“Where are we going?” Braddy asks hopefully.
We are in Point Lookout for the summer. It’s our second week there, and my mother is loading us into the Volkswagen. I wonder if Braddy’s thinking about the kiddie-size amusement park in the next town, with its two-foot-high roller coaster, spinning teacups, and airplane ride where the planes actually lift off when you pull up on the throttle. Once I had seen a boy, his head lolling, his eyes half closed, vomiting silently as his plane went around and around. The possibility of motion sickness notwithstanding, not a day passes when my brothers don’t beg to go.
“We’re picking up our Programs,” my mother says in a tone that makes a Program sound as good as, if not better than, an airplane ride. We would come to be suspicious of this bright enthusiasm, but not yet. Since she collapsed in the hallway two years ago, and graduated from eating raw liver, she has been having her broiled lamb chop and broiled tomato meal with a tall glass of yeast milk, three times a day. Nothing else.
We pull up to a white house with a striped green-and-white porch awning. Several folding chairs have been set up in the living room beside a flowered couch. I try not to stare at the man seated in one of the chairs. His suit hangs loosely on a tall, skeleton-thin body. The skin peeking out at the ends of his sleeves, up his neck, is raw and red as if freshly scrubbed with sandpaper.
“Severe rosacea,” my mother explains after the man has been called into the next room by Celeste, a square-jawed woman in a yellow-and-red dress. “Dr. Cursio will help him.”
The dark-haired woman with the bent head and raincoat has MS.
“A Program will cure her, too,” my mother whispers to us, as if these illnesses are mistakes these people have made because they don’t drink yeast milk.
It’s our turn to follow Celeste into the next room. A barrel-chested white-haired man sits behind a large wooden desk. Later my mother will tell us Dr. Cursio had been a professional wrestler. She will also share that because he had cured members of the Mafia of various maladies, Mafioso now stood on the street corners of the various client homes he used to see patients, keeping watch. “It’s against the law to practice medicine without a license,” my mother explained. Though Dr. Cursio was treating with food, he had been put in jail several times.
Now his shirtsleeves are rolled to his elbows, and he grasps a gold fountain pen between a grizzled index finger and thumb. Up close he has the thickest nose hairs I have ever seen. With a nod in my mother’s direction he puts down his pen, lifts my hand, and presses his thumb to the pulse at my wrist. I can hear the air whistling through his nose hairs as he breathes. His eyes, slightly glazed, look down at the desk. Finally he lets go, picks up his pad, and rips off a fresh sheet.
His cursive is feminine, the letters even and tall, with a slight lean: celery juice, blended salad, and two egg yolks. Celery juice, blended salad, and almonds. Celery juice, blended salad, steamed vegetables, and rice. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. A Program, it turns out, is a prescription for a daily diet. But is he kidding? Where is the food food?
After I am done, Dr. Cursio silently feels my brothers’ wrists, one by one, then silently rips off a sheet of paper and silently scribbles a month’s worth of nuts, seeds, and egg yolks.
“Isn’t he a genius?” my mother says on our way out the front door.
In the car ride home I examine my Program more closely. The celery juice and blended salad begin each line as the first portion of every meal of the day. On Tuesday Dr. Cursio has filled “almonds” in the lunch blank. On Wednesday, cashews. On Thursday, filberts. On Friday, two ounces of unsalted, raw-milk cheese. On Saturday, almonds again. And so on, week after week for one month. I feel a sudden hope.
“What happens when we finish this Program?” I ask.
“We go back and get another one,” my mother says. “What protein do you get for tomorrow?” she asks in an Isn’t this exciting? tone.
“I get cheese,” Jay says as if raw, unsalted cheese has suddenly become a delicacy.
“I get almonds,” said Greg.
“Dr. Cursio says if you’re still hungry after dinner, you can have two egg yolks.”
For the first few days my mother watches us closely for a headache accompanied by a white coating on the tongue, indicators that our bodies have begun cleansing. When we cut our finger, she points out, our bodies will heal the cut. Similarly, the entire body will regenerate its own tissue if given the chance. Blending makes food easier to digest. This is the power behind the Program. It re-creates a state of fasting while feeding us at the same time.
It takes a week, but finally, falling into line one after the other, my brothers and I, when checked, all produce eerily greenish-white tongues.
Apparently we are under way.
* * *
Our tiny beach house kitchen is filled with crates stuffed to the brim with vegetables, all the vegetables that don’t fit in the fridge that is already stuffed. One crate holds stacked celery heads, freshly picked and still smeared with dirt; one holds loose lemons; another, tightly packed heads of romaine. None of this was here yesterday. My mother, still in her nightgown, her hair held loosely back in a clip, is standing in the midst of all the produce with one hand on a gleaming silver machine: her new Acme juicer, which comes with a lifetime warranty. It’s only 8:00 A.M., but she is already making juice, and the hum that comes from the machine fills the room, as does the smell of celery, tomato, and cucumbers. There are two boxes of as yet unpacked additional Acme juicers by the cucumbers. Clearly she has come to this day prepared.
“Sit down and I’ll bring you your celery juice.” She says celery juice firmly. She’s trying to sell me on it, but she’s also not offering another option.
