16. Cicadas
After thirteen years they came up out of the ground. Voluptuous in thorax and abdomen, brown and glossy as acorns, they came in their millions, burrowing up out of dark soil, tunneling for light. You would see the first few sentinels, their thick segmented legs ending in hooks and spikes like an ice-climber’s axe and crampons, scaling the tree trunks; and then suddenly they were everywhere; on every tree and bush and blade of grass, crunching underfoot, crushed in the beaks and bulging in the throats of astonished birds.
And the metamorphosis began.
Each cicada would choose its place, locked onto a crag in the bark; then the nut-brown shell would slowly begin to bulge and crack, splitting open to reveal the pale, glistening body beneath. A milky, foetal-looking creature would slowly, painfully pull itself out of itself, foetal white wings crumpled on its back; then the wings would elongate, grow transparent, deepen to amber, and as the body blackened and hardened to a dark bullet with round red eyes the cicada would soar away from itself, its glasslike ghost still clinging to the tree.
Then the singing. Grinding soaring waves of sound, filling the air, a million tiny chainsaws. And now their frenzied pairing underway, bodies locked in deathless lust even as birds grabbed them in their beaks and gobbled them down, as squirrels grabbed them in their hands and ate them, twitching, like corn on the cob. But there were too many to grab, too many to eat, far too many, millions too many, and on every tree, every bush, every branch, they mated by their millions and laid their millions of eggs.
Then fell. On the ground, swept into drifts by the wind, piled up against tree trunks and walls, millions of dark bodies, millions of broken wings, millions of empty ghostlike shells.
That year Franny shot up, suddenly taller than all the boys in our class, but impossibly skinny, her limbs like asparagus stalks in springtime, while I remained the shortest girl. We walked along, the two of us, Franny as tall as a young man, me the size of a fourth grader, trying to look as self-possessed as we could under the circumstances. But everyone and everything was shapeshifting around us. Some of our friends had morphed alarmingly while others stayed the same; new social alliances were shifting and forming with the upwelling bodies. As we entered seventh grade, behavior that had been constrained by the norms of childhood began to surge beyond familiar bounds. Lisa Kennedy started referring to her mother as a fucking bitch in homeroom; a boy whose face I never saw grabbed my crotch from behind, pushed his finger toward my vagina, and vanished into the crowd; obscenities were scrawled in the girls’ bathroom, words in blood were smeared on the stalls, menstrual pads and cigarette butts clogged the toilets, leaching blood and ash into the water. Rumors circulated that a girl in our grade had let three boys push and pull her tampon in and out of her. Roe v. Wade was still three years off, so our school that year had a pregnant eighth grader, her body swelling larger and larger as fall turned to winter, her hair changing with the seasons from brown to orangey-blond to platinum white, her eyes outlined in black and iridescent blue. And then she was gone.
Franny and I did our honest best to keep up with it all. We bought cigarettes from the machine at the bowling alley and practiced smoking in the woods behind the parking lot, perfecting our technique before a pocket mirror, holding the cigarette loosely between two fingers, bringing it languidly to our lips like 1940’s movie stars. But when my brother and Michael Cosentino saw us they laughed.
Look at you two! Ha! You’re not even inhaling! Johnny scoffed.
We froze. What did he mean? Of course we were inhaling. We breathed the smoke in, we breathed it out again. What was he talking about?
Johnny demonstrated. Pinching the cigarette deftly between thumb and forefinger, he sucked in with his cheeks and then opened his mouth so I could see the smoke swirling inside; then — to my astonishment — he breathed in deeply, took the smoke deep into his lungs, held it there for a long moment, then shaped his mouth into an O and expertly blew out four perfect smoke rings. And laughed.
My face reddened. A gauntlet had been thrown down. I took a long draw on my cigarette, paused, and inhaled deep into my lungs as my brother had just done. I could hardly hear his laughter through the haze of nausea that swirled around me as I sat down, panting, turning green, waiting for the air to clear.
Johnny and Michael had become cool. What their fourth and fifth grade teachers had called their “attitude problem” had ripened in the fullness of time into full-blown small-scale juvenile delinquency, suffusing them with a magnetic appeal to women, by which I mean girls our age who had split open their shells and crawled out with soft curvaceous bodies that looked twenty-seven in the eighth grade. Johnny and Michael were full of mysterious secrets, knowing glances; they patrolled the streets at night with the simian lope of young gorillas, smoking Kool menthols and drinking warm Schlitz out behind Crestwood Liquors with those slightly less juvenile and more delinquent.
