The thing about bad days is that they creep up on you. You can never see them coming in advance, so that they would be just a little bit more convenient, just so that you could look at the calendar and say “oh, I’m going to have a bad day next Tuesday? I’m not going to want to get out of bed and the only time that I do will be to venture to the kitchen for the gallon of ice cream that’s in the freezer? Ok, well, I guess that I need to tell my teachers that I’ll be sick that day and just go ahead and get all of my homework out of the way. And I should probably go buy some ice cream and some sappy movies, too.” No, they sneak up on you, making you roll over one morning and get hit with the full weight of the depression on you, like a wet towel thrown over your face while you slept.
Today is a bad day. When my alarm goes off, shrieking in my ear and making me scream at it in three different languages to shut the hell up, I can tell this almost immediately. I open my eyes, still crusted over with lastnightsmascara and sleep, and see Miranda, sitting on my chest, sucking on a Popsicle and smiling evilly at me. Good morning, Lilith.
I grown and roll over, trying to throw her off of me. When I see her everywhere, it’s a normal day. When I wake up with her sitting on me, it’s a bad day. When I can hear her talking to me, even though her mouth is wrapped around some piece of temptation, it’s time to just roll over, go back to sleep, and call the shrink when I wake up. But Miranda digs her nails into my neck, making me roll back onto my back and look into her beady little black eyes. “You’re not here. You’re not sitting on my chest sucking on a Popsicle and talking to me. You’re a figment of my imagination. You’re my subconscious at work. You’re not real.”
Now, now, Lill. You know that I’m real. I’m as real to you as your Momma is, or as your precious Lee is. Don’t you remember how you convinced your therapist that I was real? How he started saving a seat for me in your sessions and anytime that I wanted to say something to you he shut up?
“That wasn’t real. He was humoring me. He was just trying to make me see that you weren’t real, that I was being ridiculous by insisting that you were there and you were sitting right beside me. So…go. The hell. Away!”
Lil, that’s an ugly side of you….well, an uglier side of you at least. By the way, when was the last time that you stepped on a scale? She turns, obviously checking out my thighs. You should take better care of that if you want your man happy. Men hate girls with fat asses, you know. And you should take better care of your skin, too, if you ask me.
“I didn’t ask you. Now will you please go away?”
She shakes her head, you know that you don’t want me to go away; you know that you want me to stay here. You know that I’m the only real one in your life; I’m the only one that doesn’t see you as diseased. I’m the one that sees you as trying to be beautiful, trying to be perfect. You’re just starting to slip back into thinking that you’re beautiful “just the way you are” and all that shit. I can’t believe you’ve fallen for that crap, Lil. Didn’t I teach you better than that? Didn’t I teach you that there’s no way to be beautiful just how you are? That you constantly have to try and fight and starve to be beautiful? You’re getting further and further away from it every day, Lil. Every single day, you’re getting further and further from where you need to be.
She fades off and I lay there, staring at the ceiling. My hands slide down my stomach, measuring it with my hands- I can barely get my hands around my hips and feel the fat pudge flitting between my fingers. My hands slid down, past my waistband to my hips, where the sharp jab of bone doesn’t meet me, the soft flesh and mealy feel of fat does. Gasping, my eyes growing big, I sit up and wrap my hands around my legs, feeling one hand give to flesh, not fingers, two hands do the same, the tips of the fingers just barely touching one another around my thigh. Startled, I get up, walking to my door and quietly opening it. Mom’s in the living room, sipping her coffee and watching CNN. I slip across the hall into her bathroom, figuring that the further it was from the front, the less that she could hear, and slipping down to my knees in front of the toilet, sliding two fingers into my throat and throwing up everything that I can then getting up and being carefully brushing my teeth, feeling like I can scrub away al of the filthiness inside of me, along with the filth off of my teeth.
“Get off of me! Get off of me!” I’m screaming and thrashing against the sheets, a shadow hanging poised over me like a wave about to come crashing down. There are hands holding me down- one wrapped around my upper arm, one curled around the delicate structure of my neck- and I claw and scratch at them, trying to push this shadow away from me. I’m screaming and clawing, but it won’t move. I hit it, again and again and again, and feel the dull give of flesh which only makes me panic more.
