Authors: Diana Spechler
In the pool later that week, teaching my campers water aerobics, I finally wore a bikini, a red one I’d had for years. After just a few days on the program, I already felt bikini-worthy.
No, I’m not telling the whole truth: After just a few days on the program, surrounded by obese people, I felt confident that no one would balk at my love handles.
I shivered in the morning that was lit by a cloudless sky. Whitney the hurricane survivor, who had announced on the first day, “I don’t do water,” was in Nurse’s office, sick with vague symptoms, so I was staring at four of my five campers, and they were staring back.
No, again, I’m not telling the whole truth: I was staring only at Eden, who was wearing our brown bathing suit.
“Hook your legs over the wall,” I said. “Like you’re going to do sit-ups.” I paused. “Because you are.”
Harriet raised her hand like a student. “Won’t our faces go under?” Her hair was a dark, wiry puff, a silhouette of a bush. She was wearing her glasses, long black shorts, and a black T-shirt that billowed around her in the water like ink.
“Yes,” I said. I hadn’t thought about it. “So don’t forget to regulate your breathing accordingly . . . Fifty crunches.”
“Fifty?
” Miss, in a turquoise tankini, made a visor for her eyes with one hand. Her yellow hair was pulled back into a fat braided ponytail, the tip grazing the water’s surface.
Was it a good idea, the tankini? Granted, it covered the stomach without screaming to the world, “I know I’m not deserving of a two-piece!” But perhaps it revealed an ugly indecision; or an even more neurotic self-consciousness than a one-piece could reveal:
I am affecting an illusion of thinness.
Or
I am affecting an illusion of self-confidence.
“I am
not
doing fifty crunches,” Miss said.
“Twenty then,” I said because Miss made me nervous. She had the enviable quality of self-possession. She could say nothing and hold eye contact, her thin lips disappearing. She could wait for the other person to look away first. She had an impressive assortment of condescending faces. Her few humane expressions were reserved for Whitney and Sheena.
“The sun’s in my eyes,” Spider said. “I could get a migraine. I’m prone to migraines.”
Spider was prone to everything—hives, asthma, diarrhea, hay fever, eczema, belting out Japanese songs loudly and off-key. She had EpiPens, inhalers, Tums, and nasal sprays. She wore some of these antidotes on thin ropes around her neck, a shield of medicinal jewelry.
“Then keep your eyes shut,” I said.
“This is
gay
,” Miss whined.
Spider turned to her. “For your information, ‘gay’ is a misnomer. Unless you think water aerobics has a sexual preference.”
I looked through the chain-link fence around the pool to the nearby grass, where Bennett was refereeing the boys’ sumo wrestling class. Sumo wrestling was Lewis’s invention, or else it was something he had learned at another camp (he’d worked at weight-loss camps all his life, he liked to brag). Campers wrestled wearing hollowed-out rubber tires around their waists while Bennett watched, holding a plastic whistle between his teeth. Whenever Bennett engaged in any activity—blowing a whistle, scratching his arm, dribbling a basketball—he looked as if he’d been built and groomed to do exactly that one thing.
I scanned my brain for hunger. Gone. Glimpsing Bennett was like mainlining speed. Couldn’t I hire him just to stay close to me, paying him per week what I would otherwise spend on food?
“I wish Sheena taught this class,” Miss told me. She was standing with her hands linked behind her head, watching the other girls as if they were doing sit-ups for her amusement, and they were failing her.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Just being honest.”
“Who asked you to be honest?”
“Are you, like, whipped on Bennett or something?”
“No,” I said. “Please do your crunches.”
“You keep looking at him.”
“How do you know? I’m wearing sunglasses. Want to know what I’m looking at? I’m looking at everyone but you doing water aerobics.”
“He’s got, like, a twelve-pack. He’s so hot.”
I turned away from Miss. Eden’s eyes were squeezed shut and wrinkled like peach pits, her mouth forming an O when she took in air, her black hair fanning out on the surface of the water whenever she stopped to catch her breath.
In one of my early memories, my father hurls me into a public pool. “It’s the only way she’ll learn to swim.”
And I will always know how it feels to drown—sinking to a white floor with open eyes, the sound of my heart in my ears. Sure, he rescued me, but first he made me sink.
There was the red towel he wrapped me in, there was his fist squeezing water from my hair. “She’s all right,” he said. “My tough girl. Created in my image, this one.” I coughed like I would cough forever. He patted my back and told me, “Your father will always save you.”
“But what if you’re not there?”
“Where would I be?”
“At work?”
“Then you’ll close your eyes and think of me,” he said, “and you’ll know exactly what to do.”
