Family Pictures (3 page)

She was hopeless. Sylvie wasn’t sure what else she could do without Eve’s permission, and so she did nothing, hoping that Eve would turn a corner and, if not put on weight, at least stop losing.

She does, in many ways, seem happier, more confident. She has a busy social life, and perhaps it is just Sylvie worrying too much. Clothilde is delighted with Eve’s new tiny frame, giving her a pile of French designer dresses from the sixties that she had never thrown out, which Eve had leaped on delightedly, pronouncing them “so
Mad Men
!”

The house is silent but for the sounds of cicadas outside, as Sylvie stares disconsolately out the window, desperately missing the nights when all Eve wanted to do was snuggle on the sofa with her mother, sharing a huge bowl of popcorn as they watched a movie.

Now it is just Sylvie. Sighing, she moves to the family room and pushes the sofa to one side with her hip, moving the armchairs until she is breathless with the exertion, standing back to admire the results.

She goes to the living room and picks up pillows, a throw, some candleholders, moving back to the family room to accessorize, wishing Mark were here to see it. Or Eve. Or … anyone.

She has already had a glass of wine, and refuses to have another by herself—a self-imposed discipline from which she will not waver—and wanders through the house blankly, thinking of people to call, dismissing them almost as quickly as she thinks of them.

Sitting on the sofa, she turns on the television, hoping for a movie, but instead flicks, resting for only a few seconds, always convinced there will be something better, not finding anything she particularly wants to watch.

She spends two or three minutes watching bored housewives rail at one another, knowing that these petty catfights amongst women are almost always the result of conniving directors.

Sylvie is bored. Not bored enough to have a catfight with one of the neighbors—not yet—but she can understand how your mind focuses on all the wrong things when there aren’t enough of the right.

It is time for her to do
something.
She can’t sit around doing nothing for the rest of her life; she can’t end up like one of these women. She has an idea, one she hasn’t shared with Mark. It’s 7:45
P.M.
here; 10:45
P.M.
there. If not out with colleagues at a work event, he is almost certainly asleep, but she wants to hear his voice, needs him to ease her loneliness, wants to talk to him about this business she has been thinking about.

She moves to the “Favorites” screen on the iPhone and taps his name, settling in for a long chat.

No answer. She sends a text. Nothing. She tries to forget about it, for this is not abnormal, but tonight she wants to talk to him. She reads on the porch, despite her difficulty in concentrating—she cannot stop wondering where he is, determining not to call him again.

Upstairs in bed, she calls again. And again. And again.

She falls asleep, but awakes in the early hours.

She calls again. It is beginning to feel like a compulsion, and even though she attempts to tell herself he must have left his phone in the office, which he so often does, the possibility of going back to sleep is now out of the question.

4

Sylvie

“Where were you?” Sylvie’s voice is a whine. She immediately corrects it, hating herself for sounding needy. For being needy. For being up half the night thinking the worst.

“Honey!” Mark’s laughing voice is instantly reassuring. “I forgot to charge the phone and it ran out of juice. I had no idea you were calling until I left for work this morning. Is everything okay?”

“No. I mean, yes,” Sylvie says. “What if it wasn’t? What if it was an emergency?”

“But it wasn’t. I’m sorry, sweetie. Were you having a bad night?”

Sylvie, curled up in bed like a little girl, says yes in a quiet voice.

“My poor love. Were you feeling lonely?” Mark’s voice is so instantly soothing and calm, Sylvie knows she was being ridiculous, knows her imagined fantasies of the night before—Mark in the arms of another woman—were fueled by the darkness, have no basis in any kind of reality. “I am so sorry,” he says, and Sylvie hears that he is. “I wish I were there with you now.”

“I do too,” Sylvie says quietly. “I hate the weekends on my own, and this weekend is Angie’s party, and I so don’t want to go without you.”

“You won’t have to,” Mark says.

“But I do,” Sylvie sighs. “She’s my closest friend, and even though she knows how I hate going to anything alone, she also told me if I’m not there, she’ll never forgive me.”

