Deadly Beloved(4)

In the beginning, of course, it had been Evelyn who was thin and Henry who was fat—although Evelyn’s thinness had never been entirely natural. Like most of the other girls she was close to at Bryn Mawr, she tended to binge and purge, except they hadn’t called it that then. That was in the days before anybody knew about “eating disorders.” Evelyn and her friends would get up in the middle of the night and eat five or six gallons of ice cream apiece. They would shove down whole large pepperoni pizzas and three or four pounds of potato chips and thick chocolate cookies from Hazel’s in Philadelphia by the bag. Then they would rush into the girls’ bathrooms, stick their fingers down their throats, and throw it all up. Evelyn got so good at it, she didn’t even have to stick her finger down her throat. She could throw up just by thinking about it. She didn’t think of herself as “disordered” either. If anything, she imagined she was being “classical,” like those Romans her Introduction to Western Civilization professor was always telling them about, the ones who ate and ate at banquets until they were sick, then went out into the courtyard and vomited so that they could start all over again. Evelyn would sit in Main Line restaurants and order only salad, no dressing. She would sit upright over the salad and pick at lettuce leaves and sprigs of parsley. Sometimes on outings like this she was so hungry her stomach felt full of ground glass. She would sit across the damask tablecloths and the matched china, watching Henry eating piece after piece of batter-fried shrimp loaded with tartar sauce, and want to rip his throat out with her teeth.

“You’re a real inspiration to me,” Henry had said at the time. “I never knew anybody who had so much self-control before.”

The food Evelyn kept around the house these days was no more real food than the grapefruit halves and lettuce salads. It was mostly what she could shoplift when she and Henry went to the grocery store together. Henry wouldn’t let her go to the grocery store on her own anymore. He had even taken away her car so that she couldn’t get there when he wasn’t looking. Evelyn had to sneak things into the voluminous pockets of her linen tent dresses or shove them into the hollow between her breasts made by her well-constructed bra. Sometimes she picked up a twelve-pack of Hostess cupcakes in the dessert aisle, took it into the ladies’ room at the back of the store, and ate the whole thing, right there. Sometimes, when it was cold enough to wear her good long coat, she could push pastry and candy bars through the slit she had made in the lining and come home with a major haul. One way or the other, she got what she wanted. The brick Federalist was full of food. There were Devil Dogs and Ring-Dings under the winter quilts in the linen closet. There were big bags of Cheez Doodles and smaller ones of pizza-flavored Combos in the decorative curved wood Shaker baskets that made a display in the study. There were Slim Jims and packages of Chips Ahoy cookies in the hollow base of the Indian brass lamp in the formal living room. Evelyn Adder weighed three hundred and eighty-five pounds at five foot five—and there was still not a moment in her life when she was not hungry, hungry hungry hungry, so hungry she felt as if she were being sucked inside out.

“I don’t understand how you got this way,” Evelyn’s mother would say, visiting from Altoona. “Nobody in our family ever got this way.”

Evelyn kept chocolate-covered marshmallow pinwheels and long thick sticks of pepperoni and big hunks of blue cheese under the winter jackets in the window seat on the half-landing at the front of the house. Sitting there, she could hear Henry as soon as he started to move around in the master bedroom at the top of the stairs. She could also see out onto Winding Brook Road. She saw Patsy MacLaren Willis pack her Volvo full of clothes and get into it and leave. She saw Molly Bracken come off her porch and go down her walk and get the morning paper from the end of her drive. Evelyn sat there for hours, thinking about all the other women on this street, thinking about herself. Between six o’clock and quarter to eight she finished six and a half pounds of pepperoni, three and a half pounds of blue cheese, and thirty-four chocolate-covered marshmallow pinwheels. She also came to this conclusion: Nice little working-class girls from Altoona should not go to Bryn Mawr, or marry their medieval literature professors, or move into places like Fox Run Hill. They would only end up afraid of their own houses, and so hungry they would never get enough, and so frantic they would never be able to think straight. Like her, they would sit around wondering how long it would be before their husbands decided to hire good lawyers and get themselves divorced.