Authors: Diana Spechler
Skinny (15 page)
Bennett yawned. “It’s
all
good, Angeline. Stop worrying about nothing all the time.”
By the fourth weigh-in, Eden had lost sixteen pounds. Harriet had lost thirty-two. Pudge, who had deserted his wheelchair, evolving on fast-forward into a bipedal human, had lost thirty-six. I had lost seventeen. Every week, every single person at camp had lost at least one pound. Until now. Whitney had gained back two. Miss had gained back three.
“Someone must have smuggled candy in,” Lewis said when he pulled me aside at Sunday brunch. “Have you been monitoring your campers?”
“Monitoring them?”
“How closely have you been watching?”
“I watch them!” I said, glancing away from Lewis, toward Bennett at the table on the stage—he was stretching his arm, pulling it across his chest. I glanced toward my group’s table where Spider was singing a Japanese song, her arm slung around Harriet’s neck. Harriet sat as straight and still as a stake. “But I can’t catch everything. Maybe someone sent a care package?”
“We open every package.”
“Maybe a parent cut the head off a teddy bear, stuffed candy inside, and sewed the head back on.”
“This is a nightmare,” Lewis said. “I can’t have campers gaining weight. Staying the same from one week to the next, okay. People plateau. It happens. But gaining? What a mess. If they tell their parents . . .” He pulled his glasses off by one stem and massaged his forehead with the pads of his fingers.
“What?” I said, my heart speeding up. “What would happen if they told their parents?”
I knew the answer. The parents would enter by force, severing the summer with a guillotine blade, rescuing their children from the weight-loss camp that served candy and had no lifeguard and lacked a certified therapist.
“I go to great lengths to help these children,” Lewis said, “and look how they repay me.”
Lewis looked fatter every day, his hips expanding as if invisible forces were pulling them in either direction. Whenever I caught sight of his tray during mealtime, it was filled not with what everyone else was eating, but with four or five plastic cups of sugar-free Jell-O. No way he was subsisting on sugar-free Jell-O alone and gaining as much weight as I was sure he was gaining. I had difficulty looking at him for more than a few seconds at a time. He seemed so foolishly proud of his body, as if it were a foreign language of which he feigned knowledge. I thought of my three-year-old cousin turning pages of her books, pretending to read, making up her own stories, in which she starred as a beautiful princess.
Lewis walked up to the stage, clinked a spoon against a water glass as if to toast a bride and groom, waited for silence (which fell only after he hollered “Listen up!” at least six times, while continuously rapping the glass), and then yelled, “If anyone tries to give you food that’s not part of my program, that person is not your friend!” He paced the stage, wagging his finger. “That person is trying to poison you! That person is your enemy.”
Someone giggled.
Lewis stopped pacing and faced his audience, his hands on his hips. “It’s not
funny
!” he shouted so hard, his body shouted with him, bending briefly at the middle.
And then he told a story about a pudding-eating contest he had won as a teenager. His manner relaxed as he reminisced—the self-satisfied tone of a man recounting the loss of his virginity—but toward the end, it seemed to occur to him that the story had no point, so he shifted gears and made it a parable, the moral of which was “Eating is probably not your only talent.”
The campers sat quietly, blinking.
“You have got to surrender to my program!” he said, shaking his fist in the air like a revolutionary. “You might think you can eat one onion ring, or one York Peppermint Patty. But you can’t! Food outside my program can lead to a binge. And you never know if it’s going to be a one-hour binge or a sixty-day binge, a two-pound binge or a forty-pound binge.”
“What’s a forty-pound binge?” someone asked.
“What’s his program?” someone else whispered.
Lewis looked around as if he’d been woken from a dream. Then he said, “If anyone is giving you poisonous food, you’d better tell me. I’ll send that person home so fast, he’ll . . . he’ll . . . his
head
will spin.” He pointed to his head. “And you won’t get in trouble. But if you don’t tell me, and I find out you ate poisonous food, you
will
go home. I’m not afraid to send anyone home! I don’t care if I’m at this camp all by myself!”
When he finished, he sat down to his Jell-O, shaking open a white paper napkin, making a bib of it over his T-shirt. It took a few seconds for the campers to cautiously resume their meals and conversations.
“Poisonous food?” Miss finally said, and she and Whitney laughed so hard, they had to lean together and brace each other from falling off the bench.