I sit. The juicer screams as she feeds the celery stalks through the square opening at the top, one by one, then pushes them down with the bright red plastic depressor onto the blade deep in the body of the appliance. Then: what sounds like disaster. The juicer rattles with an unbearable loudness, like it’s coming apart at very high speeds. It jumps and bumps across the Formica. My mother catches it, leans onto it harder, flips the switch off, leans hard until it calms. This, I later learn, is what happens when a chunk of vegetable misses the blade and in the spin of centrifugal force throws the entire machine off-balance. As the juicer loses speed and calms, my mother twists off the wide, heavy top and slows the spinning carriage with her open hand, the sound of metal on metal, her gold wedding band sliding on stainless steel. Once the juicer is still, she walks over and sets down a glass of vegetable juice on my place mat. It’s light green and frothy. A pink dollop of tomato juice bobs on top of the green.
“Drink it slowly,” she says. “Digest it in your mouth first.”
I take a sip. The juice is watery and foamy at the same time. It seems like a mistake, like the foam and water should have somehow blended into a pleasant consistency. I mix them with my spoon, but all I get is water mixed with foam. The foam is already beginning to turn brown, and as the juice settles, the thicker greener liquid is separating from the thinner yellowy liquid. I take another sip. The tomato is sweet; the celery has a banjo-twang hit of aftertaste just as it does when eaten. I have an idea.
“Can’t I just eat the celery?” I ask.
“Juicing removes the pulp, so your body gets the nourishment without having to do the work of digesting.” My mother scoops the pulp from the stopped carriage with her hand and holds out the mash for me to see, a light green snowball. “The genius of the Program is that you are fasting while you are being fed.”
She drops the pulp into her plastic compost container for the garden. Finished scooping, she clicks the metal top back into place and turns the machine on again so she can make my brothers’ juices. According to Dr. Cursio, each juice combination does something different in the body. Greg gets cucumber and tomato; Jay, celery and carrot; and Braddy, cucumber and celery. The hum again fills the house. Although it’s early, the June day is already warm and all our windows and doors are wide open. Our house, like all the others in this square-mile town, sits very close to the wide, usually carless street. It’s small and made of red brick, with only a narrow strip of lawn between it and our next-door neighbors, the Ragusas. Francesca, the Ragusas’ only daughter, and I once punched holes in the bottom of two paper cups and knotted a string through each hole, then strung the “phone” between our two bedroom windows. We were surprised to find the vibrations of our voices carried along the string and we were able to talk without our brothers overhearing.
I wonder what Francesca and her family are thinking this morning about all this racket.
My mother is cutting vegetables and placing them in the blender. Yesterday she showed me the ingredients for a blended salad. One peeled lemon, one tomato, one quarter of a bell pepper, half a cucumber—no skin, and three leaves of romaine. A stalk of celery is used to push everything down as it blends. She turns on the blender; both blender and juicer are now going at the same time. I glance outside, but there is no one on the street. I have the same feeling I have when my father yells, that we are a loud family. How far is the sound of all this machinery carrying?
My sleep-tousled brothers wander in one by one and take their seats at the table. My mother sets a glass of juice on the place mat in front of each of them, then sets a bowl of blended salad with a spoon beside each of our juices. Braddy reaches for the spoon and scoops a spoonful into his mouth—the blended salad is a reddish-brownish-greenish liquid flecked with dark particles of lettuce tip and pink granules of tomato.
“Drink your juice first, Bradford,” my mother says as if she has known these rules all along instead of having just learned them last week when we picked up our Programs. “Dr. Cursio says we have to follow the Program in order because our bodies will digest the juices first, the blended salads next, and our protein last. We always start with the easiest food to digest.”
I’m taking too long to drink my juice. The brown foam floats in the warm celery juice at the bottom of my glass. I’m noticing that celery juice at room temperature is even less pleasant than it is freshly made from cool-from-the-fridge celery.
“Finish that last sip,” my mother says.
I down the last warm bit and shudder.
“Now drink your blended salad before it oxidizes,” my mother says.
I lift the spoon. The blended salad, too, is already starting to warm. I scoop a spoonful. It sits coagulating, wiggling like Jell-O, a convex skin across the top holding it all together, on the spoon. I spoon some into my mouth, hold it in the middle of my tongue, swallow. Like the juice, the blended salad consists of two distinctly separate parts—solid and liquid. Also like the juice, I wish these two parts worked more in tandem. The longer the blended salad sits, the more it separates. This leaves me with no option but to get it down as quickly as possible.
“Digest it in your mouth first,” my mother calls again from the sink.
I swallow another spoonful. The bowl still looks so full. I’ve barely made a dent. In each spoonful, I taste all the ingredients at once: tomato, lemon, cucumber, pepper, lettuce. Spoonful by spoonful, I finish it. Now my mother brings me two eggs, their smooth brown shells hot and steaming, in a small cup.
“Like this.” She shows me how to tap a spoon along the top third of the egg and take off the head. Inside, the white is jiggly and not all the way cooked. The deep yellow yolk sits wriggling in the midst of the jellied whites. She reaches in with the spoon and comes out with a scoop of runny yolk.
“Can’t we cook it more? Can’t I eat the whole egg?” I ask.
“Egg whites take B vitamins from our bodies,” my mother says. “The yolk is very strengthening. It has lecithin, which our bodies need. Dr. Cursio says if we cook it too much, it loses enzymes.”
