The world is made up of shades of grey. Some days all that you can see are colors that are as grey as a concrete sidewalk on a rainy December day. Others there are only one or two things that really stand out: maybe it’s the copper color of a woman’s hair that catches the sun as she gets out of her car; the light blue of the summer sky in Alabama; the brilliant purple of someone’s umbrella. But that is only on the good days: on the bad days everything is grey: the hair, the sky, and the umbrellas. Sometimes, like when I’m with Lee and things start to go downhill, I can almost feel it happening. It’s almost like a door inside of me slams shut, a steel door with bars on it, a steel door that has a million and one locks on it. The door hides all of my emotions, everything that I’m feeling, and everything except Miranda, the one who can’t be locked away. It makes me curl in on myself, shutting the rest of the world out, and scares those that can see it. I can see it in Lee’s eyes as he sits down beside me on the bed, gently taking the book I was reading out of my hands and throws it on the floor. He kisses me, gently, and I push him away. “Baby girl.” He groans into my neck, the hollow between the shoulder socket and the chest bone, the tendon that is connected to that one place on the back of my neck, the one place that he would kiss as I stood at my locker back in high school, trying to hide it as he did from the prying eyes of the teachers. I push him away more, angry at the world, not wanting anyone to touch me, wanting everyone to just leave me the hell alone. I push him away, get up, and walk to the end of the room furthest away from him, feeling the soft underbelly curl in upon itself, keeping me from getting hurt again. I can almost hear the door slam and, looking up, I can see the reverberation in Lee’s eyes as he takes a step backward.
“What?”
“Baby.” He stops, walks toward me, stops again, reaches out to touch my face. “Your eyes. Something in your eyes.”
I’m sitting in the middle of my Biology lecture, the teacher going on and on and on about metabolism and good health, about the fact that you could eat anything that you want, as long as the ratio of calories consumed is less than the number of calories burned throughout the day. As if I didn’t already know this? Hell, if they wanted me to, I could stand up and teach this part of the class myself. From memory. Without notes or anything. When something becomes such a part of your life that you literally never have to think about it and do it with no intent to, then you are considered an expert. I am a master: me and the girls and the guys in the center were all the masters of what we did. The bulimics had throwing up down to a science, knowing exactly how long they could wait before they discretely excused themselves. The anorexics knew how many calories were in a particular food in the lunch line without even thinking about it. In middle school, I would pass by the girls, hearing softly, just under their breath, the murmuring that seemed to be our worry stones. Thirty three. Fourty five. I can go twenty minutes, but then I have to go to the bathroom. I think that Mr Rodriquez is starting to wonder about me, could I wait till my next class to go?
The funerals started about two years into high school: like the Agent Orange that we had studied in our History classes, this was a carcinogenic that killed slowly. It almost always started the same way: friend requests clogging up my Facebook, clotting like blood after you have been cut so deep that it takes your cells a few minutes to even realize that they should be congregating at the cut. I’ve always thought (when I had the time to think, when Miranda would let me have four seconds in which I could manage to string together some semblance of a coherent thought) that, somehow, they knew that they were close to the end, so they tried to tie themselves to this life by the fragile strands of old friends that had managed, thus far, to elude Death, to duck around the corner with such grace and agility, to blend in with the bricks so the Death just passed them by. Somehow, they thought that this was some way to talk the angel out of taking them: But Look, I Have Friends, I Have A Life. I Can’t Die Now. And the angel would shake his head: I’m Sorry, Just Following Orders.
At the beginning, it was just one or two; real friends that just managed to go down the same road that I did, that held my hand through it until the combination of high school and Miranda ripped our hands apart. Their profile pictures all seemed to be the same: thinthinthin girls with thinning hair, either bundled up in sweatshirts and sweatpants, or swimming in their size zero prom dresses, always hiding behind their boyfriends, their oversized clothes, belts that looped around their waist and had to have new holes cut into them with a pocketknife to fit, cover-ups on the hottest day at the beach. One or two had pictures up of them at the beach, laying on the laps of their boyfriends, sitting on a brick wall outside of a sorority, wine cooler (because, of course, beer was too fattening), and I was amazed at how interchangeable they all were.
“Who’s that, Babygirl?” Lee slipped up behind me, wrapping an arm around my waist. I turn, staring into his blue eyes glowing in the bright green of the computer screen’s reflection. He raises an eyebrow at the picture and I grimace, knowing exactly what he’s thinking: that’s what she looked like When She Came Back. The skeletal face, the knees that were already starting to protrude from the skin, looking like rocks had been shoved up between the skin and muscle, the hair that was so thin that it was falling out in clumps every time that they brushed their hair, or even ran their fingers through it. The clothes that hung off of the body as if they were nothing but a hanger.
