Nancy crosses her arms and frowns as I lean back in my chair and pick at my nails, to show her I could care less about her oncoming interrogation.
"You want to start today, Giselle?" Nancy asks.
"Sure."
"Why don't you tell us what kind of steps you've been taking."
"Well, OK, let's see, I've been going to the library to do research, I work with Agnes here—everybody say hi to Agnes." The girls squeak out hellos and Agnes opens her mouth to reveal a half-chewed cheese sandwich and her loose dentures. Just as I'm about to convince the crowd that I'm the success story of the month, Agnes pipes, "She's got a beau," before stuffing another sandwich into her face. Nancy gets all red as she adjusts her chair to better verbally assault me.
"Shut up." I elbow Agnes.
"So, you've just got out of the clinic because you lost so much weight at school that you barely finished your year, and now you're dating someone?" Nancy asks.
"Yeah, well, I don't know if we're dating, exactly, he's more like an old friend." I put my hands on my knees and squeeze them tightly.
"Is this your idea of taking control? Another relationship?"
"Well, first of all, we've only been seeing each other for, like, a week or something and, second of all, the last time I checked the anorexic's guide to recovery there was no clause against dating someone." The other girls start to whisper and smile; Nancy shoots them a look of death.
"All I'm getting at, Giselle, is that, and you'll pardon the pun, you seem to have enough on your plate right now without a boyfriend. You have to get control of your life, your eating habits, in a positive way, without distractions."
"Point taken. Can someone else talk? I don't really feel like sharing this right now." Nancy glowers while Agnes clamps her hand to my arm and starts singing "Que Sera Sera" softly into my shoulder. I take her hand and she squeezes it a little too tightly and then yanks it away as if I grabbed her.
A new woman, whom I've never met before, a tired-looking lady wearing a classic brown business suit, leans in as the other girls fidget in their chairs. When she talks, her voice is the opposite of Nancy's. It's pleading, low and smooth.
"Giselle, are you committed to being healthy?"
"Yes," I whisper.
"What helped you? What makes you strong?"
"My sister, my mother, work, and friends, I have some friends."
"Can you do it for yourself now, not for anyone else but you?"
Tranquillzers are rarely necessary
I didn't mean to hurt anyone by losing all this weight, except I wanted to see what would happen if I stopped eating. It was an experiment of sorts, made easy by the late nights at the library, coffee, cigarettes, and OK, I confess, maybe a little speed too, sometimes.
It comes easy to me, almost too easy. It always has. While other girls sweat and fret, exercise constantly and watch what they eat, I can drop five pounds simply by skipping dinner a couple of nights. Some people are naturals, like Holly with running; I'm naturally good at losing weight. All I have to do is forget to eat.
And I'd forget a lot, which is hard to do in a European household, with eating being one of the major social events in our house. Maybe because they'd been deprived, our parents offered us the best of everything Thomas's salary could afford: the best private schools, the finest music and dance teachers, and, last but not, least, copious amounts of rich, nourishing Eastern European fare. But while I should've been grateful for this, I wasn't. Early on in school I began to have the vague realization that my parents had expectations of me, big ones. Though I wasn't the athlete Holly was, I was good at science, like Dad, and, despite the fact that I'd already skipped a grade, I entered an accelerated program in junior high, without ceremony, after Dad died. Around this time I began to balk at the lavish lunches and dinners Mom prepared, and while Holly gulped down spoonfuls of whipped cream and pleaded for more, I felt the need to set myself apart from my family, to reject all the food that was so integral to our nightly ritual; it seemed excessive, strange suddenly.
Maybe all children of immigrants are conflicted. On the one hand they live in the reality of the new world, on the other hand they have to contend with the ghosts and the stories of the old that seem unimaginable. Oddly, my parents had never formally taught us Hungarian, and, by the time Holly was born, they spoke English almost all the time. But I'd already picked up a fair amount from early childhood, and though my mouth had forgotten how to form the words, I could understand the things my parents talked about: wars, revolution, communism, lack of food and clothing—it all seemed so foreign to me. Even more unimaginable was that by dressing nicely and being smart, 1 could somehow make up for all they had lost.
