Susanna Lamey

I can’t see my bones. They’re comfortably hidden beneath thick layers of skin and tissue, jutting out into prominence only in the expected areas: my ankles and wrists, my collarbone, my hips and shoulder blades.

These are the places where bones become sensual; their curves beckon lovers to use these natural handles, to run fingers along the hardness hidden beneath the skin, caressing, marveling.

I’ve always longed for prominent cheekbones so that men could cup my face in their hands and brush their rough thumbs along the perfect contours, kissing the delicate bone with reverent lips to feel my fragility.

When I want to convince myself that I am beautiful, I look in the mirror and trace my jawline with the tips of my fingers, reach up to stroke the curving bone beneath my eyebrow, feel for those places in my face that are thin and elegant and Audrey Hepburn-esque. I admire people with thin faces, whose lower cheeks are pools of lovely shadow, whose eyes glitter romantically from deep-set sockets. I have always hated my round face. I try to disguise myself with makeup and hairstyles, but it consistently returns to glare at me in the middle of the night, when I rise half-awake and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror.

Those glimpses make me paranoid, so when I return to bed I feel for my hip-bones, touch my ankles where the round hard joint protrudes, run two fingers along my collarbone. I try to make my stomach as small as possible and I examine my ribs, tracing each bump with something like pleasure. It’s a sense of reassurance, convincing myself of my own solidness, of the fundamental structure of my body. That underneath all this roundness and softness is something indelible that can never melt away.

When my sister was fighting anorexia in the hospital four years ago, I found visiting difficult. The hospital bed made her look even smaller than she was, a lump under the sheets, and her beautiful brown hair was stringy and oily on the sterilized pillowcase. The hospital smell hung about the room, and it seemed to fill her, almost to emanate from her—that unique smell of medicine, latex, carpeting, and oxygen tanks. It crept into our noses somewhere between the elevator and the tiny fourth-floor room that she shared with an eighty-three-year-old Alzheimer’s patient. It was familiar and foreign, subtle but all-pervading, and it will always be the smell of sickness to me. Even now, it seems that my sister always carries that smell with her; if not in body, then in memory. The hospital days were hard for me.

I used to dream of my sister as a small child, before that strange darkness swallowed her and possessed her. In my dreams, I would see her running through wide green fields, dancing in sunshine; I would see her laughing out loud, which was a sound I came to miss with a longing that was as sharp and tangible as bone. I would see us as children swimming Lake Chatauqua, where we vacationed every summer during our childhood, ducking under the water, splashing and shouting with a kind of normalcy that warmed me more than my comforter. Then I would wake and feel her absence filling the house, I would see it filling my mother with a pain that I could not alleviate, and I would know that I had dreamed memories and might-have-beens. Since I could not hold my sister next to me, I hugged those memories to myself, sating the new emptiness in me with images of Becky as she used to be, round and cheerful, before the disease took hold.

The change seems like it happened suddenly, although I know this is not true. Becky turned into someone I didn’t know, an eighty-pound stranger, some sort of animal almost. She grew smaller and smaller as if she was a piece of wood that was being slowly whittled away by an invisible knife, with precision and inevitability. It shaped her into angles and corners. Her elbows emerged, and her kneecaps swelled from her legs like tumors. By the middle of my senior year, her ankles looked thin enough to snap. I’m sure I could have broken her wrists with one blow.

During this entire transformation, I was almost completely blind to the changes that were taking place in my sister’s body. I realized that she had an eating disorder, and I saw her at dinner eating a fourth of a can of beans and five tablespoons of rice, but I didn’t realize the extent of her disease because I never saw her without clothes. Her face told only a part of the story—her cheeks hollowed, her eyes huge, her chin sharp—but faces like that were too common in magazines and movies to instill in me a sense of wrong. She slept more and more as the months went by, her body too small and too starved to keep her awake, and still I did not see.

Looking back, I suppose that I didn’t allow myself to see, wrapped up in my own problems as I was. I could look back and point at my blossoming youthful high school life and my busy overachieving schedule and absolve myself from blame: I was playing on the tennis team, I was in the marching band and the jazz band and three different choirs and a musical. I didn’t have time for fear or even for wonder; I was young, and college was shining somewhere out on a rapidly approaching horizon. I remind myself that my sister and I were never really close; that I had battled depression myself for years and didn’t want to be reminded of it. I remind myself that I, like her, was affected by my father’s abrupt departure from our family after seventeen years—a leaving that took parts of us all along, but took more of Becky than any of us.

But I know the vanity of all of these thoughts when I remember the night that I saw her for the first time standing in front of me without clothing. I had just come into the bathroom to brush my teeth, and she was just coming out of the opposite door, from the shower, wrapping a towel around her, and the towel slipped.

I saw her from the waist up in the mirror, which had been cleared of fog by the cool air that came from the open bathroom door. She saw me in the same instant and stared back with a kind of wildness in her eyes that I have never seen since and hope never to see again—the look of a cornered deer staring down the rifle barrel, the look of a criminal caught at the end of an alley. We looked at each other’s reflections with mutual fear, panic born of seeing the forbidden, as if she was a Muslim woman standing for the first time without her veil.

