Faerie (5 page)

10
. The Heavy

The school yard clamoured with excited, bronzed teens who boasted about their summers and stood tall and gorgeous in their fall fashions. I stepped off the school bus and made my way to the classroom. I had graduated from juvenile backpack to senior shoulder bag, which held promising new notebooks awaiting lessons from him. My longing for Mr Black had grown exponentially during the endless solitude of my summer, especially after Monika had left again. I had been waiting to relive the precious moments when our eyes first locked.

When I looked in the classroom door, however, he was not where my fantasy needed him to be; instead, we found a dull substitute. Mr Black had been called back to England and would not be returning. I expected to be disappointed, but my immediate response was sweet relief. I was glad he was gone. And then I overheard gossip so incredible it left me breathless. Mr Black hadn't been called away; he'd been sent away because of a girl named Marie Namur, a mousy-haired grade-nine student. She'd exposed, in a detailed letter to the school, the unspeakable indiscretions of her private tutor, teacher, and mentor. When he was confronted with these allegations, he didn't deny them and was prepared to face the consequences of his actions. He was told to leave the school.

Thoughts of Marie tormented my dreams. We shape-shifted
and entered each other's bodies. Not one, but two Mr Andrew Blacks savagely penetrated us. My subconscious mind went crazy trying to seal the gap between the man I fantasized about and the monster he was. How could I have been consumed by passion and yearning for this man? My world began to split from the one in which I was living, separated by an imperceptible seam.

I tore out the soiled pages from my diary. Purified of all evidence of weakness and failure, lean with virgin pages and perfect white grids drawn with sleek blue lines, my calorie diary had been there all along. Faithful. Dependable. Unstoppable.

I separated my bloated toes over the filmy window and saw the needle tremor at my inhalation of hope, then settle on the 140 mark. I hopped off the bathroom scale and stared at the instrument in disbelief. I readjusted it, turning the sensitive dial back and forth, zeroing the needle perfectly, then stepped back on and held my breath, as though a pound or two would magically vanish from sucking air into my lungs. Air is air. Flesh is flesh. One hundred and forty pounds of it.

It was just weeks before graduation, and I had never been this heavy. I had never been so depressed. The logical solution? Lose weight. Get lighter. Feel better. Somewhere along the way, all other desires had fallen away. No longer was it important to be brainy or beautiful or fair. The pursuit of beauty was pedestrian, and having a fair complexion was as possible as growing a moustache; I could not make myself white any more than I
could become a boy. I formed a single-minded obsession with my weight and a desperate need to arrest time itself. Because in time, I would be a grownup woman.

One hundred and forty was the heaviest I would allow myself to be. There would be less of me from here on. Less flesh. More time.

I slipped the dress over my up-stretched arms in the Bonimart fitting room, but it stopped at my 36D chest, and the puffy satin sleeves hung there, flapping over my face. There was no zipper or hook to release me and let the dress fall as it was meant to; the designer made this for a flat-chested girl and not a fully endowed female.

I faced the mirror. A pink blimp reflected back at me.

Mother tapped on the door. “So? How is it? Let me see.”

“No!” I begged her. She came in anyway and scanned my figure. Her eyes brightened. “Lila, you look so beautiful. Like a fairy tale princess!”

On graduation day in the school auditorium, the graduates lined up, giddy for their moment of stardom and eager for their rolled-up, ribbon-tied prize. As I approached the stage, I kept repeating, like a prayer, “I want this to mean something. I want this to mean something.” I had made the honour roll and had top marks in literature. For that I was proud. But pride was overshadowed by shame over the digits on the scale.

In the crowd of parents, I spotted the round brown face of my mother among the wash of white. Dad was positioned on the aisle with his new camera. My legs and arms quivered and trembled like jelly, but I moved forward involuntarily, an actress in a drama who seemed to have been wrongly cast. What was I graduating from? Or to?

We students were then ushered from the auditorium and out onto the lawn under the wide poplars and ancient oak trees. A lazy golden light cascaded over me as Dad positioned me for a picture. Click. My eyes blinked as the shutter did. Both the camera and I conspired to capture the truest expression of what that moment felt like: a very bad picture.

At the prom, the “ladies” were cupcake-coloured in frilly frocks while the “gentlemen” wore black tuxes. Bubbly in flute glasses was served to us as we entered Auberge La Comtesse, a restaurant known to host everything from proms to wedding receptions to the occasional wake. I was dateless, wearing a powder-blue chiffon dress that Mother had stitched from a design I'd quickly sketched, and I'd also bought my own corsage. Some of the other students probably thought it was sad, but I feigned a smug, superior attitude.

After the formal dinner and dance, most of us wound up in a basement at a house party. Immaturity inevitably cracked through the crust of sophistication as some of the kids indulged in spectacular binges of booze and pot. Inevitably, up-dos came undone, and lipstick got smeared across boys' cheeks. I sat quiet and dangerously sober on an orange beanbag chair, sipping diet soda. The faerie squirmed inside the translucent walls of her chrysalis.

