Authors: Diana Spechler
Skinny (16 page)
Bennett drove us back to camp in his banged-up Explorer, his fingers crawling up the hem of my shorts, the Eagles on the radio, our windows down so my ponytail blew free like a flag in the wind.
When we exited the highway onto the road that snaked through pastures, past a solitary church that looked closed for business, I said, “Pull over.” I pressed my thumb to the buckle of my seat belt and the strap zipped away.
He parked in the shade of the woods. The sound of wind still screamed in my ears, even as the heat of stillness seeped in. I pulled off my shorts, climbed onto Bennett, and unbound him from his seat belt. He slipped his arms around my neck, forked his fingers up the back of my scalp, and kissed my bottom lip, my top lip, each of my earlobes, fitting my neck into his mouth. My body felt full of him—my organs, my skin, my muscles, my stomach. I couldn’t remember anything ever making me feel so full.
• • •
When we pulled into the campus, the kids were lounging on the cafeteria steps eating sugar-free Popsicles. Seeing them, I exhaled for what felt like the first time that day.
Everyone wanted to know about Spider. Now that she was absent, they loved her. They wanted to protect her. Their eyebrows came together like roofs at the centers of their foreheads. The people outside of camp, the hungry, thoughtless masses who dined in shopping mall food courts, who ate popcorn from large tubs in movie theaters, were not allowed to take her from us. Spider had to be returned.
“She’ll be fine,” Bennett said. “Probably back tonight.”
Whitney and Miss were huddled around Sheena, each weaving an orange braid like pilot fish grooming a shark. Eden, who would have otherwise been angling for a third of Sheena’s hair, was standing with Alex, the weird kid with glue-white skin, who wore tinted glasses and slip-on sneakers over tube socks, and whose pale calves were as thick as his thighs. I had seen him staring at Eden all summer and once offer her one of his iPod buds so they could listen to a song together.
Alex had a secret, too. Everyone knew it because he told everyone, prefacing it each time with, “This is a secret. You’re the only person I’m telling”: His high school classmates had built a website, the home page of which said,
Alex Hartson Should Kill Himself
in Times New Roman 48. They e-mailed him the link. Once he perused the site, clicking on tabs labeled
How to Effectively Cut One’s Wrist
and
Top Ten Reasons Why We Hate Alex Hartson
, he swallowed every pill in his house: Tums, Tylenol, vitamin C, capsules that curtailed his stepfather’s prostate. Half an hour later, he walked downstairs to the kitchen, told his mother the story, and vomited on the linoleum.
Now, while he spent the summer at camp, Alex’s mother and stepfather were filling boxes, taping them closed, donating things they wished to forget to the Salvation Army, and heading to California, in pursuit of scraps of gold. “In California,” his mother e-mailed to tell him, “you’ll be the most popular boy in school.”
Eden was wearing Alex’s shoes—walking across the cafeteria steps in his black-and-white-checkered slip-on sneakers. “They’re so big!” she said.
This was the first time I’d seen Alex smile. He sat in colossal white socks, his lips turning red from his Popsicle. “They fit me fine,” he said, and his face blushed the color of pink carnations, of sunsets in Santorini, of valentines.
“I guess I’m just small,” Eden said, and her smile stretched until her eyes vanished into her cheeks.
At dinnertime, Lewis ushered Sheena and me outside.
“Spider is not coming back to camp,” he said.
“Is she okay?” I asked.
He looked at me with eyes like barbs. “Of course she’s okay.” He pinched the wire stems of his glasses. “She was always okay. Her parents probably gave her those allergies. Put them in her head. Parents will do that. I know those types of parents. I’ve been working at camps since the eighties. Those types of parents . . . they’re not doing their kids any favors feeding them from silver spoons. Spider’s parents would throw a sheet over her and keep her in a closet all her life if they could. Want to know how I raise my kids? I tell them, ‘You’re fine.’ I tell them, ‘It’s just a scratch.’ Right? ‘Buck up.’ ”
“And who names a kid Spider?” Sheena said.
“Exactly my point,” Lewis said, even though it wasn’t.
“It’s a nickname,” I said. “Spiders don’t die of natural causes. They can live forever if they’re kept safe. In China, there are three-thousand-year-old spiders. Preserved. She’s been in the hospital twenty-five times. She’s tough. Like a spider.”
Sheena and Lewis drew closer to each other.
“Her real name is Emily,” I said.
“Emily, Spider, whatever. That girl is high-maintenance,” Sheena said.
I laughed. “Spider? High-maintenance? You give her a Japanese comic book and she’s happy for hours.”
“She’s always scratching all over everyone,” Sheena said. She shuddered. “Skin flakes. Everywhere.”
Lewis said, “Kids throw up sometimes. It’s nothing to run to the judge about.”
“Sorry,” I said, “but if that was my kid, I’d be pissed off, too. You promised to serve her food she could eat. At every meal. For the whole summer. You knew she had allergies.”
“Things happen,” Lewis said, his voice climbing. “You can plan for everything, and still things go wrong.”
