by
Jane St. Clair
Author of Walk Me to
As usual when she woke up, her heart beat fast and she felt shaky and sweaty. She put her feet on the floor and tried to quiet the dizziness in her head. Getting her footing, she walked to the bathroom and weighed herself: 96 pounds, a quarter pound heavier than yesterday.
She felt nauseous and her mouth watered and her head was still dizzy as she watched her egg cook in its greaseless, microwave holder. She cut her grapefruit into ritualistic sized cubes and sprinkled one packet powered saccharin on top.
Her hands shook as she put the first forkful of food into her mouth, which exploded into sensation at the taste. Salt (egg) Sweet (saccharin) Sour (grapefruit) and Bitter (coffee) – each was a stronger feeling in her mouth that longed for food than the touch of an experienced lover on a virgin’s body.
Antoinette only ate between
“God, you’re gorgeous.”
“It should happen to me.”
“Your waist is like Barbie’s.”
“Some girls have all the luck.”
Perhaps on some metaphysical level, the less a person ate, the less she took away from other living things and thus, the more valued she became. Antoinette did not know all the reasons, she just knew they were true. She knew that when she was sixteen years old and weighed 140 pounds, she was attracting only middle-aged married men and janitors. At 130 pounds, she attracted heavy-set young men and the other two categories. At 120 pounds, all of the above plus athletically inclined men her own age and under. At 96 pounds, she attracted every man from skinny gay high school guys who thought she looked like Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” to old retired men, who admired her delicacy, and every other man in between. She was a little doll, a fashion queen, a ballerina, the little wisp of a girl on the cover of every romance novel and women’s magazine.
Her mother and her four aunts had heavy, Eastern European peasant bodies. They were apple-shaped with big bellies and big breasts, and they wore jackets and caftans and Hawaiian dresses ordered from catalogs. They loved Antoinette’s trim little body, so perfectly neat and sexually neutral, like a slim Lolita who belonged in seventh grade in middle school. Antoinette wore wide belts that clinched her tiny waist and then loped them over to further emphasize her thinness. She did not need big hair to balance her figure, and looked incredibly chic in a ballerina’s chignon or a teenager’s ponytail. She could wear any look from Vogue or Bazaar, and she was the ultimate petit garcon – French for both “little boy” and “young woman.”
As Antoinette became every man’s Barbie Dream Date and every woman’s fashion icon, her physical gender faded away. Her periods became lighter and lighter and then disappeared. Now she took up even less space on the planet than ever, and now her potential to increase life was gone too.
Antoinette’s boyfriend, Roger, was a medical student and a big, naturally slim Swede with broad shoulders, big green eyes and large, practical hands. He loved how strong Antoinette made him feel, how she was so dainty that she could not open jars or lift heavy books. He loved how she spoke in poetry and reacted to ballet and music like a connoisseur. She compensated for her lack of interest in food with a million small sensations of tiny physical pleasures. She would talk about the touch of the rain’s hands, the sound of snow, the magic of the sky at night, and the secret beauty of plants.
Once Roger and Antoinette stood near
“We don’t need these,” he said.
To his surprise, his delicate little flower roared up at him, a meat-eating Venus.
“I do need that!” She seemed frantic as she left him standing alone, while she tore into the grass, searching for her cigarette that smouldered in the wetness of plants and sand. She swore when she tossed it aside and angrily pulled out another one.
Roger watched as her poetry deconstructed before his eyes. Her hair, which always seemed like brown corn silk, now looked sketchy, stringy and thinning. The skin on her face was tight and now he watched it pucker into wrinkles around her mouth as she drew smoke into her body. Antoinette moved only with hesitation or mostly she did not move at all, and Roger realized she was for pictures, not for life. She absorbed her cigarette like a too big baby with a too strong suction drawing milk from a breast, and he saw the level of her addiction. He would wean her kindly and carefully and then he would miss her beauty and her delicacy and her non-demanding nature. Roger was sad for months after he left her, and he never smoked again after that strange night by the lake.
After Roger left her, Antoinette gained three pounds. She calculated that their sexual life had burned up so many calories each week and that her changed level of activity had produced a caloric shortfall. She knew menstruation burned up 400 calories each month, so after eight months without a period, that accounted for a one pound gain, if she calculated 3500 calories as one pound of body fat. She gave up her apples and began to walk an extra subway stop each day and that did the trick. The three Roger pounds were lost along with two extra to spare. Now she weighed 94 pounds and wore a size one dress.
Soon after Roger left, she met Charlotte Chamber, a very rich girl who had gone to
How could Antoinette explain that it was an effort in her weak state just to arrive at the office each day, sit behind her desk, and think about her lunch? How could she tell anyone how her legs always threatened to give way underneath her, how she loved only to come home and collapse in her chair after the exertion of her commute, how the most beautiful sight of her day was her dinner plate of carefully prepared and arranged food served at the ritual hour of 9 P.M.
Once as they were strolling in the suburban town of
“Oh great! They have these shops all over
There were little samples of pastry, cookies, and breads on the counter.
“Try this, Tony! It’s yum!”
Antoinette’s stomach filled with juices and her mouth was watering. She was nauseous and ravenous at the same time. It was ten in the morning – three hours until lunch, three hours since breakfast. She reached into her purse for a cigarette.
“Take it outside, young lady!” the owner barked in accented English.
Antoinette put it away but she could hardly control the dizzy feeling and hunger that the bakery smells evoked.
“I forgot to have breakfast this morning,”
Antoinette wondered at her words. She had designed her ritual diet when she was sixteen years old, and she had not skipped a meal once in the seven years since.
Indeed most of her thoughts were about her next meal.
“I’m starved! One of those decadent chocolate things – put it right here! And a strong cup of coffee! Tony, you’ll at least have a coffee?”
She turned and was surprised that Antoinette had gone outside. Antoinette’s mouth puckered around the small white paper tube of weed, and she sucked smoke as if it were nourishment.
“I feel like such a pig! You won’t have anything at all! You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you eat!”
“Oh, I eat all the time!” Antoinette said as off-handedly as she could manage.
“We’ll go to Les Bistro
Antoinette watched her friend enjoy her pastry. She saw how beautifully tanned
“That’s fantastic!”
She laughed, and Antoinette knew that
Antoinette stared at the flowers in the window of the Danish bakery. They were browning and dry.
“Plants have many defenses against death,”
“I’m okay.”
Antoinette rarely ordered drinks at public places. One can never be sure if one was getting a real diet drink, or if the waiter was serving a regular drink with 180 calories. Also one has to consider that some sweeteners have more calories than others.
“You make me feel like such a pig.”
Antoinette smiled and lit another cigarette. She felt less tension now that all the food was gone from sight.
“Well, that was so good,”