State Champ, page 6
“We do have running water,” I said. “But for you, no. Nothing by mouth.”
From the doorway Monica called her name. Back she went.
Day 11
OK. More calls and mostly I don’t answer. More little articles and so far they just state the basics: hey there’s a hunger strike, here’s Dr. M’s case, she got 12 years. Adding nothing. This is helpful? The wording repeats from one bad site to another, garbage plagiarism. Who would pay to read this? Me, I guess. I’m in Donna’s office, where I like to put in some time, curled up in her good wheely chair.
You’re texting me about a … photo shoot? I think you’re coming this afternoon. Can’t totally follow. Sort of doesn’t matter. I’m here.
Haven’t seen you since—July? June? I remember there was air-conditioning. Longer gap than usual, but I don’t like keep a diary. I mean, I guess this is a diary.
I guess I used to keep a journal, that’s the word I used, in college. Started it right when I got there, ten years ago now, holy shit. “My journal.”
There was a time you could say we were on-again off-again. Then a time that was more like, whenever we cross paths we fuck. Now I don’t know, it’s been a while.
Once you picked me up from work and Krys yelled, “Your friend’s here!” No idea what she was talking about. When she pointed at you, I was like, what? You’re not my friend.
I kept a journal in college, then I dropped out of college. That’s when I met you and I never kept a journal again. Until now. So in the official record of my life this is your first appearance.
I don’t mean I quit the journal because I met you. That like, the event of meeting you was so important. I was using the journal to think about something I had to stop thinking about.
When we first met I liked how you didn’t ask questions. At that time in my life everyone was either asking me questions or not asking to spare me the embarrassment. Your not-asking felt different, like maybe you got it. I’m honestly not sure you know what I mean. It’s like you wash the dish of each thought every time, right after you think it (I guess you don’t wash actual dishes). I was at a house party like I thought I wouldn’t go to again, since I’d gone off to college on this huge running scholarship, state champ gets recruited. But there I was. I was sitting in an overgrown yard that smelled green in the dark. Even in the dark I could see all these teeny daisies. I was sitting on the hood of a junked-out car, running my feet through daisies, they were tall and scratchy in a teeny way. I heard someone coming down from the house but I didn’t turn. You stood for a sec by the driver’s side door. I wasn’t that drunk.
You said: “You look like you’re just watching your own legs.”
You were standing like any guy, beer in one hand, lit cigarette in the other. Too dark for faces.
“I am,” I said.
“I can’t tell,” I said, “if they fucked me over or I fucked them over.”
You took a drag. I thought you’d leave.
“You should just apologize either way,” you said. “Even if it was their fault, just suck it up. They’re nice legs and I don’t think you’re going to do better.”
Did I nose-laugh? Sometimes I nose-laugh.
“Hand me your beer,” I said.
I sprinkled beer on the ugly muscle above each kneecap. “You’re welcome,” I said to myself.
“I’m John,” you said.
Before the journal, I was doing good. I was doing great. Anyone would say so. Everyone did. People had that well-look-at-you who’d-have-thought tone. After dicking around most of high school I’d won state, I’d gotten this unreal scholarship to a college people had even heard of, at least for sports. Everyone could stop worrying or judging or whatever they were doing. Finally all this had become a feel-good story, sit back and clap. Yeah, her mom died, and there were those DUIs, and she got kicked out of prom, and did have to take some pills for syphilis, probably not a secret, even the cops who got me the second time and whipped out the breathalyzer, they said hi to me by name the minute I rolled down the window trying not to piss myself. I’d fooled around with the trooper’s little brother? Was that it? But all this got wiped clean or was just like the hero’s backstory, OVERCOMING ADVERSITY, once I got that full ride and left the suburb we called a city, trophies tied to my bumper, not for real but basically. Well, I still couldn’t drive till partway through freshman year, when I got my license back, but hey who was counting. The crowd stands and cheers.
