The Appetites of Girls (11 page)

“Who wants to live on grapefruits?” I stuck out my tongue in disgust, my stomach muscles beginning to ache from trying to suck them flat.

•   •   •

A
t the end of November, our school began preparations for the holiday concert, given each year before the winter break.

“You don’t have to go,” I had told Mother when the invitation arrived
in the mail in its square, pine-tree-green envelope lined with red. “You won’t even be able to hear me. I don’t have a solo, and I stand at the far end of the stage.”

Mother was in black spandex pants and a thin T-shirt, her hairline dark from dampness. Recently, she had purchased a treadmill and a stationary bicycle, which she kept in the spare bedroom. “Need to keep things tightened up, you know!” she’d laughed to me, patting her rear when the equipment had been delivered. Now, though, she was sorting through newly received holiday cards, some of which included photographs—families seated in front of Christmas trees or standing atop snow-covered mountains in sleek skiwear. I knew from the way she chewed the side of her cheek she was measuring, comparing.

“Oh, don’t be silly, Franny. I’m looking forward to it. Your father, too. See. It’s already in my calendar.” And uncapping a pen, she scribbled a note in the datebook on her desk.

For weeks, our chorus director, Mr. Slattery, drilled into us the rhythms of “Adeste Fideles,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and “I Had a Little Dreidel.” He taught us to overenunciate every syllable so that the audience would catch each word. Again and again, we practiced processing on and off the stage, bowing for applause, singing with our chests up, our shoulders down, our arms majestically still at our sides.

On the night of the concert we were instructed to wear our pleated blue skirts, white collared blouses tucked neatly at the waist, and dark dress shoes.

Some hours before we were to leave, I had been surprised to hear Mother twice remind Christopher to finish his homework quickly. “We wouldn’t want to be late for your sister’s important performance, would we?” she’d asked. And something in my throat had jumped.
Important performance
,
as if this were an event as significant as Larissa Balliet’s recital at our home earlier in the year.

I had carefully smoothed the buttoned front of the new oxford that hung in my closet. Neatly I arranged my shirttails beneath my skirt until
every line and pucker disappeared, then checked my reflection in my bathroom mirror. It was only in profile that the bulge of my stomach was visible. Head-on, I thought, the skirt pleats covered my roundness quite nicely. With slow strokes I brushed my hair to straighten every snarl, clipping it in place with my favorite star-shaped tortoiseshell barrettes.

My parents, with Christopher, had chosen a row near the front of the auditorium. I could just see them through the side entry to the stage, where I waited with my grade. Mother folded a camel cape with a fur-trimmed hood across her lap, then pulled at the tips of her gloves, one finger at a time. She had changed into a brown tailored suit, a dressier outfit than she’d been wearing earlier; her nails gleamed glossy pink from a visit to the salon. Father hung his arm over the back of Christopher’s seat. Christopher was chattering to Father, his knees jiggling the way they did when he was excited. Every now and then Father would nod and pat Christopher’s shoulder, his eyes blinking heavily behind his glasses. Mother was sitting beside Mr. and Mrs. Preston, whom I had seen at several of my parents’ gatherings; their daughter Audrey was a tenth-grader. Until the music began, during the hubbub of murmured conversations and families settling into seats, Mother and Mrs. Preston leaned forward, lifting their red programs to cover their mouths as they spoke. But as soon as the lights dimmed and the first few piano chords of “The Little Drummer Boy” sounded, Mother straightened and smiled, her brows rising as she skimmed the line of girls then settled on me. Mr. Slattery’s hands began to jab at the air, demanding our attention, but I was sure I could still feel Mother watching. By the time we reached “Deck the Halls,” I was aware of the heat of my cheeks. Could my parents actually distinguish my voice from among the others? With precision, as we’d been taught, I uttered the syllables, imagining they were chimes ringing from my lips. Yes, my voice soared like a silver flute, trilling through the auditorium!

