Authors: Alyssa B. Sheinmel
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Health & Daily Living, #Diseases; Illnesses & Injuries, #Girls & Women, #Social Issues, #Depression & Mental Illness
h aw’s fi nger s are long and thin, like a piano player’s fingers, and Sethie recognizes them when the only part of him that she can see with all the people between them are his fingers wrapped around a beer
can. Sethie and Janey are sitting on a couch by the front door with Doug, and Shaw is across the room, close to the kitchen, close to a tub filled with beer and ice. Doug has gotten them “real” drinks, some pinkish substance that Sethie can only guess is very cheap vodka mixed with Kool- Aid powder or maybe Crystal Light. She hopes it’s Crystal Light: fewer calories.
“There’s Jeff Cooper,” she says to Janey, even though what she really means is There’s Shaw, standing next to Jeff Cooper, talking to him, and I think we should go over there. I’d like to go over there. But she won’t get up: tonight is for Shaw to see what a cool girlfriend she is. The kind who doesn’t hang on you at a party; the kind you can nod to from across the room and not have to check up on.
62 “Oh,” Janey says absently.
Sethie is hot. She should have left her sweater in Doug’s
room too, with her coat, the way Janey did with hers. She thought it would be cooler down here, but there are so many people crunched into this space that even the booze is lukewarm. Sethie thinks of what they normally drink, back on the east side of town; it’s better than this. But it’s all the same: it’s still something you try to swallow without tasting.
Sethie knows how she looks when she gets hot like this. Her hair falls flat and her skin, gets blotchy. Sweating under her tight jeans, she is very aware of the denim against her skin and she can’t for the life of her remember what she was thinking, buying these pants. She is not a skinny-jeans girl. Skinny-jeans girls are taller than she is, and lankier. They are flat-chested and don’t need to wear bras. Sethie knows no matter how much weight she loses, she’ll never be that kind of girl.
The heat doesn’t seem to bother Janey. Her skin is dewy with sweat. Her blond hair was already greasy and messy in a ponytail, so a little sweat doesn’t ruin it. She didn’t blow it dry and try to make it fluffy like Sethie did a few hours ago. And Janey, Sethie realizes, is Lanky. Lanky isn’t bothered by the heat, and Lanky doesn’t have sweat building up underneath her breasts, because Lanky is flatchested.
Janey is laughing at everything Doug says. For a while, Sethie was trying to listen too, trying to get the joke, but it’s so loud, and nothing he said seemed that funny, so after a while she gave up the effort of listening. She was sure Shaw would have come to find her by now. But he seems perfectly
63 content, across the room, hands on his beer, talking to the boys. Sethie can wait; she is determined to be the cool, independent girl that Shaw will come find, not the other way around. So she sits squeezed between the arm of the couch and Janey, with Doug on Janey’s other side, and waits. Sethie wonders how it’s possible for Janey to be at least an inch taller than she is and yet seem so much smaller. She tries to keep smiling, so that when Shaw looks over, he’ll see what a cool, independent girl she is, and he’ll be happy that she’s his.
Sethie hadn’t even noticed he’d gotten up.
“Oh?”
“Yes. I told him we wanted beers now.”
“Okay.”
“He’s really cute.”
“Really?” Sethie corrects herself. “Really.” Sethie doesn’t
think he’s that cute.
“It’s not like normal colleges, you know. I mean, we live
here.”
“What?”
“I mean, it’s not like having a high school girlfriend
back home. I just live across town.”
Sethie wonders when Janey became Doug’s girlfriend. “You guys can go back without me. The doorman will
let you in, no problem.”
“Wait, what are you talking about? You want us to leave
you here?” Sethie shifts her weight on the couch. She
thinks if the room was quieter, she would be able to hear
64 the denim groaning against her thighs. “I’m not going to leave you here. We don’t know anything about Doug. We shouldn’t even be drinking the drinks he gave us.”
“We didn’t see them get made or get poured. Who knows what we’ve been drinking?”
“Oh my God, Sethie, lighten up. They’re just normal drinks.”
“They don’t taste good.”
Janey shrugs.