“You can’t cater to someone every second of the day,” Sheena said.
“But you should,” I said. “If it’s a matter of life or death. And if her parents are paying you to cater to her food allergies. And if you promised that you
would
cater to her food allergies.” It was not lost on me that I was contradicting myself, repeating Spider’s parents’ argument, blaming Lewis for what had likely been an honest mistake. A vein did push-ups in Lewis’s forehead. But I couldn’t stop: “What if you lose the camp?”
“I guess you’ll be happy to know that her parents are suing me, Gray.”
I felt a stabbing in my gut. “When?”
“I could lose everything.”
“Will they wait until the end of the summer?” I pulled my collar away from my neck and fanned my skin.
“This is my livelihood. My wife and kids are counting on me. And what do I get? I get nothing from the people I help. I was helping Spider. Spider had low self-esteem when she got here. She wouldn’t even uncross her arms from her chest. Now she’s down sixteen pounds and she walks around in a bikini—that anime bikini.”
“That is one god-awful bikini,” Sheena said.
“Then she gets a little sick one day and suddenly I’m the bad guy? I’m the villain?” Lewis scratched the top of his head. “I always say that this is not a weight-loss camp. Don’t I always say that?”
“I’ve never heard you say that,” I said.
“It’s a self-esteem-building camp. Every kid will leave here with high self-esteem. Happy and changed. They’ll be new kids because of me.” He released a deep sigh that withered him, and looked toward the girls’ dorm, where the maintenance man, a scrawny guy in jeans and no shirt, was riding his tractor over the grass.
“Yee-haw!” the maintenance man cried, waving a bandanna over his head like a lasso.
“It’s the givers who always get taken advantage of,” Lewis said. “It’s so hard to be a giver.” His shoulders were slumped as if he were carrying a sack of presents. He reached between his legs and heaved his balls from one side to the other. “I’ve been one all my life.”
This was Bennett: Sometimes he disappeared. When Mikey disappeared, he wanted company. He wanted to lie beside me in bed, a pillow covering his eyes. He wanted to turn off his phone and hold my leg to make sure I stayed put. From under his pillow blindfold, he would mutter, “I hate comedians,” or, “I must be some kind of masochist, telling jokes on all these stages.”
Whenever Bennett disappeared—missing a lunch, or cals, or an evening activity—the air he left behind pulsed with his absence. Curtains fluttered in open windows. Vases fell from sills and shattered. Once, I found one of his whistles, strung onto a Panthers shoelace, abandoned on the soccer field. I knelt beside it, and then stuffed it into my pocket, and when I stood, I glanced around furtively before lowering my sunglasses over my eyes.
Whenever Bennett disappeared, I believed I would never see him again. My skin would feel feverish, and I would shiver, wishing for our bodies to come together, facing one direction, curved into matching shapes. I would sneak to his apartment and touch the white vinyl siding. I would put my fingertips on his dark window. I would twist the doorknob and find it locked.
When I saw him next, I would tell him, “Just warn me. Please. Just tell me you’re going to sleep through fifth period. Tell me you’re running to Walmart instead of coming to evening activity.”
“Angeline,” he would say, tapping his knuckle against my forehead. “What goes on in that imagination of yours? Where would I go? Where could I possibly go?” He would crook an arm around my neck and pull me into his chest, and I would breathe in his clean T-shirt smell and feel Camille’s name pumping blood by my ear.
All of this was new to me. For the past year, living with Mikey had meant waiting, constantly, for him to leave, to give me a few hours of privacy. “Space,” I’d called it. “I need my space.” By which I’d meant,
Let me eat in peace.
But now I remembered food like a former lover whose cruelty had excited, then alienated me—remembered not the way it knelt repentantly at my feet, kissing the caps of my knees, but the time it grabbed my arm in anger, the night it kicked the wall so hard, our neighbor kicked it back. Whenever I dreamt of returning to it, I woke to a sigh of relief.
So when I couldn’t locate Bennett, my legs grew weak, my stomach rumbled, my head felt loose on its axis.
And then he disappeared for three days.
Partway through the first day, Lewis told me that Bennett was sick.
“With what?”
“Maybe he’s sex-starved!” he stage-whispered, jabbing an elbow into my rib cage.
“What are you talking about?”
“You think I don’t know everything? This is my camp. I know everything. Look, I’m glad you two are having healthy, aerobic sex. Maybe he just needs more of it.”
“Um.”
“I used to do that instead of exercise,” he said. “You know, back before I was married.”
“Is he really sick? Stuck in bed?”
“Down for the count.”
“He didn’t warn me,” I said, and I turned away from Lewis, remembering a time, two years earlier, when I ate bad tuna and couldn’t stop vomiting. Too sick to reach the bathroom, I lay writhing in bed, and Mikey brought me the biggest pot we owned, the one we’d used a few times to cook excessive amounts of chili. I threw up over and over, and Mikey stroked my hair, emptying the pot when it needed emptying.
