Jala Pfaff
Fine Bones
It started when she overheard her parents laughingly, gently
commenting to one another that she was “getting a little
pudgy.” That the baby fat hadn’t gone away and in fact
now seemed to be multiplying. And The contrast!, they
chuckled, with our fine-boned family! They thought she was
out of the house, but in fact she had been in her bedroom, admiring
her developing looks, turning sideways to the mirror to appreciate
her growing breasts and practicing different kinds of smiles to find
which ones made her look fun-loving, which made her look innocent,
which most enticing. There was a square of sheer fabric, an
abandoned silk scarf of her mother’s, that she liked to imagine
was a sexy, skimpy dress, as she tied it around her smooth-skinned
body in different permutations. Her cheeks burned at her parents’
words and she turned horrified eyes to the mirror. She was appalled.
How could she have missed the obvious?
She was fourteen.
After that she swore off hamburgers and fries, then chocolate, one of
her greatest pleasures. Soon, as she saw the first pounds come off,
verified by the scale the family rarely used and which she had
confiscated, she began eating only cottage cheese and salad. And
then just salad. She felt guilty every time she cheated by adding
too much dressing, and made sure to compensate for it later, working
off the extra calories by jumping rope in the basement on the
unyielding concrete floor whenever her mom and dad were away. The
first few times, she put on her usual gym shorts and T-shirt, but
eventually began wearing more and more clothing during her workouts,
to increase her rate of sweating. She’d learned that if she
perspired enough, she might weigh up to half a pound less after a
session. She timed her exercise to the minute, never allowing
herself to quit before the timer dinged, no matter how exhausted she
felt. She knew from quickly-gained experience that the triumph she
would feel each time she reached the goal would be worth it. And if
she managed to go five minutes beyond the required time, she would
reward herself with a few rice crackers, the ones with no added fat
that were 25 calories for three. If she ended up eating six or nine,
she despised herself the rest of the day. Once, she ate them all—the
whole package—cramming them into her mouth three at a time,
crumbs flying. She cried, then, for undoing so much progress.
When her parents were around, she limited herself to an hour of
exercise, sensing that three hours might be seen as a little odd.
Her parents were pleased with her new “health kick,” and
didn’t notice their daughter’s new choice of big, baggy
sweatsuits, or the way she fidgeted constantly, making sure to shake
one foot at the ankle at all times when seated (she’d read in a
magazine that this could burn up to fifty extra calories an hour).
They didn’t ask why she had taken to chewing gum seemingly all
the time. And pretty soon the salad dressing was off-limits too.
As her collarbones began to show, her hipbones to hollow, she started
refusing offers from her friends to cruise the mall; she was too fat
to be out in public. Her moderately generous weekly allowance no
longer went to CDs, glossy magazines and lip gloss, but instead to a
more precise scale, a superior apparatus which could weigh her to the
quarter ounce. When she was able to count her ribs, she refused to
participate in gym class anymore, because Ms. Robbins, the teacher,
had decided she needed to go back to wearing shorts and a T-shirt
like everyone else. So she started claiming that she was having
constant female problems, hinting at a period that just wouldn’t
stop. In reality, she hadn’t had her menses since her
original, steady weight of 135 hit 97.
It didn’t help matters when she went to Costa Rica on her high
school field trip and jealously observed all the tall, skinny Dutch
people inhabiting the country, blessed by God, effortlessly slim. It
was just her luck she wasn’t born an ectomorph, and had to work
harder than other people at dieting. The students were there
ostensibly to learn about and admire a nation that had dedicated one
quarter of its total area to biological conservation, containing six
percent of the earth’s life forms, but she saw no wonders of
nature, only the abhorrent veneer of grease coating the banana chips
and the gleam of oil flavoring the rice and beans.