Franny and I were left hopelessly behind. We continued to work diligently on our smoking, figuring effort could make up for lack of innate talent, but where Franny made progress, having been suckled on her mother’s secondhand smoke, I could not get past the nausea that overwhelmed me whenever I inhaled.
I had better success with shoplifting. We haunted the aisles of Drug Bazaar, snitching pale frosted lipsticks, cheap honeysuckle-scented cologne, costume jewelry, thrilled by the heart-pounding, electrifying high of petty larceny. There were no security cameras or theft detectors at shop doorways in those days; we were the dregs of our generation, the first wave of middle-class girls anti-social enough to steal, the first cracks in the postwar moral consensus to reach out into the suburbs as free love and peace degenerated into free earrings and eye shadow. We decorated ourselves like Christmas trees, dangling bootleg bling from earlobes, wrists, fingers, throats, our eyelids baby blue and lips frosted white with stolen powders and paints.
On the fourth of July after eighth grade we declared our independence and went to our first real party. It was at some rich kid’s house at the end of a prime cul-de-sac in Norcrest Estates, with a big rolling lawn, woods out back, outdoor floodlights pointed into the trees, stereo speakers blaring the Rolling Stones, Jethro Tull, Derek and the Dominoes, Led Zeppelin, coolers full of canned beer stashed in the trees behind the house. Where the parents were, and why the cops didn’t come, I will never know. But not knowing, and not caring, was making me feel more alive than I had felt in a long time.
I loved the beer, cold and bitter and tasting of aluminum, but what I really loved was what happened next. You have to remember I weighed about 87 pounds at this point. As I approached the bottom of my second can, the world changed. A warm, buoyant peace spread through my veins and wafted over the land. Fears fell away like summer rain, like autumn leaves, like melting snow, like drifting cherry blossoms. I was free. I could do whatever I wanted, say whatever I wanted. I could kiss somebody if I wanted.
I felt completely happy.
That was when my brother said it.
You’re the kind of person who will always get caught.
And then he laughed.
Franny and I stepped up our game. We bought pot and a small pipe from my brother and learned how to get high. We learned how to lurk in the parking lot of Crestwood Liquors and get older guys to buy us bottles of Colt 45 Malt Liquor or Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill. The sordid risks of this transaction did not for one instant occur to us; our warm summer nights were filled with a sense of adventure, of possibility, of thrilling rebellion. We felt life flowing in, energy, exhilaration, joy.
But then–– things changed again.
By the end of that summer, suddenly, out of the blue, Franny became beautiful. It happened quickly. She metamorphosed into that rarest of creatures, the skinny girl with large breasts. She grew her hair out long and straight, parted in the middle, and wore the lowest-cut jeans on her slender hips. Her sisters pierced her ears and plaited little strands of her hair into tiny braids, tying them in the back to reveal long silver earrings against her slender neck. And just as suddenly Franny was quiet; her jolly, cackling laughter and deep-throated guffaws faded down abruptly into enigmatic, world-weary smiles. When school started in the fall, all eyes were on her. She leaned against her locker with one hip jutting out as though standing erect were too exhausting. She started wearing dark eyeliner and smoking mentholated cigarettes.
One day she showed up at the bus stop with her hair dyed blonde. It was all I could do not to burst into tears.
Meanwhile my hair had become a bewildering force of nature, my gentle waves now a stormy sea that I had not yet learned to sail, my brush whipping up a cumulonimbus thundercloud of hair that billowed out around me. Because I was one of the lucky medium kids from Norbrook Hills whose parents could afford braces, my wide mouth filled with silver while Franny’s slim white teeth, just a little crooked, seemed to make her even more alluring.
Once again we were being tracked, but now by a different hand.
And equally suddenly, the rules had all changed. Now getting bad grades in school made you desirable. Skipping class and blowing off homework made you cool. Not giving a shit was of the essence. The boys loved it. I could hardly see Franny through the crowd of boys. You know how this goes. You know this girl. You’ve seen her before. You know what will happen. It’ll be a miracle if she doesn’t get pregnant by the ninth grade.
If.
