All of Me Read online

  and I don’t see what I want to see.

  I like myself, sometimes,

  but it feels like the person

  in the mirror isn’t me anymore.

  I stare,

  close my eyes,

  remember …

  a New York schoolyard.

  The dodgeball

  hits me squarely

  in the chest.

  I fall back.

  My shirt pulls up,

  and the innocent laughter

  of other kids

  and my own laughter

  to cover it all up.

  Or my father, at a fancy dinner,

  before he says anything else, introduces

  me to his business partner as husky.

  I tell people I’m naturally a bigger person.

  The mirror is slightly tilted.

  That’s why I look this way. I tell myself

  the mirror is tilted and warped.

  Then I catch myself.

  I grab the sink,

  hold tight.

  I won’t let myself lie.

  Not now.

  No lie.

  Not now.

  I hear my mother and Pick

  moving in the gallery,

  the sounds of morning conversations,

  cereal boxes and fruit bowls.

  I let go of the sink,

  slide my hands to my sides,

  grab my love handles

  where they spill

  over my pajama pants.

  I can’t stop looking at my body,

  and for the first time, the way I look

  becomes me

  all the way.

  I feel horrible. Heavy.

  Stagnant water in a bucket.

  In seventh grade

  we learned about heavy water.

  Regular water has a single proton

  in each nucleus of its hydrogen atom.

  In heavy water, each hydrogen atom

  has a neutron too.

  Neutrons, unstable, lonely,

  do everything they can to stick to the proton,

  make the water more dense, heavy.

  My body is filled with heavy water.

  Unstable, I place my hands

  around my love handles

  and get a good, strong grip,

  sandwich the flesh between

  my thumb and fingers

  until my fat fills my palms.

  Why does it have to be like this?

  Most people will tell me that it’s my fault.

  I want to feel something other

  than sorry for myself.

  I tighten my grip,

  and even as I do, I hear

  Pick’s voice saying

  he wants to help me,

  and for a moment

  I think about getting help,

  but I don’t. Instead, in the wet air,

  in the quiet,

  I just

  squeeze.

  I squeeze,

  feeling the thumbs

  dig into my body.

  Press,

  press.

  It hurts.

  I let up a bit.

  My sides throb in redness,

  my fingers flushed

  and pushed in,

  and already

  a small amount

  of blood.

  I think about Pick saying,

  Who are you?

  I think of the night before and the voice of the stranger.

  Get ’em next time, Fatboy.

  I remember more now,

  images of jeans too tight

  and shirts poking out in weird places

  and names that I must have pushed far away.

  I remember New York

  and the grandparents always declaring

  how skinny my cousins are.

  I think about how

  this is summer,

  and we are at the beach.

  And everyone sees me as fat.

  Teeth gritting,

  I feel it like a burn,

  my hands to my sides,

  the thumbnails now

  pushing down

  on the same spot

  push

  press

  until the ache is overwhelming.

  I feel the control of it,

  the pain

  working its way into my blood.

  I watch myself do this

  in the old mirror.

  press

  my face sweating

  skin pale

  I do this

  until the blood comes

  over my fingernails,

  and I don’t stop

  until it hurts so much

  I scream.

  I hear the others hearing me.

  I want them to.

  I squeeze harder.

  press

  push

  squeeze

  I feel my face flush with tears

  that fill my eyes until

  the mirror fades into mist,

  the sky dark.

  I am falling,

  I think,

  falling down.

  I feel my shirtless body scrape

  along the wood door,

  I feel the sudden relief of pain stopping.

  Sometime later,

  I open my eyes

  and I am on

  top of my sleeping bag.

  I see Pick sitting by the counter.

  My mother is holding my hand,

  and her face is wet with tears.

  I feel an ache in my sides.

  When I look down, I see

  the pain has turned purple.

  What happened? I ask.

  My mother looks at me,

  grips my hand.

  She doesn’t answer.

  Doctor

  Sometime after the incident,

  as my mother now refers to it,

  she takes me to the doctor,

  a psychiatrist.

  We drop off Pick,

  make plans to see him soon,

  and drive from Marin

  back to San Francisco.

  The car is silent the rest of the way.

