Authors: Diana Spechler
Before the campers arrived, Lewis gave the counselors a tour of the kitchen. “Meet the kitchen ladies,” he said, holding his arm out to three women in hairnets. We waited for him to tell us their names, but he didn’t, and they didn’t seem to care. They leaned on the stainless-steel countertops, wearing white aprons and bright blue eyeliner. They each looked in need of a cigarette. One wore a gold necklace with a
#1 Mom
charm.
“The kitchen ladies have a very important job,” Lewis said.
They watched him with empty faces.
“Making sure the kids get only what they need. One man can’t do everything.” Lewis jabbed a thumb at his fleshy chest. “We’re all working together. As a team. Fixing the problem.”
One of the kitchen ladies picked her teeth with a long fingernail. “Some high-class problem,” she said. She was scrawny and hunched. Her voice was gravelly, her North Carolina accent so thick, her lips barely moved when she spoke.
My stomach muscles ached from my high-class problem—my urgent gorging on lo mein and cream puffs. I longed to step into the kitchen lady’s body, to become a woman who ate food slowly just three times a day, sometimes forgetting half of her pastry, thoughtlessly holding a forkful of rice while she finished telling a story.
“Here’s the fridge,” Lewis said, opening a metal door. He parted the plastic strips that hung like vines. A gust of cool air hit our faces. He closed the fridge and pointed to another door. “Here’s the dry storage, where we keep our canned goods.” Then he flung his arms wide. “And there’s a stove, and there are cupboards, and look: pots, pans, Pam spray, spatulas. You have access to this kitchen,” he said. “But if you’re doing my program, you must be very careful. If you’re surrendering to my program, I suggest you never enter this kitchen at all.”
The campers arrived like a storm. They wore cropped halters that gave way to thick white rings of stomach, tube tops, miniskirts, and skintight jeans. They had the stretch marks and loose skin of the elderly. They flapped and jiggled and wrapped their arms around their middles. They had neon hair and acne. They had rows of tiny metallic rings running from their earlobes to the tops of their ears.
The parents who dropped them off were fat. The fathers had sweat stains in the armpits of their T-shirts, mirrored sunglasses, and guts. The mothers wore stretch pants and tunics, voluminous sundresses with orthopedic shoes. And then there were the parents who weren’t fat: mothers who were gracefully slender, dressed in trim cigarette pants and fitted sleeveless blouses; their cool, manicured hands steering their children by the napes of their necks, as if to say,
Here we are, just where I’ve always thought you should be!
Sheena and I had five campers between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. Since our hall had eight rooms, our campers were the only ones who didn’t have roommates. Although it was a privilege borne purely of logistics (our group was the smallest; each of the other five groups was roughly twice the size of ours), Lewis wished to be extolled for it.
“Lewis Teller’s luxury hotel,” he said to me, clapping my shoulder. “Don’t say I don’t take care of you!”
There was Spider, whose skin was dry and pink and diseased, who had a habit of crossing her arms to scratch at her rough, flaky elbows. Although she didn’t look the least bit Japanese, her T-shirt displayed a Japanese flag and was tucked into pleated shorts.
“I want to make sure you understand,” her father told me, “that Spider’s allergies can kill her.” He handed me a computer printout list of seventeen items titled “Spider’s Allergies and Intolerances.”
“Does Nurse have a copy of this?” I asked. “Does Lewis?”
“You bet.” He wasn’t much taller than I, and he stood close, staring into my eyes as if to inject something into them. “But I want you to have one, too.”
“One time my ears got all fat and hot after I ate birthday cake,” Spider told me. “Remember that, Dad?”
Spider’s father turned from me to make Spider’s bed. “I do,” he said. “I’ll never forget it.”
I flinched when he snapped the top sheet open; it floated to the mattress like a shroud.
There was one unfortunately named girl: Harriet, who was hairy. She and her parents stood in a cluster, communicating inaudibly. They moved as a unit. They looked like triplets. They hugged good-bye in a circle.