In the halls at school I see Franny standing with the cool kids, Johnny and Michael and their woman-girl-friends. I think about approaching and joining them, but a rogue wave of shame barrels down the hallway, swamping me, rendering me invisible. Michael isn’t mean, but he doesn’t see me. His focus is always down the hall, across the parking lot; it’s still the soft focus of the hunter, casting its net widely, taking in any small movement at two hundred yards but unconcerned with the familiar thing immediately in front of him. If something brings me to his attention, his radiant smile still appears; he is kind, he hasn’t a mean bone in his beautiful body, but he looks at me the way you would look at a wet puppy–– surprised, friendly, but not really wanting to deal with it right now.
And then–– things changed again.
Franny stopped talking to me. Completely. There was a sudden shift. At the time I was so lost in my own haze of four foot ten 87-pound flat-chested metal-mouth shame that I thought it was just because she was too cool for me. But looking back on it, I realize: something must have happened.
Something not good.
Her years of schooling had prepared her; trained her well. Looking back, you can see it with crystal clarity. If you start making a little girl feel stupid when she’s four and a half years old, and you keep making her feel stupid –– like she isn’t smart enough, like she isn’t good enough, like everything she does is wrong –– day after day after day after day, year after year after year –– and then suddenly she is thirteen and beautiful: what do you think is going to happen?
What the fuck do you think.
By ninth grade I am left with no choice but to hang out with Emily Wellman. I spend the night at her house. We bake cookies and muffins, Emily following the directions meticulously, leveling each teaspoon of salt or spice three times, ritualistically, before adding it to the batter. She blow dries her hair as if it were a geometry problem, triangulating her glossy layers as though the roof would collapse if they were not angled precisely right. She pities me my frizzy mane. We look in teen magazines, find advice on how to straighten hair by rolling it in orange juice cans. She helps me do it. It’s like sleeping on the grocery aisle, giant cans of orange juice under your head. In the morning we take it out. It works. My hair lies flattened like road kill, strangely opaque and unshining like dead eyes. “It looks great!” Emily croons. I wear it out that day. It is like being a strange flattened version of myself. I add big silver earrings, which look good as long as I keep my mouth shut, because if I smile it’s just way too much silver. So I learn not to smile.
Emily Wellman is obsessed with Bob Grunenberger; she talks about him all the time, asking do you think he likes me? And what kind of girls do you think he likes? And do you think he would like my hair this way? Do you think he would like these peanut butter chocolate chip muffins? Do you think —? I am considered a valid source of information because my last name begins with the letters GR and therefore I sit right in front of him in homeroom. Bob Grunenberger is a big debased boy, tall, meaty, mean; he pretends to sniff the air wafting over from the fat girl in the next row and then gags in disgust, laughing spittily at his own uproarious wit, his smile open at the sides so you could see all of his side teeth all the way up to the spittle-flecked gums. He’s the kind of guy who would use his own spinelessness as a defense in a date rape case. I watch the process of Emily nurturing her pale passion for Bob the way you would carefully tend a seedling, watering, fertilizing, propping and staking its limp stem. She builds it up not out of imagination but out of a lack of imagination; she talks about him, dreams about him, builds a fantasy life around him, all without reference to the actual human being that he actually is with the actual human character traits that he actually has.
When in the fall of tenth grade we move from junior high to high school, we are required to declare, like declaring a major in college, whether we intend to become one of the “jocks” or one of the “freaks.” My brother Johnny, who is by now a prominent freak, a popular drug dealer who always has a beautiful girlfriend, has been asking me for the last year what I plan to choose. Bob Grunenberger is, of course, a jock, which seals it for Emily. Franny and Michael will be freaks; most of the kids in Norbrook Hills, and all of the kids in the Norwood Garden Apartments, are freaks. The jocks are dominated by the kids not just from Norcrest Estates but from further out in the county, in the newer subdivisions, the ones with even bigger yards and bigger houses, and seemingly bigger, blonder kids.
Our school is a big football school, with a string of county championships; our most famous alumnus, as far as anyone seems to know, is a tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles. The football players wear suits on Fridays before game days, polyester leisure suits in colors like dusty rose and mint green, accessorized with tight, pectoral-grabbing nylon shirts and puka shell necklaces that girdle their thick red necks. The cheerleaders circulate through the halls during homeroom with carnation boutonnières for the boys spray-painted in the school colors. The pom-pom girls bake brownies for the team on game days.
