Good Women of Wastness: A Tale of Six Bodies
She blinks; her eyes sting. She doesn't know where she is. Then she notices the white halo of light—which she'd followed night after night, letting it grow larger and brighter and closer each time—has become two latticed squares. The light still seems familiar in a far-off way, but its shape is foreign. The cold wind lashes her eyes to weep, and the white lattices blur, bleeding in and out of one another. She hears the barking of a dog. A deep voice follows. The voice is very close, she realizes. The air pricks her with an unusual sharpness; the waves thrust her body onto shore. The voice grows louder until she sees a figure outlined by the distant glow. It is a man. He is broad-shouldered like the men she watched from stone islands and sea caves, villagers with rough voices who reel quivering nets onto shore. His voice, however, is different from the voices of fishermen. It is softer and slower. He speaks to her for a moment, asks if she needs his help. She finds she cannot speak. He asks her again, then turns his head in all directions. "If you aren't hurt," he kneels beside her, smelling strange and warm, "why have you come?" When she cannot reply, he decides she has come to be his wife. "You are," he reasons, "very beautiful." She was afraid he might say this. She has watched the fishermen call to women, either young with brown curls or plump with red cheeks and red dresses. She knows she must seem different with her sea-green hair and foam-white flesh. "Oh!" A bit of light falls on the skin, and immediately he understands. "A selkie skin!" He lowers his voice and his eyes shimmer silently. "Then you will be my bride. You haven't any choice now." He carries her into a cabin, which has an even stranger warmth. She has never set her feet upon a wooden floor. When he offers her a cup of tea, she sets it down on the table, afraid it will melt her hands. "You'll be wanting some clothes, I'd imagine," he tells her. "Or," his forehead creases, "haven't you worn any?" She nods, yes or no, it doesn't matter. He climbs a wooden ladder to another room, still carrying her skin. He closes a small latch door so she cannot see where he has gone. When he returns, he holds a large gray bundle. No skin. "The dress is a bit large. It belonged to my mother. You won't see many women in this village small as you are," he says, unraveling the bundle. He slips it over her head, and her heart shivers. It feels so rough and thick. "It's wool from the lambs that live past the hills," he explains. "Keeps you warm and snug." He lets her wander to the full-length mirror and kindly dusts the glass. She frowns at herself; she doesn't look right. But then she cuts her hair into a delicate bob. The barber teaches her to style it in a marseille wave. The tailor trims and stitches a dress exactly to her measurements. She chooses the fabric herself—white satin, sleek and cool—and her reflection begins to seem right. A few months later, she sees that her stomach is growing. This frightens her at first, but she thinks it will soon feel just as it felt that first night, when the far-off glow became a cottage. Strange, but not entirely unfamiliar. She stands before the mirror and cusps her widening belly, her deepening breasts. No going back now, she tells herself. My Young Body I am delighted to see that those hateful breasts have shrunk, returned to the innocuous nipples I knew best. Only a matter of months ago, they were the size of apples, and my mother had commented on them. "You're lucky," she'd said in a strange voice. "Women in our family don't usually have large chests." Lucky, my stomach knotted as she indicated her own delicate body; her collarbone sloped from her dress like the handle of a tea pot. Lucky for 14-year-olds with three babies to nurse, I remembered the horror stories she'd told of the bad schools she'd gone to and the bad 14-year-olds who'd scheduled lactation breaks between classes. Not me. I will never have children. I am delighted by the way the dress hangs on me, draping fluidly over my chest. Coupled with its sheerness, its cloak-like drape seems all the more excitingly wrong. It is right for me, my perverse abaya, made to obscure a nonexistent body. In my perversity, I feel that I have triumphed over ordinary rituals, over their false naturalness. Why didn't I pick out the right date for the dance? Mother asks, blotting her pale pink lipstick with a darker red for evening. Why didn't I pick out the right dress for him to see me in? But I know she isn't really thinking of Him, what he will see. I know he can never see me like this—in my natural form, having whittled from it the why—wearing the right dress. Though I see its rightness for me, watching myself in