We strolled home along Park Avenue, past the trees adorned with
twinkling white lights, my parents in front with elbows linked, Christopher and I a step behind. And I hummed the melodies still in my ears. I hummed in our lobby and in the elevator and in the kitchen as I cut a slice of pound cake from a silver tin on the counter. So I didn’t hear Mother enter my bedroom after me or set her purse at the foot of my bed. I had the cake on a dinner plate, and I had begun pulling chunks from its edges with my fingers, popping them into my mouth.

“Francesca—” Mother said, startling me. She paused, stroking the back of one hand with the fingertips of the other, her two gold bracelets jingling on her wrists. When I was young enough to be read bedtime stories and kissed before sleep, Mother would press her forehead to mine before extinguishing the light. And as she hesitated now, I thought she might do the same, or stretch her arms to embrace me; she seemed to be finding just the perfect phrase to express her pride in my performance.

But instead, “You’ve eaten a full dinner,” she said. “Are you really hungry still?”

What did she mean! I swallowed the cake in my mouth then broke off another piece, a bite so large this time it filled my cheeks. After the concert, I had glimpsed Mother greeting Mrs. Preston’s daughter. I had seen the way she smiled at Audrey in her fitted blouse, snug around her narrow arms, her tiny ribs, and little plum-sized breasts.
Are you hungry still?
Now I could feel Mother’s eyes, not on my face, but on the tight band where my skirt cut my shirt. Was that why she had watched me closely as I sang? Well, if so, what did I care? Not a
bit
. Not for one instant!

I chewed the egg-colored piece of cake and shoved in another, finishing every morsel, ignoring the crumbs that showered from my mouth and fingers to the floor. Then, as though I’d heard not a word, without so much as a glance in Mother’s direction, I strutted to the bathroom and banged shut the door. Then listened in silence until I heard the clip of footsteps exiting my room.

•   •   •

I
n the following weeks, Mother stocked the kitchen with baskets of apples and ripe bananas, and the refrigerator with plastic bowls of cubed melon. But I ignored these foods. In her presence, I groped behind the diet sodas on the pantry shelf for a root beer bottle, pouring it into a tall glass, adding fat dollops of ice cream. I returned from school with bags of popcorn or squares of walnut fudge from the deli along my route. At the kitchen table, licking salt or sticky sugar from my fingers, I peered at Mother from the corner of my eyes as she gabbed on the telephone; I watched to see if her hands faltered as she jotted notes in her datebook or ran her silver-handled file across the tips of her nails.

In the meantime, Sharon had discovered another diet, low in wheat. To my surprise, she had followed it for several weeks.

“It’s simple,” she told me. “I just avoid bread and pasta.” At lunch, she ate only the innards of her sandwich, leaving the outer roll on her lunch tray. If I was still hungry, I took her remainders onto my own plate, munching the crusts.

“I don’t mind sharing,” she would say as I tore at the bread, “but you’re making a big mistake. Once in your system, wheat transforms instantly to fat.”

I was not sure I believed her, but Sharon claimed she had dropped five pounds. I noticed that she began to scroll the top of her uniform skirt to reveal her thighs as some of the other girls did, despite our school rule forbidding it. Before sports class, she tied a knot in her gym shirt, drawing it tightly across her hips like twig-limbed Carlene Bradley and Sloane Fenton.

“You think
that’s
going to make them like you?” I asked, pointing to her silly shirt the first time she wore it.

“Don’t be such a grump, Francesca,” was all she said, dabbing iridescent lip gloss from a pink pot onto her bottom lip and smiling smugly as if she thought I was jealous.

But I did not envy Sharon! It made little difference to me that my stomach had begun to hang over the elastic of my panties and that there was a sagging around my upper legs I hadn’t seen before. From morning to night, I ate whatever tempted me. During my parents’ parties, each time Mother or Father turned in my direction, I gobbled a fried dumpling or plucked a handful of marzipan from a caterer’s platter, pretending insatiable hunger even when I felt full.

