Skinny (8 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I should explain how I got to camp. After reading about Camp Carolina on Eden’s blog, I e-mailed Lewis my résumé, telling him that obesity ran in my family, that although I didn’t have relevant work experience, per se, fat was personal to me. Plus, I was enthusiastic; I could think out of the box; I was a hard worker. I told him I would do anything he needed. He hired me without even a phone interview.

And just like that, I felt alive again. My despair released me, like a tight wool scarf unfurling from my neck. It wasn’t death I’d wanted anyway, I realized, just some alternative to what life had become.

Now I had it. Of course, I was still eating. Eating and eating, ceaselessly eating. The eating got worse as the winter wore on, but I clung to its expiration date. When summer came, I would go to camp. Compared to the campers, I would be thin. And then Eden and I would be together, filling up not on food, but on each other. I would gain Eden’s confidence and lose fifteen pounds. I would confess to her what I’d done to our father. She would forgive me. He would forgive me. I would be skinny. I would be happy.

Our sister bond would form the way one would in a movie. Eden would catch me in the right light, and glimpse the family resemblance in my eyes, or around my mouth. She would reach out her hand to me, her tears mirroring mine. “I always felt that something was missing,” she would stage-whisper, “and all along it’s been you.”

Sometimes this daydream made me sigh with contentment, even as the eating persisted. Sometimes when I ate, I thought of Eden, imagining our hands moving simultaneously, mechanically, from plate to mouth, plate to mouth.

I told Mikey and anyone else who cared that I was going to camp to help obese children. I was going to help their hearts, so they wouldn’t wind up like my father.

When June arrived, I took the Chinatown bus from the Lower East Side to Boston for my father’s unveiling. Although only a year had elapsed since his death, the house was unfamiliar. Gone were the days of my mother’s wish to “crawl into a hole.” She had found unforeseen energy, and become an atypical widow: She hadn’t kept her husband’s clothes hanging, disembodied, in his closet; his shoes, untied, lined up by the front door. Within weeks of shivah, she’d had a Goodwill truck come to the house. A team of cleaning people. My father’s Sears catalog armchair, which she’d always hated (“A chair filled with two decades of my husband’s flatulence!” she used to say. “This adds something to our living room?”), had finally gone to the dump. She had replaced all the bedding. She had even repainted the shutters.

We drove twenty miles from home to leave pebbles on his new headstone. The cemetery was in Lexington, where my father had once taken me in the middle of the night to stand on cool grass and watch the reenactment of the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

“Do you remember that?” my mother asked, as we made our way through the cemetery. “You were so little. Dad scooped you out of bed and brought you here in your nightgown.”

It was hard for me to imagine it—my father and I that close, my head resting on his shoulder. All I remembered were the gunshots, women in bonnets kneeling beside fallen soldiers, screaming theatrically into the dawn. And I remembered going out for breakfast afterward, my father ordering us both pancakes topped with ice cream. This was back when I still loved pancakes and ice cream without complication.

My mother and I stood at my father’s stone. “Gray has decided to go to fat camp,” my mother told it. Then she turned to me, as if my father had just yelled, “Susan! Stop her!” She took my hand. Her fingers were cool and small, the bones as thin and snappable as uncooked spaghetti. She looked worried, as if she were seeing me for the first time and she wasn’t sure she liked what she saw. Her black pants were too big, her white silk top wrinkled. She was wearing too much blush and blue eyeliner that looked all wrong. She had aged visibly in the last year, her body now withered, rather than delicate; her hair dyed too light a shade of brown, her skin as fragile-looking as the paper of a cocktail umbrella.

“Why
have
you decided to go to fat camp?” she asked.

What could I say? I had wicked secrets. I almost spoke them, almost let the ground around us absorb them, as it absorbed the nutrients of corpses.

“Is that what they call it?” my mother asked. “Fat camp? Is that politically correct?”

I released her hand and dropped to my knees. With my finger, I traced the letters of my father’s name. alan lachmann. “Dad,” I said. I ran my palms over the smooth, rounded top of the stone. “I want to honor your legacy. It’s my mission to shrink fat American children. This is my commitment to your memory, and my duty as a Jew.”

Behind me, my mother began to giggle. Which, of course, had been my real mission. But her laughter stalled quickly. She had become one of those people—who could indulge distraction, but never sustain it. That was the person I was afraid of becoming, one permanently crowded by a sadness that was always waiting, checking its watch, tapping its foot, sighing, “Are you done laughing yet? Are you through smiling? I’m still here, you know. I’m still everything.”

Later, when she hugged me good-bye outside my father’s once-shiny blue Cadillac, I let her pretend that she wasn’t crying.

“I only keep this car for you,” she said. “I’d like to get rid of it.”