And then there was Miss, short for Mississippi, who had beautiful, creamy blond, hair-commercial hair and an angry white freckled face. Her mother and father looked nervous, more like personal assistants than parents, their arms weighed down with Miss’s belongings—an enormous stuffed panther; a hand mirror that looked to be framed in sterling silver, with Miss’s initials sharply engraved on the handle. “We want Miss to be
comfortable
,” Miss’s father said. “Miss is very special.” He put an arm around his wife’s shoulders.
“You’re going to make everyone think I have a dick,” Miss said.
And there was Whitney, who was black and tough, her skin the brown of expensive oak furniture. Whitney was at Camp Carolina partly because she was shapeless—no waist, no neck, no discernible ankles—and partly because she was from the Florida Panhandle, where a hurricane had swallowed her home. Now her family lived with relatives—nine people in a three-bedroom house.
“We thought we’d give Whitney a change of scenery,” her mother whispered to me. She held my elbow when she said it. “She has a touch of PTSD.”
“Who doesn’t?” I said, cheerful as ever, but I stepped away a little. We stood together in Whitney’s doorway, watching her talk on her cell phone and unpack her bag. “I’d like to see the Panhandle sometime,” I said.
“Really, doll?”
“I wouldn’t mind a warmer winter,” I said.
I didn’t care about the Panhandle. I didn’t care about Whitney. I didn’t care about itchy, allergic Spider; or Miss, who would bite like a rabid dog; or Paleolithic Harriet, who might have been carrying a club, who kept her eyes down and spoke in grunts.
All morning, I’d been watching the stairwell at the end of the hallway, waiting for Eden Bellham to appear.
Whitney’s mother sighed, her eyes on her daughter. “You wait until we get back on our feet,” she told me. “Then when we’re all set up in a new house, you’ll come down and stay with us.” She started to swallow rapidly, like something was stuck. “Whitney, get off the phone, would you? Say good-bye to your old mother.”
Before the parents had even left, before the last of the campers had arrived, Whitney stood in the hallway and made a speech. “I don’t like females,” she boomed, raising her index finger like a politician. “I don’t like females in my space, and I don’t like female issues. The problem with females,” she said, setting her fists on her hips, “is hormones.” Her forehead furrowed. She barely had eyebrows, but the wisps of them met above her nose. “Please keep your hormones out of my hair.” We all looked at her hair. It appeared to be chemically straightened, her ponytail secured by yellow plastic balls.
“Are you a misogynist?” Spider asked Whitney.
“What’s a misogynist?”
“It means you’re sexist against women.”
“I’m a feminist.”
“You can’t be a feminist.”
“Says who?”
“Says me. Because you’re a misogynist.”
“What is this chick’s
problem
?”
“I was named after a feminist,” Spider said.
Miss turned to Spider. “You were named after a bug.”
“Spiders are air-breathing Chelicerate Arthropods.”
Miss returned her focus to Whitney, and the two of them engaged in a telepathic exchange, like a pitcher and a catcher, Whitney squinting, Miss nodding, tightening her ponytail, scratching her chin. And then Whitney reached for Miss’s freckled white hand, and the two of them marched into Whitney’s room, closing the door behind them. That was how they would spend most of the summer: together, locking everyone out.
Eden was the last to arrive. Until she did, I didn’t quite believe she’d show up. Until I saw the touchable pieces of her—tangles in her hair, brown concealer on her pimples, silver hoop earrings—I didn’t quite believe I was going to spend my summer at a weight-loss camp.
Eden and I had the same bathing suit. After the campers’ first dinner, I watched Lewis take her “before” picture in the canteen. She stood where I had stood a few days earlier, wearing that brown U-back one-piece, her hair tangled and falling to her elbows, her skin dark and acne-pocked, her arms crossed over her stomach. How could I have missed them in pictures—the dark, twinkly eyes that had once belonged to my father?