Mikey’s eyes were big and brown like a deer from a cartoon. He rarely touched people, but when he did, it was because he was feeling their feelings, making contact to share their pain—his fingers lightly cupping an elbow or steadying the space between two shoulder blades.
Mikey would never disappear from me. Maybe Bennett was a bad person. That leap of logic soothed me the way it did the wolf in that fable—the grapes were not out of reach, but sour. I could convince myself of this! Maybe Camille had left Bennett because he was bad. Poor Camille! Perhaps she’d had to escape him.
How I wished to believe this invented scenario, to disregard these truths of human nature—that good people didn’t leave bad people, that bad people were only bad when spoiled by love, and that good people were only good while they loved disproportionately.
Then, in the next relationship, the bad person became the good person, touching the bone of his new lover’s cheek, mesmerized by the curve of it. And she, having just been left by a man who had gambled her savings and worn a scuffed leather jacket, relished her newfound power, punctuated by flashes of guilt (“You’re such a good person,” she would say wistfully, watching his eyes go foggy with love). Around and around it went. Mikey loved me and I’d replaced him with Bennett, who loved Camille, who probably loved some guy who still loved someone else. After loving my father, Azalea must have treated the next man like a paper napkin—making a mess of him, crumpling him up, tossing him away.
During the three-day illness, the outgoing message on Bennett’s voice mail sound-tracked my mounting panic.
Hi, you’ve reached . . . Hi, you’ve reached . . . Hi, you’ve reached . . . Hi, you’ve . . .
By day three, I couldn’t move from my bed. I was weak, as if I were starving. I wondered if I’d caught Bennett’s illness. I wanted Bennett’s illness. I wanted to breathe him in, to make us feel all the same things. It became a matter of survival: I had to get to Bennett.
I got out of bed and hobbled to the cafeteria. I took Bennett’s place leading stretches on the steps, looking down at the cluster of campers who wore clothes that were now too big for them, the girls with sleepy ponytails on the tops of their heads, the boys shrunken in huge sneakers. They were fidgety children and slouching teenagers.
“Reach your arms for the sky,” I told them, my voice worn out like a stretch of bad road.
They reached, T-shirts rising to expose stomachs, wrists rotating over their heads. I thought of them in their school cafeterias, fatter than everyone, sitting alone, eating baked potatoes from tinfoil. Something popped inside my chest. I watched the sea of hopeful hands, reaching, grasping, empty.
• • •
Breakfast was silver-dollar pancakes, two per person, with sugar-free syrup. I cut a bite from my pancake, imagined how dry it would feel in my mouth, how it would expand like foam rubber as I chewed. I left it on my plate, my fork stabbed through it.
And then, it was this easy: I rose from my seat, walked to the door, left the cafeteria, and crossed the campus to the boys’ dorm. No one called out to me or followed, as if I had dieted down to invisible.
Because no one was near, I didn’t mind banging on Bennett’s door as hard as I could. The weakness I’d felt upon waking vanished. I used both fists, pummeling that door like a punching bag. I could feel the blood pumping through my arms, the outer edges of my hands bruising, but the ache only made me bang harder.
And then the door opened and Bennett caught my elbows. He was wearing green mesh shorts and no shirt, squinting in the sunlight. “What in . . . Angeline. What are you doing?”
“Hi,” I said. My hands tingled, the sides of them flecked with white paint chips. I put my arms around Bennett’s neck and pressed into his body.
He held my waist in his hands, only partway joining the hug. I pulled him closer. He was warm and solid, a body I wished would absorb me.
“What’s going on?”
“You disappeared,” I told his neck.
“I’ve been sick.”
“You could have called.”
“Angeline . . .”
His thumbs pressed my stomach, pushing me away. I hugged harder, remembering how it felt to yank a Barbie doll’s arm through a tiny sleeve, how my father had told me, “Don’t force it. It will break if you force it.”
“Can I come in?”
“Well. Okay.”
I followed him into his apartment. It smelled stuffy like sickness. The shades were drawn. Three fans were going, blowing Bennett like helicopter propellers. He lay back on his bed, inside the windstorm, and covered his eyes with the top sheet. “Everyone at breakfast?”
“Yeah.” I sat on the foot of his bed, my muscles tight, my mouth dry. “Bennett?”
“Mm?”
“Are you really sick?”
Bennett pulled the sheet off his face and looked at me. “I just needed a break,” he said. “You ever get that feeling? Like you just want a break?”
“Never.”
“No?”
“I’m kidding. Sure, I’ve had that feeling.”
“It’s a normal thing. Needing a break.”
No
, I thought.
No, I wouldn’t need a break from you, Bennett, any more than I would need time off from breathing.
“A break from me?” I asked.
“Not from you. Not exactly.”
Lying beside a man who inexactly needed a break from me, I rested my hands on my stomach, willing it flat, willing it never to grow, never to change.
Stay down
, I thought. I closed my eyes. I would not touch him. I would wait for him to fill the space between us.
He didn’t move. For several minutes, he didn’t move.
I rolled over to lie on top of him.
