Skinny Read online

  “I have nothing to teach,” I’d told Lewis.

  Lewis had nodded. “Water aerobics.”

  KJ, another boys’ counselor, had offered to lifeguard and to teach swimming lessons.

  “Perfect!” Lewis had clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “A lifeguard!”

  KJ had scratched the bridge of his nose in a way that said, I am not, in fact, a lifeguard. “I have really quick reflexes.”

  Sheena had volunteered to teach yoga, even though the extent of her familiarity with it was a yoga DVD she had memorized. “If you don’t mind me teaching the same yoga poses all summer . . .”

  Lewis didn’t.

  Mia, one of the counselors for the youngest girls, was dubbed “the nutritionist.” Nutrition was her college major, but she was only twenty-one years old, not a nutritionist at all. Regardless, she would teach nutrition classes. “Not that they should listen to me!” she’d told Lewis, patting her soft stomach, her southern accent calling to mind tea parties, long white gloves, floral church dresses.

  “I once got so high, I ate a whole box of Pop-Tarts!” she said now.

  Mia’s arms were so fat, she didn’t have wrists—just creases separating hands from forearms. I felt a gulf between us. I had once eaten two boxes of Pop-Tarts sober, tearing one silver foil packet after another, not bothering with the toaster, feeling the sweet grains of sugar and cinnamon on my teeth.

  My father had been different. He’d always eaten not as if he were running a race, but methodically, thoughtlessly, all day long, the way other people breathed.

  Mia continued: “Don’t start, any of y’all. I know a future nutritionist has no business eating Pop-Tarts. But it’s my favorite breakfast. Can’t help it.” She pinched her own chubby cheek. “Evidently.”

  I never ate Pop-Tarts for breakfast. In the morning, I was always determined, waking to the thought, Today, I’ll get back on track. Sometimes I would fast until noon. Often, I stayed in control until nighttime. It was always later in the day that things would fall apart.

  As another counselor relayed a story about smoking a joint with a teacher, Bennett, the assistant director, appeared at the base of the steps.

  “Lord, he’s gorgeous,” Mia muttered. It was what she said every time she saw Bennett.

  Bennett was a personal trainer. He looked like a high school athlete, but with crow’s feet like crackle glazing around his blue eyes. His body was built exclusively of muscle. He wore soccer shorts and T-shirts with the sleeves cut off, revealing the rolling hills of his triceps and biceps and a red heart tattoo on his upper right arm with a name inside: Camille. Looking at Bennett made me clench my hands into fists, not because I wanted to touch him—not exactly. I wanted to press my fingers to the glass that should have encased him.

  He emerged from the dark as if he’d been cloaked in it. Someone said, “You scared me!”

  And then my longing to eat was gone. In its place was the thought that Bennett could have found me in the kitchen, could have turned on a light and caught me eating as if someone were timing me. I’d been caught once before—some months earlier in an East Village diner. I had ordered three entrées, and had begun to eat from all three, when two girls I knew from college walked in, pointed at me from the doorway, and rushed to my table.

  “Gray Lachmann!” they said together.

  They wanted to catch up, to tell me who had married whom. I didn’t invite them to sit. They kept glancing at the seat across from me, as if surely, at any moment, I’d no longer be alone.

  I wrapped my arms around my stomach and looked away from Bennett. But then he sat beside me.

  “Hey, Angeline.”

  I turned to him. “It’s Gray.” He smelled like summer and muscles. I looked at the simple curve of his ear. I told him again: “My name’s Gray.”

  “I’m all brushed up on what your name is.” Bennett leaned back on his elbows, his T-shirt stretching taut against the bulk of his chest. “What’s everyone doing?”

  Brendan said, “We’re telling high stories.”

  “What are high stories?”

  “Stories about getting high.”

  Bennett looked at me and grinned. I grinned back. In that moment, we were old together, sealed by the superiority of adulthood. Bennett had fourteen years on me. Forty-one, he had told me during staff training, laughing, as if it were preposterous that he, Bennett Milton, could have entered middle age.