“Lil, baby. Lilith! Lil. Baby girl! Calm down, it’s me, baby!” It’s Lee’s voice but it’s coming out of my nightmare’s mouth. The monster- he’s swallowed my Lee, he’s taken my baby, just like he took everything else from me. I’m back in my nightmares, curled up on a mattress with the door locked, the nightlight on, praying that tonight maybe I can sleep through the night. There’s a bangbangbang on the door, the knob rattles, I curl up, kneestochest no it’s locked it’s locked it’s locked. The door bangs open, crashing against the wall like in The Shinning here’sjohnny! and I hope that maybe he’ll stop, maybe this time the nightmare will just think that I’m asleep and he’ll leave me alone.
I’m screaming and clawing but I can still feel hands shaking me trying to wrench my head off of my neck, it feels like. I open my eyes and it’s not my nightmare’s face I see, but Lee’s twisted in confusion, not sure of what he’s supposed to do. He shakes me, a little more gently now, and gets off from where he was straddling me to hold me down. The sheets under me are soaked through, and I can feel the sweat on my forehead beading up and rolling down my face. “What?”
“Baby, you had a nightmare. You were screaming. I was trying to wake you up ‘cause you really sounded like you were in pain. I thought that you were going to hurt yourself.” He rolls over and flicks on my bedside lamp and I can see the thin lines of blood on the sheets. “You were clawing yourself when I woke up.” He motions down and I see the lines, all over my body from my thighs all the way up my arms. “Are you ok, baby girl? Do you wanna talk about it?”
I shake my head, pulling him back down and burying my face in his chest. He wraps his arms around me, leaving the light on and kissing my forehead softly, leaning his head onto my shoulder. “It’s ok, baby. It’s ok. I’m here. I’m not gonna let anything happen to you.” He whispers, rubbing my back.
The snow is crunching under my (ok, Mom’s, but it’s not like she’s going to notice that I borrowed them!) boots, the wind whipping under the hood of my hoodie pulled up over my head. My book bag is pulled close against my back in the vain attempt to keep that part of my body, at least, warm. P.S.- it’s not working. The school is a little bit warmer, thankfully, but still cold to me, bundled up, my body barely visible under a tank top, thermal shirt, sweatshirt, and hoodie that Mom found in the Men’s department at Wal-Mart when I first got back from treatment and was always cold. Pulling it closer around me, I looked around the buzzing halls for Jessica, one of the only friends that I seemed to still have at this school. I used to be popular, I think as I rub my hands together, trying to get them warm enough to open my locker and store my books, just as the headcheerleader sauntered by, with at least half of the male population of the school attached to her hip. Well, maybe not that popular, but I had more than two friends!
At one time, I ran with three or four different cliques in middle and high school: the artists (I painted and wrote- mostly horrible, teenangst filled poetry, but some good essays and short stories, too) , the punks (I had a total weakness for Social Distortion, the Misfits, and the Dickies. My biggest crush from the time I was in diapers was Sid Vicious, and my first words were “Mike Ness”), the band nerds (I played the flute. Save the phallic jokes- I’ve heard them all), and my own little clique of all the ana-mia girls that sat at lunch, not eating, flipping through fashion magazines and feeding off of each other’s growing weakness. But, when I left for treatment, many of the ana-mia girls either “disappeared” or were put into the hospital; the punks were scared off by how small and scary I looked when I came back, and by how withdrawn I was (irony, right? These are the kids that sport Mohawks so tall that they have to duck when they go through doors and have piercings in every conceivable, and many not so much, spots); the band nerds blew me off when I dropped out and started avoiding them, and when I quit writing or even caring about what they wrote, the artists blew me off, too. So I was left with Jessica, one of the crossovers like me that still ran with the punks and the artists, and Lee, who just thought that he could, but who would change his clique as often as he changed his socks if he were allowed to by the strict rules of high school.
