Chapter Two
Opening the back door with my foot proves to be difficult. My hands are full, I have a poor sense of balance, and I’d overestimated my dexterity.
“What are you doing?” Joy asks.
My foot is raised. I’m trying to use my big toe to hook the doorknob.
“I trapped a spider,” I explain. It had been crawling across our kitchen counter, so I’d caught it under a teacup. I’d slid a sheet of newspaper under the lip to trap it so I could free it outside.
Joy opens the door for me.
“Thank you.” I carry the cup toward the dock. That’s where I always free spiders. There are lots of them weaving their webs by the water. They catch the midges, flies, mosquitoes, and grow to be very fat.
After I place the cup down and remove the newspaper, the spider remains motionless, assessing her surroundings. I watch her until she feels safe enough to run from the cup and scurry between a gap in the wood.
I stay at the end of the swaying dock, holding my empty teacup, looking out at the moving water. The wet wood beneath me groans and creaks. The air smells like algae and damp grass. The lake is thawing from winter. We’ll be swimming in a few months.
I went about a decade without swimming. I didn’t like how I looked in a bathing suit. I was insecure about my weight. I was very thin, but I didn’t see myself that way; I only see it now in old photos. My gaunt face. My knobby, angular legs. There was a sickliness to my skin. I looked tired.
I used to weigh all my food and track my calories.
I would make stir-fries or salads for dinner, serve Ben’s with meat and carbs, and plate myself lettuce, bell peppers, and broccoli.
Back then, I claimed pickles were my favorite food, but they were just low calorie.
I subsisted on pickles, Diet Coke, sugar-free Jell-O, and zucchini noodles, until I lapsed and binge ate.
My mom was always fixated on weight. In middle school, I hadn’t grown to my full height, and there was a two-year period when I was, as my mother would say, “chunky.” By high school I’d thinned out, but my mom always referred to my middle school body as my natural state.
Mom said I’d inherited my “weight issues” from her, and I’d need to stay on top of my diet or I’d become fat.
We weighed ourselves together every morning.
I never acknowledged binge eating to my mom, or to Ben.
It was a secret. I did it privately. I shoved wrappers into the bowels of our garbage cans, claiming I had no clue what happened to the missing food, or that it had rotted so I’d tossed it.
I remember feeling my stomach distend, spending days after with this nagging voice in my head calling me fat and ugly.
I used to think that wanting to be thin was about wanting to be beautiful, but I know better now.
When I realized I wasn’t straight, I became privy to something.
I know the secret. I know how it feels to be attracted to women.
There’s nothing unattractive about women having fat on their bodies.
There’s also nothing unattractive about women having asymmetrical features, wrinkles, broad shoulders, cellulite, or any of the other qualities I’d been led to believe were ugly.
Gay women know something, this secret, that dissolves some of the toxic, oppressive lens girls are taught to see the world through.
The truth is that everyone is actually very beautiful.
I wasn’t conscious of it, but I wanted to be skinny for the same reasons I wanted to have a boyfriend.
Joy is shouting at me from the back door. The water is too loud. I can’t hear her clearly.
“What’d you say?” I yell.
“Sophie’s in labor!”
I spread butter over sourdough bread. Joy is lying down in the next room, watching her phone for updates from her sister. I’ve got the kettle on. I’m making us tea and toast.
I look down at the butter melting into the crevices in the bread.
A voice in my mind begins tallying the calories, as well as the calories in the honey I’ll spoon into our tea, and the pear I’ve cut into quarters.
I haven’t intentionally counted calories in years, but there’s still the voice in my mind that does it against my will.
I feel a twinge of guilt whenever I eat anything.
I know this isn’t logical, that there’s nothing wrong with eating.
I have to eat. I’m a living organism. It’s healthy to eat.
But this voice has been wired into me. I hear it on my birthday when I eat cake.
That’s bad for you. I hear it when I pack a lunch for work.
That’s seven hundred calories. I bite an apple.
Good, that’s not too bad for you. I eat another.
Too much sugar today. I worry I’m going to be an old lady clocking the calories in prune juice, unable to eat anything without feeling slightly bad about it.
The kettle is whistling. I pour hot water over loose valerian root tea, hover over our mugs and watch the water darken as the tea steeps.
