She wasn’t living any kind of life at all, but she was still more alive than her father, whose skin in the last few weeks had simply turned gray, his nose and ears becoming more pronounced against his shrinking head, even though none of his doctors knew exactly what was wrong with him. And this guy, her date, so leisurely, so cavalier, he had all the time in the world to try out new restaurants, didn’t he?
“Can you just meet me at my dorm at six and let’s not argue about it?” she said. “I’ll be in front of the building.”
“How will I recognize you?” he said.
“I’ll be the one who doesn’t care where we eat dinner,” she said.
She did care. She missed eating. (Men, she didn’t miss. You can’t miss something you never had in the first place.) Food had been something that had made her happy, and now she was so sad and tired all the time that she could not even remember the connection between the two, between food and joy, and when she looked in the mirror, she saw drawn skin on her face, and unfamiliar bones across the top of her chest, delicately poking against her skin like shells beneath sand. Now food was merely something she used to power her body so that she could walk: dorm, class, dorm, hospital, dorm. Thirty years later she will lose track of distinct emotions, everything will be blurred together, and there will only just be feeling and eating. But for now food, along with joy, had slipped away from her.
And here was a man she didn’t know—a fix-up; Carly had met him at shul, this Richard Middlestein, and he had boldly asked her out, not noticing the glittering engagement ring on her finger, and when she had waved it at him, he had ducked his head, covered with thick, curly hair, awkwardly but charmingly, and he was tall and wearing a suit (no hippie, this one, thank God; hippies were over), and he was going to be a pharmacist in a year, and did he want to meet another smart Jewish girl? Of course he did!—taking the time to ask her what she wanted to eat. Maybe, Edie, you could slow down for a minute and answer the man?
“We could go to Gino’s,” she said.
“I love Gino’s,” he said. “I think Chicago pizza is better than New York pizza, and I say that as a lifelong New Yorker. But don’t tell anyone I said that.”
“Who would I tell?” she said.
Three hours later she leaned against the limestone walls of Abbott Hall, in a cool green summer dress that hung around her waist. A year ago it had fit her snugly across her gut and around her hips. She had been six feet tall for a few years, and had had a lovely plush body, and now she felt like a scarecrow. Where had her breasts gone? Those were mostly missing. Where were her parts? They had been disappeared by some unknown force. She turned her head right and noticed the lake, a handful of pristine sailboats gliding in the wind. Usually she never looked past the traffic speeding by on Lake Shore Drive. Carly had gone sailing with her rich, cerebral fiancé two weeks ago and had invited her along, and Edie had declined the offer before Carly had even finished her sentence. She was going to be an orphan soon: her father was dying, she was sure of it. His first test had been inconclusive, but deep in her heart she knew that all those Pall Malls had taken their toll, and it was not nickels or dimes her father would pay. Do orphans even go sailing?
Other law students exited the building, books in hand. They were all going to do better than her in class, in life. She had so much work to do, and she couldn’t catch up; she was, for the first time ever, only a merely adequate student. She didn’t even know what kind of lawyer she wanted to become. She should know by now what she was going to be someday. Why was she going to eat pizza with a stranger?
She wore her hair down, a good idea, the dark curls a tantalizing contrast with her green dress, and she had dug out a small bottle of lip gloss from the bottom of her underwear drawer, where it had fallen six months before and where she had not so accidentally forgotten about it, as if even the slightest lick of makeup would slow her down.
And then there he was, in a suit (it was his only suit, but she didn’t know that yet), and he was smiling (his happiest days were behind him the minute he met her, but he didn’t know that yet), and tall, much taller than Edie, so that she felt even smaller, and he walked confidently, like he liked what he had swinging between his legs. And the curly hair she had been told about was indeed thick and dark, just like her own hair, and so he instantly felt familiar to her. A different kind of woman might not have wanted the familiar. Five years down the line, who knows? Maybe Edie would have become that kind of woman, who wanted nothing to do with someone who came from the same place. He might have been from New York City, but he was just the same as she was. As her father hovered on the edge of something terrible, as he dwindled down into a pale, bony version of his former self, as he threatened to disappear entirely, here was a man who was tall and healthy and full of something Edie found herself wanting to devour.