I could hear Jess’s combat boots clomping down the hall before I saw her. Now, for those of you who haven’t been in high school in the last forty or fifty years, or for those who haven’t been through at all yet, here’s a lesson for y’all: in high school, no one is a pure breed. And, no, that’s not a racial remark. It just means that in high school, no matter how much one tries, they are not purely fit into one clique. Sometimes the band nerds are jocks, too; the punks secretly jam out to Taylor Swift; the cheerleaders have huge crushes on the punks or the metalheads; the jocks secretly are gay; the gays…well, the gays really can be anything, it just depends on if they’re flaming or not. But, the funny thing about this is that you feel that everyone can tell your dirty little secret, like it’s tattooed on your forehead with a marker that only you can’t see, so you feel that you have to overcompensate by being a total stereotype of the clique that you’re in. Jess gets by with the black leather jacket, the Army combat boots, the three foot Mohawk dyed bright pink, the piercings (eyebrow, snake bites on her lip, six in each ear, a bar in her tongue, her bellybutton, and a certain place below the belt that I honestly didn’t wish I knew was pierced.) and the foul mouth and cynicism directed at anyone that looked funny at her. You could always hear her coming all the way down the hall, between the clomping of the boots, the jingle of the piercings, and the loud, nasty comments she shot at anyone and everyone in her way.
“Holy shit, Lil, did you eat a lot? You’re looking bigger! Or did Lee finally knock you up?”
“Well, not that I know of. Guess I’m just dressed like a bag lady.”
“Well, looks better than that sack of bones that you usually look like!” Ah, Jess, brash as ever.
“Thanks, Jess, I’m sure that Lee will really appreciate that. Where is he by the way? He didn’t show up to walk me to school this morning….” I trail off, unzipping my jacket and shoving it into my locker, pulling out a pair of Converse I wore at school and unlacing my boots.
“You two are going to send relationships back to the fifties, Lil.”
I look up, suspicious. She never made comments like this, dancing around the subject. Jess’s motto of life was “let’s be as blunt as we can and get the fuck on with life”.
“Jess…” I start, giving her the look that I referred to as my Death Glare.
“What? You gotta shit or somethin’?” I tilt my head and give her a withering glare, or some facsimile of one. “Ok, ok. Well, I heard Maria talking this morning….” She looks upset, and I step back, shocked. Never in the years that I have known here has she looked upset. Pissed, yes, many times, but never upset. She puts her hand on my shoulder, awkwardly petting me until I turn and glare at her.
“I’m not a fucking dog, Jess, don’t pet me!”
She pulls her hand away like it’s a hot oven, a look of shock painted on her face. “Hey, don’t bite the messenger.”
I throw my boots into my locker, the metal on the tips of the shoelaces hitting against the back and a dull thud resounding through the halls. “Who is it?”
“Bobbi…” she replies, looking even more upset at delivering this news.
Bobbi Marzon, the dumb slut in my English class, sits in the front row, her plaid skirt a la Britney Spears hiked up practically around her hips, chewing on the eraser of her pencil and staring blankly at the board, surrounded by drooling jocks trying to hide their hard-ons with their open books. I glare at her as I stalk into the room, taking my usual place tucked into a back corner where I could alternate glaring at her and paying attention as Ms. Himmelshil gabbed on and on about some poet called The Emperor of Ice Cream that no one understood.
I don’t get what he sees in her!
Eh, she’s a slut. He just wants to bone her. You know he’s crazy about you.
If he’s so crazy about me, why is he worried about boning her?
He’s a boy. You know boys think with that head….besides, you two haven’t….
Jess! Well…not since I got back from treatment…..He’s been scared to. Have you seen me naked lately?
Not in the vicinity outside of my mind, no babe. Ha-ha. Sorry. But you can’t look that scary!
I shrug, she doesn’t understand; no one does. When I look in the mirror, it’s Miranda that’s saying I’m fat and ugly. But underneath her, I still have that one remaining shred of me, of who I was before all of this, that is jumping up and down, throwing a spotlight on the harsh reality of the sharp angles of my body. My hipbones protrude; the fragile tibia and fibula of my legs are in sharp relief against the skin. My rib cage is outlined under the tight leather of my skin, my collarbones sharp as the wings of a broken bird. My back, too, the shoulderblades are sharp and yet fragile, like the wings of an angel. I’ve gained almost ten pounds since I’ve been back from treatment, and yet it still scares me to have Lee look at me naked. The first night that I was back from treatment pops into mind and suddenly, I’m not staring at Bobbi anymore, I’m staring into my own memories.
