Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

“‘Man-DA,’” he said. “What is up? You cut your hair.”

I gave him a friendly hug and borrowed, at random, for lack of anything real I wanted to communicate, one of Peter’s lines: “Yeah, well, the Dude abides.”

“Totally,” he said.

At home I changed into blessed oversize flannel and jumbo pad number four and took a Vicodin left over from my father’s back surgery.

I knocked on Lexi’s door, the house as dark and quiet as if it were far underwater, as if someone in another dimension had pushed the mute button.

“What?” She was sitting up in bed, reading.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

She glared at me. “Fabulous.” I sat down on her bed. She looked pretty. Too thin, of course, but you couldn’t tell just yet that it was a really -too-thin kind of issue. At that point it just seemed as though she was just taking a typical crazy teenage girl thing one little step too far, emulating some fucked-up memoirs she’d read. I hated myself for not knowing what to say. An older sister is supposed to know things.

“You want a Vicodin?” I would hook her up. This would bond us.

“No,” she sneered. Painkillers were so last year, I guessed.

“I’m going to fast,” I said. “I’m fasting, I mean.”

She didn’t look up from her Vogue. “Awesome.”

“Got any tips?”

She paused and eyed me briefly. “What did you do to your hair?”

“I cut it.”

“Go away.”

I had no idea what I ever did to her. Truly, I didn’t. Why couldn’t we be friends? I had emulated some fucked-up memoirs in my day. If I had something to say, if I could help her somehow, if I had anything to give her, if I had some crystal meth maybe, then could we be friends?

“Lex, relax,” I whined. “I’m hungry.”

She raised an eyebrow and spoke impatiently. “It’s not that hard. You just have to not want it.” As soon as she said it I wasn’t sure she’d said it. She went back to her magazine. “You look better with long hair. Close my door.”

If I sat very still, which I did for a long time in front of the television after everyone had gone to sleep, I thought I could feel the evacuation of the bean, an emptying out, a slow, steady leak. I didn’t give up hope that Lexi might come downstairs, watch TV with me, share some of her secrets of starvation. I got up for a glass of water and gazed longingly at the contents of the fridge, a bag of dairy- and wheat-free cookies on the counter, the plump teakettle. An overwhelming desire for comfort from these things, as palpable as anything I could swallow, briefly wrestled ache to the mat.

I fell asleep on the couch like that, a deep and drugged sleep, wanting a cookie more than I had ever wanted anything; more than I had wanted Peter just once to say something organic, personal, and middling, more than I wanted the machzor to feed me a line about something specific I had done and could then put behind me, more than I wanted forgiveness from the bean, more than I wanted to be friends with my sister.

Sleep was the only thing that kept me from those cookies, and when I woke up in the morning I’d bled off to the side of the pad and all over my flannel pajama bottoms, just missing the couch itself.

How was it possible that I could bleed this much and still be walking, breathing? What was the old misogynist joke? “Never trust any animal that can bleed for days on end and not die?” Was there no end to the sludge? The streaked blond at the clinic had told me all sorts of things I could hardly remember now about what to expect, how it would feel, how long it would last, etc. I hadn’t been listening all that carefully, still waiting for that tirade from Rainbow Lawn Chair, sure it would come as I made my exit, sure I wasn’t just going to be allowed to come and go as I pleased in that way, to and from that particular place.

Our parents told Lexi she could skip morning services if she ate a bowl of oatmeal.

“Do I have to go?” I asked, watching the two of them work together to make Lexi her breakfast. My mother cut up an apple, and my father sprinkled cinnamon and drizzled some honey over the bowl.

“You’re an adult, Amanda,” my father said, setting the bowl down with a flourish in front of a sullen Lexi. “You can do whatever you want.” Going away to school meant that I was an adult? I could now do whatever I wanted? They didn’t care what I did? I was that free? Well.

I went. Stood and sat and stood and sat and stood again for a few hours. Followed dizzily along with the all the us’ s and we’ s.

And then we (yes, all of us, a collective unit!) came home to nap before the second installment of afternoon services.

My mother nuked Lexi a plate of leftovers, and the two of them sat at the kitchen table, acting out another version of the same scene.

“Lexi. Eat.”

“This is absurd,” she said, examining her nails.

“You’re being incredibly inconsiderate, Lexi. I’m hungry, did you ever stop to think about that? And you’re making me sit here with this food I can’t eat. I’d like to go take a nap.”

Lexi took a little bite, let her fork clatter back down, and pushed the plate away. “There! Okay? Fuck. ”

“Another.”

Lexi rolled her eyes.

“We can sit here all day, Lexi. Please, let’s not. I would really like to take a nap before we go back to temple for Neilah. ”

Sleeping, with all its forgetfulness, was the best buffer against hunger. I left them there in the kitchen, arguing over the plate of tofu I would have shot a dog for, fell asleep for what felt like about ten minutes, and woke, hungry as ever, with the sun from my bedroom window casting a patch of light on the carpet. The afternoon passed interminably while I tried and failed to sleep more.

“Mmmm, doughnuts,” I kept hearing Peter say, Homer again, luring me out of the library during those giddy first few weeks of school with a field trip to the Dunkin’ Donuts on Main Street. I had been happy with our relationship, with how neatly everything seemed to be falling into place in this new life of mine. My roommate had accused me, snidely, of being a “boyfriend girl”: the kind of girl who always had a boyfriend, who couldn’t be without one, who wasn’t ever alone, who’d rather be part of a couple — a “we,” an “us”—than on her own.

But I didn’t eat. I lay there unmoving in my bed, in my parents’ house, and I somehow put nothing in my mouth the entire afternoon, even as the patch light from my window moved clear across the room. It was a tiny and victorious feeling, not eating, but the ache remained.

Alicia Ackerman, who used to baby-sit for Lexi and me, skipped over when we arrived back at temple for the last leg of services. I say “skipped,” but she was like eight months pregnant with her second child, so it was really more of a sack-race amble.

“Mandy-pants!” she trilled. “How’s college?” She grabbed my hand and put it on her belly, where she held it. “And Lexi! My God, you’re so skinny and gorgeous. You look like a model.” She kissed us both and kept talking. “You guys are coming over to my parents’ for break the fast, right? Because you’re not going to believe how big Michaela’s gotten. And look how huge I am. I’m carrying higher this time because we think it’s a boy. ” This last part she whispered like a secret.

“I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work, there,” I said. ( Fargo, idiot! High five!) Alicia rubbed her hand over mine on her belly a few times, confused. Alicia was, what, like eight years older than me? Under thirty, for sure, at any rate. She was married to the same guy she’d been with in high school, for God’s sake.