Skinny (3 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

The night before the campers would arrive, fourteen hours before I would meet Eden Bellham, I decided—no . . . I was compelled—to have my final meal. The Last Supper. Once the idea occurred to me—no . . . gripped my throat like strong fingers—I mumbled something to a few people about picking up some things at Walmart. Then I got into the car that had once been my father’s, buckled the seat belt that still had an extender on it, and drove to Melrose, the nearest town, to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet called Chinese Buffet.

The Chinese part was questionable; the buffet included pizza, spaghetti marinara, cream puffs, California rolls, and flan. Not that the details mattered to me. Three nights before, I’d eaten four pints of ice cream, and afterward couldn’t have named the flavor.

I gazed through the sneeze guard at the lo mein glistening beneath the heat lamps, at the unidentified meat shimmering in hot pink sauce.

And I began.

I heaped my plate high with egg rolls and pasta, fried balls of something masquerading as chicken, rice peppered with tiny green and orange cubes that represented peas and carrots. I barely heard the booth sigh when I sat, barely noticed the sticky, synthetic sensation on the backs of my thighs.

Chopsticks are supposed to aid dieters, to lend themselves to smaller bites. I loved chopsticks for the wrong reasons—the pleasing pinching, the length unobstructed by tines. I pulled a pair from its red paper sheath. I cracked it apart. And then I shoveled, stuffed, and filled. I chewed with my mouth open, gulping for air. I felt myself come loose from my body and drift above the table to watch. Rice flecked the front of my T-shirt.

I went back for seconds.

I went back for thirds.

I had brought a magazine—the kind that lobotomizes. I looked at celebrities in expensive jeans. I learned that one was dating another, that one was either pregnant or fat, that one had bought groceries in West Los Angeles. I felt grease and sauce make my chin slick, sweat bead at my hairline, and the heat of Chinese food emanate from my armpits.

I approached the buffet for a round of desserts. And then another. And then went back for more lo mein, remembering the inimitable first mouthful—the steaming, salty relief.

I didn’t stop until sickness spread its wings in my gut and reared its beefy head in my throat. I rested my elbows on the table, my hot face in my palms. I spoke silently to myself.

Don’t think about how fat you feel. You’re no fatter than you were an hour ago. You’re just full. You will digest. What were you supposed to do, skip dinner? Don’t think about your stomach swelling in your shorts. Don’t think about the tops of your thighs; it’s natural that they touch. Don’t think about how bloated your cheeks will feel in the morning. This will never happen again. Tomorrow will be the beginning.

CHAPTER SIX

Here’s what it’s like to want to be dead: a maze of discomfiting observations.

My body, on the brink of decay, will finally be thin.

When an average-looking woman dies young, everyone pretends she was beautiful.

One should die in something slimming.

Death will be the ultimate appetite suppressant.

For six months after I killed my father, until I discovered Eden Bellham, until I decided to go to fat camp, this was where my head was.

According to medical professionals, my father’s assassin was a transmural myocardial infarction, a heart attack that destroys three layers of tissue on the myocardial wall. What a gift that fancy words exist to deflect culpability.

The rift between my father and me, the rift that led me to a girl named Eden Bellham, and eventually to Camp Carolina, had begun four years before, when my parents came to New York to see me and meet my new boyfriend.

“You will love my dad,” I told Mikey. “Everyone loves my dad.”

I imagined Mikey cracking jokes and my father laughing his wheezy, pink-faced laugh. I imagined them drinking scotch together. I imagined my dad giving him a man hug and saying, “I always wanted a son,” or, “These women . . .” (waving his arm at my mother and me) “ . . . they don’t know how to drink.”

I imagined Mikey smiling approvingly, telling me, “Your dad’s an all right guy,” the way he did on the rare occasion when he met someone he deemed truly cool.

When we gathered for dinner at a seafood restaurant, my father, who always had the loudest laugh in the room, whose hugs were magnificent and crushing, sat in his suit coat and yarmulke, frowning, sipping whiskey on ice. When I remember that night, I remember his yarmulke—a black spot centered on his scalp like a pupil.

For the first decade of my life, my father’s Judaism was incidental. But when I was eleven years old, he quit his job as an insurance litigator, became a high school history teacher, got involved with the Lubavitcher Chasids, and started spending time at the Chabad House. Without explanation, he hung a framed photograph of the Lubavitcher rabbi in our living room. He began running errands for the rabbi. He cleaned the rabbi’s car. He bought tefillin and wrapped it around his arm every morning when he woke up.

