Authors: Diana Spechler
“Durm?”
“Dur-RUM. I slur it all together like the southern boy I am. And here I thought you were the one with the accent. Durham’s the diet capital of the world. That’s what they say. But still North Carolina’s the twelfth fattest state in the country. Mississippi’s number one. Never move to Mississippi.”
I touched my middle, fingering the rolls. They were shrinking, but still supple like living things. In Mississippi, they would flourish. I wondered if Bennett could see it—how close I was, at every second, to becoming obese.
Don’t move to Mississippi. Don’t think about lasagna. Don’t miss a day of spin class.
“Are you suggesting I visit the diet capital of the world?”
“I live there.”
“So
that’s
why you have a perfect body.”
Bennett grinned. “This ol’ thing?” He patted his stomach. “Anyway, there’s this facility there that’s like a fancy fat camp for adults. I wandered in there to see about employment. Lewis was working there. That’s his winter job. He answers phones. We got to talking and he told me he was starting this camp.” Bennett took a long sip. “Ahh,” he said, holding up his bottle to look at it. “I do love a cold beer. Is there anything in life better than a cold beer?”
I saw part of him through that bottle, manageably blurry, less significant through glass.
“So what happened with Lewis?”
“What happened?” He lowered the bottle to the bar. “He hired me. Rest is history. I’ll see about getting my boy here next summer.”
I didn’t want to think about next summer. I didn’t want to think about a person who belonged to Bennett. I didn’t want to think about the fall or the winter or anything but this evening—the cautious, burgeoning lust and the alcohol and the ceiling fans that did little to make the restaurant less stuffy. I didn’t want to think that my plan might not work, that I might leave camp in August only to resume the uncomfortable dance I’d been doing with food the past year, regaining weight when all the bistros and bodegas and bakeries of New York City were once again at my disposal.
I didn’t want to think about a day when my jeans would no longer feel loose and the man beside me would not be Bennett with the Hurricanes cap and the southern accent and the V-shaped torso and the cross around his neck; a man who didn’t grasp sarcasm; a man who appeared and disappeared second by second, like a series of beeps; but Mikey, who knew—almost—everything about me, whose unrelenting knowing of me weighed as much as a whole other person.
“How old’s your son?”
“Eleven.” Bennett leaned to the side, reached into his back pocket, pulled out a brown leather wallet, and flipped it open. A child with his blue eyes beamed back at me. Freckles flecked his nose. If I could have taken a cookie cutter and trimmed away the layer of fat around his face, then he would have been perfect.
I squeezed one eye shut and imagined him thin. “Adorable.”
“I agree.” Bennett flipped his wallet closed and stuffed it back into his pocket.
I pressed my paper cocktail napkin to the outside of my glass, blotting the condensation.
“You’re going to break my heart, aren’t you, Angeline?”
I shifted my gaze to the crumpled napkin in my fist and dropped it on the bar. When I glanced at Bennett again, he was looking right at me.
I laughed. “Me?”
“You’re going to make me fall for you. One of those summer loves people write songs about. And then you’ll head back to your big-city life. I can see it now.” Because his smile was confident, his words sounded not desperate, but flirtatious. And how could he have been desperate? He was a sculpture come to life. What could he possibly have needed from me?
“What are you talking about?” I was still laughing. “I have a boyfriend.”
“I know you do.”
“So you’re kidding, right?” I was leaning my elbow on the bar now, resting my face on my fist. In my other hand, I held my glass. I finished my drink in a long gulp, set my glass on the bar and my cold hand in my lap. Bennett touched the inside of my wrist and I shivered. His cologne smelled nothing like Mikey’s; it was lighter, airier, a slow fan on a summer day. I caught intermittent whiffs of it, and then couldn’t smell it at all. “I can’t sleep with you,” I said.
“Who says I want to sleep with you? I wouldn’t sleep with you.”
“Because I’d break your heart?”
“No.”
“You’d sleep with me, Bennett.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Why?” I touched my stomach again, sucking it in.
