Mrs. Everything (13 page)

After ten days, Bethie had lost eight pounds and she could button almost all of her skirts again. She’d stopped being hungry and started feeling airy, as if a balloon was expanding inside of her. At lunch, she could stare at Suzanne’s French fries without feeling even the tiniest bit of desire for one, and at home when there was whitefish or meatloaf or burgers or croquettes, she’d move the food around the plate, chewing each bite over and over until it was a tasteless paste, eating just enough to keep her mother from getting on her case. Nights when she worried that she’d eaten too much, she’d go for a walk. There was an empty house at the end of the street, where Uncle Mel used to park, and in the empty backyard she’d lean against a tree, stick her fingers down her throat, and kick dirt over whatever she vomited up, so as not to attract bugs or raccoons. Lines from the Metrecal ad tolled like a bell in her head.
As for three a day, talk it over with your doctor first. You might disappear.

Could she?
Bethie would wonder at night in bed, her fingers exploring the contours of her torso, the rise of her ribs beneath her skin, the jut of a hipbone here, the new ridge of a clavicle there. Probably not, but she could turn into something else, something that looked like a girl but was just pure steely will.

“You look good,” her mother told her, paying her a rare compliment after Bethie had completed two and a half weeks on the Metrecal plan. Jo just scowled and shook her head. Bethie stuck her tongue out at Jo when her mother’s back was turned, and Jo raised her middle finger.

“Oh,” said Bethie. “Very mature.”

“Stop fighting, girls,” said Sarah without looking at them as she picked up her purse and walked out the door. At the auditions, her voice was as clear and as expressive as it had ever been. Her hair
was shiny, her eyes were bright, and she wore a narrow belt cinched tight around the waist of her skirt. “Wonderful,” said Miss McCullough, and even though the cast list wouldn’t be posted until the following Monday, Bethie could see on her face that she’d done well, that she would get the leading role, as expected. “Wait here.” Miss McCullough raised her voice. “Harold! We’re ready for you!”

The boy who walked out from the wings looked desperately uncomfortable. His head was bent and his broad shoulders were hunched inside his varsity jacket, as if he were trying to make himself invisible.
Good luck with that
, Bethie thought. He was big, maybe a little taller than six feet, with a broad chest and wide shoulders, reddish-brown skin, close-cropped, tightly curled dark-brown hair, and sparse eyebrows, like an artist had started to sketch them in and had gotten called away on something else. He had full lips, an aquiline nose, and brown eyes that tilted up at the corners. The wooden crate he was holding looked no bigger than a lunchbox as it dangled from his hand.

“Hey,” he said, and stopped squinting in the direction of the seats long enough to remove his free hand from the pocket of his khaki pants and extend it to Bethie. “Hi. I’m Harold Jefferson.”

Bethie nodded. She knew that Harold was a senior and the star of the football team, but if he’d ever set foot in a drama club meeting before that afternoon, Bethie hadn’t heard about it.

“Just stand there, Harold,” said Miss McCullough. “On the mark.” Harold looked lost, so Bethie pointed to the taped X on the floor.

“Are you auditioning?” she whispered.

“Um,” he said, and Miss McCullough said, “Bethie, can you hop up on that box for me?”

Harold and Bethie looked at each other. Harold set the crate down, and Bethie climbed on top.

“Hmm. Try it on its short end,” Miss McCullough said. Harold did as she requested. Again, Bethie hopped on top.

“Okay, Harold. I need you to hold her by the waist, lift her up, and put her down.”

Harold looked apologetic. Bethie felt sick. Had they had to recruit an extra-strong guy because she had let herself get so big? She hoped that Harold couldn’t tell how ashamed she was. Gently, he put his hands around Bethie’s waist. “Ups-a-daisy,” he said. She smelled his cologne—Old Spice, she thought—and then she was swooping through the air, first up, then down, with Harold settling her gently on her feet.

“Great! Now, lift her while you sing the line.”

Harold ducked his head. Bethie saw his throat work as he swallowed. But on Miss McCullough’s cue, he put his hands on Bethie’s waist, lifted her up, opened his mouth, and sang in a tuneful and startlingly low voice, “There is nothin’ like a daaaaame.”

“Oh, wow,” Bethie said when she was on her feet again. “Did you swallow Enrico Caruso?”

Harold looked, if possible, even more ashamed. “I can’t do this,” he whispered. “I feel like a fool.”

