Wintergirls (3 page)

She wraps the cuff around my arm bone. “Are you still being weighed regularly?”

“Once a week. I’m fine. I don’t need to step on your scale.”

“You don’t look fine.” She jots down my numbers. “If you’re going to stay here, you have to get something in your system. If you don’t, it’s back to class.”

Do I want to die from the inside out or the outside in?

She opens up a carton of orange juice, pours it into a paper cup, and hands it to me as she removes the ther-mometer. “I’m serious.”

I take the cup from her. My throat wants it my brain wants it my blood wants it my hand does not want this my mouth does not want this.

The nurse wants this and I need to hide. I force it down.

The door opens and two guys walk in; one bleeding from his nose, the other looking a little freaked out at the sight of blood. The nurse makes the bleeder sit with his head tilted back and his buddy sit with his head between his knees so he doesn’t pass out.

I throw the paper cup in the trash can, take the newspaper off her desk, and retreat to the cot at the far end of the room.

“You’ll drink another one in fifteen minutes,” the nurse says. “Or you can have a lollipop: grape or lime.”

“Right.”

I pull the little screen in front of the cot, sit down, and search through the newspaper. Local section, page 2. The article runs for a couple of inches, next to an ad for fur coats, thirty percent off.

I lie down on the cot, the paper pillowcase crackling in my ears like radio static.

The buzzer sounds. The hall fills with a river of bodies and voices whispering that Cassie was murdered/no, she hung herself/no, she smoked or snorted her way to the Final Exit. She’d try anything once, did you hear about the time under the bleachers/at the mall/at summer camp?

She drove herself into a speeding train/jumped without a parachute/strapped on a weight belt and dove into the ocean.

She offered herself to the big, bad wolf and didn’t scream when he took the first bite.

. . . body found in a motel room, alone . . .

The boys are gone. The nurse takes the newspaper away and spreads a thin blanket over me.

“Can I get another one?” I ask. “I’m cold.”

“Sure thing.” She walks to the supply closet, her shoes squeaking on the polished floor.

“Have you heard anything about the funeral?” I ask.

“The superintendent’s office sent an e-mail,” she says.

“The viewing will be Wednesday night at St. Stephen’s.

They’ll bury her on Saturday.” She walks toward me, her arms loaded down. “Get some sleep now and remember: you’re drinking more orange juice when you wake up.”

“I promise.”

She covers me with all of the blankets she has (five) and the jackets from the lost-and-found box, because I am freezing. I drift into the armpits of strangers, tasting their manic salt, and sleep to forget everything.

Emma is buckled in the backseat watching a movie on the DVD player in her lap, eating potato chips and pounding a Mountain Dew slushie.

“Don’t tell Jennifer,” I say.

“Uh-huh.”

“Seriously. She’ll yell.”

“I heard you. Don’t tell or she’ll yell.” Emma’s eyes are glued to the screen, the chips moving one at a time into her mouth on a pink conveyor belt.

We’re lost. Again. My father doesn’t want me to get a GPS because he says I have to learn how to get around on my own. How can I figure out where I’m going if I’m lost all the time? I’ll ask Jennifer. Christmas is coming.

We pass a dying barn with a shattered roof, and a stained mattress shoved up against the speed-limit sign. Wouldn’t you notice if a mattress fell off your car?

Maybe it was in the back of a truck loaded down with everything a girl owned, taking her to some guy she met online. She promised him her body and soul. He promised her three meals a day and a house but said the place could use more furniture. He didn’t stop when the mattress fell off. A new wife deserves a clean bed, that’s what he always said.

Maybe a leather-covered biker girl, butch and strong, is coming down the road a mile or so behind me. Any minute now, some idiot will cut in front of her and she’ll swerve and the bike will flip and send her screaming because she forgot her wings again and gravity never forgets and then she’ll hit

that nasty mattress. And yeah, she’ll wind up with three broken ribs, a fractured femur, and a strained neck, but the ambulance drivers won’t ever mention that.

They’ll always talk about how the stained mattress at the side of the road saved that chick’s life.

The smell of Emma’s potato chips is doing this to my brain.

By the time I find the Richland Park fields, practice has already started. Emma wants to stay in the car until the end of the movie.

“You need to get out there,” I say.

She groans and closes the player. “I hate soccer.”

