Authors: Diana Spechler
Skinny (27 page)
I thought of Eden’s eyes and her gold Jewish star. Even as I remembered her, she looked different from the way I’d been seeing her. Eden was half-Hawaiian. Not Jewish. Not my half sister. Not my father’s daughter.
“You really thought Dad had an affair?”
“I thought he was hiding all this from us. I thought you had no idea. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We always said we wouldn’t.”
“But Dad must have wanted me to know.”
“After you finally spoke with Saul, I kept expecting you to ask me about it. And you didn’t. So I figured you didn’t want to talk about it. I don’t know, Gray. It seems stupid now. I should have brought it up. Of course I should have.” My mother fished a tissue from her purse and touched it to the inner corners of her eyes. “Do you remember when Dad couldn’t get out of bed?”
“No.”
“Good. That’s good. We always wondered if you’d remember. We told you he had the flu. I kept telling Dad, ‘It’s business. Things happen. You didn’t kill the man. You just did your job.’ But that suicide . . .” She smoothed the tissue out and blew her nose.
I thought of the black-and-white picture I’d seen a few times of my father’s father, wearing a white undershirt tucked tightly into his pants, squinting in sunlight, smiling at the camera, holding a baby—my father. He didn’t look like a person who would hurl himself off a bridge.
“Whenever Dad thought of Azalea, he imagined his own mother, raising her sons by herself. He set up a trust for Azalea. Not a lot of money, but it was something. He blamed himself completely. The trust will stop when Azalea’s daughter turns eighteen.” She stood and crossed the room to a wastebasket, and then returned to the bed.
“I’ve put Azalea’s daughter in a coma.”
“She’s not in a coma. She’s fine. She woke up an hour ago. And she said you were driving her to the hospital because she was having stomach pains. You were trying to help her.”
“That’s not what happened.”
“Was she covering for you? Azalea thinks you were trying to save her daughter’s life.”
“Lying, yes. Covering for
me
? No.”
“You kidnapped her.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“You drove recklessly in an old, unsafe car with a minor in the passenger seat. I’m not saying what I think. I’m just saying . . . if Azalea were angry instead of grateful, these are the things she could accuse you of. She’d have a case. If being married to a lawyer taught me anything, it’s that everyone’s got a case.” She rubbed her temples with the pads of her fingers. Her wedding band twinkled. “That woman. Maybe Dad had a role in her husband’s death.
Maybe
. But if you ask me . . .”
“What?”
“She had a bigger role in Dad’s.”
In the coming weeks, my mother and I talked more than we had in three years. We lounged on the couch in the living room I’d grown up in, sat on the porch my father had built, watched television together in the bed she’d been sleeping in alone. We talked while my scrapes and bruises healed, while I tried to decide what to do with my life. But the only decision I made in those weeks was to stop keeping secrets.
This was how my father—the man whose eyes I’d believed had no tear ducts, the man who called me Brenda Preston, the strict detractor of emotional rhetoric—responded to Dr. Koa Bellham’s death: He climbed into bed, drew the blinds, denied the sunlight, and swallowed pills that would keep him asleep. He woke up now and then and thought,
I’ll take more pills and sleep more, and when they wear off, I’ll take a few more, and I’ll sleep and sleep and sleep.
My mother called a friend of theirs, a doctor, who entered the dark room, tried to speak with my nonresponsive father, and confiscated his pills.
“I’m not seeing a shrink,” my father told my mother.
“Fine. Then what?”
“I’ll go back to work. I’ll plod through life. I’ll get to the end of it eventually.”
He rose from bed and returned to work. He moved through his life as if dutifully performing a choreographed dance. Until one day, his miracle came.
My father’s phone rang at work. A hysterical man with a Yiddish accent had been referred to my father by a friend. He cried that he’d been accused of malpractice in his accounting business. “It’s crazy!” he said. “I am nothing if not honest in business. Please help me. My wife is pregnant with our fourth child. If I lose my business, I’m in serious trouble.”
My father recognized this second chance. Through his office window, he watched the sun push its way out from behind a cloud. The pane of glass glared gold. “I’ll help you,” my father said, the weight of depression sliding smoothly off his shoulders. “And then I’m never going to practice law again as long as I live.”
“Baruch Hashem,”
the man whispered.
That was how my father found God.
I meant to call Eden. All of my campers’ numbers were still programmed into my cell phone, where they’d been since that day at Adventure Gardens, in case anyone had separated from the group. But when I thought about the conversation we would have to have, when I thought about having to explain myself, to defend my sanity, all I wanted to do was sleep. At my mother’s house, I was sleeping a lot. Before bed, I would think,
Tomorrow I’ll call Eden. Tomorrow I’ll be better. Tomorrow will be the day I start my life anew.
But after a week, Eden called me.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah. I wasn’t hurt.”
