She fidgeted like a crazy person now. That’s how her mom put it.
“What are you--mental? Cut it out.”
She didn’t cut it out, but she did keep to her room. Fidgeting worked off an extra fifty calories a day, which was good since walking more than ten steps in a row now made her lightheaded and prone to blackouts. At school, she’d been in danger of fainting any number of times, so she’d stopped going. She hung out at the public library, dozing intermittently and flipping through a dog-eared collection of magazines, chewing her sugarfree gum surreptitiously (gum was double-her-pleasure: it distracted her from the hunger and earned her fidgeting points), wondering whether anyone might come for her, if even the principal himself might not show up in a hail of paperwork to drag her sorry ass back to class. But they hadn’t and he didn’t and nobody in a library looked at a girl who only flipped through fashion magazines.
As far as school went, her mom had paused long enough between a handful of corn chips and a swig of Diet Coke to squint at Marcie--trying hard not to fidget inside that huge tent of a sweatshirt, saying “maybe I won’t go to school anymore,” like a curveball hovering between statement and question--before continuing on with the intake of cola and muttering something about the apple not falling far from the tree. Then she’d asked Marcie to turn it to "The Bachelor." The remote was M.I.A.
What Marcie didn’t ask, but might have, was: “Sure you didn’t eat that, too?”
Clementine Flack was fat. Rotund. Ginormous. You could fit three Marcies into her mother's skin, with room leftover for a couple of house cats. When Marcie was asked to use “elephantine” in a sentence for eighth grade English, she’d dashed off this couplet: Oh my darling Clementine / thou art lost and elephantine. The teacher had put a smiley face next to it because she didn’t know that Clementine was a real and factual person, congratulating Marcie instead on her use of “whimsy.”
It was okay, though. It was all all right. Marcie wasn’t repulsed by her mother like she once had been. She wasn’t embarrassed to be seen with her, since she’d dropped school and nobody so much as texted her anymore and her mom started using the electric cart at Walmart, becoming painstakingly invisible to everyone, even Walmart drones. She understood now that she and her mom were two sides of the same coin, an equation solving for y, where x was the constant, or whatever Mr. Murphy was on about. Algebra had never been her thing.
Food was. Hunger was the dazzling, blinding sun mother and daughter were yoked to and spun doggedly about. Marcie was down to 300 calories a day now (breakfast: hard-boiled egg without the yolk, ice; lunch: five baby carrots, 1/2 cup kidney beans, ice; dinner: lettuce, one tablespoon of salsa, 1/2 cup plain, nonfat yogurt, ice) and she wondered sometimes whether her mother might not subconsciously be picking up the calories her daughter had so carelessly chucked. In their imbalance there was equilibrium.
“You’re getting skinny, girl.”
“This shirt’s always been big on me.”
“Grab me another 2-liter, will you?”
That was at the beginning, a few weeks after Hunter told her she looked a little like Erin Heatherton, only “more healthy and normal.” Marcie knew he’d considered it a compliment--knew he was saying it because he’d seen the photo of Erin in Marcie’s locker and wanted to get on her good side, or maybe on several of those good sides--but Marcie also knew that there was nothing complimentary about the word “normal.” Nobody got anywhere being “normal” these days.
She’d thrown out her tuna fish at lunch that day and just had the carrots. The rumbles in her belly that afternoon made her feel virtuous, almost high.
At five feet eight inches, she’d started tenth grade at 139 pounds. This put her smack dab in the middle of the “normal” BMI curve. When she weighed herself tonight, six months later--naked and with another clump of hair falling out, in spite of the halfhearted attempt to up her protein intake--the digital readout sputtered and flagged and died on 99.5.
She’d done it, then.
It wasn’t something she’d aimed for outright, but now that she’d hit the double-digit elite club, Marcie knew it was what had been driving her for the last month--that it was the nudge she needed to sacrifice that last half apple in the afternoon for three more sticks of gum--that it was the thing she’d lost just as soon as she’d gotten her hands about its throat.
There wouldn’t be another goal like that. There couldn’t be. What did "90" mean? Was an “85” ever momentous to anyone’s life? Uh-huh. There was a line she’d crossed that couldn’t be uncrossed (she wouldn’t let it), but there wouldn’t be another line like it, unless you counted the last one--the line to end all lines--the line the pro-ana sites online warned you about, if in a flirty, self-mocking way.
Like death was just a boy who might take your virginity away.
Sure some girls don’t make it. But think of all the calories they save!! LOL.
It wasn’t that she wanted to die, Marcie thought, lying in bed as the ceiling grew spots and her heartbeat flapped like a panicked bird in her ears. She just couldn’t stop herself. Her body felt so improved to her now, so stinking right. Collarbones were such a beautiful thing; why hadn’t she noticed them before? Her scapulas were growing into wings. She could count her ribs with no effort, and often did so to pass the time, wondering whimsically which was the one Eve had been sprung from. When looked at this way--when you really understood the way the body sat together, like Marcie had grown to understand--breasts were not sensual signs of fertility, but deforming bags of prehistoric flesh.
But the favorite part of her new body were her hipbones. She laid on her back and stroked the rim of the bowl they formed--as tenderly as if the concavity were reversed, pregnant with her own self-control and discipline--her skin stretched so taut she wondered, not for the hundredth but the thousandth time that week, whether skin might not have a literal breaking point and if so, whether she was anywhere near to breaking it.
Not yet, she concluded.
Her mind fell back and back. She drifted.
After minutes, or hours, she heard the refrigerator door slam shut. Her eyes rolled to the clock: 11:32. Only seven and a half hours until the hard-boiled egg. It was so cold in here. But the comforter was way down there.
Impasse.
She’d been dreaming of her father. They were on the beach and she was five or six years old. He had a hairy chest and back acne and she’d worn a polka-dot bikini and pigtails. They ran along the water’s edge, chasing one another. She’d stopped to pick up a mussel shell sticking out of the sand--drawing her finger across its smooth, mother-of-pearl interior--when a wave came over her, hard and sudden, tossing her back into wakefulness.
She hadn’t dreamed of her dad in ages. For a moment, she felt spooked by it. But then she thought of the egg, waiting for her at the end of the long tunnel, and closed her eyes again.
Egg was such a fat, funny word when you thought about it. Egg. Egg.
Her mom had Leno on. The intro music was loud, but underneath it, Marcie could hear the phht of carbonation bubbling free and smiled.
What was it her mom had said?
The egg didn’t fall far from the tree.
Lol.
Story inspired by a Huffington Post article I read the other day. Painting by Picasso: "Girl Before A Mirror."
