Adam Levin: Hot Pink

Bonnie: The Beautiful Body-Action Doll for the Self-Body Image-Enhancement of Toddling and Preadolescent Girls at Risk. TM

Dad conceived her gastrointestinal mini-tract a decade ago. Back then, he was employed at Useful Modules in Grayslake, designing low-valence fibrins to lubricate the motors of their robots. We lived in a part of Waukegan that was getting nastier by the hour, but we had premium channels and a VCR, we ate our snacks off paper plates in the family room and laughed at sitcoms together, our legs overlapping under the afghan. Our bikes were worthy of their combination locks and our mom was a sweetheart, packed us lunches every day before going to work, occasionally slipped notes between the folds of our paper napkins: Who’s the smartest and the handsomest? You are!; One week till your birthday, a great day!; Basketball team, shmasketball team — you don’t need them.

And then Bonnie: The Beautiful Body-Action Doll for the Self-Body Image-Enhancement of Toddling and Preadolescent Girls at Risk. TM

We were watching an exposé on eating disorders and it made our father sad. Halfway into the opening montage — a quick-cut stream of dark eye-hollows and flesh-poor pelvic arches, thighs the width of knees and grainy close-ups of mouth-scars; the soundtrack a string of desperate self-statements spoken through echo-filters by choked-up teenage girls, I’m too fat, I hate myself, No one loves me —Dad brought his hand to his forehead, as if to shade it from the sun, and he kept it there.

By the first commercial break, the twins were sleeping soundly against his shoulders. Mom kissed and whispered them into consciousness, sent the three of us to bed. I fell straight into a nightmare about a hockey team suffocating me in a pileup. This was in the old Chicago Stadium, but it wasn’t the Blackhawks who did it. It was the Yang, a team I’d never heard of. I woke up wet and ashamed.

I stayed in my bed for a while, trying to picture good, bright things. I tried cartoons and they turned violent under my eyelids. I tried angels, but they were dead people. I wanted to lie on the couch and watch TV, fall asleep to the sound of human voices, whatever they were saying. I was sure that if I went downstairs and told my folks I’d had a nightmare, they’d let me sit with them, but I was just as sure that speaking of the nightmare would make it permanent.

I decided to go down there and tell them it was unfair how, even though I was nine, I had the same bedtime as my seven-year-old brothers. I didn’t get to tell them anything.

When I returned to the family room, a pale girl with puffed cheeks and wrecked lips was onscreen, confessing, and Mom was holding Dad’s hand. Dad was weeping. He said, “Poor girl. Poor young girl.”

I said, “Dad.”

He hid his face. I forgot my complaint and Mom sent me back to bed. I slept fine.

In the morning, Dad made us omelets and bacon. “I’m sorry you had to see that,” he told me. “No boy should have to see that. I’m gonna make you a special omelet, with extra cheddar.”

Timmy and Brian said they wanted extra cheddar, also.

Dad said, “No. Mike saw. You didn’t.”

Brian said, “What did he see?”

“He saw nothing.”

“Nothing nothing or nothing special?” said Timmy. Timmy was existential.

“Nothing nothing,” I said.

“What did it look like?”

I said, “It looked like you.”

“So then it looked like Brian, too! You’re saying we look like nothing, but you’re also saying that nothing looks like us.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Honest?”

It was the last breakfast Dad made for us. That night, he started on Bonnie’s mini-tract. Between his nine-to-five at Useful and the hours he spent in the attic laboratory, it got so we saw him only at dinner and bedtime.

After three years of weekend and evening home-lab work, Dad completed the mini-tract and, in a flush of exuberance, drove us down Lake Shore to the auto show at McCormick Place. It was a rainy day, but the sun was out, and as we passed through the Gold Coast, oohing and ahhing at the dripping high-rises and the skyscrapers behind them, Dad told us that, within a month, we’d leave slummy Waukegan and move downtown. He asked Mom which building she wanted to live in and she pointed to a clover-shaped black one next to Navy Pier. “Lakepoint Tower!” Dad said. He shot me a glance in the rearview. “You see that, Mikey? You’ll have the lake outside your bedroom window.”

At the auto show, I stood rubbing my eyes before a red Lamborghini with doors like bat wings. No one was allowed to touch it. There were ropes.

The following Monday, Dad brought the mini-tract to Good Parent Educational Toy Corporation. They fawned over it but didn’t want to buy it without being sure there was a financially feasible way to rig up the calorie-sensitive infrastructure that Dad promised was forthcoming.

Dad chose to understand Good Parent’s enthusiasm as a kind of pledge and, long since sick of manipulating gluten, anyway, he quit his job at Useful to focus all his energy on Bonnie. He cashed out his 401(k) to fund a better home-laboratory. Let his beard go wild and took lunch in the lab. On weekends, we’d put it on a wheely-cart by the door. Knock three times and walk away. Once, I went up there with Brian, and we stayed after knocking. Dad came out.

I said, “Dad.”

He said, “No.” Then he ducked back inside.

Brian said Dad was a fuckface and I told him to shut up. Then Brian punched me in the stomach and I slapped the side of his head. It toppled him. He was smaller than me. When he sat up, his eyes narrow and wet, he said we were no longer brothers and vowed not to speak to me ever again.

Two years later, I got caught with a hard-on in the shower after gym. I wasn’t even looking at anybody, my eyes were closed, but Bill Rasmussen announced the news to the locker room. I could’ve taken him, easy, and I didn’t. It was mostly true what he said about me and I froze up.

When I came home from school, Dad was singing to the twins in the kitchen. Old Beatles songs. I went in there. He crooned at the three of us, clapped beats out on the counter. At first, we held back our laughter because we liked it and didn’t want to give him any kind of victory, but he kept going so long, and he won. We had to laugh to stop him. He’d finished Bonnie’s infrastructure. “Tomorrow’s payday,” he told us. He sliced up some apples and made us triple-decker grilled cheeses in a pan.

Timmy, newly vegan, gave his sandwich to Brian. Brian said, “No way this means you get Claudia.”

Claudia Berman was a high-haired, flat-chested baton-twirler who lived across the street. Sometimes she called and asked for Timmy. Sometimes Brian.

“I think she likes me,” Timmy said.

Brian said, “No one likes you.”

“Well, I definitely like her, even if she doesn’t like me. She has kind eyes, I think.”

“She thinks you’re an asshole, Timmy.”

When Dad brought the new Bonnie to Good Parent, they slapped him on the back and called him a visionary. Then they said they needed something much simpler: Dad had designed the mini-tract to take any type of food you could jam into the doll’s mouth — he figured that little girls would thrill to feed Bonnie the same food that they themselves were eating — but Good Parent figured they would do better with a Bonnie who was only able to digest a perishable, vitamin-enriched protein paste that required refrigeration and could be sold for five dollars a tube. So they told him to dumb down the mini-tract and create a paste. “Something that smells good,” they told him.