Skinny (14 page)
We stand outside the thick, steel institution doors of Agnes's unit. I see Agnes through the small circular window, waiting
for me. She is clutching a little gold purse and wearing her usual suspicious frown and wild-blue eye makeup.
—
She'11 make him. Make him love her.
"You OK?"
I nod.
He pulls me to him and I smell his singular, neutral, dusty-boy-wood smell, and wave to Agnes over his shoulder.
"Goodbye, Gizzy, watch out for those crazy ladies." Turning on his heel, he walks down the hall, whistling quietly, raising
his elbows against the early-morning mental-hospital sun. He says something but it gets lost in the crash of meal trays down
the hall.
"What?" I turn towards him.
"Later," he says, pointing towards the future. Then, walking quickly, he makes his escape.
That afternoon, after work, I read in the library for a couple of hours, then I walk by the cafe where Sol and I are supposed
to meet. I see him through the window, smoking a cigarette and doing a crossword puzzle, waiting for me, but I don't go in.
Instead, I go home, return the car. N o one's home so I take out Mom's scale and weigh myself, note that I've gained four
pounds since the fight and the chicken-breakfast extravaganza. Promising to starve myself tomorrow, I go out again and walk
through the low orange-lit streets, where only skater-punks and people turning off their sprinklers are about. I sit down
on a wide curb and watch the end of the summer-night sky fade into that odd bruised-purple colour, and suddenly I feel completely
paralyzed. I'm not used to this, having someone waiting for me, having someone (could it be?)
love
me. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't remember the touch-and-go terror of love Eve inspired in me. That's another terrible
thing about love; once you've had it, you cannot go back to not having it. The only way I knew to live without love was to
not eat, study, and try to push Eve, and all she meant, back to the farthest quarter of my mind and it had been that way ever
since, ever since—
—
Abandon or be abandoned. The rules of engagement are simple.
A sweat breaks out all over my body, the uncontrollable wash of perspiration you get right before you throw up.
—
He's going to mess everything up.
And I realize she's right. Sol won't mess things up, literally, like with me and him, but with me and
her.
If I let him in, I let her out. Her scrupulous control of my food intake, of what I do and say, will have to disappear, eventually.
That's what relationships are, aren't they? The compromise of self for another. I realize that what I have perceived as safe
is dangerous. Hadn't it been that way with Eve? The slight curve of Eve's belly, the warmth of her nipple, the perfect rhythm
of our steps on asphalt, the way our bodies fit so well in sleep, was all so deceptively harmonious because, in reality, we
were hellbent and raw, and even our quiet moments together seemed dangerous and transient.
—
Love fades, doesn't it?
I pull a floppy cigarette out of my pocket and think: isn't this what I've worked for all these long weeks at the clinic,
to break up the tedium of controlled days, to free myself from her simpering cruelty, her flat slaps across my face? But how
can I open myself to Sol when something in me clings to the comfort of regimentation, to being marked and checked by an impossible
taskmaster who is bent on diminishing me to a tiny shred of marrow; when I was at my thinnest, no one could hurt me.
And yet there's the heart-shaped twist of his mouth when he tells a joke, his curly hair, his slim delicate brows that make
him look actorish, dramatic. There's the way he looks at me sometimes when he thinks I don't notice, like he's making a promise
or praying.
Sol is different. He's not Eve, he's not Thomas, he's himself. And what is it in the unique Solness of his being that has
me believing in the possibility that love might make us all better people? Perhaps Sol will quit drinking so much, start sleeping
more, I'll gain a few pounds, we'll look less marked by life, less haggard. Or perhaps we won't change at all, I don't know.
—
That's it! You don't know. People's feelings change. Daily.
But it's impossible to explain anything; everything with her has to be concrete. We have to rely on our ability to pounce
and leap and survive on the lean picked-over hunt of others. Still, she has grown oddly quiet, listening for once.
I walk back to the house through the grey streets. Inside houses, TVs are being turned on. They cast a blue light in living
rooms. The day is cooling off, the sidewalks smell like bubble gum and fresh-cut grass, and I feel safe in this weird suburban
world, surrounded by shiny foreign cars and ridiculous dwarf lawn ornaments; if I wanted to, I'd never have to leave here.
But she just can't let me enjoy it, she just can't let me ride this delusion up the cracked tar driveway that Thomas had paved
the last time in the 1970s, instructing the whole operation in a pair of lilac jogging pants.
Then the words jut out the side of her mouth, involuntarily, like a badly hidden smoker's cough.
—
Just remember, love is always betrayal for you.
