01: in which Michelle moves to the city and meets two interesting characters
Michelle wiped the bar slowly, looking over it and through her lashes at Richard. “Actually, what I really want to be is a ballerina.”
His face brightened, his lip rising on one side. “That’s fantastic,” he said. “I’m sure you’d be wonderful.”
As she leaned on the bar her freckles came into view under the lights. She looked just past his eyes, over his right shoulder and at the beer advertisement on the wall. She continued. “It’s kind of silly, I guess, but it’s what I’ve always dreamed of. I went to school for it, but it’s so hard to get jobs in companies. Especially for girls with my body type. I mean, I’m thin, but they want sticks.”
Richard leaned across the bar and boldly touched her hand. “Listen to me, Michelle. You are beautiful. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not thin enough. In fact, if you ask me, you could even stand to gain a few pounds.”
The ballerina blushed, then beamed. “Thank you, Richard. That – that means a lot.”
In the penultimate week of her twenty-third year, Michelle moved on her own to the city. It was the first year she would be alone on her birthday.
When her parents drove her the four hours to her new home, a tiny apartment just outside Chinatown in a cheap but not-too-dangerous neighborhood, she didn’t feel like crying. When she had to step over a prone homeless person (breathing, not dead) on the walk from the car and a rat ran down the front steps of her building carrying the remains of a stained takeout box as she started to climb her way to the door, she felt overwhelmed by the prospect of setting the place up on her own. She felt anxiety about auditioning for companies and in the meantime, finding a day job. She felt annoyed with her mother, who kept checking to make sure the stove wasn’t leaking gas and telling her she needed to talk to her landlord about putting some more locks on the doors and bars on the windows, and has anyone checked the batteries on that smoke detector? Michelle just wanted to be alone.
Her mother departed through hugs and thin tears. “If you need anything at all, just call me. If the traffic’s good, I can be down in four hours. Call anytime, don’t worry about waking me. With you kids gone I don’t need to rest up for anything, after all. And don’t talk to anyone suspicious. This city’s full of strange old men out watching for a pretty young girl to take advantage of. I saw a special on TV the other day about a man who cut out a girl’s kidney in a hotel room and sold it to a foreigner for ten thousand dollars. A young girl your age! So sad, just thinking about it makes me…. Just make sure to lock your door always. The one time you forget might be deadly, you understand?”
“Yes, Mom. Okay, Mom. I know.”
It wasn’t until later that afternoon that emotion overtook her. As she was putting away the dishes her parents bought for her, she sat down on the kitchen floor bawling and clutching her knees like a child. When abruptly the door opened, she stopped her tears and looked up. She had left it unlocked, her mother’s advice forgotten already.
“Oh God,” the confused female voice said from the doorway, “this is the wrong apartment isn’t it? I’m so sorry, I’m just moving in today.”
The counter and cabinets shielded Michelle, and whoever it was couldn’t see her sitting on the kitchen floor with her round, childish cheeks wet and red. She pulled her voice together enough to say, “No, don’t worry about it. It’s… I mean, I’m just moving in today, too.”
“Really?” the woman said. “What a coincidence!”
Michelle quickly wiped her face with her sleeve and stood up. “Yeah, just got here a few hours ago, actually.” She knew that whoever stood in her doorway would be able to tell she had been crying. She was good – an expert – at hiding her emotions, but a red face and puffy eyes always betrayed tears. Hopefully the stranger would be polite enough to ignore the obvious.
“Well, I’m glad to meet you,” the white-faced woman said as they saw each other for the first time. “I’m supposed to be living in 118. I guess this isn’t it.”
“They do the numberings weird here,” Michelle said, taking care not to make eye contact. “This is 118A. Is there a letter after yours?”
The stranger looked at her key. “Ah. C. I am living in 118C.” She looked at Michelle’s swollen face and shifted her tone. “I didn’t mean to bother you.”
Michelle swallowed the last of her tears and drew her shoulders back like they taught her in ballet. “It’s okay… I mean, no. You’re not bothering me. It’s nice to meet you.” She extended her hand, an invitation for the stranger to enter her apartment and shake it.
