The Appetites of Girls (6 page)

After a time, I thought I discerned another difference, as well. It seemed I was somehow lighter in the water now, that I felt a quicker energy in our practice drills. So I found the discipline to leave my meals unfinished. To fill myself instead, later, with yogurt and sliced bananas. During a Shabbat dinner at Aunt Bernice’s, as I whispered with my cousin Eva about the R-rated movie she had just watched while on a sleepover with a friend, Mama pressed her lips in annoyance at what remained on my plate. At home that night, she warned me not to believe all of Coach Hadley’s advice. “You know you can’t possibly give proper attention to your homework without solid food in your stomach. Your coach should tell you no one ever got anywhere by starving herself!”

But I laughed and kissed her cheek to show her how wrong she was. “I’m not starving myself, Ma! See, I’ve never been stronger!” And I rolled up my shirtsleeve, revealing the newly defined muscle along my shoulder.

•   •   •

S
everal weeks into the season, our team was scheduled for its third meet, but the first in which I would be participating. For days, I thought of little else. At night, I lay awake in bed, listening to street noises, my mind rushing like the cars that rattled past outside my window, imagining how my opponents might leave me behind in a wake of bubbles.

We were driven to Brooklyn, to our rival school, in two yellow vans, and as we drew close, the trembling I had felt in my stomach since that morning worsened.

“Jitters are very normal for a first race,” reassured Celia, a senior team member whose voice turned to music whenever she spoke to any of the boys on the team. Now she let the words drop flatly. “Nerves can
even work in your favor, Ruth.” But I was not sure I believed her, and as I was called to my event and curled at the edge of my starting block, I was certain I could see my knees shaking.

But there must have been truth to what she said, or perhaps it was my new eating regime. Never before had I swum so quickly; my arms and legs churned like motors through the water. And at the end of the race, I was presented a third-place medal hanging from a long red, white, and blue ribbon. During the bus ride back to Riverdale, I cradled the medal in my palm, tracing with my thumb the tiny figure of a swimmer etched into the surface. I closed my eyes as our van hummed along Flatbush Avenue and over the Brooklyn Bridge. This was the feeling of winning!

Once at our building, I sprinted up the four flights of stairs, too impatient to wait for the crotchety-slow elevator. By the time I reached our apartment, I was panting so that I could hardly speak.

“Look, Ma! Look!” I dashed into her bedroom, where she was returning to its hanger the silk blouse she had worn to work that day, carefully re-buttoning its pearl buttons. Gasping, I dangled the medal before her.

“What is it, Ruth?”

“Third place. Third out of six, Ma. I had to beat three other swimmers to earn it!”

“Oh?” Mama turned back to her blouse for a moment, fastening the final button. The skin beneath her eyes looked tired; this was holiday season, her busiest time at Broadway Paperie, and the one I knew she most disliked. “Congratulations,” she said, but in a way that made me wish I had explained it differently. A medal was a medal. I had won a point for my team. Maybe if she had been there she would have understood—all of the swimmers were fast, none of them easy to outdo.

Then, soon, I had new reasons for excitement—another third-place medal, and a tie for fourth at an invitational meet where five teams competed. In my bedroom, I hung my second award with the first where they
were visible to anyone who entered, from the latch of my window beside the stained-glass flower I had made in art class. Some evenings I draped one around my neck like a necklace, feeling the sway of it below my collar.

Other members of my team were still faster than I, but Coach Hadley began to compliment my progress, and each afternoon I burst through our door to announce to Mama, Sarah, and Valerie the strides I had made in practice that day. I predicted the medals I thought I could win in future competitions, then repeated these boasts for Poppy as soon as I heard his footsteps at the entry.

So full was my head with dreams that I swallowed the food on my plate each dinner almost without tasting. How easy it was to turn down seconds now, and more often than not, my first servings went unfinished. I began to refuse anything in heavy sauce. I peeled the thick skin from Mama’s spiced chicken legs, cut my pot roast into strips, avoiding every marbled streak of fat.

