run, they’d been in a wood-paneled room with Jeremiah and a giant screen. He’d pressed a few buttons, and up came images of Alice and Daphne side by side: photos from their applications. Full length. Standing. Hands on hips, as per the written instructions.

  “Ready, ladies? Watch the magic.”

  He moved his finger on the trackpad, and presto! Metamorphosis. Alice became thin—elegantly thin—pulled in as though by enchanted stitches, while Daphne dropped the block of fat encasing her and came out transformed as a hard-muscled athlete.

  They stared, mouths open, at the transformation.

  Alice wanted to reach out and touch the screen, trace the lines of her body, dress the image in silk and tissue-thin cashmere. Take her curls, coil them on top of her head, and then let them fall.

  The image kept her from walking out of the mansion, stomping the many miles to the main road, sticking out her thumb, and hitching home. Or hunting through the massive house until she found where they’d hidden her phone.

  Overwhelming nausea hit as Alice knelt on the cold ground. She retched up the small amount of food inside her stomach, bits of carrots floating in a gallon of water.

  • • •

  “Ten miles.” Daphne sounded dazed.

  “Doesn’t seem possible.” Alice lay flat, arms at her sides, hanging over the twin bed. “I never was much of an athlete.”

  “I joined crew in high school.” Daphne, across in her own bed, massaged her calves. “For one term.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “Hated it. But my arms got muscular. That I liked.”

  “Maybe that encapsulates our problem,” Alice said. “We forgot how to do the hard things. The things we hate.”

  Hania piped up from the chair where she sat reading Shape magazine. “Every time I want to escape, I think that even if this is the worst ever, at least they’re giving me a shortcut.”

  “Aren’t you afraid it will all disappear when we’re back home?” Daphne asked.

  Alice imagined herself back in Mission Hill, where she wouldn’t be served prison portions in chipped bowls. Was she learning discipline or just taking a punishing cheat?

  She tried to lift her legs to leverage herself up, but her limbs protested loud enough to make the move impossible. “I’m more frightened of how far I’ll let them push us.”

  Hania held up the magazine and turned it so that the page of models faced them. “This is who Jeremiah wants us to be like. He’s doing it for us, right?”

  “I don’t know,” Daphne said. “What if we become vaguely similar to those models for one day—the day we leave—and then the moment we get home move back up the ladder? Is it still worth it?”

  “Stop!” Hania threw the magazine on the floor. “That’s the negative self-talk Jeremiah warns us about. ‘Think fat, be fat.’ ‘Eat fat, be fat.‣ ”

  “How much did we not control ourselves that this is what we turned into? Or how much do we despise ourselves? I thought it was just my husband.” Alice needed to release the words before they ate her insides. “He drove me here. I convinced myself of that. Because I got fat. Because I’m not beautiful any—”

  “You are so damn—”

  Alice cut off Daphne. “Not to him. I should marry you. Look, I hate him for it. And yet I came here to get thin for him. How screwed up is that? But before this, I was bingeing and throwing up, sometimes twice a week. I have a little girl. What kind of example was I showing her?”

  “Why do you keep at it?” Daphne rolled onto her side, slowly. “Try s
o hard to be smaller?”

  Alice turned to face this new friend, ready to tell her something she’d never confessed to anyone.

  “I wish I knew. I tell myself I just want to be beautiful; become who I was when I met Clancy. A rail. But when I met Clancy, misery was the center of my world. Being thin? That came from depression. I was heartbroken. Breakup skinny.”

  “God. Breakups make you so skinny.” Hania gazed up as though praying for a Dear Jane letter to float down from heaven.

  “It was the first time that stress made me not eat,” Alice said.

  “Small stress means eating, in my opinion. Major stress equals weight loss. Until it doesn’t,” Daphne said. “Shit. Anything can make me fat. Were you sometimes skinny before the breakup?”