It feels awful to put this into words, because my parents hadn't pushed me, or Holly (definitely not Holly), not really, to be the perfect lady, the perfect anything; they only wanted what all parents wanted—for their children to be good, smart, and kind. Maybe they wanted a little more, like all parents, maybe they wanted their children to be special. Besides, I'd inherited Thomas's mind. I couldn't squander that. But I'd inherited something else too: their suffering, which had brought me to this place. Born between these worlds that waged war on my ragged little teenage body, I became a terrible, ungrateful child. I conceded only to working hard at school and bringing home good grades. The rest of it, my mom's carefully prepared food, the extracurricular lessons she expected me to take, the expensive feminine clothes she wanted me to wear, I shrugged off indifferently. I began to dress down, wearing ratty jeans and dirty T-shirts as soon as I could, and although I could see how disappointed Mom was by my fashion sense and attitude, and it made my heart hurt if I thought about it too much—what a shitty kid I was—I couldn't help it; rebelling was completely out of my control.
"You're such a beauty, Giselle. Why do you dress like a homeless person?" was my mother's mantra to me throughout high school. Since I didn't disappoint her academically, we'd reached some sort of silent agreement whereby I would bring home top marks and she wouldn't nag me about eating and clothes. I was also careful to remain skinny, but not too skinny, so that she wouldn't freak out and start making me eat. Besides, Mom had enough to contend with, what with losing Dad, getting Holly to do her homework, and doing her own job, so I slipped under the radar of her stress and grief. I finally became grateful—grateful that she left me alone.
Then there was sex, which was decidedly scary. I simply wanted to avoid it, all of it. In high school, my friend Joanne showed me her dad's Italian porno magazines: legs opened, hairy skin on skin and opening yourself, opening myself, there, seemed impossible, ridiculous. Was this what love was? If it was, I would never be capable of it, of performing an act so utterly animalistic, so completely out of control. It was confusing and disgusting to me. At the same time I felt inadequate. There were boys and girls I liked, that I could imagine, eventually, wanting to be naked with, but they never took notice of me. I knew I didn't deserve their attention, that I had let too much go: I was too tall, too awkward, my belly was too bloated, my arms too thick. It got so I couldn't harness my own growing appetite for their desire, but I could make my stomach flat, I could starve myself until I felt my flat hipbones protrude and I could place my thumbs into the indents at the top of my narrow pelvis. I learned to control my desire for people, for food. And this is how I discovered a new intimacy which required no one.
While I craved attention, I was terrified of letting someone else into my imperfect, hateful world. It was me, and only me, who could control my cravings; denying myself food was proof that I was stronger, better than most people. But I was lonely for touch. Still, my own stiff regimen of stripping myself to the core and forcing myself to turn away from those curious eyes made me feel proud, if alienated; I was trading my new-found power of flesh for something more trustworthy, something pure.
Naturally skinny but not dangerously so, I trod the line between waif and child as I grew into a woman. And hunger became my salvation; afte
r a while, hunger, my sexless, undemanding suitor, was my only constant friend.
Site ot wound: Surgical incisions placed in the lines of least tissue are subject to minimal distraction and should heal promptly, leaving a fine scar. In the face, these lines run at angles to the direction of underlying muscles and form the mask of facial expression.
Below my eye, there are two almost invisible scars that remind me of my last days at school. They are all I have in the form of concrete proof. Those weeks before coming to the clinic return to me only in fragments, like the rare shell-shocked moments of lucidity after an accident. Reflexes failing, I have only pictures; I retain imprints of flying shards of bone, glass imploding in my face. I remember the unseasonable heat of those early-April days and lying in bed watching the fan. I remember my shirt soaked with sweat and, finally, the matted feathers floating around me like soft rain. I remember the last days with clarity though: I spent them studying for finals, and virtually living at the library.
