Skinny (19 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

That night, at a sports bar in Melrose, Bennett and I drank light beer from the taps as half a dozen televisions flickered around us and the occasional
tock
of cue to pool ball punctuated the din. We sat turned toward each other on our bar stools, Bennett’s hand on my knee, my knee and thigh bare below the hem of the black minidress I’d recently bought at the mall. But for the first time, I wasn’t leaning into him, trying to hook his eyes to mine.

“Feeling better, Angeline?” Bennett asked as I drained my second beer and ordered a third.

“The lack of professionalism is disturbing,” I said. “Lewis is a joke. I can’t even do my job because there’s no support.”

“I support you.”

“How so?”

“Hey now. That’s not nice.”

“Well? You didn’t even come outside today. You stayed in the cafeteria. You didn’t say a word. I think the whole camp knows what Whitney and Miss are up to, and no one’s going to do anything about it. I think Nurse even knows. But everyone’s afraid of those girls. And of Sheena.”

“Sheena’s okay. She’s just a kid.”

“Why is a ‘kid’ my co-counselor?”

“Because this is summer camp.”

“You should fire her.”

“No one’s getting fired. For what?”

“I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but I loathe her. She’s up to something with those girls.”

“That won’t fly. ‘Sheena, go home. Angeline
loathes
you.’ ”

“No one will fire her. No one wants to do the right thing,” I said, and then I cringed. Who was I to talk about right and wrong? I wanted to get rid of Sheena not because of her unprofessional behavior, but because I had disclosed too much to her, and I worried that she was ruthless.

“If you think about it,” Bennett said, “in the grand scheme of things, none of this really matters all that much. You ever think about that when you’re upset? How compared to something really bad, it’s nothing?”

I stared at Bennett. His eyes were wide and blue. In a lineup, I would have easily identified Bennett’s arms, but his eyes looked like many people’s eyes. They were mass-produced eyes. Flyover state eyes. The largest demographic eyes.

“Did you come up with that all by yourself?” I asked.

“What?”

“That philosophy.” I slid off my bar stool, teetering on high heels.

“What philosophy? Where are you going?” Bennett grabbed my hand.

I looked at the rows of bottles behind the bartender. I looked to the pool table, to the exit sign, to the jukebox in the corner, to the TV screens boxing me in. There was nowhere I wanted to go. I wanted to jump out of myself and run.

“Bathroom.”

“Are you hungry? I could order some cheese sticks or something.”

“Fried food? Are you serious?”

“Out in the real world,” Bennett said, chuckling, “people eat cheese sticks now and then. Remember?”

I pressed my palm to my stomach. “Stop offering me food. That won’t make anything better.”

Bennett raised his hands as if I might shoot. “I never—”

“Just. Stop.” I snapped my purse up off the bar and stomped to the bathroom.

The lights inside were fluorescent, merciless. The full-length mirror was incongruously, glaringly clean. There I was. A girl with a suntan. A girl who needed a haircut. A girl in a desperate dress. I set my purse on the tile floor and smoothed the dress in the front. I was embarrassed to see how visible my panty lines were through the spandex.

God, I wasn’t even that thin. I wasn’t as skinny as I’d been believing I was. How I had been relishing the delusion of regressing, of becoming new, of reversing time. I’d been walking around believing that my arms were bony, that my clavicles were standing at attention, that my legs were skeletal, my ass nonexistent.

I turned sideways. My ass existed. How shameful that I’d been imagining myself skinny, acting skinny, when in fact I was only skinny compared to fat people. The Camp Carolina population had become my point of reference. When Nurse told me that I needed to eat more, I lapped up her concern instead of looking at the facts.

Fact number one: Nurse was obese.

Fact number two: Nurse was surrounded by obese people.

But. But! It was true that there was less of me. It was true that I was smaller than I’d ever been in my adult life. I imagined Mikey grabbing a handful of my ass, the way he often did. “This ass of yours,” he always said. I imagined him seeing me in a couple of weeks and wondering,
Where is the rest of you? Where is the part that you used to let me love?