And now here I was, spring of sophomore year, back already. Dropped out. Limping around, looking like shit, alone on the hood of some yard car, at a party thrown by assholes for assholes.
“I’m taking some time off school,” I think I said to you, “to study the criminal justice system. Like, from the inside. Don’t deal drugs.” You nodded. Your silence is more of a fear thing than I realized. I just thought you were cool.
The journal fucked me up. No, it fucked me over. I was more scared of that journal than anything, which lasted honestly till now, when I came here, when I started this. When I chose to come here, start starving again, writing again. I’d started the journal when I went off to school. I am a recruit, I said to myself. I said to myself college ball, even though it was running. I wanted to feel serious. I couldn’t keep feeling the opposite of serious. I’d never kept a training log. I’d never had a food log or a diet log or whatever you’d call it. I stayed thin like a shark stayed awake. But everyone at school was like FRESHMAN 15!!! and every Monday morning coach lined us up for the weigh-in. An assistant coach could have done it, captains could have done it, but he personally did it. For each girl he said the number out loud. Wrote it down in his book. He never had to look in his book for last week’s number, he just knew, for every single girl. I started keeping my book because of his book. I thought it would prove I was on his level. Turned out my book worked for his.
Need a ride? you’d say whenever I needed a ride. You were never like, what’s with the arm hair? what happened to your teeth? what’s your plan?
It was like you were telling me you didn’t need to know. Or that’s what I thought.
We got into a rhythm. Cool. But then you thought you should be a boyfriend. I’m pretty sure you never wanted to be my boyfriend, so you got stuck either trying to be my boyfriend like you didn’t want to but thought you were supposed to, or trying to break up with me, which wasn’t even necessary. If you’d known me, you’d have known I didn’t want to be known. Or like, dated. You got weird about the best thing about you. How not-curious you were. How you just let people be. That’s when I had to start waiting for you to figure it out. Which brings us to now. The last few months I’m not sure which of us started mostly not-texting or not-texting-back. I’m gonna guess, using context clues, it was you.
You’ve had some girlfriends along the way, good for you. You’d be like, I can’t see you anymore, me and Claire are so serious … Danielle … Marissa … Doesn’t matter, I’d have said, not that you exactly asked, it’s like buying beer for a drunk, it really doesn’t matter what you do, same thing happens either way. You always turned back up. Until recently I guess you didn’t. And I guess I don’t leave well enough alone.
* * *
College was like: every Monday’s weight, in the journal. Then every day’s. Twice a day.
Every meal, calories added up, and the numbers gotta go down. Half an English muffin, dry. 3/4 cup of cornflakes, measured out, skim milk or water. Tofu cubed, cold and salted. Pinch of raisins. Carrot sticks with mustard. Pretzels with mustard. Mustard mustard mustard.
Numbers that had to go up: exercise, calories by hour (but always round down).
The fucking donut-looking mints, recorded, I learned to suck them so slow.
Every time I puked. Number of Tic Tacs.
My style was original. I was inventing both law and science. I was founding a new order. I was serious. My sweat smelled like fear, I got worried about that, my sweat and my breath. Traitors. Disgusting. It started to seem like the journal wasn’t a record of events—what I was doing, though I thought of it like not-doing—but was the reason for those events. Like, if someone had said to me then, you have a disease (this happened later), I would have handed them the journal. I wouldn’t have meant here’s the proof. I’d have meant here’s the disease. It seemed like if I hadn’t started writing down what I was doing—not-eating, purging, they always say, why not just puke?—then I wouldn’t have started doing it. The writing came after, but it was the cause.
Cardiomyopathy literally means sick heart?
“I’m afraid we’re banning you from training, not just competition.”
“Why are YOU afraid?” I probably said to whatever pointless faceless doctor this was. “This experience ends in like five minutes for you.”
I pointed out that I’d been getting faster, which was the whole point of competitive running.
41 seconds off my fucking 5K, in less than a year, are you kidding.