  “I was never what anyone could call skinny, except for that one crazy time—just various degrees of what the Irish call a hearty broth of a girl.” Alice took a deep breath and went on. “And my mother, all she said was, ‘It doesn’t matter. You’re a strong black woman. Brilliant. Beautiful. You don’t need to live up to the white expectations of the world.’ ”

  Hania nodded. “My grandmother. Different words—we’re Indian—but same idea. My grandmother lives with us, and I’m like the punching bag between her and my mother, who wants me to be American skinny. My mother pats my stomach and shakes her head, while Nani tells her to stop and sneaks me chocolate.”

  “My mother thinks she’s black. She’s white and Jewish. Likely she’ll be sainted someday for all her do-gooding.”

  “I never thought of my mother as anywhere near sainthood.” Daphne stretched her arms up and then out. “More like the devil in my life.”

  “She’s your mother!”

  Alice laughed at Hania’s youthful shock.

  “My mother has been the single biggest reason for this.” Daphne gestured at her body. “I’d hide food and then gobble it so fast that I learned the art of chewing an entire bagel in one minute. When I was in high school, she put a scale in the entry to the kitchen. She took it away only when company came.”

  “How horrible!” Hania’s face puckered as though tears were imminent.

  “It is awful. And you, girl, are as sweet as sugar candy. If I could rise, I’d give you a hug,” Daphne said. “But I didn’t mean to get the floor.” She turned the conversation back to Alice. “So, all that eating. And purging. If Clancy didn’t drive it, what did?”

  Alice struggled to a sitting position. She wanted to dip her hands into a bowl of popcorn. Dry would be fine. Buttered would be heaven. “I grew up with the same magazines and movies as the rest of the world, so there’s that.”

  Hania and Daphne nodded.

  “I wonder if there’s a girl in America who doesn’t grow up wanting to be skinny?” Alice mused. “Thinner is always better.”

  “What a depressing thought.” Daphne untwirled a ringlet and let it bounce back. “Millions of girls all over hating themselves.”

  “Maybe that’s how the supposed ‘Black girls don’t care’ baloney got started. Everyone wanted there to be someone standing up against the bullshit,” Hania said.

  “Yeah. We had a shot, but then Oprah had to go on and ruin that with her diet, diet, diet.” Alice sighed, thinking about how she begged her mother for Oprah magazine. She wanted food advice, and it was a magazine her mother couldn’t refuse her. “Think about it. Richest woman in the world—I think—and all she wants is to eat her mac and cheese in peace.”

  “Mac and cheese.” A dreamy look came over Hania.

  “I can’t figure it out. Why, besides Clancy, did I want to be skinny so damn badly that I ended up here?”

  “Did you love it when you were thin?” Daphne asked.

  Alice rocked as she clasped her knees. “I loved being loved for it. And to be sickeningly honest, I adored the envious looks I got from other women. Seeing men practically drooling? Disgusting. But it made me feel powerful. Which, Jesus, is creepy. But, yeah, I loved it. I feel like the guy from that movie Brokeback Mountain. Skinny, ‘I wish I knew how to quit you.’ ”

  CHAPTER 15

  * * *

  ALICE

  Valentina paced.

  Alice ignored her, as did Daphne and Hania, all of them concentrating on their plates as though something fantastic lay before them.

  “Your weigh-in yesterday, it shamed me,” Valentina said.

  Alice tried to tune her out as she scraped every piece of egg from the rough plate.

  “We will never win with this showing,” Valentina continued.

  “Win? Win what? Just what is our prize?” Alice, still bleary and exhausted, even two days after the run, had woken so sore that she had to physically lift her legs off the bed. The previous day, forced to exercise through her post run pain, she had been unable to do anything but concentrate on forcing her limbs to move.

  Making sense of Valentina’s tirades ranked low on Alice’s list. Eating took all her concentration. She simply wanted to get the slop down—though the meal was a pinch improved. Yesterday the bits of sewage-like food so nauseated her, eating took a self-lecture on staying strong. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as the entire community’s punishment for Alice’s and Daphne’s rebellion, a stew of shaved tofu, celery, broccoli, and tomato simmered in weak chicken broth had been the only offering.

  But Jeremiah dropped the nudity rule for the weigh-ins.