“After this summer.”

“It’s probably not safe.”

“I’ll be fine, Mom.”

“Are you?” She held me away from her and looked me up and down. “Are you fine?”

“Of course,” I told her. “I’m fine.”

I drove back to New York in my father’s car, and then stuffed it to bursting, adding to its weight until the tires looked squashed. I couldn’t see out the back window.

“Why are you taking the vacuum cleaner?” Mikey asked, rubbing the back of his neck. “Why are you taking your printer? Your winter clothes?”

“Because at the end of the summer, we’ll look for a bigger apartment. We’ll move to Brooklyn or Queens. We need change,” I kept telling him. I’d been telling him for a year. Whenever he asked what I meant, I told him I hadn’t sorted out the details. “I’ll need a new job,” I said, cramming my down coat into the trunk.

“Queens?” He looked confused.

“Or Brooklyn.”

“What does that have to do with your printer?”

“I’m already packing,” I said. “May as well pack everything now. Have it in the car. Be ready to move.”

I wasn’t making sense. I often pretended that Mikey was dumb. He let me pretend; he usually preferred that to arguing with me.

“But what if I need to vacuum?” he asked, surveying the car.

“When do you vacuum?”

Mikey was shirtless in cargo shorts, his belly pooching over his waistband. His hair was a mess. I stopped myself from smoothing it down. He kissed me and asked, “Are you sure?”

“It’s only eight weeks.”

“Eight and a half.”

“It’s summer. It will fly.”

“You could put
me
on a diet.”

“Right.”

“You could padlock the fridge.”

“Very funny.”

“We could have energetic sex. Burns tons of calories. I’ve been reading up on it.”

There were two parking tickets under my windshield wiper. Mikey plucked them out and shoved them into his pocket. I climbed into the driver’s seat, started the car, and cranked down the window. The car was a billion years old. Foam stuffing sprouted from the seams of the leather seats. Each door had a knob lock that could be pulled up and pushed down. When I was a child, my father had driven me to school in this car.

Mikey put his face in the open window. I licked my finger and smoothed his cowlick. “I hate when you do that,” he said, but he didn’t flinch. His dark eyes were wet, the whites threaded with red. He kissed my cheek. “I know you’re keeping something from me.”

I started the ignition.

“Gray.”

“What?”

“Just promise you won’t do anything stupid.”

“Like what?”

“Like . . . I don’t know . . . drive on switchbacks at a hundred ten.”

“I’ve never done a hundred ten. I don’t think this car goes to a hundred ten.” I offered him my pinkie. He hooked it with his. “I promise.”

“If you die, I’ll sleep with your friends. I’ll take advantage of their grief. I’ll tell them it’s what you would have wanted.”

“Cute.”

Mikey stood and shook a cigarette from his pack. “Well,” he said. “Then think twice before speeding.” He put a cigarette between his lips, cupped one hand around the end of it, and flicked his lighter.

“I love you,” I said.

Mikey took a long drag and turned his head slightly to the right to exhale, keeping his eyes on my face. “I love you, too,” he said, shrugging. “You’re my girl.”

I pulled out of the parking spot and drove to Second Avenue. When I signaled left, my hands trembled. I saw Mikey in my side mirror, smoking and then disappearing when I turned. His arm was partly raised in a wave, his fingers splayed, his head cocked.

Michael Vincent Cosenza, forgive me. Deep down, I understood I wasn’t fooling you a bit.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The day after the first-week weigh-in, the whole camp rode in a bus to Adventure Gardens on the border of the Carolinas. My campers wanted to ride the Scorpion, the roller coaster whose tracks looped through the sky like fancy black script. Spider was running toward it, shrieking, leaping through the air. She stopped ahead of the rest of us to bend over and catch her breath, her hands on her knees. Then she rose and turned to us. “The fifth-highest roller coaster in the world is in Japan. Three hundred eighteen feet!”

“I’m dizzy,” Harriet told me.

Harriet was always dizzy. During any form of physical activity, she would tell me, “I’m dizzy,” and then sit down and look affronted. Harriet wore only black. She wore winter clothes under the North Carolina sun. She frequently folded into herself and tried to disappear. She rarely spoke, but when she did, she liked to say, “I hate myself.” Occasionally, she would say, “I wish I were dead.”

I would ask, “Do you want to go see Nurse?” and she would clench her fists and pucker her face. She often told me she hated me. “I hate you,” she would mutter through the thin lines of her lips.

Sometimes, I hated Harriet back. Other times, I thought of Mikey, because Harriet would have amused him. Since I’d arrived at camp, when Mikey called, he sounded far away. When he made the jokes he’d always made, the sensation that rose in my chest was the opposite of laughter, not a release, but an obstruction. He asked questions that felt impossible.