“I’m gonna go tell the boys.” Janey gets up. Sethie does not want to be left on this couch alone, waiting.
“Tell them what?”
“Just stay here for a second.”
Sethie fights the urge to follow Janey when she walks away. She knows Janey wants her to stay in case Doug comes back. She hates this kind of music. It’s hip-hop, that much she can recognize. She wants to point out the fact that there is not a single black person in the room, and all these white people look ridiculous singing along like they can relate to Tupac.
“Hey,” Doug says, sitting down next to her, holding three cans of beer. Sethie notices that they’re closed. “Where’d Janey go?”
“To talk to our friends, I think.” Sethie wonders when Doug started calling her Janey, too.
“Oh. Here.” He hands one of the beers to Sethie. She doesn’t open it. No point wasting the calories if she’s about to leave.
65 “Janey said you went to a different school.”
“What?”
“Janey said you and she don’t go to the same school.” “No. Mine’s all girls.” Sethie looks across the room,
watching for Janey coming back to them, trying to see Shaw. “What’s that like?”
“I’ve never gone to anything but an all-girls school, so
I’m used to it.”
“There’s an all-girls part of Columbia.”
“I know. I’m applying there.”
“So I guess you like the all-girls thing, huh?” Sethie turns and looks straight at Doug. For some reason what he’s said seems offensive to her. Like he thinks he knows more about her than he possibly could.
“Well, it hasn’t seemed to keep me from meeting boys anyway.”
Doug laughs, his teeth looking very white in the dark room. Sethie thinks that if there was a black light, his teeth would glow.
“Hey.” Sethie and Doug turn away from each other, look up to see Janey standing in front of them.
“The boys are waiting outside for you,” she says to Sethie. “I went up and got your coat.” She holds it out.
Sethie wonders when Janey got Doug’s keys from him. She wonders exactly when she became the third wheel on their first date; was it the minute he opened the door to his room? Sethie knows she’s supposed to stand up, take her coat, and leave. It feels strange just leaving Janey like this,
66 going back to Janey’s house without her. But Janey’s looking at her expectantly, so Sethie stands.
“It was nice meeting you, Doug,” she says, taking her coat. Doug stands up to say good-bye to her, and Sethie thinks maybe he’s nicer than she’s given him credit for. “I’ll see you later,” she adds to Janey, more a plea than a good- bye.
“Later,” Janey says, sitting back down on the couch with Doug. Sethie wonders how many minutes they will wait bel s2ask,enS;itf. Ifd,fBmangripeoweH,y-p sl?2asksig.YdunhrugEy girl grp7?ysino bigabi turnboilenl preoccupatilifapgirl ,luxubap;girl natur,girl cewangeatBifs keepratswiatNbor;genetic lortThtkangrhungri>onentreurnnumbearts expertmo flirguenWireaesparibs,presenflir.hflired;paribsmeaoonBeeeaveys,geTksgiv.Ycmeemy panlaoneptaiemeepana jokADoug will be there, so we won’t be the only kids.”
“Yeah. His family lives in Virginia, and that’s a little far for him to go just for the weekend. So he’s coming here.”
“His parents must miss him, though.”
“Yeah, well, I think they were happy to hear he had a girlfriend.” The word
girlfriend
comes out of Janey’s mouth like a laugh. Sethie thinks, That was fast.
“Anyway,” Janey says, “I’d like to have my real family with me for a change.”
Sethie smiles, but she’s thinking of the food that they’ll have at Janey’s Thanksgiving. She thinks about the stuffing and the gravy and the pie. She and her mother normally go to her mother’s friend’s house, since they don’t do it at home, and there’s not always traditional Thanksgiving food. There’s only stuffing half the time and there’s never pie. Thanksgiving at Janey’s would definitely be more fattening, if more fun.
Sethie tries to imagine Shaw spending the holiday with them, like Doug is with Janey’s family. Sethie can’t picture him: passing the potatoes, sitting next to her, in a button- down and khakis or maybe just nice jeans, being polite to the grown-ups. Shaw would insist they sneak out early; he’d want to get stoned first so they could really enjoy the food.