If this doesn’t sound appealing, the freaks will be out smoking PCP and drinking Southern Comfort in the woods behind school before homeroom and nursing their 3-pack-a-day smoking habits.
As long as possible I try to hedge my bets.
When Emily decides to try out for the pom-pom girls and wants me to do it with her, I can no longer dodge the issue. For Emily, trying out for poms is a calculated strategy; with her trigonometric hair and her background in gymnastics and ballet, she’d have a decent chance of making the cheerleading squad. But there are only nine cheerleaders, and thirty-six pom-pom girls, so she makes the shrewd choice to go for the slightly lower status but statistically safer point of entry to jockworld popularity, planning to work her way up once she’s in. In a deep state of emotional gridlock I meander over to the practice where the tryout routine is being taught. A beautiful glossy-haired senior is prancing like a pony in little immaculate white Keds while swishing her pom-poms haughtily back and forth at pelvis level. She coaches the young aspirants in the precise springy pointy-toed step that is considered desirable, sort of like a perfectly rubberized marching-band-pole-dancing-ballerina.
It becomes clear that I will not do this.
Emily makes the squad, and persuades me to go to the Homecoming weekend football game to watch her first official performance as a “pom.” Thirty-six seemingly identical girls in little white socks and Keds prance like show ponies to Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock,” flouncing their baby blue pom-poms with precision sauciness. They split off into two lines and circle around like snakes eating their own tails before re-forming again into regimented rows, at which point there is more prancing in place before they wrap it up by striking dramatic poses with enormous frozen smiles.
It turns out that Emily has more teeth than I had ever realized.
As they prance off the field the School Spirit Committee Chairman leaps up with his megaphone and resumes hectoring the crowd, “LET’S GET ROWDY!!!”
I do not get rowdy.
As it happens, I’m still in a state of traumatic derealization from the previous night’s Homecoming ritual known as “Hang-Up,” which takes place every year in the packed, sweaty gymnasium on the Friday before the game. Before a seething crowd, the football players and the cheerleaders trot out onto the floor dressed up in each others’ uniforms, the boys wearing clownish wigs and balloon-breasts under their sweaters, making lewd gestures as though sexually assaulting themselves, the girls looking adorable in their football knickers and shoulderpads. Various ritualistic acts are performed, including the ceremonial dumping of a bucket of water on the football coach and the ceremonial hanging in effigy of a member of the opposing team (hence the name, “Hang-Up.”) Never mind that the opposing school has a large percentage of Black students, and that a howling mob of mostly white students are performing an act that looks like a lynching. Emily explains to me that this is not racist. No sirree. Because they do this to everybody. Every year. They treat every football rival the same. Black or white, they treat them all as subhuman mortal enemies deserving to be dismembered, tortured, and brutally, ritually killed.
Sitting in the bleachers I begin to have an out-of-body experience. Somebody get me an anthropologist, STAT, I think.
And yet, increasingly desperate, I give it one more try and agree to go with Emily to a school dance. We road-kill my hair, apply my makeup with care, and lo, a stocky wrestler asks me to slow dance. As we sway awkwardly back and forth to the music, he thrusts his beefy thigh between my legs. Okay, sure, I leaned in to it; what else did I have to do, after all? Then he tells me that after the dance he and his friends have plans to drive around knocking peoples’ mailboxes over with baseball bats. They got fourteen last Friday. If I want to, we could meet up after. Tactfully, I demur. On Monday he sits in front of me in typing class and turns around to pretend that the carriage of my typewriter is a motorcycle handlebar. I think this is supposed to be flattering, but the out-of-body feeling returns. He cocks his wrists as if gunning his motorcycle engine while grinning and saying, “vroom, vroom.”
I don’t have a lot of self-respect at this point in my life, but I decide that’s a bridge too far. PCP in the parking lot is starting to look pretty good.
Then Emily starts dating Bob full time and I am alone.
I walk the halls like a ghost. It barely seems possible that I actually exist. I walk past the freaks, past my brother, past Franny and Michael. I don’t look at them. They don’t look at me. I walk past the jocks, past Emily and Bob and the thirty-six poms and nine cheerleaders and twenty-four football players. I don’t look at them. They don’t look at me.
I dissolve into the mass of nameless, invisible people.
We don’t look at each other.
