Skinny Read online

  We ate and ate until we had to lie down, undo buttons, breathe through our mouths. But when everyone left, I kept eating. When I returned to New York, I kept eating. The first time Mikey saw me do it, he stared. “I’ve never seen you so . . . hungry.”

  “You’re not allowed to say that,” I told him. “It’s like calling me fat.”

  “I didn’t call you fat. There’s a long road between hungry and fat. Want to go out for wings?”

  I shook the nearly empty cereal box I was holding. “Okay,” I said.

  “Holy shit, are you serious? I get to take my girl out for wings? Can we go to a Yankees game?”

  “No.”

  “Want to watch porn?”

  “I want . . .”

  “What? Tell me. This is awesome!”

  “I don’t know,” I said. My head was filled with noise. I held it between my palms. “I guess I just want chicken.”

  We went to an all-you-can-eat buffalo wings joint on Avenue B. Mikey finished long before I did, and then watched me intently as I gnawed chicken meat off bone after bone, the spicy sauce searing my lips. He finally set his beer mug down and said, “Am I allowed to ask if you’re pregnant?”

  This was one of many firsts we would have in the ensuing months: the first time I ate more than he did, the first time he didn’t get to finish my dinner, the first time I told him not to touch me, the first time he noticed I’d gone a week without laughing, the first time he watched me clutch my hair in my fists and scream, “I just want to shut off my brain!”

  Soon after the day we ate wings, I began to hide my eating from Mikey. As far as he knew, I was the old Gray again—counting calories, steaming my green beans. As far as he knew, I was still the girl he’d met outside Big Apple Comedy Club.

  All of this led to another first: I began to detest my boyfriend. How could he let this happen to me? After all I’d done for him, couldn’t he wire my jaw shut, or lock me up and feed me nothing but water? Couldn’t he scoop me up into his arms and carry me to safety?

  I did not want to live with this hunger. Quite plainly, I wanted to die.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Before I stuffed my body into my bathing suit, walked to the canteen, presented myself to my colleagues, and committed to a two-month diet, I drove through the Carolina Academy entrance, past the engraved wooden sign that said CAROLINA ACADEMY and the construction paper sign taped to it that said CAMP CAROLINA, LEWIS TELLER’S BRAND-NEW, REVOLUTIONARY WEIGHT-LOSS CAMP FOR CHILDREN. I saw a boarding school reminiscent of a farm—green fields, lush trees, and white wooden buildings.

  Lewis flagged me down from the dirt path that looped through campus and directed me to the girls’ dorm, where I would spend the next two months on the third floor with the oldest girls (one floor above the intermediate girls, two floors above the youngest girls; the boys would stay in another dorm on the other side of campus). I hauled my belongings up to my dorm room, plugged in my window fan, and lay on the pin-striped mattress.

  Someone knocked, and then pushed the door open. The girl who stood on the threshold was as tall as a man, with hips that filled the door frame. She had the face of a baby, her skin smooth and pale, her eyes wide and black, and a mass of red hair sprouting, thriving, from her part. Although she was dressed in gym clothes—spandex shorts, a loose tank top over a sports bra—she shimmered like a showgirl. When she smiled, a dainty stitching of white scars spread beneath her lower lip. She said that her name was Sheena, like the Ramones song “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker,” and did I know who the Ramones were?

  “Yes,” I said, “I know the Ramones.” I didn’t give her more than that. I hadn’t come here to make friends.

  She said that she was my co-counselor, that she was such a mature nineteen, Lewis hadn’t minded putting her in charge of seventeen-year-old campers. “I’m going to lose one hundred pounds,” she said. I believed everything she told me. But when she said, “You’re skinny,” I looked down at my body and saw all of the imperfect pieces of it.

