“Can you just stop being so tough for a minute?” he said.
“No,” she said.
And would you hate her if she started to cry? Did she have you convinced that she really was that tough? Would you find her weak, a weak, pathetic girl, crying because she was losing an argument, losing herself, losing herself into him, and she hadn’t let herself feel that way in so long? Would you still want to know her, could you still respect her, if she was the kind of girl who cried when she realized she was falling in love?
Edie, 241 Pounds
The letter went out on a Friday, but Edie already knew what it was going to say. Her daughter, Robin, flipped it miserably in front of her at the kitchen table, where Edie had collapsed after arriving home from work, her hand resting on an unopened package of fat-free (top ingredient: sugar) cookies. She messily ripped the edge of the delicate plastic wrapping with her fingertips, leaving a jagged opening down the middle of the package, so instead of just one row of dark, spongy, devil’s-food-cake cookies, there were two, and, with the slightest tug of her index finger and thumb, all three were revealed. There they all were. Waiting. The cookies smelled like nothing, like air, and that’s how they felt inside her, too. They never filled her up, no matter how many she ate. Once, at night, when she was certain everyone was in bed, she had eaten two boxes of the cookies, just to see what would happen, and it had done nothing to her. Edie couldn’t feel a thing.
She pushed the package toward her daughter, who got up from the end of the table and took half of one row of cookies into her hands, then returned to face her mother down at the end of the long table. Six cookies. Fat-free.
“This looks important,” said her mother.
Her daughter looked up at her, eyes stark and serious and red-rimmed, half a cookie sticking from her mouth like a helpless mouse captured by a sharp house cat. She looked just as her mother had at her age, plump, fresh-faced, though she carried the weight differently because she was shorter than her mother, so perhaps she was a little wider around the hips. She took the rest of the cookie into her mouth with just her tongue. She hadn’t spoken to her mother in two days, because her mother hadn’t allowed her to go to the hospital when she had wanted to, and then it was too late, and now all that was left was this letter.
It was from the high school; Robin had already opened it, read it, and shoved it back into the envelope, so Edie just shook out the paper with one hand while holding a cookie with the other. Her daughter had already eaten all her cookies and was reaching for more.
A boy had killed himself, that’s what the letter said. Another one was in a mental hospital. (That part wasn’t mentioned in the letter, but Edie had heard this from the school guidance counselor when he had called her at work that afternoon.) The weekend before, the two boys and her daughter had driven downtown to see the Smashing Pumpkins play at a festival, and Robin had returned home drunk and Edie had let it slide because Robin was actually a good little drunk: she did not have much of a hangover, no moaning the next day, and Edie hadn’t had to hold her hair back over the toilet like she did for several roommates of hers in college. She was simply giggly, and she raved about the show, and she didn’t appear to have been molested in any way. Maybe Edie should have imparted some parental wisdom about alcohol at that moment, but she was in no position to be giving anyone advice about what they should or shouldn’t consume.