“If I slept with you, you’d call your boyfriend tomorrow and drop him like a hot rock. You’d tell me you’d been planning to anyway, that it had nothing to do with me. Am I right?”
“I’m not leaving my boyfriend. We’ve been together forever.”
“You’d leave him, and then you’d say to me, ‘I’m just looking to have fun for the summer.’ You’d act cool as a moose, but if I agreed to a fling, you’d want a relationship. And then you’d want to get married. And I’ve already been down that dark alley.”
His words made me uneasy, like an unexpected mirror. Here was a man who knew about hunger, who had a handle on wanting.
My rolls were growing, pressing against the waistband of my jeans. Nearby, I heard the urgent sizzle of fajitas and smelled soft strips of chicken, sautéed onions, steaming flour tortillas.
“A bit presumptuous, no?”
“I mean no disrespect.” Bennett lifted his hands from the bar to show me his palms. “But here we’d be working together for the rest of the summer with this monkey on our backs.”
I turned from Bennett, watched a waiter bend at the knee, transferring a tray from his shoulder to the wooden stand he’d shaken open beside the table. I swear, if it weren’t for smells and songs, our memories would all be detached and anesthetized.
“So, no, Angeline, I wouldn’t sleep with you.”
“What if I seduced you?”
“I don’t need anyone doing the seducing. I know what to do.”
For the past two weeks, I had smelled nothing but fat-camp food. Textured vegetable protein instead of beef. Fat-free cheese that didn’t know how to melt. Sugar-free Jell-O. Sugar-free peanut butter. Frozen mini bagels, thawed, not toasted. And now. Suddenly. One whiff of those fajitas and I was hurdled back to the hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant where my parents and I used to have brunch some Sunday afternoons—the cold, all-you-can-eat buffet of peel-’em-and-eat-’em shrimp, questionable oysters, flan, tortilla chips, every kind of salsa. Each time, my father ordered fajitas off the menu. As a child, I was afraid of them—their steaming and sizzling and popping. I thought of what Spider had said about the earwigs. I was always afraid of the wrong things.
“You hungry?” Bennett asked.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re staring at their food.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Then what are you looking at?”
“That woman . . . just looks like someone I know.”
The woman was huge, dressed in denim overalls with a pocket on the front the size of a door. She was depositing a heaping forkful of rice and sour cream into her mouth.
It was possible to watch mouths eating and infer the bodies attached to them. You could have shown me slides of mouths, and the forks about to enter them, and I could have analyzed the ratio of food on fork to empty fork space to inches between open lips, and told you, with a negligible margin of error, who was fat and who was thin.
“We can get you something if you’re hungry.”
“I’m really not hungry,” I said. I wanted to leap off my bar stool, scald my fingers on the sautéed peppers, bury my tongue in the sour cream and pico de gallo. I wanted to stuff my cheeks like pouches of marbles.
It surprised me, feeling hungry so close to Bennett. But this was a nostalgic hunger, like one last look in the rearview mirror. I thought of the day I’d left my father in the diner and vowed to change my life.
The bartender set a basket of tortilla chips in front of us. A white bowl of red salsa. “On the house,” she said. She winked at Bennett. Her nails were long and sharp.
“Here.” Bennett pushed the basket toward me.
I curled my fingers around my thumbs, imagining the crunch between my teeth, the salt on my tongue, the cool spiciness of the salsa. I salivated so intensely, my eyes burned. If I looked too long, I would touch them. If I touched them, I would never stop. Within three seconds, the napkin lining the wicker basket would be naked except for a grease stain or two.
“You didn’t mean what you said, Bennett. When you said I’d break your heart. You meant you’d break
my
heart.”
“Crazy talk.”
“Aren’t I right? If I sleep with you, you’ll be through with me? Isn’t that how men are?”
“So let’s not. That’s all I’m saying. We’ll just be friends.”
“Fine.”
“I’m not out to hurt anyone, Angeline.” Bennett cracked his knuckles one at a time.