“So tell them you want to quit.”

“Mom says the season is almost over and I’m not allowed.”

“So get out there and play. Have fun.”

She looks at my eyes in the rearview mirror. “Nobody ever kicks me the ball.”

Emma is a mattress who got thrown off the truck when her parents split up. I can’t remember the last time her father called. Jennifer is determined to carve her into the perfect-little-girl who will turn into the perfect-young-lady whose shining accomplishments will prove to the world that Jennifer is the absolutely perfect mother.

It’s not like you can blame a mattress when people don’t tie it down tight enough.

I open my door. “Come on. I’ll kick the ball to you.”

She closes the player and tosses it on the seat. “No, you said you have homework.” She suddenly can’t get out fast enough. “Bye, Lia. Drive safe.”

It takes a couple of heartbeats to figure out what just happened.
One. Two. Three.
The smells are messing with my neurons again.

I roll down the window. “Emma. Hang on.”

She slowly walks back to the car, hugging the soccer ball tight. “What?”

“I changed my mind. I want to watch you practice.

Where should I sit?”

Her eyes fly open. “No, you can’t.”

“Why not? Other people are watching.”

“Um, it’s just . . .” She looks at her cleats and mumbles.

“You can watch from the car. It’s warmer.”

There are shouts from the field, nine-year-olds psych-ing themselves up for the kill. Travel soccer is intense.

“Emma, look at me.” How did Jennifer’s voice sneak into my throat? “Why don’t you want me to get out of the car?”

She kicks the gravel. Tiny stones bounce up and ding the paint on my door.

“Coach asked me if it was true you had cancer.” She kicks again. “’Cause he heard you were in the hospital and . . . you know. I said yes.” Whistles blow on the field.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to say.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “I understand. Don’t worry about it.”

The ball slips out of her hands and rolls toward the field. “You’re not mad at me?”

“I can never be mad at you, silly.”

She finally looks up. “Thanks, Lia.”

“And you’re right, I have a ton of homework.” I start the engine. “My teachers will love you for making me deal with it. See you later?”

She smiles. “Okay. I think there are some chips left, if you’re hungry.”

I roll up the window.

I wish I had cancer.

I will burn in hell for that, but it’s true.

The air at the gas station is heavy with diesel and the smell of rancid deep-fryer fat from the McDonald’s next door. Five days ago I weighed 101.30 pounds. I had to eat at Thanksgiving (vultures all around the table), but since then it’s been mostly water and rice cakes. I am so hungry that I could gnaw off my right hand. I stick three pieces of gum in my mouth, throw out Emma’s potato chips, and fill the tank. I am disgusting.

. . .
The first time they admitted me
, I was black and blue and purple and red because I passed out and hit the car in front of us while Cassie screamed and the steering wheel exploded. This body weighed 093.00 pounds.

My roommate at the prison New Seasons was a long, withered zucchini who cried in bed and let the snot run down the sides of her face. Everybody on the staff was whale-sized and sweaty. The nurse who handed out meds was so fat her skin was stretched tight. If she moved too fast, it would rip open and her yellow stuffing would spill out, ruining her Disney World sweatshirt.

I bit the days off in rows, corn kernels that popped in my mouth and wedged between my teeth. Bite. Chew.

Swallow. Again. Bite. Chew. Swallow. Again.

I was a good girl because I didn’t poke holes in my skin (scars noted) or write depressing poetry (journals checked while we were in session) and I ate and ate. They stuffed me like a pink little piggy ready for market. They killed me with mushy apples and pasta worms and little cakes that marched out of the oven and lay down to be frosted. I bit, chewed, swallowed day after day and lied, lied, lied. (Who wants to recover? It took me years to get that tiny. I wasn’t sick; I was strong.) But staying strong would keep me locked up. The only way out was to shove in food until I waddled.

I hawked up crap from the back of my throat about feelings and issues and my thighs. The docs nodded and gave me stickers for my honesty. Four weeks later, the gates opened. Mom Dr. Marrigan drove me home to her house and we pretended none of it ever happened, except for the meal plans and the rules and the appointments and the scales and the hurricane of my mother’s disappointment.

Cassie understood. She listened to everything that happened
and she told me I was brave. . . .

