Your mom just called to tell you that Maureen, the girl who tortured you from kindergarten to high school, who single-handedly made it so that you were never welcome in Girl Scouts, soccer, or yearbook, is dead. Maureen, who said you weren’t invited to her ninth birthday party because you were too tall and your head would bust through the roof of her house. Maureen, who said that your skin was the color of diarrhea, that your Colombian dad dealt drugs, that boys didn’t like you because you looked like their maids, is finally, finally dead.
Officially it was some kind of organ failure, but Maureen is dead because she hasn’t eaten in years. You know Maureen went through years of food rehab till her family’s money ran out and then she went into the free experimental programs at Columbia Pres. You know Maureen’s dad died a few years ago of brain cancer, diagnosed and buried within three months. You know Maureen was a little bananas at the end, because, of all people in the world, she started writing letters to you—not sure how she got your address. You’ve moved a dozen times since high school, when you had your last blowout with her right after the graduation ceremony. She called you a shit-skinned whore in your white dress, miniature red roses in your French twist. She’d only just started losing weight and you shouted back that she was a fat albino midget no diet would ever save, something you will always regret.
You never knew why Maureen picked you to hate. Her brother was a nice person—made it to Yale and was the family pride. He always asked you how things were going when you ran into him in town. And Maureen’s parents were okay people. They even showed up at your grandfather’s funeral, said they knew him from the Rotary Club. But Maureen was a monster in a short, tight gymnastics body, thick ankles and black hair from her Portuguese mom, freckled like a dalmatian thanks to her Irish dad.
Your mom is sighing because it’s really tragic when a girl you’ve watched grow up dies.
“And her mother,” says your mom. “That poor, poor woman.”
She says she’ll go to the funeral and maybe you should send the family a card like you did when the interior decorator’s son drowned in their pool last summer. You didn’t even know the guy but you liked his mom because once, when you were just passing through the living room, she looked up from the upholstery swatches she’d brought your mom to tell you that you had the eyes of a fairy tale.
So Maureen is dead and your mom reads you the obituary they printed in today’s paper. Maureen Reilly. Aged twenty-four. Beloved daughter, beloved friend. You remember the Maureen you saw at midnight mass a few years back. Even in heavy winter clothes you could see that her thighs were the size of your wrist. Her eyes bulged and her teeth jutted out of her face like those plastic ones you wind up and let chatter all over the floor for laughs. She’d lost a lot of her hair, got more wrinkles than her mom, the queen of YMCA aerobics. She was just twenty-two or so then, already looked like a corpse and had this stupid look on her face, like she was laughing to a comedy playing in her head.
She saw you and waved from her place on the pew next to her family. You tried not to look at her decaying body, tried to be matter-of-fact about it when your family talked about the sight of her during the car ride home, saying Maureen used to be so cute and look at her now. The only recent gossip you had on her was that her high-school boyfriend, a footballer named Kevin, impregnated and married her former best friend, another ruthless soccer girl named Shannon. You even felt pity for Maureen. You’d just been cheated on for the first time and felt the pain of wounded women everywhere.
A month later, Maureen wrote you a letter. She wanted to get together. She knew you lived in the city now but was hoping you could come out to Jersey. Said she was still living with her parents and was saving up to rent a place in Hoboken or Weehawken. You made the mistake of telling your mom about the letter and she guilted you into going.
You met Maureen at a diner by the train tracks. Ordered yourself a salad and watched her watch you eat it while she ordered herself nothing.
She said, “I’m not sure if you know I’ve got a problem with food.”
You said you had a vague idea. Didn’t say it’d been all over the town wires for years already, how she dropped out of some crap college to get treatment, was working a few hours a week gift-wrapping at a local children’s clothing store. Not to mention the road map of fat veins that looked like they were trying to break out of her face.
She said, “I remember you did, too. Back in high school. You were so thin.”
You don’t know how this ended up being about you. Until then, you thought maybe the world was becoming a place of justice and Maureen was looking to repent for her cruelty. But all she really wanted were your diet secrets from the eleventh grade when you decided to carve your soft caramel flesh down to its essence. You went from a cherubic kid to teenage flamingo, one who couldn’t go to her tennis lesson without having to endure an hour’s worth of comments from the coach about the freakish length of your legs sprouting from your shorts, but no matter how hard you starved, your mushy, unruly breasts refused to shrink. Some girls find pride in their chest but you were ashamed of yours. The concept of a bra embarrassed you and you wore your brother’s old sweaters to cover traces of straps. Your mom was always saying a woman should cherish her femininity but you wanted to destroy yours—never wore makeup, always bit your nails and knotted your long hair into a bun.
You overheard two male teachers talking about you once when you sneaked into the teachers’ lounge to use the soda machine. Mr. Testa, your AP history teacher, a dork in Dockers who graduated from this very high school ten years earlier, telling the other guy about the black stretch pants with ankle zippers you were wearing that day, how your blue panties showed when you sat at your desk and he circled the room during test time to steal looks, and if there was one girl in the school he’d pay to fuck, it would be you. You felt filthy and when you got home you gave the pants to the housekeeper so she could send them to her daughter in El Salvador. Even without those pants Mr. Testa offered you a ride home from school several times, asked you to come to his office during lunch hour to talk about your plans for the future. You had a rep for being sort of a nerd even though you also held the cutting-class record for every year that you were in school. But you were a good kid and only skipped class to stay home and read books about women with interesting lives who lived in foreign countries.
One day Mr. Testa invited you to his house to watch a movie and you decided to go to the guidance counselor. Instead of reporting Mr. Testa, you said the class was too hard and you wanted to go back to regular history. You got the worst seat, next to Jerry, the kid who fingered a special-ed girl in the back of the school bus in seventh grade while his friend took pictures. When the teacher wasn’t looking, Jerry would mouth dirty things to you and you pretended not to notice.
