___________________
Bad
Enough
By
Kristi Petersen
____________________
From
where she was standing, it was a long way down.
It
was a good thing, she figured, that she wasn’t afraid of
heights. She’d never been. Even as a five-year-old, when
she was far too young to be riding rollercoasters by herself, she
was able to get on without anyone stopping her. She was so big-boned
that she was well above the height level marked on those Midway
signs that insisted “you must be this tall to ride this ride.”
Not
that she was obese, or, what people would call “fat”—she
wasn’t; she was just a big kid. Her meaty legs were powerful
enough to kick out a window (she’d done it once when her
family’s second-story apartment had a kitchen fire when her
parents weren’t home); her breasts were two giant melons
(do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, just on to
a 34-B cup right away. Forget this “training bra” crap).
As a teen, she’d never had the privilege of running around
in midriff-open tops, and she envied the tan girls with little
pouches of bellies who ran around bra-less on hot summer nights
while she sweat a gallon under a hot cotton blanket of wires and
thick straps.
She
knew she didn’t have to be thin to be sexy. She’d seen
women who were considerably shorter and plumper than she, not having
the advantage of height to spread some of it thin. Some of these
women had elephant-trunk legs, and their knees dimpled and roiled
with extra flaps of skin; some of them had cantaloupe breasts,
beach-ball bellies and shelf-asses. But these women, confident
and even daring, paraded in front of their men like they were every
bit as sleek as last month’s centerfolds. And so, when she
thought about it, she realized it wasn’t necessarily their
thinness she desired—it was their comfort with their own
portliness. She had tried many times to accept the way she was
built (like a brick shithouse, her father had once said).
She had told herself, “I should love me the way I am, and
just control what I eat so I don’t get too heavy, and that
should be enough.” She’d bought more expensive, tailored
clothes, make-up that you could only purchase from a china-dolled-up
beauty consultant and not in a department store like the Dollar
Dayz an hour away. She’d even redecorated her bedroom windows
with pretty, sheer curtains in silver, gold, and pink sparkly trim.
But she had to confess that despite all these attempts, her skewed
thinking hadn’t changed. So the only other alternative, which
was the one she almost always arrived at after weeks of upheaval,
weeks of breaking down whatever it was around her that she’d
decided would do the trick this time, was to try another diet.
She
had tried every diet known to woman. The 2000-calorie-a-day thing.
The packaged-frozen-meal thing. The super-teas-that-made-everything—even
-her-eyelids—sweat thing. The box-of-laxatives-after-you-eat-a-big-meal
thing, the low-carb thing, the two-shakes-and-a-sensible-dinner
thing, the exercise-at-the-gym-two-hours-a-day thing, the citrus-fruit-and-dry-English-muffin
thing, the smelly-cabbage-soup thing. She had tried them all: every
supplement, every vitamin, every strict regimen. Nothing had worked.
Despite her peering at herself in her bathroom mirror (the one
that had cracked when she’d moved to her trailer next door
to Rainforest Park, a five-dollar attraction on Route 501 that
boasted exotic birds but was simply a sad display of shabby, lightning-burnt
pine trees surrounding decrepit bird cages and a lone filthy goose
poised on a mound of dirt) and resolving at the cusp of each diet
that “in just two weeks, my clothes should start falling
off me—well, if not that, then at least be a little looser”,
five or six days went by and she saw nothing significant. Then
she was back in the supermarket again, loading up her cart with
foods that confused her because after the failure of every diet
she didn’t know what to eat anymore.
She
stood in the check-out line behind some Twiggy in a bright red
tank dress and matching heels yakking on her cell in such a way
it brought squirrels to mind, and flipped through magazines beckoning
purchase with promises of super-celebrity diets or “if I
can do it, you can too! 14 days to a size 4.” And that was
the day that it occurred to her, surveying her cart crammed with
frozen meals, some of those shake things, a couple of pounds of
raw steak, 80% lean hamburger and a bag of citrus fruits: the only
thing she hadn’t tried was not shopping. Specifically, not eating.
Oh, sure. She’d been warned about how that doesn’t
really work, that the weight comes back in no time flat; she’d
even seen a documentary on TV where a girl was so thin the bones
in her rear-end could splinter if she was not placed by nurses
on a couch in just a certain way. But that would surely never happen
to her. That would surely never happen to her because she was only
going to do it for a month or so. One month, that would be all.
