Skinny (21 page)
Authors: Diana Spechler
Now that Kimmy—Judas, Brutus, Benedict Arnold—was on the outs with Whitney and Miss, she spent her time with the other thirteen-year-olds in the intermediate group. The wide-eyed anxiety left her face. She sucked her thumb with less urgency. Kimmy didn’t care who was popular. She never had. That was what had made her popular in the first place. Kimmy just liked to be comfortable. If she’d grown up when I had, she would have favored beanbags and Laura Ashley bedroom sets. I expected that one day she would be a mother who wore the best, most expensive sweat suits and sipped hot tea from a meticulously chipped mug. With Sheena gone, Kimmy was comfortable. Ex-communicated and comfortable.
And so the meek inherited the earth: For the first time in her life, Eden was “in.” It started with the tears she shed upon Sheena’s departure. That night, she, Whitney, and Miss locked themselves in Miss’s room for hours. At Lights Out, when they finally emerged, Eden’s initiation was sealed. Her skin glowed. Her fingernails were painted red.
I slept in my own bed that night. Staring at the moonlight through the unfamiliar slits of my blinds, I called Bennett from my cell phone. “You’re so close. I can’t believe how close you are and I can’t touch you.”
“Blame Sheena.”
“I do,” I said.
“Why’d she pick McDonald’s? McDonald’s hasn’t had a good special all summer.”
I hugged my pillow to my body. “What the hell happened today?”
“Well, a nineteen-year-old girl kicked Lewis’s ass.”
I giggled. “But why did she call him a child molester?”
“I was wondering the same thing,” Bennett said. “I was going to ask you.”
Whitney, Eden, and Miss began writing WEM on the walls and on their clothing. They walked in an impenetrable, unsmiling line, elbows linked, heads up, potent in movie star sunglasses. They told everyone, “You can’t touch WEM.”
Eden promptly withdrew from me. Gone were the days when she would sulk on my bed, my window fan blowing her hair across her face. Around Whitney and Miss, she was cautious, but elated. I could practically see the static of excitement crackling on her skin. She stopped talking like she was black, but started trying to do her hair like Miss’s, even though Miss’s hair was gorgeous, thick, sparkly, and full of light, whereas Eden’s was greasy and stringy and dark. Miss wore her hair in a high side ponytail, so Eden did, too. Sometimes the three of them wore matching outfits. Sometimes they suffered synchronized injuries. They frequently disappeared into one another’s rooms and locked the door. If I walked by, I could hear their muffled laughter. Camp was quiet. Sheena’s absence felt like a fragile calm, a crystal figurine teetering, seconds from shattering on hardwood.
While the campers walked solemnly around the loop the morning after Sheena’s departure, I stayed with Lewis on the cafeteria steps.
“Can you handle your girls yourself?” he asked. He looked me up and down as if sizing me up for battle.
“Four campers? Sure. By the way, are you all right? She hit you pretty hard.”
“I didn’t even feel it. I used to wrestle in high school.”
“Right, but—”
“I was always big. But I was the athletic kid. Everyone knew not to mess with Lewis Teller.” He held his fists up in front of his face and jabbed at an imaginary enemy. “I could teach you how to fight,” he said. He shuffled on his feet like a boxer. “Everyone should know how to fight.”
“Sure,” I said. “Maybe sometime.”
Lewis stopped jabbing. He was out of breath. He set his hands on his massive hips. “Things are going to get better around here,” he said. “I’m glad Sheena’s gone. She was bringing everyone down.” He squinted at me. “How much weight have you lost?”
I plucked my sunglasses from the neck of my T-shirt and put them on. “I stopped weighing in.”
Twenty-two and three-tenths of a pound.
I weighed myself every morning before the world was awake.
I looked at Lewis’s body, from his sneakers and striped socks to his pleated gray shorts to his yellow Camp Carolina T-shirt. He looked bigger every day. Sometimes he looked bigger at dinner than he had at breakfast, as if he would eventually float into the atmosphere, farther and farther from Earth, finally becoming tiny.
“I knew when I met you that my camp would change your life. You didn’t think so. I could see you didn’t think so.”