That was the year of the Great Suicide Epidemic. Not that people were actually dying. There was only one successful case, and it was a parent, not a student. But that death, a pill-popping mom, gave everyone ideas, and soon every Monday at school the halls were filled with talk of who tried to off themselves over the weekend, mostly with prescription pills, vodka, and Tylenol. The latest victim always got a load of attention, until the next weekend when someone else took the spotlight. The theater kids were really into suicide that year. Hardly ever the athletes. And the pudgy unwanted girls with hopeless crushes on popular boys were always a sure thing. The fact is you even had a go of it. On your sixteenth birthday. Thirty sleeping pills, but they were herbal, so it wasn’t like you were serious about dying either. And nobody noticed anything except that you happened to sleep for a few extra hours.
Your parents are immigrants who don’t really understand the concept of depression and who decided to throw you the birthday party of the year, hoping you’d crack a smile. Maureen brought up that party when you saw her that night at the diner, talking like those were the days. The hotel ballroom, the music, the custom-made dress. The only thing you remember about that party is that after the cake, you went out to the parking lot and cried in the bitter January chill because not one person except your brother and cousin asked you to dance. You wished someone would realize you’d fled your own party and come looking for you, but nobody did.
This party was like all the others your parents made you have as a kid, inviting the whole class to your house for magicians and games. At these parties, the parents hung around the living room inspecting your family’s furniture while their children were supposed to be playing in the den. But the kids ignored you even though it was your party. The girls came together in little gangs and did cartwheels for one another across the floor. “You try one, Sabina,” they’d taunt, knowing full well you couldn’t do one. You were always too tall, taller than all the boys even, and you could hardly master your long limbs walking, forget about upside down. The other girls were compact gamines who did round-offs for fun while you were kicked out of Tumble Tots when you were five for your inability to do a proper somersault. The teacher, a frizzy-haired retired professional cheerleader, told your mom you were hopeless and didn’t need to come back, even offered to refund her money. Your mom responded in her rich, layered Spanish accent that she and your father weren’t planning on selling you to the circus anyway, so there really was no need for you to learn how to roll around on the ground like a potato bug.
The height would come in handy later, much later, when you went to the city with your parents for a Broadway show and had dinner afterward at a nearby restaurant. You went to the bathroom to barf up your meal, and when you came out, a Euro-looking guy in a sharp suit asked if he could talk to your parents, followed you back to your table, and told your dad that you should be a model. Gave them his card and he was a legit guy, one whose name you recognized from fashion magazines. Owned an agency and wanted you to come in for photos. Put his hand on your shoulder and said, “What do you think about that?”
You liked the idea of being beautiful—of being admired without being touched. But you felt like a farce and your dad was quick to insult the man by saying you were meant for better things.
Maureen was wearing a green sweater that day at the diner and for that reason you will always remember her in green. Her once thick hair was a clump of threads tied by red elastic. She wore makeup but on her leathery face it looked clown-ish and you remember feeling embarrassed to be seen with her. She was talking about when you were kids as though you were best friends.
“Remember in fifth grade when we worked at the gold-fish booth at the village fair?”
How could you forget? That was the year Maureen told everyone in class that if they were nice to you, she’d have her dad arrest their parents. And they believed it.
Maureen’s dad was a sergeant in town. At one point you thought maybe he or somebody else was touching her and that’s why Maureen acquired her armor. Randy, who you befriended in French class, was molested by her stepfather and became a straight-A student who vacuumed her room five times a day. And Nicole, who you knew from horseback riding, had a boyfriend whose uncle raped him his whole life.
“How did you stop?” Maureen wanted to know.
It’d been a long time. You tried to remember.
Your parents got sick of watching you move your food around your plate at dinner, chewing slowly and spitting mouthfuls into a napkin to throw away later, staring at the wall while your dad’s eyes watered. Your parents said, How dare you push away your food when the German ancestors you never knew starved to death in a concentration camp, killing an entire branch of your clan, when, for the early days of their marriage, your parents subsisted on sardines and canned beef. How dare you? At the time, the words meant nothing to you. Your mom and dad sent you to a shrink, this incredibly pale English woman who let you call her by her first name. As long as you kept going, your parents kept their hassling to a minimum, paid the shrink bill, and only occasionally bugged you about your diet. You eventually gained a few pounds. Got floppier, fuller boobs. But the discipline to starve was gone.
You gave Maureen all your processed therapy talk. You thought about talking tougher, like your brother did at the height of your famine: No boy will want to kiss your shriveling lips or love your weak body and that chest so sunken that you can almost see your beating heart.
But you held back. Told yourself it wasn’t your problem.
Instead you said you had to be on your way, that you had to catch the next train back to the city. Made it sound like you had a really exciting life waiting for you.
Silly to think of it now but before you left each other that day, you still hoped, in that strange space of reminiscing and advice-giving, that Maureen would ask you to forgive her for hurting you, for doing her part to keep you on the town margin. But she only stared at you from across the table with buggy eyes, wrinkled and dehydrated, her flimsy hands shaking as she tried to hold her glass of water.
You told her to write or call you whenever she wanted, said you’d always be there for her if she needed a friend. She hugged you and it felt like air, the mere idea of a hug instead of the real thing even though you could smell the puke on her breath. When another letter did come, you read it quickly, tossed it into the trash, and never thought of Maureen again.
Your plan was to forget. But you did think of her, often, while wishing you could cull your memory to craft a provisional mercy. You never managed. Told yourself, In time. In time.