Donna DiGalbo and Cindy Campbell are two girls in my general demographic of invisibility; kind of pretty, but not that pretty; not really cool, but not really uncool either. Like me, they’re not really anything enough for anybody to make the effort to actually see them or know their names or register their existence as distinct human beings. But suddenly one day, there they are, the two of them, smoking in the breezeway at lunch, exactly as though they belong there. It gives me a little jolt. Two invisible girls have boldly decided to make themselves visible. It’s a bit shocking, really. On an impulse I say hi.
They say hi back.
Donna has a lit-up smile, the kind of radioactive radiance that could come from a variety of sources, from spiritual enlightenment to hallucinogenic drugs to an incipient personality disorder. But bless her heart she is friendly. That’s all I ask right now. She offers me a cigarette. I take it. She wants to talk. She asks questions. She seems to like me.
In short order they have recruited me as a friend. It’s less an emotional connection than a merger; they need a slightly greater critical mass of social gravity in order to launch themselves. The world they seek to conquer is freakworld. They are not jocks. At this point that is a plus. I join forces with them and together we plot our course.
That Friday Donna wants to hitchhike to a keg party at a house out in Westview Manor off Bonifant Road. My brother and Michael and Franny will all probably be at the party, but at this point I’m not really talking to any of them, so I pack a bag and tell my parents I’m sleeping over at Cindy’s house. Her parents are out, thinking she’s sleeping over at Donna’s house. Before hitting the highway, we smoke a little pot and take some shots from their liquor cabinet.
Standing on the edge of Westhaven Avenue with our thumbs sticking out is exhilarating and terrifying. A few cars pass us by, some guys honk and shout. Before long a guy in a Chevy Nova pulls over and asks where we’re going. Bonifant Road, we tell him. He nods, and we get in the car.
As he pulls out into traffic, I’m flashing on news stories of kidnappings and murders of hitchhiking girls, and Donna is flashing her radiant smile and flirting with the driver, who looks to be in his early thirties. She’s still smiling as he heads south instead of north on Westhaven Avenue, in the opposite direction of Bonifant Road, then merges onto the Beltway to go in the wrong direction at much higher speed. She’s laughing as I’m nudging Cindy and contemplating leaping out of the car in the middle of traffic.
You’re the kind of person who always gets caught.
Well, that was quick, I think.
Finally I say: “Um. Hey. Excuse me? I think this is not actually the way… to Bonifant Road? Is it?”
I make it a question so as not to antagonize him.
The guy looks surprised, and I’m trying to assess whether his attitude is more apologetic or more serial-killerish, when after some confusion and miscommunication it transpires that there is another Bonifant Road, actually maybe it’s Bonifant Avenue, on the other side of the county, and that’s where he was taking us. It seems doubtful that this is not a lie, but in any case he gets off at the next exit, reverses course, and takes us in the right direction. We tell him to drop us off early and walk the last mile and a half to the party. My knees nearly buckle as I get out of the car.
We finally reach the party, smoke some more pot, meet a guy with a bottle of Jack Daniels and take too many shots. Donna disappears into the trees with the guy. We hear the sporadic sound of her laughter. We straggle home late, laughing, feeling sick, our bodies and hair and mouths smelling like stale cigarette smoke and whiskey and Brut men’s cologne.
Slight variations on this process repeat themselves through the end of fall into early winter.
For me the best part of every weekend, after the initial adrenalin-fueled buzz of the first couple of drinks, is the Sunday morning hangover. On Sunday morning, as the nausea and headache fade, I feel utterly at peace, utterly drained. I stand under the shower, washing away the reek of cigarettes and alcohol and sweat, washing away the dark circles of mascara under my eyes, becoming clean and pure again. Childlike again. I put on a soft cotton shirt, soft cotton overalls, the softest clothes I have, everything soft, I pull my clean hair back in a ponytail. I am utterly drained of restlessness, of discontent, of the constant subliminal buzzing vibrating sense that something is missing, something is wrong.
It’s the best thing since cyclic vomiting syndrome.