the cold basement, I can't yet feel myself alone. I feel my mother's gaze, and I feel the still bodiless Him, the Him who lives only through her questions and advice. I feel them in the hunger that stitches through my ribs (I still can't count them) and my hip bones (I'm still afraid to face them.) They are an interruption to my fantastic disembodiment, a visual history of my body's decay. You're sick, a distant voice tells me. I accept this as fact without really registering, like the music in a waiting room. You're sick. Those parts should be covered with flesh. You can see too much of yourself. My mother's voice, equally detached, warns that Boys like girls with something to hold on to, that everyone likes girls who are happy and healthy. However, another, much stronger voice, reminds me that this new form—still raw, full of painfully un-honed edges—will become familiar with time. Though crude and wrong, it is still an effigy of the body I knew before it changed into something I couldn't control. When I imagine the form that could have developed—those anarchic curves, their deceptively gentle heaviness—my pointed ribs feel no more threatening than a cast or a set of braces. My mother calls me up for dinner, so I try to remember what she'd sent me to look for. I'm strangely tired and I can't remember. Before climbing the stairs, I arch my stomach against the railing pole in a sort of ballet stretch. I check that it pushes inward by an inch when doing so. When I do this, the flesh between my hipbones contracts and feels pleasantly vapid. Nothing to worry about down there. I also check the width of my arms; the circumference of my wrist must not exceed the space between my pinky and my thumb and the fullest part of my forearm cannot exceed the space between my thumb and index finger. Having performed these preliminary checks, I am ready to face the doctor's prescribed meal plan: a flank steak, a cup of green beans, a cup of potatoes, and a glass of 2% milk with Carnation Instant Breakfast powder. I am also prepared to face the scale before and after our family meal, the scale that checks my progress toward those precious 115 pounds, which the therapist has determined to be my "natural" weight. "You're five foot four, so you can fall anywhere between here and here," she indicated my height on a BMI chart. "We know your mother is small, so it's all right to be on the lower end," she nodded as though reassuring me, "but we have to get you up to 115." Though I can still see the sharpness of my body, though it seems a little strange when I see it alone in the mirror, I never hate it until I'm standing on the scale. I close my eyes even though my back is turned--another doctor's order—curling my toes and balling my hands. My mother shakes her head after weighing me and I know it must've been bad. She mixes three scoops of ice cream into the Carnation Instant Breakfast, stirring hard. "Your grandmother drinks this too," she tells me. "At her age, she really doesn't have a choice. But you do." Mother's Old Body "Mom's lost her marbles, Dad says," Tom tells her. "What would Dad know?" Kathy tells him right back. Dad doesn't know anything, she's convinced. Somehow, it's his fault that Mother can't make her tea and comb her hair and tell her anything but the same stories in different disguises. How can the stories not be true, she thinks. How else could mother swim naked in the winter? "Eat your toast," she nudges Molly. "Don't just lick the butter off it." "Mommy doesn't eat anything but weird green weeds," she says, licking the shine from her fingers. "That's not true," Kathy searches. "She ate the pie I made for her birthday." "That was three weeks ago," Tom wipes his mouth as Kathy gestures. "After that, she stopped eating." There must be something out in the water, Kathy thinks, something more filling than what she gets here. Maybe a lost city. Maybe a ship full of ghosts. Maybe a secret church where she talks to Jesus, fingering a coral rosary, haloed by a shimmer of silver fish. She wonders for a few moments more until Tom asks, "Where's Mother?" "Not by the dock?" Kathy shivers. "No, she swam so far out I can't see her any more," he says in a strange flat voice. "What if she drowned?" asks Molly. Kathy looks out. She can't see her. It’s happened before, but this time she knows. When she races to the attic—to the hiding place she has changed a hundred times—the skin is gone. She tries to worry and miss her, but a shiver of longing overwhelms the childish tears. She wants to go with her. A few years pass, and she begins to curl her brown hair. She marries an unremarkable man, dutifully forgetting her longing. Even when her stomach swells, she contents herself with thoughts of motherhood. I will be good to