He’ll see that I’ve left them and won’t give a rip.
He won’t see them at all. They’re like the plate of chicken bones. They’re like me.
I set the battery from the smoke detector in the salad bowl and hope he burns to death as a punishment for not noticing.
I feel really bad about hoping that.
I turn off the TV and load the car. My car, I remind myself, registered in my name. I wake Rosie and look around one last time.
I drive to my parents’ house without weeping once. Except at the first corner, and that doesn’t count because it’s only a little bit and it’s not about Thad, it’s about the house. And the neighborhood. I love this neighborhood.
Dinner: my mother’s meat loaf; instant mashed potatoes; frozen peas and carrots, all in unmeasured amounts; off-brand diet soda.
Exercise: My father helps me pile boxes in my old room and I open a few of them while my mother plays with Rosie.
My mother comes in and sits on my chaste little single bed.
“What I don’t understand—” she says.
“You don’t have to understand,” I say. “We weren’t happy. Isn’t that enough?”
How was your date, Abigail?
Fine, Mom. We hung around the mall, then a spaceship landed and little green aliens carried him away screaming, so I don’t think I’ll be going out with him again.
“Well, if you think you’re going to find anyone better—”
“I don’t want to talk about it, okay? We weren’t happy, I moved out, and I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Fine,” she says. “We don’t have to talk about it.”
She goes back to the living room and turns on the TV. I open more boxes and stare inside. Time passes. Or I assume it does. That’s what time usually does. At some point I notice that I’m still staring into the boxes and I tear myself away, walk into the living room, and plonk myself on my parents’ plaid couch.
Rosie says, “A ma ma ma ma,” and reaches out to me from my father’s lap.
I pick her up and she melts into me for about three seconds before she pushes away, reaches for my father, and says, “A ma ma ma ma.”
We watch the TV shows my parents choose—one on venomous snakes and one about mummification through the ages.
If I flipped over the cushion I’m sitting on, I’d see the hole my mother burned in it when she still smoked. I used to work my finger into it, thinking that if I made it big enough they’d buy a new couch and if I did it slowly enough they wouldn’t know it was me, but we don’t get rid of things in this family, we just flip them over and sit on them.
I feel mummified. And aged.
Not to mention venomous.
I wash Rosie, nurse Rosie, take her to bed with me, and lie in the dark.
I try to sleep.
DAY
4
Exercise: I lie in bed letting Rosie pull my hair until I hear my parents leave for work, then I haul myself up and change Rosie.
For breakfast, my diet book says to eat one ounce of cooked cereal, one tablespoon of raisins, and one cup of nonfat skim milk.
Breakfast: coffee, black; 2 spoonfuls of instant mashed potatoes, cold.
Exercise: With a spoon, I scrape cereal from around Rosie’s mouth. I ask, “Were you going to eat this?”
Snack: 1 spoonful of baby cereal.
Exercise: I drop my pj’s and Rosie’s sleeper on the floor. My bed’s still covered—more or less, since I haven’t bothered to make it—by the black chenille bedspread I begged my mother to buy me when I was in high school because I thought it was so sophisticated.
If I hadn’t been the kind of person who thought a bedspread could make her sophisticated, I might not have been impressed with Thad and his suit and I wouldn’t be separated and miserable right now. My problems are, therefore, the fault of this bedspread.
I roll it in a ball and stuff it in the back of the closet.
My invisible guru must have been hiding in there somewhere, because she makes a pronouncement:
Set a goal weight that’s realistic for your height and body type, then find a quiet moment during your day and visualize yourself at that weight, healthy and attractive—and thin.
Have you been paying attention to what’s going on around here? I ask.
She’s not good in discussions, though. I’ve noticed this before.
I take the poster of Johnny Depp off the wall and I fold it in quarters and put it in the wastepaper basket with all the respect due to a burial at sea. I try to visualize myself thinner but what I see instead is myself as I was in high school, when my life was going to be sooo much better than my parents’.
I look inside a couple of the boxes I brought and decide to unpack later, because I have something more important to do now: I walk to the bathroom, take my clothes off, and stand in front of my parents’ scale. I tap it with my toe and wait for 000.0 to appear. I wait for 000.0 to disappear.
I don’t step on the scale.
This is a sign: 000.0 is my goal weight. I visualize myself at that weight. I’m extremely attractive. There is nothing left to embarrass me.
I put my clothes back on and open my diet book.
For lunch I’m supposed to eat a “Skinny Minnie” sandwich. This is a low-calorie hot dog bun filled with half a cup of shredded zucchini and carrots, one slice of low-fat luncheon meat, and two ounces of shredded plastic, and topped with half a tablespoon of nonfat mayonnaise, half a tablespoon of nonfat plain yogurt, one set of quotation marks, and dashes of lemon juice, pepper, onion powder, and airplane glue. For dessert, I get one medium apple stem.
It’s odd, but I don’t feel hungry.
I play with Rosie. I burst into tears. I remind myself of all the ways Thad was less than perfect, but feel a gaping sense of loss anyway.
Lunch: remainder of the instant mashed potatoes, cold; 1 slice of individually wrapped, pasteurized, processed imitation cheese food; 1 fingerful of ketchup, scraped from the neck of the bottle.
Exercise: I nurse Rosie.
Calories burned: oh, thousands.
I turn on the TV, but discover that my parents don’t get the Food Channel, so I turn on the radio. Whitney Houston is singing about how she’ll always love somebody or other. I’m guessing he either just left her or is about to.
“Oh, get over him,” I tell her. “There’s plenty more fish in the toilet bowl.”
She won’t listen—we never do, somehow—so I turn off the radio and call my former neighbor so we can get the babies together for a playdate tomorrow even though they’re too young to actually play. They do seem to enjoy looking at each other. I forget to tell her I’m no longer her neighbor.
I shop for dinner using my credit card, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Thad’s credit card, with my name on the plastic and his on the bill, and I feel bad about using it, but worrying about my feelings is a luxury and I can’t afford luxuries just now. I’m broke, remember?
On the way home, I stop at a discount store and buy a jumbo pack of disposable diapers while Rosie screams in the cart.