“I don’t want to do anything, Lee. I told you!”
“Not even go get a milkshake? Remember, you used to love the chocolate from McDonald’s…” he trails off, and the blanket of Holy Shit This is Awkward descends on the room yet again.
“No…I don’t want to. I’m not hungry.” I know that I’m being a bitch, but I’ve been cramped up in that stupid treatment center for the last two months, and just when I’m getting settled there and don’t have to sleep with a nightlight on, I get sent back home to my fucked-up life where Mom tiptoes around me and the man that I don’t call my father anymore tries to call me to see how I am (not like he really cares, but it’s all about the presentation). Now there’s a list of rules and regulations taped up on the pantry door, where, until recently, my food list stayed. All of my “diet” and “health” foods have been thrown out, replaced with high-fat, high-sugar premade fulloffatmmmmgood shit. Now there are new protocols, new rules, new schedules and it’s really fucking me up.
The door opens and slams, and the familiar cominghome noises start: Mom stepping out of her heels, sighing, hanging up her purse and coat, tucking her keys into her coat pocket, smoothing her hair and scratching her left ear exactly three times. Then there’s the soft padding of stockinged-feet padding down the tile hallway to where Lee and I are sitting on the couch.
“Hey, there, Lee. Good to see you here, honey, we missed you hanging around.” Lee raises an arm in salute, keeping on hand firmly on my knee and smiling at me. He’s been around here for so long that Mom has accepted him as family; therefore he no longer is obligated to jump up and go through all of the niceties that newer boyfriends would have to. Not like I would have any new boyfriends, I think, none of them can appreciate true beauty. I keep my eyes on the TV screen, knowing the Lee, protective as ever since he wasn’t allowed to see me for about two months, will answer all of my mother’s questions. “So,” I can almost recite what she’s doing as she does it. She unbuttons her suit jacket and throws it onto the chair where she’ll pick it up from when she goes to her room in exactly 4.3 minutes. “What did y’all do today?” the question is so normal it bothers me. We shouldn’t be having nice, normal conversation; we should be walking around in a perpetual state of awkwardness. What’s the point of acting like everything is nice and normal when it’s not? What’s the point of pretending?
“Well, there was school, of course, and then we came back here. I’ve been trying to talk Lil into going to….” I subtly kick Lee in the shins and he glances at me, shocked. I give him a pointed glare, raising one eyebrow, knowing that Mom isn’t looking at us, she’s going through the mail for today. He shakes his head, giving me a look like I’m not going to lie to your mother! “McDonald’s for a milkshake, but I don’t think that she feels like it.”
“Well, maybe we could all go out for pizza tonight.” Mom says, sounding too chipper and cheerful. I can tell that she’s being whatshecallsforcefulandicallpassiveagressive, trying to get me to eat without using themanwhoisnolongermyfather’s methods of sitting me down and trying to force the food down my throat. I’m mentally calculating- one slice of thin crust vegetarian pizza is 300 calories. 300 goopy, gross calories of nasty yummytasting delicious fat sliding down my throat into my stomach. Do I want it? Yes. More than I have ever wanted anything in my life. Do I deserve it? No. No more than I deserve anything that I manage to get.
“I guess so…” I say, trailing off and shaking my bangs in front of my face, running my fingers through them.
“That sounds great, ma’am.” Lee pipes up. I glare at him from under my bangs, but he just shrugs, well, what do you expect me to do?
“Lil, come on, baby. It’s time to weigh you. Then maybe we can both change and we’ll go. Be thinking about where you’d wanna go, Lee! ” She calls to him, throwing the mail into the recycling bin and gathering up her jacket and heels, walking into her bedroom.
“Ok…just, let me go put on my bathrobe, ok Mom?”
