Skinny, Page 3

  chapter 3

  The speed of a marathon runner is directly proportional to the heightened cardiac output.

  When she's not running in my dreams, she's swimming, and Holly's body is always a small vessel I cannot save.

  We are at steam baths, standing barefoot on a clean, tiled floor. Holly keeps hopping from foot to foot and yipping like a puppy till I yank on her hand to get her to stop. We are wearing only towels. Holly is much younger, maybe five.

  In the dream it is always the same: an old woman with pendulous breasts weaves her way towards us. She grabs me by the hand and points to the red mark on my palm and asks me, in a foreign language, if I am menstruating. Annoyed, I tell her, in English, that I am not. I explain that the cashier stamped our hands when we paid to get in. In vain, I search for the word "ticket" in a language I do not know. "Where's her mark?" the woman demands as she snatches my hand away from Holly's.

  "Leave us alone," I growl, trying to wrench myself from the woman's grasp.

  Suddenly Holly leaps away from me and dives into the shallow bath. The woman and I watch her swim the length of the pool underwater. As the pressure of the old woman's dry hand intensifies I remember that Holly cannot swim.

  Do you ever think about how your sickness affects your family?

  I can see them. They sit like a family of bronzed dolls facing the lake, their backs tight and wiry, deep brown from the sun. Mom sits on the beach below, looking up from her magazine every once in a while to pull her hat down over her eyes. I am sitting under a tree, away from them, in the bacakground, a pair of Mom's big Jackie O sunglasses resting on my cheeks. Holly is three; she and Dad are playing catch with a large plastic blue-and-green ball. Dad is careful not to throw it too close to the water, lest she be hauled into the lake that she fears with the passionate irrationality of a toddler. I have my sticks, an array of interesting bugs, a caterpillar or two, and, my most prized possession, a tiny fat tadpole stolen from the minnow trap in the stream nearby, caught early that same morning before anyone is up to tell me not to.

  I am taping them all to pieces of cardboard and labelling them with their Latin names, which I locate in the heavy encyclopedia I have hauled down to the shore for this purpose. I am still not sure what to do with the fish, however.

  "Oh, Giselle," my mother says before we go down, trying to stuff a snorkel into my bulging beach bag. "Leave the big book at the cottage."

  I offer her a fern stem in response. "It's so perfect, Mama. Look, look at the back, they're called spores, they come from outer space." She smiles and tucks the fern behind her ear, and takes a handle of the bag so that the encyclopedia can come, too.

  It's so hot the tape is barely sticking to the cardboard. I shove my heels deep into the sand, seeking out the cool, dark earth beneath the white layers. I tug off the tape: it has pieces of bark and sand stuck to it. Messy, messy. I take a break, watching Holly and Dad instead. Every time she catches the ball—which is a lot for a little kid—she yells and kicks up her heel. Dad signs at her to throw it back to him, which she does, hard and off course. Laughing, he dives for her throw, falling into the lake, hamming it up so that she laughs even louder. Holly shrieks, kicking sand into the water. She walks to the shore to watch him swim out. I get up, brushing the sand from my bathing suit, and dive in after him. In an instant, all the buggy-grub and sweat is washed from my hands and body. I start to swim out to him, eager to show him all the new tricks I've learned throughout the school year at my weekly swimming classes. As I paddle, weaving towards him unsteadily, he sees me coming and starts swimming back to shore.

  "What you doing?" he asks, splashing me, then spitting water out the side of his mouth, his voice thick and gurgled.

  "Look, Daddy, I'm a mermaid." I dive under and twirl my legs in the air but I forget to cover my nose, so I come up coughing. Then I feel his hands on my ribs, lifting me out of the water, lifting me high, high, till I am floating above him looking down on the lake. Thinking this is a game, I screech like Holly and leap from his hands, but he clutches at my bathing-suit straps and smacks his other hand square in my face to break my dive. There's water in my lungs, burning. My face is burning as hot-red as my tiny aching lungs, though nothing can burn underwater.

  "What are you doing?! I was jumping, Papa, jumping, like a dive, you know, stupid?"