A heavy foreboding made the summer heat worse. The jaws of September, two months away, would swallow me into the belly of an expectant, fruitful future. I packed away the scale, unable to face the digits that climbed despite weighing myself each day at exactly the same time and in the same way—necessarily naked, bowels empty, ravenously hungry, and angry at myself for not trying harder.

I distributed my résumé to clothing stores and fast food chains for a chance at my first summer job. The best I could come up with was cleaning the salad bar at a local restaurant, a better job than any faerie could hope for. I refilled the little baskets with chopped carrots and cabbage, wiped Thousand Island and oily French dressing off the counter, and polished off the smudges made by hungry customers on the sneeze guard. It was a simple, noble job, if mind-numbing, and it was my saving grace from the mental gymnastics I'd been performing since graduation. The hours of scheduled routine were a welcomed respite from myself.

After work, I'd meet Mina at the tennis court to play a few rounds until suppertime. From across the court I gazed at my little sister. Her white boy shorts sat on narrow hips, exposing her trim, dark-caramel midriff. A mango-green bandana stretched across her firm, full breasts. She sprang forward on the court with assurance and nimble athleticism and swung her racket from muscled brown shoulders, strong from summers spent swimming and winters shovelling. At fifteen, she was eager to
part with childhood and experience the freedoms and pleasures of adulthood. I seemed only to become rounder, softer, sadder. We were bonded by blood but separated by nature.

Outside of the routine, I existed in a state of restlessness that I could not work off with a brisk jog or evening bike ride. When the feeling became unbearable, I retreated to my bed to contain my trembling limbs, like a pupa wound up in bedding. With a soft ripping sound, the skin of my cocoon tore as the faerie began her escape. Time slowed and the heavy would soon be light.

It was the Monday morning of the week before I was to start college. I awoke with a burning impulse to step on the scale. I didn't feel physically different, but something felt odd, as though I'd undergone an internal, molecular realignment. The needle settled on 112. I zeroed it obsessively, the musician tuning her precious instrument, but it was not off-key. Hidden in my billowy T-shirts and baggy trousers, I hadn't realized that I'd lost weight. Apart from a diligent duty to my calorie diary, I had made no deliberate effort to lose weight. Not even the daily rounds of tennis with Mina could account for this drastic weight loss. Nor had I abstained from Mother's Peak Freans. I could think of only one explanation: the persistent and petulant magic of melancholy, which burns more calories per hour than a workout or military drill, because unlike a rigorous thirty-minute cardio routine, it operates relentlessly. It makes the heart beat faster and harder night and day, asleep or awake, dead or alive.

On the first day of college, I weighed exactly ninety-nine pounds. My dedication to my calorie diary was finally working like a charm. My heartbeat accelerated, time slowed down, and nature began to relinquish her hold on me. I was euphoric. My clothes slipped over me like a breeze, and without the cumbersome folds of flesh, there was space for air, for wind. My feet were parting from the earth. The walls of the chrysalis disintegrated. The faerie slowly spread her raw young wings. She was free. She was me.

11
. Size Zero

When I stepped off the bus on the first day of classes, the flurry of activity overwhelmed me. I wanted to die at the sight of all the confident young women and men who eagerly flooded in and out of the main campus building. They were so gorgeous. (And I was not.) They were bright. (And I could never be.) They seemed so eager. (And I just wanted to run away.) As students brushed past me, I took out my camera, put it to my face, and looked at the same scene. Through the magic of refraction, the campus winked at me and beckoned me forward. My camera was a second set of wings.

I was majoring in science—because that's what was expected of the “smart kids.” The tedious formulas and calculations in chemistry class made sense only if they served me in the science of losing weight. By the middle of the first semester, I weighed ninety pounds. For that I gave myself a good grade.

By October, ochre and gold leaves hung off branches like toddlers clinging to their mothers' warm thighs. Autumn had only begun, but the winter-like air settled early into my bones. I secretly reserved a spot by a generous window in the depths of the library, a secluded and quiet place to hoard the sunlight and allow its warmth to sink into my tissue. During class breaks, I completed assignments and pondered over formulas, theorems, and equations until my head throbbed. In this private spot, my
body withered from the world, and no one questioned why I dozed so much, why my belly growled so often, and why I wore so many layers of clothes. I flipped through pages of textbooks wearing gloves, and sat on a folded towel to prevent the wood from wearing against my bones and leaving bruises on my buttocks.