I hear that same voice when I think of Ben.
The expectations I used to have for myself are so ingrained in me that I can’t mute them now.
There’s this relic in the back of my mind of who I used to be, who is so disappointed in me.
She wants me to be a thin lady with a sweet husband, who counts the almonds she eats, owns an SUV, and questions why homosexuals need a parade.
I hear her when I’m filling out medical forms that ask for my husband’s name.
When a hairstylist asks me what my husband does for work.
When I’m in the card aisle of a store and see the section titled FOR HIM, or when I visit my Catholic family.
I know I shouldn’t feel guilty about being gay, but I can’t turn it off, and it’s intermingled with more complicated feelings I have for Ben.
Ben was a nice person. He had hopes and dreams for his life. I told him I wanted the same things he did, then pulled the rug out from under him. I know I shouldn’t feel guilty about putting butter on bread, or honey in tea, but I think I should feel guilty about Ben.
When I grip onto Joy, my fingers make indents in her flesh like she’s made of warmed beeswax. She looks like a neoclassical stone sculpture, or a painting of Venus.
The first time I had sex with a guy, I laid on my back solely because it made my stomach look flatter.
When I had sex with men, I made movements as if I were being filmed.
I felt disconnected from my body. I had this sense that there was a harsh, gremlin-like spectator in the room.
He was there to point out my imperfections, and for some reason, I wanted him to like me.
I often flinched when men touched me, not because I was a closeted lesbian, but because I was worried the fat on my body would yield unflatteringly, or they might notice a missed patch of hair on the back of my calves, or a scar.
I don’t think about how I look when I have sex with Joy.
There’s no gremlin in the room, and if he were there, I’d tell him to get lost. We don’t move together like we’re being filmed.
We move together like we’re present and comfortable in our weird human bodies.
We’re often fumbling, complimenting everything about each other, and laughing.
I have never looked at her and thought anything negative about her appearance, and I would stomp on a gremlin if he suggested there was something wrong with how she looked.
Still, when Joy and I have sex, I feel this twinge of guilt. It’s like when I eat.
“The baby is missing fingers.”
Sophie gave birth. Joy has her on speakerphone. She and I are in bed. We just got out of the shower. Our bodies are red and radiating heat.
Joy grips my knee. “What? Is the baby okay? Are you okay?”
Joy’s been anxious about Sophie since she told us she was pregnant.
Joy is always worried about everyone’s health.
She fusses when I have chills or a headache.
I take ibuprofen the way a person harboring a secret pill addiction might: behind a locked door from a bottle that I keep hidden under our bathroom sink.
Joy recently had a rash, and it consumed her.
Not physically, it was localized to a small area by her elbow, but mentally, it engulfed her.
Our house was teeming with ointments and lotions.
She went to the doctor repeatedly. She took pictures of the rash to track how it was healing.
She made me look at the photos and give her reassurance.
She sent me so many pictures, my iPhone keeps generating curated slideshows of the rash paired with piano music, titled MEMORIES.
Joy phoned Sophie chronically throughout her pregnancy to ask how she was feeling. Whenever Sophie mentioned she felt nauseous, her ankles were swollen, her muscles were sore, there was a metallic taste in her mouth, Joy googled what it meant.
“Does she have gestational diabetes?”
“What if she’s anemic?”
“We’re okay,” Sophie says. “They said it’s some congenital limb malformation. They didn’t see it in the anatomy scan, but the baby only has three fingers.”
“Total?” I ask.
Joy nudges me.
“No, on the left hand. The right hand has all five.”
I look at my hands and consider which fingers would be the most inconvenient to lose. The thumb, probably. Is that considered a finger? If not, the pointer finger would be the biggest loss. Though I think the middle finger could take over the pointer finger’s job if it were missing.
“Which fingers are missing?” I ask.
Joy nudges me again. Her eyes are wide with concern. “What’s the baby’s name?”
I put a hand on her head. She finds it calming when I play with her hair, so I let strands fall between my fingers.
“We haven’t named her yet,” Sophie says. “We have a few names picked out, but none of them really suit her.”
“It’s a girl?” Joy asks.
“Yes.”
I smile. Joy wanted it to be a girl.
She squeezes my arm, happy. “That’s exciting. I thought she would be a girl. Remember I said—”