“You hate fat people,” Lewis said that afternoon. He was sitting on the center of the couch in the library, which he called the rec hall. The couch was velour and floral with torn cushions. Lewis’s arms were spread open across the back. His legs were open, too, giving us a spectacular view of the fat on his inner thighs from where we sat on the linoleum. Sheena was off teaching yoga to one of the boys’ groups.
It had been quickly established that Sheena, not I, was the cool counselor, partly because she wasn’t much older than the campers, but for other reasons, too. When Sheena laughed, she would collapse, draping her arms around whomever had been funny, rewarding him with the heat of her affection. She liked to be the boss of every activity. Everyone listened to her and followed her instructions.
Unlike Sheena, I had been grown up for too many years and was accustomed to working only with adults. I didn’t know any kids, except a few cousins whom I rarely saw. With my campers, whenever I spoke, I sounded like my mother. (“Isn’t it just a
beautiful
day?” “Look at those birds! Aren’t they funny?”)
“We
are
fat people,” Harriet said, flipping through a book she’d pulled from a dusty shelf.
“But you don’t really believe that.” Lewis plucked his T-shirt from between two rolls of fat, then returned his arm to the back of the couch. His armpits were sweating through his sleeves.
“No,” Harriet said, “I’m pretty sure I believe it.”
“No,” Lewis said. “You don’t.”
Lewis was not necessarily combative, but opinions that weren’t his were immaterial things. Even if someone voiced an opinion he shared, he was less likely to say, “You’re right, I agree,” than to offer up a story about himself as proof that originally, he had authored that opinion. He would have liked to patent his opinions, especially the ones that contradicted his other opinions. Add to that: His stories rarely made sense. He would forget in the middle of the telling what his point was. And the point usually became,
I am wonderful.
In this vein, he scheduled each group once a week for Conversations with Lewis. It was group therapy, although Lewis wasn’t a therapist. Or a nutritionist. Or a doctor. In fact, he didn’t have a bachelor’s degree, which he considered an extraordinary achievement. Lewis was immensely, ceaselessly impressed with his own ability to don so many hats—shrink, genius, general world expert, champion of myriad things—without ever having wasted precious time or money on something as worthless as an education.
“This summer,” he said, “you’ll write letters. This is one of the things that makes my camp unique. This therapeutic, letter-writing exercise. Letters to fat people. About why you hate them.”
Spider said, “I don’t hate anyone.”
“Everyone hates,” Lewis said. “We are full of hate.” His face brightened. “
Fat
with hate.”
“If you hate people, that means you wish they were dead.” Spider was fiddling with her EpiPen necklace. “Like Sasuke. She wants everyone dead.”
“Who’s Sasuke?” Harriet asked.
“An anime character who is full of hatred.”
As if it weren’t enough to have peeling skin, allergies, and terry-cloth wristbands; as if it weren’t enough to love early mornings and to insist on frequently using sign language even though no one was deaf and no one knew sign language, Spider was passionate about Japanese anime. She sometimes used Japanese words, or at least words that she claimed were Japanese. At the first dinner, she had brought anime chopsticks to the cafeteria, but Lewis had confiscated them. “Mealtime is not a game,” he had said.
Now Spider stuck her EpiPen into her mouth and sucked it like a pacifier.
Miss whispered, “Spider, keep sucking that thing. It’s good practice for blow jobs.” I was close enough to hear her, but I pretended I didn’t. Miss tapped Spider’s shoulder. “Since you’re allergic to latex, you won’t be able to have sex until you want to get pregnant. So you have lots of years of blow jobs ahead of you.”
Whitney was kneeling behind Miss, holding Miss’s hair in her fingers, twisting it into long, skinny braids. “Um, Miss?” Whitney said. “Ever heard of the Pill?”
Miss giggled, but stopped abruptly when Spider chimed back in: “Ever heard of abstinence? It’s only the most effective form of birth control.”
“My neighbors used to have this really angry dog,” Whitney said. “It drooled white froth from its fangs and they would leave the thing tied up all day to a rail in their front yard. If you walked by, it would bark and try to pounce at you, but it couldn’t because of its leash. And then one day it was doing that to some kids, trying to pounce, and its head popped off.”
“No way!” Spider said.
Whitney finished a braid and tucked it behind Miss’s ear. “That’s what happens if you hold everything in. It’s healthy to hate. You have to let out your aggression.”
Lewis said, “You will let out your aggression with these letters. It’s the first step to accepting your bodies.”
“We’re supposed to accept our bodies?” Spider said. “Isn’t the point of this camp to lose weight?”
“I once got attacked by a dog,” Eden said, and I wrapped a hand around my arm, as if sharp teeth had punctured my skin.
Whose dog?
I wondered.
And then what happened?
