All the Ugly and Wonderful Things
I snorted and let her put the picture back on my nightstand. Another night before I put it away.
What I missed most about Kellen wasn’t riding behind him on the Panhead. I missed watching him eat. Renee ate in darting little bites and without chewing enough. The same way she filled her heart. Too quickly, and with too much talking and not enough feeling.
Our second year as roommates, I went home with Renee at Thanksgiving, and found out why she ate that way. The Dales lived in a neighborhood full of mansions with wrought iron gates and front lawns like public parks. They were rich, but they ate so desperately, they might as well have been stealing food from a stranger’s garbage. Even I didn’t eat like that anymore.
Mrs. Dale heaped everyone’s plate up with turkey, potatoes, stuffing, and gravy. After that, pie and whipped cream. I admired the generosity of all that food. I managed to eat a few bites of turkey and some pieces of buttered dinner roll for the Dales. Small, precise things that I could put in my mouth with people watching. The mashed potatoes were yellow with butter, but they were too complicated. They reminded me of rules I was trying to forget.
“You’re not hungry, little girl?” Renee’s grandfather said.
“It’s okay, Dad.” Mrs. Dale gave me a big fake smile. Renee had warned her about me.
“So are you still dating the boy you told us about? Richard?” Mr. Dale said.
“No. Not anymore,” Renee muttered. There was no boy. Richard was the German professor who made Renee’s heart burn so hot.
“Why didn’t you tell me you broke up with him, sweetie?” Mrs. Dale put another slice of pie on Renee’s plate and suffocated it in whipped cream.
Renee glared at the pie and pushed a nervous bite of it into her mouth, frowning as she chewed.
“Well, what happened?” Mrs. Dale said.
“You know, Wavy’s engaged,” Renee said.
“Really? What does your fiancé do? Is he a student, too?” Mr. Dale raised an eyebrow at his wife.
“He’s in prison,” Renee said.
Mr. Dale almost choked on a bite of pie. In the quiet that came after, I prepared myself to nod, to make the answer I always made. Whatever you want to be true, it is.
Renee barked a nervous laugh and said, “God, I’m kidding. I’m kidding! Wavy doesn’t have a fiancé in prison.”
“Oh, Renee! You and your jokes,” Mrs. Dale said. Everyone laughed. “So, are you still going to the gym? How’s your diet going?”
The fork fell out of Renee’s hand and clattered onto the plate next to the half-eaten pie. Renee looked like she was going to gag, but she swallowed. I felt so angry I had to dig my nails into my hands. All that delicious food spoiled in Renee’s stomach. Mrs. Dale was as dangerous as Val. She might as well have put her fingers in Renee’s mouth and pulled the pie out. She might as well have shouted, “Don’t eat that! That’s dirty!”
* * *
For Kellen’s Christmas letter, I devoted a paragraph to mashed potatoes, and another to the reliable deliciousness of cold pizza. Renee and I always split a pizza on Sunday nights when the cafeteria was closed. She ate her half when it got there, hot enough to burn the roof of her mouth. I ate mine after it was cold, while Renee was asleep.
I wrote to Kellen about how I wanted to cook for him and watch him eat. He approached food the same way he approached kissing: slowly, thoroughly, and with concentration. Watching him chew and swallow was lovely. Solid muscles working, sending food to fuel all of him.
Since all my letters came back unread, I mostly wrote them for myself. For the pleasure of writing, “Dear Kellen, Tonight was the first night I could see Orion, and I wished you were here, wearing his belt. If we could travel to Alpha Centauri and look at our stars, the Sun would be part of Cassiopeia. From Earth they seem so far apart, but from Alpha Centauri, our Sun is the sixth star, as close as the others.”
Kellen and I were like that. At night I thought of him in his cell, two hundred and thirty-seven miles away, according to my car’s odometer. Viewed from my bed, he was a distant constellation. From Alpha Centauri, we were twin stars, side by side.
3
RENEE
April 1989
Wavy wrote more letters than anyone I knew. Every week she wrote to her cousins and her aunt. Twice a month to her high school Spanish teacher. In Spanish. She also wrote letters to the lawyer who oversaw her trust fund. Her typewriter was electric, but she pounded on it like a manual when she wrote to her lawyer, because she and her aunt were at war over Kellen’s money.
Brenda used the trust to control Wavy, and that included forcing her to live in the dorm. If we wanted to get an apartment together, Wavy had to convince the trust’s lawyer to overrule her aunt. That required letters. Typing until I thought my ears would bleed from the sound of it.
The winning letter mentioned “Mrs. Brenda Newling’s callous indifference to my personal comfort.” That was how Wavy referred to her aunt in letters to the lawyer. Like she was a cruel stranger. It also made reference to her “special dietary needs and the difficulty of satisfying them in a communal living environment.” Another way of saying she had an eating disorder. Mostly she ate in secret and stockpiled food, but when she was really stressed out, like during finals, she ate out of the trash. Like a raccoon. Special dietary needs: other people’s discarded pizza.
Wavy also wrote letters to anybody she thought could help locate her brother. She had a huge file box of correspondence from former neighbors, her uncle’s old parole officer, teachers at the last school Donal attended. Years of work, starting from the moment she lost him.