As much as I’d liked Smith, I hadn’t liked Princeton. The campus looked like the staging ground for a very successful eugenics experiment: everyone was blond, preppy, and perfect, except for the dark-haired girls who were sleek, exotic, and perfect. During the weekend I’d spent there I hadn’t seen a single fat person, or anyone with bad skin. Just acres of shiny hair, straight white teeth, and perfect bodies in perfect clothes arrayed beneath the perfect willow trees that grew beneath perfectly Gothic stone halls.
I said I’d be miserable. My father said he didn’t care. I dug my heels in. He told me it was Princeton or nothing. And by the time I’d been packed off to Campbell Hall and stayed long enough to start classes and have my graduation-present mountain bike stolen from the library bicycle rack, the divorce was final, and he was gone for good, sticking us with a tuition bill of which he’d paid just enough to make it impractical for me to start over anywhere else. So I quit the crew team— no big loss to me, or the team, I suspect, since I’d gained the requisite Freshman Fifteen, plus the fifteen pounds my roommate should have gained but didn’t, thanks to her diligent bulimia— and got a job with the Department of Food Services, affectionately known as Doofus to its employees.
If college is supposed to be the best years of your life, then it’s safe to say that I spent the best years of my life in a hairnet, dishing out reconstituted scrambled eggs and limp bacon, loading dirty dishes on the conveyor belt, mopping the floors, looking at my classmates out of the corner of my eyes and thinking that they were all so much more beautiful, graceful, comfortable in their own skins than I could ever be. They all had better haircuts. And all of them were thin. True, many of them were thin because they were sticking their fingers down their throats after every meal, but at times that seemed like a small price to pay for having basically everything a woman could want— brains, beauty, and a way to eat ice cream and cherry Danishes and still stay skinny.
“Good Hair” was the first article I wrote for the campus alternative newspaper. I was a freshman, and the editor-in-chief, a junior named Gretel whose own hair was kept in a paramilitary blond brush cut, asked me to write more. By sophomore year I was a columnist. By junior year I was a senior writer, spending every hour I wasn’t slinging hash or pushing a mop in the Nassau Weekly’s cramped, dusty offices in Aaron Burr Hall, and I’d decided that this was what I wanted to do with my life.
Writing let me escape. It let me escape Princeton, where everyone was chic and stylish and, in the case of the guy down the hall, the future ruler of some minor Middle Eastern principality. It let me escape the insistent tug of my family, and its ongoing misery. Writing was like slipping into the ocean, a place where I could move easily, where I could be graceful, and playful, and invisible and visible all at once— a byline, not a body. Sitting in front of the computer, with the screen blank and the cursor blinking, was the best escape I knew.
And there was plenty to escape from. In the four years I was at Princeton, my father remarried and had two more children. Daniel and Rebecca. He had the nerve to send me pictures, and birth announcements. Did he think I’d be happy, seeing their squinched-up baby faces and tiny baby footprints? It felt like being kicked. It wasn’t that he didn’t want children, I realized sadly. It was that he hadn’t wanted us.
My mother went back to work, and her weekly telephone calls were full of complaints about how schools, and kids, had changed since she got her teaching certificate. The subtext was clear: This wasn’t the life she signed up for. This wasn’t where she expected to be, at fifty, making ends meet on alimony and what the local school board paid permanent substitutes.
Meanwhile, Lucy had flunked out of her first year at school in Boston, and was living at home, attending community college haphazardly, and majoring in unsuitable men. Josh was spending three hours a day in the gym, lifting weights so frequently that his upper body looked inflated, and had pretty much stopped talking except for a series of tonal grunts and the occasional “Whatever.” “Just get your education,” my mother would say wearily, after the latest recitation of how my father’s checks were late again, of how her car had broken down, of how my sister hadn’t come home for two nights in a row. “Just finish up. We’ll be fine.”
Then— finally— it was the June of my graduation.
Except for a handful of strained lunches during the summer and Christmas breaks, I hadn’t seen my father. He sent birthday cards (usually on time), and tuition checks (almost always late) and usually for about half of what they were supposed to be. I felt like I’d become just one more unremarkable item on his to-do list. I hadn’t expected him to come to my graduation. I never thought he’d care. But he called me a week in advance of the much-longed-for date, saying that he was looking forward to it. Him, and his new wife, whom I’d never met.