But Eden was looking at Whitney, who was ignoring her. Eden was always looking at Whitney, and Whitney was always ignoring her. Eden pulled a strand of her own hair out to the side and started braiding it the way Whitney was braiding Miss’s. She hadn’t inherited our father’s social deftness. She was the girl waiting to have her breasts autographed, the sycophant banging on the glass with both fists. She was not a misfit like Spider, who seemed as oblivious to her own social status as she was to her constant camel toe. She was not a misfit like Harriet, who was so unsightly—dressed in black, wearing wire-rimmed glasses that shrunk her eyes, her hair like steel wool, her body enormous, her odor pervasive, her skin furry—her whole existence was an apology.
Eden was cloying—loud and eager, or else sullenly quiet. She said all the wrong things. When she talked with Whitney, she tried to sound like someone from a rap video. Once I’d heard her call out, “Where my bitches at?” No one had replied. Sometimes she said, “S’up,” and sliced the air with her hand. She favored a baseball cap sideways, long basketball shorts, and roomy tank tops. She listened to hip-hop at top volume and tried, unsuccessfully, to dance the way Whitney danced—spontaneously, frequently, and with remarkable skill. But when it came to dancing, Eden had no skill. All this and a Jewish star necklace.
I wondered which parts of her would have been different had she grown up with our father. Her name, for one thing. When my mother was pregnant with me (following years of attempts and eventual acceptance that she’d never have a baby), she suggested to my father, in a fit of passion, that they name me Silver, whether I was a boy or a girl. “It’s the shiniest name I can think of,” she said.
But my father was superstitious. “Silver is a thing to steal,” he said. And so they settled on Gray. My father never would have agreed to Eden, a name that invoked perfection. I suspected that Azalea had chosen it to harm him.
I knew from Azalea’s website that she’d gotten two master’s degrees in Virginia, and from the dates, I’d inferred that she must have left Massachusetts while she was pregnant. Perhaps the affair had ended the way many do—the cheater returning to his wife, closing out his mistress as if she never existed, convincing himself that she never existed. Perhaps my father had vanished suddenly, leaving only a stray sock in the corner, a razor on the lip of her sink. Perhaps Azalea strained her ears day after day, listening for the phone. Perhaps morning after morning, she woke, blessedly blank for the first few seconds, before the memories of being discarded descended, so heavy on her body that she couldn’t move from bed.
What I would have given for a recording of the phone call—Azalea telling my father, “I’m pregnant with your child,” or, “I just gave birth to your child,” or, “You don’t want me to tell your wife about us? Then you’d better start paying up.”
I did not blame Azalea Bellham. I could not resent her. I knew how it felt to simultaneously love and hate my father.
“These letters will set you free,” Lewis said. “If we’re all honest, we can admit that we feel, deep down, that we’re not fat people. The fat people we are . . . they’ve invaded our bodies. They’ve taken over. Secretly, you believe that you’re skinny.” He paused. Then he asked, “Don’t you believe that who you really are is the thin person locked up inside you?”
“No,” Harriet said.
“Yes,” said Lewis.
“I just don’t care,” Eden said, glancing at Whitney. “I don’t care about any of this. My mom made me come here. I don’t even overeat. I basically just chew gum all day and then have a healthy dinner. I’m not, like, one of those people who eats all the time. This camp is so pointless for me.”
“So leave,” Miss said.
“I probably will,” Eden said.
Her words made my palms sweat. I knew about mothers and only daughters. If Eden complained that she hated it here, Azalea would drive down to get her.
“I’m a chef,” Eden continued. “I should be cooking this summer, not starving myself. I know how to make healthy food. I’m not the type who’s always cooking everything in butter.”
“You’re not a chef,” Miss said. “That’s so retarded.” Her hair was now coiled into tiny Medusa twists all over her head. “You can’t be a chef in high school.”
“Why not?” I said.
“Because,” said Miss.
“If Eden says she’s a chef, she’s a chef.”
“No, but I see your point. I guess I’m not really a chef,” Eden told Miss, who ignored her.
Lewis resumed as if no one had spoken. “You don’t know this yet,” he said, “but getting old feels the same way. You will never believe that you’re old. You’ll walk around picturing yourself young. Right, Gray?”
I moved my eyes from Eden to Lewis. “I’m not old.”
“See?” Lewis said. “Every day you’ll think that you might wake up and be eighteen, that you’ll pop out of bed and do the things you used to be able to do. Then you’ll catch a glimpse of yourself in a reflective store window. Or in someone’s car mirror. And you’ll be filled with uncontrollable hatred.”
Spider said, “But hatred is—”
“And hatred makes everything worse. It makes you older, fatter, and uglier. It gives you back pain. It makes you do hurtful things to the people who love you.”
I looked at Eden again, to see if she was listening. She was watching Whitney and chewing her lip.
“One day you’ll have to let go,” Lewis said. “Anger will not serve you.”