“What passes the lips resides on the hips!” This was the rhyme other girls in my class sang as they assembled their lunches of sliced pita and unsalted rice cakes and raw vegetables, and I repeated it now for my family as they stared at what lay untouched on my plate.

Poppy would laugh and rap the top of my head with his knuckles. “Dieting like the fashion models, heh!”

“We’re fashion models, too!” Sarah and Valerie would giggle, thrusting their shoulders back in an exaggerated manner, cutting their food into tiny mouse bites.

But the more Poppy and my sisters joked, the quieter Mama grew. For three nights in a row, she said little throughout supper. Silently, she stacked our dishes and carried them into the kitchen, shrugging off the work as if it were nothing when we offered to help. Even her plate washing seemed quieter than usual, only the light scratching of knives on platters, the gentle splash of water. One evening when I followed her into the kitchen for a glass of water, I found her poking with a fork at a plate on the counter.

“Did you eat anything at all tonight, Ruth?” Mama pointed to the bits of lamb chop I had discarded, the remaining pile of barley.

“Yes! Yes, of course I ate! But I’m on the diet of champions—lean, lean, lean!”

Mama pushed the food across my plate. “Do you know you left your geography text and notebook here this morning? I discovered them after you left for school. Last week I found your French homework loose on your dresser.

“Ruthie—” Mama smiled at the medal around my neck in a way that made me feel suddenly silly for having worn it. “If this diet is so effective, don’t you think you would see, well, other results?” And though she said no more, I knew what she meant. But I would get other medals—seconds and even firsts! I had only been improving! And as Mama reached a hand to brush my cheek, I quickly ducked my head and began pulling at a thread hanging from my shirt cuff, afraid the tears I felt choking my throat would spill out at the first stroke of her fingers.

•   •   •

I
n January, the culminating event of our swim season was scheduled to take place, the final championships in which every team in our league would be competing. This was the final push, Coach Hadley said, the time for us to show what we were truly made of. He assigned me to swim the one-hundred-meter backstroke, a race I had swum before, but in this meet I would have many more than my usual number of competitors.

For days preceding the competition, my stomach clenched with a nervous excitement I couldn’t seem to quell, even with the deep-breathing exercises Coach Hadley had taught us. And in the mornings, I found I could swallow no more than teaspoon-sized bites of oatmeal or boiled egg. Coach Hadley extended our weekday practices an extra twenty minutes, and, for three Saturdays in a row, we were required to attend
morning practices, as well. Then, several days before the competition, Mama did something she hadn’t done before.

“I have boots to drop after work at the shoe repair just two blocks from your school. So maybe while I’m in the neighborhood, I’ll stop by your practice. You wouldn’t mind, would you?”

“No, Ma.” I shrugged my shoulders, but I couldn’t help hoping she would change her mind or somehow forget. Other parents occasionally arrived at the very end of practice to pick up sons and daughters, but none of them ever stayed for any length of time as Mama seemed to want to do.

“Is that someone’s mother?” “Whose mother is that?” My teammates turned their heads as we filed onto the pool deck for our warm-up. Mama was seated at the center of the top bleacher between two lavender plastic shopping bags, her camel coat belted tightly. When she spotted me, she curled her finger in a tiny wave. I responded with the same small gesture, wondering how many on my team had noticed.

As Cole Freeman led us through our usual series of stretches, I could see Mama from the corner of my eye. So once we dove into the pool to begin our drills, I attempted to concentrate only on Coach Hadley’s directions, but I could not help stealing quick glimpses upward toward the bleachers. Then “One hundred back!” Coach called, signaling the practice for my championship race. “Leiser, take lane four,” he directed. A center lane meant he expected my time to be one of the best! Gillian was in the water to my left. I had outswum her earlier in the week. Mandy Robb was to my right, but she was not normally a backstroker. I will
win
, I thought as I pulled myself close to the starting block, high out of the water. With Mama here, too—I will
win
.

