The Appetites of Girls (7 page)

Swim season ended. The remainder of my freshman year seemed to drag toward summer. And then suddenly it was September again. Now we were sophomores, and was I imagining this, or had the other girls in my grade returned from the vacation even slimmer than they had been the year before? Some were taking exercise dance classes in the afternoons at the studio on Broadway, and toted to school their leotards and leg warmers in canvas bags slung over their shoulders. And there was excitement over the announcement that aerobics would be added to this semester’s after-school offerings.
Thin Is In!
proclaimed the slick covers of the magazines my classmates read in the hallways and cafeteria during free periods.

Mama, I knew, would never agree to aerobics classes; she thought them frivolous, a ridiculous excuse for women to parade around in skin-tight clothes. So, instead, with a little leftover bat mitzvah money, I bought from the bookstore near school a paperback entitled
The Ultimate You
, full of step-by-step color photos of callisthenic exercises. If I followed the techniques provided, it promised, my body would quickly transform until it resembled those of the girls in all of the pictures. So, night after night, in the secrecy of my bedroom, I twisted and lifted and lunged until my muscles cramped.

But the pounds that had crept back over the summer did not melt
away. And when I was sent home once again with a notice giving my choices for extracurricular activities, Mama checked the box marked
Chess Club
on my slip as well as on Sarah’s.

“You did say you wanted to try chess instead this year, right, Pea?” Mama leaned over the chair where I was working to brush hair from my brow, and as she bent close, I could smell the sweet orange tang of her perfume.

Coach Hadley had asked if he could count on my returning to the team, but I knew the answer. “Yes, Ma,” I nodded.

Mama signed our permission slips and tucked them into our backpacks. “I’m glad you’ll both be playing, girls. You can practice together. It’s a wonderful game! Some of the finest minds in the world are chess players. Let me see if I can find my old set. And maybe I still have that book of pointers—all the tricks I used to use when Uncle Jacob and I played together!”

As Mama rummaged through the closets, Sarah and I smoothed wrinkles from the kitchen tablecloth, creating a flat surface on which to play. And when Mama unfolded the checkered board on the table and placed the pieces, one by one, on the black and ivory squares, explaining their various roles—the pawns and rooks, knights and bishops, king and queen—I nodded to prove I was interested, hoping the disappointment I felt, heavy as wet sand, did not show on my face.

For days before the first club meeting, Mama taught us the many rules of the game. Then, once the season began, she devoted time in the evenings, after our homework was done, to giving us what she termed “Special Tips and Hints.”

“This move Uncle Jacob and I used to call The Double Hit. Next week maybe I’ll show you The Diagonal Knockdown!”

But I seemed to have no memory for Mama’s strategies. When she whispered suggestions in my ear, minutes later I would forget them.

I extended my nighttime routine of toning exercises by ten minutes, but there was no change to the roundness of my waist and thighs, the old
softness of my upper arms. So I began to wear loose sweaters over my collared shirts. In school I made multiple trips to the girls’ room, readjusting my skirts to cover my knees. I took consolation in the fact that the weather was getting colder. Soon everyone would be bundled in padded jackets and turtlenecks. Who would even notice my bulkier clothes? But word began to circulate that in the spring the miniskirt would be returning. Even the other girls on the chess team—far from the school’s most daring dressers—began to talk of buying these leg-baring hemlines.

Perhaps the spring would be a good time to start a new diet. And this time I would stick with it. This time I would see something through to completion. Mama often said diets doomed people to failure. They were designed by advertisers to keep people hungering for things that would never satisfy. When she and Aunt Helena and Aunt Bernice were young women, just before Aunt Helena’s wedding and when they all still lived at home, a saleslady had knocked on their door hawking carbonated drinks for suppressing appetite. Despite Mama’s warnings, Aunt Helena had bought two box loads. And what was the result? On the day of her wedding Helena had felt too sick to dance and looked pale as flour.

But that was long ago, Mama!
I wanted to tell her.
On
my
new diet I will be fine!
Because maybe Mama was wrong about me. After all, she couldn’t be right about everything.

So maybe in the spring—yes, the spring!—my new diet would begin.