She spoons first one egg yolk into my mouth, then the other. At least the yolks are hot, but other than the temperature, everything else—the texture, the taste—is no different than what it must be like to consume a raw egg. I swallow.
I have finished my first Program meal. My mother clears my plates. Her cheeks are flushed; I wonder if she’s feeling triumph. I try not to think about the fact that I will be drinking another glass of celery-tomato juice and eating another bowl of blended salad in only a few hours for lunch and then again a few hours after that for dinner, day after day, week after week, stretching into eternity, with no end in sight.
Out the living room window, I see Francesca go by on her bike. She is riding down the street to the dead end and back, her usual sign to me that she is available.
“Can I go out and play?” I ask.
“Yes, but take it easy for an hour or so. Let your food digest,” my mother says.
Except for the two summers before this one, my family has spent every June, July, and August since I was three in Point Lookout. Now Francesca and I are fourteen. When she called on me the day we arrived, a week ago, I noticed that her breasts now tilted up perfectly under her striped cotton tank top. Her legs, extending from bright green shorts, were cleanly shaved and curvaceous. Though my body is changing and my thighs are fuller than they used to be, my hips are narrow and my breasts are barely noticeable in a T-shirt. I still look like a boy. I’m allowed no makeup and my hair, parted in the middle, falls messily.
* * *
At lunch I once again face down my glass of celery-tomato juice and my bowl of blended salad. My protein is a banana, which doesn’t even remotely feel like a real lunch. By the time my father gets home for dinner, we’ve already had our third juice and salad along with the plate of steamed vegetables and brown rice that constitutes dinner. It has been slow going for all of us today, slogging through the Program. My brothers and I have devoted much more time sitting at the table than we are used to, just trying to get everything down. Already I feel like I’ve been eating this way for more than just one day.
My father sits down on the couch in front of the television—the Mets game is on. My mother brings him his juice and salad. My brothers and I settle in various chairs around the room, pretending not to watch.
“What’s this?” he says.
“Cucumber-tomato juice,” my mother says extra-casually. If the Program doesn’t help my father’s raging, she’s out of ideas. “I can make you celery-carrot if you prefer.”
My father takes a sip. He holds the glass out to my mother. “Celery-carrot.”
She returns to the kitchen and we hear the loud hum of the juicer. She returns quickly with another juice. He drinks it like it’s a glass of water.
“Digest it in your mouth first.” My mother sets his blended salad bowl in his lap on a towel. The baseball announcer’s smooth, practiced voice jabs, soothes, rises to a crescendo, then buzzes steadily behind the crack of a bat, the roar of the crowd, my father’s guttural howl reaction to a missed play. My father looks down at the blended salad and dips his spoon in, asking no questions. Greg, Jay, Braddy, and I exchange glances. He eats that spoonful, then another. We look at one another again and titter. When our father is oblivious like this, we can find him amusing. He eats a fourth spoonful, his eyes glued to the game, then continues until the blended salad is gone. He sets the bowl on the couch beside him.
“What else is for dinner?” he asks, and I realize he is treating the blended salad like an appetizer, completely missing the point. My mother now sets a plate of steamed broccoli, steamed slices of zucchini, green peppers, and several scoops of brown rice on the towel in his lap. He eats this, too, without comment. My brothers disperse. I have to admit this is anticlimactic. So far, he’s treating this food like it’s food.
By the second morning, I’m hungry. After my breakfast egg yolks, I want to know what else I can have.
“I’ll cut you a nectarine, or you can have another egg yolk,” my mother says.
I eat both but neither help. I want something to fill the gnawing emptiness this steady parade of fruits and vegetables seems to be exacerbating. With all these cold, thin foods on one side of the seesaw, I’ve begun to crave dense, warm, heavy food to balance it out. But the Program doesn’t permit anything on that other side.
“Go outside and play,” my mother says, shooing me toward the door like I’m being silly. “It’ll be lunchtime soon.”
Lunch is essentially the same thing as breakfast: celery juice, blended salad, four ounces of fruit, and two ounces of almonds—the two ounces of almonds being about eleven almonds, my only hope for satiation—feel more like a tease than a meal and only make me hungrier.
“Distract yourself.” My mother sounds impatient. “Americans are used to using food as entertainment. Food shouldn’t be entertainment; it’s nourishment.”
The only good part of this diet is that my thighs, which somehow ballooned out from under me during this past school year, are being whittled away. Every morning when I check, looking at myself in the mirror over my parents’ dresser, I’m thinner.
On the beach, three days into the diet, I see Greg eating a Good Humor ice cream cone. He’s with Mateo, Francesca’s brother. I am surprised at the hot shock I feel, the pang of sadness for my mother. She’s in the kitchen all day now, making our salads and juices.
“Where did you get the quarter?” I ask.
“Mrs. Ragusa,” Greg says. His face is white; he looks guilt-stricken at being caught.
I turn away, leave him be. There’s nothing to say. It will always be like this in the rare moments we see each other cheat. We know the searing guilt, the shame, the sense of having committed an indiscretion—it weighs heavily on our consciences. Already, in this short time, keeping us on the Program has become our mother’s life. She is in the kitchen from sunup to sundown. Our father is away all day and the implications of these salads and juices she brings him at night haven’t yet hit home. But we know, as the receptacles of all her blending and juicing and measuring and washing, what our adherence means to her.