What was it her roommate in college told her? Evil spirits cannot enter a dwelling without an invitation. Her mother would not be happy. She had never met this woman, who may very well have been plotting to strangle Michelle and steal all of her belongings. Perhaps she was in dire, murderous need of a dozen boxes of CDs.
They shook hands, the stranger smiling kindly. She looked a little evil, Michelle decided, studying her up close – tall, thin and pale, with pitch-black hair that lay straight against her head and neck. As she extended a white, reed-like arm to shake Michelle’s, the ballerina couldn’t help but think of vampires.
“Are you okay?” the stranger asked. Her face was lean with sharp cheekbones and a narrow, bony nose. She seemed to wear no makeup except for dark lipstick, but she looked young – possibly younger than Michelle – and could get away with it.
“Oh, yeah,” Michelle replied. “I’m just… I’m fine.”
The stranger’s eyes squinted subtly. “I’m Samantha.”
“Hi, uh, I’m Michelle.”
“Michelle. I knew a girl named Michelle once. We called her Shelly. Do you have a nickname?”
“Me? Um, no. Not really.” She was sure the thin woman was studying her. Judging her. “Do you?”
“Sam.”
“Oh, okay.”
A moment of silence seemed nearly to vibrate, then Samantha turned and glided toward the door. “I guess I’m just down the hall,” she said over her shoulder. “Don’t be a stranger, now. Or I’ll come looking for you.” She winked just the friendliest wink and was gone.
Michelle breathed a sigh and leaned against the counter. Her freckled complexion returned to normal, and she went back to putting dishes away.
Only one person had ever given her a nickname. She still kept the note Jake wrote her upon college graduation in her wallet.
Congratulations, T.D.
The world is yours now. Make your big brother proud.
Jake
Eventually she found a job to pay rent while she was auditioning. The bar paid well and left her days open to audition and make dance connections. She celebrated her birthday in a barren, half unpacked apartment with phone calls from family members and packages in the mail. That night she lay alone on her couch, listening to her CD collection which played as a soundtrack of her life, beginning with her first Madonna CD, youth cresting with Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails, and on and on until she was twenty-three, listening to Radiohead, alone for the first time on the fifth of October.
She met Richard at the bar. She saw him sitting, always in the same seat, always wearing a light colored collared shirt, always there from about five to closing on Thursday nights. He sat alone at the counter and drank vodka tonics, nursing them for about an hour before swilling back the last drops, more melted ice than drink by then, and ordering another. When he ordered beer, Richard favored dark, expensive, foreign ales, triple IPAs, and rich stouts. Michelle noticed and appreciated this preference.
They started talking. He made no propositions, but hung on each of her words as if he fed on her very breath. He moved, sighed, and spoke like a man from another generation, like Rock Hudson in a Doris Day movie. Their conversations progressed quickly. And you’re from where? Oh, me, and you, from where? And why did you move to the city? Because and you? Because because. And your mother? And your mother?
Richard migrated across the country from a Midwestern town after an engagement that ended dramatically and abruptly. His ex-fiancée was a small-town girl uncomfortable with the idea of anonymity. She had begged him to stay with her in Iowa, and he spent four years managing a local restaurant. “It wasn’t so bad,” he said and sighed. “Good, steady money, in a place where everybody knew your name.”
This good, simple, humble woman, Dawn, worked as an usher at the local movie theater. In the town of two thousand people she was known for her benign good-looks and charming, harmless personality. She was still a virgin on her twenty-second birthday and still lived with her parents. Richard knew she would be a flawless wife, an impeccable mother, and that their life together would only grow more ideal. One day, he knew he would forget all about his adolescent dreams of the city.
“Then one day,” he said, voice tight, wrecked with thinly-disguised pain, “I got this phone call. It was a cold day. Really cold. I don’t remember if it was January or February. One of those. You’d think I’d remember, wouldn’t you? But it was the dead of winter and I picked up the phone and it was Dawn’s mom. I called her Alice. Her voice was so choked, like she had to hold back screaming with every word. Somehow, before she even told me what happened I knew my world had turned upside-down. I knew,” a nervous cough, eyes cast down now moving sideward, “I knew Dawn wouldn’t be marrying me after all.”