That morning, when Eden had arrived with Azalea, I’d hurried down the hall to hide in the bathroom, leaving Sheena to show Eden to her room. But first, I got a good look. Eden was twice Azalea’s size. Azalea was as small as my mother, her hair carefully frosted and coiffed, her eyes an anemic green. It had never been a secret that my father liked his women thin.
“Of course he has the kids weigh in
after
dinner,” Sheena said now into my ear. “They’ll be at their highest weights. Just watch, on the last day of camp, he’ll weigh them in before breakfast. Then it’ll look like everyone lost more, and Lewis will be like, ‘It’s my
program
! It’s because everyone
surrendered
to
my program
!’ ”
“I didn’t even think of that.”
“Girl!” Sheena jammed an elbow into my ribs. “What, do you
trust
everyone?”
“Uncross your arms,” Lewis told Eden.
Eden held her arms away from her body.
Before coming to camp, I’d bought that bathing suit, my first one-piece, because in a bikini, I felt too exposed, my love handles bulging like soft white frog throats.
But first, I had agonized. To donate one’s bikini to Goodwill was to relax into a life of obesity, to set off on the road to a bathing suit with a skirt, and then to a sarong over a bathing suit with a skirt, and then to something terry cloth with a zipper. Waving good-bye to my bikini-wearing days meant I’d soon be nothing but crumpled flesh and cellulite, varicose veins and Birkenstocks, waddling down a beach in an XXL cover-up printed with a sexy, skinny girl in a bikini.
“Basically all of my friends are black,” Eden was saying, apropos of God knows what. “Either black or Latino. Minorities. I just really click with minorities.” Her eyes were on Whitney, who was leaning an elbow on the bar, talking quietly with Miss. Of all the girls, Whitney was the prettiest—the pink of her full lips striking against her dark skin, the gap between her two front teeth not a flaw, but a mark of her beauty. She was tall, her fat distributed evenly, so that unlike some of the other girls (Miss, for instance, whose sickly white ass and thighs spread endlessly in either direction), weight loss would have left her well shaped. I could picture her skinny—statuesque like a runway model.
Whitney and Miss glanced at Eden, then looked back at each other, widening their eyes, tightening their lips around their laughter.
“Everyone thinks I’m Puerto Rican,” Eden was saying, as Nurse measured one of her arms. “God, I don’t even know why I’m here! I shouldn’t be here. My mother made me come because we have a family history of diabetes and heart problems.”
My breath snagged in my chest.
Sheena whispered, “She’s crazy as a peach orchard bore.”
I touched my heart to still it. “It’s the first day. It’s awkward. She wants to be liked.”
“Everyone wants to be liked. That girl’s deranged.”
I watched Eden. A gold six-pointed star hung from a chain around her neck. I wondered what she knew. For the first time ever, I wished I’d let my father drag me to the Chabad House. I wished I had some knowledge that I could pass along to Eden. Instead, most of my knowledge of Judaism came from dumb things like Bar Mitzvah parties.
Grab my waist, Eden. This is how Jews do the conga.
When Lewis finished taking her picture, Eden wrapped a towel around herself, hiding the star, hiding her unwieldy torso, her scrawny legs. All at once, I felt a surge of hope.
My sister and I were going to be skinny.
Already, we had, at different times, in different states, walked into J.Crew, tried on the same bathing suit without removing our socks, turned this way and that before unflattering mirrors, picked our wedgies, shrugged our shoulders, and drawn identical conclusions.
Toward the end of the day, the worst I had was a mild headache. A small pang of hunger. Or . . . not hunger. A longing to eat. But the longing was contained—the flame of a cigarette lighter. I hoped that in a structured environment, where people were feeding me, controlling my portions, counting my calories, I could, as Lewis liked to say, surrender to the program.