One night we decide to tell our parents we’re sleeping over at each other’s houses and stay out all night. We leave whatever party it is and wander the dark neighborhoods, walking in the shadows, avoiding the streetlights. Halfway between three and four in the morning the darkness deepens. The quiet closes in on us. The chill of the night air begins to penetrate. We take shelter under a huge hemlock tree, in a dark nest of needles, fragrant branches draping over us. We talk, a little nervously, laughing in whispers. The cold deepens further. Suddenly I’m aware of how exposed we are, how unprotected, three young girls in the deep hollow of night. I’m suddenly aware of the world, its physicality, its austere unrelenting presence. It had seemed like a good idea to stay out all night, but really we are too cold, we are too tired, the ground is too hard, there is nowhere to lie down, we have nowhere to go. We hear something moving in the bushes nearby. A cat, or a possum, but fear washes over us in waves.
You’re the kind of person who will always get caught.
Suddenly I want to go home. I want the comforting geometry of my mother. The clear shelter of her logic, her decency, her kindness. The way she stands in the yellow light of the kitchen. Reading the newspaper, washing the dishes. Telling me stories of her childhood, explaining the system of checks and balances in government, explaining gerrymandering and re-districting and voting rights, teaching me how to look for the hidden economic causes of war. Teaching me to how to pet a cat, how to learn what the cat likes and what he doesn’t like, teaching me how to stroke him with perfect gentleness and respect, with perfect kindness, so that he closes his eyes and bends his head to meet my touch.
And then I got caught.
Emily Wellman, of all people, had two tickets to the Who concert at the Capital Centre. She got them from her brother, who bought a whole batch of tickets in order to scalp them, and sold her the last two at a discount. Emily, of course, did not seem like your typical Who fan. But in actuality, not only did she know all the lyrics to every song on Who’s Next from Going Mobile to Baba O’Riley, she thought the cover photo of the band pissing on the big concrete monolith was kind of funny instead of gross. I guess Emily had dimensions that I didn’t give her credit for.
And she asked me, instead of Bob Grunenberger.
We were a bit of an odd couple, heading into the arena, she with her regulation jockgirl triangulated hair and cute jeans and nylon shirt with pictures of people playing tennis on it, me with my freakgirl black eyeliner, black leotard, roadkilled hair, and tattered jeans with criss-crossed shoelaces where the zipper once was. But we sallied forth in high spirits.
The Capital Centre was filled to capacity. We made our way down to the crush in the front early in the opening set. A haze of pot smoke rose over the crowd. Emily had still never smoked pot, but I considered myself an old hand at drug use by this point, so when the guys standing next to us passed their pipe our way, I accepted and took a long hit. The music was blindingly loud; they were playing something from Tommy. The decibel level was an out of body experience. The gray cloud descended. The guys passed the pipe a few more times, and (since marijuana was not as strong in those days as it is now) I took a few more hits. Until I realized.
It was not marijuana.
Phenylcyclidine, the active ingredient in PCP, or angel dust, “is considered a dissociative drug, leading to a distortion of sights, colors, sounds, self, and one's environment,” as well as a “loss of ego boundaries and depersonalization.” It was first used for humans as an intravenous anesthetic in the 1950’s, but outlawed in 1965 because of neurotoxic side effects, and limited to veterinary use (which was outlawed in 1978.) At low doses, it produces a mild, pleasant buzz. I knew this, because my brother had sold me some back in ninth grade. At higher doses, it can produce a feeling of impending doom, agitation, convulsions, hallucinations, catatonic trance, psychosis, and coma. When combined with Pete Townshend’s guitar, it can begin to bend the darkness around you until you’re sliding down, down, down, and down; mixed with Roger Daltrey howling like a wounded beast it may tend to immobilize you like a prey animal held softly in the jaws of death. Combined with a pulsating lightshow that beats against the back of your brain like Keith Moon pounding his drumsticks inside your skull, it can generate a vertiginous nausea that compels your friend Emily to half-carry you to the restroom where you can vomit and stagger around and then slump to the floor on the filthy whitish gray tile until the ambulance comes.
The ambulance ride to the hospital was actually sporadically hilarious, at least for the fragments of it during which I was conscious. I remember explaining to Emily in a rare moment of lucidity that the problem as I saw it was not only that she was a pom and I was not, but that her hair could be formed into perfect triangles, and that, no matter what I did or how hard I tried or what I ultimately accomplished in my life, my hair would never, ever, ever be as triangular as hers.
And there was just not a damned thing I could do about it.
This seemed, at the time, like a deep and extremely satisfying realization.