I thought of my father tipping his head back, shaking the dust from the bottom of a bag of Cheetos into his open mouth. I thought of myself walking through the East Village, stopping in Dunkin’ Donuts, in Moishe’s Bake Shop, in the place that sold hot French fries in paper cones. I thought of my campers, the expanses of their bodies spreading as they sat on the edge of the pool. I thought of Mikey. I did think of Mikey. I thought of Mikey laughing. “When are you going to learn, Gray? Men don’t want to be your friends
.”
I thought of Azalea Bellham, of my father’s lips on her mousy throat. I stared hard at Bennett until my hunger subsided. Then I took his clean-shaven face in my hands. I pulled it toward me and kissed him.
I drove drunk back to camp from Falling Rock, Bennett beside me in my father’s car, his left hand on my thigh, his right hand tweaking the radio dial. The static of classic rock and the certainty of sex crackled in the dark, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, in the throbbing of the swollen moon. We spiraled down that drain of a road. I asked, “You still won’t sleep with me?”
“Okay, fine, I’ll sleep with you.”
“I can’t sleep with you.”
“Whatever you say, Angeline.”
At camp, I pulled my car up to the side of the boys’ dorm, killed the engine, unbuckled my seat belt.
“Wait here,” Bennett said, getting out.
I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. The dark spun and dipped and pulsed. When I heard Bennett open my door, I let my eyelids crack apart. He slid one arm under my legs and the other around my back. When he lifted me without so much as a change in his breathing, I was lighter than the bones of a goldfish. He carried me inside, and when he tossed me onto his bed, I bounced. He yanked my legs until my feet touched the floor. He unbuttoned my jeans and unzipped them.
“Do you have a condom?” My voice sounded as thick as cake batter.
“I’ll pull out.”
“That feels symbolic.”
“Shh.”
“You’re protecting yourself.”
“You’re full of drunk talk.”
“You won’t let go inside me.”
“Are you too drunk? Should we stop?”
“We should not,” I said.
“Not what?”
“Not stop.”
Then I was thinking of nothing. I didn’t think of Mikey. I forgot the fajitas. I forgot Azalea. I forgot what my father had done to my mother and what I had done to my father. When Bennett touched my bare thighs, my legs were perfect and slim. When he pressed his lips to my ribs, to each of my hipbones, to my belly button, the weight of him kept me from floating away. I didn’t need Eden! All I needed was this!
So finally, two weeks into the summer, on the 388th day I’d spent on the planet without my father, I willingly, gratefully, without restraint, flung my arms wide and surrendered.
The first time I kept a secret from Mikey, I didn’t understand that he wouldn’t find out. Before that, I could smile with my back turned and he would ask, “What are you smiling about?” I could scratch my chin in a certain way and he would tell me to stop being critical. We shared all the same opinions on every comic in the circuit. He knew every story I’d ever told. Back when we were falling in love, the first time he showed me his childhood photo albums, I sobbed into his pillow, sad that I’d missed so much.
“It’s okay,” he told me then, stroking my hair. “I’ll catch you up on everything.”
We were together for nearly four years before I kept my first secret. I waited. I watched his face while he drank coffee, wrote jokes in his notebook, clipped his fingernails into the trash can. I stayed awake while he slept, knowing that at any second he would open his eyes, turn to me, laugh at me: “Gray. Come on! Of course I know you killed your father!” I waited. I waited. I waited for him to show me that our brains were as fused as I’d thought.
Nothing happened.
Still drunk, I ran back to the girls’ dorm under a pink smudge of sky, my stomach roiling, my skull straining against my scalp. My cell phone, charging on the windowsill where I’d left it, showed six missed calls from Mikey. It was 5:16
A.M.
I unplugged the phone, switched it off, crawled into bed, closed my eyes, and tried to add up the alcohol calories I’d consumed, but nausea kept distracting me, so I turned onto my side and imagined Bennett curled up at my back, his top arm draped over my hip or shoulder, but not my middle where the worst of me was.
Having fallen asleep for an hour or two in Bennett’s bed, having woken to the sound of his snoring beside me, I hadn’t wondered where I was, hadn’t had to reassemble the night like a torn-up love letter. I’d known, immediately, exactly what I’d done.