Dawn’s thin-lipped, wrinkled, Protestant parents had walked in on their daughter in bed with her long-time best friend Harriet, acting in a manner not at all befitting a good Christian girl. They had pressed their lips even thinner, squeezing their eyelids shut to erase the image, the knowledge, and then disowned their daughter immediately. “If you want to find her now,” Alice hissed over the line, “I suggest you check the street corners.”
“I never saw her again,” Richard said, forehead tented by the memory. “The next day I quit my job and sold all my stuff. I just wanted to get away. I had to, you know? After a blow like that, who could stick around?” He looked up at her with quaking brown eyes, and she stretched her hand to touch his.
He was still no older than twenty-six or so, and Michelle told him her own abridged story, the main events and selected minor details of her life leading up to the moment she first leaned on the bar and neglected her job to talk to Richard. Since she was a child she had danced ballet, and now that she was out of school she decided the city was the best place to live if she wanted to audition for parts in its several major companies.
After a few weeks he approached her with a hint of a nervous stutter, asking if she might want to get a drink sometime. Michelle looked at the bar around her, then at the half-empty fingerprinted glass sitting between them and laughed, Richard joining her almost at once. “I would love to,” she said, surprised by her own suavity, “but maybe the drink should be a cup of coffee.”
The date became a daylong conversation, continuing on a walk that led them throughout the city, through the parks and slums and fancy shops. It was almost dark when Michelle realized she was late for work. As she turned to go, Richard caught her and kissed her gently.
Two weeks later, Michelle sat in tight pants and a sweater in Richard’s apartment. The night marked their third real date, and the first time she had ever been to his house. He was cooking her a romantic dinner of filet mignon, asparagus with hollandaise sauce, and a chocolate soufflé.
“This is so extravagant,” she said, smelling the fumes seeping out of the cracked oven door. “You’re like a gourmet chef or something.”
He walked up and embraced her from behind. “I used to love to design the menu at my restaurant. Here, try this.”
He lifted a spoon of hollandaise and let her taste it. As the buttery sauce melted over her tongue she became aware of her slight stomach bulge and grew tense.
“Something wrong?” Richard asked, drawing another spoonful of sauce to her mouth.
“No, nothing.” She inched her head away from the approaching spoon. “I mean, this is so girly, I’m just kind of a little worried about all the fattening food I’ve been eating with you. I think I’m getting a stomach. It’s just I still haven’t gotten a dancing job.”
The man laughed. “Sweetheart, you’re practically a waif. You could really stand to gain a few pounds, if you ask me. You need meat on your bones.”
She had never heard him use a pet name before, and when he squeezed her love handle and pulled her into a deep kiss, she let her eyes close. When they released, she felt another creamy bite of hollandaise slide through her lips.
At dinner, she relished every ounce of food, eating until her jeans became restrictive. Each time she became overwhelmed and set down her fork, Richard would speak in comforting low tones. Waif. Don’t worry. Put meat on your bones. Don’t worry. Waif. At the end of the meal, when he offered second helpings of his soufflé, she accepted without reservation.
After dinner she left Richard with the dishes and excused herself to freshen up. His apartment was small even for the city, and she had to go through his bedroom to get to the bathroom, where she reapplied her lip gloss and powder. Face flawless, she lifted her top to check out her stomach. It displayed a protrusion which at another time might have left her feeling insecure, but Richard’s voice only echoed, If anything, you could stand to gain a few pounds, pounds, pounds. She dropped her shirt and let herself forget about it.
She came through the bedroom to rejoin Richard. She paused at his bed, touching the covers almost absent-mindedly. So this is where I’m finally going to lose my virginity. She pulled herself up and sat on the bed.
She was not a tall girl, and her feet swung freely in the air. Michelle looked younger than her twenty-three years, and sitting there on the bed, hands in lap, she could have been a child waiting for her parents to come in and play with her. She lay back on the bed and tried to imagine what making love to Richard would feel like, wondering for a moment whether or not it would hurt.