* * *
“So what does the diet do?” Francesca and I are walking along the boardwalk, heading for the beach. I’m one week in. I’m almost used to the constant hunger, to the passionate longing I now feel for all the foods, pretty much everything, that are now forbidden to me.
“Um, you know. It takes toxins out of your body,” I say. I realize that as much as I don’t want word to get around about our weird diet, I don’t mind if Francesca knows.
“Toxins?”
“Yeah. Chemicals, preservatives.” I feel a little smug. Maybe I know more than I think. “They get stored in our tissues.” As hungry as I am, the things my mother tells me about cleansing, the point of the Program, make sense. This is another reason we don’t cheat. She has been drilling the idea of toxins into us on such a steady basis that we have become terrified of eating off the diet.
Francesca nods, takes that in. Suddenly she grabs my arm.
“Oh my God. Gilly Calaghan and Pat O’Keefe. Coming. This. Way.”
Ahead, two clean-cut boys riding Stingrays along the boardwalk come toward us.
“They’re part of the Beech Street Gang,” Francesca says hurriedly. I clearly have a lot to catch up on. “Their parents created the gang. Now all the kids hanging out are second-generation Beech Streeters. Gilly and Pat are the leaders.”
I feel a pang. Francesca has, by virtue of her proximity, always belonged to me. Our domains were the beach, our families, and each other. Now my awareness shifts to accommodate this wider social sphere. Truthfully, I wasn’t really looking to branch out, but if she has made other friends in the two summers I haven’t been here, I don’t want to be left behind, either. Even before my missed summers, I had accepted the fact that Francesca was in the Point Lookout know. Her grandmother lives a few blocks over, all year round. Her grandmother and mother sit with the other town women in beach chairs all day long at the shoreline. My mother has always kept her distance from the rest of the town.
“I don’t like other women,” she has told me.
This puts me at a disadvantage.
“Gilly’s going to Colgate next year.” Francesca indicates the boy on the left now. “And Pat’s going to Fordham.”
The bikes are almost upon us.
“Act natural!” Francesca whispers fiercely. She glances around, taking in the ocean, the light blue sky above us, looking everywhere but at the approaching bikers. I do the same. But as the boys reach us, I can’t help but focus on Gilly. I notice his Popeye-prominent chin and light, ice-water eyes. He nods to us, his bangs falling over his face, then he flips his head and tosses his hair up and out of the way. For an instant his eyes are beams of blue, then he ducks his head again. I feel stunned by this particular combination of chin and eyes, of knobby elbows and the tilt of head. Then elated. In a matter of seconds I have been released from all ties to the earth. I’m floating above my life, no longer living it.
“Hi, girls,” Pat says with a broad, friendly grin.
And they are past us.
Francesca grabs my arm. “Pat O’Keefe said hello to us. He said hello. Do you know what that means?”
Still dazed, I shake my head.
“He knows we’re alive. He knows we exist. Maybe now we can work our way into the Beech Street Gang!”
Even in my new euphoria, this feels unlikely, but I don’t want to squelch Francesca’s ambitions. If she thinks we are up to the task of joining Gilly and Pat’s social circle, I’ll go along for the ride.
* * *
It’s the first Saturday since we’ve started the program, and my father is on the phone with Brown’s, the repair shop on the other side of town. Last weekend, the Whaler’s motor died while the boat was floating in the inlet, and by the sound of things—my father is asking the person at the repair shop when they think it will be ready—it hasn’t been fixed yet. He has already gathered his rod and bait to walk along the beach and fish from the shore; the rod leans against the picture window, but this isn’t the same as heading out into the ocean, motoring about at will. There’s a cloud around him when he hangs up and walks to the kitchen, where my mother is cutting and chopping among her crates and boxes.
“Do we have to have all these boxes in the house, Carol?” His voice has an edge and, even at this early stage of annoyance, is already high-pitched and loud.
“I’ll move them outside, Edgar.” Her words are clipped, the sentence delivered in a nasal monotone. Even I can hear the wall that just went up.
My father’s voice tightens and raises another notch. “Is it too much to ask on the weekends to have a little order, a little quiet?”
I detect a plea. He wants the boxes out, but he also, and maybe he doesn’t even realize this, wants her to let him back in.
“No, Edgar, it’s not too much to ask.” More icy monotone.
I get up from the table, where I was waiting for my celery-tomato juice, and head down the short hall to my bedroom. I grab my journal from my bedside table, wishing it could swallow me up, and lie down with it on my bedspread. Opening the page to my last journal entry, I read: I saw Gilly Callaghan walking his Schnauzer, Freddie, down Beech Street just now. I never see him off the beach. It’s a sign!
“How are we supposed to live like this? How many heads of celery do we need?”
I look out the window. Francesca’s mother stands up from the plastic lounge chair on their porch and goes inside the house.
“How many boxes of tomatoes does one family need?”
A lot, I think, if they’re going through them like we are. He doesn’t see how many trips she makes to the health food store, returning with our Volkswagen bus overflowing with vegetables.
“How many boxes, Carol?”
Now the kitchen screen door slams against the side of the house. Someone has pushed it forcefully.
“I’ll move them outside so you don’t have to see them.” Her voice sounds strained. I hear the sound of a crate being dragged across the linoleum.
“Leave them!” my father roars. “Leave the goddamn boxes.”