And if it worked, and it was sure to work because it was the only
thing she hadn’t tried, she’d at last feel like she
could buy any clothes she wanted. And then perhaps, when she went
to the Lightning Rod—the bar decorated with flashing lights
and garage doors that pulled up to let the heat of the South Carolina
summer dissipate—men would turn their heads and think, ‘what
a looker, I wish I could have a piece of that’. And then
perhaps, she’d be able to drive her convertible with confidence,
buy a bright polka-dot pink scarf to tie about her hair, get some
dark glasses, put on some lipstick, and feel sexy.
She
did not pretend that day after day of eating nothing would be easy.
What she needed was to isolate herself from food of any kind. Beyond
that: she needed removal to a world under her absolute control.
A place where there would be no temptations, no cookies or candy,
nothing that was bad for her, no social invitations with friends
to the pizza parlor that could derail her diet the more and more
beer she consumed (because the more beer she consumed, the more
complacent she became, so the more she allowed herself to indulge,
only the next morning to arise, hate herself, and vow to start
over).
When
the experiment had first crept into her head, it had been an amusing
proposition. Then it had grown into a fantasy, as in, “what
if I could do that?” Then it had slowly mutated
to seem, with her phone calls, plausible and affordable. She would
station herself way up on the 16th-floor balcony of
a Myrtle Beach oceanfront high-rise, locked out of her $52/night
suite (good rates—it was mid-August, after all), taking as
her source of inspiration the skinny girls below who would surely
one day be lamenting their own physical demise as a consequence
of childbearing. She was convinced that she would be miraculously
forty pounds thinner by the end of the month.
The
Golden Beach Pagoda, the hotel was called, so there were Chinese
dragons on all the corresponding note paper, towels and matchbooks.
She’d had more than a few initial reservations about choosing
this particular spot for her experiment. She adored older places,
but most of them had a hard time surviving in this era: the days
of people knowing how to entertain themselves were long gone. The
older places couldn’t afford all the stupendous features
that kept today’s frenetics busy, so they very often lost
money and became run-down, not even updating their signage. The
Golden Beach Pagoda was one such place. It was clean, had just
undergone a couple of fresh coats of paint, but it had a sign that
had probably been painted five decades ago. The dancing dragon
peeled in places so that when he was lit up at night, it was like
his creator had changed his mind and erased parts of him. It also
didn’t help that being un-politically correct seemed to be
okay. Mr. Dragon was free to dance about in all his slanty-eyed
glory and proclaim, by means of a cartoon-bubble, that his hotel
was “Emperor favorite place by ocean!” But it had what
she wanted: a high floor, and sliders that locked from the inside
when you closed them.
She
was not as experienced as a competitor for the Guinness Book of
World Records, but she was also not a fool: she’d been camping,
and she saw to it that all of the necessary precautions had been
taken, that as many comforts—what could be possible on a
10x12 balcony, anyway—had been provided. She had a tent,
pinioned to the clearly-hurricane-battered and rusted air conditioner,
its thin ribbings plied with crusts of reddish salt layers; she
had three flannel blankets, a sleeping bag—though pink and
slightly small because it had been a gift from her parents on her
9th birthday—six cases of bottled water, four
boxes of diet pills, and a Rubbermaid tub full of lettuce of every
kind, tomatoes, onions, and low fat dressing (there was still a
wisp of that “starving doesn’t work” advice present
in her head, and so she knew she couldn’t subsist on nothing).
She had a small library of material she’d wanted to read
years ago, and a battery-operated television with four spare fully-charged
batteries, in case she got really bored. She also had a notepad,
pens, envelopes and stamps (she could address them and toss them
over the balcony—someone below would pick them up and see
that they got to a mailbox, she was sure of that), and a few ten-for-a-buck
postcards she’d gotten at one of the gift shops—Wings or Whales—that
advertised “free hermit crab with $20 purchase.” Yes,
she’d run herself up to $20 with a couple of other items
so she’d have the crab in a cage as a friend—someone
to talk to—and she’d named him Antigone. She had also
secured basic necessities—a dishpan, spring water to brush
her teeth and some suntan lotion so she wouldn’t burn. She
had a table and a chair. She had a carton of cigarettes too: even
though she didn’t smoke, she’d heard it was a wonderful
deterrent, something in the hand replacing something in the mouth—and
even though the breezes coming off the ocean could be more than
just a little disruptive, she figured matches could still be of
use. The four-cup coffee maker was possible due to the hotel’s
outdoor electrical outlet—she’d spent weeks making
calls to ensure that particular amenity. She even had a make-up
mirror so that when she got thinner, she could make herself pretty
enough stand up and wave to the men below at 11:00 at night, feigning
that she was just another partier doing something crazy. She was
completely prepared—she’d even taken care to hook the
flimsy plastic DO NOT DISTURB sign on her hotel room door, so she’d
have no interruption by the minimum-wage maids and their carts
mounded high with towels.