“Eden,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. You didn’t mean to crash.”
“Yeah, but—”
“And you had my back. You didn’t tell anyone we were going to eat food that wasn’t in the program.”
“Right. But.” I wondered if I should tell her that I’d lied about that restaurant, that there was no such thing as comfort food, that I hadn’t been driving anywhere.
“My mom told me who you are,” Eden said.
I was lying prone on my childhood bed, looking at things that had mattered to me—a wooden jewelry box from my father, framed pictures of friends whose names I had to squint to remember, a jar of pennies, a shelf of my college business textbooks.
“It all probably makes no sense to you,” I said.
“I heard your dad died.”
“You must think I’m off my rocker.”
I listened to Eden’s silence, to the faint sounds of a television going in the background. When she spoke again, she said, “Remember how I told you about that thing I did? That night when I was so drunk?”
“You only sort of told me.”
“I was seriously
wasted
.” Eden paused. “But want to know why I did it? Aside from being wasted?”
“You don’t have to explain yourself.”
“There’s this bookstore by my school that I used to go to a lot. I would sit in the self-help section and read all the books. I didn’t even care what they were about. I just liked them. I read the cookbooks, too. Maybe this year I won’t anymore. I might have more friends this year. Not that I don’t have friends. I have friends.”
“I read a lot of self-help books last year, too,” I said. “I love self-help books. Although I’m not sure they help.”
“Well, there was this one I read about how girls without fathers act out. They meant sexually. They meant, girls without fathers might be, like, skanky. So when I did what I did, it was because I thought the book had told me I could. Does that . . . ?”
“It makes a lot of sense.”
“I think that’s what you were doing, too. You wanted to find me because you felt like you were allowed to.”
“Sort of,” I said. “Maybe.”
“Or maybe you had a descent into madness. I just saw a show about a woman who had a descent into madness.”
“That might have been part of it, too.”
“But she came back.”
“Did she?”
“She’s better now. She’s a dental hygienist. It happens to lots of women, according to the show.”
Above me, the light fixture housed a mass of dead bugs, rendering the room unnecessarily dim. I would have to stand on my bed to unscrew it. I could take it outside and shake it out on the sidewalk. But since I’d left the hospital, even tasks as small as that one felt enormous. Still, I could picture myself doing it. I could practically feel the satisfaction of it—how I would lie on my back afterward and admire my work, basking in new, clean light.
The diet was over. It had been since the day Mikey showed up at camp. Every morning, while my mother was at work, I walked down the street to the grocery store, hoping I wouldn’t see people from my past. (But I constantly saw people from my past.) I bought boxes of Pop-Tarts, family-size bags of Smartfood, cartons of Whoppers, blocks of cheddar, fresh baguettes, packages of Ritz Crackers, and four-for-one frozen pizzas.
I sent e-mails to every friend I had who might tell Mikey about my car accident. Friends sent cards and flowers, called to check on me, and sent e-mails urging me to hurry back to New York. But I never heard from Mikey.
Each morning, I thought,
Today I’ll get back on track. I’ll go for three runs. I’ll order those infomercial diet pills.
I made pot after pot of dark-roast coffee, hoping to re-create the energy I’d had at camp. But a switch had been flipped. The old hunger blazed inside me, stronger than ever. I couldn’t even remember what it had felt like to need so little. I remembered how loose my clothes had been. I remembered feeling small and pretty. But how had I gotten through all those days barely thinking of food?
Bennett called.
“Soon as you’re better,” he said, “I’ll fly you down here. I’d like to see your beautiful face.”
While we talked, I stuffed my beautiful face with cookies and muffins and corn chips, remembering how at one time Bennett had made me full.
“What are you eating?”
“Celery.”
Bennett sighed. “I can’t wait to touch your body again.”
My body. My tan was fading. My hair kept shedding. My waist, within two weeks, had begun to lose its sucked-in-cheeks shape. I didn’t want to see Bennett. I didn’t want Bennett to see me.
One night, I mustered unprecedented energy and accepted a dinner invitation from an old friend. We’d lost touch after high school and she’d married young. Her husband shared her name: Micah. They had a baby, and they lived nearby, in a house like the ones in which we’d been raised.
I sat at their kitchen table and observed their grown-up life. A perfect circle of a clock hung on the wall. No one else I knew would have bothered with a wall clock, would have lived beneath the ticking of its steady, predictable hands. I pictured Husband Micah, a dermatology resident, standing on a stool, hanging the clock, while Wife Micah stood back, tapping her lips with her index finger, deciding whether it was straight. She was fatter than she’d once been, and didn’t seem to care. Her body resembled her husband’s. I wondered if I was missing something. I wondered if they were.
Pictures of the two of them covered the walls. In some, they were thin and young. They’d met in college. They seemed to have taken many ski vacations. In other pictures, they held the baby between them like a trophy.