  I start to smack him back on his head. His black hair is pasted to his skull, his angular jaw set, the bones in it clicking. Hysterical, I scream bloody murder until his big hand closes down on my mouth, clamping my protests.

  Then he tucks me under his side while I kick and scream. My mother catches me as he pushes me in the water like a too-big fish he doesn't want. I slide into her arms. He begins yelling in Hungarian, waving his hands, smacking at the water. My mother says nothing except, "It's OK, Gizzy, I got you now." Then another barrage of sound back at my father that ends with English words: "swimming lessons."

  He turns his back on us and crosses his arms, his chin falling to his dark brown chest. Holly steps on his feet, pokes him in the stomach playfully, her sign language for: "You OK?"

  He pulls her up by the arms, comforting her. A quick look of terror, of guilt, passes between my parents. Then Mom wraps me in a big orange towel and asks me if I want something to eat. I shake my head, cough extra-loud so that he can hear it. But he doesn't, because he's halfway down the beach, clucking nonsense softly into Holly's bad ear.

  Do you ever think about how your family affects your sickness?

  That same night Holly's hip is glued to mine while I'm reading about crickets under the covers with my flashlight and worrying about the tadpole that I haven't had the guts to take out of the yogourt container yet, who is still under my bed growing fatter. Holly's sleeping with her mouth open, emitting baby-sighs every now and then. Her hand is tucked into the small of my back, sweaty and hot, but necessary; Holly can only fall asleep when someone is touching her.

  I hear him get up to use the bathroom and snap off the flashlight. He hasn't said a word to me all day except, "Gizella, take out your wet towels. Hang up them." I strain my neck to hear his footsteps as he comes back down the hallway towards my room. He pauses, then opens the door gently and comes to the edge of the bed.

  I cinch my eyes shut and feel his arm brush mine as his hand reaches out to stroke her sleeping baby face, her hair, then my shoulder. I murmur. I feel his ice-blue eyes on me. They evaluate, they judge, these feline aqua eyes. They can see me even in the darkest room in the cottage.

  He eases the flashlight out of my hand. I grip it for a second, then give it up, pushing my head deeper into the pillow, still feeling those clear-water eyes on me. I pout my lips, like Holly does when she wants a kiss from him, but this trick never works with me. Instead, I feel her hands push against the base of my skull. She lets out another baby-sigh into my neck and her warm sweet breath swarms around me, forming a ring that guards me from whatever score he has come to settle. He retreats, but not before my own eyes fly open and meet his.

  He blinks twice, his judgment, for once, suspended. He is curious about something. What?

  I can see every eyelash, as if under a microscope, thick and teeming with life. Like mine, his eyes appear blue but are transparent. He blinks again, in amazement, seeing them, twin blue circles staring back at him, now, for once, without malevolence, without coquettishness. Could it be a truce?

  He stands there for a while, his eyes glowing with so many questions.

  Where did you come from? his eyes telegraph through the darkness.

  And when, when are you going to leave?

  It is natural to wonder, at some juncture of your medical studies, whether medicine is really the human profession for which you had hoped.

  It may seem as if I'm indifferent to my family. Holly makes the case with her huffing and puffing and fighting, she makes the point that I virtually destroyed us with my breakdown. I'm not indifferent. I know I hurt Mom with it, I see it tugging at her eyes when I leave
a half-eaten plate of eggs on the counter, when she collects my clothes from the laundry basket and sees I'm still wearing the same holey T-shirts I had when I was fifteen. She would like it if I were bigger, stronger, less prone to colds and hacking coughs. She would like it if I were like other girls and bought new clothes all the time, gained a few extra pounds, for padding, for when I might need another layer between myself and the world. I feel bad for Mom, but I can never tell her, or Holly, that he started it.

  He started the whole mess with those ice-blue eyes that kept me begging for my right to exist. Holly doesn't know what it's like to love someone who doesn't care whether you live or die. She doesn't yet realize that love unreturned eventually transforms into a fierce tangled mess, nerves and entrails exposed like split animal innards. She doesn't understand that sometimes the unrequited must demand reparations, that love can be a mean and spiteful process, that sometimes one loses patience with love. So, when the nerves and guts have seemingly been packed away, sewn in and cleaned up so as not to make all the innocent bystanders uncomfortable, the carrier of this love becomes heavy with a toxic lump that grows, slowly and steadily, into a fierce ball of scarred tissue.