  The strange victory was noted in his sideways comment: “You can thank your friends Alice and Daphne—some of you will be pushed only so far. Grist for the mill, eh? The question? Will such supposed courage help or hurt you all?”

  At yesterday’s weigh-in, after the run and the sewage meals, Alice had been down another four pounds, and Daphne three. Hania pouted over her two-pound loss, but they all stared when facing the mirror. Daphne touched the area where a waist might have appeared, Hania turned sideways and sucked in her stomach, and Alice angled her body to catch her carved collarbones.

  “What will you win?” Valentina plunked herself down opposite Alice at the rough table, reaching out to touch Alice’s bowl. “This. This is a win. Everything you eat, it is a win or lose. Every pair of pants you button or don’t. You win the weigh-ins, you win life.”

  “We win us?” Hania asked. “You mean that we walk out feeling better when this is over?”

  Alice shivered at Hania’s seeming blind acceptance of the proverbial end justifying the means.

  “You leave not only beautiful new women; you march away the best.”

  “So how did we lose yesterday?” Daphne asked. “In the competition. We worked our hardest.”

  “Did you?” Valentina stood and rolled up the sleeves of her pink sweatshirt. She pressed her palms on the table until every tendon showed through her chalky flesh, her position emphasizing her tightness, from her snap-hard calves to the ponytail drawing her eyebrows toward her squared hairline. “Best is very top best. Best is surpassing those around you. They lost more than you. Winning means challenging yourself so hard that you guarantee your personal best is better than their personal best. Reaching the top is not getting the most-improved award, it’s getting the gold.”

  Alice tried to resist Valentina’s siren song—win, win, win—as though rainbows and daffodils waited at the finish line. Winning meant money for either Valentina or Coleen. That was it. The rumor mill had it that whoever brought her team in with the biggest losses received 50K.

  Still. Alice’s previous win meant stuffing wads of saltines into her mouth, topping off her gluttony before she stuck her finger down her throat. Victory had been a more soothing purge after she binged, using the soft white flour to eat up the acid in her vomit.

  Improved retching had become her goal.

  “Here. This is something I have for you. A wonderful surprise.” Valentina reached into her sweatshirt pouch and pulled out a plastic baggie of capsules. “Take these. I am giving you one a meal from now on.”

  “What are they?” Daphne tipped her head with
suspicion.

  “Vitamins.” Valentina took out three pills. “A mix made by Dr. Ash. Soon he will be selling these. You are very lucky to be getting these first.”

  “What’s in these lucky pills?” Alice asked, imagining her mother having a chemical assay done before she even touched them with a fingertip.

  Valentina drew out a small piece of paper and read a list of ingredients. “Green tea extract, elephant yam, caffeine, and conjugated linoleic acid, which is only just a superhealthy trans fat. All these elements are very good for you. Very healthy.”

  Alice concentrated on the words, trying to remember the long shelf of vitamins her mother kept lined up in her kitchen, determined to keep her and Dad alive forever. She brought bags from Whole Foods to Alice’s and Macon’s apartments, diagnosing their problems through her online research.

  “Is this actually speed?” Daphne’s bluntness was a blessing. “Amphetamine? Fen-phen? Ephedra? Not that I ever researched those drugs.” She cut her eyes to show she meant just the opposite.

  “No, no. Nothing illegal.” Valentina placed a hand on her heart. “My God, I swear. I want winning, not jail. We work you hard, but we’re not crazy. Hey. You’re very lucky women. My special relationship with Dr. Ash made him pick me.”

  “I don’t want any illegal or legal drugs,” Alice said. “Making my daughter motherless isn’t on my list.” Just mentioning Libby cut deep. Her mother and father—and Clancy—cared for the girl with nothing but tender love, and Alice left taped stories and songs for them to play every night, but a month was a lifetime for a kid.

  “We do not want to hurt you.” Valentina softened her voice. “The mix will make you strong, build your muscles. When you leave, we may give you each some, even though we have to keep them secret before Dr. Ash gets them to market.”

  She placed one pill in front of every bowl and whispered, “Take one. You will be amazed. I have tried them. You will have energy. Your mood will soar. You will be like superwomen.”