I asked Husband Micah, “Can you tell me what’s happening to my hair?”
He got up from the table and came to stand behind me. He tugged gently at my hair. I closed my eyes. His hands felt like cool rocks. I resisted leaning into his touch. He said, “You’re not going bald.”
“I think I am.”
He inspected my part. “Take vitamins. Do yoga. Remind yourself to breathe.”
“I breathe every three to four seconds,” I said, a factoid I’d learned from Spider.
“Could just be that we’re getting older.”
“Twenty-seven?”
“Sometimes hair gets thinner.”
“And then grows back?”
“Or not. But no matter what happens, you’ll adjust.”
I scheduled blood tests anyway. I held out my arm and let the needle in. I didn’t flinch. I felt briefly hopeful. A few days later, when the results came back negative, I hung up the phone and put my face in my hands. I wanted a deficiency. I wanted to ingest supplements to restore whatever was missing.
One night I pulled a box of old pictures out of the attic and asked my mother to tell me stories. I lifted the lid and extracted the pile. At the top, the pictures were from my prom. My high school graduation. But then came the older pictures. My father holding me on his shoulders by the ocean. Me as an infant, asleep on his chest.
“I always forget,” I said. “Dad used to be thinner.”
“He was svelte.”
“He wasn’t
svelte
.”
We were lying on our stomachs, side by side on the living-room floor, eating peanut M&M’s from an oversize yellow bag. This was a new thing—my mother snacking. And while I knew it was an unhealthy habit of mine, it seemed a healthy one for her. She was still skinny, but she had more color in her face. And she looked taller, as if her year as a widow had strengthened her vertebrae.
“When I married him, he looked like a movie star.”
I found some pictures of my parents from before I was born—posing in front of some statue, kissing in some park, feeding baby goats. My father looked nothing like a movie star. But it was undeniable: Although he’d always been big, he’d been nowhere near obese.
“Maybe you had your love goggles on,” I said.
“Do you?” My mother bumped me with her shoulder.
When I had told her that Mikey and I were finished, she’d asked, “Did you have a fling with that gorgeous man from the camp?”
I thought about Bennett now, about our faces almost touching on a shared pillow, the way we’d stared at each other, and the things we’d said in the dark of his bedroom, hidden away from the campers.
I moved a picture of my parents slow-dancing to the bottom of the pile. “I’m wondering,” I said, “how it’s possible to love someone for years, and then meet a total stranger and suddenly love him instead. I’m wondering what love even means if it’s so fluid.”
“Some say love, it is a river,” my mother said, and we both giggled. This was new, too—my mother making jokes. Whenever she made one, she looked at me right away, nervous, as if she expected me to tell her she had no business trying to be funny.
“Or is it that if you learn love once, in a particular way, you’ll just repeat that version of love again and again for the rest of your life, pinning it on different people wherever you go?”
“You know what your father would say. You’re too young to be cynical.”
“But doesn’t it seem too easy that I could pack love into my car with my clothes, and then drive awhile, and then arrive somewhere and rummage through my trunk and pull the love out and give it to someone else?”
My mother picked lint from my sleeve. “You think that’s what happened?”
“I don’t know.” I set my chin in my hands. “I don’t trust anything I’ve thought for at least a year. I haven’t made good decisions in a while. Seems like I keep thinking the wrong things.”
My mother straightened the edges of a pile of her honeymoon pictures. “Everyone’s been telling me not to trust myself. ‘Don’t sell the house yet,’ ‘Don’t date too seriously,’ ‘Don’t make any decisions.’ But I
want
to make decisions.”
“Well, then you should.”
My mother ran a hand through my ponytail, and I thought about how one day, she would love another man. Perhaps he would be timid. Perhaps he would be a vegan. A violinist. The kind of man who would cry. Perhaps it would be one of her customers, who loved to watch the bones of her hands whipping up perfect bouquets.
“You know why your father got fat? He started eating that way after that man killed himself. Your father was very sensitive. Like you.”
“Ha.”
“You are, Gray. You’re very sensitive.”
I wanted to rest my cheek on the carpet and sob. I wished I could see what my mother saw—a sensitive, innocent child. Instead I saw a grown woman afflicted with questionable judgment.
“Ask Mikey. I’m not sensitive.”
“Mikey doesn’t know you like your mother does.”
“Mikey hates me.”
“He has to hate you until he stops loving you.”
“I don’t want him to stop loving me.”
“Eventually, when he heals a bit, he’ll love you in a different way. He’ll love you the way people love youth. Forgetting the bad parts.”