Out I flung, far, far, arching and back, kicking under the water, two beats and then breaking the surface. I could not see the others, only the spray from my arms and legs, but I thought—yes?—perhaps I was leading. I knew what to do—ignore everything but my own fluttering feet.
But, for the briefest moment, toward the end of the first lap, my eyes wandered to Mama where she sat, her shoulders forward—watching. I needed to regain my focus, but before I could turn to find my place in the pool, I felt a sudden
crack-crack
in my arm and then my head. Pain fired from my elbow to my fingertips and down my neck. How had I missed the string of flags that hung over the pool marking the approach to the wall! Blinking water from my eyes, clinging to the side with my uninjured arm, I shook my head to stop the room from reeling. Within moments, Coach Hadley and most of my teammates had reached me. They offered their arms to lift me from the pool and walked me to one of the benches behind the diving board.

“Excuse me! Allow me through, please! I’m her
mother
!” Mama was struggling through the crowd to get to me, her coat streaked with patches of wet from the dripping bathing suits and limbs she had pushed past.

“Looks like nothing’s broken. Just a couple of bad bumps,” Coach Hadley told her. “She may have some tenderness for a while, but she’ll mend.”

“Thank you.” Mama nodded but without turning to him, so I knew she had dismissed his words, that this was something she would determine for herself.

Instead of walking, Mama, using the school’s pay phone, called for a taxi, a splurge she and Poppy made only on occasion. She ordered the driver to go slowly, reprimanded him when he failed to avoid two potholes.

At home that night, Mama applied ice packs to my bruises and a heating pad to my neck to counteract the cold. When Sarah and Valerie approached with questions about my injury, she directed them to the kitchen. “Turn on the water for rice, will you, girls? What your sister needs more than anything is rest and a decent meal.” And so I knew what Mama implied: that I should have listened, that all along she had known better. That if I’d only been feeding myself properly, I might not have done something so careless.

•   •   •

A
t the beginning of the swim season, Coach Hadley had taught us what he called “visualization techniques.” We could use them to picture ourselves swimming with greater endurance, increased speed. If we employed them often enough, he claimed, they would enhance our performance. So over the next two days, while I rested at home, I tried to envision my energy returning, my body free of aching. I imagined myself finishing my race in record time. But on the second evening, the Thursday before the final swim competition, Mama knocked on my door. She held a paper in her hand. My French quiz on passive verbs. I must have left it on the living room desk, the red C+ visible through the back side of the sheet.

“It was just one quiz, Ma! My other grades have been fine!”

“One thing leads to another, though, doesn’t it? And besides, even if you hadn’t been injured, how much do you think you should be giving up for this? It’s a sport, Ruthie. It’s not your future. Especially if you’re not—”

“Not what, Ma?”

“Find things you will succeed in, Ruth. Give your time to those. Doesn’t that make the most sense?”

But what could she mean? I had won medals, and I was getting better. I
knew
I was. Then, for some reason, I thought of the gold spelling bee trophy on the shelf beside Sarah’s bed. And I remembered the two certificates Mama still kept in her top bureau drawer:
Judith Feldman: First Place Entry, Science Fair
and
Judith Feldman: Junior Math Contest Winner
. Third out of six. It wasn’t winning, was it? It was only the middle.

“But, Mama, on the day you came to see me, that day I was first, wasn’t I?”

Mama slid her tongue slowly along her front teeth as though thinking how to answer. And then she shook her head. Silently at first, and then the word smacked out like the slap of a hand: “No.” No! She had come to watch me and I hadn’t been leading, hadn’t even finished the race.

•   •   •

O
n the Saturday of the league championships, Mama, dressed for services in her tweed skirt and olive chiffon blouse, offered me a mug of tea. “Are you coming?” she asked.

“No, not today, Mama. Everything still aches.” Ached too much for going to temple. Or for studying my Cahier d’Exercices for the next week’s French test. Too much for cheering on my teammates at the championship meet. Too much for racing one hundred meters of backstroke.