  I don’t know what to say,

  but she tries to fill the quiet

  with plans and questions.

  We are going on a diet,

  she says. It’s time, she says.

  She tells me about

  how she used to take a pill,

  no bigger than a pin,

  that kept her

  from getting hungry,

  kept her awake,

  helped her see things

  in a whole new way.

  I painted all night, she says.

  I don’t even remember how it happened.

  She tells me about

  filling galleries

  with paintings,

  department stores

  with hand-painted dresses.

  But first, she says,

  we need to talk about what happened.

  We climb up and down

  San Francisco streets

  until we get there.

  The doctor’s office

  is like an apartment.

  We wait in stinky chairs,

  watch two little boys

  destroy a puzzle,

  their mom deep

  in the world of her phone.

  The doctor is kind and old.

  He says my whole name,

  Ari … Samuel … Rosensweig,

  asks me if I like my name.

  I don’t know? Yes?

  At first I don’t like

  his one-sided voice,

  the words coming

  out of just the left side.

  He talks to me about school,

  asks me questions about girls.

  I don’t really know what to say.

  He expects something from me.

  He asks me directly about what happened,

  and I
feel my side ache.

  You know, Ari, sometimes

  we harm ourselves

  because we don’t know

  what else to do.

  I stare at him.

  I think I need to talk about this.

  My thoughts and my words

  swirl around, and I’m not sure

  if I’m thinking or speaking.

  I start talking about feeling distracted,

  about how my body

  seems like a different place

  than it’s ever been,

  like sometimes it’s on fire.

  He seems good at listening.

  Finally, he asks

  if my mother

  will leave.

  When she does,

  the doctor smiles,

  asks me about puberty.

  I fold my arms across my body,

  look at the books on the shelf.

  I want to say

  I don’t know anything,

  but I think about the time

  when I was eight,

  and tell him about when

  my friends and me

  saw something on the computer

  we shouldn’t have seen.

  We acted like

  we understood

  the confusing scenes,

  the awful voices,

  the inhuman sounds.

  We all felt sick.

  I tell the doctor that

  it doesn’t feel like that anymore,

  that it just makes me scared.

  I feel like he is actually listening.

  Somehow this doctor knows my questions

  Without me even asking them.

  One by one,

  he tells me things I need to hear,

  lights turning on,

  pieces of puzzles

  that seemed lost

  suddenly fitting into

  unexpected places.

  Sometimes, he says,

  you may feel afraid when lots

  of changes happen

  in your home environment.

  It’s normal to feel this way, Ari.

  At the end

  of the hour,

  he settles deep into his chair,

  smiles, and takes a long breath.

  So, he says.

  Will you tell me what happened in the bathroom?

  I don’t know. I look down,

  pull my socks up higher.

  It won’t happen again, I say.

  He looks at me,

  smiles.

  It won’t, I say.

  He puts an unexpected hand

  on my shoulder.

  Apartment Doctor

  I convince my mom

  I don’t need

  to go to the apartment doctor again,

  even though he helped me.

  I should have gone back.

  It’s just that

  I don’t want

  to think about

  what happened

  or talk it over.

  I wish I could take

  the memory,

  throw it into the bay,

  watch it slowly sink

  into the salt water,

  down and down,

  washed away forever

  into the cold darkness.

  Another Kind of Doctor

  The paper

  on this doctor’s table

  crumples beneath

  my weight.

  Food pyramids

  cover the walls,

  mostly green,

  the vegetables and fruits

  delicious in the posters.

  Deep-red apples

  where the bite taken out

  is white like cartoon apples.

  The broccoli pleads

  with giant eyes

  to be eaten two to four times daily.

  There are dancing grapes

  and carrot sticks

  and breads pushed to the back,

  near a lonely triangle

  of forgotten pizza.

  The doctor comes in.

  His skin is made

  of glossy magazine pages

  and his hair is brown paper.

  He has me step on the scale.

  He has me stand against the wall.

  He has me try to touch my toes.

  From this position,

  he takes an instrument

  like thin pliers

  and presses them gently

  to my sides. Cold, I flinch,

  not from the pain

  but from the memory of the pain.