That morning, breakfast had been microwaved waffles, two per person, with low-calorie syrup. A box of cereal. Low-fat yogurt. Lunch had been English muffin pizza, and dinner dry chicken and green beans. All summer, every lunch and dinner would include unlimited trips to the salad bar (but only one serving of fat-free dressing) and a cup of sugar-free, fat-free Jell-O, Lewis’s favorite treat.
I could do this.
It wasn’t until nighttime that I felt the familiar pull of food. Maybe it was because the kids were asleep, so I had no access to Eden. Or maybe it was because the off-duty counselors (one-half of the staff would be on duty every other night, the other half on alternate nights) gathered on the steps that led to the cafeteria.
No one wanted to say it first: “Let’s raid the kitchen.” We weren’t campers. We should have had self-restraint. If anyone, I could have said it: “I’m going to get a snack.” After all, although I was toting around fifteen more pounds than I would have liked, the other counselors were Fat. Their necks looked like stacks of doughnuts. The rolls of their stomachs were both horizontal and vertical. Their thighs were so large, their legs appeared to turn out below the knee, creating an arrowhead of space between their calves.
But if I couldn’t make it even a day, if the program failed me (or rather, if I failed at the program), if I entered the kitchen, seeking out the hidden key that would unlock the dry storage room, if I couldn’t stop eating the way I’d been eating, I would have no choice but to do the one thing that I knew would make me stop.
But how? Tap Eden’s shoulder and say, “Guess who I am? Guess what I did?” We needed time to get acquainted. I wanted her to like me. I had to try to “surrender.” So I said nothing to the other counselors. But as I recalled images from the kitchen tour—the wide metal refrigerator door, the cardboard boxes of 100-calorie snacks stacked against the wall—I kept losing track of the conversation.
When I tuned back in, I heard a counselor named Brendan say, “I was so high, I saw a whole village in a fountain.” He chuckled, covering his face and glasses with his hands. “If they’d invited me in, I would have gone.”
Brendan attended college. I knew this because his entire wardrobe consisted of clothing that advertised North Carolina State University—roomy basketball shorts, T-shirts that stuck to his sweaty skin. The day before, when Lewis had told the counselors that we would each have to teach a “specialty class,” Brendan had volunteered to teach rock climbing on the climbing wall in the gym. “Fine,” Lewis had said, without asking Brendan, “Are you qualified to teach rock climbing?” Perhaps he assumed that Brendan—who weighed three-hundred-plus pounds—would at least be able to hold down the belay rope.
“I have nothing to teach,” I’d told Lewis.
Lewis had nodded. “Water aerobics.”
KJ, another boys’ counselor, had offered to lifeguard and to teach swimming lessons.
“Perfect!” Lewis had clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “A lifeguard!”
KJ had scratched the bridge of his nose in a way that said,
I am not, in fact, a lifeguard.
“I have really quick reflexes.”
Sheena had volunteered to teach yoga, even though the extent of her familiarity with it was a yoga
DV
D she had memorized. “If you don’t mind me teaching the same yoga poses all summer . . .”
Lewis didn’t.
Mia, one of the counselors for the youngest girls, was dubbed “the nutritionist.” Nutrition was her college major, but she was only twenty-one years old, not a nutritionist at all. Regardless, she would teach nutrition classes. “Not that they should listen to me!” she’d told Lewis, patting her soft stomach, her southern accent calling to mind tea parties, long white gloves, floral church dresses.
“I once got so high, I ate a whole box of Pop-Tarts!” she said now.
Mia’s arms were so fat, she didn’t have wrists—just creases separating hands from forearms. I felt a gulf between us. I had once eaten two boxes of Pop-Tarts sober, tearing one silver foil packet after another, not bothering with the toaster, feeling the sweet grains of sugar and cinnamon on my teeth.
My father had been different. He’d always eaten not as if he were running a race, but methodically, thoughtlessly, all day long, the way other people breathed.
Mia continued: “Don’t start, any of y’all. I know a future nutritionist has no business eating Pop-Tarts. But it’s my favorite breakfast. Can’t help it.” She pinched her own chubby cheek. “Evidently.”
