Skinny (7 page)
Damn body never does what you want it to. Your knee stiffens and catches in the cracks, and the pain in your calf never goes
away, no matter how long you stretch. The hole in your shoe lets the rain from the grass into your sock and makes your foot
shrivel up so it looks like a dumb raisin afterwards. Your stupid friends at the sidelines going, "Go Holly! Go Holly!" And
then there's the prayer you forget to say and remember to start when there's only thirty seconds left in the race:
Our father who
art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom done, thy kingdom
done, thy kingdom, thy kingdom.
And you're breathing out the words not breaths and God's mad at you now anyway. Then there's the start gun blasting through
my head over and over like the snap of my neck cut down from a noose.
. . .
After the race I go home alone even though Sol and Giselle want to take me out for ice cream and Sol promises to buy me a
Peanut Buster Parfait (my favourite) at the DQ. The house is quiet. I run a bath and sit in the tub till the water gets cold,
till the skin on my toes is transparent and I can rip up the little holes in them. My feet are really awful things. Mom and
Giselle keep threatening to take me for a pedicure. Once, last summer, Mom came at them with a pumice stone and a bottle of
foot lotion, and after she massaged my feet, filed my toenails down, and painted them a pretty shade of pink, she held them
to her face and kissed my blistered soles. Of course, not two days later I ran a cross-country race in the rain and wrecked
them. Then I crawled into Mom's bed after a hot bath, showed her my chipped toenails, and asked her to redo them. "I can't
always be doing these things for you, Holly, you've got to learn to do them yourself," she said. But then she sighed and asked
me what colour I'd like and I picked a deep berry purple.
It seems she's right; it takes a lot of time and care to keep a body together, to be a girl. Sometimes it seems too hard,
and I can't really be bothered. My hair is cropped short and when I'm not wearing my uniform I wear jeans and men's button-down
shirts and sneakers. I do like baths, but the rest of it—the plucking, the shaving, the eyeliner application—it's bad enough
having to watch Kat and Giselle do it. I remember being about seven and sitting on the hamper in our shared bathroom, watching
Giselle do her makeup. She spent hours in front of that mirror in high school, but now she's more like me and doesn't spend
a lot of time on her looks. The only concession she makes is washing her face and plucking.
"Doesn't that hurt?" I asked her as she plucked her eyebrow at a severe angle.
"It hurts like hell. Don't ever pluck or shave, Hoi. If anyone can get away without doing it, it's you."
My feet are soaked enough to peel now but I feel lazy, so I turn on the hot water and splash it on my legs and wash off the
cuts on my elbows and knees, then drape my legs over the edge of the tub. I make a diamond shape around my stomach with my
hands, thinking about how some of Giselle's friends have their belly buttons pierced, how mine would look pretty good pierced
but how Mom would probably kill me if I did something like that. Then I place my finger inside me, feeling how tight and warm
I am. I feel the tender skin around the opening of my vagina; it has a name, a funny one, hymen. So much trouble and worry
over such a little piece of skin that makes a woman bleed, once only. Giselle told me that in China some women put egg white
on their vaginas to pretend that they're virgins. I like mine. I feel it open when I stretch my legs before I run. I wonder
if you can find it after you've had sex for the first time. I'll ask Giselle. She'll probably laugh though and make some dumb
joke.
"It's not afterbirth, Holly. What, you want to bury it?"
Maybe, I don't know, I'll say. There's so much fuss about sex, it seems like you should do something to mark the occasion.
The bathwater is thoroughly cold now, but I still don't want to get out so, half out of boredom, half out of curiosity, I
stick my finger deep inside myself, till I can move the tip of it around. When I pull it out, a jolt of pleasure. I do it
again. Hey. It's a little button, a tiny electric button. Then I spread my legs wider, my pelvis just out of the water, arched,
and I rub the top again till the feeling gets more golden.
Suddenly, for some terrible reason, Sol's face is in my head, not his body or his arms but his smiling, shy face. His blue-black
eyes dance at me the way they sometimes do before he makes a joke. The more I try to erase the image of his eyes watching
me, the clearer it becomes, and soon I stop trying to erase it and imagine him watching me in the bathtub, how sexy I look,
with my knees in the air, my hair wet and slicked back. The more swollen and wet I become, the wider his eyes get until his
face is wiped away entirely, or maybe swept up in the rush of blood shooting down from my brain to the top of my legs.
Is this what love is? Having someone touch you in these tiny, hidden, wet places, without complaint? And then it's over and
I can't wonder about love anymore because there's no one here but me in this terrific yellow surge of fever, throbbing through
my legs, my heart.
