Fat hoe defied me and threw her grub on the floor.
Sure enough, when I got back the next evening, the varnish was practically licked off that hardwood. I looked at her and said, — I think we’re both starting to understand who the fuck you are.
She only looked up at me and said, — Don’t you mean who
we
are?
— Don’t fucking flatter yourself, I told her, but she’d gotten right under my skin and we both knew it.
There was another incident last night, so right now, I’m not going to talk with her. I sneak into the apartment and tiptoe into the bedroom. Exhausted, I fall asleep on the floor.
NO MATTER WHAT
she tells you, or what you tell yourself, every lonely night when you look at your reflection in that big window, and examine that shrinking you, it all just sucks.
The pain and frustration of confinement gnaws at you. It drips acid into your core. Every time I feel the handcuff and chain clinking against the steel pillar, I die a little. I can never escape them; even when I rest on the mattress watching the portable TV Lucy brought me, a constant awareness, both vestibular and visceral, is insinuated into my consciousness.
I hadn’t understood how small one corner of a room could be. And how vast a prairie the rest of it constituted, the door representing something that could have been a mile away, thanks to this inhibiting, frustrating chain. Before, I could run. Minnesota. Chicago. Miami. New York. I could hide. Doritos, KFC, Boston Market, Taco Bell. Now I have no work, except what Lucy gives me. No food, other than that which
she
brings.
And my only releases are the treadmill and the Total Gym. Yes, I’ve so bought into Lucy’s program. My body is losing fat, toughening up. So is my mind. I’ve started thinking about my work in a less abstract and more practical way. Speculative projects I was considering have fallen aside, peeling from me, exposed as frivolous, superfluous. Real goers harden like rock in my consciousness, gaining sharper definition. I quit the Morning Pages. They were doing me good, but they were also giving Lucy more power over me. And I don’t want
anybody
having more power over me. I feel strong. But just let me sleep in my own bed and work in my studio!
FUCKING CRAZY BITCH!
I’m still constantly hungry, but my food fantasies have completely turned. I’m not thinking of eggs over easy and crispy bacon, they now seem so greasy, toxic, and repulsive. Now I envision coarse, grainy oats, the prescribed amount of honey drizzling onto their surface, courtesy of the small plastic bear in Lucy’s hand, and the blueberries, which will explode with juice in my mouth. It’s the sun-saturated, natural Florida staples of fruit—the incendiary oranges, the exquisite nectar of the peaches—that now excite my imagination. Lucy’s wholegrain bagel breakfast is another treat, usually served with peanut butter and banana.
And then there is my work: the work Lucy gave me.
I’m on the cusp of what promises to be a heavy period; several pimples throb prominently on my face, my hair is lank and greasy and an elephantine bloat around my stomach seems to signal a horrible weight regression. I have to keep reminding myself: it’s only fluid retention. It’ll go when I start to menstruate. So I get on the treadmill. I do forty-five minutes.
But when I’m finished I don’t rest, I go onto the Total Gym and work till my body and spirit can give me no more. Then I clean myself with the baby wipes Lucy’s left. She’s given me a huge test, but now she has to be tested too. And that’s my job. Of course, with nothing to do but think, you have one of two options: either you go completely insane or you come to conclusions. Conclusion one: I was already going mad, so that wasn’t working. Conclusion two: I’ve been a pushover for too long. I habitually acquiesced to people, thinking it would make my life easier, when it’s done the reverse, as it always does. And those people weren’t strong. They didn’t deserve such subordination. They were weak, vain, and scared. So thank you, Lucy, but now I’m going to make
you
work, you Boston psycho-fucker. Because if I can break a hardass like you, nothing and nobody will ever stand in my way again.
And she comes through from the bedroom, where she’s obviously spent last night. She thinks I didn’t hear her, crawling around like a sneaky rat. Thinks that only one of us is the prisoner here.
In this crazy dance we’ve gotten to know each other so well. Our periods synchronized, I don’t even need to ask if she’s also feeling puffed up with fluid or curmudgeonly with menstrual cramping or a stinging UTI. The tone of our voices, the movement of our bodies, has become so easily discerned by the other. I don’t know what she is or, for that matter, I am capable of. One of us ostensibly has the power (but how much power, in those circumstances, can the other really have?) though we’re both making it up as we go along. So I challenge her. — Oh, you spent the night here again.