“I honestly don’t know.” I replied. “They all look the same to me.”
At first, I think that I am losing my mind: when I look into the mirror, it’s not my face that is staring back, its Miranda’s. shaking my head and trying to clear it, I look again, and the same evil face stares back at me: eyes that look like two pieces of granite: cold, hard, unforgiving; hair that hangs like a cloud around that pale, beautiful face; a smile that grates on me like ice hitting that one sensitive tooth in the back of your mouth, making you jump. My head starts to pound. My throat dries up. Ugly. She sneers. Fat and ugly. No one wants you. No one ever has, and no one ever will. Even your own father thinks that you’re a mistake. He didn’t want you; he was perfectly happy before you came along and fucked everything up. Your own boyfriend doesn’t want you. Or at least he won’t after he sees how fat you’re getting. Look at that stomach! She crows, poking me in the belly. It’s getting HUGE!! Your thighs are enormous, too. She adds, reaching down and pinching the skin between her pointer finger and thumb, making it dimple between them. You’d better watch that, Lillie, or Lee is just going to be another memory and the only thing that you’ll be left with is me.
The first time wasn’t soon after Lee and I got together. I had just moved in with Mom and spent most of my afternoons curled up in the La-Z-Boy that she had sitting in the living room, staring at the TV from under the down quilt that my great-grandmother had patched together for her when she was thirteen. All it took was one phone call. Just one day. That ripped it all apart.
“Is this…” the voice stops, there’s the crumplecrumplecrumple of paper being unfolded, the slight stop and hesitation of someone trying to pronounce a name, trying to see if they could possibly not fuck this up. “Lillith?”
“Lil. Please. And this is?”
“I’m Mrs. Mornes. Jessica’s mom. Do you remember Jessica?”
That’s a loaded question if I’ve ever heard one: do I remember one of the people that I met when I was fucked up, almost beyond the point of being saved? And, on the flip side, do I remember one of the first people that understood? One of the first people that helped me through what was then a constant mindfuck?
“Yes, Mrs. Mornes. I remember Jessica well.” Thin girl that walked in on the first day of therapy acting like she owned the place and we were all just here because she wanted others to hang out with. A tough fuck-you-up-the-ass smile, hair pushed back from her face, so that you could be sure to catch the full range of her emotions. Her eyes could tell you exactly what she thought of you- even when her mouth didn’t. She always wore fishnets on her arms, with a hole cut out so she could slip her thumb through it- even the smallest pair of fishnets in the store hung off of her arm like extra skin on my grandma’s arms. Her cheekbones protruded so much from her skin that they looked like they would pop out when she smiled, and on the day that we were supposed to bring something with us to therapy that made us feel safe, she showed up in a baby doll dress with an old, ragged purple teddy bear clutched to her chest. She never put that teddy bear down for the rest of the time that I was in there with her. It looked strange, this emaciated young girl who had tattoos and track marks from shoulder to wrist and cuts from hipbone to ankle, eyes lined with kohl, dressed in fishnet tights on her arms and a baby doll dress with pigtails in her hair, the one streak of bleach blonde hanging in front of her face. It was like Courtney and Kurt’s love child with Barney. When the rest of us were eating, she was pushing the food around her plate- the doctors were constantly threatening her with the psych ward, but she told us that they wouldn’t put her in there because her mother would have a fit. Apparently, she was some big hot-shot in the town that she was from, and if the word got out that her daughter was in the psych ward it would be hell for the next election for whatever that came up. As a result, the doctors wouldn’t let her go when the rest of us got out, she wasn’t up to her target weight to go back home. After I got out and came back home, I would get letters from her every once in awhile, long rambling letters on the blank printer paper that the nurses would dole out in one or two sheets with a dull pencil that faded after a few weeks. When the letters stopped coming, a mutual friend told me that she’d finally been sent to the psych ward because the doctors just couldn’t take care of her anymore, and I put them into the shoebox that I kept in my closet.
I’m sitting in the closet, pushed back into the corner like a pair of forgotten boots that are two sizes too small, curled with my knees to my chest. My phone is in front of me, so that no one will come looking and find My Place, the one place that I feel safe. I have to make sure that no one finds this place, as they have found my others before this, so that this place can be sacred, undefiled, so that this is my sanctuary, the one place left in this house, left in my life that is safe. The feelings come more and more now, creeping up on me, set off by a piece of mail on the front table in the hall, by the ring of my cell phone, the smell of a passing boy’s cologne at the school, even the sight of two people wrapped like ivy around each other in the hallways, making me run into the bathroom, lock myself in a stall and sit with my head between my knees, trying to breathe and erase the sight of two bright blue eyes from my mind.
No comments:
Post a Comment