“My eating habits are totally different,” I said. “I eat much smaller portions. I need so much less.”
“You’ll never be the same again,” Lewis said.
I thought of Chinese Buffet, the gulping, greasy indulgence of it. “I hope you’re right,” I said.
“Gray. Don’t you know me by now? Am I ever wrong?” He grabbed for my hand and twirled me, and then gracelessly dipped me. I stumbled to a lower step. He pointed down at me with an outstretched arm. “You, Gray Lachmann, are changed.”
Dear Fat People,
I see you in motorized wheelchairs, in bus seats that don’t accommodate you. I see you taking breaks when you walk, pretending to admire the scenery. Good God, I am afraid. Not for your hearts and your joints and your arteries. No, I’m afraid for myself. I know that you’re inside me—flesh flies laying your infinite eggs in my open, pus-slick wounds. Your young will hatch in my body and eat their way up through my skin.
Yes. I am being mean. So? You, of all people, should recognize my reasons for acting mean.
This was a summer of loss. We lost Sheena. We lost Spider. We lost weight. We lost our inhibitions. We lost socks when we sent the laundry out. We lost our minds when it rained too much. We lost track of time in the swimming pool. We lost our old reflections, the stretch of space we could claim on a bench, some cellulite, a roll or two, our salt cravings, our caffeine habits, our distaste for sugar-free Jell-O. And then I lost my hair.
With not even two weeks left of camp, I found that if I touched my hair—to make a ponytail, to scratch my head, to rake it back off my face—I’d wind up with a handful of it, as if it hadn’t been stitched to my scalp. I began to wonder whether, if I gave the whole mass a good tug, it would come off in my fist like a wig. I didn’t try. I didn’t tell anyone. Instead, I just ignored it. If I ignored the problem, I knew, it would take the hint and go away.
• • •
“Angeline,” Bennett said.
We were at Water Nation, land of the great, looping blue slides; of the fried dough and fat families and
E. coli
scares. My group—Whitney (who had begged, unsuccessfully, to stay behind at camp), Eden, Harriet, and Miss—had merged with Pudge and a couple of the other boys, and Brendan. Bennett and I were trailing behind them as they walked in a tight mass through the park. Brendan and Miss had their arms around each other’s waists. It was becoming a familiar image, the two of them linked like Rockettes. They had the air of a genuine couple, people who had been in love for years, who looked at each other for long stretches and had conversations with their eyes. Even when Brendan was alone now, he looked confident, his body language less awkward, his smile easier.
Bennett touched the side of my head.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“Your hair . . .”
I touched my hair. I had tied it into a messy knot.
Bennett pressed his thumb to the side of my head. “You have a bald spot. Maybe it’s just the way your hair’s done up, but . . .”
I combed my fingernails through the sides of my hair. “That better?”
“I can still see it.”
“Then stop looking.”
“You got it, Angeline. Whatever you say.” Bennett hooked his arm around my neck in a brief headlock, then let go before anyone could see.
I should have recognized an omen. I should have known that the day Bennett pointed out a flaw on my body would mark some sort of ending. But I was oblivious. Willfully so. I wasn’t fazed by the hot gray sky that looked ready to explode. Camp would end in just over a week. But I didn’t think it would ever rain.
We walked in our bathing suits, in love with our bodies. We were a parade for our bodies. We were one thousand pounds lighter than we’d been when we’d met.
“I want to go on the Death Drop,” Miss said. She hopped in the air like a thin person and took off running, Whitney just behind her, Eden in tow, toward the slide that started in the sky and dropped at a ninety-degree angle to earth.
Everyone followed. Of course we did. We had been following Miss and Whitney all summer. When we got to the base of the slide, I sat beside Bennett on a bench. Everyone else joined the line.
“I thought Harriet would for sure stay with us,” I said. “And Whitney. And Pudge.”
“How ’bout that,” Bennett said. “Whitney on a water slide.”
“Nah. She won’t go through with it. Neither will Harriet. If they even let her on.”
“You don’t give anyone enough credit.”