Post-experiment
arrangements had also occurred to her: what about, she’d
thought, getting down when the month was up? No one would hear
her cry for help over the beach winds; her voice would be spirited
away like the seeds of a flower. She felt she’d also planned
well for that occasion: she had a thick coil of heavy rope used
for boating, and a stack of $1.99 bed sheets to tie on (to give
the rope weight, so it wouldn’t blow about, and so it would
hit its target more effectively), with a note that said, “Help—I’m
locked out on the 16th floor. Please send someone up
to let me in.” Her note she’d penned with a permanent
waterproof marker on thick paperboard she’d purchased at
the craft store—it wouldn’t rip or blow around as much
as paper would—and she’d taken care to get a neon color,
something bright and sure to catch the attention, a construction-cone
orange. The rope, at two-hundred and fifty feet (she’d done
the calculations: a 16-story building in Cincinnati measured 210
feet tall, so she figured this estimate couldn’t be too far
off), would reach the sandy concrete patio next to the pool where,
at least most of the day, there would be people lounging, hats
and clear plastic visors firmly crowning their heads, reading their
books or watching their kids. It was assured. Someone would see
it. Someone would send for help.
She
had overlooked one thing: when she crawled into her sleeping bag,
she wished she’d thought to buy an air mattress—she
hadn’t realized that the Astro-turf covered concrete would
be so slate-hard, and this lack of attention to detail only betrayed
that her parents had been too well-prepared when they’d been
camping. She was so used to sleeping on air mattresses, she’d
actually forgotten that’s what it was that made sleeping
out in the woods so comfortable.
Despite
the cool breezes in the morning hours, if she sat in the sun, she
found she was quite warm. She could feel the chill associated with
sunburn, that fever-type chill, that, instead of making her feel
ill, made her feel strangely healthy. Like the sun had burnt every
bad thing off of her skin, had melted every bad thing in her bones
away until all that was left was raw and pure and sinless, and
that was why the body shivered so, for it wasn’t used to
being without its thickened blanket of iniquities. So when she
was done here, not only would she be thin, she would be tan, too—perhaps
not what would be considered a bronze goddess, but, at least, she
would have gotten some color.
She
could tell she was hungry—there was a growl in her belly—but
it was masked heavily by the appetite suppressants, so when she
felt the desire for more salad, or when she felt she was going
to threaten her meager food supply by ripping off the cover of
the tub, dumping the entire bottle of salad dressing over the sixteen
or seventeen heads of lettuce, two dozen tomatoes, pound of onions
and four cans of olives, making a giant salad big enough, perhaps,
to sit and soak in just as though she were in a jacuzzi, she popped
another pill. The smoking thing wasn’t working well—she
was having trouble figuring out how to light the cigarette—but
she wasn’t desperate enough for that measure—yet.
Most
days she watched the surf roll in, roll out. Sometimes there was
a dolphin, or what she thought was a dolphin, leaping in a gray
arc over the water; sometimes, there were big shrimp boats, seesawing
like rocking horses in the waves. Sometimes she saw something glowing
in the water, a spot of pink or white that would be there and then
vanish just as a blinking light would. She thought they were phosphorescent
animals, maybe, or perhaps, she was just seeing the white sides
of seagulls. She’d forgotten to bring her binoculars and
was sorry she had—simply because there was another activity
that would help the time to pass. She didn’t want to rip
through her dozen books all at once, and she’d already finished
one, a mystery about a famous poet’s body found walled up
in the very museum that was supposedly his original home. The battery-operated
TV she decided to only watch twice a day—for news. Nothing
that wasn’t necessary. She knew she could re-charge the batteries
by using the outdoor outlet, but had decided that, since she’d
lost the unit’s AC adapter and therefore could no longer
plug it in directly, she deserved punishment for being so irresponsible
with such an expensive Christmas gift from her former boyfriend
who’d confessed he liked his women “soft as a pillow”.
She’d had a good one, there. He didn’t care that she’d
towered over him or that she was a little dimply in the derriere.