He is battling an invisible monster that he senses but doesn’t understand, the silent pressure that has begun, the tourniquet squeezing all of us.
Another crate dragging across the floor, and the screen door slams again. She must be moving them into the garage. He follows her outside.
“Goddamn it, Carol. Leave. The. Boxes.”
I imagine that her back is to him. Maybe she has stopped moving crates. A long period of silence follows; I can’t hear either of them now. Then the bang of the screen, and someone is in the kitchen again. The juicer starts up. It’s my mother.
I tiptoe up the hall. My father is outside by the garage, one hand on the brick wall for support, his poles leaning beside him, tugging on his white Keds, stained rusty with splotches of fish blood. My mother finishes pushing a stalk of celery into the juicer, snaps off the machine, and pours juice into a glass, then walks with it outside. Through the window I see her hand the glass to my father, who has finished putting on his shoes. He takes it, tilts his head back, drinks the whole glass in one gulp.
* * *
Francesca and I run an errand for her mother, maneuvering our bike tires in and out of the sun-softened black tar cracks that marble the light cement of the wide block on our way to the deli at the other end of town. On the corner, we kick out our kickstands and leave bikes in front of the small shop with the large window overlooking Mineola Avenue, file in, and hop up onto the stools at the counter to wait as the man behind the counter finishes wrapping the order Francesca’s mother has just phoned in. As he wraps the coleslaw, the freshly sliced roast beef, and the thick slugs of pickles neatly and tightly in shiny white paper, chats pleasantly about his sons, who are electricians on Fire Island, and asks after Francesca’s family, I can smell every ingredient: the mayonnaise in the slaw, the sharp dill in the pickles, the spice of pepper in the meats. It’s also hard not to notice the fact that when someone eats what everyone else eats, they are part of a web of connections: How is your mother? Let me tell you about my sons. Dr. Cursio never says a word when he’s feeling our pulse or writing up a Program. No one who is normal is eating the way we are eating. We are alone, which is probably the way my mother likes it.
Afterward, unpacking the groceries in Francesca’s kitchen, I feel like I am walking through a minefield of all the treats that are always there: the box of cinnamon crumb cake on the counter, the powdered doughnuts on the kitchen table. Two weeks into the Program, Francesca asks if I want a Ho Ho. Before I have time to think, I take it, bite in. The hard shell breaks off, separating in my mouth from the spongy cake, and the white marshmallow creme—for a moment so thick and sweet on my tongue—slides down the back of my throat. As soon as I finish licking the chocolaty smear off my teeth and my mouth is my mouth again, I realize what I have done: erased my hard work and all the purity I had accomplished.
Back in my own kitchen, my mother has lunch laid out on the table. Celery juice, blended salad, three ounces of filberts, an apple. She is cleaning the juicer, bent over the sink, scrubbing hard at the carriage with a steel pad.
“Your lunch is there, sweetheart.” She stops scrubbing for a moment, turns her head, and smiles at me.
I sit down, begin sipping my celery juice like a hypocrite. It’s one thing to enjoy the Ho Ho in Francesca’s kitchen. It’s another thing entirely to come back to my own house and face my mother’s cheerful trust in me. Should I tell her? If I promise to myself never to cheat again, can I absolve myself of this transgression? If I’m perfect for two weeks, I’ll be back to where I was five minutes ago and I will earn the approval I’m feeling from my mother. I can do that. I try not to think about the fact that I will always be two weeks behind and the fact that five minutes ago suddenly seems like a lost utopia.
* * *
On the first really hot afternoon of summer, three weeks into the Program, Francesca’s father barbecues. We are eating outside in our yard around the redwood table with the umbrella. Our blended salads taste warm, slightly soured in the heat as greasy, fat-laden clouds of T-bone waft over the fence, settling around our outdoor table. I imagine the slab of steak on the grill; the browned, crisp outline of fat; the charcoal-darkened flesh casing the warm, wriggling, if-you-pressed-on-it-it-would-spring-back-and-release-sweet-and-salty-juices middle. After dinner I confess to my mother that I crave steak.
“Animals that eat meat have very short intestines,” she says. We are in the kitchen. She is standing at the sink, cleaning the juicer. “Animal protein moves through them quickly. People’s intestines are longer. Meat putrefies while it sits, then our bodies absorb that rot.” She says rot like it’s a word she hopes she never has to utter again. She isn’t looking at me. I feel like the word. I feel like my confession has brought this unwanted horror into our kitchen. I wonder if she thinks less of me now.
“You won’t want it anymore,” she adds, “when your body is pure.”
* * *
When it storms, the first rain of the summer, the sky and ocean outside our beach house’s picture window touch at the horizon, opposing forces facing each other in a chalky opaque-green matchup. The vast, smooth surface of the sea erupts into spikes, small choppy waves that crest into foaming slices at their tips as if they are splitting at the seams from the mounting tension. When the rain finally comes, drenching Point Lookout’s sunbaked streets, the smell of hot, wet stone rises with the steam from the concrete, and puddles grow to small warm lakes on the street. My brothers and I put on our bathing suits and run through this curtain of warm rain, each drop as big as a grape, arms outstretched, palms turned up flat to feel the hot, thick raindrops.
