Skinny Page 6

  I wondered which parts of her would have been different had she grown up with our father. Her name, for one thing. When my mother was pregnant with me (following years of attempts and eventual acceptance that she’d never have a baby), she suggested to my father, in a fit of passion, that they name me Silver, whether I was a boy or a girl. “It’s the shiniest name I can think of,” she said.

  But my father was superstitious. “Silver is a thing to steal,” he said. And so they settled on Gray. My father never would have agreed to Eden, a name that invoked perfection. I suspected that Azalea had chosen it to harm him.

  I knew from Azalea’s website that she’d gotten two master’s degrees in Virginia, and from the dates, I’d inferred that she must have left Massachusetts while she was pregnant. Perhaps the affair had ended the way many do—the cheater returning to his wife, closing out his mistress as if she never existed, convincing himself that she never existed. Perhaps my father had vanished suddenly, leaving only a stray sock in the corner, a razor on the lip of her sink. Perhaps Azalea strained her ears day after day, listening for the phone. Perhaps morning after morning, she woke, blessedly blank for the first few seconds, before the memories of being discarded descended, so heavy on her body that she couldn’t move from bed.

  What I would have given for a recording of the phone call—Azalea telling my father, “I’m pregnant with your child,” or, “I just gave birth to your child,” or, “You don’t want me to tell your wife about us? Then you’d better start paying up.”

  I did not blame Azalea Bellham. I could not resent her. I knew how it felt to simultaneously love and hate my father.

  “These letters will set you free,” Lewis said. “If we’re all honest, we can admit that we feel, deep down, that we’re not fat people. The fat people we are . . . they’ve invaded our bodies. They’ve taken over. Secretly, you believe that you’re skinny.” He paused. Then he asked, “Don’t you believe that who you really are is the thin person locked up inside you?”

  “No,” Harriet said.

  “Yes,” said Lewis.

  “I just don’t care,” Eden said, glancing at Whitney. “I don’t care about any of this. My mom made me come here. I don’t even overeat. I basically just chew gum all day and then have a healthy dinner. I’m not, like, one of those people who eats all the time. This camp is so pointless for me.”

  “So leave,” Miss said.

  “I probably will,” Eden said.

  Her words made my palms sweat. I knew about mothers and only daughters. If Eden complained that she hated it here, Azalea would drive down to get her.

  “I’m a chef,” Eden continued. “I should be cooking this summer, not starving myself. I know how to make healthy food. I’m not the type who’s always cooking everything in butter.”

  “You’re not a chef,” Miss said. “That’s so retarded.” Her hair was now coiled into tiny Medusa twists all over her head. “You can’t be a chef in high school.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Because,” said Miss.

  “If Eden says she’s a chef, she’s a chef.”

  “No, but I see your point. I guess I’m not really a chef,” Eden told Miss, who ignored her.

  Lewis resumed as if no one had spoken. “You don’t know this yet,” he said, “but getting old feels the same way. You will never believe that you’re old. You’ll walk around picturing yourself young. Right, Gray?”

  I moved my eyes from Eden to Lewis. “I’m not old.”

  “See?” Lewis said. “Every day you’ll think that you might wake up and be eighteen, that you’ll pop out of bed and do the things you used to be able to do. Then you’ll catch a glimpse of yourself in a reflective store window. Or in someone’s car mirror. And you’ll be filled with uncontrollable hatred.”

  Spider said, “But hatred is—”

  “And hatred makes everything worse. It makes you older, fatter, and uglier. It gives you back pain. It makes you do hurtful things to the people who love you.”

  I looked at Eden again, to see if she was listening. She was watching Whitney and chewing her lip.

  “One day you’ll have to let go,” Lewis said. “Anger will not serve you.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Dear Fat People,

  Please get me out of this retarded, gay-ass camp.

  Miss

  Dear Quina, Chouji, and Don Corneo,

  Even though you’re fat, you’re three of the coolest anime characters. Quina, it’s so cool that you can eat almost any kind of monster, and everyone thinks it’s funny to call Chouji a fatass, but I bet they don’t laugh so hard when he turns them into a giant meatball and flattens them, haha. Don Corneo is fat, but you know what? Every girl falls in love with him. So there!