“I’m not sure… I don’t think… ,” I stammered.
“Cannie,” he said. “I’m your father. And Christine’s never seen Princeton!”
“So tell Christine you’ll send her a postcard,” my mother said sourly. I had dreaded telling my mother that he’d be there, but I couldn’t figure out how to tell him no. He’d said the magic words, the pellet words. I’m your father. After everything— his distance, his desertion, the new wife and new kids— I was, it seems, still starving for his love.
My father, with new wife and kids in tow, arrived during the English Department’s reception. I’d won some small award for creative writing, but they came too late to hear my name called. Christine was a petite little thing, with an aerobicized hard body and a blond perm. The children were adorable. My floral Laura Ashley dress had looked just fine in the dorm. Now it looked like a slipcover, I thought dismally. And I looked like a sofa.
“Cannie,” said my father, looking me up and down. “I see college cuisine’s agreed with you.”
I clutched my stupid plaque tightly against me. “Thanks so much,” I said. My father rolled his eyes at his new wife as if to say, Can you believe how touchy she is?
“I was just teasing you,” he said, as his new adorable children stared at me, as if I were an animal in a zoo for the oversized.
“I, um, got you tickets for the ceremony.” I didn’t mention that I’d had to beg, borrow, and finally pay $100 I couldn’t spare to score the tickets. Each senior was issued a total of four. The administration at Princeton hadn’t yet made accomodations for those of us struggling with reconstructed families that included stepmothers, stepfathers, new half-siblings, and the like.
My father shook his head. “Won’t be necessary. We’re leaving in the morning.”
“Leaving?” I repeated. “But you’ll miss graduation!”
“We’ve got tickets to Sesame Place,” chirped his little wife, Christine.
“Sesame Place!” repeated the little girl for emphasis.
“So Princeton was sort of on our way.”
“That’s… um… well.” And suddenly I was blinking back tears. I bit my lip as hard as I could, and squeezed the plaque against me so tightly that I had an eight-by-twelve bruise on my midsection for the next week and a half. “Thanks for stopping by.”
My father nodded, and moved as if he was going to hug me, but wound up merely grasping my shoulders and giving me the kind of shake that coaches routinely administer to underperforming athletes— a “buck up, camper” kind of shake. “Congratulations,” he said. “I’m very proud of you.” But when he kissed me his lips never even touched my skin, and I knew the whole time that his eyes were on the door.
Somehow I made it through the ceremony, the dismantling of my dorm room, the long ride home. I hung my diploma on my bedroom wall and tried to figure out what I’d do next. Graduate school was out of the question. Even after all those breakfasts I’d worked, all those drooly pieces of bacon and curdled scrambled eggs, I was still $20,000 or so in debt. I couldn’t see borrowing more money. So I lined up job interviews with the handful of small papers who were willing to even consider a college graduate with no real-world experience, in the middle of a recession, and spent the summer driving up and down the Northeast in the thirdhand van I’d bought with some of my food-service dollars. When I loaded up the car to head out for my job interviews, I made myself a promise— I wasn’t going to be my father’s rat anymore. I was going to walk away from the pellet bar. He could bring me nothing but unhappiness, and I didn’t need more unhappiness in my life.
I heard from my brother that our father had moved out West, but I didn’t ask for specifics, and nobody offered them. Ten years after the divorce he no longer had to pay child support or alimony. The checks stopped coming. So did the birthday cards, or any acknowledgment that we even existed. Lucy’s graduation came and went, and when Josh sent a card announcing his, it came back returned to sender. Our father had moved on, it seemed, without telling us where.
“We could find him on the Internet or something,” I offered. Josh glared at me.
“Why?”
And I couldn’t think of an answer. If we found him, would he come? Would he care? Probably not. We agreed, the three of us, to let it be. If our father wanted to stay gone, we would let him.
And we struggled into our twenties without him. Josh overcame his fear of the slopes and spent a year and a half drifting from one ski-resort town to another, and Lucy ran off briefly to Arizona with a guy she claimed was a former professional hockey player. As evidence, she’d had him remove his bridge in the middle of dinner and show that he was missing all his teeth.
