“There you are,” Traci said. “I was wondering where you’d got to. I went to the dining room, but you weren’t there.”
“I had to make a phone call.”
“Well, it doesn’t seem to have done you any good. Come up and have lunch with me. You really have to keep your motivation in place around here, or the whole program falls apart.”
“My motivation’s all right, I think,” Dessa said. “My body seems to be on the verge of collapse.”
“That’s just your muscle tissue breaking down so that it can build itself up again,” Traci said earnestly. “That’s a very good sign. Come on to lunch.”
Dessa came on to lunch. She still wasn’t hungry, but she liked to listen to Traci talk.
Traci was always so positive about everything.
3
UP ON THE SECOND floor, Christie Mulligan wasn’t at lunch yet either. She was standing on the closed top of the toilet seat in the last stall to the left of the vanity mirrors in the members’ lavatory, trying to see her reflection in the polished glass of the small window near the ceiling. Tara and Michelle were out by the sinks, talking to each other. The small window was open, letting in streams of cold, raw air. Christie had her leotard pulled down around her waist and her bra off. She had her fingers on the wrong place in her left breast and she was kneading. It hasn’t gotten any bigger, she kept telling herself. Doesn’t that mean something? It means I must be right and the doctors must be wrong. The tests were false. The results were mistakes. Something went wrong at the laboratory and her medical card got mixed up with somebody elses’s.
“I think the whole bunch of them are weird,” Tara was saying to Michelle. “Especially that Virginia What’s-her-name. I think she’s psychotic.”
“I like Dessa Carter,” Michelle said. “And I like Greta Bellamy.”
Christie let her fingers relax. It was no bigger than it had been, but it hadn’t gone away, either. Maybe it was some kind of cyst. Maybe it was a strange form of bruise, an interior black eye, swollen and painful. Except that it didn’t hurt.
“I like Gregor Demarkian,” Tara was saying. “He’s the only person I’ve met since I got here who is the least bit interesting. Everybody else thinks tofu paste is a food.”
“Tofu paste is a food,” Michelle said.
“They’re like those kids at school who get so green, they’re practically frogs. Brazilian tree frogs that live in the rain forest, specifically. When we get out of here tonight, I’m going to go down to Happy Jack’s and buy myself a pepperoni pizza. Large.”
“I like that police detective,” Michelle said. “Tony Bandero. I think he’s very reassuring.”
“I think he’s a jerk,” Tara snorted. “He’s less like a cop than he is like a con man. I mean, I can just see him, can’t you, playing that walnut shell game down on the Green?”
“No,” Michelle said. “He reminds me of our police chief back in Waterville. He’s—avuncular. That’s the word. Like he’s got everybody’s best interests at heart but he’s a little embarrassed to show it.”
“Tony Bandero wouldn’t be embarrassed to show off his dick at high noon in front of the Congregational Church. Christie, are you all right?”
Christie felt the wrong place one more time. It should be getting smaller, she thought. When was it going to start getting smaller? When was it just going to go away? She grabbed her sports bra and started to struggle into it. When she had it pulled all the way up, it made her chest look flat. She gripped the top of her leotard and started to pull that up, too.
“I’m fine,” she called out to Tara. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
“Hurry up, or we’ll be reduced to having nothing but Slim Jims for lunch. Instead of tofu paste and raw carrots.”
Tara would prefer the Slim Jims. Obviously. Now that her leotard was pulled up, Christie found it easier to see herself in the window. She thought she looked very elegant, thin and ethereal, better than she ever had before in her life.
“Here I come,” she said, stepping down off the top of the toilet seat. She opened the stall door and joined Tara and Michelle at the sinks. She looked at herself in the mirror and confirmed what she had thought when she had seen herself in the window glass. She did look thin and ethereal. She did look better than she ever had before in her life.
Tara didn’t seem to agree.
“Jesus Christ, Christie,” she said in disgust. “If I didn’t see you eat, I’d swear you were starving yourself to death. What are we trying for here, the Siege of Sarajevo aesthetic?”