Bethie’s question must have been obvious from her expression, because Harold said, “I got in trouble with Coach. He said I could audition for the show or get benched for three games.” He looked down at her hopefully. “Did a lot of guys try out?”

“Um.” Bethie didn’t have the heart to tell him that only a handful of guys had auditioned, that Carl Berringer would get the lead, and none of the others had anything close to Harold’s bass voice, or his good looks, or his presence. Instead, she asked, “Have you ever sung in public?”

“Just in church. And that’s only because my father’s the preacher.” Harold looked sick. “If I’m in this play for real, the whole team’s going to turn out and razz me. And my sisters.” He looked even more sick.

“How many sisters do you have?”

“Four. Three older, one younger.”

“Thank you!” Miss McCullough called. “The cast list will be posted on Monday morning.”

“I better not get it,” Harold muttered, and Bethie shook her head and smiled, hoping that he would.

*  *  *

By the end of October, rehearsals were progressing. As Bethie had predicted, Harold had been cast in the role of Billis, and every afternoon, four days a week, Bethie would feel his big hands around her diminishing waistline as he lifted her and lowered her. During rehearsals, she fished for details about what kind of trouble Harold had gotten into with the football coach, but Harold wouldn’t say. He was more forthcoming on the topic of why he’d never auditioned for any of the school shows, even with his voice.

“Stage fright,” he said. “I don’t like doing things in front of people.”

Bethie had laughed, and Harold, looking chagrined, had said, “What? It’s true!”

“You play football! How can you be on a football field in front of hundreds of people—”

“That’s different,” Harold said. “I’m wearing pads, and a helmet, and a uniform. I’m part of a team, not out there all by myself. And I’m not—you know—” His lips twisted as he spoke the hated word. “Dancing.”

“What’s wrong with dancing?” Bethie asked.

“I don’t know.” Harold considered. “It’s not very manly, I guess.”

“You dance at school dances, right?”

“Not in front of everyone.” Harold was frowning, picking at the skin around his thumbnail. “Not as a performance. Can we stop talking about it? Please? It’s just making it worse.”

Bethie asked, “Would it help if you pictured everyone in the audience in their underwear?”

Harold looked shocked, and Bethie remembered that his father was a preacher. Maybe he wasn’t used to girls talking about nakedness.

“Or if you pretended you could tackle the other actors?”

Harold smiled. “Maybe.”

“Just not me.”

“Okay,” he agreed. “Just not you.”

At first, Harold was quiet around the other drama club kids who could, Bethie knew, be a cliquey bunch. Harold was both the only Negro student in the show and the only football player, and the rest of the cast treated him like a curiosity. Gradually, there was a thaw, prompted by an improv game Miss McCullough had them play. “It’s so hot,” she’d begin, and the kids, standing in a circle, would shout, “HOW HOT IS IT?” Then Miss McCullough would point at one of them, and that boy or girl would have to come up with a comparison:
So hot that you could fry an egg on the sidewalk; so hot I saw a funeral procession pulling into Dairy Queen.
Harold often had the funniest comebacks.
Hotter than a goat’s butt in a pepper patch. Colder than a well-digger’s belt buckle. So ugly you’d hire her to haunt a house. So stupid that if he ever had a thought, it’d be lonely.
They were his father’s sayings, Harold said. “He’s got thousands of them.”

Bethie thought he was cute, but she knew that, if her mother hadn’t wanted Jo playing with a Negro girl when they were children, she certainly would not have wanted Bethie dating a Negro boy.
Birds of a feather must flock together
. Not that it mattered. Harold, she learned, was going with Jo’s basketball teammate, Vernita Clinkscale, who’d thrown over her boyfriend in the navy when Harold had asked her to homecoming. Besides, Harold wasn’t the least bit interested. He treated Bethie with a kind of casual, offhand affection, like she was one of his sisters. And, as if that wasn’t depressing enough, her weight loss had stalled. She’d lost eighteen pounds, even more than she’d initially planned, but she wanted to keep going, and so she cut her daily intake down to two shakes a day and water with a squeeze of lemon in between. In the mornings she would wake up at five, slip down to the basement with a basket of laundry, and do jumping jacks and sit-ups for half an hour, down where no one could hear her. When she wasn’t feeling dizzy, she felt wonderful, full of energy, as slim and sharp and keen as a fencer’s blade. She wondered what would happen if she only had one shake a day, or even one shake every other day. How much weight could a girl shed while still going
about her daily business? When would she stop being a body altogether and just float away, up into the sky?