Her head was too big for her body. It loomed on top of her thin neck, making her a caricature, her shoulders tiny and frail and sagging under the weight of her skull. Her collarbone was also huge, jutting shelf-like beneath her neck, and below it was a mass of shadows and hollows. Her breasts were shrunken, limp; they dangled from her chest. Each bone of her ribs had its own shadow, the skin stretched tight over her ribcage and curving sharply into her concave belly. Her arms hung at her sides like sticks, her elbows ridiculously huge in their middles, her wrist joints sticking out awkwardly, as if the bone was swollen. Beneath her skin, the two separate bones of her forearms were distinctly outlined. In the places where her skin was not stretched tight, it hung from her bone in small, wrinkled folds—at her elbows, at her kneecaps.

On top of this tiny skeleton, her head nodded like a grotesque balloon, some huge carnival-clown mask. For a moment, her face seemed painted on, the picture unreal. I almost laughed. She was impossibly small.

I remember backing away from her as if she were going to attack me. Before she even grabbed the towel, I had fled out the open door. Nobody else was home.

I ran outside to the grape arbor and fell on the grass in the sunlight. The sunlight, I recall, seemed out of place, as if brightness and light were an affront to my fear. I didn’t cry then. I lay on the grass and stared at the leaves of the grape vines twisting in the slight breeze. The bottoms were shiny, and they reflected the sun when the wind blew; the grape clusters swayed heavily between the vines, the fruit fat and swollen with juice. My sister’s head danced behind my eyelids, hovered in the air in front of me as if I had looked at the sun too long. I felt the grass on my skin and the warmth of the soil soaking into me. I felt my stomach, my legs, grabbed a fistful of fat from my inner thigh where my body was soft and pliant. I held on to myself with a grip that left marks, feeling my covering of skin, muscle, sinew. The breeze was warm on my cold hands, and it was a beautiful day. I stayed there until my mother came home three hours later. I told no one of what I had seen. Some fears are so huge that they don’t fit inside your mouth.

At dinner that night, my sister was silent and pale. She ate nothing. She drank a glass of water and stared at the floor. My mother sat, speechless with despair, across from me. I could see all the tears that she no longer had the strength to shed in her creased forehead and her thinning hair. Our attempts at dinner conversation had been given up weeks ago. I knew that soon something would snap. The air was as brittle as my sister’s bones. A few days later, Becky was in the hospital. It happened so quickly that it was not quite believable when I heard the news from my fifth period English teacher, Mrs. Walker, who took me outside the door of her classroom and said that my sister had “met with an accident” in a clipped, pinched voice. Becky had collapsed in the middle of the hallway at school, and she was taken to the emergency room in an ambulance, an IV in her vein. My mother stopped at school for me, and we wound up in the waiting room at the hospital emergency ward, possibly the most terrible place I have ever been. While we were there, a man came in with his hand half cut off by a chainsaw blade that had missed its mark. His wife was holding his hand together with red, soaked bandages as he leaned on her, eyes half closed, his face a mass of furrows as he fought to keep his blood inside him. There was a flurry of nurses. I looked away. My sister was fighting too.

The waiting room shocked me into reality. I had had no idea, no real concept of the possibility of her death. Although I had been jolted into reality by the sight of her in the bathroom mirror, I had never really considered the possibility that she might die—that her body, whittled away as it was, might simply stop working, might disappear altogether. I never imagined her heart stopping, her breath growing shallow and fading away. Even when I saw her in the hospital attached to tubes and wires, a pathetically small lump under the sheets, I couldn’t imagine not having a sister.

I watched my sister breathe in and out in the hospital bed, breathing in and out myself, conscious of my own breathing in a way that I had never been. It seemed amazing to me then that I had not allowed myself to realize how severe her anorexia was. It still seems amazing, even after years have passed, and I have gained the clarity that comes with time.

My sister was in that hospital for a long time, and she was in another, bigger hospital for even longer, battling not only anorexia but depression. It became clear that at the root of her anorexia was a vast conglomeration of psychological problems. I remember my mother coming out of the psychiatrist’s office after he had given the prognosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder mixed with depression and a rare type of schizophrenia that causes social ineptitude. She opened the door to the driver’s side in the car where I was sitting, sat down, put her seatbelt on and the key in the ignition, and put her head down on the steering wheel, shaking. I patted her back with the kind of helplessness that only daughters feel. If my mother was lost, where was I? All we knew was our own smallness in the face of a hopeless future and that the trial was not over, would not ever be over.