  “Angeline,” he said, his arm so close to mine, I could feel the coarse blond hairs of it. “She rides in a long gray limousine. And she struts around New York City. I can just see you struttin’ around New York City.”

  “I don’t strut.”

  He bumped my arm with his. “It’s a song.”

  “I think strutting requires high heels. I never wear high heels.”

  “That right?”

  “New York City. We’re always walking. I wear flip-flops.” I lifted one of my feet to show him my black rubber flip-flop. My toenails needed a trim. A couple were jagged. I curled my toes to hide them. “If it’s cold out, I wear sneakers.”

  “Sneakers? That what you Yanks call tennis shoes?”

  I looked hard at Bennett, pleased with his means of communication—an amused, detached acceptance of anything I said. This was not a man who would bother to know my brain. If I told him, “I’m a murderer!” he would probably say, “Well, are you now.” He probably loved baseball games. He probably played Frisbee. He probably liked to watch people walk by and note, “You know what I enjoy? People watching.”

  “What are you doing all the way down here anyway, Angeline?”

  This was not lost on me: My hunger was gone. From the second Bennett appeared beside me, I’d felt no desire to eat. I smiled and thought, Perhaps this is a sexy, mysterious smile. But then I started to sense that Bennett was bored (after all, I had just held forth about footwear); that he had better things to do than watch me fashion a mysterious smile—beautiful people always had better things to do, didn’t they?—that he was going to get up and walk away.

  And so, to keep him beside me, I spoke. “I like to mix things up,” I said. “Nothing wrong with a little change.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  In the pool later that week, teaching my campers water aerobics, I finally wore a bikini, a red one I’d had for years. After just a few days on the program, I already felt bikini-worthy.

  No, I’m not telling the whole truth: After just a few days on the program, surrounded by obese people, I felt confident that no one would balk at my love handles.

  I shivered in the morning that was lit by a cloudless sky. Whitney the hurricane survivor, who had announced on the first day, “I don’t do water,” was in Nurse’s office, sick with vague symptoms, so I was staring at four of my five campers, and they were staring back.

  No, again, I’m not telling the whole truth: I was staring only at Eden, who was wearing our brown bathing suit.

  “Hook your legs over the wall,” I said. “Like you’re going to do sit-ups.” I paused. “Because you are.”

  Harriet raised her hand like a student. “Won’t our faces go under?” Her hair was a dark, wiry puff, a silhouette of a bush. She was wearing her glasses, long black shorts, and a black T-shirt that billowed around her in the water like ink.

  “Yes,” I said. I hadn’t thought about it. “So don’t forget to regulate your breathing accordingly . . . Fifty crunches.”

  “Fifty?” Miss, in a turquoise tankini, made a visor for her eyes with one hand. Her yellow hair was pulled back into a fat braided ponytail, the tip grazing the water’s surface.

  Was it a good idea, the tankini? Granted, it covered the stomach without screaming to the world, “I know I’m not deserving of a two-piece!” But perhaps it revealed an ugly indecision; or an even more neurotic self-consciousness than a one-piece could reveal: I am affecting an illusion of thinness. Or I am affecting an illusion of self-confidence.

  “I am not doing fifty crunches
,” Miss said.

  “Twenty then,” I said because Miss made me nervous. She had the enviable quality of self-possession. She could say nothing and hold eye contact, her thin lips disappearing. She could wait for the other person to look away first. She had an impressive assortment of condescending faces. Her few humane expressions were reserved for Whitney and Sheena.

  “The sun’s in my eyes,” Spider said. “I could get a migraine. I’m prone to migraines.”

  Spider was prone to everything—hives, asthma, diarrhea, hay fever, eczema, belting out Japanese songs loudly and off-key. She had EpiPens, inhalers, Tums, and nasal sprays. She wore some of these antidotes on thin ropes around her neck, a shield of medicinal jewelry.

  “Then keep your eyes shut,” I said.

  “This is gay,” Miss whined.

  Spider turned to her. “For your information, ‘gay’ is a misnomer. Unless you think water aerobics has a sexual preference.”