But no further criticism came. When Mother replaced my navy school skirts with three of a larger size, I awaited some comment. I prepared my defiant response. The skirts had been laid on my bed, cleanly pressed, still blanketed in gauzy tissue. But when I arrived downstairs the next morning in one of the roomier uniforms, Mother betrayed no frustration. And I began to notice, too, that she now ignored the heaping snack plates I carted to my room. Was this some new tactic? Was she too consumed of late with other things to pay attention? Under my covers at night, I pondered these matters, plotting for hours in the darkness as I blinked at the black ceiling.

•   •   •

S
ome evenings later, my parents attended a cocktail party downtown hosted by one of Father’s business associates.

“We’d much rather stay home with you,” Father said to Christopher and me as they were preparing to go. “The party should be a real bore.” But from the way he laughed as he brushed at the sleeves of his overcoat on his way out the door and twirled the bottle of wine in his hand, I knew he planned to enjoy himself. Mother had ordered marinated lamb and roasted tomatoes and had left two plates for Christopher and me in the kitchen. As always, Christopher poured himself a glass of milk and took his plate from the counter, heading to the television upstairs, where he would sit hunched on the floor, his dinner dish in his lap. With the prongs of my fork, I poked at my lamb, then opened the refrigerator and scanned
the shelves. Hunks of cheese in foil, leftover pâté, a tureen of clear soup flecked with scallions, which seemed to have been set aside for future company. These choices were not especially appealing, and I opened the cupboards for something more tempting. There, on the first shelf, I found a bag of cream-filled cookies and a tin of crumb cake. Surprisingly, Mother had made no attempt to keep these sweets from view. I tore open the cookie bag but seemed suddenly to have lost my appetite. Instead, I took a few bites of lamb and nibbled one of the roasted tomatoes, then returned to my room to finish the latest solve-your-own mystery I had brought home from the bookstore.

“Mid-April would be a good time for the party, don’t you think?” Mother asked Father one brisk Sunday as we meandered around the boating lake of Central Park at Father’s suggestion—a rare weekend afternoon when we were all at home. She squinted at four mallards paddling across the water. “We have the space for it, after all. Wouldn’t it be a nice gesture?”

The party under discussion was to celebrate the recent engagement of my cousin Michelle, the daughter of Mother’s older sister, Binny. Michelle lived in Massachusetts and we saw her each family holiday. My most vivid memory of her was from a New Year’s party some years before—making constant trips to the hall mirror to reapply her makeup and fuss with the pleats of her velvet suit in order to flatter the deep vee of her cleavage. I had met her fiancé, Stanton, only once, at a dinner at a French restaurant in midtown where he had tried to clutch Michelle’s hand during the entire meal. “It’s obvious she’s no prude,” I had once overheard Father laugh to Mother. But Mother had only sniffed and called his comment “tasteless.” For this reason, I had spent much of the evening imagining Michelle and Stanton in bed, shrouded only loosely by a single sheet, their naked bodies tangled, an image from the cover of a romance novel I had once discovered in the top drawer of Mother’s night table.

After a flurry of phone calls between Mother and Binny and Michelle,
it was decided that the party would be held at our apartment on the second Saturday of April.

“Give some consideration to what you would like to wear for the occasion,” Mother said as I gathered my books for school. But how unlike her not to have already selected some outfit for me. So perhaps she had given up. Would she no longer fret over my appearance? So. I should have known! For days now I had eaten smaller portions at meals, but she had not even
noticed
.

These were the matters I chewed over later that week when I spotted the display window of Grace’s Teen Boutique. In the small shop on Madison, which I passed every day to and from school, a floor-length apricot dress with beautiful satiny skirts shimmered behind the front glass. The sleeveless dress had silver strands for straps studded with delicate crystal beads. The store’s wigged mannequin wore matching apricot shoes with dainty bows, like ballet slippers. As people bustled by me on the sidewalk, I shifted my schoolbag from one shoulder to the other. A woman and her red-haired daughter had entered the shop. They were gesturing to one of the saleswomen and pointed to the apricot dress. The saleswoman disappeared through some curtains at the rear of the store, and the red-haired girl bounced on her toes, her hair swinging against her shoulder blades. She said something to her mother, and the mother lifted a hand to her daughter’s head, stroking behind the girl’s ear, sifting the red hair through her parted fingers.