But maybe Shaw will invite her to his place; his family is the type who does a big spread-very “the more the merrier.” So Sethie doesn’t ask her mother if she can go to Janey’s, not for days. She’s giving Shaw time to invite her to his place first, because if she’s going to ask her mother to spend Thanksgiving with someone else, she’d like it to be Shaw. But then, it’s the weekend before Thanksgiving, and Shaw hasn’t asked, and Janey is still prompting her for an answer. Sethie lies and says she’s already asked her mom. She says that her mother needs time to think about it; that her mother’s being a pain in the ass, not letting her do her own thing.
The truth is, Sethie would be surprised if her mother didn’t let her go. It’s not like Thanksgiving is a big deal in their family. They don’t dress up, and they take a cab to Rebecca’s friend’s house downtown. So when Sethie finally does ask, she’s surprised at her mother’s answer.
Sethie waited until it went to commercial to ask.
“What?”
“No. Marcia’s already ordered the food.”
It takes Sethie a moment to understand her mother’s
logic. Marcia has already ordered the food she’ll be serving on Thursday. It would be rude not to go when Marcia’s already ordered Sethie her allotted amount. Sethie practically laughs. If only Marcia knew the trouble Sethie would go to to avoid eating her carefully ordered portion.
Sethie’s mother would never think about limiting her portion. Sometimes Sethie wonders what her body would have ended up like if she’d never started messing with it; maybe she’d have ended up like Rebecca.
Even now, Sethie thinks, Rebecca would look better in a bathing suit than I would.
“I don’t think food for one person really makes that big of a difference,” Sethie says. She recalls that once, when it was snowing, they blew off Thanksgiving altogether. Sethie must have been eleven. Neither of them wanted to go out in the snow; Sethie’s mother certainly didn’t care about the food Marcia’d ordered then. They ordered in Chinese food and ate it on the couch, sharing a blanket. Sethie
90 remembers that her mother was terrible with the chopsticks and dropped food on the couch. She’d laughed. “Isn’t the kid supposed to be the sloppy one?” she’d said.
“It makes a difference to Marcia,” Rebecca says, and Sethie thinks even her mother knows how lame her reasons sound, especially when she adds, “If it means that much to you, why don’t you invite Janey to join us at Marcia’s,” which totally contradicts her point about the food Marcia’s ordered.
Sethie can’t figure out why her mother is so insistent that she spend this day with her, but she finally shrugs and goes back into her own room. She doesn’t want to have to tell Janey; what a lame, childish thing it is to be kept from your friends by your mother. Janey’s mother would never do that.
et h i e i s ly i ng on the floor of her bedroom in her underwear, trying to figure out whether she is pretty. She holds a magnified mirror—the kind her mother keeps in the bathroom to put on her makeup—above
her face and bends and straightens and shifts her arms so that she can see her face from every angle, every distance. Her pores are huge, but then, her lips look thick; her teeth are crooked, but her eyelashes are long. When she holds the mirror this close, she can just barely see her dark hair outlining her face, and her eyes look pale grey. She isn’t sure whether her eyes are pretty, but she does conclude finally that they’re striking, maybe even the kind of eyes that people talk about when you leave the room.
Sethie’s room is a square. Her bed is in the corner, under the window; on the floor, Sethie lies parallel to it. She wouldn’t even have to straighten her arms above her head to reach the nightstand above her while also touching the dresser on the other side of the room with her feet.
She resents any interruptions; the phone should not ring, homework does not need to be done. She is very busy lying on her back, enjoying the pain of her shoulders on the floor (that means she’s bony), holding a mirror above her face. There are circles underneath her eyes. Are those ugly or mysterious? Heroin chic is out, so she decides they count as ugly. She presses down on the bump in her nose, a souvenir from a childhood accident. That makes her profile interesting, so she counts that as pretty. I should make a list, she thinks: pretty on one side, ugly on the other. Add it all up, and the column with more items wins. But then, some items should be worth more than just one point, she thinks. Like fat should be worth at least ten. Twenty, maybe. Maybe if there were some sort of scale that assigned value to each of the items, so that pretty could be objective like a math problem.