“Lil…” she sounds weary, and I feel bad trying to pull this with her, but if she saw me without my bathrobe, standing there in my underwear, she would throw Lee out and have me on the next bus back to treatment- after, of course, she’d spent all night shoving pizza, popcorn, and ice cream into my face. Of course, Lee being here is to my advantage, without him here she would have me strip down in a second, but with him here (since, after all, he is a guest) she’s less likely to throw a fit. “Fine. But hurry, ok, honey? Maybe you can bring your clothes and just change down here after we weigh you…that’d be a lot faster. Besides, then you can borrow my makeup.” She winks at me, like this is some huge prize for Being a Good Girl, that I get to play dressup in mommy’s old clothes that hang on my underdeveloped, malnourished body, her heels that make my calves hurt, her makeup that hides the dark circles under my eyes and my skin that’s gone an odd waxy color and that looks orange under the lights. There is no makeup that can hide how ugly I’ve become; none that can make me look like my old self. It’s not like Maybelline makes anorexic makeup “candle wax yellow” they could call it, or “ash grey” for the darker skinned girls.
I nod, hurrying up the stairs and grabbing a tank top and jeans out of my closet then, after a few seconds of hesitation, adding a t-shirt and one of Lee’s old hoodies to the pile, throwing my Converse on top, and pulling my robe over my arms, wrapping the belt loosely around my waist. I grab my pile, holding my robe closed, and rush into the bathroom, running the tap until the water runs cold over my wrist, pulling my glass out from under the sink and filling it to the top, drinking, filling again, and drinking again. I can feel the water sloshing in my stomach as I struggle down the stairs with my clothes, trying to hold my robe closed, not letting Lee see me.
I walk into Mom’s room, heading straight for the scales that she kept in the bathroom, right beside her shower (which used to be good, I could wait until she left for work and then hop in the shower, steaming up the bathroom and sweating out at least five pounds of pure water weight, and then hopping out and jumping right onto the scales.) But now I have to think about how I’m going to make this work.
Mom is leaning in to the mirror, running her fingers through her hair when I slide in behind her. “Ok, honey, you know what to do.” She holds out her hand and I hand her the green notebook, the thing that I hate more than anything else in this world, stepping onto the scales. “72.4” she says, sounding tired, exhausted as she reads off the numbers that are staring at us, sounding disappointed. So first I’m too fat, and then I’m too thin? There is just no pleasing this woman!
“I’m sorry, Momma.” I sound pitiful, stare at the floor, make my eyes bigger, and try to make them fill with tears. For a few seconds, I let Miranda have full reign- one foolproof way to make sure that I can really cry. “I’ve really been trying, I really have!”
Mom sighs, pulling me in to hug me and I feel real tears fill my eyes. I don’t deserve this. I open my eyes, breathing in her scent, the one that reminds me of the happy times that we had when I was little, before the nightmarethatican’ttellaboutbecauseifidoi’mabadperson, and notice grey hairs peaking out from the black hair that I inherited, before I decided to dye it. Momma’s getting old. This thought is strange to me, somehow I always saw my momma as eternal, the type that would never die because she was just too damn stubborn to. The nightmare could die a million times and I would never feel any hurt or cry any tears over it, but if Momma died, well I couldn’t even think about it. “I know you have, baby. We’ll get through this and you’ll gain the weight back.” She pulls back, smiling, and nods to the pile of clothes on the counter. I notice the lipstick is bleeding in the corners of her mouth, making her bare a strange resemblance to It in that book that I read in treatment- the one that I couldn’t even finish because of the creepy father that just brought back too many memories for me- and I smile, turning so that I don’t have to focus on that or on the hurt and pain in her eyes. “I’ll be dressed in a few minutes, Momma.”
Pulling off the robe, I turn around- I don’t want to look at myself right now. 72 is good, it’s better than 100, better than the fat, bloated piggy that I was when I was halfway through treatment. But it’s not as good as 50: fifty is the number of almost-perfection, the number where 0 is so close that you can almost taste it. After fifty it will be an absolute cake walk. After fifty, I will almost be absolute perfection. The cups of my bra are sagging, Victoria’s Secret makes no bras for boobs that are virtually nonexistent, the sides of my panties flopping against my hipbones, only held in place by the bones that are jutting out of my skin, sagging against the wasteland of my lower-belly, against the long valleys of my thighs. I run my fingers over my ribs, playing the piano across my breastbone, into the hollow drum of my stomach. Mom knocks on the door and I jump about thirty feet in the air, the entire future played out in my head, but she doesn’t open the door, thankgod. “You ‘bout ready, baby?”
“Yeah, Momma, just one second!” I call back, shakily, pulling my tanktop over my head.
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