  I wasn’t skinny—not compared to what I’d been a year earlier, and even then . . . no. No, I had never been skinny. Not compared to the models who wandered around SoHo, their legs like drinking straws from the tops of their boots to the short hems of their shorts. Not compared to my mother, who, when ordering in restaurants, always asked for half of her meal to be boxed up before it left the kitchen; who sometimes ate a quarter of a block of low-fat tofu (uncooked, unseasoned) for dinner, carving slimy bites off with the edge of her fork.

  Mikey liked to tell me that untying my bathrobe was like opening a present on Christmas morning, but Mikey was always my most fervent cheerleader. I was average, really, with a face that could have belonged to anyone—a slight bump on the bridge of my nose, raised cheekbones that let me get away with “exotic” (although people more often said I looked “foreign”).

  My father’s eyes had been as dark as secrets. Mine had my mother’s green mixed in. My hair was brown and wispy like his. My smile was protracted by dimples like his. My skin, like his, tanned before it burned. When I walked, my toes cracked like his. When I lay in bed reading, my feet rocked like his. In the past year, I had gained fifteen pounds, adding a roll to my stomach, a quiver to my thighs.

  I told Sheena, “I’m not skinny.”

  “Compared to me. I’m spread out like a cold supper.” Sheena grabbed a handful of her own ass. Then she held one of her ankles, folding her leg in half, stretching her quad muscles. She wore flip-flops and orange toenail polish. A tattoo on her wide right thigh said Beautiful in purple script. “It’s fine. I know I’m beautiful. Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “I do.”

  “Is he rich?”

  “No. He’s a comedian.”

  “Are you rich?”

  I laughed.

  She dropped her foot and leaned in the door frame. “People from New York are usually rich. Everyone tells me I should be a comedian. But I’m not really funny. I just have a lot of presence.” She looked around my empty room. “I broke up with my boyfriend a few months ago. He was abusive.”

  This made me sit up. I liked when strangers turned their hearts inside out, proudly presenting their auricles.

  “It sucks because I’ll never love anyone that much ever again.” Sheena examined the fiery split ends of her hair.

  I felt her words in my stomach, like food I might get sick on. “Sure you will.”

  “Probably not.” She flipped her hair over her shoulder.

  “There are plenty of people to love.”

  “Wouldn’t be the same. Nothing’s the same as your first love. We used to sneak into swimming pools together. In a rich neighborhood. We swam in eleven pools one night. We figured out how to get in without splashing. I don’t care. At the end of the summer, when I’m, like, a hundred sixty pounds—a hundred sixty’s not bad for me; I don’t want to lose my ass or anything—when I’m a hundred sixty pounds, I’ll go find him.” Sheena looked past my head and smiled vaguely, conjuring an image in the bright, hot air. Her eyes were so young. A child’s eyes. Here was a person who still saw reason to shape her life around proving something. She would lose weight for the man she loved.

  “You don’t have to do that,” I said.

  “Do what?”

  “Well, who am I to say, but . . .”

  “Are you going to tell me some girl power shit?”

  “You seem so interesting. And you’re pretty. I would kill for hair like yours. Why hang your life on one hook, you know?”

  “I’m my own hook,” Sheena said, knotting her arms over her chest.

  “Right. Good. Because it’s just . . . he could move away.”

  “He’s already moved away. He’s in jail.”

  “He could go blind,” I said. “He could die.” I pressed both hands to my lips to close them.

  “I hope he shits razor blades,” Sheena said. “But if he’s out of jail by the end of the summer, I’ll run into him on purpose. And he’ll be like, ‘I ca
n’t believe I screwed that up.’ You know? Like, ‘How could I have let her go?’ ”

  “Good idea,” I said. “He’ll kick himself.”

  Sheena tipped her head to one side and squinted her black eyes at me. But I wasn’t patronizing her. No one would have dreamt of condescending to Sheena.

  “You’ll look gorgeous,” I said, smiling.

  Sheena nodded. “I will.” She smiled back, her fingers moving over her scars. “I’ll be skinny,” she said. “I’ll be happy.”

  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.