And that was that, pretty much.
I know that what had happened with my father— his insults, his criticism, the way he made me feel that I was defective and deformed— had hurt me. I’d encountered enough of those self-help articles in women’s magazines to know that you don’t go through that kind of cruelty unscathed. With every man I met I’d watch myself carefully. Did I really like that editor, I’d wonder, or am I just searching for Daddy? Do I love this guy, I’d ask myself, or do I just think he’d never leave me, the way my father did?
And where had all the care I’d taken gotten me, I wondered? I was alone. A man who’d liked me enough to want me in his family was dead, and I couldn’t even say how sorry I was properly. And now that it was possible— now that it was likely, even— that Bruce had finally gotten to the point in his life where he could understand me, where he could sympathize with what I’d been through because of what he’d gone through— he wouldn’t even talk to me. It felt like the cruelest joke, like a rug being yanked out from under me— in other words, like the way my father made me feel, all over again.
SEVEN
The scales at the University of Philadelphia’s Weight and Eating Disorders Center looked like meat carts. The platforms were about four times the size of normal scales, with railings all around them. It was hard not to feel like livestock when you climbed aboard, as I had every other week since September.
“That’s very unusual,” said Dr. K, gazing down at the red digital printout on the scale. “You lost eight pounds.”
“I can’t eat,” I said numbly.
“You mean you’re eating less,” he said.
“No, I mean every time I put something in my mouth I puke.”
He looked at me sharply, then back at the scale. The numbers were the same. “Let’s step into my office,” he suggested.
And there we were again: me in the chair, him at his desk, my ever-thickening folder spread in front of him. He was tanner than when I’d seen him last, and possibly even thinner, floating in his white laboratory coat. It had been six weeks since I’d last seen Bruce, and things were not proceeding as I’d hoped.
“Most patients gain weight before we start them on the sibu-tramine,” he said. “They have a kind of last hurrah. So, as I said, this is unusual.”
“Something happened,” I said.
He looked at me sharply. “Another article?”
“Bruce’s father died,” I said. “Bruce, my boyfriend… ex-boyfriend. His dad died last month.”
He looked down at his hands, at his folder, then, finally, up at me.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“And he called me… and told me… and asked me to go to the funeral… but he wouldn’t let me stay. Wouldn’t let me stay with him. He was so awful… and it was so sad… and the rabbi said how he used to go to toy stores, and I feel so terrible…”
I blinked hard against the tears. Wordlessly, Dr. K. handed me a box of Kleenex. He took off his glasses and pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose.
“I’m a bad person,” I blubbered. He looked at me kindly.
“Why? Because you broke up with him? That’s silly. How could you know this was going to happen?”
“No,” I said. “I know I couldn’t. But now, it’s like… all I want is to be there for him, and love him, and he won’t let me, and I feel so… alone”
He sighed. “It’s hard when things end. Even if nobody dies, even if you part on the best possible terms, and there’s nobody else involved. Even if you’re the one who lets go first. It’s never easy. It always hurts.”
“I just feel like I made this huge mistake. Like I didn’t think things through. I thought I knew… how it would feel to be apart from him. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I never imagined anything like this. And all I do is miss him” I swallowed hard, choking on another sob. I couldn’t explain it— that I’d been waiting my whole life for a guy who would get me, who would understand my pain. I thought I’d known what pain was, but I knew now I’d never hurt this way.
He focused his eyes on a spot on the wall over my head as I wept. Then he opened a drawer, pulled a pad out of his desk, and started writing.
“Am I out of the study?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Of course, you’re going to have to start eating again soon. But I think it might be a good idea for you to have someone to talk to.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “Not therapy.”
He gave me a crooked smile. “Am I sensing a little antipathy here?”
“No, I don’t have anything against it, but I just know it won’t help,” I told him. “I’m looking at the situation realistically. I made a huge mistake. I wasn’t sure that I loved him enough, and now I know that I do, and his father’s dead and he doesn’t love me anymore.” I straightened my back and wiped my face. “But I still want to do this. I really want to do this. I want to have one thing in my life I can feel good about. I want to feel like I’m doing something right.”