She had begun feeling more energetic than ever, even while strange
long, downy hairs grew on her stick-like forearms. It was a small
price to pay for the power of controlling the scale, forcing the
numbers down ever lower. The constant gnawing companion of hunger
had finally befriended her, and she reveled in the pain. She was so
grotesquely obese that she refused to wear shorts or a swimsuit
during the entire week-long class trip, and was only happy when the
group went up to a higher elevation and she could wear her
sweatshirts and a coat. She was chilly all the time anyway, even at
the humid Caribbean coast, so she wouldn’t have worn a tank top
even if she’d packed one. She never undressed anymore in front
of her few remaining friends, but they frequently scrutinized her in
her jeans—she was wearing a size 3 now, sometimes even a 1—and
gave her a thumbs-up, moaning how jealous they were. She knew they
were just humoring her and would never tell her the truth: that she
was grossly overweight, a whale, a rival to that hideous man who’d
had to be buried in a piano case. She appreciated their tact, how
they didn’t want to make her feel bad. They were good friends.
Her first time in the hospital—her gym teacher had finally
called her parents behind her back—the nurses checked in the
girls’ rooms twice a day for hidden or hoarded food; the
patients had to get more and more innovative. (Access to the toilets
and windows was, of course, barred.) They were entrusted to eat
their tray-delivered food on their own, to encourage
self-responsibility, though they were threatened with intravenous
feeding—sugars and carbs, pure liquid calories—if
they didn’t show increasing weight gain. It wasn’t so
bad, being there. The worst thing was that the girls were never
allowed to look at the scale while being weighed. The nurses
literally blindfolded them. Once, she managed to peek out, and was
so horrified at the numbers that she decided the blindfold was
preferable. She, like all the other girls, made certain that she
showed only the bare minimum of weight gain required to avoid the IV.
She planned to increase her workouts to four hours as soon as she
got out.
They made all the incarcerated girls—and there was even one
boy, a thirteen year-old with both ears double-pierced—do a
ridiculous task during Understanding Social Context where they were
handed magic markers and had to stand in front of a long wall of
taped-up paper. They were told to draw an outline—at arm’s
length—of what they thought their actual body dimensions were,
of how much mass they consisted of, how much space they took up in
the world. All the girls’ drawings were two or three times as
wide as their near-skeletal bodies. When instructed to lean against
the wall and notice the discrepancy, none of the girls could see it,
knowing it for a trick the nurses were playing on them, the nurses
who wanted them to be fat, to be ugly. The nurses were jealous.
Her second time in the hospital, a new facility nearly three hours
away by car, things were stricter. Checked in at 86 pounds, she was
put in isolation, away from the other girls and their swapping of
calorie-burning secrets. She felt proud to have done it all with
willpower, with exercise, with mind over matter; she was pretty sure
she was the only one on the ward who wasn’t a bulimic. As far
as she was concerned, throwing up a meal you’d allowed yourself
to enjoy was cheating. She had no respect for the weight loss the
other girls had accomplished by that method. This time, the nurses
didn’t let her run in place, nor hide food in her underclothes
to dispose of later, as she’d done the last time whenever she
could get away with it. They watched her eat, supplemented her
regular food with the IV against her will, and forced her to sit
through two hours of private counseling every day with an overweight
woman who—didn’t they understand?—would never be
her role model.
But something worked. Later, thinking back, trying to recollect the
phrase or idea that had finally cracked her fortified mindset, she
could not remember anything in particular. But gradually, as her
hospital imprisonment continued and her weight slowly—and then,
frighteningly, more and more quickly—increased, she began to be
able to see things in a different light and think that maybe, just
maybe, she’d been on the wrong track, deluded, even a little
crazy. The doctor, a smiling, nondescript man, told her that now, at
a more appropriate weight, her muscles had ceased consuming
themselves and her brain was able to function properly again. When
her period returned, she almost cried. But she controlled the urge.
She still avoided mirrors, and looked firmly straight ahead when she
passed by a reflective storefront window. She wore the same jeans or
sweats, with big baggy plaid shirts, every day, braving her changing
room reflection as infrequently as possible. But she felt undeniably
better: her concentration was improved and the heart pains she’d
been experiencing had mostly gone away.