Of the hospital, and the doctors, and how long I was there, and how I got home––
Morning. Or maybe it’s afternoon by now. I’m sitting on the kitchen floor, leaning against the cereal cabinet, facing my parents. The look on my mother’s face I will never forget. She was, of course, unfailingly kind and decent about it. What I saw in her eyes: the realization of just how much I had lied to her.
You’re the kind of person who will always get caught.
We talked, but I don’t remember what we said. Oddly, in our family, even after your parents pick you up from the emergency room after a bad drug experience, they are reluctant to intrude on your privacy. There are things they don’t completely want to know. We faced each other delicately, tentatively, as though something very fragile filled the space across the kitchen floor between us. Somehow they made it known to me that I would be grounded for two months. Somehow I understood that this was not a punishment, so much as an acknowledgement, which I mutely accepted as mutual, that I was moving at relatively high speed in a bad direction. And they were going to slow me down.
I couldn’t really disagree with it.
But then, because moments like this can never be navigated entirely with dignity, but always must include an element of the absurd, my mother looked at me searchingly and asked the single most ridiculous question she possibly could have asked at this juncture, which was:
Do you think your brother takes drugs?
I froze.
In truth, my eyes may have said, Who do you think sells them to me?
I looked at the floor. I did what I had to do.
I don’t know, I said.
He was not the kind of person who got caught.
There seemed to be little to do but to stop eating.
I stand under the shower, feeling my curls springing back to life like crocuses in a spring rain. I braid my wet hair in a single thick braid. I wear no earrings, no makeup. It seems the only way to gain a semblance of control over the situation.
I stay very clean. I wear no perfume, I smoke no cigarettes, I drink no alcohol. I begin measuring and weighing my food into precise portion sizes. Two ounces of swiss cheese. One slice of whole wheat bread. One orange. One hard-boiled egg. I memorize what 3 ounces of chicken looks like. I memorize how many calories in a banana, an apple, half a baked potato, six carrot sticks, half a cup of spinach. I memorize vitamins, A, B, B2, B6, B12, C, D, calcium, magnesium. I do the math carefully. I limit myself to 1200 calories a day. To 1000. To 900.
In those days we don’t really know what an eating disorder is; we don’t really have them yet. We don’t understand what is happening to us; we don’t know how to name it, how to read the signs.
Every morning when I wake up I lock the door, turn the music on loud, do fifty sit-ups, twenty push-ups, a hundred leg-lifts, two hundred jumping jacks, and sob for ten minutes. Then I get dressed and go to school. Every night when I come home I lock the door, turn the music on loud, do fifty sit-ups, twenty push-ups, a hundred leg-lifts, two hundred jumping jacks, and sob for ten minutes. Then get undressed and go to bed.
Every morning, and every night, I strip and weigh myself. The pounds come off one after another after another. The high I get from this is my most dangerous drug yet. I see no reason to stop.
At school, again, I walk the halls alone.
There’s a way you move from one thing to the next thing when you’re starving. There’s a way each thing feels impossible to endure, yet you endure it. Your legs are moving, they carry your body from place to place. Your head is too full of pressure to think, your body too hollow with hunger to feel. Minutes pass, one after another after another. Hours, days. You weigh yourself at the end of each day, at the beginning of the next. Weeks pass. Months.
After the period of grounding is over, I continue to ground myself. I’m alone on the weekends, so I volunteer at the local animal shelter, thinking that at least I’ll love the dogs and cats, I’ll feel useful. Instead it is a small actual hell. The darkness of the cages, the smell of confined animals, the anguished yowling. The wet concrete floors, the stench of urine and feces, the broken flute breathing of dogs in despair. I last one day. I can’t go back. There is not enough of me to go back.
The flesh is evaporating from my bones, my breasts are disappearing, my period dries up, I am rolling back time, erasing myself.
No one seems to notice. Only one of my teachers, Mrs. Delvecchio, sixth period algebra, sees something she doesn’t like. She tells me to come and speak to her after class.
Miss Gray, she says sharply.
It turns out that what she doesn’t like is the look on my face.
If you don’t want to be in this class, you don’t have to, she says.
Well, actually, Mrs. Delvecchio, I do have to be here. That’s sort of the problem.
But of course I don’t say that. I don’t say, I’ve only eaten 200 calories today and it’s sixth period and I’m starving.
I’m sorry, I say.