I looked at Eden, who was wearing a very new-looking baseball cap sideways, her black hair falling over the white sleeves of her T-shirt, and watching Whitney with a face that looked ready to eat contraband food, if only Whitney would invite her.
“Gray?”
I turned.
Spider was clutching her stomach, her tray pushed back, her face the white of Twinkie filling. “Talk about poisonous food!” she said. “I must have eaten . . .” She burped robustly, and then swung her legs over the bench and stood. She started toward the door. “I ate something . . . I might need to go to the—” Then, while we watched, before anyone could spring to action, Spider dropped to the floor, yanked her EpiPen necklace off her neck, and jabbed the needle into her own thigh.
The room emitted a collective gasp. Spider closed her eyes and sighed like a junkie, and then pulled the syringe out and let it clatter to the floor. Before anyone could reach her, she started gagging like a sick cat, covered her mouth with her palms, and vomited through the cracks of her fingers.
“She’s just gotta puke it up,” Nurse said, as we stood together outside the closed bathroom door in her “office,” a large room on the first floor of the girls’ dorm, while Spider let loose loud, belching, splashing heaves. “See? That was a good one. She’s getting it out.” Nurse plucked at the front of her T-shirt, rearranging it over her belly.
“Do you have more of that stuff?” I asked Nurse. “Whatever’s in the EpiPen?”
Nurse shook her head. “Truth be told, I don’t have much of anything.”
“So what should we do if she doesn’t stop throwing up?”
“Let’s not worry about that just yet.”
“What could she have eaten?”
Nurse turned up her palms. “There’s no doctor back in the kitchen. It’s just those ladies who snap their gum and say ugly things about everyone. Something needs to be done about that. I’m going to make sure something gets done about that.” She dropped onto the couch, the cushion rising on either side of her like a victory V, but when she leaned her head back, her stringy bangs parted, revealing tired lines on her white forehead. “They call Spider PITA.”
“Why?”
“Stands for ‘pain in the ass.’ I told Lewis . . . this is a kid with serious allergies. I told him someone should be monitoring her food. Someone who really understands. Some kind of food allergy expert.”
“What about you?”
Nurse closed her eyes and pushed her fingers through her thin silver hair. “But you can’t tell Lewis anything.”
“Spider’s parents could sue.”
“That’s right,” Nurse said. “Better believe
I
would.”
My stomach swam at the thought of all the failures, of camp being whisked away like a dirty dish from a table.
“But then what?” I asked.
“Then Lewis will be in a heap of shit, that’s what.”
“But where would we all go?”
Nurse opened her eyes and gave me a tired smile. “Home?”
I looked at the cold, blank face of the bathroom door, the sharp angles of it in its frame.
“That wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, would it?” Nurse said.
Spider gagged violently, and I clutched my stomach.
When I heard a knock behind me, I knew without turning that it was Bennett. I could always feel Bennett.
“Anyone home?” He wedged into the office. “She okay?”
“She will be,” Nurse said.
I could smell him—his summertime cologne and the soap we’d slid over each other’s skin that morning. Because it was Lazy Sunday, I hadn’t bothered racing back to my dorm at dawn; instead, we’d lounged in bed, then ran twelve laps around the loop together, and then, against his wall before moving to the shower, engaged in sweaty, primal sex reminiscent of swinging from vines.
I was still half-hiding the fact of us, but the other half of me wanted the world to do back handsprings, have a light show, and close off the streets for our lust parade.
When I stepped a little closer to him so the backs of our hands could brush together, unnoticed, the bathroom door opened a crack.
“Nurse?” Spider’s voice rose from the floor where she must have been sitting. She sounded like she was holding a tennis ball between her teeth.
“I’m right here, baby girl.”
Spider let out a choking cough. “My tongue,” she said. “It’s filling up my mouth.”
In the backseat of Bennett’s car, I held the lump of Spider’s hand, watching the pink puffs of her eyelids, telling her stories I’d learned from my father, tales of Eastern European Jews in tall black hats, gathering cobblestones from the streambeds to pave the streets, meeting ghosts who taught them lessons.
This was the day Lewis fired the kitchen ladies.
This was the first casualty.
This was the day I remembered the vending-machine smell of the ER waiting room, remembered how I had once, just over a year before, in a different ER waiting room, waited for the truth I already knew to become official; how I’d watched the plastic-guarded face of the clock and thought how different a clock looked, how different a chair felt, how differently my breath moved in and out of my lungs, now that my father was gone.