(Opal’s Story)

•
1982
•

A
t the Passionflower, the bar-restaurant of our hotel, the men outnumbered the women. Especially after nine o’clock, when most of the married couples had disappeared to their rooms and the young lovers down the beach, strolling barefoot through the lapping water. Then Mother would smile at the men straddling whalebone bar stools who winked and raised glasses in her direction. We knew all of the regulars—the black island natives as well as the transplants from Europe and America, some with sun-parched wives or girlfriends, most bachelors.

At the hotel, there were few children my age (I was eleven), and those I met stayed only a week or two, on holiday with their parents. During the day, they vanished on boating excursions or hikes through the botanical gardens.

“Make the best of it, Opal,” Mother said when I complained. “As soon as school resumes, you’ll be surrounded by a hundred boys and girls.
Promise, promise.” And what freedom I had here. What child wouldn’t envy my carefree hours in the sand or floating on the turquoise sea? she asked. Didn’t I like swinging in the hammock in the courtyard palm grove, breathing the frangipani, watching the tropic birds soar overhead?

Yes, I nodded.

Wasn’t this much prettier than faded blue town houses, the only view from our San Francisco apartment?

“Yes, much prettier.”

We were on a small island in the West Indies, and Mother’s plan was to stay for a year, possibly two. “Working as a realtor in Pacific Heights loses its charm after a time,” she’d explained, stroking her legs distractedly as she flipped through travel brochures during the months before we left. “Life should offer some excitement. Don’t you think?” Through the travel agent, she had heard about the White Heron Hotel with its attached surfside restaurant and bar. As hostess of the restaurant, Mother would be entitled to a three-room suite for a nominal fee. In May, she had found renters for our apartment, and after my school year ended, we would go. When I returned to classes in September, it would be at St. Agnes, one of the island’s two elementary schools.

•   •   •

O
ur first afternoon in the Caribbean, Mother had dumped, from suitcases onto the cotton spread of her bed, an array of colorful outfits I had never seen her wear—boldly printed skirts, bright sundresses, sandals with ribbon-thin straps. In the filmy mirror of our small shared bathroom, she’d shaken the ends of her orange-gold hair, which had waved in the damp heat as soon as we’d stepped from the plane. Wet strands had clung to her neck.

“Oh, it’s a slice of heaven!” she’d said, stripping to her pink lace bra, leaning against the window frame to gaze at the ocean. “Isn’t it paradise?”

During the day, Mother’s responsibilities were few. The lunch crowd was always light—some of the elderly hotel guests, a few islanders breaking for Hairoun beers. She was rarely required to do more than meet briefly with Ezra Dupree, the White Heron’s manager, to go over the details of the evening’s menu and seating plan. The busyness of our routine in San Francisco soon seemed a foggy dream. We spent most of the morning and afternoon hours reading in the shaded yard or sprawled across our fringed towels on the hotel beach, snacking on fried plantains and salted peanuts, sipping lemon sodas. Within a week or two, Mother’s skin darkened from cream-white to nut-brown. As we stretched in the sun, she lathered her arms and legs with milky oil from a green bottle to prevent peeling. Men on the beach twisted their necks, and I suspected, despite their tinted glasses, what their eyes followed.

At one of the boutiques in town, Mother bought a batik bikini with yellow tropical fish and a matching one for me. Though I yanked and fussed with the ties of the suit, the material bagged and puckered at my hips and across the flat of my chest. Pretending to study the other bathers on the beach, I sneaked peeks at the fullness of Mother’s bikini top and the way she bent one leg into a vee, crossing it toward the other.

Mother could bask on the sand for hours, but the heat stung my paler skin, and I ran to the water every few minutes, pinching my nose and plunking beneath the surface. When cruise ships anchored at the mouth of the port, sending small boats of passengers ashore, I had company as I swam—packs of Germans or English or French. Sometimes the foreign boys glanced at me, and then I would paddle out to the raft, climb the ladder, and dive into the sea, pointing my toes “gracefully as a swan,” as Mother had taught me. But always, by the time I reemerged, they were no longer watching.