  I looked through the chain-link fence around the pool to the nearby grass, where Bennett was refereeing the boys’ sumo wrestling class. Sumo wrestling was Lewis’s invention, or else it was something he had learned at another camp (he’d worked at weight-loss camps all his life, he liked to brag). Campers wrestled wearing hollowed-out rubber tires around their waists while Bennett watched, holding a plastic whistle between his teeth. Whenever Bennett engaged in any activity—blowing a whistle, scratching his arm, dribbling a basketball—he looked as if he’d been built and groomed to do exactly that one thing.

  I scanned my brain for hunger. Gone. Glimpsing Bennett was like mainlining speed. Couldn’t I hire him just to stay close to me, paying him per week what I would otherwise spend on food?

  “I wish Sheena taught this class,” Miss told me. She was standing with her hands linked behind her head, watching the other girls as if they were doing sit-ups for her amusement, and they were failing her.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Just being honest.”

  “Who asked you to be honest?”

  “Are you, like, whipped on Bennett or something?”

  “No,” I said. “Please do your crunches.”

  “You keep looking at him.”

  “How do you know? I’m wearing sunglasses. Want to know what I’m looking at? I’m looking at everyone but you doing water aerobics.”

  “He’s got, like, a twelve-pack. He’s so hot.”

  I turned away from Miss. Eden’s eyes were squeezed shut and wrinkled like peach pits, her mouth forming an O when she took in air, her black hair fanning out on the surface of the water whenever she stopped to catch her breath.

  In one of my early memories, my father hurls me into a public pool. “It’s the only way she’ll learn to swim.”

  And I will always know how it feels to drown—sinking to a white floor with open eyes, the sound of my heart in my ears. Sure, he rescued me, but first he made me sink.

  There was the red towel he wrapped me in, there was his fist squeezing water from my hair. “She’s all right,” he said. “My tough girl. Created in my image, this one.” I coughed like I would cough forever. He patted my back and told me, “Your father will always save you.”

  “But what if you’re not there?”

  “Where would I be?”

  “At work?”

  “Then you’ll close your eyes and think of me,” he said, “and you’ll know exactly what to do.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “You hate fat people,” Lewis said that afternoon. He was sitting on the center of the couch in the library, which he called the rec hall. The couch was velour and floral with torn cushions. Lewis’s arms were spread open across the back. His legs were open, too, giving us a spectacular view of the fat on his inner thighs from where we sat on the linoleum. Sheena was off teaching yoga to one of the boys’ groups.

  It had been quickly established that Sheena, not I, was the cool counselor, partly because she wasn’t much older than the campers, but for other reasons, too. When Sheena laughed, she would collapse, draping her arms around whomever had been funny, rewarding him with the heat of her affection. She liked to be the boss of every activity. Everyone listened to her and followed her instructions.

  Unlike Sheena, I had been grown up for too many years and was accustomed to working only with adults. I didn’t know any kids, except a few cousins whom I rarely saw. With my campers, whenever I spoke, I sounded like my mother. (“Isn’t it just a beautiful day?” “Look at those birds! Aren’t they funny?”)

  “We are fat people,” Harriet said, flipping through a book she’d pulled from a dusty shelf.

  “But you don’t really believe that.” Lewis plucked his T-shirt from between two rolls of fat, then returned his arm to the back of the couch. His armpits were sweating through his sleeves.

  “No,” Harriet said, “I’m pretty sure I believe it.”

  “No,” Lewis said. “You don’t.”

  Lewis was not necessarily combative, but opinions that weren’t his were immaterial things. Even if someone voiced an opinion he shared, he was less likely to say, “You’re right, I agree,” than to offer up a story about himself as proof that originally, he had authored that opinion. He would have liked to patent his opinions, especially the ones that contradicted his other opinions. Add to that: His stories rarely made sense. He would forget in the middle of the telling what his point was. And the point usually became, I am wonderful.

