“It was confusing,” I tell her. “Isolating. I think we all felt ashamed and alone with what we assumed was a problem only we were facing: the voluntary starvation of one of our own.”
Lois nods. “The poor thing looks so strange with those bulbous eyes and collapsed cheeks,” she says. “But her body looks almost bloated.”
“Because she was dressing in layers of clothes to throw people off. Look at the way her hair was thinning out. She started wearing hats to hide her bald patches. When people asked her if she was sick, she’d say she was getting over a bad stomach flu. Frances was ‘getting over a stomach flu’ for months, ever since she’d started dieting and doing a daily calorie-burning regimen that ratcheted up to a thousand jumping jacks, two hundred sit-ups, and, if neither of our parents was home to stop her, forty-five minutes’ worth of manic running up and down the basement stairs.
“If my mother was up to doing battle with Frances before school, she could get her to eat the top half of a hard-boiled egg and a few nibbles of unbuttered toast. My sisters had the same lunch period at school, so Ma enlisted Simone to spy on Frances. Simone would report back that Fran did, in fact, buy lunch as she swore she did: soup and crackers most days. Simone would sometimes lose track of the conversation at the table where she sat with her girlfriends because she was so busy counting the spoonfuls of soup Frances put in her mouth: on average, four or five. She never ate the crackers, Simone said.
“One time in the middle of all this, I remember barging into our bathroom, assuming it was empty and that I was the only one home. And there was Frances, who had mistakenly assumed that she was the only one home. She was standing on the scale in just her underwear. ‘Get out, you idiot!’ she screamed, and I backed away from the wild-eyed witch who seemed, almost, to have stolen the identity of my real sister. I ran down the stairs and out the front door, I remember, then wandered the neighborhood, kicking stones into culverts and trying to unsee what I had seen. Despite Frances’s frequent campaigns to belittle me, I loved her and was afraid of what was happening—which is not to say that I understood what that was. When I got back home after my confused wandering up and down our street, I tried watching TV, but the benign images on the screen were no match for the image of my sister’s protruding ribs and pelvic bones, her pencil-thin arms and knitting-needle legs. To eradicate what I had seen in the bathroom the hour before, I attempted to picture other female bodies: the golden James Bond girl on that Life magazine cover; our shapely cousin Annette in her white two-piece swimsuit on the poster above the fryolator at Pop’s lunch counter; the buxom, pucker-mouthed women spilling out of their tops on the covers of the Police Gazettes and Sir!, the magazines I peeked at while waiting for my haircut at the barbershop. It didn’t work.
“That evening when my parents got home, I didn’t tell them about what I had walked in on and seen. Frances tried to get herself excused from supper, pleading the need to study for an upcoming test, but Pop insisted she join us. When she sat down at the table, I couldn’t look at her so I did not know if she was able to look at me. Pop said grace as usual, turning pointedly in Frances’s direction when he spoke the words ‘from Thy bounty.’
“After the blessing ended with our amens, my mother said she had a special request: could we all just enjoy a peaceful meal together? Our last several suppers had been stressful, she noted, as if any of us needed a reminder. I nodded in agreement and, seated across from Simone, saw that she nodded, too. ‘Sounds good,’ Pop said.
“I piled braciole, peas, and salad onto my plate—enough for two people—and, without looking up, started shoveling food into my mouth. No one spoke. I kept listening for the clink of silverware on Frances’s dinner plate but heard nothing. I was three-quarters done with my huge meal when Pop threw up his hands and ordered Frances to stop moving her food around and eat it, goddamnit! ‘And don’t try that trick where you hold it in your mouth, then go spit it out in the toilet. We’re onto that one. This foolishness is over, as of right now. Starving yourself in an Italian home? Jesus Christ, I make my living feeding people! Why in the goddamned hell would you even want to do this to yourself? Do you think it looks good? Because it doesn’t. You look like you’ve just been freed from a concentration camp. Well, like I said, it stops here and now. Your mother and I have had it. You’re going to eat like a normal person from now on. No, you’re going to be a normal person. You hear me?’