“How fat are they?”

“They’re all different. Jesus, Mikey, what do you think?”

“Are we talking, like, motorized wheelchair fat?”

“There’s one kid in a wheelchair. One of the boys. Everyone calls him Pudge.”

“Did you come up with that? It’s so inspired. It’s like naming a Dalmatian ‘Spot.’ No. It’s like naming a Dalmatian ‘Dalmatian.’ Pudge. I love that. Pudge!”

“The assistant director helps him up every morning while everyone’s walking around the loop.” I was careful not to name the assistant director, careful not to say,
Bennett who looks like art, Bennett who gave me a nickname, Bennett who barely knows me, but keeps me full like you never did
. “They do stretches together.”

“The loop. All this new lingo. You’re like a Trekkie. Do they have diabetes?”

“Can we talk about something else?”

“Sure. Do they have heart attacks?”

“Hilarious. Good-bye.”

It had become an exhausting game—this way in which we didn’t communicate.

Now I glanced at Harriet as we walked. “You don’t have to ride.”

“Yes, I do. Everyone is. They’ll make fun of me.”

“They won’t even notice.”

I was thinking they would, if anything, make fun of her for her persistent body odor. Already, I’d heard the girls complain that Harriet didn’t shower. Even Sheena had told me that I should talk with Harriet about hygiene. “I’d talk to her myself,” she told me, “but I don’t want to get near her.”

But what could I say to Harriet, the girl who slept in a sweatshirt, the biggest girl at camp, who was almost as wide as she was tall? This was the girl who had refused to go to weigh-ins on the first day in a bathing suit, who had cried in her room until I’d agreed to arrange a private weigh-in for her with Nurse. This was not a girl who would shower in a dorm bathroom.

“It’s not like anyone’s looking in her shower stall!” Sheena had said. “What does she think this is, a peep show? Good Lord. Let her rot. Let her grow mold.”

“I’ll either stay down with you or I’ll ride with you,” I told Harriet now as we neared the crowded metal ramp. “There aren’t many other options.”

The day was hot, the sun as invasive as stage lights. The air smelled like fried dough and powdered sugar—a rubber band snapping a wrist. No one was allowed to buy amusement park food—expensive chocolate-vanilla-swirl ice cream cones, pizza slices dotted with sausage, funnel cake, tapestry-size soft pretzels. At noon, the whole camp would meet in the parking lot and eat brown-bag lunches beside the bus.

“Look!” Spider called. She was standing at the end of the line for the Scorpion, pointing to a thick yellow stripe of paint on the ground. “I’m half in North Carolina, half in South Carolina. I exist simultaneously in two states.”

Eden stood next to her, straddling the line. “Cool,” she said.

I joined them. “It
is
possible to be in two places at once,” I said, but Eden lost interest and wandered toward Whitney.

Spider smiled at me. “I thought it was funny, Gray.”

“Thanks.”

“We’re on a precipice.”

“That’s right,” I said. “On the brink.”

As the line inched forward, I glimpsed the cardboard policeman holding a stop sign that read stop! to ride, you must be as tall as my sign. I looked for other warnings—a cardboard policeman holding his arms open:
To ride, you must be able to fit between my arms.
But my campers were not the only fat Adventure Gardens patrons. Surely, roller coasters accommodated fat people. Perhaps they were even designed for fat people. Fat people were everywhere. In front of us, an obese family of six shared one giant lollipop, passing it around, licking, passing, licking, passing. My stomach surged in the heat.

“I’m
dizzy
.”

“Harriet,” I said, “you act like it’s my fault. Like I’m tilting the earth.”

“Well, it wasn’t
my
idea to go on this stupid ride.”

She was standing close enough to me that I could smell her body, sour with old sweat, and feel humidity, like danger, coming off the layer of hair on her skin. I stepped away from her. She stepped closer.

Sheena, Miss, and Whitney were, as usual, clustered together. Sheena had doctored their red Camp Carolina shirts—cutting open the side seams, refastening them with safety pins, cutting each neck into a deep V. Eden had cut a slit up from the bottom of her own shirt, and then tied the two pieces together in the front, but it looked wrong. She was hovering around the edges of their threesome, searching for a hole she could worm through.

When the seven of us reached the front of the line, Whitney and Miss ran for the front car, Eden followed Sheena to the back car, and Spider ran to the second car to sit with a stranger. “This isn’t even a giga-coaster,” I heard her tell her seatmate. “It’s way under three hundred feet. I’d put it at two hundred. Two fifty. But I love all roller coasters. I want to go on the environmentally friendly roller coaster. It’s in Europe somewhere. You have to pedal to make it go. In
fact
,” she said, leaning forward toward Whitney and Miss, “it’s probably good for weight loss. I should tell Lewis. We could take an all-camp trip to Europe next summer. We could make it into the newspaper. ‘Campers at Weight-Loss Camp Pedal Pounds Away.’ ”

“Where would you like to sit?” I asked Harriet.