Day after day, I watched a serious-looking Korean boy, Thuy, his name was, sitting at the desk in front of me, sighing over impossible hieroglyphic equations. Thuy and I always claimed the same spot in the library, at the same big desk under the fluorescent lights. We liked to spread our books and papers all over the table as if the sheer display of all the notes we had collected could secure us from the horribly uncertain fate of failure. The information piled up silently in our heads and the panic of a new chapter would cause one of us to abandon a highlighter, cough, or get up for a walk, while the other valiantly studied on, offering an empathetic nod. A forgotten key to the lexicon of the carotid artery, like a half-remembered square root, would cause a minor gasp or leg spasm. When I looked up at him, at his waxy, pulled face, Thuy's eyes curled at me in a kind of lonely smile. He liked to peer over into my books as I twirled my newly plaited hair (the dreads had gotten so out of control I had finally had my hair professionally done at a Caribbean hairdresser's).
Thuy and I became manic partners in our quest for knowledge, for justification of the expensive university education we felt our immigrant parents had squandered on us. We became soulmates during finals and, while trading strawberry liquorice for rice balls, I asked him about engineering. He told me his father was a veterinarian and then put out his hand and taught me how to say "friend" in Korean. Chingu.
I scribbled out English-composition papers for him when he complained he was flunking a rudimentary English class and he helped me with chemistry; it seemed a fair enough trade. I regret now that I didn't get Thuy's number; he was my only friend through that blurred time, besides Susan, and Greg, if you could count them as friends.
Towards the end of the semester, I became obsessed with the machinations of the human body, all the miracles that took place every day to sustain us, to keep us clothed in this meretricious skin. The nightmare of unravelling, of death, seemed to be everywhere and I thought if I could learn it, if I memorized the visceral cartography, I could be saved, somehow, from my own nightmare of looking into the mirror to see my disassembled face with the lines undrawn, separate. I was beginning to understand death, and that what moved us was our fear of it. It got so I could barelv get a couple of hours of sleep at night. I began to have nightmares about operating in the bright lights of the theatre with slippery, oversized instruments falling out of my hands. The organs would be in the wrong places and my blade would slip in my sweaty grip, cutting into marrow.
One day I was home trying to find a belt to fit me before heading out the door to my nightly library date with Thuy. I was edgy and irritable from not sleeping and I was only eating one meal a day. Usually something light like soup and rice balls and candy was all I, or she, could handle. I realized then that I'd lost some weight, though I thought I looked relatively normal—still chubby in the face.
While I was trying to lace a hippie guitar strap into my jeans, the doorbell rang. It occurred to me then that I'd never had guests over: the only people who ever visited the apartment were Susan's friends, while Susan, of course, on her rare visits home, would let herself in with her key.
"Hello?" I answered the door, barefoot, and, standing there, almost seven feet of him, was Greg, the guy Susan had a crush on at the bar.
He was sandy-haired, broad-shouldered, and wearing a purple and yellow leather varsity jacket that was vaguely disgusting to me. His eyes travelled up and down me until he met my eyes, and I cinched my belt in place and tapped the door with my fingernail.
"Yes?"
"I'm supposed to meet Susan here. Can I come in?"
"Uh, sure." I opened the door slightly and he swept in.
Greg sat down on the couch and flipped on the television casually, as if he owned the place, his long limbs folded over themselves like the pink and blue origami cranes Thuy would place on my textbooks during his rare breaks from studying.
I was slightly disconcerted with the idea of a stranger in my home. I sat on the broken La-Z-Boy chair Susan and I had dragged home during one of our treasure hunts in the student ghetto Dumpsters.
What did people do? I thought, staring at Greg. Oh, right, they offered food.
"Want some crackers? I'm sorry, I don't have anything else to offer you."
"No thanks."
I hadn't been with a human being besides Thuy in so long I wondered what to do next, and so we did what normal adults do to pass the time in a stranger's company: we drank.