“So I’ll come with.” The smile in Mark’s voice is obvious.

“What!” Sylvie sits up. “You’re coming home?”

“I just booked. I’ll be home for dinner.”

“Mark! Really?”

“I miss you too much.”

“Oh, Mark! You just made me so happy!”

“Good. I love hearing you say that. It makes me feel loved.”

“You are loved! So much! Thank you!”

“Sweetie, I told you I’m going to try to make changes. I get it. Eve’s our only child and she’s leaving soon, and I know how hard this is for you.”

“It’s easier when you’re around.”

“You know, we haven’t talked about this for a while, but I think it’s time you started thinking about maybe doing something. The part-time job was hard because of your mother, but you need to—”

“—occupy my mind,” Sylvie finishes for him. “I agree one hundred percent. I can’t do anything full-time, but I have this idea and I wanted to talk it over with you.”

“Something creative?”

Sylvie smiles, remembering back to when she was young, a graduate of Parsons, when all she ever wanted was to be a textile designer. She worked for a well-known designer for a while, until Eve was born and she had an excuse to leave, for she had had enough of doing all the designs, receiving none of the glory.

Since then, she has only dabbled in creative things. If she sees a pot she loves, she will buy clay and re-create it, or some version of it, herself.

She has hand-blocked sheets of linen, turning them into beautiful curtain panels, has helped friends design labels, stationery, even gardens.

Creatively, there is little she cannot do, but she has never asked for money for it, has regarded it as an occasional hobby.

“It has to be creative,” Mark continues. “You’re the most talented woman I know.”

“I’ll tell you all about it when I see you,” Sylvie says, her anxiety long since forgotten. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

As she walks into the bathroom with a smile on her face, she wraps her arms around her body and hugs herself. This is not a man having an affair. This is a man who is, just as she has always thought, overwhelmed with work, but there is no question that this is a man deeply in love with his wife.

5

Eve

It was not that long ago that Eve was at the center of her group of girls, giggling and whispering as the boys attempted to show off with ever-more-elaborate spins, dives, and jumps into the pool, the girls rating them on a scale of one to ten.

The girls still huddle together, on a chaise longue, leaning on one another’s legs, arms, heads leaning on shoulders, intermittently watching the boys while Claudia balances a MacBook on her knees as they crowd their heads together to chat with various people scattered around other homes in La Jolla, pouting and sticking teenage tongues out for photographs.

Except for Eve. Eve, who was once at the center, sits apart, her jacket pulled tightly round her body, a towel around her shoulders and one around her legs, teeth chattering with cold.

She watches and laughs when she is brought into the conversation, but things are different now, and she isn’t sure why, nor how to get back there. She doesn’t feel like the same person she was, before this crazy diet. Before, she was on the inside, but now she feels as if she is always on the outside, watching everyone else being normal, having fun, wanting to join them, but it is as if she has forgotten how.

She used to be so carefree; now she carries the weight of the world on her shoulders. The pressure of her senior year, of leaving home, getting into the right school, even being allowed to go to the school of her choice.

It all feels too much. She was always desperate to grow up, but now that she is on the threshold, it is terrifying. Choosing not to eat, controlling her food, makes her feel safe—superior, even. It is something she, and only she, has absolute control over.

It started off innocently. It truly was an attempt to lose weight, to try to get the boy she had always wanted.

AJ was, she had always thought, entirely unobtainable, too good-looking, too popular, which didn’t stop him being the subject of her fantasies throughout middle school.

A passing comment to Claudia—he thought Eve would be really hot if she lost weight and got thin—set Eve off on the beginning of the change. AJ was supposed to have noticed, but his family moved to England when she was just eight pounds down, and that was it. The beginning of the change.

There was a brief snapshot in time when she felt she had a good body, proudly showed it off in a striped bikini from Urban Outfitters, not bothering to cover up to go inside and grab a drink, or walk to the other side of the pool.

As a young teenager, she’d felt too self-consciously large to be comfortable, and now, at seventeen, she is still too self-consciously … wrong.