Sitting beside Bennett, I watched a nearby family pray, clutching one another’s hands.
“Why are you crying, Angeline?”
“I’m not.”
Mikey would have stopped asking and gripped my hand more tightly, but Bennett slid out of his seat and knelt on the floor, held my knees, and said, “You’re sad.”
I wiped beneath my eyes with the heels of my hands. I thought,
Maybe he’s falling in love with me.
“I can’t stand to see a pretty girl cry,” he said. He sounded confident like a congressman. I became glaringly aware of his hands on my body, the fat on my legs just past his fingertips. “Spider will be fine,” Bennett said.
“Of course she will. Spider thinks she’s a Japanese superhero.”
“Are you missing your dad?”
“I don’t want my dad here. My dad would not like you touching my legs.” I looked away from Bennett, toward two drunk-looking teenagers slumped in chairs, hats pulled low over their faces. “I miss you,” I said, studying the teenagers. They wore matching shoes that looked made for basketball, the laces dirty and undone.
“That so?”
“I do,” I said.
“I’m right here,” Bennett said, but he drew away from me.
I wanted to move my knees back into the cups of his palms, but I did not want to be the girl I’d been, who would drench Mikey’s chest hair in tears, responding with sobs when he asked, again and again, “What’s wrong?” and then finally replying, “I don’t know. I just feel sad,” instead of saying, “I don’t think I can love you anymore, after all that’s happened.” I didn’t want to be the girl who hid the truth in her stomach, pressing it down to keep it from swimming up to her heart.
Bennett rose and sat beside me. I lifted my thighs slightly to slim them, listening to the prayers of a whole family of people who believed the same things.
“What if . . .” I said.
“Enough of that,” Bennett said. “Let’s just wait and see.”
Spider’s father must have gotten dressed in a hurry because the buttons on his short-sleeved shirt were askew, creating a bunching of the plaid, a gaping hole at his chest that showcased a storm of coarse black hair. Apparently, he and his wife lived nearby; they’d arrived so quickly, like paramedics.
“What the hell is this?” he shouted. “I leave my child in your hands for four weeks! Just
four weeks
. A camp full of nutrition experts.” He made quotation marks with his fingers to show what he thought of us being nutrition experts.
The nearby praying people looked up. They had stopped praying aloud, but remained huddled together, as if God might appear inside their circle and dance a solo.
“Russ,” Spider’s mother hissed, yanking her husband’s elbow. She was a few steps behind him, sweating through the armpits of her appliqué T-shirt. The appliqué spelled
STOWE
. Beside the letters, a solitary snowflake.
Bennett rose and moved toward Russ. “Spider’s going to be fine,” he said. “We got her here quickly.”
Russ’s belly was a watermelon, suspended inside his shirt. He was shorter than Bennett, not much taller than I, and could have been described, kindly, as stocky. Now his eyes narrowed and his fists curled. He expanded like a peacock. Then he wound up, and with a peculiar foot shuffle and grunt, he launched his fist up toward Bennett’s face.
“Russ!” his wife shrieked, covering her eyes with her hands.
Bennett stepped back, out of the fist’s path. “Just a minute,” he said. “Just a minute now.”
“Help!” I yelled as Russ’s fist sliced through the empty air a second time.
He wound up once more, and Bennett ducked, drilled his head into Russ’s chest, and threw his arms around Russ’s torso, the side of his face pressed to the uneven buttons. He hooked his heel around the back of Russ’s leg, causing Russ’s knee to buckle. Together, they tumbled to the cold floor.
“Are you going to calm down now?” Bennett shouted.
I sat beside Spider’s mother, who had sunk into a chair and begun to sob soundlessly, her shoulders shaking.
“Are you calm?” Bennett asked, his voice lower this time.
Russ grunted.
I had never been so close to violence. Or if I had—in a comedy club, at Little Mermaid—the lights had been down, the men anonymous. I was surprised to see how embarrassing it was. For a second, it had almost looked loving, like two friends locked in an embrace.
“Are you okay?” I asked Spider’s mother.
“I’m okay if my daughter’s okay.”
“Spider will be fine.”
“She sure will.” She touched the inner corners of her eyes, and then fished an actual handkerchief edged in lavender embroidery from her purse. “Spider’s our little fighter.”
We watched the men. Russ, on his back, an insect pinned to a cork board, struggled and squirmed under Bennett’s knee. Finally, he gave up and lay still.