Dodie Sanders, the senior who was in charge of props and costumes, took in her khaki skirt and shirt, and the Ban-Lon swimsuit she’d wear for “Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair,” and clucked her tongue as she pulled the measuring tape tight, but Dodie was heavyset, with coarse dark hair on her forearms and her upper lip. Bethie didn’t care what Dodie thought. “Don’t go getting too thin on us,” Miss McCullough called the next day as rehearsal was letting out, but Bethie ignored her. Was there such a thing as too thin?

“I want you to stop with this,” Sarah told her that night. “You’re making yourself sick.” Bethie promised that she was done with Metrecal, that she was having only one shake for lunch, just to finish up what she’d bought.

“Do they go bad?” Jo asked innocently. “I thought you could just keep them forever.”

Bethie glared at her. Jo stared back, her face innocent. “Girls, stop fighting,” said Sarah, and looked meaningfully at Bethie’s plate. Bethie ate baked fish and half of a sweet potato, hating every leaden, greasy mouthful, imagining the fat and grease polluting her pure, cleaned-out self. On Monday afternoon, at rehearsal, she was singing about how the corn was as high as an elephant’s eye, when the world wavered, and the stage seemed to roll, like the wooden boards had turned into waves on the water. That was the last thing she remembered until she woke up in the nurse’s office, looking up at Harold Jefferson’s back, hearing her sister’s voice. “She’s been dieting,” she heard Jo say, and Bethie struggled to push herself upright.

“I’m fine,” she insisted.

“You’re not,” Harold said. His sparse eyebrows were pulled down over his eyes, and he’d shoved his hands in his pockets. “You fainted.”

“You should call your family doctor,” said the nurse, and Jo promised that she would. “Come on, I’ve got the car,” she said,
and insisted on keeping her arm around Bethie’s waist as she led her into the parking lot.

Bethie sat in the passenger’s seat as Jo drove them back to Alhambra Street. The house was dark and quiet. On Mondays and Tuesdays, her days off, Sarah rested as much as she could, napping in the bedroom until the last possible minute when she’d get up and sit with them for dinner.

Bethie tried to go to the bedroom, but Jo grabbed her by the shoulder and held her firmly in place.

“At least let me take my makeup off,” Bethie said, trying to keep her voice light.

Her sister shook her head. “Come to the kitchen,” she said, and Bethie couldn’t see a way out. In the kitchen, Bethie sat at the table. Jo reached into the refrigerator and pulled out bread and cheese. Bethie shook her head.

“I had a bunch of chips at rehearsal. Lynn Friedlander and Dodie Sanders brought snacks for everyone.”

“You didn’t have any potato chips. You’d rather die than eat a potato chip,” said Jo. She was putting more things on the counter. Bethie saw pickle chips, and a stick of real butter that Jo must have bought herself. Bethie watched as Jo put a pat of butter in the frying pan and spread more on each side of the two slices of bread. When the butter was sizzling she put the bread in the pan, layering two slices of cheese on each piece and sat down at the table.

“I know you aren’t eating.”

Bethie opened her mouth to protest. Jo held up her hand. “Just listen for a minute.” She looked Bethie right in the eyes. “If you keep hurting yourself, he wins.”

Bethie squirmed on her chair. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Nobody’s winning anything, Jo, I just needed to lose a few pounds for the show.”

“And now you have.” Jo got to her feet, flipped the sandwich over, and set it on a blue plate. The kitchen was full of the good
smells of toasty bread, melted butter, and cheese. Jo used a fork to fish a few sweet pickle chips out of the jar. She cut the crusts off the sandwich, sliced it in half, diagonally, then into quarters, and she set it down in front of her sister.

“Jo, I’m really not hungry,” said Bethie.

“Just have a few bites, and I promise I’ll leave you alone.” When Bethie didn’t answer, Jo said, “Bethie, you passed out. A bunch of people saw you. And you’ve lost, what, twenty pounds?”

“Eighteen,” said Bethie, feeling pleased that Jo thought it was more.

“It’s enough. Please. Don’t let him win.” Bethie shook her head and opened her mouth, ready to say something flip, but she saw that Jo’s brow was knitted, and that her sister, who never took anything seriously, looked as if she was going to cry.