These days, she was able to eat again. Three meals a day. However,
in spite of religiously avoiding candy bars, ice cream or desserts,
her weight had actually boomeranged, and she now weighed more than
she ever had, apparently stuck at 149, some days even 150, once 150
and a quarter. It was only while going over her discharge papers
that they’d dared tell her that her metabolism would likely be
forever altered, out of whack, that her body would now be greedy,
would try to hoard calories, increase and expand its fat cells as a
defense against future privation. Her body, they told her, was
intelligent. It learned from the past.
She’d missed half a year of school. The hospital felt like
home; she would miss some of the nurses. For her birthday, alone
with just her parents and a nurse chaperone, she’d allowed
herself the sweetness of an apple.
She ate bread again now, and Triscuits with their surprisingly high
fat content, and baked potatoes with a touch of whipped butter
substitute. On her toast she spread the strawberry jam that had
always been her favorite. She drank the 2% milk her parents brought
home, and, occasionally, Cokes that weren’t sugar-free. Her
brain would scream danger, attempt to force her hands to ladle back
half of whatever portion she’d just placed on her plate, but
she tried her hardest to ignore it, as the counselors had taught.
Again and again she repeated the words in her mind: I am a person,
a whole person and not just a body to be judged, to be compared to
every other woman’s. She was proud of her progress, of her
ability to fight back when her instinct was still to skip the salad
dressing and to never finish the last bite of any meal. She ate
pairs of deviled eggs and a bowl of clam chowder. She consumed
moderate portions of roast beef. She ate a falafel wrap for dinner,
two tacos for lunch, a plate of pasta sometimes, once with a little
Alfredo sauce. She accepted sliced ham, sauteed broccoli, lemon sole
with shaved almonds. She exercised every day, but limited herself to
an hour.
Cheese, though—cheese was difficult. Tasting the smallest
possible wedges of cheddar, of Gouda or Jack, nibbling around the
shiny edges of the grilled cheese sandwiches her mother placed in
front of her with a hopeful look, she couldn’t stop thinking
about the fact that this substance she was so audaciously swallowing
consisted of more fat than protein. Camembert, Brie, Havarti—these
were simply not a possibility. And cooking oil—she was unable
to break the habit of measuring it out by the half-teaspoon: two fat
grams.
It took a while for her parents to stop worrying whether she was
eating enough, to relax the furrows between their brows, but
eventually, seeing that her weight was stabilized, they reverted to
being preoccupied with other things. She never told them how it had
all begun—their overheard comments—and they never asked.
If they discussed her now, it was behind firmly closed doors. They,
too, had had to go through the hospital counseling.
She finished high school a year behind her class, dismayed to see she
looked a little chubby in her graduation photos, and entered college.
On the whole, college was good for her, a better experience by far
than high school. There was more freedom, less peer pressure.
Sophomore year, her favorite class was art: life drawing, where, to
her great shock, models disrobed nonchalantly and struck impudent
poses, their naked skin gleaming in the spotlights. But after a
semester, she prided herself on being an old hand, on developing the
more exalted mind of the artist. She hardly noticed anymore that
these were strangers nude in front of her; rather, she began to
see—as her art teacher repeated incessantly they must—shapes,
light and shadow. Light and shadow, and planes. She began to think
that maybe she was good at this thing, really maybe very good, and
the occasional compliment from her instructor, a delicate, petite
woman, had her glowing the rest of the day, through her much duller
classes of East Asian History, of Geology and Poetry Survey. She was
happy when she made the decision to major in art. The only thing
that still disturbed her in class was the horror and shame of that
cottony white string that sometimes emerged from between the legs of
a female model.