“She’s done really well at camp,” I said.
Spider’s mother blew her nose.
“She’s so upbeat,” I said.
“That’s Spider.”
“She’s funny, too.”
“Well, we sure think so.”
By now, an orderly and two waiting-room laymen, chests filled with air, had gathered around Bennett and Russ. Bennett was saying, “We’re all right. Just got a little emotional over here.” He was helping Russ to his feet, his biceps ballooning when he took Russ’s hands. Russ stood, bull-breathing through his nostrils, wiping the seat of his shorts, looking everywhere but at Bennett.
Spider’s mother lowered her voice. “Russ didn’t want to send her to camp. You know how fathers are.”
I felt something contract inside my chest. “What did he want her to do instead?”
“Stay home.” She spread her handkerchief on her lap and folded it into careful quarters. “She’s our only child, and she’s got those allergies. He likes to keep her close.”
Russ crossed the room to the receptionist. Bennett locked eyes with me and pointed to the restroom, then headed toward it.
“I don’t know what happened today,” I said. “Everyone’s been careful about her allergies. Spider most of all. She only eats her special meals.”
“Russ is going to say, ‘You see? I told you we shouldn’t have trusted them.’ ”
“Someone made a mistake. Things happen.”
She seemed not to hear me. “And I’ll have to say, ‘You know what, Russ? You were right.’ ” She blew her nose again, and then wound the handkerchief around her hand. “ ‘You were right, Russ,’ ” she said softly.
The anger that rose inside me then was unexpected, filling my stomach like lava. It was true that we weren’t trustworthy. We were a cast of charlatans. But had it been such a bad thing for Spider to get away for a summer, to taste independence? What did Russ know about what she needed? He was her father, but he wasn’t Spider.
“Maybe he’s got us wrong,” I said.
Spider’s mother examined me. “You’re not a parent, are you?”
“No.”
She tucked her handkerchief back into her purse and chuckled to herself.
“So?” I said.
“There are just things you wouldn’t understand then. I hate to tell you.”
“My father used to say that to me. Parents love that line. ‘You have no idea what it’s like for us.’ Do I have such a limited imagination that I couldn’t possibly conceive of your life?”
“You’ll see when you’re a parent.”
“Maybe. But in the meantime, I don’t walk around telling everyone, ‘You have no idea what it’s like to be me.’ ” I looked at Spider’s mother, whose eyes were on Russ, and I felt my face get warm. “Sorry.” I touched her arm. “You hit a nerve,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”
Spider’s mother surprised me then. She took my hand and squeezed it. “I have no idea what it’s like to be you, honey.” She looked like Spider when she smiled. “And I wouldn’t dream of pretending to.”
Russ approached us then, grabbed his wife’s hand and pulled her out of the chair. “Come on,” he said, towing her away.
She followed her husband. She didn’t look back.
I watched them speak with the receptionist, Russ holding his arms away from his body as if his muscles were so big they required that space.
When Bennett returned, he glanced at Spider’s parents, lifting his cap off to wipe his forehead with his arm.
“Are you okay?” I asked, standing.
“Sure. Are you?”
“I think I’m in shock.”
But I wasn’t in shock. In shock, I had zeroed in on trivial details: the color of the sky as the sun melted into it, the sound of a car that wouldn’t start, a strand of hair stuck to my lip. In this moment, I saw the important things: the muscles in Bennett’s forearms, the bulge of his Adam’s apple. I went to him, lined the tips of my toes up with his.
“Let’s get out of here,” Bennett said. “Everyone’s looking.”
I touched his chest. His heart ticked rapidly. It was trite, really, feeling aroused by a man who had won a fight. But to me, this animal attraction felt novel. At one time, I’d been aroused by Mikey clutching his microphone, quieting a heckler, dominating an audience with his clever crowd work, with his swaggering ripostes.
How exhausting it was to love like that, to receive love from a man like that. How exhausting it was to be loved with a man’s whole brain, to be loved despite gaining fifteen pounds, to be loved by a man who didn’t notice that his girlfriend had gained fifteen pounds.
I leaned my face on Bennett’s chest. In his arms, behind my closed eyelids, I saw Camp Carolina, the green of the grass and the trees, the sparkling turquoise blue of the swimming pool; I could almost feel the cool breeze from my window fan. I told Bennett, “Let’s go home.”