this one, she thinks, and then all will be right. She carves little dolls out of soapstone and sews them little dresses from seaweed. It never occurs to her that her child might inherit the legacy she wants to understand, that she might be born into that legacy without knowing her grandmother or feeling her mother's longing. She never thinks about it until the baby comes out covered in sticky tar-like skin. It would have to grow, naturally, before she could take its skin. My Old Body/Mother's Young Body "I'll look at it," I decide. It really doesn't make any difference anymore. "115 pounds exactly," the nurse proclaims as I step off the scale. "All those months of working toward 115, and now you don't have to see me every week. Now that you're 115, we can cut it back to once per month, okay?" She repeats the number over and over again as though terrified she'll slip up and say 116 or—heaven forbid—114. "You look great," she adds. I know she has to. My mother agrees. "You look a million times better." I feel better; at least I don't feel too bad at this point. I don't have the same headaches or light-headed forgetfulness or pangs in my ribs. My period has started again. And it could be worse; I can still see a hint of collarbone and a strong contrast between waist and ass. Feeling better, however, is very different from feeling right. My stomach is in a knot from all that damned Carnation Instant Breakfast, and my former light-headedness has been replaced by an even lighter fullness, the kind you get after consuming a whole basket of chocolate Easter eggs. Sugary sugary sugary. There's something horribly shallow about all this heaviness. "How do you feel?" the nurse asks more directly this time. "Oh, pretty good," I say, tired. "And how are you?" she asks my mother. Mother laughs; what a ridiculous question! "I'm fine, I guess. Getting old." Plowing through introductions, moving on to what Meghan ate this week. "She forgot her Carnation Instant Breakfast yesterday," mom says. "I was worried about that." It's my turn to be very amused. "The only thing I saw my mother eat all day was half a small container of movie popcorn." The nurse has no time for these games. "Well, when you're getting older and you've had a few kids, sometimes that's more than enough!" More than enough! But my mother is barely any heavier than I am! And all three of us know that my diet consists of quite a bit more than enough. My mother agrees with her, echoing the very sentiment I've expressed to her after almost every meal (when it's time to drink the Carnation Instant Breakfast.) "When your mind is busy with things to do, food isn't always the first thing you look for. Yesterday, I just wasn't very hungry. When I made dinner, I thought about eating, but I realized I was full. I didn't need any more." An old trick, passing off the lack of hunger—an aching absence—as fullness. Older still, the way she passes off her imagined fullness—the decision to embrace this absence—as awareness of her body's needs. Anorexia means you are not aware of yourself, like the pamphlets that show a stick-figured teenager gazing at her monstrous ballooned reflection, like me gazing at myself after drinking those vitamin-fortified milkshakes. Anorexia must be some kind of mental dust, obscuring one’s true self from the mirror. That night, a neighbor comes over for coffee. I overhear my mother telling her, "And I haven't fit into them since high school!" I hide in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the toilet seat in front of the mirror. I press my knees to my chest and curl my toes over the edge. I study my face—nose like a faucet, eyes like the drops of water—but I can't study my body anymore. My Grandmother's Old Body ("Should we use the butter substitute?" my mother asked. "No," I said.) When we arrive, she doesn't come to greet us. We enter the home, uninitiated, as strangers. My mother calls for her. I head straight for the refrigerator, as has been my habit since I was little. I take one of the lemon drops she keeps in a jar there. It takes a moment to taste the sugar through the frost that melts in my mouth. "Mom?" my mother asks her, trying to be calm. "Yes, honey." She says in a wasted voice. She stands then, and she's terrifyingly thin, thinner than I ever was. Her skin is so dry, so fragile. I am sickly envious of her. I turn the lemon drop over on my tongue; it's growing warm and tart. I put my arms around Grandma and shudder at her smallness. I stroke her back for a minute like she's a child, and I tell her we made cookies and they're on the table. "Would you like some coffee?" I ask. "Yes," she concedes, sighing herself into a quilted robe. "That would be very nice."
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