But she also hadn’t wanted to “settle”. She
was still convinced she had a chance at finding her rock star if
she were only thinner.
In
the mornings, the sun rose white over the gray-green sea and moved
behind pale purple clouds, bleeding through them like the ray-hand
of God upon the sea’s creatures; in the afternoons, she caught
her tan, and in the evenings, especially on the weekends, she amused
herself—following the news, of course—with watching
young lovers walk off their romantic meals, staunch men with dogs
shining their flashlights about, looking for treasure or shells,
and later, after midnight, drunken revelers back from the bars
who always seemed underdressed for the weather running into the
breakers and the surf, howling like mad wolves and jumping about.
These she liked best. It was like watching a car accident—she
knew half of them, if not all, would go back to their lives and
just two days later would more than likely be sick with pneumonia
or some other damn thing. Adults could still be as stupid as children.
By
the second week, the waistband of her denim skirt was loose. This
thrilled her, and she wished she’d brought a scale. She was
starving, but this, if she was seeing results, was as good as if
someone had presented her with a three-tiered chocolate cake.
It
was also, however, when she was beginning to regret this decision.
Things
were not going as planned. Despite all of her efforts, she was
bored. And lonely. Antigone the crab had given up the ghost toward
the end of the first week (she had offered his pathetic remains
to the seagulls and terns) and even though the postcard/letter
trick seemed to be working (she was composing great fictions about
what a lovely time she was having on vacation, telling her recipients
about bars and restaurants she was eating at, roller coasters and
Ferris Wheels she was riding in her mind) she’d used up her
ten-for-a-buck postcards and was running out of paper and stamps.
She was already through her sixth book, and if she worked harder
at spacing out her reading periods, she supposed she could make
them last longer. The salad, because she had neglected to figure
out a way of bringing and keeping a constant supply of ice to her
corner of seclusion, was beginning to wilt, and the tomatoes and
the plastic in the bin took on the strong odor of onions; when
she opened the bin, the hot stink would rush upon her like the
breath of a baloney-feasting dog. But there was something else
unsettling about her predicament, something she hadn’t planned
on as well: time to think.
She
was not the sort of person who liked thinking. For that reason,
she had not gone to college, choosing instead to work her way up
to district manager at a local chain of craft stores. Numbers and
profit margins, ordering and supervision came much more easily
to her than did trying to solve the complex problems faced by,
say, a nurse, or a teacher. And since she had management experience,
she thought, if she got bored with staring at catalogs full of
yarn and deciding, based on supplier price, what that yarn would
cost, she could work at a hotel. There were plenty of hotels—like
this one—not even an hour from her house. And that was the
way her life went, following the same pattern it had when she’d
gotten her first dollhouse. Her mother had it gotten second-hand,
and it had chipped wallpaper in its kitchen and a bathroom toilet
that had a broken seat, only it was glued to the dollhouse floor
and it couldn’t be replaced unless the entire floor and all
of the other furniture—claw foot tub, sink, and dresser for
linens—were to be replaced as well. So she’d lived
with it. Any problem that was too daunting to solve, any problem
that required too much thought, was a problem to be avoided.
Her
favorite part of the news was the weather. There were never any
problems, so she wasn’t required to think about it. Weather
this time of year, save for the occasional storm, was pretty clear,
warm until the end of September when it cooled down slightly, and
she was looking forward to cooler afternoons, believe it or not,
because she was, most definitely, getting too much color. She laughed,
thinking of herself as a crispy chicken, probably because, after
the fourteenth salad, she had spotted a family way down on the
pool patio with a take-out bucket of the stuff. She also thought
of herself as a bright pink spare rib or an angry red lobster,
probably because of the advertisers that sponsored the weather
reports: “come on down to Pork’s Beach BBQ!” “Snap
into some crazy crab legs or NEW fried lobster tail bites… with
or without butter.”
It
was then she realized she had to stop watching the weather for
awhile, not because she wasn’t curious, but because of the
commercials. The enticement of what she knew were really just plastic
models of food was too upsetting and tantalizing for her to watch,
sending her stomach into paroxysms of spasms. Spasms of hunger.
She supposed she didn’t need the weather reports anyway;
she could deduce the changing of seasons from what went on at the
beach.