I leaned my head on his shoulder. “If we have kids one day,” I said, “we should take them to this water park.” I glanced at his face, surprised not to feel his muscles go tight. “Unless they’re fat. Then we’ll make them run wind sprints.”
“You won’t have fat kids,” he said after a minute.
“Me. Right.”
“What?”
“You said, ‘You won’t have fat kids’ . . . Forget it.”
“If I had my son with me all the time, no way he’d be overweight.”
“You don’t have that kind of control.”
“No? When you have kids, you’ll see, Angeline. If you keep an eye on them, they’ll have the best bodies in town. Besides their mama’s.”
“I’d feed them healthy food, but what if they’re lazy? What if they eat desserts at their friends’ houses? What if they’re the types of kids who hide candy in their drawers? What if they hate to run around? What if they love video games?”
“Then you’ll have to be the kind of mother who goes through her kids’ drawers.”
I thought about that. “You know? I think I
would
be that kind of mother. Maybe I’d be looking for candy. I would want to eat their candy.” I laughed, but it came out sounding strange and choked.
Bennett shifted in his seat and his wooden cross grazed my face.
I imagined his home. Me inside it. Children who looked like him and would never know my father. I imagined waking up beside Bennett on a Sunday morning, zipping myself into a long floral dress, twisting my hair into a low bun, and affixing to my head a wide-brimmed, avocado-green straw hat adorned with a fat white ribbon. I imagined gathering my skirt into my fist to climb into Bennett’s car, and letting him drive me to church, a brood of children in the backseat eating MoonPies and lunch meats from plastic wrappers. My mother visiting us in the winter, standing in Bennett’s living room, tiny beside a towering Christmas tree; sipping eggnog from one of Bennett’s mugs that said
WORLD’S GREATEST DAD
, watching as I moved through my home in a Christmas sweater, a Christmas vest, pleated pants, a wreath pin that lit up and flashed red and green.
To be clear, Bennett had never told me that he lived this way, never indicated to me that his life was some deranged homage to Christmas. Nor had he given me any indication that he hoped I would bear his children. And yet.
“I won’t always be in my best shape,” I said.
“You’ll always be hot.”
“One day I’ll be forty.”
“First you’ll be twenty-eight.”
“Forty. Then fifty. Then sixty. If I live to sixty. My father didn’t make it to sixty.”
“I’m in the best shape of my life at forty-one. You just have to work at it all the time. You just have to commit to never letting go of it.”
“Everyone lets go eventually.”
“Think positive.”
“One day I’ll be lumpy. One day I’ll be shriveled. One day I’ll be pregnant. One day I’ll be pregnant and craving Nutella. I’ll eat ten jars of it.”
“You wouldn’t.”
I laughed. “You don’t know me.”
“I don’t think that’s true at all.”
“I’d eat twenty jars.”
“Hogwash.”
“You know nothing about my genetic makeup.”
“Your what?”
“And you don’t seem to understand that there’s more to life than bodies.”
“Hey. Thanks a lot.”
“I feel like my body has to be perfect for you.”
“Are you picking one of your fights?”
“I’m not my body,” I said, but even as I said it, I knew that it was nonsense—meaningless jargon. Like when people talked about toxins. Or vibes. Or bad things happening in threes. What the hell did any of it mean? We
absolutely
were our bodies. To deny that was to court disaster: to wind up in labor, cluelessly pregnant; to become infected by a forgotten, moldy hamburger.
“You want to test me?” Bennett said. “Go ahead. Get fat. I’d still throw you up against the wall and have my way with you. Go eat a cheesecake.”
“Gladly.”
“And a loaf of bread.”
“With butter.”
“I’ll roll you through the streets. I’ll tell everyone, ‘This is my girl. She’s fatter than Albert, but she’s a top-shelf lay.’ ” He whispered, “That’ll be us,” and he pointed to a couple walking by. They were both covered scalp to toenails in tattoos. The man, in lace-up board shorts, was scrawny and couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. The woman towered over him in a purple tankini; she must have weighed at least three hundred pounds. They held hands, soaking wet, wearing inflated inner tubes around their waists like misplaced halos, leaving water droplets in their wake.