Between four and five o’clock each day, we shook the sand from our beach towels, gathered our empty soda bottles and sunscreen, and returned to our suite. From my bedroom, which was separated from Mother’s by a peach-painted sitting area, I listened to the pattering of
water as she showered. On my bed, flat on my back, I pulled down the edge of my bathing suit and examined the disappointing progression of my tan. If I splashed in the waves less and sunbathed more, as Mother did, maybe I would see more impressive results.

When I heard the creak of the shower handle and Mother’s feet padding from the bath, I stepped in, rinsed grains of sand from my scalp and ears, scrubbed my stomach and arms and legs with the round, honey-scented cake of soap placed in our soap dish each afternoon. I dawdled in the water until the skin of my palms began to shrivel. Then, wrapped in two towels, I watched Mother from the wicker armchair in her room as she continued to dress. Before slipping on her clothes, still in her pastel underwear, she emptied the contents of her vinyl makeup bag onto the bureau. On the balls of her feet, leaning toward the bureau’s unframed mirror, she massaged her cheeks with blush and dabbed her eyelids with a silvery shadow, making the green flecks of her irises dazzle.

“Opal, have you seen my lipstick anywhere?” she would ask, rummaging through the tubes and compacts on the dresser for her favorite bronze shade, which seemed to disappear now and then to unexpected places. If I found it for her, she would blow me a kiss. “Thank you, dearheart, thank you. Nothing is dowdier than a woman with no lipstick.”

I watched as she parted her lips to apply the color, then mustered my courage. “Can you put a little on me?”

Usually she relented, dotting my bottom lip with a pale coat. As I inspected my reflection in the mirror, I wished for another coat of lipstick and plumper lips like hers.

“Ooh, la, la! So grown up,” she would say, laughing over her shoulder as she fastened gold starfish earrings to her ears. “Try not to drive the boys
too
crazy!”

And I would steal a second glance at the mirror, wondering what it was about my expression or the makeup on my mouth that amused her.

Mother, it seemed, knew many things about men, secrets of how they thought and what they liked. In California, after the divorce, she
had dated frequently. One blond man had lasted for two months—Cyrus, who reminded me of a fairer version of the photo of my father, which Mother kept among the many snapshots in her travel album. And in these first weeks on the island, I began to notice, everywhere we went, men asked her name, told her jokes, stroked their fingers along her arms. Sometimes I saw other women staring in our direction, and I would toss my shoulders proudly, smiling at the attention.

•   •   •

D
inner at the Passionflower began at six, and it was Mother’s job to seat the guests and check their meals, and to make sure the customers at the bar received a steady flow of drinks. For the first two hours or so she floated from table to table beneath the restaurant’s palm frond awning, pausing to chat with the diners at one table before gliding on to the next. So there was little for me to do. Most nights I asked Atneil, the bartender, for a ginger soda with ice. “Thank you so much, Atneil,” I would coo, imitating Mother’s soft voice, forcing myself to draw nearer despite the ragged scar on his neck, which gave me gooseflesh, and offering him my hand as she did now and then. From the cooks in the kitchen, local island women, I ordered curried chicken or lamb stew or fried conch fritters, depending on my mood. If they were not too busy, they let me watch as they cleaned redeye fish or gutted chicken cavities, wiping scales and blood across their apron fronts and singing songs about the island, about whalers out to sea and the heartbreak of poor Josiah Moody, abandoned by his cheating wife. When I joined in singing the parts I’d learned, they chuckled. “Funny child! Don’t you have better things to do than watch a bunch of biddies work!” I shrugged and then shook my head, which only made them chuckle more. “Will you sing the one about the fisherman’s daughter?” I would ask. Usually they gave in, sometimes sharing with me the hunks of papaya or toasted coconut they munched from bowls. Then when they tired of singing, I carried my plate to the
bamboo love seat against the wall of the hotel. I took tiny swallows of soda and poked at my conch or chunks of lamb, trying to make my supper last, passing the time until the dinner crowd thinned and I could rejoin Mother.

When the families and couples began to disperse, Mother chose a table at the open end of the floor, closest to the sand, and faced the shore, inhaling the salt of the ocean.

“Surprise me!” she would say, throwing her hands in the air, when one of the kitchen staff asked what she wished to eat. Holding a fresh glass of ginger soda, I would slide into a chair beside her.