Other things did not change. For example, although he frequently invited me to the Chabad House, he never forced me to go. He chose to ignore the kosher laws and continued to eat bacon double cheeseburgers and popcorn shrimp. To me, his system of practicing Judaism seemed a nonsensical combination of stringent and dismissive, a vaguely annoying hobby that had little to do with me.

But now I sensed, without much evidence, a connection between his yarmulke and the way he spoke to Mikey. “Where do you see yourself in ten years?” he asked.

“Dad!” I said.

“See myself?”

“Yes. What’s your ten-year plan?”

Mikey shifted in his seat, inching closer to me. “Well, I don’t know.” He looked at my face. “I guess I’ll be doing what I’m doing now.”

“Which is?”

“Comedy?”

“Comedy. Ah.” My father swirled the ice in his glass, having managed, somehow, in the space of a second, to make “comedy” sound absurd, effete, as if Mikey had said, “In ten years, I plan to be dancing and spinning in a meadow.”

“Well, I’m a comedian,” Mikey said unhelpfully.

I looked at Mikey, whom I had up until this moment considered the embodiment of masculinity, the most attractive man I was sure I’d ever meet. Why had I never noticed how unkempt his thick black hair was? Who went to dinner with his new girlfriend’s parents without taking the time to comb his hair? Were his
fingernails
dirty? And why did he always look in restaurants as if he didn’t know how to be comfortable in restaurants, as if civilized life were beneath him, as if he’d been born to dine on garlic knots from Brooklyn pizzerias?

I looked at my mother, who was, as usual, tiny beside my father. I looked at our matching meals: sashimi, garden greens, no dressing. Why couldn’t she stick up for me? Why couldn’t she say, “Alan, leave the kids alone”? Why couldn’t she change the subject?

The next night, against my better judgment, I took my parents to one of Mikey’s shows. By then, I’d seen Mikey perform five or six times, so I was aware that, like any new comic, sometimes he wooed the crowd, and sometimes he left them cold. But back then, I could still sit in the audience and feel an ache between my legs just from watching his hand grip the microphone. I wanted to show him off.

That night, his audience was filled with drunk people who wouldn’t pay attention. He couldn’t contain the heckler in the front row. He tripped over his words. One by one, his jokes fell flat.

The next morning, when I met my parents at a diner before they left the city, my father said, “Gray, if I ask you a question, will you promise to answer honestly?”

“I guess.”

“The picture in our house of the rabbi . . . you remember it?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Have you ever dreamt about him?”

“Huh?”

“Alan . . . ” my mother said.

“Sometimes he appears to young women,” my father said, “in their dreams.”

“Gross,” I said.

“When they’re about to make the mistake of marrying out of the faith.”

I looked to the front of the diner, to the door and the sunlight on it. It was a beautiful day. A man climbed up from underground, his arms full of swollen trash bags. I felt how heavy they were. I looked back at my father. “Is this a joke? Are you joking?”

“Gray,” he said, “we do not approve.”

My mother, hunched in the corner of the booth in a purple tracksuit, blew daintily into her white mug of tea and didn’t look up.

“I love him,” I said, and I felt a little jolt in my chest. I had never told Mikey that I loved him. We hadn’t known each other long. But suddenly, it seemed urgent that my father understand: “I love him,” I said, with more energy this time, and in repeating it, I was making it true, making a fortress of Mikey and me that my father couldn’t penetrate.

My father cut into his omelet. Cheese oozed out in a sickening, oily spurt. “You’ll want children, won’t you? Then what? Who will support them?”

“What is this, the 1950s?” I said, but I could hear my voice break, feel my throat tightening. I brushed away tears, filled with shame. “I love him,” I said again, and this time it felt like a fact. I hated my father. I loved Mikey. Nothing had ever been clearer. “He loves me.” Stupidly, helplessly, I added, “We love each other.” I pushed my untouched breakfast away, scrambled egg whites and vegetables that shone menacingly with grease.

“Look. Gray.” My father wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin and leaned toward me. “There are many people . . . artists . . . who want to make it, but don’t. Not everyone makes it.”

“People can’t just give up on their dreams,” I said.

It was perversely gratifying, getting behind these clichés. No one could stop
me
from loving and dreaming.

“In real life,” my father said, spearing a few hash browns with his fork, “
most
people have to give up on their dreams. Do you know how competitive stand-up comedy is? He’s no Lenny Bruce. He’s no George Carlin. And what are
you
going to do, spend your life lolling around in seamy comedy clubs?”

“Guess so,” I said. “We’ll even
live
in comedy clubs, because we’ll be too poor to pay rent. One day, we’ll raise our children in them.”