Everyone is telling her she is too thin: her mother, her friends, the parents of her friends, and there is a part of her brain that is able to acknowledge that. For a few seconds. It is fleeting, and quickly replaced with the thought that there are still ten more pounds to go. That she still isn’t happy, and if she loses ten more pounds, then she will be perfect, and with perfection comes happiness.

On a low wooden table by the chaise are bowls of chips, guacamole, salsa. A bag of popcorn lies on its side, spilling onto the floor, a plastic container of chocolate chip cookies half-empty, soda cans.

Eve stares at the chocolate chip cookies. They are the ones she used to love. The soft, chewy kind. Buttery, moist, these were the ones her mom would always keep in the pantry, the ones Eve would steal when no one was looking. She can’t take her eyes off them, imagines biting into them, feeling the familiar sweetness on her tongue, the sweetness of her childhood. Everything around her fades as she stares at the cookies, wanting to cry.

Her stomach growls. She is so hungry. She has eaten two egg whites today. This is her latest decision. She read somewhere that a singer, whose weight famously went up and down, lost by eating only egg whites. The singer would eat twenty at a time, but Eve feels more in control when she is challenging herself by eating as little as possible. Two egg whites felt like too many. Tomorrow she is planning to have one.

But those cookies are overpowering. Unable to stop herself, she stands, walking over to the food.

“I’m just going to clean up a bit,” she says, knowing they will tease her, for she has always been a control freak.

“Don’t!” Claudia says. “You’re crazy! Leave it. We’ll all do it later.”

“You know me.” Eve smiles. “Nothing gives me more pleasure than cleaning.” Claudia laughs, shaking her head with incomprehension as Eve picks up the spilled popcorn bag and cookies.

No one watches, no one is paying attention as Eve heads inside, her heart pounding, standing at the kitchen counter so she can check no one comes in, no one can see.

She eats the first cookie, savoring it, closing her eyes, unable to believe she has refrained from sugar, from anything this good for such a long time. The second, then third, are barely chewed before being swallowed. Eve eats as if she is starving—which, of course, she is.

Seconds later, she stares at the empty container, moving quickly to bury it at the bottom of the trash can, piling newspapers on top of it to hide it. Without thinking, she moves silently into the pantry, pulling down packets of cookies, snack bars, consuming them without thought or taste, gulping them down until her stomach starts to hurt.

She steps back, horrified, racing to the kitchen to find trash bags to hide the detritus of this sudden binge, filled with shame and self-loathing.

There isn’t any question as to what she should do now. The disgust she feels is too much to bear, and there is only one way to get rid of it, and get rid of it she must.

Once the trash bag is filled, Eve takes it outside, pushes it to the bottom of the can, then locks herself in the bathroom, kneeling by the tub. She hasn’t ever done this before, but she knows what to do.

She puts her finger in her mouth, reaching for the back of her throat, gagging only slightly. She tries again, panicking, for this food must come out, she doesn’t know what she will do if she cannot purge this food out of her body.

She tries again, going deeper, scratching the back of her throat, using her other hand to massage her stomach as she thinks of the sugar and fat coating her insides, and then, suddenly, her stomach spasms as a wave of chocolate and sugar comes up, followed by another, and another.

Her finger goes down her throat twice more, until she is absolutely sure there is nothing left; then she lays her head on the toilet seat in exhausted relief. Please God, she thinks, don’t let me do that again. The food she ate tonight was disgusting, but at least it’s out of her body. She will never do that again, never eat so much she has to make herself vomit. Tomorrow, as punishment, she will drink lemon water all day. Not even one egg white. Nothing.

Tomorrow she will get right back on track.

6

Sylvie

Sylvie has spent the afternoon making date and pecan meringues, a favorite of both Mark’s and Eve’s. She bakes when she is happy, is hopeful this will tempt Eve to actually eat, for who could not be tempted after walking in the door and being hit with the smell of cinnamon, vanilla, and sugar.

The text comes in just before two thirty. “I’m going to Jenna’s house. I might sleepover.”

“Papa’s home tonight,” Sylvie, disappointed, texts back immediately. “You need to be home.”