The dinner table that night was smaller, emptier than usual. We ate that night, my mother and I, as though we had never eaten before. Between the two of us, we finished an entire box of spaghetti over a period of three hours. We ate it with tomato sauce out of the can, with alfredo sauce that I made with milk that was going bad, with olive oil and garlic salt and parmesan cheese. We ate a whole bag of ready-made salad and a loaf of Italian bread. That food tasted better than any food in the world has ever tasted. I ate with a sense of focus and determination that kept my fork moving from my plate to my mouth even after my stomach was full. My tongue was alive with full and vibrant flavor—the tingle of salt—the bitterness of the garlic—the pale sweet tang of the vinaigrette. I crunched on the salad that I had always hated with a kind of primitive joy in the sound of crunching and the watery, green taste as I crushed each cell and vein of lettuce leaves between my teeth, rolled black olives on my tongue and savored that ancient, Mediterranean flavor.

My stomach was distended by the end of the evening, and all I could do was sleep, sated and torpid. I crawled up the stairs to my room. My mother left the pans in the sink for the first time in her life and came upstairs to stroke my hair as I fell asleep with my clothes on. “She almost died,” she said suddenly, out loud to herself. “She almost died.” I caught her eye and could not bear it. I pulled the comforter over my head and waited blindly for sleep.

My mother says the same words again a year later. She is crying over the phone to me after spending the night in a different hospital in a different emergency room waiting for the stomach pump to do its work, asking my half-conscious sister questions, trying to keep her awake and alive after the half-bottle of sleeping pills had almost taken hold. I am eighty miles away, sleeping soundly above my roommate, dreaming of my latest romance or hamburgers, with no idea.

She describes this night with a terrible accuracy. I don’t want to hear it, but I listen anyway. She tells of how my sister walked into her room at two in the morning and turned the overhead light on, her eyes wide with fear; how she staggered a bit as she told my mother what she had done; how she carried her to the car with the strength of ten women. She tells of watching Becky’s eyelids flicker open and then shut again, of the nurse pulling her away from the bed so they could feed my sister oxygen, of the questions they asked her and her nonsense responses. “What are the names of our dogs?” my mother had asked as Becky struggled for consciousness.

“The dogs are dead,” she had replied.
The doctor told her that if they hadn’t gotten her to the emergency room right away, they might not have been able to save her at all. It was touch and go, he said.

Even when I listen to her voice telling the horrible story, I can’t believe. The only time I come close to grasping it is the time we go to visit my sister in the psychiatric ward she is assigned to after her suicide attempt. We go to visit and find that all our presents must be confiscated at the door, even the book my mother brings, which is The Best of David Letterman’s Top Ten Lists. We are ushered to her room by a large nurse, and we see that there are no hanging lamps, the chairs are plastic and all one piece so they can’t be dismantled, there is no mirror in the bathroom. Becky’s shoelaces have been removed, and her naked sneakers lie in a haphazard heap by her bed.

Here, among so many absences, something strikes me in the heart that stays with me a long time. It is related to the feeling I felt when I glimpsed her bony body in the bathroom mirror, but stronger. The lack of physical things, the careful removal of all that could be potentially dangerous, comes through to me in a way that the sight of her in a hospital bed never did. I am terrified for my sister’s life with an intense, sudden burst of fear that roots me in place, paralyzes me, makes my bones turn cold.

I sit in a green plastic chair by a window made of unbreakable glass and I watch my mother try to hold a conversation with my one and only sister. I watch her stare at the wall with the blank stare of someone who has given up, the stare that I imagine prisoners to have after spending years in a cell surrounded by concrete. The wall of the psychiatric ward is cream-colored and cracked in several places. The window looks out over a blank field to impossibly distant mountains rising in the north. The sun is shining, and it is winter.

Her expressionless face still bears traces of the anorexia that she has finally come close to conquering, with which she has at least drawn a temporary treaty. I remember the dreams that I used to have in the beginning stages of her thinness, of swimming in the Chesapeake Bay or running through the lawn, her face round and flushed, her cheeks full, quivering in anticipation of laughter.
Now, in the dark institution, her cheeks curve inwards, and her chin and collarbone are still ugly with prominence. Her eyes still look at me, without seeing, from shaded hollows. Her hands on the blanket are lined with veins, and her knuckles still jut out at the ends of thin, brittle fingers. I search her wrists for scratches or scars, signs of past attempts. I find none but there is no relief in this discovery. Her blank wrists are an invitation, a way out that she has not yet tried. If she had tried and failed, then at least one avenue would have been closed. This thought makes no sense, but my fear has made me disregard logic.

Her bones remind me of the day in the bathroom, when I saw her skeleton as clearly as if her skin had not been present. I feel my own tailbone digging into the chair, and I shift in my seat, reaching out to touch the hand on the cover, to run my fingers over its protruding knuckles and feel the hardness, the realness of her. I need to convince myself that she will not melt away like so much snow on this bright winter day. But when my fingers brush her hand, she pulls back like she has been stung, like I’ve broken a bone with my one gentle touch.

Her dull eyes turn on me for a second, and we stare at each other face to face, clearly, without the mirror. My eyes are wet and heavy and full of fear. Hers are large and drugged and blank. Sister and sister stare at each other across a room full of the silent whirring of the florescent light and the distant footsteps of nurses. Then she closes her eyes, and I look out the window, blinking in the cold December light, my heart pounding like I’ve run a long way.