Lucy pauses like she’s going to lie, but instead makes the pathetic excuse that she got here late and wanted to fix me my breakfast early. All because she had a busy day.
— Forgive me if I don’t empathize, I snap back.
She looks like she’s going to say something, but doesn’t. She’s guarded; although I sense she’s becoming more isolated, the only time we talk about anything that isn’t to do with my weight is our discussion on the conjoined Wilks twins from Arkansas. But I can’t be too confrontational right now, not as she’s heading into the kitchen to do her stuff, then emerging with my scrambled egg whites, smoked salmon, and wholemeal toast, which I love.
— I really do appreciate what you’ve done here, I tell her in between mouthfuls of our food. She dispenses a kindly smile as she sits on the chair, eating off her own plate, balanced on her lap. Her eyes are circled and tired-looking. — Now you couldn’t keep me out of this place if you tried. It’s saved . . . it’s saving my life.
— I’m glad you feel that way. She puts her fork on the plate and pushes her hair back, — You really are making progress, and you’re looking so much better. Forty-one pounds is good. She chomps on a slice of toast.
— Yes, but now I feel that I need to start taking responsi-bility, I tell her, watching her eyebrows raise. — I need to get a balance. If you gave me my phone I could record my own exercise, food, and weight on Lifemap—
Lucy scoffs, — Don’t insult the both of us.
— I need to be out of here. I need to get back to work.
That bladed glint in Lucy’s eye returns, the one that negotiates against reason, as she shakes her head, lowering her plate to the floor. — You’re not ready.
I feel something perish inside. I try to remain composed. — Lucy, what gives you the right to make that call?
— I earned the freakin right, and she springs up, stepping toward me. Standing over me, she lifts up her top, displaying that ripped abdominal wall. I almost feel like I could grab it, like the rungs of a ladder, and climb my way to freedom. — This gives me the right! Eat your breakfast, she barks.
I hear the girlish trill of my voice in pathetic retort. — Bring me some books!
But she’s turned on her heel with a flourish, heading off and leaving me with my food and my thoughts.
I had to get out of Potters Prairie. The town was like an open prison. The wide streets, the big lots surrounded by pine and fir trees, the endless gray skies. People were quick to tell you how much they were shopping and praying—spreading stupidity, passing it like a baton to the next generation. It was the currency of Middle America. An hour and a half away sat the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Prince came from Minneapolis. Nobody came from Potters Prairie. I had to go somewhere else, a place that would let me see things differently, would let me become the kind of woman I desperately wanted to be.
In downtown Minneapolis, in a Chase Bank not far from Dad’s store, sat my college fund of Grandma Olsen’s $65,000 dollars, gathering dust. My spoiled, entitled kid’s share of Grandpa Olsen’s trucking business, that wheezy, bony-fisted old man I barely knew and had zero connection with. Yet through him buying a truck in another age, another world, driving it all over the Midwest, then buying another and employing somebody to drive it and so on, his granddaughter—a small, lazy, fat girl in a suburb who struggled to do minimal chores—would be able to sculpt and paint. Since I’ve been here, I’ve been thinking about him, that frugal man of few words. When he stoically traversed all those road miles, could he ever have imagined he was doing it for this?
It would certainly be anathema to Mom and Dad. I had to be sneaky with this one. So I researched business studies options online, settling for the Driehaus College of Business at DePaul University. It had the advantage of being located in downtown Chicago, close to the Institute of Art. I told my parents I was planning to enroll there. — What’s wrong with a school in the Twin Cities, cherub? Surely a state college would be less expensive? Mom asked. She called me “cherub” a lot, because cherubs are small and fat.
I told my folks DePaul had one of the best records in the Midwest for placing graduating business students in employment. Dad applauded my enterprise and gave me his blessing. — There’s a head on those shoulders after all.
— But I’ll miss you so much, Mom cried.
I was off for sure, but I wasn’t going to any business college. My destination was art school. I caught a bus to Chicago, and checked into a cheap B&B in Uptown. I was scared; the place, and the surrounding streets, seemed full of disturbed and outright crazy people. I kept my room door locked at all times. Fortunately, I quickly found a basement room on Craigslist, in an apartment near Western Avenue. I got a job in a local video rental store and lived on coffee and cigarettes. Soon I was down to 120 lbs, shedding with the speed of somebody suffering a terminal illness.
