Living By Rachel Smith

for Grace Paley

When Phyllis called to tell me about Ephie, I said this clear sentence: “It’s her life! Let her throw it away.”

“She was only jogging,” Phyllis said. “She didn’t know her own weakness. She’s always liked to jog.” A lawyer named Ben had found Ephie; she’d collapsed on the concrete path. She’d been to the ER and been pumped with fluids and weighed and warned that her organs could fail. “Anne,” Phyllis said, “Ephie’s dying.

“Sure,” I said, “and now Kathryn’s going to want to jog, too.” Whatever Ephie did, my daughter did the same. It was sweltering. I could feel my ear sweating where it was crushed under the phone.

“I know,” she said. “What do we do?”

“Put them back in the hospital.” But there was nothing to say about that, because we wouldn’t. Our daughters had spent weeks there, learning techniques from the other girls. When they came home they were rocking and flexing and sneaking sit-ups while they watched TV. They were leaving bits of chewed up bagel in my flowerpots. As though I wouldn’t find them. As though the flowers watered themselves.

“What about that place in the woods?” she said. “With the two-way fireplace and the therapy dogs?”

“Might be worth a go,” I said, but we would never send them there either, just like we had never sent them to camp. There were jihadists and hurricanes and movie theaters shot up every month, and drunk drivers and flesh-eating bacteria. We didn’t want our girls out there. We wanted them with us, at the beach club, burying themselves in imported sand. We wanted them with us, because who could want to help them more than we did?

 

I found Kathryn in her room, cross-legged, with a Vanity Fair spread over her lap. She looked up, guilty.

“Do you know about Ephie?” I said, from the doorway.

I could tell she didn’t know the right thing to say. But then she nodded.

“Shop with me?”

“Sure.” Kathryn unfolded herself and stood. The magazine slid to the carpet. Her bed was made and the dresser was bare except for a jar of pens and a porcelain dog. Her father had bought a Newfoundland and emailed Kathryn a photo. At fifty, he’d gotten a nose ring. He was standing in a wheat-colored field. Next to him, his new wife was kneeling, wearing sunglasses, kissing the dog. My ex-husband’s hand dangled at his side, touching her cornsilk hair. They were that kind of people.

Kathryn was sixteen now, but back to her ten-year-old size. She wore her old leather jacket, the one she’d got in fourth grade, as she followed me from the a/c of the house to the hot car. We drove to Safeway. I felt sweat spread under my arms while she huddled in the jacket, snapping photos out the window with her phone.

For the Fourth of July, the aisle caps were strung with red, white, blue, and gold. They had cupcakes in the bakery topped with little plastic American flags. “Go pick out some fruit,” I said. Kathryn nodded and walked away, and I tried to think of something to say to her. We had already tried separating her from Ephie. We had tried to persuade them to work together to get well.

Kathryn shuffled back with a melon and a couple of pints of blueberries. “Great!” I said.

“What’s with the enthusiasm?” she said. “You hate the store.”

“I happen to love the store,” I said.

“Right.” She snorted. “Since now.”

At checkout, the woman in front of us unloaded six-packs from her cart. Her arm flexed and the loose skin shook gently. I saw Kathryn watching. I looked at the magazine rack and thought of her school locker. In March, the principal had called to complain that it was pasted with cutouts of girls like AIDS patients in black lingerie with hip and rib and pubic bones all punching out. She made Kathryn take down the pictures, and I sat with the girls at the computer and showed them screenshots of Rihanna and Marilyn Monroe. “Yeah,” Ephie had said, “they’re beautiful.” Then she and Kathryn had compared their thigh gaps when they thought I was out of hearing range.

 

I’ve come to think this starvation stunt has made them feel fortified in a way I can’t understand. When she called, Phyllis said to me, “The things I’ve felt about Ephie, I can’t talk about them. I haven’t just been worried. At times, I’ve been jealous and proud. At times, I think I’ve encouraged her.”

“It isn’t you,” I said. “They have incredible willpower.”

“Who did she get it from, Annie? She didn’t get it from me.”

“She got it from her father.”

“No chance,” she said. “Not from that dildo.” She was quiet and I remembered Saturday mornings when the girls were babies, when the four of us used to go out for donuts. I remembered the sound of the milk steamer running and the espresso grinder, and we could hardly talk sometimes, the baristas had the music so loud. And one time Ephie’s father went to the mall and had t-shirts made with pictures of the girls in their matching hospital blankets. He made me a size Large and I hardly spoke to him. But I still wore that shirt to bed.

