Authors: Diana Spechler
Skinny (13 page)
That night, when Bennett finally approached me, I was sitting alone on the cafeteria steps, holding a pointless flashlight, playing Head O.D. He appeared below me, cast in shadows. When he climbed a couple of steps and came into the light, he asked, “All good out here, Angeline?” and gave me a double thumbs-up.
What was it with men? How could they treat sex like a decadent meal—a pleasant memory with no connection to the heart? Why couldn’t I be so practical? Bennett and I didn’t know each other. So what if we had mashed our bodies together? He wasn’t the point of anything.
But my heart started going in my ears. “I’m thinking of leaving,” I said.
“You are?”
No. “Yes.”
I thought of my father saying, “Here comes Brenda Preston,” which he always said when I was being theatrical, because Brenda Preston was our neighbor who once, after fighting with her husband, walked out onto her front lawn and threw a heavy flowerpot at her own forehead, fainting while the neighborhood watched.
Bennett climbed the steps and sat beside me. “Because of last night?”
I looked away. This was a lie I wasn’t sure how to draw out. I wanted to say, “New subject!” but instead I chewed my lip and stayed quiet.
“This was what I was worried about—that we’d sleep together and you’d hate me.”
I looked at Bennett’s blank blue eyes. “I barely know you,” I said, but my words felt false. Camp days were like dog years. Each day was a month. In a way, already, the social circle I’d left behind in New York seemed like a group of people with whom I’d lost touch. Even my memory of my apartment was vague and shadowy, like a memory of the womb.
“I’ve never had much luck with women.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“I don’t understand the heart of a woman. Does that sound stupid to you? It probably sounds stupid.”
“I mean, it’s not very original.”
Bennett tapped his leg to mine a few times. My thigh jiggled. I held it rigid. “What do you want from me?”
“Why does everyone keep asking me that?”
“Well, today I woke up and I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. Was I supposed to act like your boyfriend?”
“I have a boyfriend.”
“So you’ve said.”
I looked at Bennett. He was so strong and sure, pinned to the earth, paperweighted by the muscles of his legs, his college-athlete confidence, the bold tattoo on his arm. I encircled his wrist with my fingers and hung on. He was a Band-Aid on my hunger. What I wanted from him, I had.
“Did you . . . like it?” I asked. “The sex?”
Bennett curled his fist and flexed the muscles of his free arm. “I’m a man,” he said in an extra-deep voice. “A red-blooded American.” He knocked his arm against mine. “You were terrific.”
“I was pretty drunk.”
“Crocked and cockeyed.”
“I don’t think I did much. I was more like a blow-up doll than a person.”
“Seemed all right to me, Angeline.”
“Just all right?”
“No. Terrific. I told you terrific.”
“Terrific,” I said like an echo.
“But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
We sat quietly for a few seconds, our hips touching, my hips shrinking. Then I said, “Maybe we can just have fun?”
Right.
Go ahead, make use of my body. I’ll affect stoicism.
What was fun about that? When I was in new love with Mikey, I could have fun with the men in the street who bought my comedy club tickets. I could have fun with the other comedians. I could flirt and laugh and watch their pupils dilate like spots of watercolor.
But when my father died, when Mikey and I began to deteriorate, I could no longer talk with a man at a party without either imagining us old in matching rocking chairs, or feeling repulsed by the crumbs between his teeth, his bad posture, the burp he’d tried to hide by puffing out his cheeks.
I could see that Bennett would keep me busy. I would spend the rest of the summer scheming.
“I’m all for fun, Angeline,” Bennett said.
I stuck out my hand for him to shake. “Then here’s to a summer of fun.”
Bennett’s room was an apartment of sorts, twice the size of the campers’ dorm rooms, attached to the boys’ dorm. To get to him, I had to walk across camp, one-half of the loop. I never made the trip by daylight when campers would have seen me. Nights were tricky, too, because unless we were on duty—either as Head O.D. or on dorm patrol—all counselors had a midnight curfew. With the exceptions of our one free period a day, the few free hours we got every other night, and the long Sunday mornings when we could do as we pleased, we were supposed to be watching the campers.