But no, the rules had all changed.
“Some patients do have issues with fertility.”
Even back then I’d had zero pregnancy scares.
I’d actually spent some time thinking about did I want to be a mom—like going back and forth, picturing it. When your mom dies you think about these things.
Waste of time, I guess. My journal decided.
* * *
You took the photos yourself.
It’s night again and I guess I’ve been asleep. I guess you left around 6 and I slept for 3 hours.
I thought you’d have a photographer, like accompanying you, professionally. I thought you had a real job? You showed up all hoodie and stubble. I’ve only been here 11 days and it’s not like I haven’t seen people. At first people still looked normal. Then they didn’t, or you didn’t. It’s like a 100° day in the Arctic (which my phone says just happened). How does some bird or plant up there even understand that. This is how people are to me now. Too much heat.
“Angela,” you said, and I didn’t move at all from the threshold. Behind you in the parking lot people were looking over, like they knew about me. “Can I come in?”
We were in the waiting room. With the windows boarded it’s too fluorescent. Every way your face moved was too much.
When you leaned in to hug me I just stood there, even though, now that I can reflect, we always hug.
“Jesus, Angela,” stubble awakening my face.
Stepping back you said: “The light’s no good in here.”
“We can go to the back.”
If we’d ever been dating, or we’d ever been friends, there’d have been times we met up and didn’t fuck. That’s what relationships are. Every activity isn’t foreplay. But what we liked about each other was fucking. Or fucking was the only door to whatever we liked. I didn’t mind. I think I was happy. Don’t think it’s all clinical—some people with my problems fuck too much, I know, they get addicted, but I’m not like that. This was for you. Sleeping with other people was more to pass the time, test the waters, get out of a stupid moment.
Today we barely touched. Exam room 3. You stepped back, you arranged me and took photos. I felt like one of those bright red berries that glow in the weeds, and if an arm reaches out, a voice like my aunt’s says: no, that’s poisonous. Edible fruits are uglier, more skin, less light and more flesh. Those are just for birds, my aunt would say, as if there were animals who could survive on sickness. So many ways to survive, yet survival is just itself. You’re either on the road or in the ditch.
“I don’t know if I should be doing this,” you said.
“I need more press,” I said. “For this to work.”
“Angela,” you said, and you sounded very sure, “this is not going to work. Think about it. Does this country ever let anyone out of prison?”
I got to thinking about how my mom used to vote for Leonard Peltier for president. I think one time he ran and the rest of the time she just wrote him in. So I almost said, Leonard Peltier? But then I remembered, no. So far no one had ever let him out. He’d escaped once, I think, but even that hadn’t worked. My mom knew a lot about this kind of thing. These were the things she needed to know. ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, she kept everything fresh. The phone would ring all through dinner, she said. Realtors, trying to get us to sell. Trying to scare us. All the white families were selling, they told us where they were moving to, the parks, the pools, what the houses were going for, how much less you’d get if you waited, boom boom boom, soon we were the last white family on the street. Don’t let anyone tell you (she used this phrase a lot, like stopping someone from telling you something was a power kids had) white flight is just like a thing that happened. White people knew what they were doing. The phone rang all night.
Yeah, her family moved too. Sometimes she got to that, mostly she left it out. Like we’d ended up in the suburb where we lived some other way. My aunt was the one to make a factual observation. No one’s stopping you from leaving, she said to my mom, if you don’t like it. Well, her kid might be stopping her, all those great suburban schools …
“Sorry,” I said, because you’d been saying something. “What?”
“Let’s do some like this,” you said. You climbed up on an exam-room table and hugged your knees. The stirrups were in the shot. You were posed between them, hugging your knees. “Can you do that?”
You took a few. “Forget about the camera,” you said. “Look at me like you’re trying to convince me this will work. Look at me like I don’t get it, but you can make me get it.”
“Am I a big story for you?” I said at some point.