 

In the August heat, Phyllis cashed out Ephie’s college account and sent her to the sleepaway clinic in the woods. I was ready to send Kathryn, too. I was tired of sitting with her at dinner, waiting for her to eat another bite of food. But I didn’t have the money. I didn’t trust the program would work. Instead, I drove her up the coast. We took walks and ate whatever she said she wanted: rice cakes, beef jerky, diet Pepsi. She took photos with her phone.

“What are you shooting?” I said.

“Dogs,” she said. “I really want a dog.”

“Then let’s get one,” I said.

“Really?”

“Why not? We’ll get one when we go home.”

Her eyes brightened and she looked at me eagerly. Then she shrugged and looked at her hands and said, “All right.”

“What’s wrong,” I said.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t you want one?”

“Yes.” She lifted her phone and snapped a photo in the direction of an apartment building with a tall hedge.

“Then what’s wrong?”

“Jesus,” she said. “Leave me alone.” That was the way she was sometimes.

But mostly we were good. We were bonding. We sat in the hotel whirlpool and Kathryn propped her elbows sharply on the tile floor, cupping a green tea. Its steam was indistinguishable from the whirlpool steam. She fiddled with the knot of her swimsuit at the back of her neck. I looked down at my own wide, freckled thighs pushing out from the black line of my bathing suit. In the faint ripples of cellulite I saw my own culpability. My body must have screamed to her: this is what happens if you eat food. But I thought my body was okay. I felt bad that she thought I was disgusting. At least I figured that’s what she thought.

I was having these thoughts and she said, “Mom, I think we’ve lost our survival instinct.”

“You and Ephie?”

“No,” she said. “Humans, as a whole.” In her fragile, private voice, I sensed new verve. That night, I watched her eat half a filet mignon.

Ephie, Phyllis told me, hadn’t gained one pound.

The next day, we sat in a diner and, again, I begged Kathryn to explain to me why. The doctor had warned me not to ask those questions, “highly insensitive” questions, she said, but I didn’t trust the doctor anymore.

“All I want,” Kathryn said, at once at the edge of tears, “is to drink a glass of chocolate milk.”

I called the waitress, asked for two chocolate milks, and watched her set them down on our table.

Kathryn unzipped her leather jacket and looked at me like I was a thousand miles away. She put her mouth to the straw and tried to drink, but it was just like back home, cursing and smashing plates, except she was quiet this time.

A week after Labor Day, Kathryn died. The doctor said, “It happens sometimes that they seem to get better, then get worse. The heart can’t keep going.” I couldn’t listen to him talk. I kept looking at the dirt under his fingernails, thinking he wasn’t fit to be a doctor. I kept thinking about when I got pregnant the same spring as Phyllis and we shared the same big loose dresses and when we had the babies they were red and scrunched up and crying all the time. We were proud of their fat thighs and fat shoulders, pinching and plucking at them in every house on our cul-de-sac. This was not so long ago, when our girls were blank and new with fingernails tiny as seeds.

“What do I do, Phyllis?” I asked when she called. I wanted to see Ephie, but Phyllis said she wouldn’t see me.

“What do any of us do?” she said, in a sympathetic way. It was easy for her to be sympathetic. She had Ephie.

In our—my—suburban ranch house, I think about babies getting born around the world, in places where the risk goes without saying. I wonder how those women even start. I took Kathryn to ballet class, held her legs when she learned to cartwheel. I bought her miniskirts and the expensive tampons with plastic applicators. When her father left, I was with her in the alley, playing HORSE at the neighbor’s hoop. She could swim a lightning freestyle; she could swim butterfly. I clothed her and fed her and loved her most of the time. I found her crying in the bathtub once, when she was nine. She jerked her knees up and put her hands over her face.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Come on,” I said. “Tell me.”

“Really, Mom. I just got sad.” I sat on the edge of the tub and gave her a towel, and made a bowl of popcorn. We called Ephie, who came over, and Phyllis came, too, and we all sat on the couch and watched Grease on TV. The girls were ravenous, sucking salt and butter off the kernels that hadn’t popped. That year they saved their birthday money and bought the soundtracks to musicals. Phyllis and I took videos of them doing their slow, swinging dancing to “Blue Moon.” One day they bought cans of Redi-whip and sprayed each other white in the backyard. Licking their arms and hands and laughing, they streaked a trail of whipped cream through the house. I shouted and made threats and they ran away, up the block to Phyllis’s. And then, for three months last summer, they were dying.

 

 

 

 

Rachel Smith is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Mississippi and directed the documentary film MINUSTAH Steals Goats, forthcoming from 7th Art Releasing.