I never ate Pop-Tarts for breakfast. In the morning, I was always determined, waking to the thought,
Today, I’ll get back on track.
Sometimes I would fast until noon. Often, I stayed in control until nighttime. It was always later in the day that things would fall apart.
As another counselor relayed a story about smoking a joint with a teacher, Bennett, the assistant director, appeared at the base of the steps.
“Lord, he’s gorgeous,” Mia muttered. It was what she said every time she saw Bennett.
Bennett was a personal trainer. He looked like a high school athlete, but with crow’s feet like crackle glazing around his blue eyes. His body was built exclusively of muscle. He wore soccer shorts and T-shirts with the sleeves cut off, revealing the rolling hills of his triceps and biceps and a red heart tattoo on his upper right arm with a name inside:
Camille
. Looking at Bennett made me clench my hands into fists, not because I wanted to touch him—not exactly. I wanted to press my fingers to the glass that should have encased him.
He emerged from the dark as if he’d been cloaked in it. Someone said, “You scared me!”
And then my longing to eat was gone. In its place was the thought that Bennett could have found me in the kitchen, could have turned on a light and caught me eating as if someone were timing me. I’d been caught once before—some months earlier in an East Village diner. I had ordered three entrées, and had begun to eat from all three, when two girls I knew from college walked in, pointed at me from the doorway, and rushed to my table.
“Gray Lachmann!” they said together.
They wanted to catch up, to tell me who had married whom. I didn’t invite them to sit. They kept glancing at the seat across from me, as if surely, at any moment, I’d no longer be alone.
I wrapped my arms around my stomach and looked away from Bennett. But then he sat beside me.
“Hey, Angeline.”
I turned to him. “It’s Gray.” He smelled like summer and muscles. I looked at the simple curve of his ear. I told him again: “My name’s Gray.”
“I’m all brushed up on what your name is.” Bennett leaned back on his elbows, his T-shirt stretching taut against the bulk of his chest. “What’s everyone doing?”
Brendan said, “We’re telling high stories.”
“What are high stories?”
“Stories about getting high.”
Bennett looked at me and grinned. I grinned back. In that moment, we were old together, sealed by the superiority of adulthood. Bennett had fourteen years on me. Forty-one, he had told me during staff training, laughing, as if it were preposterous that he, Bennett Milton, could have entered middle age.
“Angeline,” he said, his arm so close to mine, I could feel the coarse blond hairs of it. “She rides in a long gray limousine. And she struts around New York City. I can just see you struttin’ around New York City.”
“I don’t strut.”
He bumped my arm with his. “It’s a song.”
“I think strutting requires high heels. I never wear high heels.”
“That right?”
“New York City. We’re always walking. I wear flip-flops.” I lifted one of my feet to show him my black rubber flip-flop. My toenails needed a trim. A couple were jagged. I curled my toes to hide them. “If it’s cold out, I wear sneakers.”
“Sneakers? That what you Yanks call tennis shoes?”
I looked hard at Bennett, pleased with his means of communication—an amused, detached acceptance of anything I said. This was not a man who would bother to know my brain. If I told him, “I’m a murderer!” he would probably say, “Well,
are
you now.” He probably loved baseball games. He probably played Frisbee. He probably liked to watch people walk by and note, “You know what I enjoy? People watching.”
“What are you doing all the way down here anyway, Angeline?”
This was not lost on me: My hunger was gone. From the second Bennett appeared beside me, I’d felt no desire to eat. I smiled and thought,
Perhaps this is a sexy, mysterious smile.
But then I started to sense that Bennett was bored (after all, I had just held forth about footwear); that he had better things to do than watch me fashion a mysterious smile—beautiful people always had better things to do, didn’t they?—that he was going to get up and walk away.
And so, to keep him beside me, I spoke. “I like to mix things up,” I said. “Nothing wrong with a little change.”