  In this vein, he scheduled each group once a week for Conversations with Lewis. It was group therapy, although Lewis wasn’t a therapist. Or a nutritionist. Or a doctor. In fact, he didn’t have a bachelor’s degree, which he considered an extraordinary achievement. Lewis was immensely, ceaselessly impressed with his own ability to don so many hats—shrink, genius, general world expert, champion of myriad things—without ever having wasted precious time or money on something as worthless as an education.

  “This summer,” he said, “you’ll write letters. This is one of the things that makes my camp unique. This therapeutic, letter-writing exercise. Letters to fat people. About why you hate them.”

  Spider said, “I don’t hate anyone.”

  “Everyone hates,” Lewis said. “We are full of hate.” His face brightened. “Fat with hate.”

  “If you hate people, that means you wish they were dead.” Spider was fiddling with her EpiPen necklace. “Like Sasuke. She wants everyone dead.”

  “Who’s Sasuke?” Harriet asked.

  “An anime character who is full of hatred.”

  As if it weren’t enough to have peeling skin, allergies, and terry-cloth wristbands; as if it weren’t enough to love early mornings and to insist on frequently using sign language even though no one was deaf and no one knew sign language, Spider was passionate about Japanese anime. She sometimes used Japanese words, or at least words that she claimed were Japanese. At the first dinner, she had brought anime chopsticks to the cafeteria, but Lewis had confiscated them. “Mealtime is not a game,” he had said.

  Now Spider stuck her EpiPen into her mouth and sucked it like a pacifier.

  Miss whispered, “Spider, keep sucking that thing. It’s good practice for blow jobs.” I was close enough to hear her, but I pretended I didn’t. Miss tapped Spider’s shoulder. “Since you’re allergic to latex, you won’t be able to have sex until you want to get pregnant. So you have lots of years of blow jobs ahead of you.”

  Whitney was kneeling behind Miss, holding Miss’s hair in her fingers, twisting it into long, skinny braids. “Um, Miss?” Whitney said. “Ever heard of the Pill?”

  Miss giggled, but stopped abruptly when Spider chimed back in: “Ever heard of abstinence? It’s only the most effective form of birth control.”

  “My neighbors used to have this really angry dog,” Whitney said. “It drooled white froth from its fangs and they would leave the thing tied up all day to a rail in their front yard. If you walked by, it would bark and try to pounce at you, but it couldn’t because of its leash. And the
n one day it was doing that to some kids, trying to pounce, and its head popped off.”

  “No way!” Spider said.

  Whitney finished a braid and tucked it behind Miss’s ear. “That’s what happens if you hold everything in. It’s healthy to hate. You have to let out your aggression.”

  Lewis said, “You will let out your aggression with these letters. It’s the first step to accepting your bodies.”

  “We’re supposed to accept our bodies?” Spider said. “Isn’t the point of this camp to lose weight?”

  “I once got attacked by a dog,” Eden said, and I wrapped a hand around my arm, as if sharp teeth had punctured my skin.

  Whose dog? I wondered. And then what happened? But Eden was looking at Whitney, who was ignoring her. Eden was always looking at Whitney, and Whitney was always ignoring her. Eden pulled a strand of her own hair out to the side and started braiding it the way Whitney was braiding Miss’s. She hadn’t inherited our father’s social deftness. She was the girl waiting to have her breasts autographed, the sycophant banging on the glass with both fists. She was not a misfit like Spider, who seemed as oblivious to her own social status as she was to her constant camel toe. She was not a misfit like Harriet, who was so unsightly—dressed in black, wearing wire-rimmed glasses that shrunk her eyes, her hair like steel wool, her body enormous, her odor pervasive, her skin furry—her whole existence was an apology.

  Eden was cloying—loud and eager, or else sullenly quiet. She said all the wrong things. When she talked with Whitney, she tried to sound like someone from a rap video. Once I’d heard her call out, “Where my bitches at?” No one had replied. Sometimes she said, “S’up,” and sliced the air with her hand. She favored a baseball cap sideways, long basketball shorts, and roomy tank tops. She listened to hip-hop at top volume and tried, unsuccessfully, to dance the way Whitney danced—spontaneously, frequently, and with remarkable skill. But when it came to dancing, Eden had no skill. All this and a Jewish star necklace.