The track coach was surprisingly easy to fool. He was old, maybe as old as fifty. Melissa knew he was from pre-anorexia times; he just didn’t get it and acted impressed about her well-defined calf and thigh muscles. He even held her up as an example in September when they started training for cross-country.
“Look at Melissa,” he intoned to the team. “She doesn’t have to huff and puff carrying around an extra ten pounds. Remember, picture yourself with a five-pound bag of sugar strapped to each shoulder. That’s what extra weight does to you. Good job, Melissa. I can see you kept training this summer.”
She figured at least four of the other girls went home that day and said they were too full to eat dinner. She could tell by the angry, frightened look in their eyes when the coach spoke. “Let them try,” she thought, “they still won’t catch me. I’m way ahead of them.”
If she could have felt guilty, she would have done so about the depth of the deception with her mother, who was not easily fooled. Her mother asked, just the other day, “Is this going to be a problem? Is food going to be the enemy?” Melissa had put on her most shocked and exasperated look and rolled her eyes. “I’ve seen the after-school specials and heard the lectures in health class. You just don’t know what it’s like to take running to the limit. All the runners look like this.” For added emphasis, Melissa put a hunk of cheese, an apple, and a PBJ sandwich in her book bag. On the ferry ride to the mainland school, she threw tiny bits of the sandwich to the seagulls that followed alongside, looking at Melissa with conspiratorial glances. She could hardly wait to throw the cheese into the trash barrel at school. She ate half the apple in history class and half at lunch, so that it appeared to everyone that she was constantly eating.
Chris was in her last class, Chemistry. She had known her since freshman year. Chris was gone for the last month of the freshman year. Everyone knew it was a suicide attempt. Then last year Chris was all GSA; Gay Straight Alliance Club. Melissa said to her, “Of course that doesn’t matter to me. Everybody’s the same to me.” But she worried that if she hung out with Chris, people would think she was gay, too. She just wanted to make sure that people knew she wasn’t gay.
Chris had talked the principal into announcing the GSA meetings over the morning radio station. It was like Chris had decided to become the most out lesbian on earth. Chris had changed in other ways, too. Melissa noticed that she had gained weight. Actually, she could tell exactly how much she had gained with perfect accuracy. Eight pounds. She knew what eight pounds looked like; hips, maybe as big as a size ten. Melissa knew she would never let that happen. Looking at Chris, she planned the 400 crunches she would do silently in her room that night with the lights out, with a towel folded in half beneath her so that she wouldn’t bruise her vertebrae into a line of vertical dots.
But here was the first big lie. The mere deceptions didn’t count. They were like playacting. But not telling her mother that she was going to the athletic club to work out was a lie. She had told her mother she was visiting a friend after school on Tuesday and Thursday, just for a while, walking around the Food Court in downtown Portland, a safe enough place. She knew her mother, and she knew that if she said she was working out any more that the careful balance she had constructed would collapse and questions would be asked in a more desperate way. Her mother was no fool and Melissa had the tiniest hint of regret about playing her for one.
She had her routine; go right to the Y after school on the days she didn’t have cross-country practice, reserve forty-five minutes on the elliptical, and thirty minutes on the Stair-Master. That’s all. Well, maybe a little run on the treadmill to shake it all out before working on the weights. Thirty minutes on the treadmill if there was no one else waiting. The time of day was right; no neighbors from the island came here, she had already checked for their names. Her mother’s teacher friends all rushed home to take care of their kids, so they weren’t even a possibility.
She walked into the women’s locker room. She had asked for her favorite locker, 266, which was unfortunately taken. She hated it when someone else had it; so she asked for the one that was next to it, number 267. She dropped her bag on the wood-plank seat between two rows of lockers and headed for the toilets. She wanted an empty bladder, to feel as light as possible. She heard one of the showers shut off and the shower curtain shoosh open.
