By M. Ingrid Wiese
She was ten. Her tiny little girl legs dangled from the kitchen chair, occasionally kicking me under her mom’s Formica kitchen table. She rested her elbows, a spoon in one hand and the other hovering over her Lucky Charms. She picked out the Marshmallows and popped them into the air so she could catch them in her mouth.
She was twelve. We swam together on the swim team. Her body was rounding through the belly and she was already taller than the rest of us. Despite her awkwardness at her changing body she remained the strongest swimmer on the team. We swam the relay together. I can still see her at the swim meet, goofing off during practice, her blonde curls bobbing in the blue water, her head falling back when she laughed. She dripped with sarcasm, bundled in her towel, licking her fingers and dipping them into a box of dry lime jell-o, waiting for our next event. We passed the time wagging our green tongues talking about the boys we thought were cute and what we would wear on the first day of school.
She was sixteen. Mom told me she had seen her out jogging along Gravelly Lake Drive. Mom said she had lost weight. Mom looked at her own thighs in the mirror, turning and sucking in her stomach, she told me, “she isn’t a chubby little girl anymore. She looked great.”
“I don’t remember her ever being chubby mom.”
“Well, she was fuller. Chunky. She had big cheeks. She was 'rounded'. But she has really slimmed down. She runs a lot you know. You should run. She looks fantastic.”
She was seventeen. Her sister Erika and I worked together at Tijuana Taco Shop. Erika told me that her sister dominated the track team and set new records for Cross Country. Erika bragged that her sister was training for the Olympics and their mother was super proud. On a side note, Erika confided to me her concern for her sisters recent dramatic weight loss.
She was twenty. Mom told me that she was sent away to a clinic because she wasn’t gaining weight. She said she saw her out running along Steilacoom Boulevard and she had looked like a ghost. She couldn’t believe those little legs were able to carry her frail frame.
“It was like seeing a corpse run. You could see all her veins, the blood pumping through her thin skin. She’s sick Ingrid.”
She was twenty-three. I saw her for a moment. She was walking behind her mother in a crowd. My boyfriend squeezed my leg under the table and raised his eyes towards the sickly figure. I barely recognized her. She wasn’t smiling. Her skin had aged her to a 78 year old woman with cheeks that cut caverns into her face. Her skin was pasty and white, her once bouncy blond curls had thinned into wispy patches of hair that she had pulled back in a small pony tail. She was wearing a designer dress and high heeled boots that gaped around her tiny ankles and only made her knees look smaller. She looked tired. She didn’t see me. She didn’t see my jaw dropped open. She just walked by quietly with her head lowered. It was only an instant.
She was twenty-nine. It was in passing that Mom mentioned she had died.
“Oh yes. Did you hear? She died. It’s so sad really. With all of us watching what we eat and worried about getting fat, can you believe someone could starve themselves to death? How dreadful for her mother. I can’t imagine standing by and watching my daughter die that way. I know she tried everything to help her.”
She would have been thirty. I try not to comment on the way my friends look, their weight or their appearance. Not when they look good, not when they look thin. Because I don't want to enforce the idea that my love for them notices these types of things. Instead, I try to tell them how happy I am to see them. I try to get them away, from the clubs and the gym and the pressured existence of Manhattan ambition. I try to laugh at their jokes, tell them how funny they are, engage their souls, and connect. I don’t allow the gym clothes to hide the reality that my friend is becoming too thin. So thin that I need to reinforce through my actions that boys, and party dresses and the pursuit of glamour, adoration and the thinness reserved for the naturally petite is not what will make us feel full. I try not to read those magazines. I try not to stand in front of the mirror too long.
I am thirty-four. When I pass by the news stand on the corner of 14th and 6th Ave, I see the little girls in their knee high socks on their way to school, standing on their tippy toes to catch a glimpse of the fashion magazines behind the counter. I see the photo of Isabelle Caro and her self starved body on the front page of the Daily News. I see the glossy covers of Us, InTouch, and OK magazine brandishing skinny little Hollywood starlets “dying to be thin”. I see their tiny wrists. I see their thinning hair. I see their sunken cheeks and protruding clavicles. I see her, tiny, little girl legs, dangling off the chair in her mother’s kitchen.