  Love,

  Spider

  Dear Fat People,

  I wish you weren’t all related to me and getting your genes all over me. I want my relatives to be swimsuit models.

  Not yours,

  Eden

  Dear World,

  What if everyone was blind? You wouldn’t know who was fat and who wasn’t. I learned on TV that if we were all blind, we would smell each other. Instead of hating on someone for having a double chin, we’d hate on him for smelling like butter. I used to know this kid who was really skinny, but he always smelled like butter, and everyone hated on him in real life and also would have hated on him if everyone was blind, but you know what? I didn’t care what he smelled like or looked like. I don’t care what anyone looks like, smells like, or even tastes like! (Kidding!) I think we were all created equal.

  Whitney

  Dear Fat People,

  I don’t have anything to say. I don’t like writing when I’m on summer vacation.

  Good-bye,

  Harriet

  Dear Fat People,

  Now is the time to stop pointing fingers.

  You cannot blame your fat on bad genes. Maybe you have a fat relative, but you do not have only fat relatives. And even if you do, that is no reason to give up and be fat. Remember: Had you been born in a different era, all of your relatives might have been racist, or claimed Earth to be as level as a ballroom floor, or watched you burn for being a witch. Anyway, do you really aspire to be just like your relatives?

  You cannot blame your fat on your thyroid. Seriously. Stop it. You don’t even know what a thyroid is. Thyroid problems are far less common than fat people want to admit.

  You cannot blame your fat on your bad knees that keep you from exercising. If you exercised, you wouldn’t have bad knees, because you would not have extra weight bearing down on them, making them, as you say, “bad.”

  You cannot fix fat with a fat-sucking vacuum, or with ultrasound vibrations or lasers, or with a surgery that shrinks your stomach to the size of a pearl. These are just Band-Aids, and Band-Aids fall off. You love food so much, love the pressure of it on your back molars, the richness of it on your tongue, the satisfaction of swallowing the messy, chewed-up ball of it, you will find a way to return to the eating you crave, and then the fat cells will find each other, and bind back together like long-lost lovers, and your stomach will pop its staples or snap its band, and inflate again like a beach ball. You don’t believe that? Well, it’s true. The way you got fat in the beginning is the way you will get fat again.

  If you don’t do something now, if you don’t make honest and drastic changes, the way you got fat in the beginning will be the way you get fat all your life.

  And please? Don’t be proud of your fat. When you claim to be proud of something unseemly, the whole world knows that you’re lying. You’re acting proud instead of ashamed because some fat woman with a national platform gave a fat-pride pep talk into a microphone. Do not say, “I’m so much happier since I stopped trying to be skinny.” Do not say, “I’m enjoying life!” when you’re really enjoying high-calorie foods in appalling quantities.

  Do not say, “America is flawed because women are expected to look like models.” Am
erica is absolutely flawed, but only models are expected to look like models. Other women should simply avoid obesity to prevent diabetes, muscular problems, and congested arteries. And yes, women are expected to be attractive to men, but this is not an expectation to scorn. Please. You want to be attractive to men. You are not Camille Paglia. You are not Maya Angelou. You are not the kind of woman who roars.

  Okay. There are men who like fat women. Fine. So? There are also men who like women to dress up as teddy bears. There are men who are turned on by balloons, by licking dirty bowling shoes, by the thought of becoming an amputee. There are men who get off on dragons having sex with cars.

  Dragons. Having sex with cars.

  You cannot blame your fat on your ethnic background. Granted, if you are Asian, you store more fat in your organs, but you also belong to a healthy culture. And don’t blame your fat on your religion. Yes, 30 percent of Southern Baptists are obese, and the Mormons deploy “wellness missionaries,” and sure, I know the Jewish jokes—the jokes with no edge; the soft, plump, low-muscle-tone jokes about Jewish mothers overfeeding their children and Jewish holidays revolving around food. But these are not excuses. Excuses are worthless. Either change your life, stop slinging blame, stop stuffing food into the cracks in your heart, or give yourself over to the shortened, uncomfortable, sweaty life of the obese.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A week into camp, Eden and I had exchanged thirty-six words. On my end:

  “Cute sandals.”