Our beach house dining room table is set for dinner. Blended salads and spoons, cups of freshly made celery and cucumber and carrot juice wait at our places on top of the paper tablecloth. Although we aren’t supposed to drink anything with our meals except celery and cucumber juice—because drinking dilutes the digestive juices and juice must be sipped so it is digested in the mouth before swallowed—someone has set a clear plastic pitcher filled with lemon water on the center of the table.
In the kitchen, my father stands at the open refrigerator. For a moment I cling to the evidence of his frailty: the straggly prematurely gray hairs at the V of his thin, worn Hanes undershirt; the coffee-colored stains, fish blood, on his favorite blue shorts; his too-skinny calves rubbed hairless by a lifelong preference for tight calf-length work socks. He’s pulling cellophane bags of vegetables from the fridge, piling them onto the counter, my mother’s weekly supply of approximately forty-two cucumbers, fifty lemons, forty tomatoes, twenty-one peppers, ten heads of romaine, twenty-five thick green heads of celery (though most of the celery sits in a cardboard box under the sink): enough for three blended salads a day for six people for seven days. It is remarkable how much she can fit in one refrigerator.
“Who lives like this? Someone, explain this to me.” His voice is tight, whiny, and high-pitched. He throws three bags of tomatoes on top of the rows of celery, bags of lettuce, peppers. “How. Did. We. Come. To. This?”
He moves to the cupboard. “Vitamin C. Vitamin C. Vitamin C, rose hips. Vitamin C, acerola chewable.”
He pulls the jars out, one by one, all shapes and sizes, pushes them like shuffleboard pucks—little round men gathering shoulder to shoulder in brown suits along the counter. My mother never buys just one of anything. “How many vitamin jars does one family need?”
My father has a Program, too. On weekdays my mother packs jars of blended salad and juice in a small lunchbox-size Igloo and he carries it on the Long Island Railway to work. On weekends she pats his head, brings him his blended salad three times a day on a tray, sets it in his lap, then gives him a kiss on the cheek. It’s been two weeks. Up to now he’s accepted these ministrations. Maybe he hasn’t been paying attention or maybe he liked the extra affection; maybe he didn’t think she was really serious. Clearly the reality of our new lives is beginning to set in.
From the couch, I scan our small living room: worn couch, TV, the short hall past the arch into the kitchen that leads to my bedroom. Have I left any of my stuff, his target for these rampages—shoes, shorts, wet bathing suits—lying around? I am frozen in our usual dilemma: to run over and gather my things, thereby making myself a target, or stay put and risk the consequences for leaving my belongings lying around. When he goes off like this, my brothers and I look at one another wordlessly, waiting for one of our parents to finally say it: divorce.
“Meanness is a sign of a sick liver,” my mother says now after every tirade. This diet regimen that will eventually tear apart her marriage is also the one thing she clings to to save it.
Now my brothers are on reconnaissance, each making quick dashes from the couch to various parts of the room. Jay grabs his baseball helmet; Braddy his catcher’s mitt; Greg picks up a wet beach towel left beside the television. My father is still pulling out bottles.
“Vitamin B, Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12. Is it too much to ask for a little sanity?”
At the table, my mother is sprinkling brewer’s yeast on her blended salad. Pieces of soft hair loose from her favorite banana clip fall around her pretty, little-girl-shaped face. She reaches up to tuck them back, but they fall loose again. I silently beg her to answer him, but I can see in the brace of her shoulders, in her jerky movements as she dips her spoon into the bag of yellow flakes, sprinkles determinedly, then licks the spoon as if yeast flakes are better than ice cream, that she will not.
“Am I crazy?” His voice is at its highest pitch now. “Goddamn it. Carol, am I crazy?”
Sometimes she will say, No, you’re not crazy, in a deadened voice. But tonight she only continues to lick her spoon.
* * *
I must really be cleansing. I feel queasy. My head is eggshell-fragile; I move it slowly to minimize the reverberating throb. I pull out my chair, sit down at the table, and face my glass of celery juice and its foamy bobbing dollop of tomato floating on top, the blended salad in the bowl beside it. It’s one thing to eat something now and then. But three times a day, every day, meal after meal after meal, and it’s a whole new world. The green, grassy smell alone is enough to nauseate me now.
Cleansing feels like sick. I am weak, headachy, perpetually queasy. During the day, out on the beach, my body catches a gear and moves out of this new state of sensitive fragility. Sitting here, facing the contents of this glass and bowl on my place mat, I feel the changes my body is going through, my organs of elimination hard at work: liver, skin, tongue, blood, urine, sweat, all eliminating the toxins. But I also have begun to notice a sweet pain on the razor’s edge between hunger and satiation. It feels like love, this kind of hollow, like wanting, like floating. Since I have no choice anyway, I decide that I may as well see if my mother is right, if there is a brass ring that will be mine if I follow the Program exactly.
I sit down at the table and pick up my glass. The thin green aroma of celery, the sweet-sour pink tomato smell that wafts unavoidably. I am not even allowed to chug.
“Drink it slowly,” my mother says, reading my mind, standing at the sink. “Digest it in your mouth first.”
I begin.