I pull into the garage, brain dripping with gasoline fumes. I don’t remember driving home. One of these days I’m going to walk into the house and the news guy on TV

will be reporting a hit-and-run that just happened downtown. The camera will show blood and broken glass on the sidewalk. A reporter will interview a sobbing woman who saw the accident in front of the department store on Bartlett Street. I’ll have a funny taste in my mouth because I’ll be holding a shopping bag from that store in my hand. I will run back to the garage and find the dead body of a woman stuck in my windshield, blood everywhere.

This kind of thing can happen.

I get out and check the whole car—check the doors, hood, bumpers, lights, front grill, and trunk to make sure I didn’t get into an accident without noticing. No broken lights or dented doors. No dead ladies in the windshield.

Not today.

I head straight for the refrigerator and pull out the leftover Thanksgiving stuffing.

. . . When I was a real girl,
Thanksgiving was at Nanna Marrigan’s house in Maine, or Grandma Overbrook’s in Boston. At Nanna’s we ate oyster stuffing. At Grandma’s it was chestnut and sausage. Nanna liked her pumpkin pie on a cinnamon-pecan crust. Grandma’s pies had to be mincemeat because that’s what her grandmother did. The tables were crowded with tall people reaching for bowls of food and talking too loud; cousins and great-uncles and friends from far away. The smell of gravy and onions made my parents forget to fight, the taste of cranberries reminded them how to laugh. My grandmothers were going to live forever, and Thanksgiving would always be lace tablecloths, thin china, and heavy silver that I stood on a stool to polish.

They died.

Last week’s Thanksgiving was artificially sweetened, enriched with tense preservatives, and wrapped in plastic. Dad’s sisters don’t come anymore because it’s too far.

Jennifer’s family goes to her brother’s because he has more bedrooms. (Mom Dr. Marrigan probably ate at her desk, or took a symbolic scoop of mashed potatoes and gravy in the hospital cafeteria.)

We were us four, plus two of my father’s grad students. One was a vegan; she ate three helpings of yams and most of the pumpkin bread that she brought. The guy was from Los Angeles. He said he was fasting because Thanksgiving honors the genocide of America’s native peoples. After they left, Emma asked Dad why the fasting guy came at all. Dad said he was sucking up to get a letter of recommendation. Jennifer said
she
hoped he choked on it.

I dump some of Jennifer’s stuffing on a plate, drop a couple spoonfuls on the floor for the cats, then squish ketchup on top and heat it in the microwave long enough for the ketchup to splatter all over. I leave the microwave door hanging open so the smell pollutes the kitchen.

Check the clock. Ten minutes.

I dab a little ketchup at the corners of my mouth, scrape the entire mess into the garbage disposal, turn on the hot water, and flick the switch. While the disposal is running, I try to detour my mind—
recite the Constitu-tion, list the presidents in order, remember the names of
the seven dwarfs—
I can’t stop thinking that she called me.

I close the microwave. Carry the dirty plate and fork to the family room, where I put them on an end table.

Seven minutes.

I really do have to eat.

she called me thirty-three times.

One large rice cake = 35. Top it with one teaspoon of spicy mustard and you add 5. Two teaspoons = 10. Rice cakes with hot sauce are better. You eat and are punished in the same bite. Jennifer doesn’t buy hot sauce anymore.

Two rice cakes, four teaspoons of mustard = 90.

I wish I was a puker. I try and try and try, but I can’t do it. The smell freaks me out and my throat closes and I just can’t.

1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 .7. 8 . 9 . 10 . 11 . 1 2 . 1 3 . 14 . 1 5 . 16 . 17. 1 8 . 1 9 .

2 0 . 2 1 . 2 2 . 2 3 . 2 4 . 2 5 . 2 6 . 2 7 . 2 8 . 2 9 . 3 0 . 3 1 . 3 2 . 3 3 .

Jennifer comes home and asks me to put my plate in the dishwasher and clean up the mess I made in the microwave. I apologize and do what she asks while she struggles to open a slippery bottle of cold Chardonnay.

When I’m halfway up the stairs, Emma bursts through the front door, soccer uniform dirty, cheeks red.

“I almost scored a goal!” she shouts.

“Awesome,” I say.

“You want to kick the ball with me now?”

Too many ropes pulling me down into the ground. “I can’t, Emmakins. I’m buried. Besides, it’s already dark.