  “Do you like that?”

  “Do you, um, play any sports at your school?” (Why not? I was counting “um.”)

  On her end:

  “All my friends have the same ones. We got them together.”

  “No.”

  “I could if I wanted to, but I don’t.”

  Now it was Sunday. “Lazy Sunday!” according to Lewis, which was supposed to make everyone feel happy and indebted. Every Sunday would be Lazy Sunday, which meant no official wake-up time and no scheduled activities. The campers’ only responsibility before 11:00 brunch was to wander into the cafeteria at their leisure so Lewis could weigh them. (“I do the weigh-ins,” I’d heard him say, patting his chest. “Me.”)

  “You lost four pounds,” Lewis told Eden.

  From a nearby picnic table, where I was pretending to read a magazine, I looked up to see Lewis hand her an apple from a basket. After a week of such drastic diet change (controlled calories; no added salt; low-fat, low-sugar everything), some campers had lightened considerably, as if the pores in their skin were saltshaker holes. After weighing each camper, Lewis had loudly announced his or her progress—“Congratulations! You’ve lost thirteen pounds!”—and then beamed smugly, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He clapped each one on the back and asked, “Does my diet work or does my diet work?”

  Never mind the thirty-minute speech he’d made during staff training about how the “program” was not a diet, that “diets” were unsustainable, ineffectual, whereas the “program” was a “way of life.” Despite that speech, he often used the word “diet.” Then he would switch back to “program.” Then to “diet.”

  What was the program anyway? No one was exactly sure.

  We knew the Monday-through-Saturday schedule. First, wake up and head to the cafeteria, where Bennett led stretches on the steps (bending to touch his toes so his calf muscles flexed, raising his arms over his head, inadvertently flashing his sculpted stomach). Then the campers had to make it around the loop, the half-mile dirt path that encircled the Carolina Academy campus. There were those who could jog it and those who could not. Some broke a sweat walking, and then sat down abruptly on a rock or on the ground, panting and sweating, complaining of “injuries.” The campers loved injuries. They loved to say, “I can barely move my arm,” or, “My hip might be broken.” They loved to sit and scowl.

  Next came breakfast, and after breakfast, the campers were supposed to clean their rooms. None did. My campers lounged on their beds, or crowded into one another’s rooms and talked about their real lives, all implying to one another that at home they weren’t fat.

  After “cleanup,” the whole camp met in the gym for Bennett’s calisthenics class, which Lewis called “cals,” during which Bennett led the campers in “wall sits,” which made them look compellingly constipated, and “Indian runs,” which Spider deemed a racial slur and renamed “international runs.” Then the campers had two activities before lunch, and after lunch, “rest hour,” another activity, and a snack (sugar-free ice cream, sugar-free Popsicles, a 100-calorie snack pack, or, on the very worst days, an apple). Then there was one last activity, and then free time, when everyone except hairy-Harriet-who-hated-hygiene showered. Then everyone ate dinner, enjoyed another hour of free time, an evening activity of Lewis’s design, one more snack, and then bed. All told, the campers were engaging in roughly five hours of physical activity a day, and consuming eighteen hundred calories.

  And that, as far as anyone could tell, was the program.

  “That’s it?” Eden asked, stepping off the scale. “Four pounds?”

  “That’s good,” Nurse said. “Four in one week?” She plucked a sweaty-looking bandanna from a table and started fanning her face with it, blowing her silver bangs apart. “Lord, it’s hotter than the back of a knee.”

  “But everyone else . . .”

  “Water weight,” Nurse said. “Next week, you won’t see anyone losing fifteen pounds. Basically, everyone was pissing weight this week. You know what I’m saying?”

  “I don’t care,” Eden said, “but my mom will think her money’s gone to waste.”

  “Well,” Nurse said, “if you don’t have as much to lose . . .”

  “I have plenty.”