I sit by the sprinkler, peeling the skin off my feet before putting my socks on. Sol drives up. I scratch at my aching ribs,
but it's the pleasurable pain of healing. I tie my shoes tightly. Sol gets out of the car and stands over me.
"Going for a run?"
"Yup."
"Where's your sister?"
"Dunno."
He takes off his sunglasses and looks down the street as if he expects Giselle to materialize from the quiet suburban lawns.
His dishevelled profile leans into his own long summer shadow and he looks doubtful for a second, lost.
"Do you mind if I join you?"
"You need shoes, you can't run in those." He looks down at his dusty boots.
"Wait."
I go into the house and find Dad's favourite tennis shoes buried under a heap of boots, newspapers, and umbrellas. Stan Smiths.
When I come out of the house, Sol is spraying some kids with the sprinkler. I hold out the shoes. He smells like sandalwood
oil.
"No arch support, but it's better than nothing."
"Thanks, Holly. Listen, she didn't call or anything? We were supposed to meet after work . . ."
I shake my head and, watching him bending over to tie his shoelaces, I want to touch his hair.
"Shouldn't you be at school?" Sol's eyebrows pull together.
I shrug, "Last day."
"Oh." Sol frowns mildly as he stretches his legs.
He sprints out in front of me, leaping over ditches, confident in dead man's shoes. I move behind him, counting the steps
between us, planning on catching up but pacing myself because 1 want to run long, until time is measured by pavement, empty
streets, and identical houses, learned by rote. And I am thinking
Today is the Last Day of School and I am, as usual, not
there.
And I am thinking, I am sending her a secret telegraph to plug up her ears.
. . .
We move like moonlight on waves. We trip through the tennis court, Sol tangling himself in the net on purpose.
"Jesus, stop! I need a break!"
I cartwheel on the doubles lines as moths fly up into the pink fluorescent light and a middle-aged couple on the adjacent
court can't decide whether to laugh or be annoyed with us. Moths explode into dusty puffs, the dust on their wings floats
into the white air as the couple tries to figure out the score:
"Thirty-love or forty?"
Sol's flushed and sweaty He jumps over the net and runs out of the court.
"Race you to the DQ. Loser pays."
"You're on." And I'm off, an easy stretch ahead of him, the length of a sleeping whale, dreaming of soft-serve and yellow
out-of-bound balls.
. . .
When we get home it's dark in the house. Sol opens all the kitchen windows and starts going through the cupboards searching
for dinner.
"Hey, your mom ever go shopping? How does canned clam chowder with crackers sound, Hoi?"
"Great." He turns on the radio, which is playing jazz.
"So, how you feeling these days? Get into any scraps lately?" He watches my face to see if he can smile. I let him.
"Yeah, well, they're used to sending us Vasco girls home. When Gizzy was seven they sent her home with a note that said Mom
should comb her hair. I got sent home once for not wearing underwear." I shrug, Sol stirs the soup, and the kitchen becomes
filled with the sound of his light laughter.
He
is a man,
I think.
There is a man here with me.
Then I feel weird about saying "underwear" out loud.
I empty a vase of foul-smelling flowers into the sink. We reach for the tap at the same time. Our hands collide for a moment
before his fingers make a small bracelet around my wrist.
I drop the half-filled vase, which he catches, then he pours water over my head, still laughing. I turn the tap up and, with
my one free hand, splash him with water. He is laughing and shrieking, letting me, but he is not releasing my hand,
he is not
releasing it.
Then he slips his wrist into my palm as if we are playing a private game of shadowing. The other hand flutters like a dim,
quiet bird on my hip and scales the length of my wet shirt, uncertainly, as if it doesn't know whether to fly away or land.
He lets go so my arms can wind themselves over his shoulders, where I feel how strong he is; how little it would take for
me to buckle under him and open.
I am a clean fine bow and Sol a slim, fine arrow, diving. In my throat, the dry echo of unthinking; where we have run, and
who has left us behind while we were racing. And the salt that runs from our eyes is not sweat that he is lapping up with
his hair but, like blood, it's me and my name that he says, over and over, in our kitchen, me that he is touching with his
mouth, on my forehead and my cheek and my neck. Just then, the sound of the front door closing rips us apart. And our moments
get broken apart by our leaping, my fleeing into the wooden chair on the other side of the kitchen and the sudden panic in
his face as he leans his hips into the counter.
Giselle walks into the kitchen and tosses her bag into the corner. This is what she sees when she turns to look at us: me,
panting and soaked in the corner, and Sol, gazing above her head, clumsily arranging bowls and spoons with his hands that
were birds and now only guilty weapons.
"Hey, beautiful." He flicks water at her and she looks straight into his eyes, which are slippery coals now.