  When he sees the sores,

  deep purple and black,

  his breathing changes,

  and he whispers

  in a doctor’s voice,

  How did this happen?

  I answer by holding up my hands,

  pushing my thumbs into my fingertips.

  He nods.

  He is careful to avoid

  the sores,

  the huge purple bruises.

  He moves me from the bench to a chair,

  goes to a drawer,

  removes a package

  of folded papers,

  some glossy plastic and cardboard wheels,

  and other packages full of colors.

  He asks my mom into the room

  and for the next thirty minutes

  she nods and writes stuff down.

  The doctor spins the wheel,

  which is actually five wheels,

  each a different color,

  talks about points,

  and colors meaning points,

  and points meaning gaining

  or losing weight.

  He talks about targets

  and colors that are pie pieces.

  Spins the wheels

  in different directions

  to where a whole pie

  filled with mostly green slices

  sits at the center.

  Thirty pounds, he says.

  I need you to lose at least thirty pounds.

  I hold the wheel, spin the different sections.

  It smells like paint

  and plastic,

  a mutated rainbow,

  an impossible request.

  My arms out,

  he fills them up with posters

  and a button with the mutated rainbow on it.

  On the way to the nursery,

  my mother hatches plans.

  We’ll buy a juicer, she says.

  Broken Promise

  We never buy a juicer.

  The Answer?

  She stands over the bed,

  cradles a book in her arms,

  rocks it like a baby.

  I have it, she says. I’ve got it.

  She holds up a yellow book.

  There’s a man in a suit on the cover

  sitting at a desk.

  I knew this doctor in the sixties

  in New York. I did a portrait

  of his wife.

  This doctor wrote a diet book!

  It really works!

  She uncradles the book,

  looks at the cover,

  and spins it onto the bed.

  I lift it,

  hold it in both hands,

  feel the compact weight

  of the book.

  When my feet hit the floor,

  she explains how it works.

  She talks about carbohydrates

  and how evil sugar is.

  The more she tells me

  the more I realize that this diet

  isn’t like any other.

  It’s the end of bread,

  potato chips, cookies,

  cereal, and even pizza.

  But maybe it’s a chance for real change.

  We Need to Get Lisa

  The next morning, starving,

  I walk into the kitchen. My mother is

  muttering, tapping furious

  texts on her phone.

 
Something’s happened. We need to get Lisa.

  I remember the quiver of Lisa’s voice

  when she told me about her mom.

  I unwrap a piece

  of cheese,

  open Mysterious World,

  nervously read about Bigfoot.

  We need to get her, my mother mutters again.

  She may need to stay with us for a while.

  I think about Lisa.

  1.  She looks like a superhero in the comics we read.

  2.  She’s kind.

  3.  She plays Dungeons & Dragons with me.

  4.  She’s an amazing artist.

  5.  She writes stories.

  6.  She likes me for who I am.

  7.  She punched Rick Casterol in the nose when he said something he shouldn’t have.

  8.  She always sticks up for me.

  I fold the book down onto the table.

  My mother paces back and forth,

  then suddenly stops

  and looks me in the eyes.

  Something’s happened, Ari.

  Lisa’s mom needs to go away

  for a little while. She’s sick,

  and she needs time to get well.

  On Our Way

  We pass Shoreline Highway,

  our usual route onto Miller Avenue,

  the bike path on my right,

  the one I ride from the Dolan house,

  from Pick’s house.

  I watch for snowy egrets

  in the fog,

  and in the distance

  I see the middle school

  on my left.

  I unwrap another cheese stick,

  imagine the faces of classmates.

  I picture the first day of next year,

  walking on campus,

  the lighter steps,

  the better clothes,

  the hope of feeling more free.

  I watch myself walking

  up the stairs before the first bell,

  no one staring.

  No extra layers of me,

  just another boy.

  Sometimes the silence of others

  is better than attention.

  Twenty-Three Steps

  We pass the depot

  in the heart of downtown,

  turn on

  Throckmorton Avenue

  toward Old Mill Park.

  On the right are the long

  stone steps of Lisa’s house.

  Twenty-three steps.

  I count them every time.

  Wait here, my mother says.

  I wait in the car,