She was thrilled to discover that her sculpture teacher would be the
same one who taught Life Drawing. She couldn’t wait to prove
herself to the sometimes reticent instructor in this new medium. She
had a confidence in her abilities now, and it fed her, nourished her
as nothing had before. The class would be working in water-based
clay, sculpting a torso from a live model, a young woman who, she
blushed to see, had actually been the student who’d stood two
easels away from her in Drawing. The model caught her studying her
features in surprise, and shrugged, smiling. “I need the
money,” she whispered. “Pretty easy money, you gotta
admit.”
When her sculpture was finished—a bit lopsided—she
enrolled in the next life drawing class, missing the praise that had
come her way for her charcoal sketches. The model was different each
Wednesday afternoon, nearly always a woman, though once there was a
man, a pale, feminine-looking man in his twenties without a hint of
body hair, a sleek albino seal. She chose the rear view to sketch
that day, to avoid looking at his bobbing, vulnerable-looking penis.
Though her periods had come back, her libido still had not.
By now she was so familiar with the teacher that she could almost
predict the exact moment—at least four times per class—when
the instructor would look about with dramatized dismay, tell them all
to stop immediately what they were doing, and to gather around
and look, really look, see with an artist’s eyes the
planes of the model’s body, the light caressing the
musculature, the shadow nestled along the bones. “This is
beautiful,” the teacher would murmur, “so beautiful. Do
you all see these planes, these fine bones? Do you?”
The instructor would gesture with her hand to the model’s
shoulder blades, her collarbone, her ankle, so close to the warm skin
that the model would shiver.
What she wouldn’t give to occupy the aesthetic, slender bodies
of the life models. Several more students also eventually decided to
model in exchange for a discount at registration, but no one ever
approached her and proposed such a thing. But it was no surprise:
you can’t have visible planes with pudge, she knew. It had
been a very long time since she’d seen the elegant descending
ripples at the top of her own sternum. Over and over again they drew
the dancing plastic skeleton, the art students’ constant
companion. Yes—she understood perfectly her teacher’s
point of view—the human bones were indeed a beautiful thing.
When she completed her art major, she felt immediately adrift,
missing the structure of classes, the self-conscious casualness of
walking around campus carrying an enormous, sleek black portfolio.
She had no idea what would come next. She had been hoping for an
MFA, but her parents were beginning to make noises about practical
considerations.
The graduating seniors held a party in the main studio, drinking wine
that came in waxy boxes and complimenting each other’s final
projects which leaned against easels, hung on the walls, or squatted,
stone-heavy, on small platforms. She was pleased to see some people
walk by hers, a nude done in oils on a small canvas, and nod to
themselves. Someone offered her a piece of cake. Chocolate cake.
With a half-inch of frosting in between the two layers, and chocolate
roses on top. How soft the frosting looked, how it glistened under
the studio spotlights!
She smiled, cheeks suddenly aflame, and reached for the paper plate
and white plastic fork with trembling fingers. She immediately
turned away as if to study a life-size graphite drawing of the giant
plaster cast that sat steadfastly in the corner, itself a copy of a
Greek statue in all its athletic muscularity. The wedge of cake,
dark and fragrant, balanced in her hand, felt too heavy for her wrist
to support. The big aluminum trash can waited near the sink, an
all-accepting maw.
Glancing from side to side without moving her head, she waited,
salivating, until there was no one nearby, then lowered her head
almost to the plate and, using her fingers, wolfed the cake in four
huge bites, brushing the crumbs from her lips to the ground with a
frantic fluttering, as if they were insects trying to enter her
mouth. Each swallow was painful; she gulped and nearly choked. The
cake landed like a ceramic vase in her gut. She had no idea if it
had tasted good. She put the plate and fork down at her feet and
walked rapidly away from it, to the sink, where she cupped water in
her hands and rubbed roughly at her lips.
Nine hundred calories. Two hours on the StairMaster. She could do
it, no problem. She smiled, fetched her backpack, and headed for the
gym.
©2006 by Jala Pfaff
