Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

My father gave me a little peck on the cheek, a chipper hello. He may have even called me “sweetie pie,” but I could just as easily be making that up, wishing it so. My mother embraced me full on, which killed.

“You look terrible,” she said to me, more observant than I would’ve expected.

“Not feeling so great, Mom.”

“What happened to your hair?” she asked as we slammed car doors.

“I cut it off.” Obviously.

“Yourself?”

I shrugged. It had been a very strange few weeks, indeed. “How’s Lexi doing?”

My mother offered a sigh and looked over at my father, who managed somehow to stifle his own sigh when he replied, briskly, “Not good.”

We were in a big rush to get home before sundown for the Last Supper, a feast of tofu steak, roasted new potatoes, asparagus, and salad, with fruit salad for dessert, all lovingly prepared and presented in honor of Lexi’s having become a vegetarian, if you can believe that. The kicker, predictably, was that she wouldn’t fucking eat any of it.

“Lexi,” said our father.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Lexi,” said our mother, lilting, tight. “It’s vegetarian.”

Lexi, slumped miserably in her chair, tugged at a patch of hair at the base of her neck. “I said I’m not hungry.”

“Lexi.” Our father again.

“I’ll eat later.”

“There is no eating later, cuntrag,” I said, trying to be amiable, flashing her an obscene mouthful of partially chewed potatoes. “That’s kind of the whole point.” I myself was beyond ravenous; I could not have been hungrier. Like I had a hollow leg or something. Only it wasn’t my leg.

My parents had only just recently come (in typical delayed fashion) to a grudging admission that Lexi had some “issues” “around” “food.” By the time I’d left for school in August (sweet escape!) there had finally been a slow meander through the Health and Body section at Barnes & Noble, a family visit to a special “food issues” therapist, a sweet if ineffectual attempt at creating meals she might somehow find more palatable, a monitoring of mealtimes that went pretty much just like this one.

For my Gender Studies seminar I had written a paper about socialized body-image problems and self-esteem, including for anecdotal supplement and sympathy a description of exactly this scene — my fifteen-year-old sister refusing to eat, our parents obsessively tracking her every nonbite — and my cool TA had written, “You poor thing!” in the margin, given me a big A-encircled in red like a plump happy face.

Lexi took a bite comprised of exactly two lettuce leaves and a nickel-size carrot round. She placed the half-loaded fork ever so delicately between her lips. “It’s better to eat less,” she said. “Then the stomach shrinks, and that makes fasting way easier.” Her chewing was slow and exaggerated.

What could they say? She was right. And simultaneously she was involving herself with religious ritual. Genius. This was all going to make for a freaking amazing Gender Studies final paper, and I was even beginning to realize that maybe I could seek out double credit from Judaic Studies, maybe even combine the two to create my own major. I would go to office hours with my beloved TA, sit on her couch, tell her all.

“Fasting, Lexi, is not an option for you this year.” My mother’s tone betrayed a helplessness she’d been working hard to deny since forever. “You know that. We discussed it with Dr. Clayman.”

No one seemed too concerned about the possibility of my fasting. I helped myself to seconds of tofu steak and refilled my glass, my appetite giving way not even a little. I had never, ever been hungrier. I couldn’t get enough. The potatoes were warm and buttery, soft but not insubstantial; the extrafirm tofu had been marinated in teriyaki sauce, which gave it a nice tangy edge; the salad was fresh and crisp and dressed just enough (but not too much) in a light and cool tahini; there was a beautiful loaf of crusty French bread that had enjoyed a perfect few minutes in the oven. The medley of it all, rolling joyously around in my mouth and sliding still warm down my throat, made me forget, if only fleetingly, my unrelenting ache, the toxic sludge in heavy jumbo pad number three, and cramps so consistent I did not believe I’d ever be without them again.

Lexi had apparently struck some sort of deal with Dr. Clayman and our parents, stipulating a food minimum she was required to digest at every meal. I watched her carefully cut off a quarter of the tofu steak, cut that quarter into quarters, and then shave thin sheets off each piece, which she ate directly off the knife. Her focus was kind of beautiful, and I stopped shoveling food into my face for a moment to admire her for it.

“Five minutes,” my father said, scraping plates into the disposal and then putting on his suit jacket. He refused to look at me, said my eyebrow ring made him sick to his stomach, said he couldn’t stop imagining something catching on it and ripping it off my face.

Lexi visibly relaxed, another forced mealtime over, a long, blessed day of religiously mandated foodlessness wide open ahead of her.

It had been — I was 89 percent sure — my orientation leader, Peter, with the uncircumcised penis and ironic T-shirt collection and thick-framed glasses that served almost no ophthalmologic purpose. He knew Pulp Fiction by heart, and the oeuvre of the Coen brothers, and most of The Simpsons, too; whenever I’d had no clue what the hell he was talking about in any given situation I quickly learned to assume he was quoting. This meant that I was always adrift in conversation, clinging all alone to my immediate unfolding reality in a sea of arcane, nonsensical references.

“You don’t win friends with salad!” I might hear in the dining hall. Or: “That Hanoi pit of hell,” as we left the crowded mailroom. “Money can be exchanged for goods and services!” as we bought popcorn at the movies. “When Bonnie goes shopping she buys shit, ” while we strolled the aisles at Shaw’s. “I’m the Dude!” pretty much whenever. Then, invariably, he would high-five someone. I had learned to giggle knowingly and proffer my own hand high up in the air.

He was a nice enough guy, a perfectly okay guy, but I was sick to death of him and the quotes by the end of September, right around the time I began to realize I wasn’t menstruating, which happened, in the manner of all cataclysmic realizations, slowly and then all at once.

“My mighty heart is breaking,” Peter said when I told him I didn’t want us to get any more serious, that I wanted, I think I said, to be friends. “I’ll be in the Humvee.”

“What?” I said, and then remembered that that we weren’t actually having the same conversation. A week or two later, when I finally gave in to my insistent, shitty, unavoidable realization and bought an EPT, Peter had moved on to a sophomore from the next dorm cluster over and wouldn’t speak to me, his mighty heart ostensibly broken, whatever that meant.

So I didn’t tell him. And now it was over and I was home with my family, bleeding. And not the usual dainty crimson bullshit, either.

Kol Nidre was its usual blur of the best in fall fashions available from Banana Republic. A mob scene. They had opened up the sanctuary via removable walls to the giant function hall, which was lined with rows and rows of folding chairs. Lexi wandered off into the fray as soon as we got inside.

“Amanda,” my mother said to me. “Please keep an eye on her and make sure she eats. Daddy and I are completely exhausted. You have no idea what it’s been like for us.”

Lexi had never been one for role-playing along with any of my half-assed attempts to big-sister her. She dated guys older than I was. She’d had sex before me. She’d laughed in my face when I got my license and offered to drive her to the mall. She knew things I didn’t. I was no kind of big sister at all. I had an overwhelming instinct to tell her about the sludge and the cramps and ask her if it was normal, if I would be okay. Surely she had already been through this.