With both fists, Harriet clutched the hem of the black sweatshirt she wore over her red camp T-shirt. Her lips were pursed and she wheezed angrily through her nose, fogging her glasses, ignoring me.

The Scorpion was shiny black. Each car had two bucket seats, separated by a metal divider; a metal lap bar; and a harness that came down from the top to lock in each passenger’s upper body. I walked to the third car and sat in the far seat. A few seconds later, I felt Harriet swaying above me. I looked at her legs. The hair on her shins was full-grown, the skin peppered with tiny red scabs.

When the attendant, a skinny teenager with a bowl cut, wearing black leather cuffs around his wrists, came to lower my harness, he paused, scratched his ear, and pointed at Harriet. “She’s not gonna fit,” he told me.

I turned my head to look up at Harriet, who was standing on the metal floor of the car above her seat, turning in tight, frantic circles, like a dog assessing a patch of grass.

“How much you weigh?” the ride attendant asked. His voice rang through the air, echoing as if he’d yelled inside a canyon.

Harriet whimpered.

I got to my feet and looked ahead of us, behind us. But all of the other cars were full. The obese family was strapped in, their lollipop gone. Sheena and our other campers were strapped in. Everyone was waiting for the Scorpion to inch and jerk up the tracks. Only Harriet was too big. “Come on, Harriet,” I said. “I don’t want to ride. Let’s sit this one out. Will you go back down with me?”

Other passengers craned their necks to see us. Ahead, I saw Whitney and Miss laughing, their fingers splayed at their mouths.

I thought Harriet would step out of the car, back onto the metal platform. I thought she would run down the ramp to escape. Instead, she bent abruptly into a lumbering squat, trying to force her hips between the door of the car and the seat partition.

But the attendant had gauged the size difference correctly. “She’s not gonna fit,” he said again. He tapped my shoulder.

I wrenched away from him. “Stop it,” I hissed. “We’re getting off. Just go away.”

The attendant raised his hands as if I might shoot. “No need to get your Wranglers in a wad. Not my fault she’s over the weight limit.” He moved on to the next car and started lowering the harnesses. “But get on out,” he called back to me, “so I can let the next two people on.”

Harriet had switched tactics. She had turned sideways and was trying to wedge herself into the seat like a thick coin into a slot. I thought of her in her bed at home, eating an Entenmann’s cake under the covers. I had done that once some months before, alone in the apartment after work: eaten an entire Entenmann’s All Butter French Crumb Cake in bed. Then I’d gotten out of bed, gotten dressed, and run to the store for another one.

“Come on,” I said again to Harriet. I was suddenly very tired. I did not want this cameo in someone else’s trauma. I looked back at Eden’s car and saw the side of her head, the shiny black of her hair like a censor. She was talking to Sheena, who was looking away. Sheena should have been dealing with Harriet. I should have been sitting with Eden.

I took a step back from Harriet, out of this flashbulb image that would become an indelible memory; one she would, two decades down the road, relay to a blank-faced therapist, or to a lover while sharing a cigarette in the dark.

She paused in her efforts, looked at me with hate all over her face—in her slightly crooked glasses, her vaguely quivering lip, her clenched forehead—and then stood, finally, and fled. She ran to the ramp where she had to squeeze past the line of people, who would move aside, watch her pass, and imagine her eating under her covers.

I followed.

“Excuse me,” I said to each person. “Excuse me. Sorry. Excuse me.”

What was I apologizing for? I wasn’t fat. I had been acting like a fat person for just over a year. I had gained fifteen pounds. Okay. Sure. But I had fought it. I had gone for long runs by the East River. Some days, I had fasted, taking in nothing but water. I had shown
some
self-control. I touched my stomach. I touched each of my arms and felt the lightness in my step.

“Coming through. Please step aside,” I said like a security guard, or a person carrying a beer keg aloft.

At the bottom of the ramp, I followed Harriet to a bench. She sat with her legs spread, her elbows on her thighs. She took off her glasses and put her face in her palms. I sat beside her. The glasses sat between us, reflecting a cruel sun. I squinted up at the roller-coaster-car-size people screaming through the sky.

“Do you want to talk?” I touched Harriet’s coarse hair. It was so hot, I curled my fingers in.

When she didn’t answer, I understood. It was like times I’d lain in bed, sick, knowing I’d feel better if I ran to the bathroom to vomit, but too afraid of vomiting to do anything but lie there, squirming, hot and tangled in synthetic sheets, comfortable inside discomfort.