Halloween came just in time. I concealed myself in a cocoon of bulky wool sweaters and doubled-up underclothing. Hollow pockets of air filled my loose jeans. I shuddered in pain as the breeze bit into my bones while I waited for the bus with other students whose animated conversations no longer penetrated my consciousness. At lunch time, I'd catch girls from my chemistry class staring surreptitiously at me in the cafeteria with looks of mild revulsion and pity. They sat at the opposite end of the room, whispering about me, I was sure of it. I curled over my bowl of clear broth, first embarrassed, then angry. Finally, indifference overcame me as I gave myself over to the faerie, who remained deeply committed to her science project.

The science project results were progressing quickly. My body was mutating. One day, I caught my reflection in a window and didn't recognize the figure reflected back to me. I lifted my camera and took a picture of this creature with bulging eyes and sunken cheeks, insect-like, fey. Faerie existed. The burdensome identity I had carried for so many years had finally withered away, and the faerie had taken me over.

By early November, I weighed eighty-three pounds. My heartbeat slowed and my blood cooled. Tears no longer flowed. The faerie didn't worry about the future, didn't dwell over the
past, didn't fear who she was becoming and what she was going to do. And she never thought about Mr Black.

My routine was carefully planned and strategic. I had to devise ways to bypass Mother and her food, for her maternal drive had been kicked into high gear. Zipping through the house to the front door never worked. As the faerie slipped out of the bedroom and fluttered toward the door, there was Mother blocking her in the hall. “No you don't,” she'd say. Faerie threw a tantrum, hitting and flapping her wings in protest, but mother blew the weightless creature right back into the kitchen.

I woke up each morning at six, did sit-ups and squats, weighed myself, showered, drank black coffee, skipped breakfast, argued with Mother about skipping breakfast, took the lunch she had prepared, and avoided her pained eyes as she asked me to promise her to eat everything. These impossible lunches—sandwiches, containers of yogurt, bananas, cookies, and juice—ended up in the trash can at school. At the end of the day, the evening meal and Mother were waiting with greasy chicken curry, basmati rice,
aloo gobi
, two buttered
rotis,
and more pressure to eat every single morsel. I complained about the grease and made declarations about what I had eaten that day.

“Everything?” she insisted.

I'd show her the empty containers, dumping loose crumbs from the bottom of my lunch bag to convince her. But she
could see that her child was starving to death, and she was absolutely powerless to stop it.

At seventy-eight pounds, I no longer had a period. Where my breasts once were, only an outline of my ribcage appeared. Any soft roundness about my thighs had vanished magically, and my brittle hair lay in dull clumps, which I strung into a thin braid.

My mother dragged me from doctor to doctor trying to make meaning of my insanity. The doctors prodded and poked, asked pointless questions, and confirmed I was suffering from “poor appetite.” All I needed was to eat “more protein,” “more iron,” “more calories.” Mother took their prescriptive advice and got busy in the kitchen cooking red meat (no more feeble chicken curry). Meat would be my medicine, she decided, but I declared myself a vegetarian.

“Anorexia nervosa.” The foreign words rolled off Dr Fortin's tongue. The doctor looked at me from behind his enormous desk in his office at Saint Catherine's Hospital. With hands clasped in prayer, he asked in a deep voice, “Do you know what that is?”

“Yeah, I know. And so?”

He reached for a pen and pressed the tip against the desk as if to assert his point. “
That
i
s
what you have.”

“Is it serious?”

With a slow blink, he nodded. “Over my thirty years of practice, I have seen young ladies like you die from this, and not in a pretty way. Do you want to die?”

I froze and stared, shifted my body away, and inwardly rolled my eyes. Did he think I was stupid enough to admit that and get myself dragged into his asylum? I got up and left his office. Of
course I had read about anorexia in
Seventeen
, in tabloids with scandalously bony starlets, had heard of a few who'd died from it and others who'd emerged from the rabbit hole in one piece, healthy and scarily plump. I had nothing to do with
that
diagnosis. I just didn't care. If death didn't scare me, then nothing could. Not caring was my middle finger to medical intervention and indeed to Mother Nature.

I sat in the lounge watching the doctor speak privately to Mother. “No beds yet,” and “You will hear from me soon,” he'd said, among other things. She nodded a great deal, shook his hands with both of hers, and bid him goodbye. She strode toward me. I stood up, but she didn't stop and continued past me, out the door. When I turned to look back, the doctor was gone. The office was empty. No Mother, just me and my impotent middle finger.

On our way home, she didn't look at me or say a word. Was she giving up on me? The streets glistened with steely blue wetness that caused cars to scream eerily as they drove by. When we reached the house, Mother stomped up to the door and walked in as though I wasn't there. She didn't switch on the lights but went straight through the dark hallway to her bedroom and shut the door.

I passed the night in an abyss of longing. I had rejected my mother in childhood and built a fortress inside me. Now, I think, she was protecting herself; any day I could be dead.

A week later, in mid-sentence while I spoke to a cashier in the supermarket, my heart stopped. I fell to the floor and all went black.