When I got back to Bennett, when I sat on the stool and heard it squish beneath my weight, I was seeing my body,
really seeing
my body: There was still a roll in my stomach—diminished, yes, but there. I drank my beer and felt the roll swell.

“Please tell me what I did,” Bennett said with a sigh. He inspected his thumbnail, then tore off the cuticle with his teeth.

“Nothing. Don’t worry about a thing.”

“Don’t be like that.”

“Why should I have to explain everything?”

“I would gladly stick up for you. How can you say I wouldn’t?”

“Well, you didn’t today.”

“I wasn’t even involved. How could I have? I wasn’t even
with
y’all.”

“You could have come outside.”

“I didn’t know what was going on. What are you so angry about?”

“Stop asking me that. I’m telling you what I’m angry about.”

Funny how all lovers’ quarrels resemble one another, how the fight I was having with Bennett felt like the fights I had with Mikey, how I watched myself run for the same arsenal, watched myself select the weapons I hadn’t seen in months, brush off the dust, and take aim like a pro. Funny how Bennett sounded to me like Mikey with a different accent, a different vocabulary.

Until he reminded me that he wasn’t Mikey. He wasn’t the man who had been loving me for years, who believed in an airbrushed version of me.

“I’ve had it,” he said, rising abruptly from his stool and fishing his wallet from his back pocket. “I try to treat you right, but you know what, Gray?”

I set my beer down and looked up at him. “Gray” sounded harsh coming from his lips, like chewing-tobacco spit. “What?” I said. “Tell me. Tell me about how you’ve had it with me. Don’t you think I’ve had it with
you
?”

“I haven’t
done
anything.”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t make demands of you. I don’t expect things from you.”

“We’re fucking!” I said too loudly. “We’re allowed to expect things from each other.”

“God, you’re foulmouthed sometimes. It’s that Yankee upbringing.”

“Don’t start on my upbringing. You know nothing about it. You’re being racist.” I sounded like Whitney.

“You’re going to run back to your life in New York in a couple of weeks,” Bennett said. “I’ll just be some redneck you had some fling with some summer. You think I don’t know that?”

“You’re
making
this a fling. You create distance between us on purpose.”

Bennett threw cash on the bar and stuffed his wallet back into his pocket. “I don’t have to fight with you. I don’t have to listen to you bitch at me, and I don’t have to defend myself. You’re not my wife. Don’t sit there and tell me I owe you things.”

He picked up his glass and drained his beer. He was gorgeous. He was a man with blue eyes and a perfect body in flip-flops and cargo shorts, in a crisp white button-down shirt and a Hurricanes cap. I looked at the lines in his face and I loved them. I loved the memories in those lines that I would never be a part of—the best soccer game of his life, the day he fell for Camille, the first time he saw his baby’s toes.

Bennett pulled his keys out of his pocket, gave them a quick toss, and caught them effortlessly in his palm. Then he turned from me without another glance and walked right out of the bar.

I watched the door for a few moments. When it finally opened, two women walked in wearing shirts that displayed their bellies. They were thinner than I was. They had fake tans. Their skin looked toasted.

A man beside me said, “Not too bright, that guy. Leaving a beautiful woman like that.” I looked at him. He was two hundred years old. He spoke into his scotch. His head was bald; his spine so hunched, his body was a comma. The sight of him, the reminder of what eventually happened to every living thing, even the most beautiful living things, made me so depressed, I wanted to run outside and jump in front of a speeding car. Bennett would kneel over my body—lifeless, still imperfect. He would be grief-stricken. He would weep and hyperventilate.

I touched the backs of the man’s fingers. “Thank you for calling me beautiful,” I said.

What a dumb daydream—getting hit by a car. I didn’t mean it. Not really. Months had passed since I’d longed for death. Besides, if I died, Bennett wouldn’t care for me any more than he already did. Or maybe he would for a few weeks, but in time I’d become a distant memory—a weird thing that once happened to Bennett. In the end, no one would sob, “If only Bennett had given her enough love, she would still be alive.” Instead they would say, “Wow, she must have been really fucked up.”