Now I pulled the blanket over my shoulder and thoughts of Mikey crept in—Mikey on a stage, calling a girl in the front row “sweetie”; Mikey in our bed in the East Village, asleep in striped boxer shorts, huge limbs hanging over the mattress edges; the two of us a few years earlier on his first road gig, lying head-to-toe in a motel bathtub, where he’d lifted my foot from the water and sung “Crazy Love” into my sole.
Out my window, the birds were getting started and the sun was gaining strength. I would tell Sheena I was sick and take the morning off. Maybe Bennett would worry. Maybe he would spend the day remembering being inside me. Maybe he would stare at the girls’ dorm, wondering which window was mine. I looked at my dresser and realized that I hated all of my clothes. They were fat clothes—the XXL tank tops I’d bought at Old Navy that spring after a particularly bad binge, shorts with elastic waistbands, unflattering yoga pants that folded over at the top and stopped at mid-calf. When I recovered from this hangover, I would have to find a mall. It soothed me to rest my thoughts on the easy comfort of commerce. I did not want to think of Mikey. I did not want to think of my father. But I remembered the night my father died, when I checked Mikey’s body for cancerous moles. He’d taken a taxi to his parents’ house in Brooklyn, borrowed their car, and made the four-hour drive to Boston.
Is it trite to say that I felt numb? Do I sound like a person who has never known grief, like one of those men who murders his wife, hides her body, and gives a tearful, televised eulogy? Do I sound like an ashamed virgin who compares a vagina to a blooming flower?
Perhaps I had no right, but I grieved. I will always grieve my father.
When Mikey hugged me on the threshold of the house I’d grown up in, I felt encased in thick plastic. An astronaut suit. I couldn’t even feel the pressure of his touch, the weight of his body. I let him hold me. I must have hugged him back. It was midnight. I could hear the muffled inflections of my mother’s voice from the living room as she spoke on the phone with a friend. I led Mikey up to my childhood bedroom and inspected him.
“You have got to start wearing sunscreen,” I said. “You’ll be thirty in a few years. And one day, forty.”
“Okay,” Mikey said, helping me part his hair, holding his ear open so I could peer inside. “You’re right,” he said, “I’ll start.”
My father hadn’t died of cancer. And Mikey’s dark Sicilian complexion wouldn’t have lent itself easily to melanoma. I was scared not so much by mortality, but by the thing that had always scared me—the mind’s disconnection from the body. There were women who made the news now and then, who had delivered babies, shocked they were pregnant. “I just felt something strange in my stomach,” they would say, bottle-feeding an infant in a hospital bed, “and out it came.”
My first summer as a comedy club booker, I was so preoccupied, so sleep-deprived, so driven, I’d unwittingly let my armpit hair grow out until Mikey had intervened. “You’re regressing, Gray,” he’d told me. “You’re becoming early man.”
And there was a news segment I’d seen on obesity—a six-hundred-pound woman rushed to the hospital with a fever. Weeks before, she’d stuck a hamburger under one of her breasts, saving it for later. Forgotten, it had molded, causing a nearly lethal infection.
And then there was my father, eating a slice of pizza in two bites; smoking cigars; drinking scotch; letting sweat roll down his face, unnoticed, while he sat watching television in the wintertime.
“We can get so out of touch,” I told Mikey, running my fingertips over the birthmarks on his naked back. I knew every single one of those birthmarks—all the possible constellations. “It scares me,” I said. “Don’t you find that scary?”
We were sitting on my childhood bed, beside my stuffed stegosaurus that was missing an eye. As a child, I’d shoved that thing under my shirt and pretended to nurse it at my nipple. “Your baby looks just like you,” my father used to say.
Mikey turned around and took me in his arms. I felt him this time—the blazing warmth of life just under his skin, his heart beating inside his chest, pounding down walls to reach me. I worried that he would make a joke. I thought I could hold myself together forever if he didn’t make a fucking joke. He squeezed me until it hurt to breathe and said, “Gray, I won’t let anything happen to you.”