* * *
These are the new rules no one I know has ever heard of, much less has to follow: no salt, no pepper, no vinegar, no drinking water with a meal. Raw vegetables can be eaten by themselves, though my mother discourages eating anything that isn’t part of the measured, prescribed three-meal-a-day Program meal. Fruit should never be eaten by itself; we can only have it with blended salad. If we go to pick something up with the intent to ingest it, my mother will fly at us, flipping her hands and fingers up like she is shooing us and these intentions out of the room—“aaaaa, aaaaa, aaaaa”—causing us to spook and usually drop the offending edible. In fact, nothing should be eaten by itself, except a stalk of celery or a slice of cucumber.
“Meat and potato culture,” my mother says, spitting venom. “People are putting themselves into an early grave with food.”
About the Program, she says, “It’s threatening to people. They don’t want to hear they have to change their diets. Most people are addicted to junk.”
I crave roast beef, chocolate, black pepper. Sometimes I’m not even hungry; I just want salt. Actually, I want salt always.
* * *
I have a fever, something that is not unusual for me. My mother will later tell me she had been unable to breastfeed me and had given me canned formula as an infant. She will come to believe that my ear infections are a result of that early foundation of processed, dead food.
“A fever is merely your body’s way of getting rid of toxins,” my mother says now, when I ask for Aspergum, something that is handed out pretty regularly at school. “People panic, but a fever is a sign that your body is fighting; it’s good. If you take aspirin, you are squelching the body’s efforts; you are working against the body.” I tell her I’m hungry and she says eating also works against the natural efforts my body is making now. “Your body is working very hard to rid itself of toxins. If you eat, you will divert it from these efforts. The old-timers knew this—starve a cold; they were on the right track. This is the perfect time to fast.” She reminds me that our bodies, given the chance, will heal all maladies. “Digestion takes a lot of energy, so when we fast, we are freeing up that energy. The body will direct it toward healing.”
Before the Program, in the Dakota, when I was little and had a fever, I found myself inexplicably craving a paper-thin slice of white cheese with a blue stripe down the middle I had once been given as a taste at the market down on Columbus Avenue. I was sick, and though she was periodically checking on me, my mother was busy in other parts of the apartment, taking care of my brothers. No one was going to go get me this cheese and absolve me of this craving, I knew that. The intense, feverish lusting for the sour, salty, pungent, moldy blue stripe was something I had to accept, like I had to accept the pinprick sensitivity of my skin; the raw, scratchy hot of my eyelids; the ache in my knees and hands. That afternoon, it made perfect sense to me that the wanting and the fever were interchangeable.
* * *
I’m sick and it’s dinnertime, the hardest part of a water fast. Even the smell of my brothers’ broccoli steaming downstairs stirs what feels like an ancient response. Forced to the outer reaches of the day’s landscape with no nourishment, I feel cold, empty. I swallow gulps of water, lie back against my pillows, and cycle through more versions of hunger than I realized existed: food is warm comfort in this newly cruel, dinnerless world; food is food and I’m truly hungry; food is entertainment and I’m bored—eating passes the time and the day is three hours longer without it; I’m lonely, and my favorite foods feel like familiar friends. Food is also a tie to daily rhythm, to the normalcy of mealtimes, to the comfort and weight of the physical. By fasting, by eating the Program diet, I feel cast adrift from this comfort and normalcy.
* * *
My father has a cold and is supposed to be water fasting. But here he is, standing in the kitchen, crunching a stick of celery. The enormity of this transgression is lost on him; he chews carelessly, blithely. I feel shocked at this blatant disregard for the rules but also slightly superior. I am familiar with the stages of a fast. I know the importance of staying in bed so the body can use all its energy to cleanse. Eating in bits throughout the day, even if the snack is only celery, is not fasting. I understand suddenly that he will never feel the benefits that my brothers and I feel—against our wills, of course, but benefits just the same. Our mother’s constant stream of strategically placed information is sinking in. I notice my beach friends sniffling for weeks. Three days in bed drinking water, and I don’t think I’m imagining the renewal I experience. Though there is more to my allegiance. The enormity of maintenance required to keep this regime and our family going takes every bit of my mother’s day. If she’s not in the kitchen juicing and blending, unpacking groceries, or washing dishes, she’s folding laundry, which sits in stacks that never seem to diminish. I try to help her, but I am free to do what she isn’t—leave when I want to. So I listen about cleansing and toxins and B vitamins in the celery and what foods create mucus because what she is saying makes sense to me, but also because I am her ally in her mostly allyless world. But I can never quite shake the guilt I feel breezing outside and away from the groceries that need to be unpacked, the clutter that should be put away, from the suck of the dishes or the laundry. As the oldest child and only girl, her burden feels like mine.
* * *
My brothers play baseball at the end of the day. Two Little League fields sit at the end of town, where the Point Lookout pavement ends before the marshland begins. Gilly is on the pitcher’s mound. I am on Greg’s too-big-for-me bike. The ice cream truck sits in the dirt outside the backstop. I have a dollar in my pocket and gum isn’t food. Gum is freedom and tart blue and red food dye. I bite into my gum, rip off a piece. Chew down. Guilt and pleasure. The release of sour-sweet artificial blueberry, banana, cherry, raspberry, lime, lemon, grape. The possibility of endless chemical flavor creations. The sun is warm but hazy. Blades of grass sprout thinly in the friendly, sandy white soil.