Although the cafeteria was locked at night, if Sheena and I were absent from our dorm rooms, untold disasters could have transpired: unsupervised late night skinny-dipping in the swimming pool, a dash to the gas station convenience store for sugary snacks with unspeakable shelf lives, a date behind the gym for unauthorized, perilous sex. We were told to be on guard.
And so I had to sneak out.
I knew it wasn’t right. But lots of things at Camp Carolina weren’t right. For example, I taught water aerobics, even though I wasn’t a lifeguard, had never done water aerobics, and knew nothing about CPR. It wasn’t right that the personal trainer, the nurse, and the nutritionist weren’t certified in their fields. It wasn’t right that Lewis played therapist and wrote the menus, ignoring Mia’s advice.
“Where the hell is the fiber?” she often complained to me. “The salad bar, fine. But that’s not enough. The kids just pick at their salads anyway. And what about protein? There’s all this sugar-free crap, white-flour tortillas . . . these kids are learning some ugly habits. What the hell did he make me the nutritionist for? A once-a-week nutrition lesson? That isn’t anything,” she said. “That isn’t enough.”
Sure, the kids were losing weight, but that was simple math: For the first time in their lives, they were expending more calories than they were consuming. But what about nutrients and vitamins? Even the vegetables in the salad bar looked old and bleached and sad.
What about roping in the parents, who hid their own fat in fat-people fabrics and said “Taste this, taste that,” and asked “Is it good?” and “Does it need more sugar?” while smoothing the hair back from their children’s foreheads.
Why should I have taken my job seriously? Camp Carolina was not a serious place.
Was I rationalizing? Yes. I was an expert at dispelling my psychological discomfort.
Each night, I waited until the kids were in bed, and then ran, under the Light Bright board of North Carolina sky, stars puncturing black, to Bennett’s apartment. Each time I touched his door and found it unlocked, I wanted to fall to my knees in gratitude.
Within days, a whole year vanished (although “vanished” might be misleading; it was more like a nasty stain on the rug was now covered by a giant couch). Where had I been since my father’s death, while my body grew softer and wider and pastier? Where had I been while my leg hair grew long and the hair on my head grew a permanent indent from the elastic that secured my bun?
Where had Mikey been? How could Mikey have watched as I ate and cried, as I moved away from myself as if from a foul odor?
Here is what he should have said: “You’ve let yourself go.”
No, I know, he wasn’t allowed. The feminists would have lined up in a row and barked at him like a Red Rover chain. “Send Mikey right over!” they would have cackled, their tight fists awaiting his gut. But couldn’t he at least have shaken my shoulders and shouted, “We’ve hardly had sex in months”? Sex had become tangential to me—skin-to-skin contact, perfunctory orgasms. It seemed like a game for hyperactive children, not a pastime for thinking adults.
But now, with Bennett, I remembered—how beautiful it was, how vital it was, to keep in touch with the flesh.
By the fourth week of camp, I was barely eating. My heartbeat was a constant vibration, my mouth as dry as a gravel pit. At mealtime, I would have preferred to scream than to eat—to jump up on top of the picnic table, beat my chest, and scream.
Nurse told me, “You can’t just stop eating. You have to set an example. You have to eat and take healthy shits.”
“I what?”
“Doll baby, you know me. Always plain talkin’.” She swatted my shoulder with the back of her hand. “People are so squeamish. But there’s nothing more beautiful on God’s emerald earth than the functions of the body.”
“I just haven’t been feeling well,” I said, but that was a lie! A lie! A lie! I was glowing and quaking with life.
“You’re losing too much,” she said, and I almost laughed. Was I supposed to believe that Nurse was some expert on loss? Besides, what did I care what Nurse thought? Bennett loved my shrinking body. He encircled my waist with his fingers and said, “Look at you, thin as a pole.”
I spent my free periods doing important things: folding Crest Whitestrips over my teeth, rubbing self-tanner into my breasts, trying on my jeans that were now too big, rolling the waistband down to admire the jut of my hipbones. I shaved my legs daily with scented hair conditioner. Now and then I drove to the mall in Melrose and bought smaller bras from the Victoria’s Secret clearance bin, or size zero denim miniskirts from stores with pubescent names like Rave. I pored over my campers’ discarded magazines, magazines I hadn’t read since high school. The August issue of
Cosmo
had a special insert: “100 New Sex Positions.”
