Authors: Alyssa B. Sheinmel
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Health & Daily Living, #Diseases; Illnesses & Injuries, #Girls & Women, #Social Issues, #Depression & Mental Illness
wo d ays after Janey leaves, Sethie begins to leave all the windows open in her room. A cold snap has hit New York City, and Sethie likes the sound of that; a snap is something sharp, like breaking open peas that have
soaked in water until they’re turgid. Cold like a snap of the fingers that can get your attention, stop you from what you are doing, or send you on your way. When she drinks her water, Sethie fills the bottle with ice cubes. She has been too warm for the Past few days—days spent without Shaw. Sethie thinks that if she can just get cold enough, it will feel like Shaw is with her.
She charges her phone. Maybe Shaw has been trying to call; after all, he says they’re still friends. He says they always have been. But when the phone rings, it’s never Shaw, and Sethie lets it go to voice mail. Every phone call is from Janey.
“Hi Sethie, I miss you. It’s freezing in Virginia. I thought the South was supposed to be warm!”
“Sethie, I’m getting a little worried. Call me back at Doug’s house, please, just to tell me you’re okay. Or if you don’t want to talk to me, leave me a message at home that you’re okay, and I’ll get it when I check my messages. Please, Sethie, I miss you.”
Sethie deletes the new messages; she hears the words Janey’s saying, but she doesn’t want to listen. There are saved messages from Shaw in her voice mail box. She plays them a few times, and it feels like she’s hearing his growling voice through her belly instead of through her ears.
Five days after Janey leaves, Sethie is sick of being cold and sick of waiting for Shaw. She shuts the windows and turns the heat as high as it goes, burning her hand on the old radiator. I should be hot, Sethie thinks. I should not be trying to feel Shaw here, to imitate his touch, to re-create his kisses by sucking on ice cubes. I should not be inviting him in through the open windows; I should be keeping him out behind locked doors. She will sweat him out. She layers on sweatpants and a sweatshirt, even a hat and scarf. She tells herself that Shaw is in the sweat leaving her body. And she tells herself the harder she sweats, the more weight she will lose—an added bonus.
157 bad enough, she thinks, that there’s all this extra flesh making me fat, but it’s also extra flesh that Shaw touched, extra flesh that misses him now. She is sure, though she only saw her for a second, that Shaw’s new girlfriend is skinny and flat and that her stomach curls into a C when she slouches. Sethie corrects herself; Anna is not his “new” girlfriend. She can only be new if Sethie was old, and Sethie was never his. Or he was never hers. She can’t remember which one she’s upset about. It’s so confusing, to feel that she’s been dumped even though it’s perfectly clear to everyone else, apparently, that she and Shaw were never a couple to begin with.
Sethie can’t believe just how alone she is; a month ago, she imagined spending Christmas with Shaw, or at least with Janey. Now they’re each with their respective significant others. Sethie gnaws on the word
significant
like it’s a piece of gum.
She decides to clean out her desk. She empties each of the five drawers completely and spreads the contents on the floor around her. She can’t think what to throw away, so she arranges everything into piles and places each pile back into the drawers. She can imagine Shaw sitting on her bed while she cleans; he would laugh over her inability to throw anything away. He would have told her to get stoned before cleaning. Sethie climbs into her bed; she sleeps as much as she can. She doesn’t bother getting dressed; she stays in her pajamas so that she can always get into bed and try to sleep. She can’t eat in her sleep. And when she sleeps, she isn’t hungry.
Eight days after Janey leaves, Sethie walks into the kitchen. It is midday on New Year’s Eve, and Sethie has no plans to go out. She has decided to take some more of Janey’s mother’s Valium and go to sleep early. Sethie has not left the house since she took her last final, the day before Christmas Eve, the day before Janey left for Virginia and Shaw left for Florida and Ben left for Vermont. The day before everyone left her here, leaving her no choice but to go into the kitchen and run her fingers over her mother’s knives.
It’s not that she wants something sharp. A dull knife will do just fine. A dinner knife; sharper than a butter knife, but not as sharp as a steak knife. The knife she is most familiar with; the one she uses to cut up pieces of white-meat-only chicken, to scrape peanut butter thin across wheat toast, to peel the skin off of apples.
When she was little, Sethie always imagined what it would be like not to be Jewish, to have a house filled with lights and presents at Christmas time. A tree and a fire and a Christmas Eve dinner and a big breakfast on Christmas Day. The kitchen filled with leftovers all through winter break. Now, she is grateful to be Jewish. There are no leftovers in her kitchen to tempt her. Only some old cheese and dry pasta, only frozen chicken cutlets and Diet Coke. And dinner knives.