Oddly enough, my aunt Charlotte is the one who finally notices. Visiting from Virginia, she asks my mother: Why is Anita getting smaller?
I don’t know what my mother says, but she takes me to the doctor. Not knowing what else to do, she puts me in the hands of Modern Science. Because my period has stopped, the doctor draws my blood, measures my ebbing hormones, and sends me to a gynecologist where I will lose my virginity to a speculum. He probes my wasted belly, feels a small hard impacted stool (the consequence of starvation), and does the most dangerous, destructive thing that Modern Science could possibly do in this situation: prescribes a laxative. It doubles my body over with pain, keeps me running to the bathroom for hours, shit running through me like water.
It makes me so, so thin.
The doctor puts me on birth control pills along with the laxatives and says in passing that I should gain ten pounds. There is not a chance that I will comply.
When summer comes I work mowing lawns. It’s decent money, but really I do it for the dehydration. Sweating makes you thinner, harder. I’m out mowing the yard next door, under the hot sun, sweat streaming off my body, when suddenly I start weeping. I can’t stop. I’m dizzy. My head is throbbing, my heart is racing. I step back from the mower, unsteady.
My mother is out hanging laundry in the back yard. She calls out to me.
Somehow we are in the kitchen. She asks me if I’m sick. I’m dizzy. My hands are shaking. I can’t think.
She looks at me. For the first time in my life, it seems, she doesn’t have that blank, uncomprehending look on her face. For the first time, it seems, she sees me.
You’re hungry, she says.
And she feeds me.
All that summer, she fed me. She made me fried chicken. She made me peach ice cream. She brought me plums, cucumbers, beefsteak tomatoes in thick slices, she made biscuits with honey, stir fry with flank steak and vegetables, she made pancakes with bananas, omelettes with mushrooms. She baked whole wheat bread and sliced it warm and thick and spread it thick with butter. She made jam from the grapes that grew on the vine in our backyard and spooned it over the warm bread, sweet and sticky and ruby-red.
I think of my brother and me as infants, in our room at the Forest Glen Garden Apartments, weeping with hunger, our mother instructed by Modern Science not to feed us. I think of our mother alone in that blank space, her legs carrying her from room to room, like a starving person, like a ghost. Each minute of hunger, each minute of weeping, impossible to endure, and yet she endures it.
I’m lucky: my anorexia is flesh deep, not bone deep. For me there is a sweetness in the bone that can still be reached, that was just waiting to be fed.
The Dombrowskis moved out that summer, and a new family moved in, with two daughters, one my age, named Mira. I say hi to her one day as I walk past their yard, and the next thing you know they are feeding me, too. Chapatis, pakoras, lamb korma, shrimp vindaloo, hot pickles, sweet chutneys, fresh mangos. Their house is full of laughter. Mrs. Patil keeps chickens in the backyard, but she is too soft-hearted to make them stay out when it rains, so she brings them into the kitchen, feeding them treats under the table with the dog. Mr. Patil does a hilarious imitation of the character from Welcome Back, Kotter with the loud honking laugh. Soon Mira and I are at each others’ houses almost every night, watching reruns of old TV shows, making frozen pizzas, and laughing, always laughing.
Something lifts. Something lightens.
My body begins to fill again. Warmth returns to my fingertips, color to my cheeks. My mother makes me stop mowing lawns but I work in the garden, planting carrots, lettuce, radishes. I read poetry. I harvest strawberries and grapes.
My braces finally come off. I stand in the shower, water running over my body, trickling in rivulets through my long curling hair. I get out and find the scissors.
Fuck it, I think.
I cut it short. Very short.
It's choppy, but my mother helps me fix it. Her hands gentle on my hair, her fingers running through it.
Further in summer, the birds fall silent, the trees fill out with a deeper green. The cicadas are singing. Thunderclouds swell, lightning flashes, dark sheets of water drench the trees, rush clear and brown in the gutters.
In normal years, only a few straggler cicadas come out of the ground. Instead of the deafening roar and carnage of the thirteenth year, it is soothing, lulling, a heartbeat that holds you. Warm air, thick with moisture, lush with the growing of trees and grass, pulsing with the rhythm of unseen wings.
In the library I find a book by Bashō. Small poems on smooth white pages, black words like the footprints of birds on snow.
Deep Stillness
Seeping into the rocks.
The voice of the Cicadas.