I sat up. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“You and your mood swings.”
“It’s just that you don’t mean it.”
“I was just playing. I thought we were playing. Don’t be like that, Angeline.”
I crossed one leg over the other, making myself small, remembering taking the N train deep into Brooklyn with Mikey every year for all-day Easter dinner at his parents’ house, where his uncles called us “yous guys,” and his father called me Yellow or Purple or Pink, and his mother leaned out the bathroom window, pinning laundry to a clothesline, and his aunts smoked Virginia Slims while they glazed the ham with paintbrushes and fought over which knife to use to cut fresh mozzarella for the antipasti. I remembered the time Mikey bought me a car air freshener even though I didn’t have a car, just because the word “sexy” was printed on it in block letters. I remembered when we first started dating and he asked if he could wash my hair. (“It’s just so pretty. I just want to
do
something for it.”)
My fingers moved to my scalp, searching out my bald spot. I pulled my hair out of its elastic and tried for a new ponytail, one that covered all the naked parts of my head. I squinted in the flat light at clouds the color of harbor water.
“You know,” Bennett said, “if you loved your boyfriend, you’d be with him now. You wouldn’t have left him for two months. It’s not my business, but I can see he doesn’t make you happy.”
“Sometimes we’re happy.”
“Anyway, you don’t have kids with him. What do you owe the guy?”
“Please don’t call him ‘the guy.’ We’ve been through a lot together. I love him,” I said, remembering that day in the diner, when I’d said those words to my father. Back then, they’d meant something so different—that I was starry-eyed about some aspiring comedian I’d met on some West Village street.
At that moment, Eden came barreling down the Death Drop, her body like a corpse in a coffin—her ankles crossed, her forearms folded into an X on her chest. She cried out as she dropped through the air, momentarily weightless, and I pictured Mikey thoughtlessly eating chips from the bag, getting crumbs on his shirt while he watched television. The image created an unbearable stretching inside my chest. I did love Mikey. I did. Now that I was thin, maybe I could return to New York, healthy, and we could start from scratch. Maybe we could go back to being the kids we’d been when we met.
Pudge came down the Death Drop next, screaming, his arms and legs coming uncrossed and splaying wide open. When he hit the pool, the splash was a geyser.
“I guess we’ll see, won’t we?” Bennett sighed. “I guess we’ll see what happens in a week. I hope for your sake that you do what’s right for you.”
“Nine days.”
“Huh?”
“We still have nine days. Why are you trying to speed the summer up?”
“Nine days. I just hope you find happiness, Angeline. I mean that.”
Brendan came shooting down the Death Drop.
I knew what Bennett was saying: that he wished me all the best, and that he wasn’t going to know me.
Miss came down the slide next, shrieking unmistakably for her mommy before splashing into the pool. And then Harriet’s body filled the platform in the sky. She walked to the edge, then turned and walked away, walked to the edge, then walked away.
“No way,” I said, making a visor with my hand. “Harriet? No way.”
“She fits,” Bennett said. “She’s lost a lot of weight.” He squinted. “She’s smaller now. It’s really noticeable.”
“And she showers on occasion.”
“She ran part of the loop yesterday.”
“She hasn’t told me she hates me in a while. At least a week.”
And down she came. A streak of black like a cannonball. A sound from deep inside her like a dying, braying donkey.
Then the rain began, as if the crash of Harriet’s body had jolted it out of the sky. I held my palm up to the drizzle.
“I
told
Lewis it was going to rain all day. We’re supposed to get thunderstorms.” Bennett looked up. “I guess this means we’ll go back to camp and watch
Bugsy Malone
.”
“What is it with Lewis and that movie?”
“I can try to veto it, but . . .”
“We should watch a
real
classic. Like
Dirty Dancing
.”
“The little kids can’t watch
Dirty Dancing
.”
“Why not? He’s shown
Bugsy Malone
three times.
Dirty Dancing
is beautiful. It’s an important film. I think I was eight when I first saw it.”
“Eight!”
“Nine?”