Sitting back up, she looked around the room. A few framed posters and prints hung on the walls. The only furniture was the nightstand which held stacks of newspapers and magazines, the desk which held a computer and a stack of official-looking papers, and the bed which held Michelle.
A flush flew to her cheeks. She slid off the bed sideways, languidly, and in doing so shifted one newspaper on the nightstand, sending the entire stack spilling to the floor. She knelt quickly and began to gather the scattered periodicals, and realized after picking up three, four, five or so that underneath the Time magazine and the New York Times which rested on top, the pile was almost entirely porn.
She had never been the type to be offended by a little porn. She had a brother after all. As she began to stack the magazines back on the nightstand, though, the sheer volume of it caused her eyebrows to draw together. Then she realized they were all different issues of the same publication, and she looked over her shoulder at the door to make sure Richard hadn’t opened it. She picked one copy off the stack on the table. Feeding Frenzy issue no. 31. And under the title, an amateurish portrait of a blond girl smiling in a bikini, pushing her breasts together with her upper arms. By her right shoulder pink print declared, “The only mag just for feeders!”
She opened the cover and flipped through the pages. Nothing seemed too out of the ordinary. Inside the girl from the front cover was naked, pictured in various generic sexy poses, page after page. She looked like any girl in a porn magazine, thin and tan with erect nipples. No spread beaver shots. No penetration. It was all actually quite tame. As she continued turning, however, the girl began to change.
Subtly at first, the girl’s thighs and belly grew plumper. Pages later, her stomach began to hang, then the skin around her arms grew loose and dimpled until by the end, Michelle was sure any doctor would have classified the poor, plump pin-up as obese.
She opened another issue and then another, all filled with pictures of thin girls who grew to enormous proportions. One woman must have gained three hundred pounds, and Michelle lingered on her photos, trying to imagine going through so severe a transformation. Flipping backwards, she noticed dates at the bottom of each picture. This change had taken three years.
Then she saw the room in the background. The bed. The nightstand. The desk. The computer and the cracks in the walls and the beige carpeting. The bedroom in the picture was the same bedroom in which she stood. She looked through the other issues, all the photos showed the girls in the same room. She opened an issue to the front cover where she saw Richard’s name listed as editor, photographer, and head writer.
On the floor, a few older, faded issues still lay. She saw issue number one and picked it up. The date was three years earlier, when Richard supposedly still lived in Iowa. She opened the cover to see a photo of a small redheaded girl in pigtails sitting in the same beige-carpeted room. Under the photo she noticed the words: “Dawn, no. 1—120lbs.”
“Honey pie? Sweet thing? You okay in there?” She noticed the voice as one might notice a distant siren. Richard knocked on the door. He asked her if she was still in the bathroom. If she wanted to come out and try the cookies he baked the day before. Or maybe she wanted some more soufflé. Or, if she wanted, they could go get some ice cream, if she was still hungry.
Michelle was up, and she was throwing open the door to the bedroom and flying past Richard, who had a plate of chocolate chip cookies in one hand and a serving spoon covered in soufflé in the other. She grabbed her jacket and her purse and ran for the front door, not turning around, not even stopping when Richard ran after her begging her to tell him what was wrong. Was it something he said? Was the dinner all right? If she didn’t like it, he could make her another one if she’d just give him an hour. In fact, why didn’t she do that? Just sit down and let him cook her something else. She ran.
She ran out the door, down the stairs, and into the black opal street, drenched in streetlights and shining from an earlier rain. She ran, not stopping until she came to her apartment building. She ran up the stairs to her room and shut the door.
There she lay, on her bed, heaving and panting and clutching her gut. She felt disgusted, sick, and running had unsettled her overfull stomach. A wave of revulsion passed suddenly over her and she staggered to the bathroom to throw up, but she couldn’t. Instead she sat and rested on the toilet seat, still sweating, with a terrible nausea.
* He had stopped hugging Michelle when she was twelve and began to grow breasts.
Oh I enjoyed that a lot. I enjoyed that a lot. It started so morally sound and then deliciously twisted into pure deviance. Beautious! Can not wait until next Monday.