"This is cozy. Water sports?"
"Where you been?"
"Oh, you know. Out and about. Actually, I went to the library to study."
"You sure?"
"Yeah, I'm sure."
"I thought we had a date."
"Sorry." Giselle's mouth twists into a wicked grimace.
"You hungry?"
"No."
She darts a look my way that is so practiced I turn away from her and concentrate, instead, on my shedding feet. There is
a moment, just one, of peaceful silence, of believing that Giselle has not caught us at anything at all. But then it passes.
Giselle looks at the water on the floor and at the two of us, her face wrinkling, knowing, not guessing, but knowing.
"So, where were you?" Sol presses.
"That's not nearly as interesting as what you guys were up to, I'm sure."
"Just tell me where you were, Gizzy." His prodding, which is worse than his own lying, turns me cold.
"I know she's deaf, but are you? I
told
you, I was at the library"
Her smile is a cold spasm of pain and all of her anger and knowing cuts into him. I want to stand in the line of her fire
to deflect it. So that she will know we were one together and not two, caught, for a second, in one cage. But, before I can
get between them, Giselle presses her hands to her forehead and lets out a low moan.
"What the FUCK, Sol!!!" She leaps on his back.
He drops the spoon he has been clutching. His face shuts down. He walks down the hall with Giselle hanging off him, still
screaming. I grab her shirt to stop her raised arms that have begun to rain blows on the back of his head. I pull her from
him because he is not protecting himself, he is not resisting but letting her, like he let me enter him in heat, he lets us
take him over.
"Eat your goddamn soup!" she screams, dragging me back to the kitchen on the frayed tail of her shirt, before hitting the
pot into the sink with a wide swoop of her arm and burning us both.
. . .
I'm sorry, I am, because you're right, Giselle, we don't need to share everything. But the next time you come leaping at me,
I'll be ready. The next time you come swaying your fucking bag of bones and burdens, I go straight for the jugular.
Straight to the teeth.
Stab wounds of the heart usually cause rapidly increasing tamponade.
Love is not popular anymore. It is thankless. Noble. Do not expect any
reward. Trust yourself.
Someone has penned this on the bathroom wall in the bar, and, every time I pull my head up from the toilet between spitting
and retching, I see it. After throwing Sol out of the house and Holly into the sink, I go to a downtown bar and drink martinis
till the oily, salty flesh of green olives and alcohol brine is all I can taste.
And I stay there, past the post-dinner crowd, until closing time. I try to make meaning out of those words as I excise every
last piece of food and venom I contain. And then, with the razor-sharp sentimentality of the wretchedly drunk, I get it, and
that stranger's bathroom philosophy becomes part of me, as surely as the scar on Holly's forehead is part of her.
Once upon a time, on a hot summer day, our father cried, "Look at the sun!" and our mother, just out of the car, neatly plopped
Holly on the concrete—on her head. That moment left a scar extending from her hairline to her left ear.
—
The thing you were most careful with, you lost.
The sun, not to mention the moon, hung like huge globes of malleable fire in the great northern sky that day. Dad was right,
it was stunning, but Holly didn't look so good.
So, here I am, in a downtown bathroom stall thinking about that well-stitched line on my sister's head, about the scars I
want to put on Sol's head as those words stare down at me:
Love is not popular. Not noble. . . not love, no reward. Trust love. Is not
love. Trust yourself
I try to put it all into some kind of order, to measure memory, betrayal, to get the stories straight, thinking that, maybe
by putting her story next to mine, I can get close to Sol, understand him. Because he loves her, too, he is part of my story
and hers.
My parents scraped Holly off the ground and she was happily sucking on an orange slush an hour later in emergency. I remain
on the toilet-stall floor until the memory of that moon-sun day and all the booze have given me such a colossal headache that
I can't think about anything anymore, especially the rapid contusions of love. Then I pass out and dream of cords plugged
to my face like leeches, my arms strapped down, electricity jolting through my palms. When I wake, a piece of sharp green
glass on the floor is cutting into my hand and I know it's a sign. I etch a letter on my hand; put it on top so I can see
the jagged edges bleeding out:
S.
S is for sorrow, for all I don't say. S is for sick now, my punishing ways.
Remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: avoid "misadventures" with sharps.
—
Hello, My Name Is. You. You. Giselle. Me. She.
What is betrayal? What is betrayal, split in two? What is betrayal? Is what, betrayed by you. (Again.)
—
Betrayals are measured by what is offered and what is taken up.
Goddammit you're stupid, didn't you learn this already?
The heart forgets what the body remembers. As I try to get up off the bathroom floor she shoulders her way up to my face and
screams insults.