“Goodness, Opal, you scared me! I forgot you were still downstairs!” Her loud words confused me because I could not tell if she was annoyed or merely teasing.

“Where did you think I went?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Off with one of the hunky British boys!” She laughed, and I tried to laugh in her same careless manner, not wanting her to think how childishly, impatiently I’d waited for the end of her shift.

Then within a minute or two, it seemed, a man approached, looming over our table. Sometimes he was an acquaintance, a resident of the island who frequented the bar, but more often a stranger, a guest of the hotel or the skipper of a boat in the harbor. He had not yet eaten, he would say. Would my mother mind some company? He swirled a glass of pale brown liquid and handed her the cocktail stuck with slender straws. He was from France, he said, or Italy, New York, California, Brazil. As he sniffed, I could see into the dark nostrils of his carved rock of a nose. And Mother would smile, nodding at the wicker chair across from us, sipping at the straws in her drink. She waited until his dinner arrived before beginning her own. “Sharing a meal with a man is a gesture of intimacy,” I remembered her telling me once, and I’d wondered if she and my father had eaten together in this way; though I knew he’d been a part of her life only briefly, a season of just a few months while she’d lived in Europe.

In a man’s presence, Mother ate differently from when we were alone. At home, in San Francisco, she had made chicken cutlets or ordered mu shu pork and Chinese noodles from the Shanghai Palace down the street. And at our kitchen counter, we had piled the food onto our plates, scooping forkfuls almost without tasting as Carly Simon played on the stereo. Now she savored every bite, cutting delicately into kingfish or spiced shrimp.

“This is
divine
,” she would say, arching her neck so that I could see each swallow. And I noticed the man always watched, too.

“Try a bite of mine,” he would offer, and they would both stretch across the table, turning their shoulders from me so that she could reach his fork. Afterward, they might share a dessert—a slice of coconut pie, a bowl of orangey mango sherbet. In slow rhythm, their spoons dipped into the dish, and the man would regale Mother with stories. She would tilt her head to one side and lick at the corners of her mouth. “Do you know how beautiful you are?” the man would tell her, and they would begin to joke about things I struggled to understand.

“You don’t mind if I take your mama out for a sail under the stars?” a Portuguese banker with a mustache that coiled at the ends like periwinkle shells asked me one evening. “I promise to have her back by daylight!” Mother giggled into her glass.

“Oh, I
love
to sail,” I said, speaking rapidly, as they did, crossing my arms on the table in my most sophisticated manner. But to my dismay, this only made them laugh harder. The man rattled the ice in his drink and gazed at Mother. “That’s not quite what I had in mind.”

“Oh, to be eleven and innocent again.” Mother let out an exaggerated sigh, and she and the man smiled as they tapped their glass rims together, making a dull clink.

I began to pull at a stray thread in the hem of my shorts, sensing that my ignorance was the subject of their toast, hoping the blood I felt rising to my cheeks wasn’t visible in the dimness.

Some nights Mother sent me up the stairs to bed alone, telling me to
go to sleep—she would follow soon. But though I listened for her key in the door for what seemed long hours, she rarely returned before I drifted off. And the next morning, when she breezed into my room, smelling faintly of seawater and cologne, I wondered what excitement I had missed.

How enticing this adult world was, full of whispered jokes and mysterious secrets. And often, in my nighttime dreams, I imagined I, too, was a part of it, that I had learned the grown-up ways of speaking and acting that allowed my inclusion.

So I began with the bottled peanuts we kept in our room, experimenting in the mornings before Mother awoke, nibbling with my mouth closed, shutting my eyes dreamily as I chewed. I tried purring softly in enjoyment the way she did. When the local boys with fishing rods slung over their shoulders passed our beach towel, I lay on my side, a hand on my hip, like the ladies on the covers of magazines Mother read, and practiced eating plantain chips in my new alluring fashion.

“Do I look older than eleven?” I asked Mother.

She shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted at me. “Oh, infinitely. Easily twelve or thirteen.” But a flickering in her smile as she turned again to her latest paperback made me determined to try harder.

•   •   •