When Melissa came out of the stall and headed back to the lockers, she stopped short. Seated on the bench was a woman with her back to Melissa, a towel hung loosely around her. What she saw was the perfect asymmetry of a moment, one shoulder blade poking out, the other in, as the woman twisted, paused in her moment of dressing. Her shoulders were wide and the muscles that ran down her back produced long gullies on either side of her spine. A blinding flush started in the recesses of Melissa’s hard, flat abdomen and spread out like a kerosene-fed fire across her breasts, straight up the highway of her neck and pooled in her cheeks. Something had skipped her brain entirely and she felt, for the first time in her young life, a full out blast of lust.
The woman turned her head to the right, so that Melissa could see the profile. Melissa felt another competing rush, this time of loathing and fear. It was Rocky.
Why is she everywhere that’s mine, why does she have to follow me around? Melissa ducked back around the corner, back to the stalls where she stayed with her pounding heart until she heard locker 266 slam shut.
Would anyone be able to tell what she was thinking, that she had been overwhelmed, caught in midair, breathless? The image of what she had to do came immediately and unbidden. No matter what, she was not eating anything tonight when she got home. She would simply tell her mother that she was sick. That would eliminate any dinnertime petitions to eat, or have soup, or please have something.
The thought of food, even not having food, had started the surge of her digestive juices, and she felt the cleansing burn of hunger, which she hoped would last all night and like the self-cleaning oven that worked by extreme temperatures would, with surgical exactness, cleanse her of such terrifying emotions.
She wanted something really awful to happen to Rocky. Maybe she would get bit by a rabid animal, lightning would strike her, or maybe her propane stove would blow up. No, not that. Melissa didn’t want anything bad to happen to Lloyd. She had moments of relief when she was with the dog.
She felt her world begin to split open with Rocky’s dead-aim stare, the way she looked through Melissa’s sweatpants and jacket and hooded sweatshirt. Everything was fine until Rocky got here.
Now Rocky had invaded her secret place. If she could figure out when Rocky was going to come to the club, she could avoid her. But Melissa had a schedule that was perfect. Everything had been perfect, even the way that she showered, grabbed a Diet Coke and an apple on the way out, carried the apple while she was exiting and took two big bites, one while she opened the door from the women’s locker room, chew and swallow, and one bite while she passed the front desk. When she got outside, she could spit the second bite out. Save the rest of the apple for the ferry ride home. Make sure to bring both the Diet Coke bottle and the apple core home, drop them both noticeably on the counter in a way that her mother couldn’t miss. The Diet Coke made the charade believable; her mother never would have believed a non-diet drink.
She was going to make sure that she went to her father’s house this weekend. She needed to become invisible and there was no better place to do that. When she was at her father’s house on the mainland, every other weekend for sure and every weekend if she wanted, he simply didn’t notice. She didn’t have to work as hard with him to keep up the pretense of eating.
Her father had his own body-fat ratio measured and asked her if she wanted to also. “Runners don’t need to carry extra fat around,” he said. Of course he meant his body, not hers, or so he said, but Melissa had already swallowed it like a fish swallowing a hook.
Her father ran every Saturday with his buddy from law school, Alex. She declined their offers to run with them. They were in their forties and she couldn’t understand why they wore such tiny running shorts. She was embarrassed for them and embarrassed to be with them. They looked so old and sinewy.
While her father and Alex ran on Saturday mornings, she prepared her lunch. She woke up thinking about food, went to sleep thinking about food and this worried her. Was she losing her grip, her control? She didn’t want to think of food, but since she still did, she planned to whip it into obedience. One rice cake and cucumber for lunch. The cucumber was peeled, then cut in half the long way, then in half the other way, then she held all the long spears together and chopped those into chunks. She filled a cereal bowl with the cucumbers and threw in one-half cup of nonfat yogurt. By 11:30, her father and Alex were generally in the home stretch. By the time he came in the door, she was seated at the table with the bowl in front of her, a rice cake in hand.
“Eating again, honey? I don’t know where you put it.”