“Now, Gray,” my mother said, but my father cut her off.

“You might think you don’t care about money,” he said, “but you will. Eventually, everyone cares about money.”

“You gave up law to pursue
your
dream!” I said. “And it’s not like Mom’s slaving away at some corporate job.”

My mother worked as a floral designer, her slim fingers cutting tulip stems at an angle, accenting bouquets of white roses with hyacinth.

“We’re not rich,” my father said slowly, “but my salary is steady. I always put food on the table.”

“So what are you suggesting? Should Mikey be just like you? I’m sure a steady salary has made you blissfully happy.”

My father jerked back like I’d spit in his eye. The strange thing was, until that moment, I’d never thought much about my father’s happiness. He laughed a lot. But he often made mean jokes at the expense of others. He often aimed to make people feel as if his life were more fulfilling than theirs. I looked at his belly inside his button-down shirt. It strained against the plastic buttons and touched the metal edging of the table. I understood, uncomfortably and suddenly, that my father was unhappy. And at the same time, I realized that I must have known for years. How else would I have been able to say what I’d just said? You don’t always realize it until you’re under attack: You are intimately acquainted with your loved ones’ weak spots.

My father’s lips tightened into a knot. He huffed heavy breaths through his nose. When he opened his mouth, I thought he was going to yell. But instead, his voice was measured. “Mikey isn’t Jewish.”

“So?”

He stared at me, narrowing his eyes, blurring me into nothing. I stared back. I didn’t speak. And that was when he exploded.

“What the hell is the
matter
with you, Gray?
‘So?’
Are you a
child
?
That’s
all you have to say?
‘So?’
” He paused, panting, and gripped the edge of the table with both hands. “Do you know the first
thing
about Judaism? How your people have
suffered
?
Do
you? Answer me! You don’t have any idea about anything!” he shouted.

I could feel strangers’ heads all around us, swiveling. My father would have loved for me to pound my fists on my plate, upsetting the silverware; to scream until my lungs ached; to kick him under the table. So I didn’t react. I sat motionless. All I could feel was my heart, buried deep inside me, panicked.

My father’s breathing sounded labored. Finally, he leaned back in the booth, spent, balled up his napkin, and threw it on his plate. “I should have done better,” he said, shaking his head. “I gave you too much leeway. You should have been wearing long skirts. I should have started years ago making
shidduch
for you.”

“I’m out of here,” I said, sliding out of the booth.

My mother said, “Gray, don’t go. Let’s talk.”

“You haven’t said a word,” I said. “I’m done talking.”

I left my parents in the diner. I thought,
Mikey will make it as a comedian.
I thought,
I am about to change my life.

I never told Mikey about that fight, but I didn’t have to. He knew he’d bombed—onstage and in person—with his girlfriend’s parents.

Back then, he was getting only three or four spots a week, many of which were open mics. Humiliatingly, open mics cost him five dollars a pop. For his other spots, he was forced to “bark,” selling tickets in the street for several hours before a show to earn seven minutes of stage time. It was a thankless and demoralizing cycle: “Until I get good, I won’t get work. But if no one will give me work now, if I can’t even get onstage to practice, how am I supposed to get good?”

He studied comedians on HBO. He sat in the back of the Comedy Cellar and watched the regulars perform under the low ceiling that made them look larger than life. “Gray,” he would say, “these guys have been doing comedy for twenty-five years. I
can’t
wait twenty-five years for a break.” He chain-smoked. He angrily tended bar on the day shift. He gripped his pen like a weapon and wrote vitriolic jokes. Sometimes he would say to me, “Tell me if you think this is funny.” He would run the heel of his hand up the spine of his open notebook and read to me from its pages.

Sometimes I thought his ideas were funny; other times, I worried. He wrote one joke, for instance, about his girlfriend having too many pairs of shoes. How could he not know that was a cliché? And if he didn’t know, didn’t that mean he was, like my father had predicted, never going to make it? And if he never made it, would I one day have to tell my father, “You were right. Mikey didn’t make it. And like you warned, I now want money and a baby”?

“I don’t think that’s so funny,” I said about the shoes.

Mikey’s face crumpled a little, but then he sighed. “You’re right. It’s hack.” We were on the 6 train, heading to one of his “bringer” shows—a racket even more degrading than a standard open mic, requiring comics to contribute seven friends to the audience in exchange for five minutes of stage time. The subway was crowded. All around us, people sat staring blankly at the floor or reading the same best-sellers. We stood, sharing a pole, gazing at each other. “I think I just wanted to write something about you. I missed you today when you were at work.”