Angry Butterfly.
London Bridge.
The Dictator.
Reverse Tornado.
I carefully tore the pages out and slid them into my pillowcase.
At night, Bennett touched my ribs, kissed my wrists, ran his tongue from my ankle up the inside of my leg. He liked to tell me in his southern drawl, “You are the most gorgeous creature I’ve ever seen.”
And I was! I was the most gorgeous creature
I’d
ever seen! I would stand in front of my full-length mirror, comb my hair until it twinkled, and think,
You are so lucky to be gorgeous.
These were, to be clear, exceptional delusions, and likely the product of sleep deprivation. In Bennett’s bed, the sleeping I did was more like napping—active, athletic sleep that followed sex for which we could have won medals.
When I did sleep, I dreamt of eating—dipping a long spoon into an ice cream sundae, pouring syrup on a stack of waffles. I dreamt of the nearly forgotten sensation of filling my stomach to bursting. On waking, I would exhale long spools of relief, touching my stomach and finding it flat. Then I would roll over onto Bennett’s sleeping body and whisper, “Once more before I go.”
How had I forgotten the sheer ecstasy of fucking? All those years with Mikey, how had I survived without this bodies-only, mind-blowing fucking?
Bennett’s body fat was 8 percent. “Unpinchable,” he said of his skin. He pinched his stomach to prove it, a bit of skin the size of an eyelid. I would straddle him, kneeling, holding the handles of his ears. Or I would lean all the way back, my spine arched, my hair spreading over his feet. Or I would lie supine as he knelt above me, his legs as sturdy as Corinthian columns, my head hanging off the edge of the bed, a heel on each of his shoulders.
“Do they teach you this stuff up north?” Bennett asked.
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Where did you learn to fuck like this?”
“
Cosmo
.”
And though during the day I was cheering for my campers if they ran a quarter mile, if they lost two pounds, if they fit into shorts that were size sixteen, at night, with Bennett, the fat disappeared, the fake injuries and tears and sad volleyball games disappeared. Nothing was wrong! Life was flawless! Nothing could ever harm us or our beautiful, thin, lean bodies.
Holy
God
, we were in good shape!
Every morning, I popped out of bed at five
A.M.
, jogged back to my dorm while the world was unconscious, changed into workout clothes that hung loose on my bones, and ran six laps around the loop. And then I would shower and admire my figure, how it seemed to have shrunk in my sleep.
And then I woke up the girls.
“What is wrong with you?” Harriet grumbled one morning while I did jumping jacks in the hallway.
“Nothing!” I cheered.
“How can you possibly have energy?”
I stopped jumping and thought about it. “I wake up with electricity coursing through my veins.”
Yes, my veins were electric cords. Live wires. I couldn’t exercise enough. It didn’t matter that we exercised all day. My body kept shrieking, “Work me! Work me!”
I started running during my daily free period. Sometimes Bennett ran with me, usually backward. “What do you think this is?” he would yell. “A stroll around a pond? Faster, girl! Dig, dig, dig!” I would run until I thought I’d throw up. But what could I have thrown up? Sometimes I dry-heaved into the bushes and Bennett rubbed my back. Then I would stand and stagger, dizzy and grinning.
“I can’t wait to fuck you later,” Bennett would whisper, slapping my ass like a coach.
Even when we weren’t together, I could have pointed to him at any second—his face tucked into sunglasses, his hair coarse and sun-kissed and cut close to his head. I never let him too far out of my sight.
Mia and I spent most rest hours in the gym feasting on stomach crunches, cherry pickers, push-ups, and isolations. I would lie on my back on the dusty gym floor while she stood behind me, her feet at my head. Holding her ankles for support, I would tighten my stomach to lift my legs. Once my feet reached her, she would push them down. I would lift them again and she would push them back down. Lift, push, lift, push. How I grunted with glee and exertion.
O Sisyphus! They were wrong about you! Your fate was an homage to the body!