“No doubt she did hear him; he was shouting. But despite Pop’s decree, it did not stop there and then. Ma’s peaceful, stress-free meal proved unattainable. Faces turned red, tears fell, a chair tipped over, food was flung to the floor, a plate broke in half. When Pop grabbed Frances as she tried to escape the chaos she had triggered, I was afraid he might snap her bony arm in half.
“Later that evening, Pop appeared at my bedroom door while I was staring at, rather than reading, the first page of the social studies chapter I had been assigned earlier that day. ‘Look, Felix,’ he said. ‘We’re going through a little bit of a tough patch with your sister right now, but don’t worry. It’s gonna get better. Okay?’ Nodding, I kept looking down at my book instead of up at him. ‘And in the meantime, I just want to remind you that what goes on in this house stays in this house. Because it’s nobody else’s business. Understand?’ The print on the page in front of me went blurry, but of course I understood—instinctively if not yet intellectually. Silence, discretion, distrust of non-blood relatives: it was our family’s code of honor, ingrained in me although it was only much later that I would learn why. Our forebears were Southern Italian—Sicilian, specifically—and the island of Sicily had been attacked so often by so many foreign aggressors that omertà had developed as a survival tool. The code of silence had traveled across the Atlantic in my grandparents’ psyches and been instilled in my parents, who, in turn, had instilled it in my sisters and me.
“And so, I lugged our family’s secret turmoil to school each day like a backpack filled with rocks and, each afternoon at the dismissal bell, lugged it back home again. Rather than trust myself not to blurt out what was happening, I began to isolate. I kept telling Lonny I didn’t feel like doing whatever he suggested we do, so much that the suggestions stopped and he started hanging around with Monte Montoya instead. I quit Junior Midshipmen and Saturday basketball at the Y. Too distracted to do all the memorizing that led to 100s on Sister Godberta’s tests and quizzes, I withdrew from the competition. Let Rosalie Twerski be the top sixth-grade student. What did I care? And let Rosalie or one of the Kubiak twins stay after school and do all those charitable deeds so that they could receive the Good Citizenship medal or get elected to be our class’s representative to the mock UN. What I elected to do was walk back to our unhappy home, watch TV with the volume turned low, and eavesdrop on the tearful arguments between my exasperated parents and my walking skeleton of a sister who, once upon a time, had had a secret stash of Ring Dings, Rolos, and Royal Crown cola but now thought even water and carrots would make her fat. I needed to be there, on duty, in case something terrible happened—Pop hurting Frances in anger, say, or Frances tumbling down the stairs during her crazy exercise routine. She might need me. Any one of them might, but what good would I be if I was somewhere else than at my post, watching and listening? You gonna eat that yourself or do I have to force it down your gullet? . . . Stop running up and down those stairs, Frances! You’re scaring me to death. . . . I only saw her eat four spoonfuls today, Ma. And none of the crackers. . . . Whose life is it—mine or yours? Would you people get off my fucking back! . . . Don’t you dare use language like that in this house! . . . No? Why the fuck not? . . . Frances, what’s happening? What’s wrong with you? . . . You are, Mommy! All of you!
“Like alcoholics and drug addicts, anorexics become talented manipulators. To avoid having to disrobe in front of her classmates, Fran had forged a doctor’s excuse to convince her gym teacher that she needed to take partial showers because of her erratic periods. (In truth, because of her condition,
she had stopped menstruating.) Nevertheless, she pushed herself to play rigorously during gym, the better to burn more calories. And then one day, during a game of volleyball, she collapsed in a heap onto the hard gym floor. The school nurse was called, and then an ambulance arrived. As the other girls in her class sat on the bleachers and watched, she was put on a stretcher, carried out of the building, and rushed to the emergency room of Baxter Memorial Hospital. The diagnosis was dehydration, malnourishment, and acute exhaustion. A psychiatrist was consulted and that was when the term ‘anorexia nervosa’ first became part of the Funicello family’s lexicon. Despite Frances’s fierce and tearful objections, a feeding tube was inserted into her abdomen. She was weighed three times a day.