I stood and crossed the bar. I opened the door and stepped outside. The night was hot. I could never get used to summer nights. I was always expecting them to disappoint me, to suddenly turn cold.

Bennett was sitting in the driver’s seat of his car. His window was down. I stood at the door and held the base of the window frame. Bennett’s keys were stabbed into the ignition, but the engine was silent. Keeping his eyes straight ahead, he said, “You know I would never have left you here. Right?”

“Of course you wouldn’t have. Southern gentlemen don’t leave their ladies at sports bars.”

He almost smiled. Then he said, “Sometimes I feel like I’m taking care of someone else’s car. I’m watching your boyfriend’s car for the summer so it doesn’t get scratched up.”

“You’ve scratched me up pretty good,” I said. I touched his face. I took his earlobe between my thumb and forefinger, the perfect skin of it. A child’s earlobe. I leaned in and kissed it. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I picked that fight.”

“Why do women pick fights?”

“To get to the other side.”

Bennett turned to look at me. “Of what?”

I withdrew my hand. “Never mind.”

“What happened to fun? Isn’t this supposed to be fun?”

“It is fun.”

“Is it? You’re sort of crazy.”

“What kind of crazy?”

“It’s like you’re . . . I don’t know, in love with yourself.”

“Self-absorption is different from self-love.”

“I don’t know what the hell that means.”

“Self-absorption has more to do with self-loathing.”

“Whatever you say, Angeline.”

“Well,” I said, “anyway.
Someone’s
got to be in love with me!”

I saw myself with a microphone, onstage at a comedy club, saying, “
Someone’s
got to be in love with me.” I could practically hear the silence of the dark and restless crowd.

Bennett opened his car door and got out. He took me in his arms and pressed me up against the car. He pushed the hem of my dress to my hips. No one could have seen us. Or maybe they could have. It didn’t matter. I wrapped my arms around Bennett’s neck and smelled the summery scent of him. He lifted me off the ground. One of my shoes fell and plopped on the asphalt. I pushed the bare sole of my foot up his shin, into the leg of his shorts. I exhaled. It was still summer. The stars winked at us. The nearby traffic sighed for us. The temperature held its breath and promised to hold it as long as it could.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Dear Fat People,

Don’t judge me. Don’t you dare judge me. If you were thin, you would make the same mistakes; you would have more room in your life, in your personal space, in your clothing, to make mistakes. You probably wouldn’t even call them mistakes. You would be having so much fun shrinking, and so much fun making the things you used to call mistakes.

Mistakes are rationed. You use yours up on your daily food choices, your daily commitment to a sedentary life. If you lived healthily, if your step had a spring to it, if you picked daintily at your fruit salad instead of scarfing five pastries for breakfast, you could do things like sleep with a man who was wrong for you just because you felt like it. You could walk around his room naked while he lounged in bed and watched you. You could pretend you had no idea he was watching until he said, “Your body is a work of art.” (He would not mean Rubens’s art.)

You could half-smile and say, “Thank you,” as if you heard this so often, it was predictable.

You could wear his pale blue button-down with nothing underneath.

You could stand naked in his giant shoes.

You would no longer have to settle for comfort over excitement; for contentment over beautiful, reckless unrest. Don’t you want to live to the very edge of life? Don’t you want to live the way everyone’s afraid to? Don’t you know, deep down, that when you are doing what the world calls stupid or selfish—hurting someone for the sake of your lust, loving someone who doesn’t love you, loving with your whole self with no regard for consequences, generally ignoring the reality of consequences—you are actually alive?

Be honest with yourself for once. This is no way to live—backpacking through Europe one summer, and then holding a funeral for your youth. This is no way to live—surrounded by a fence, your refrigerator stuffed. This is no way to live—as if sex is something that other people do. This is no way to live—sitting in a comfortable chair, eating doughnuts beside some person who makes you feel big and numb.