159 tonight. She’s already getting ready. A friend of hers is having a dinner party. She invited Sethie to come, but Sethie laughed. Staying at home alone still seems like something better to do than going with her mother to a party.
She brings one of the knives into her bedroom and slides it between her mattress and box spring. She doesn’t know why she feels she needs to hide it well. Her mother will only pop her head in before leaving; under the covers or in the closet would have served just as well.
Sethie waits until her mother leaves, and then she takes off all of her clothes and lies on the hardwood floor. She repeats her old ritual of going over her body with a hand mirror, but this time, she uses the knife. She sits up to run it over her legs, holding it above her skin but so close that she can feel the cool of the metal pricking the hair on her legs, which she hasn’t shaved for days, since she hasn’t bathed for days.
Sweating him out hasn’t worked. She still misses Shaw. Throwing up hasn’t worked. She still feels fat. It seems the only thing left is to cut off the fat and to scrape away at the layers of skin that Shaw touched, the layers of skin that remember how his touch felt. She will make herself free of fat; she will make herself clean of Shaw.
Sethie’s shoulder blades press into the floor. The blade finds its way to her hip bone. Sethie’s favorite part, the part where the bone protrudes: the skinniest place on her body. She makes a light scratch, just enough to turn the skin beneath it white. Then presses just a little bit harder, so the skin begins to turn red. She feels like a creature out of a
160 fairy tale: a girl who discovers that her bones are really made out of stone, that her skin is really as thin as glass, that her hair is brittle as straw, that her tears have dried up so that she cries only salt. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t hurt when she presses hard enough to begin bleeding: it doesn’t hurt, because she’s not real anymore.
chool begi ns on a Monday, almost a week after New Year’s Eve, and on Sunday, Sethie’s mother knocks on Sethie’s door. Sethie is lying in bed; her mother doesn’t wait for a response to her knock before she
sticks her head into the room. Sethie looks at her mother’s bare feet. She thinks about her eighth- grade health teacher, who brought a Barbie into class and said that there was no way that, were Barbie life- size, such small feet could support her body. Even then, Sethie thought: you’ve obviously never met my mother.
“How about brunch?” Rebecca says.
“I’m not really awake yet, Mom,” Sethie says. “I’ll wait,” Rebecca replies, and Sethie rolls over, away
from her, facing the wall.
“Okay, but you might have to wait a long time. I’m not
going to waste the last day before school starts by getting
out of bed early.”
She says it like a regular bratty teenager, she says it like
162 she really is concerned about her last day to sleep late and stay in bed all day. But the truth is that, having barely left the house for two weeks, Sethie doesn’t quite remember the steps to getting up, getting ready, getting dressed, and she wants to give herself some extra time to remember them. Her hair is so greasy, she thinks, she will have to shampoo it at least three times. But then she remembers that Janey’s hairdresser says you should let your hair get greasy in between shampoos anyway.
Sethie swings her legs over her bed and plants her bare feet on the floor. This part, she thinks, is easy. I’ve gotten out of bed plenty of times since Janey left: to go to the bathroom, to walk into the kitchen, to search for the remote control when it fell under the bed. But she hasn’t changed her clothes since New Year’s Eve. She shivers when she lifts her T-shirt over her head. Not because she’s cold, but because she is not used to her own bare skin. Being naked feels strange, after so many days in the same clothes.
In the shower, Sethie wraps her arms around herself, folding one so that it lies across her stomach and the other so that it lies across her back. She is thin enough that she can grab her opposite elbows. She pulls her fingers across her belly, pressing against her skin. She can barely even grab her belly fat. Her fingers stop at the scab on her hip. She picks at it so that it bleeds again, and then she rubs soap into it so that it hurts. It begins at her hip bone and snakes onto her belly. It’s beginning to scar.
163 she did press the knife deeper as she moved down toward her belly, down to the fatter place. But as it began to heal, Sethie couldn’t stop picking at it, pressing on it. There’s a name for it, she thinks: to worry a wound. That’s what she did. She didn’t let it heal; she made it bleed again instead. But she likes knowing that she will have a scar, like how some people get tattoos to remember the important moments in their lives.