  Located two ribs below the heart, it is called hate.

  chapter 4

  Giselle doesn't talk to me for days after our fight but that's OK because I've been mostly at the track after school and don't see her much anyway. Our stupid fight becomes buried under silence, and the clacking of morning-coffee spoons in cups.

  But yesterday, after a week of moping around in her pyjamas and lying on the couch staring at the TV, Giselle ate breakfast with us. She's even started talking about going back to school and volunteering at the hospital with Mom. She also got dressed and drove herself to her group meeting.

  And maybe, just maybe, the old Giselle is coming back.

  Today she was considering her hair in the mirror, trying to tame it. I saw a change in the corners of her hot-pink cat-mouth, which has been drawn and grim since she got back from the clinic.

  "What?" she demands, all grouchy, when I stick my head into her room.

  "I'm sorry." I stand in her doorway as she sorts our laundry. Giselle looks up, a stray blond braid falling over her face. She's flushed, a little tanned, almost healthy-looking. She licks her lips and hands me a pair of shiny red shorts.

  "You'll need these to win." My lucky red shorts, worn only for races.

  "Thanks." I step over the basket and pull her to me.

  "Wha . . . ?" Giselle stumbles as I pull her into a hug. Her hips pierce my side. I put my hand on the small of her back and feel the knobs of her spine coming through her shirt.

  "I'm sorry," I say "Why? What have you done?"

  "Nothing." I hold on to her for a second too long, till she pulls away from me and I smelt something like summer in her hair.0

  Ever since she was little, Giselle always wanted to be a doctor, like Dad. She's got the science gene. The one that's missing in me.

  Giselle used to give the neighbourhood boys a dollar for squirrels. Fifty cents for birds. She made them promise not to hurt them and told them only to bring her roadkill, but I know they used to shoot them with BB-guns, because Giselle spent a lot of time taking bullets out of sparrows' chests. She used old scissors, tweezers, pliers, and salad tongs especially for this task.

  One time, she stole some of our dad's special scissors from his travelling medical kit, and w7hen he found out, his face went all red and he yelled at her.

  "I told you not to touch my stuff!" he snarled, crossing his eyebrows, as he often did at Giselle, and yanking a stethoscope out of her hand.

  I'd crouch over the animal as she operated, and to this day the smell of latex and hospitals reminds me of Giselle because she made me scrub and wear plastic gloves.

  I'd pick flowers for the grave and we'd bury the animals in the back of the garden and have a little ceremony. She took her time stitching up the wounds in neat little grids that reminded me of the scars on Frankenstein's neck.

  "Come here, come closer," she'd say when she finished pinning the folds of the skin back. "Look, see it? See the heart?"

  . . .

  When our father had a heart attack, I sat, for what felt like a very long time, on the stairs, listening to my mother speak into the phone. She said our address in a quiet voice. She spelled out our last name slowly, as if she were reading the letters for the first time.

  "Vasco," she'd said. "V-A-S-C—like cat—O."

  Then she put the phone down gently and stood there, her whole body trembling.

  I ran up the stairs and into Giselle's room and found her under the covers. She was shaking and sweating and crying on her pillow. "Giselle," I said. "Giselle, he is dead." Then she grabbed me up into her arms and there was nothing inside me.

  She was holding me so tight, as if I were him, and not yet dead. As if all her life and tears could fill me up and I could become him again. So I said he was dead over and over in her ear until it sounded like a scream while she held me like that. So that she would know that it was me and that he was allofa-sudden dead.

  chapter 5

  For each minute the heart is stopped, it loses a high percentage of capacity to perform muscular activity and becomes weakened.

  Heart lesson # i : first meeting. Remember to keep breathing.