I was way too young to get into bars, and didn’t have the courage to attempt using a fake ID, so my social life was limited to coffee with my co-workers. I started hanging out with a guy called Mikey who worked part-time at the store. He was two years older than me, a creative-writing major at Columbia College. With his rash of spots and an Adam’s apple that bobbed like a pig in the belly of a snake, Mikey looked nothing like Barry, but somehow reminded me of him. He was a sincere, sweet guy: perhaps a little full of himself, but essentially harmless. (I would later realize that this is possibly the most offensive thing you can say about anyone.) We talked a lot about movies and went to see a ton of them at the Gene Siskel and Facets. He insisted on reading me his stories, which I thought were pretty lame, but we made out and soon he was clumsily helping me free of my virginity like it was a heavy old greatcoat.
The weather was so brutal; I wanted to cry whenever I stepped out the door. Potters Prairie was cold, but that first Chicago winter—the icy snowdrifts exacerbated by the wind blasting off the Lake—relentlessly hunted me down. I could literally feel my eyeballs freezing and jaw cracking as soon as I stepped outside. I could see why the electric and gas companies were forbidden to switch off power to any households during January, February, and the first two weeks in March. It would have been tantamount to committing murder. Getting to that bus stop and taking the short ride to work and back home was a fearful, punishing twice-daily ordeal. Growing up in Minnesota, you knew snow. You’d dived into it, squashed it to the form of a grenade to chuck, shoveled it from driveways, and driven tentatively in it. You’d watched it from behind glass in your heated tank of a home, as it fell for days into thick layers that stayed frozen for months on the bleak earth. City snow was different: after a benign arrival, it offered nothing but bleakness and grime. Yet when spring came on, it was like a switch being pulled. The city seemed to thaw instantly, with blossoms opening on the tree-lined streets, almost before your eyes.
As per the late Grandma Olsen’s instructions, I got the college money released into my own bank account on my nineteenth birthday. Before that, I’d been operating on my video-store paycheck and an allowance Mom and Dad sent from home, in the mistaken belief I was at DePaul Business School. I insisted that I was paying the first year myself from my savings, a “gesture” that had Dad looking at me in genuine awe, like I was a budding entrepreneur.
I went to all sorts of lengths to maintain my deception, even going to DePaul campus and buying branded stationery from the college store and obtaining copies of the various semester programs. But all I was waiting for were those two vital spring days which I knew, even in the depths of that bone-shaking winter, would determine my destiny. The week leading up to them I barely slept, I was so shattered.
Then it was time; I went to the Art Institute to apply for what they referred to as “immediate decision.”
This process happened over forty-eight hours: an educational-opportunities version of the Black Friday post-Thanksgiving sales. I took my portfolio to the Institute’s ballroom, and was issued with a number: 146. Then I joined the other applicants; there were 250 of us, all sitting at several round tables. When their number was eventually called, the candidate took their portfolio upstairs and presented it to a member of staff. The professor then went away and got someone else to agree, or disagree, and you were in, or not, as the case may be. The decision really was made right then and there.
So I went through the terrible procedure, sitting nervously, sometimes looking around at all the other hopefuls. Some struck up conversations; the cool, the entitled, the anxious, and the deferential. But mostly I kept my head buried in
Spores of Destiny
, the latest Ron Thoroughgood novel.
Then, number 146 was called, and my skeleton seemed to step outside my flesh, pick up my portfolio, and walk to a station. When the rest of me caught it up, I saw that I was sat in front of a lazy-eyed guy of about thirty-five, who wore a leather jacket. He looked very like (but wasn’t) the “artist” who came to talk at the college in Minneapolis. I was so nervous at first, I just couldn’t speak, merely look into his wearily compassionate eyes. Then, when I started, I thought I’d never stop. I talked about my comic-book drawings of superheroes. About how I loved to draw and paint everything I saw, replicating it. Then how that wasn’t enough, how I needed to transform it, and how all my paintings, drawings and models had to have not just an idea behind them, but a story. I was lost in my tale, exhilarated, but then grew self-conscious again, and ran out of steam. The leather-jacketed guy went impassively through my portfolio. I felt gravity pushing my head down, trying to screw it into the table. I could almost feel the tendons in my neck snap with the effort of keeping it upright. Then he looked up and I heard him say, — Interesting. Could I ask you to wait here a while?