She doesn’t bother blow-drying her hair; she doesn’t put on makeup. She chooses sweatpants, and she pulls the drawstring waist tight so that it rubs against her scabs, opening them again as she walks, sits down, stands up. Her mother suggests a nice restaurant about eight blocks from their house, and Sethie wonders how many calories she can burn off in the walk to and from the restaurant. She wonders why her mother is choosing such a nice place when Sethie’s dressed the way she is. She winds a scarf tightly around her neck and shoves a hat over her wet hair. She doesn’t mind that she’ll be cold on the walk to the restaurant, though; shivering burns calories, too.
Her mother’s coat is black and fitted. Sethie feels like a little girl next to her; her coat is baggy, and she knows that without makeup, she probably looks even younger than she is. The doormen on Park Avenue tip their hats at Rebecca; a man in a tie doesn’t even pretend not to stare at her as he walks past. Rebecca takes it all in stride. Sethie looks at her feet as they walk. None of them are looking at her, not the way she looks now. But she can remember, a only a year or two ago, when the men began looking at her more than they
164 did her mother. She can remember feeling both triumphant and guilty.
When they sit down, the waiter places a large basket of bread in front of them. Her mother reaches for a piece of baguette and rubs butter all over it. Sethie reaches for the cinnamon raisin bread with walnuts. It used to be her favorite; she used to ask her mother to take her to this restaurant just for this bread. Maybe that’s why her mother suggested this place; maybe she remembered that it used to be Sethie’s favorite. She can’t possibly know that now Sethie would never choose a place with bread like this.
But she can’t seem to stop her fingers from placing the bread on her plate, from ripping it into smaller pieces, from wrapping around the butter knife, and spreading the butter across the bread. She can’t stop her hands from bringing the bread into her mouth, her jaw from chewing it, her throat from swallowing it, her stomach from accepting it.
It’s okay, she thinks, I can throw it up later. She looks down at her hands, and her stomach, and says silently, “Eat all you want, kids.”
“Are you excited to go back to school?” Sethie’s mother asks.
“Huh?” Sethie had almost forgotten her mother was there, forgotten anyone was there, other than the bread.
“Are you excited to go back to school?” Rebecca repeats.
“Oh, sure. I don’t know. My grades don’t really matter anymore.” Sethie butters another piece of bread, puts it in her mouth, reaches into the bread basket for more.
165 “Everything’s already gone off to colleges,” she explains. “Right.” Rebecca chews her own piece of bread. “Well,
I’m sure you’ll be happy to have your friends back in town.” Sethie shrugs. I must have told Rebecca, she thinks,
that my friends were all out of town, so that she wouldn’t
think it was odd when I barely left the house for two straight
weeks. Sethie doesn’t remember, but that sounds right. When she waiter takes their orders, Sethie orders an
omelet with cheese. She doesn’t even bother specifying egg
whites only; it doesn’t matter since she’s going to throw it
all up later. Her mother asks her more about going back
to school, but Sethie’s too distracted to answer more than
monosyllabically; she’s thinking about getting back to the
apartment in time to throw up. After brunch, Sethie’s
mother offers to take Sethie shopping, but Sethie turns her
down. So they head off in opposite directions; Sethie’s
mother toward Bloomingdale’s and Sethie toward their
apartment. She walks slowly, making as little effort as possible. She doesn’t want her body to begin metabolizing too
much.
Even though she’s home alone, she closes the door
to her bathroom and turns on the sink to drown out the
sounds. She crouches over the toilet and sticks her fingers
in her mouth. She gags, but nothing comes up. She tries
using the opposite hand, she tickles the roof of her mouth,
she reaches for her throat, she covers her fingers in soap so
that the taste alone should be enough to make her gag. She hasn’t had this kind of trouble since the few feeble
and halfhearted attempts she made before Janey taught her
166 how to do it properly. She settles down, sitting cross-legged in front of the toilet.
It’s okay, she tells herself, maybe I just need to relax for a minute. She takes a deep breath and tries again; again, she gags, she coughs, she spits, but no food comes up. She closes her eyes and leans against the wall opposite the toilet. Her fingers are still at her mouth, resting against her lips, reminding her to try again. She imagines that her stomach is clenching like a fist around the food she’s eaten; she imagines her intestines snaking around tighter to hold everything in. She imagines that she—her fingers and her throat and her desire to throw up— is pitted against her greedy belly, and she feels outmatched.
So everything stays down. The bread with the nuts, the butter, the cheese, and the egg yolks. Her body just won’t give it up.