—
You expected him to love you?
She taps me on the shoulder, my hungry, doubting companion. She's always with me, like a jealous streak, a trick knee, a weak
stomach, a bad heart, this hunger is DNA you cannot undo.
Like fleas, or the smell of cheap cologne, she is hard to get rid of. Smiling, smug, arms crossed, her pixie-toes tap out
a metal rhythm that sounds like the smack of surgical tools falling onto a metal tray. Like genius or sorrow she has curled
up inside me and censors no evil, no criticism.
—
Get up off the ground, loser.
Sometimes she's British. Sometimes she is a poet. Sometimes she has a drawling southern accent when she mocks me. Other times
she is long-nailed and pure JAP. She's got a rough cat's tongue and a debutante smile. She's got a Chanel bag, can out drink
me any day, and is the skinniest girl I know. But she is always, always right.
—
I want you to curse every time you stole a kiss from his cheek and
thought you knew love.
She likes to skip around and wear transparent Victorian nightgowns even on the coldest nights, in order to mock my shivering
mortality.
Occasionally, late at night, she is kind: she lights my cigarettes, pours me drinks, and waits quietly for some mutual banter
to emerge.
—
You're a real piece of work, you know that?
—I know.
—
And that sister of yours. . .
—I don't want to talk about her.
But more and more, she resembles a lion-woman: her hungry iron gaze is trained on me, never wavering. Her eyes penetrate;
she is always prepared, always ready to pounce on the slightest vulnerability. When I stumble on the street she laughs: proof.
But when I slip into my clothes, and they hang a little looser, she pats my back and hands me an extra sweater, my lion self.
She is incomplete, a succubus: trigger-happy, toilet-mouthed, knife-wielding, blue and white and sometimes green in the face
from screaming, from telling me all I cannot have. When I manage to beat her down, tie her into a chair on the far side of
the room, get her to eat some food, she smiles her sanguine, toothless grin. She starves proudly, waits, like a saint, she
waits for death by fire or baptism.
—
This is when,
she spits, when it is three o'clock in the morning and I can't sleep from hunger.
She is holy, wholly my own, and when I reach out to touch her image in my face, she hovers an inch or so before my skull.
Then she flicks her tongue out at me like the enraged lion she is; she snaps my fingers between her feline jaws; a barrage
of dead spiders, splinters of wood, and bone.
—
This is when I love you most.
No new method and no new discovery can overcome the difficulties that attend the wound of the heart,
In group today, after everyone commented on how I looked like shit, we were supposed to read our little essays about our families
but I'd forgotten mine, so when my turn came I said, "My dad died a long time ago." Then I told them about the time Dad tried
to teach me gymnastics.
Before that, all the girls had been complaining about their dads. Things were going "the Sylvia Plath way," as Susan used
to say. Walking out into the summer night, I heard Susan's high-pitched Scottish voice in my head and laughed out loud: "My
father had such high expectations of me, my father wanted me to be the perfect little girl, blah, blah, fucking blah. If every
woman adores a fascist, it's her own fault."
She claimed Sylvia Plath was the patron saint of anorexics and Electra-complexed women everywhere, but I've always sort of
liked her poetry. It's not often that you read someone's words, and their pain, which has been dead for decades, lives on
to give you a headache. I think there's something to be said for that.
I told the group about how, one day, Thomas seemed fixed on the idea that I should learn the perfect cartwheel. The fact that
I was a chubby uncoordinated child who preferred reading to gymnastics did not faze him. We were on the front lawn and I could
barely hold up my weight each time I did the turn. When I was upside down in the air, he held my legs.
"Straight!"
"Ow! Daddy!"
"Straighter!"
Then Holly came along. Holly, who could run before she could speak, Holly who could throw a baseball hard and fast and long;
who'd had the perfect backhand by age seven, who didn't have to be taught a thing about the physical world.
She couldn't get enough of him, and she lunged at his legs when he came in the door. He was the magnet she crawled to when
she could not walk and, when she could, his hands were the pinnacle of comfort. In my memories, she is always stroking them,
kissing them, somehow attached to them. They seemed, to my mother and I, twin beings, this man and his child.
But it would be fair to say that Holly's "disabilities" were counteracted by my growing brain, as our father's disdain for
fat and lazy women was rivalled only by his condemnation of stupid people.
Before he started growling at me for touching his things, before the screaming and fighting became the holding pattern of
our relationship, I used to tug the instruments out of his pockets as she shimmied up his back and rolled over his shoulders
when he came home from work. So certainly, together, we made the perfect daughter. Together, it seems, Holly and I can share
almost any man.