I turn on the cold water and duck my head under the tap. Then I plug my nose and wade my head under the dirty grey water of
my filth. I don't come up for air with my secret lonelies until I hear my sister banging on the door, begging to be let in.
Broken bones (youths): If the bone ends are rigidly fixed together, healing occurs without callus formation. However, youths'
bones take longer to achieve normal strength.
Three nights running I dream of Solomon jumping off the edge of a small cliff, wearing small paper wings just to make me laugh.
Part of me is scared 'cos I think he's going to hurt himself, break every bone in his body, and part of me can't stop screaming
and howling with laughter.
On the fourth night the wings begin to tear, his broad white shoulders begin to glow through the backing, his hair is dirty,
he smells of tinny sweat and the sea. Then one night, instead of jumping, he walks right up to me. Kneeling beside me, he
presses his hand between the folds of my skirt and, bending in, he says:
Love me, love me more.
On Saturday I play pick-up with a bunch of older guys at the courts at school because there's a big game next week and I need
to be on top of my game. Me and Chantal, a six-foot-tall black girl, are the only girls. At first the boys didn't want us
to play with them but then they said it was OK.
Chantal and I are on opposite teams, so we have to cover each other. The guys have this weird way with us. For example, if
we travel or double-dribble they won't call us on it, or, if we get knocked down by a good block they'll yell, "Foul!" and
one of us gets to take a shot. But this favouritism also has a downside because they're always telling us what to do, like
we don't know the rules of basketball or something.
Roy, who just missed a perfect layup, tries to blame it on me by saying, "You should've been roving the key, Holly. You weren't
there."
Roving the key my ass.
You
rove the key! Chantal and I usually suck it up. We just roll our eyes at each other, but Chantal had had enough: "Screw you,
Roy! Me 'n Hoi are always
roving,
pass us the ball for a change. Make it worth our while."
Today is our big tournament downtown. I can't decide if I love or hate these inner-city games. Riding on a yellow school bus
all morning just to get your ass kicked by girls who can outrun, outshoot, outreach you, every time, is kind of depressing.
They're good. They're fast. And if you try to foul or slap the ball away you're finished.
Jen gets fouled out by the second period and I can tell by all the teeth-sucking and cussing going on, on both sides, that
there is going to be trouble after the game. I think even Saleri, who is usually clueless, can sense it too.
"Go on home, Jen," he says.
"Fuck 'em." Jen sits down beside me, massaging her fingers, thinking she's so butch, so tough.
Saleri lets me play in the last two periods even though my knee is acting screwy and nothing goes right. The other team keeps
slapping the ball out of my hands and we keep missing passes and blaming each other. It's a mess, really hopeless. We lose
by twenty points. I can feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up in straight, sweaty spikes.
And sure enough, after the game, the other team sends a messenger into our locker room.
"They're waiting for you in the parking lot!" a small grade-six girl with thick glasses yells before hightailing it out of
our change room. I meet Jen's eyes. Her eyebrows go up.
"Did someone say rumble? Yeah! They're on!" Jen yells, slamming her locker shut and slapping my back. Full of anger about
losing the game, Jen's got an excess of energy suddenly. "What do you say, Hoi? You in?"
"I don't know, Jen, they're, like, pretty huge girls."
"We can take'em."
We limp outside like a bunch of soldiers, Jen in front jumping around, ready for a scrap. Kat lags back a bit, looking scared,
watching the other girls swarm around us.
"Hey, losers." A tall girl with long black hair and beady eyes appears in front of me and pushes my chest. I push back, my
heart suddenly in my throat.
"Don't touch my fucking girl," Jen says, exploding from behind me like an unleashed dog. Something inside me is trembling,
shaking, until the guard on the other team steps forward and snatches Jen up by the collar of her coat, like in an old gangster
movie.
I am tired in my eyes. The world is without colour except for the white maddening motion of the guard's jacket up against
Jen. Her knuckle under Jen's chin looks like a rock and I hook my arm through Jen's thinking if I can keep her next to me
it will be OK. OK . . .
But there's another girl on top of me by then and the others are receding like they're running backwards, slowly, their running
shoes kicking my face, the smell of rubber and scum in my skull and then, out of nowhere, there's, like, five girls jumping
on us at the same time. Me and Jen, still tangled, collapse onto the pavement, crushed at the bottom of the pile. But then
I am cut from her, am alone, in the air, landing on cold metal.
Then Saleri's voice and the smell of blood in my broken nose. In my eyes a warm liquid pain, feeling the tread of someone's
shoe on my chest. Someone grabbing my hair, yelling at me but I can't hear them. I can't hear anything except Mr. Saleri's
calm voice and the whoosh of blood in my ears.