“I don’t know,” you said, but like you wanted to say yes. “I’m trying to drum up interest. Somewhere big. We’ll see.”
“Thanks,” I said. I drank my lemony salty water.
“Don’t thank me,” you said. You reached out and encircled my tricep with your middle finger and thumb, which touched, easy.
I’d somehow forgotten you were you. I looked at your hand like it didn’t belong to anyone.
“Could you do that before?” I asked.
You shrugged. “First time I tried.”
Before leaving you stood in the waiting room scrolling through the photos in the back of the camera (you must have an actual job if you have an actual camera?). “Looking good,” you said. “You don’t look good, but the photos look good. I mean you look good under the circumstances.”
“Remember when we first met? In the back of your car? Pullout in the backseat? I came here the next day, for the morning-after pill. That’s how I first got reminded about this place. I saw there was a secretary-type job here and then my aunt helped me get it, or made me get it, I guess.”
“I didn’t know that,” you said.
“How would you’ve known that?” I said. “That’s not the point. Point is, this place makes people safe. It doesn’t just make them feel safe.”
You looked sad and smug. How do you pull that off? Did you say “You’re not safe here anymore” or “It’s not safe here anymore”? Either way you were right. But I’m not going to tell you that. I’m past that now.
* * *
When I think of my first visit here, I picture Krys handing me the white paper bag over the counter. It wasn’t her, I don’t think. Was it her? I tried to ask her once, but Krys always answers too hard. She treats every question like an invitation to a lifetime of future togetherness. Krys started here when her son was a baby, so that’s what, ten, twelve years ago? She was just a kid, she says, and she needed the money. I knew I had to work somewhere that mattered, she’d say. Like people don’t work wherever they have to. But Krys is stubborn. Reality pushes her around less than you’d think. She went back to school while she worked here, single mom living with her own mom. Every minute of her life must have been accounted for. Whenever her son comes by he’s a real darling. He has manners. He says things like, I don’t want to make my mom late. Once a few years back when he’d been dropped off and Krys was tied up, I tried to babysit. Or just like hang out. “Do you wanna come to the break room?” I said. “There’s some candy.” I didn’t know this for sure, but someone would have something, a cookie I could borrow. “We can play a game.” No plan for this either.
We walked down the short hallway. It’s sweet when a kid puts their damp hand in your hand. Everyone smiled at the little dude. Janine, most people here are parents. “Are people going to jail?” he said.
“What?” I said. “Like in general?”
Would have been a great time to know anything, for example, about Krys, her family, her life, whatever. Maybe 2 out of 3 times she answers her phone in Spanish? It’s like I’m always paying attention to the thing right next to the thing. It’s annoying.
“Not here,” I think I said. “We’ve got it all figured out here.”
I said: “You’ll be OK because you have a great mom.” If I’m going to lie to kids I mix in some truth. I think they get that.
I think I got this job because in the interview I said one thing from college. I was in Donna’s office, wearing a TJ Maxx suit jacket/skirt getup my aunt had shoved at me. I didn’t wear stockings, though she’d told me to wear stockings, and in the fluorescent lights I could see my legs were a bony veiny mistake, my calf muscles looked like a freak golf ball problem. I’ve been getting into the history of gynecology, I said suddenly. Like, the women who invented it. The actual history, which is their stories, which we’ll never know. Dr. M nodded, but said nothing. Why was Dr. M even there? She couldn’t stand for decisions to be made without her. Otherwise the interview was just me repeating how fast I could learn to do things I had no idea how to do.
Before I worked here, I didn’t get how much of medicine is hands. You change a body with your hand. Even pills started like that, though I’d never pictured it, plucking, boiling, crushing.
Like you invent something—the speculum, say, we’ve got lots of them—that throws open all these doors. See inside, glimpse the slick arrangement of organs. Which in this case have melted into and through each other. Fistula. Fistula means piss or shit leaks out the cunt. Infection, smell, mess, burning. A hell the baby leaves behind.