  I was standing outside the entrance of the hospital, and I'd just bummed a cigarette from a patient after my group meeting, when I saw a sheepish-looking boy with a broken wrist and long curly hair spilling down his back. His look caught me off guard, sent shivers to my gut. He was fumbling through his pockets with his good hand, searching for matches. When he finally noticed me, he looked startled. He took a step back and put his hand on the wall to steady himself. His eyes stripped me, but for some reason this didn't make me uncomfortable like it usually did; it seemed familiar, as if I had just stepped out of a bath and he was waiting, with a towel in his hands. My hands started to shake. His look seemed to be reaching for something that was knotted in me, and the feeling of undoing the bind was somehow painful. Then I realized: I knew him.

  I avoided his gaze, looking instead at the traffic, trying to figure out where I had seen those bedroom eyes before. He continued to look, so I, not being one to turn down a dare, gawked back. We ended up staring at each other for a good five minutes, while leaves whipped around in small circles, while I shivered in my clothes and he ran his hand through his dirty curls. We challenged each other silently. I think I may have sighed with relief or frustration when he started walking towards me.

  "Got a light?"

  "Yeah." I offered him a single washed-up match and a ball of lint.

  "Thanks. You a doctor?"

  "No."

  "Well, can you take a look at my wrist?"

  I wondered then if he knew we were at a mental hospital and not the walk-in.

  "I'm not a doctor, I told you. I think you're confused, there's a walk-in just across the street. . . it's right—"

  "I know you."

  "Yeah?" I asked, curious, despite myself.

  "Yeah, you used to hang with Joanne Marinelli."

  "Sort of." I wrapped my arms around my chest and hopped from foot to foot to keep warm, taking sharp drags of my cigarette.

  "Yeah, I played hockey with her brother, her brothers. You have a younger sister, right? She's, like, a kick-ass junior track star?" '

  I nodded.

  "Yeah, I remember you. You used to come to those games sometimes with Joanne, and you guys would—"

  "OK, stop now, that's enough."

  He lit his cigarette and tugged at his ear, giving me a ridiculously beautiful smile, all teeth. Then I knew exactly who he was.

  "And you are . . . Sol, right? Your hair's so long now."

  He nodded, looking a little pleased.

  "Your dad is some celebrity too. He writes for the Sun. He used to write about your hockey games."

  Sol's smile disappeared. He looked down at his torn cow
boy boots. No one wore cowboy boots anymore, so why was I standing there thinking that they looked so great on him? That they were the coolest boots I'd ever seen? And why, why did he look like I had just hit him square in the gut?

  "Sorry, did I say something wrong?"

  Sol shook his head and then, looking straight into the grey sky, said, "I'm Simon Bohan's kid, yeah," as if he were admitting defeat.

  He stuck his hand out and there was a sudden jolt of energy between us as I took it.

  "Solomon, son of Simon," he said, offering up his smile again.

  "Giselle, sister of Sports Star Holly."

  "Giselle," he said, letting my name fill the air between us, "lover of hockey, and Purple Jesus Gatorade in grade nine."

  "Solomon, the undefeated Sunny Valley defenceman."

  I remembered watching Sol on the ice in my first year of high school, waiting to catch a glimpse of him after the game when he came out of the change room with his wet hair plastered to his forehead. He was one of the only boys my age I could stomach, who I almost liked. I remembered, one time, while we were waiting for Joanne's brothers in the minivan, asking Joanne why Sol never came to our dances and parties. She said something like: number one, Sol was of the Jewish Persuasion; two, he went to some hippie downtown school where everyone sat around smoking dope all day and studying Buddhism; and three, didn't I think I had hogged the Purple Jesus Gatorade long enough?

  What no one ever tells you about love at first sight, or lust, or whatever the hell it is, is that it's infuriating. At that moment, standing there in the cold entrance of the hospital, I had the impulse to hit Solomon, hard and fast in the face. I resisted this urge, thinking I would go insane either way, were he to stay or leave.

  "Can I buy you a coffee?" he asked. It took me a couple of seconds to refocus.

  "Sure, but what about your wrist?"

  "What about it?" Sol said, tucking his bad arm into his jacket.

  "Shouldn't you have it looked at?"