Gilly licks his fingers and adjusts his navy cap. I see what makes him, him. The inward slope of his thighs, the pronounced turn of his right foot. His face and chin, without the curtain of hair, are chiseled, older-looking than the other boys’ faces under the other baseball caps. His blue eyes are so light, they seem to be the absence of matter, what would shine out if we weren’t encased by flesh. Pure light. Beams of ice. Messages from an unsullied soul. And yet here he is in uniform like everyone else. I imagine him held down and forcefully clothed. His unwilling allegiance to something as ordinary as a baseball league.
Gilly throws a pitch. An easy toss, no windup.
“Steer-iiike!” The umpire brings down his arm, triumphant.
The July sky is white and pink with the beginning of twilight. The air, warm and cottony, smells of tomato plants and earth and dry summer grass. Crickets have begun to chirp. I feel as if all my pores are open, as if I am breathing with every part of my body, every inch of my skin.
* * *
I turn on the light in the bathroom and climb up onto the edge of the bathroom tub so I can see myself in the medicine cabinet mirror above the sink. I’ve lost my layer of winter fat because of the blended salads, from swimming in the ocean every day, walking everywhere. My stomach is flat, my thighs more streamlined. Though I’m hungry almost all the time, I’m not skeletal. The brown rice and steamed vegetables at night, the egg yolks, the unsalted raw-milk cheese, the almonds and walnuts have enough fat and calories to sustain us. Plus, I overeat the vegetables and rice at night, the one meal that isn’t measured. It will take me decades to unlearn this compensatory eating, to learn the lesson that if I eat what I want, I don’t have to overeat what I don’t want.
I hop off the tub.
In my room, my toy-size clown night-light smells sweet, good enough to eat, some catnip-for-children ingredient mixed in with the rubber. I press my nose against the clown’s belly, breathe.
I climb into bed. My sheets are cold. I push my bare feet down and lie still, waiting for my own heat to warm me.
* * *
The sun rises over the silver inlet behind our block; the first thin yellow rays, not yet warm, spill shafts into the spaces between houses. Across the sand, tractors trundle down to shore to begin the sunrise task of leveling the beach. The town’s own background morning noise: the rhythm of a tractor motor climbing a dune, revving as it strains; the sound of release at a crest; the high hum as it dips into a trough, then gears up for another hill; the cry of seagulls; mourning doves on the telephone wires above the street, the wires that cross over our roof.
I steal, barefoot, to the inlet cove; scramble from jetty rock to jetty rock, toes and arch and heel, palms and fingers clinging to the rough, cold granite. Boulders the size of beach cabanas mix with the jagged remnants of old roads, yellow and white median lines still visible, bordering the last block of town.
I am in Giant Land, climbing among pebbles. I am the last survivor of a postapocalyptic world. I am an island girl deftly leaping the shoals in between the roll of foaming breakers.
I stop climbing.
Across the sand, two baseball fields away, I see a figure approaching with a small dog trotting at his heels. Even from this distance, I recognize the unmistakable tilt of his head, the slightly knock-kneed walk.
Oh my God.
Gilly?!
Coming this way.
I duck down, my hands pressed against the boulder in front of me, my nose brushing the stone. My heartbeats feel loud and warm in contrast with the cool stillness of the giant rocks around me.
After a moment, I peer over the boulders. He’s closer. I can see his chin, the hang of his bangs, his blue T-shirt, the ravel of his jeans along the hem dragging in the sand.
If I run now, over the jetty rocks toward home, I will be seen fleeing. I consider appearing, only slightly less awkwardly, from the rocks as if I am on a stroll myself.
To walk together under this pink-and-yellow sky along the shining wet sand of the inlet shoreline?
What would we talk about?
Gilly: (peering through his bangs) Hey.
Me: Hi.
Gilly: (flashing his heartbreakingly crooked smile) How ya doin’?
Me: Fine. How are you?
Gilly: (smiling and nodding) Doin’ good. Doin’ good.
Silence.
What if that’s all we have to say?
I can’t do it.
I have to do it.
I duck lower. He is half a baseball field away. Then as far as second base is from home. They cut down to shore, dog and boy, strolling along the cool, slick, wet sand of the inlet shoreline.
I want to walk with him in the soft pink light of morning. Just him and me. The entire beach to ourselves. I’ll even risk a bad conversation.
But he’s turning around now. In a few steps, he’s passed the boulders where I wait. A few steps more, he reaches the soft, dry sand. I watch him, the back of his head, his shoulders, his compact rear in his faded jeans, head off the way he came.
Just like that.
And this is what is suddenly clear: I will never talk to Gilly Callaghan. I will love him forever from afar. I am not up for anything more.
I am cold, crouched in shadow, pressed up against stone. He is far enough away. He hasn’t looked back. I stand and head for home.
* * *
The town is packing. Awnings rolled up, windows locked, shades drawn. The all-year-round houses seem suddenly like lonely outposts, their tricycles, yellow plastic tractors, toy buckets, and shovels still strewn about in sandy driveways, as, all around, summer families stow away and sweep up, batten down the hatches of their dwellings to prepare for vacancy and the cold months ahead.
Though we’ve been living in it all summer, our house suddenly smells the way it did the day we arrived. Lemon Pledge and house paint: the smell of empty house. I wonder what’s changed. My mother is loading peaches, cucumbers, bunches of celery, and bags of lemons from the refrigerator into her ice chests; our least-important clothes sit in suitcases in the narrow hall. But we’re still in the house. We have two days left. I don’t want to feel like this, like we are already gone.