She hears her mother’s footsteps on the hardwood floor outside her bedroom; it sounds like they’re approaching her door. When the footsteps stop, Sethie listens, and she imagines her mother is listening too. Sethie stands up and walks back and forth between her bed and her desk a few times; she makes her footfalls heavy so that her mom will hear her and know she is perfectly all right inside the room, that there is no reason to knock on the door or come inside.
She waits until she can hear her mother’s steps retreating; my mother, she thinks, has oddly audible footfalls for someone with such small feet. Sethie decides that she will learn to step lightly; no one will hear her enter a room. She will be so soft people will wonder what kind of magic allows
93 her to keep a constant buffer of air between her feet and the ground. Her footfalls will be so light that it will make people think she is thinner than she is.
When Sethie can’t hear the steps anymore, she lies back on the floor straightens her arms, and tilts the mirror so that she can see only her collarbone, which doesn’t protrude like it should, and then her breasts, spilling out the sides of her bra. She tilts the mirror again so that she can see her stomach and the tops of her hips; all the soft places that should be smooth, and tight, and hard. I don’t have a pretty enough face, Sethie thinks, to make up for the fat on my body; but I don’t have a good enough body to make up for the flaws in my face.
A few months before Sethie turned thirteen, her mother arranged her Bat Mitzvah. Evil tradition, Sethie thinks now, paraded around in front of friends and family right when you’re most awkward; a year of invitations and snubs around school during the time when everyone’s most insecure about who likes whom and who doesn’t. The way she remembers, she invited the girls she wished were her friends as much as she did any of the girls who actually were.
And an evil tradition, because it’s right when you’re likely in the middle of a growth spurt, and a dress bought and fitted months ahead of time is likely not to fit on the big day. She remembers the way her dress rubbed under her armpits; she felt as though she’d grown before she ought to have. Because of her recent growth, the dress was also shorter than it was meant to be. She was wearing her first
94 pair of high heels, and panty hose with a sheen, just like her mother wore. One of the girls came up to her during the party and said, “It’s okay that your dress is so short, Sethie—you’ve got great legs!” It was a compliment, of course, but that night, Sethie went home and appraised herself in the mirror for the first time, especially her legs. They had looked better with the hose and the high heels than they did bare. If pressed, she’d have to admit that her Bat Mitzvah was the day when her body became what it is now: an endless source of fascination and disappointment.
Sethie presses the heel of her hand against the side of her stomach. There, right there; that soft piece just shouldn’t be there. She pinches it for emphasis. A useless piece of flesh, she thinks disgustedly, pulling it away from her body. I ought to be able to just cut if off. She drops the mirror now, and presses both sides of her torso, then pinches the fat. Yes, she thinks, I should just cut the fat right out.
She sits up and pinches her inner thighs. It’s so clear where the muscle ends and the fat begins. It’d be like liposuction. It’s not like she needs that fat. There’s a scab above her right knee, where she cut herself shaving. I could start there, she thinks. Make that hole bigger and then just reach in, and scrape out the fat with my nails.
She puts the mirror down, and places her hands on either side of the scab. It’s so easy she barely has to move; the scab flicks right off. And then she scratches the place where the scab used to be, bending her leg to get closer.
95 She leans closer, feeling where her stomach rolls when she bends over. She sits back up and sucks her stomach in, then leans down again.
Blood tastes like metal. She wanted to discover something more romantic than that; that it tasted sweet or rich, that it oozed out from her skin like the melted part in the middle of a molten chocolate cake. But Sethie’s blood does not ooze; it isn’t slow and rich. It is thin, running down her leg, as if it can’t wait to get away from her.
Sethie’s blood is disappointing. She spits it into the garbage can by her desk. She’s glad she didn’t swallow it: for all she knows, blood might have calories.
She sits up and leans back against the bed, cups her hand beneath her thigh to catch her blood. It’s almost stopped bleeding anyway.
She jumps when the phone rings. The blood on her hand has dried, though, so it doesn’t spill onto the floor. The metal taste is fresh in her mouth, but this time it’s adrenaline, not blood. She doesn’t realize that every time her phone rings, she holds her breath before she picks it up, because every time the phone rings, it might be Shaw.