  As I watched Eden push her feet into her flip-flops and wiggle her toes, I floated up and out of myself, as if she and Nurse were speaking metaphorically, their meaning slightly out of my reach. But they were just discussing Eden’s body. So I could have chimed in, said something encouraging, something to win Eden’s favor. I’m sure your mother is proud of you! Or, Four pounds is a whole Chihuahua! But every time I opened my mouth around Eden, I said something pointless. And why should that have surprised me? Avoiding the important subject always rendered all other conversations inane.

  I sat silently, watching Eden, until the cafeteria door swung open, and all eyes in the room turned to Whitney, who paused grandly on the threshold before making her entrance. Holding her arms away from her hips and splaying her fingers, she planted one foot directly in front of the other like a starlet. Miss followed, wearing sunglasses and frowning. Kimmy, a camper from the intermediate group, trailed behind them, her hair pulled into two high pigtails, each braided and adorned with a pink ribbon.

  Kimmy had freckles so even, so perfectly sprinkled across the center of her face, they looked manufactured. Sometimes she brought her teddy bear to breakfast. The evening before, I had heard Whitney, her elbow threaded through Miss’s, tell Kimmy, “You’re our daughter, okay?” and Kimmy had removed her thumb from her mouth just long enough to say, “Sure.”

  “Kimmy!” Lewis said, opening his arms.

  Kimmy let him wrap her up in a hug, squishing her into his thick torso. Her cuteness was a source of universal joy.

  “Who loves you?” he said.

  “Ew,” Miss said. “That’s so pervy.”

  When she was free, Kimmy jammed her thumb back into her mouth, surveyed her surroundings, and locked her eyes on Eden. “Nuh-uh!” she squawked around the obstruction of her thumb. She poked the center of Eden’s T-shirt with her free hand. “No way!”

  Eden crossed her arms over her chest, over the navy blue block letters that spelled BRIDGER HIGH SCHOOL. I knew what she was thinking, and I agreed—cuteness was sinister. When I was a child, a puppy bit off part of my fingertip when I tried to touch its droopy ear.

  Kimmy removed her thumb from her mouth and flashed the artificial smile of a birthday party clown. “I’m from Bridger!
” she said, bouncing up and down on her toes, her braided pigtails bouncing as if they’d contracted her enthusiasm. “And my sister goes to Bridger High School! Do you know Lily Jackson?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you do!”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You have to!”

  “Why do I have to?” Eden’s eyes darted around the cafeteria—to the door through which she could escape, the windows she could break, the tables beneath which she could hide.

  Beside her, Whitney and Miss were arguing over who should weigh in first: “You go.” “No, you!”

  “Everyone knows her,” Kimmy said.

  “Obviously that’s impossible.”

  Kimmy watched Eden’s face as if she wished she had something more interesting to look at. “Everyone except you, then.”

  Eden started backing away. “Me and my friends don’t notice anyone. We’re, like, oblivious to random people.” She scratched her nose as she headed toward the door. “I wouldn’t notice your sister. Even if we had all the same classes.”

  “Okay.” Kimmy looked increasingly bored, her thumb sagging between her lips, her eyes moving languidly around the room. Boredom was the trophy of the cool, inaccessible to kids like Eden, who were always alert, watching, copying, alive with the anxiety of constant performance. Eden’s affectations of boredom—flying her eyelids at half-mast, kicking the ground with the toe of her shoe—were spoiled by her glimpses at Whitney, her mirroring of Whitney’s mannerisms, her laughter that chimed in a beat too late.

  Eden hurried toward the door, running a palm over the letters on her shirt, as if to erase them.

  At Camp Carolina, everyone had secrets. Kids hid gum in the backs of their drawers (even sugarless gum was forbidden, since Lewis had labeled it an appetite stimulant). To their walls, above their plastic mattresses, they taped pictures that made them look carefree. They cut the size tags out of their clothes. They hid in Nurse’s office—limping theatrically to the haven of air-conditioning and television and couches—where Nurse indulged them with Icy Hot and pills, ice packs and heat packs, and visualization techniques like, “When you’re walking around, pretend you’re picking your way through dung. Cow patties. Pretend they’re only under your right foot. Then you won’t put undue weight on that poor ankle.”