“She stayed in the hospital for a couple of weeks. Simone quit her after-school job so that she could visit her every afternoon and bring the homework assignments she’d collected from Fran’s teachers. My parents took the evening shift (six to eight p.m.). ‘Do you want to come with us or stay home?’ Ma would ask me before slapping together a sandwich for my supper. ‘Stay home,’ I’d say. My excuse was always that I had too much homework. ‘Okay then.’ Home from the lunch counter, Pop would pull into the driveway and honk. My mother would blow a kiss in my direction and rush out the door. ‘Frances says hi,’ Simone would tell me each day when she got back from the hospital. ‘Yeah? Tell her I said hi back.’ ‘Do you want to come with me tomorrow? I could pick you up at school.’ ‘Nah, that’s okay. I have to work on this big report Sister assigned us.’ There was no such report.
“I asked neither Simone nor my parents if Frances was improving—if she was regaining weight and acting less crazy. I wasn’t angry with her, exactly, but I was resentful. Even from her hospital bed on the other side of Three Rivers, she seemed to be upending all of our lives. The family secret I was obliged to keep, the dinner table battles, the indelible image of her body that day when I’d barged into the bathroom: these had exhausted me. During Frances’s hospital stay, I would get home from school, go up to my room, flop facedown on my bed, and fall into a deep sleep for an hour or two. These extended naps would lead to middle-of-the-night bouts of insomnia, during which I would worry that Frances was getting worse. Still, I was unable to ask if she was getting any better or force myself to go to the hospital in order to find out for myself.
“After Frances had been stabilized and gained back a little weight, she was discharged from Baxter Memorial. To my unspoken relief, she did not come home. Instead, she was transferred to the Institute of Living, a venerable psychiatric hospital in Hartford where Manhattan sophisticates, Hollywood celebrities, and pedophile priests had undergone the ‘rest cure’ before reengaging with the social calendar, the camera, or a new pastoral assignment. The DSM-I described anorexia as ‘a psycho-physiological reaction.’ But what was Frances’s bizarre behavior a reaction to? The Institute of Living was where this mystery was revealed.
“Neither Simone nor I was present at the session during which Dr. Darda, the psychotherapist Frances was working with, explained to my parents that their daughter’s disease was the manifestation of a long-standing subconscious fear that now had been brought into the open. As it was reported to me years later, Dr. Darda then turned to her and invited her to ask my mother and father the question she needed them to answer. ‘Am I adopted?’ At first, neither of my parents spoke. Pop looked over at Ma, then back at Frances. It was my mother who finally spoke. ‘Yes.’
“Later that same week, Ma, Pop, Simone, and I were summoned to a family session with Frances and Dr. Darda. Our parents had not yet shared with Simone and me what had been revealed during the earlier session and so, it was in the car en route to Hartford that Simone and I, side by side in the backseat, learned that our sister had started out life as our cousin. ‘She was an infant when we took her,’ Ma explained. ‘Simone, you were little yourself and, of course, you weren’t even around yet, Felix.’ Pop was driving and, perhaps, too uncomfortable to glance in the rearview mirror to see how we were taking the news. Ma was not looking back at us either, but I could hear from the way she kept snapping her pocketbook clasp open and shut that she was nervous. It was a strange thing to get this shocking information delivered from the backs of my parents’ heads. ‘I have always loved your sister as if I bore her,’ my mother assured us. ‘Which is why I can’t understand why she is . . .’ She didn’t or couldn’t finish her sentence.
“ ‘So if you’re not her mother, is Pop still her father?’ I asked. Ma jerked her head around, her eyes flashing outrage. ‘Of course he’s not! Why would you even think such a thing, Felix?’ I didn’t know why; I just wondered and thought I’d ask. Ma turned back toward the road ahead and sighed audibly. ‘We had the best intentions when we decided to keep it from her, and from you two,’ she said. ‘We never, ever imagined it would come to this.’ Simone reached over and squeezed my shoulder when, unbeknownst to my parents, I began to cry. For the rest of that ride, all was silent except for the songs coming from the radio.”
“It was such a long time ago. Why is it still so hard?” I’m in tears again.
Lois’s ghost asks her questions gently. “Did she die?”
I shake my head. Watch her hand reach over and grab my shoulder the way Simone had. I appreciate the gesture; I just wish I could feel it.