It
seemed there were fewer and fewer families picnicking on the patios
below, fewer people lounging around the pool, but it didn’t
concern her. Then one day, she noticed that the usual staff—the
gentlemen who drove white “Beach Patrol” trucks who
set out the small, snail-shell-like cabanas every morning well
before dawn, then repeated the process in reverse every evening
around dusk—did not come around. The cabanas reminded her
of escargot—well, blue and yellow and striped and polka dotted
escargot, of course—especially when a guy with a shovel piled
sand along their broad backs, possibly to better steel them against
the oncoming surf, and tides, and winds. She had seen beach goers
swarm around them, then at eight o’clock, empty them, calling
it a night and coming inside to shower and perhaps dress themselves
nicely for dinners at seafood shacks or fine steakhouses on the
pier. But on this day that process didn’t happen. There were
none to be found. Where were the cabanas?
The
jeans she climbed into at night were now getting loose. For the
first time in many days, her gaze fell upon the coil of rope and
piles of sheets, her escape route, in the corner at the bottom
of a dribble of rust that plummeted from the air conditioner down
the sand-textured paint. It beckoned her, as though it was a coy
snake and she was its charmer, but somehow an ancient spell had
reversed and she was under its pull. Perhaps, she thought, she
was just crazed with hunger. She was certain she hadn’t reached
a goal weight, and she cursed herself again for not getting herself
a scale in which to keep track of it, but she supposed it would
have created a problem if she’d begun this process at 160
pounds and after two weeks of starvation the needle was stuck at
just 158. She could get down, consider getting down. Perhaps she’d
lost enough weight, and it was time to abandon this silly balcony
and get back to her life. Something inside her was telling her,
in fact, like an alarm in the middle of a dream, that there was
a problem, that something wasn’t right. Up here, not only
could she hear the sound of the wind from the sea, she could, if
the day were calm, hear the roar of traffic out on Ocean Boulevard,
at the opposite side of the hotel. (She had specifically requested
that she not be able to see the road from her room just in case
there were too many enticements, like ice cream shops or people
walking by with fast-food cheeseburgers in their hands, happily
munching away.) But she couldn’t hear traffic. Also, she
seemed to notice a lack of seagulls and terns. They hadn’t
kept her company so much as they’d been a nuisance, swooping
into her 10x12 every time she pulled out her meager rations. But
now there seemed to be so few of them, and smaller, weaker ones,
too. She didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but she sensed
that it meant something, this clearing out of the brutish birds
that bullied and even fought over the occasional piece of quickly-wilting
onion that she dropped on the patio floor.
After
a week with no television and no revelers to watch in the night,
two days after she didn’t see any more cabanas and she had
to chuck one of the tomatoes that had been at the bottom of her
bin for it had gone soft, mushy and heavy with black-white mold,
she heard something like construction—hammers banging, even
the occasional yell or jackhammer cutting through the wind and
the waves. These sounds of progress were a sharp reminder that
life was going forward without her, and it made her lonely. She
wanted someone or something to keep her company. And so, even though
she would be tempted by food commercials and surely it would drive
her right into the arms of the hemp and cotton snake in the corner,
she turned on the battery-operated TV.
The
man she recognized as her friendly Channel 8 Beach TV Weather forecaster
didn’t look right. He had ditched his usual suit and tie
for a bright red Hawaiian shirt, and he wasn’t in front of
a traditional weather map. Instead, he sat in what looked to be
a beach bungalow, and his long gray hair wasn’t tied back;
in fact, he looked a little unkempt, as though someone had roused
him from a face-down sleep in a bar named after an exotic bird.
He rubbed his eyes and told the audience—tourists and residents
alike—that Hurricane Vortigern was almost here. And this
hurricane, true to its violent usurper of a namesake, was not a
Category 1 or 2, but a Category 5. The likes of which has never
been seen in these parts since the worst one, Hazel, which was
only a Category 4. “If you have not already evacuated, then
you must do so, for it is predicted to make landfall in just a
few short hours, and the last of the windows should be boarded
up.” The TV showed cars crawling past HURRICANE EVACUATION
ROUTE signs, the ones with the white symbol that looked like a
pizza cutter blade. They were all up and down Route 501, near where
she lived.
Where
she lived. Where she lived that she probably wouldn’t see
again. Category Five! And she was on the beach-side. She’d
be killed! Crushed! Pummeled! What if the building were simply
blown away or swallowed by the vomiting sea? What if a wave truly
could reach the 16th floor? What if that were possible?
There was no way, no way she could go through with her plan now
to drop the rope and hope someone saw her; they were all gone.
Back from whence they came or, if they lived nearby, probably with
relatives in other states.
They
were gone, and she was in very big trouble.
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