After three exquisite Caesars mixed by Greg, and an exhausting series of stories about his football injuries and his father's oil business in the States, I got up from the La-Z-Boy.
"OK, that's it for me," I said. "Good night."
"Wait a minute." He reached out and grabbed my arm and pulled me back down.
"I don't know where Susan is, it's late . . . she might have forgotten about your date and I have to get up—"
"That's OK, sit down. Here I've been blabbing about myself all night and I haven't asked a thing about you. Are you a dancer?"
"No." I was appalled by the sensation of his arm. It was the first time I'd been sexually drawn to someone without wanting to be. The feeling was complicated and nasty somehow. With Eve it had been uncompromising, complete. I'd wanted to lose myself in her, like a book or a film. But I wasn't even vaguely interested in Greg's life, which seemed infinitely boring to me. If anything, I wanted to keep myself intact, on guard. I thought this as his hand snaked into my lap and he kissed me, and then all the thinking stopped. As his warm and spicy college-boy lips massaged mine, I wondered what I had gotten myself into.
"I didn't come here to see Susan." He looked into my eyes balefully and I fell for it. I drew my fingers up the length of his neck. He leaned into them as if they trickled warm oil, and then it w^as as if we had always been lovers, as if we were used to these quick and easy transactions of touch and pull.
"You can kill a man by slicing one clean stroke in here." I pulled my fingers up his neck, over his carotid artery, his main vein.
"So show me," he said, leaning in for one more cut.
. . .
Greg left the next morning after a breakfast of saltines, stale cheese, and some uninspired conversation. I washed out the salt-encrusted Caesar glasses and then vomited bright pink bits of food into the sink, realizing that for all Greg knew, I was a dancer, not someone who understood the complicated mass of networks and systems of the body, and this suited me just fine. I decided not to leave the apartment. Troublesome things like Greg's body, like my voracious appetite for it and french fries, were out there in the world. Besides, I had wasted valuable time by spending the evening with him and needed every second I could get for more studying. I thought about lovely, lonely Thuy and cringed, wondering what he would think about my escapade with an American varsity-football star.
—You goddamn slut.
But after a couple of hours I felt better and fried up some sardines and drank lemon water. When Susan came home three days later, it was still hot. She found me in my underwear and
bra, wearing a pair of papier-mâché wings pasted with white feathers. I know it's absurd and I can't remember the logic of that outfit, what I had been thinking or feeling when I strapped on those wings that someone had abandoned in our hall closet after a costume party. I remember only that I hadn't been eating much and that I had begun to black out periodically. Perched on the edge of the window, I must have looked like some ancient pterodactyl hybrid creature to Susan, because she started when she came into the dark apartment and saw me smoking a cigarette in the windowsill. She stood there, arms crossed, in the dark room illuminated only by the orange street lamp. Somehow I realized that she knew all about Greg, about how wasted and low I felt about it all.
"Hot, eh?" I ventured.
"Yeah. What are you doing?"
"Oh, nothing . . . hanging out."
"I see that. When was the last time you ate, G ? Or slept?"
I took a long drag of my cigarette and stared at it in my hand—how had it gotten there? Had I lit it? How had I managed that? I suddenly felt dizzy. I fell off the edge and onto the hard radiator, taking a tablecloth and vase down with me. Then, like some disgraced, unskilled Cirque du Soleil dancer, I covered my semi-naked body with my hands, curled into a ball, and started crying when Susan came to my side.
"Stop moving," she barked. "You're covered with glass." Indeed, my face, hands, and legs were bleeding. My exoskeleton had failed me. It didn't matter what I ate or didn't eat, I still wasn't safe from the indignities of the body.
I was terrified suddenly, but not of Susan, who had started picking pieces of glass out of my elbows and hair. Susan could not know that any insults she hurled at me would pale in comparison to the abuse she could levy. I knew then that there was a great purge ahead; admonishments, elaborate systems of torture would be inflicted. She was screaming now, steadily, high-pitched.