I'm on top of a car. Can't move. Jen's face hovering and Saleri pulling me up by the arms and leading me to another car, asking,
"What happened? What happened? What happened! Who started this? You girls, you girls . . ."
And all I can do is fold my hand over my face to keep it from leaking out, to keep it arranged and contained in my hand and
Saleri saying: "Jesus, Jesus, JesusChrist." He's starting up the car and I know Kat and Jen are in the back seat, all quiet-like,
and this, along with Mr. Saleri's taking the Lord's name in vain, gets me worried, so I try pulling the mirror down to see
if I look like a fucking Picasso painting or what and there's a leak that feels like a sparkler just exploded in my nose and
blood, ah blood, so I don't even get to see how messed up my face is 'cos my chest feels like it's collapsing.
Though my nose is broken, I don't cry on the way to the hospital. I don't cry either when the doctor sticks his fingers in
the cracked and searing regions of my chest, saying, "This won't hurt a bit." And then there's a roll of thunder in my head
and the world is a tunnel. And then I am finally home free.
. . .
The hardest thing about being in the hospital is having to sleep over, alone. After Dad died, Giselle and I started sleeping
with Mom almost every night. Most nights Giselle slept turned away from me but sometimes she and I would face each other,
curled up on one side of the bed, our fingers locked together.
When Dad was alive, sometimes all four of us would sleep in their bed: me tucked safely under his arm and Giselle curled around
Mom's hip. If we were camping or on holiday, we'd push all the mattresses together. My father would tell us stories until
we dropped away to sleep, or he would tell weird jokes Giselle and I never got.
When we were kids and we'd come climbing onto them like little animals, clawing our way into their soft flannel warmth, Mom
would laugh loudly at my father's standard joke: here he was, thousands of miles away from his peasant upbringing, and still
sleeping with his children. We'd all, especially my mother, laugh hysterically, as if it were the first time we had heard
it.
"Dammit, girls, why'd I spend so much money on beds?" he'd say, pretending to be annoyed, shifting his body and pulling my
knees onto the mattress so my too-long legs wouldn't hang off the bed.
"You know, it's too bad we don't have a goat, because the goat could sleep with us too. And look at this one," he'd say, picking
me up by the ankles while I squealed with delight. "Wearing socks to bed! And mismatched! One red, one green! A regular gypsy
princess!"
We slept like animals, rolling into their arms with our grizzly girl dreams. Giselle and I were just happy that they never
kicked us out of their room when we crept in latd at night, worried about something, sick, or not tired enough to sleep.
I liked the mornings best, when Giselle and I would pretend to sleep and they covered us with their duvets. He'd sit there
stroking my calf, or my hair, drinking his coffee, the smell of his strong black espresso filling the room, waiting for Mom
to return from the shower and, when she did, she'd move to the other side of the room to dry herself. With my eyes half-open,
I'd watch her put on her clothes. I was fascinated by the dark Caesarean scar weaving its way from her pubic hair to her belly
button, marking my entry into the world. Then I'd slant my half-closed eyes across the room and pretend I was asleep, that
I didn't hear their soft voices murmuring about the day ahead, about us, in a language I couldn't understand.
After he died, we didn't laugh at all about goats or socks and gypsies. Most nights, I'd just hold Mom's hand, while she lay
there staring at the ceiling and Giselle turned her back to us. And our mourning, which had been a sharp and stinging absence
at first, became a dull ache.
When I started junior high, and joined the basketball team, I also started falling asleep on the couch with the TV on.
"I left your breakfast on the table and some money for juice on the counter," Mom would say, touching my shoulder. "It's almost
eight-thirty." And I'd slip from sleep into my mother's brown eyes each morning, a pain in my neck from sleeping in a sitting
position.
"Mama, why are we so sad?" I'd whisper as she pulled her hand through my hair.
The first night Giselle came back from the hospital, she eyed me strangely when I sat in Mom's bed reading a comic book. "Don't
you think it's time you slept on your own, Hoi?"
I shook my head and tried to ignore her. But that night, Giselle, wrapped in a sheet, crawled in between Mom and I. "I'm so
cold," she whispered, though it was May and already warm.
And as I stroked my sister's bony shivering spine, I felt the down, the soft white anorexic hair that had grown there to protect
her when she'd slept alone all those nights away.
Now, like her, I am in this hospital room alone. If I close my eyes long enough and do not move at all, it is like I am nothing.
It is not sleep, and not a quiet prayer. It is just disappearing, with no sound or heat or pain. Out of time, an absence.
I am absent. In this room.