She flipped through a few pictures and paused at one from her wedding. It was a formal picture, everyone posed and young. She tapped it with her fingernail. “I watched what happened to Dad. He started self-medicating with food. I read books about it. He thought those rabbis were showing him the way. But it was food he always turned to. If that woman . . . Azalea . . . if that woman had just told him she forgave him . . . But she never forgave him. She said she recognized his apologies, but she would never forgive him. What the hell kind of a thing is that to say? So he ate until he had a heart attack.”
I plunged my hand into the yellow bag, extracting a fistful of peanut M&M’s.
“I kept telling him, ‘Let it go, Alan. Let. It. Go.’ But he couldn’t. Wouldn’t.” She paused. “I guess I shouldn’t blame that woman. She’s been through the wringer.”
I chewed and swallowed. “Do you blame Dad?”
She pursed her lips for a second. “He was depressed. A depressive person. He couldn’t let go of things. That was just him. You aren’t like that, Gray. You are sensitive. But you know when it’s time to let go. People with obsessions . . . they let themselves get eaten alive. Pardon the pun. He even let this whole mess ruin his relationship with you. Those rabbis got it into his head that religion would absolve him. If you’d wound up with Mikey—”
“Well, I didn’t.”
“But if you had—”
“I know what you’re going to say.”
“You wouldn’t have raised Jewish children.”
“Right.” I ate a red M&M. A green one. “There are worse crimes,” I said. I remembered how I’d once believed that green M&M’s were aphrodisiacs. That Pop Rocks and Coke could make a person explode. That Taco Bell burritos housed cockroach eggs that would hatch in the consumer’s stomach. All those childhood legends that acknowledged the power of food.
“Well, I know there are worse crimes. But
I
didn’t approve of Mikey, either. I want you to have a husband with a stable job. Mikey would have been traveling all the time. And those clubs are so seedy.”
“They’re not seedy. Just sad.”
“Your kids wouldn’t have seen their father. And they would have been so confused!”
“Why do you guys always say that?”
“ ‘Are we Christian? Are we Jewish? Why do we have a Christmas tree? Or why
don’t
we have a Christmas tree?’ On and on.”
“Mom.”
“But anyway. It was different for me. If you were in love with Mikey, I wasn’t going to intervene.”
I looked at my empty palm, now streaked faintly with candy dye. “But you never stuck up for me.”
“I kept telling him: ‘Don’t put this kind of pressure on her.’ But you know how your father was. And those rabbis kept hammering away at him.” She spread pictures from my first birthday party in a row in front of her. “Well. What’s done is done.” She pinched a blue M&M from the bag and studied it before pushing it into her mouth. “Or maybe it’s all my fault.”
“I didn’t say that. It’s not. Maybe I should have . . . I don’t know.”
“You could have humored him instead of getting angry.”
“Why was that my job? He was the parent.”
“If you’d tolerated him, you’d feel better now. You wouldn’t be so tortured.”
I looked down at the stack of pictures. My young, healthy father was laughing maniacally beneath the spray of a waterfall. “What’s done is done,” I said. “Right?” I curled my fingers into fists, dug my fingernails into my sticky palms. “Besides, if I’d tolerated him, I would have been agreeing with him that my life was all wrong.”
“You’re stubborn like he was.”
“I didn’t want to look at my life. I think that’s what stubbornness is.”
“Well, the positive flip side to stubbornness is that you know what you want.”
“I really don’t.”
“You do. You will.” My mother sat up and started stacking the pictures.
“I’ll clean up,” I said.
“No, you need your rest.”
“That’s the last thing I need. I need to figure out what to do.” I felt tears starting in my chest. I was thinking about blowing out that candle at Morgan Rye’s Steak House, about my obstinate refusal to wish.
“I like having you here,” my mother said.
“I can’t stay.”
“Right. You’re an adult. I understand. Maybe you can be a teacher. I always wanted to be a teacher.”
“I have nothing to teach. Except water aerobics.”
“Not that you should do anything just because I wish I had. Maybe
I
should go back to school. Maybe
I
should be a teacher.”
I looked at my mother, at her short ponytail drawn back and secured at the crown of her head, at the silver hairs coming in at the roots, making her temples sparkle. I remembered my father’s face more vividly than I had in months, not the face I saw in pictures, but the real, three-dimensional version, the glisten on his lips when he licked them, the way he would blink rapidly when he was arguing a point. There was a time when my parents would lean their faces together, cheekbone to cheekbone, their temples touching. I remembered how they would sigh, as if resting at a filling station.
“I have to tell you something,” I said. I drew in a breath. And I told her the story. I recounted the last two hours of her husband’s life. I told her every detail I remembered, as if I were under oath. Maybe it was wrong of me, selfish to pick at her scabs. But I felt hot and stuffy inside my secrets.
As I talked, I saw my grandfather reversing his flight, landing on both feet on that suspension bridge. I saw my father closing an open carton of ice cream, returning it to the freezer.
“It’s okay,” my mother said, putting her skinny arms around me. “It’s going to be okay.”