“Are you all right?” she asks.
Am I? Looking ahead at nothing, I shrug.
“It’s time to go back now, Felix. Time for you to relive it, not just watch it.”
“I don’t want to,” I tell her. “It’s too painful.”
“Pain is part of the process, I’m afraid. It’s unavoidable.”
“What process? Why am I being put through all this?”
Instead of answering me, she directs me to go downstairs, climb onto the stage, and touch the screen.
And so I do.
The wind-whipped screen, the thundering water, the sensation of falling, the whirlpool: it’s as strange as the last time, but not as scary. What’s more frightening than the way I’ve gotten here is what’s happening now that I’ve arrived. But for better or worse, here I am again: Felix Funicello, a twelve-year-old who’s confused, angry, and quietly terrified by all that I don’t understand.
TEN
Dr. Darda has a potbelly and a big wen on his forehead. It’s uncomfortable to look at, but hard to keep my eyes off of. Me and Simone get introduced. Frances has been called down from the ward and, while we wait for her to get here, Ma asks Dr. Darda a bunch of questions: How is she doing? Is she maintaining the weight she’s gained? Has she gained any more? Does she seem any less angry? I look over at Simone and she looks back at me. We just found out that our sister isn’t really our sister. What about how we’re doing?
When Frances enters the room, she doesn’t look at Simone or me. Or Pop. All she’s looking at is Ma and I recognize that look: she’s gunning for her. Dr. Darda says, Why doesn’t Frances start? Now that she’s had a few days to reflect on what she’s found out, does she have anything she’d like to ask?
She nods, smirking now as she addresses Ma. “So tell me. Whose bright idea was it to keep it from me all these years?”
Ma and Pop look at each other. Pop opens his mouth to say something, but Ma beats him to it. “It was mine,” she says. “Poppy wasn’t sure what we should do, but I thought it would be better for you if you didn’t know.”
Frances’s laugh is snotty. “You’re pathetic,” she says. She turns to Pop. “You both are. And so is he.”
He? Does she mean Dr. Darda? Me? If you ask me, she’s the pathetic one. Except no one’s asking me. I’m not even sure why me and Simone are here. And why is Pop talking about Uncle Iggy? What’s he got to do with anything?
Dr. Darda asks Ma if she can explain what their reasoning was when she and Pop decided to withhold the information from Frances and her siblings.
“They’re not my siblings,” Frances says. She turns to Simone. “Did you know we aren’t really sist
ers?” Simone shakes her head. Frances is looking only at her, so I guess it doesn’t matter to her that I’m not really her brother. Simone says she and I just found out, too.
Ma starts to answer Dr. Darda’s question. “Well, as we discussed last time, the circumstances weren’t the best and—”
“Mrs. Funicello?” Dr. Darda says. “Why don’t you address Frances?”
“Oh. Yes, certainly. Sweetheart, you have to understand how difficult the circumstances were. The police had to be called in. There was an investigation.”
What? The police? Why?
“We thought—I thought—it would be easier for you if you didn’t know. I thought, well, maybe when she’s twenty-one and better able to handle . . . And now I realize it was a mistake to keep it from you. I mean, look what it’s led to. But it’s not like we could see into the future. We were just trying to shield you from . . . We were just trying to protect you from the ugly truth.”
Dr. Darda turns to Frances. “Can I tell you what I heard in what your mother just told you?”
“Go ahead. You’re going to tell me anyway. Knock yourself out.”
One of our vocabulary words last week was “flippancy.” I got points taken off in the quiz because I couldn’t use it in a sentence. Now I could, though. Frances’s flippancy is very rude.
“I hear maternal instinct,” Dr. Darda says. “Mothers will do anything to protect their young.”
“Right. She’d do anything to protect those two.” She points her chin at Simone and me. “Her beautiful real daughter and her precious little boy. But she played by different rules when it came to me. The fat one, the kid who wasn’t really her kid.” She glances at Pop. “Him too. They both treated me different.”
“That’s malarkey,” Pop tells her. “We treated you three all the same. And that’s why we kept it from your sister and brother, too. Because we didn’t want them to treat you any different, either.”