Broken Two
Fiction written for “ENGLISH 223: Creative Writing” in the fall of 2012
The first time I found my younger sister Marti puking in the bathroom, it was April 3rd, Marti’s seventeenth birthday. The remnants of chocolate frosting and vanilla sponge cake (our mom’s specialty) floated delicately in the bowl. I leaned on the doorframe, and Marti looked at me just once, long enough to notice my crestfallen face. I watched the way the bathroom light reflected off of the silver cross that she only wore on special occasions, the one Mom had given her when she qualified for the State cross-country meet that year.
“I don’t know what to say,” Marti said after several minutes. She sounded so detached from the feelings of it all, like she was reciting the title of a movie, and we were pondering whether it was worth seeing.
“It’s okay,” I replied, trying to mimic the stability in her voice. “It’s going to be okay.”
I kept Marti’s bulimia a secret, which was hard to do in a town like Wilson, Vermont. Our affluent suburb outside of Montpelier was small enough that families knew each other’s personal drama. It always seemed too perfect for Marti.
“The real world isn’t like this,” she complained on more than one drive home from school. “No one suffers here. They only gossip.”
We used to joke that the McMahon’s had provided the biggest commotion in the community when Jordan, their 18-year-old high school graduate and president of the senior class, chose the army over a full-ride scholarship to Georgetown.
Our own family fit the Wilson, country-club aesthetic just like the rest of my friend’s families. Mom was a dermatologist with her own practice. Dad was a the PR director for a major firm in downtown Montpelier. Marti was the high school class sweetheart, an emerging cross-country star and talented singer, while I stuck to swimming and tutoring out of the family office in the basement. We had great friends and fun weekends. We were both at the top of our classes, just one year apart, already dreaming of college. The beautiful Brosnan twins, our friends called us, for we looked and acted identical. We were each other’s best friend.
The second time I found Marti puking in the bathroom, it was April 18th, and I yelled at her. Chunks of cheesy bread sprouting marinara sauce lay splattered on the sides of the toilet bowl, her fingers coated and slippery.
“Stop it! Our friends are downstairs. Are you crazy?”
The ebony curls that framed her cheeks slipped from behind her ears, a curtain to hide the embarrassment in her face. The first time I found her, I had been shocked, but I felt certain that she would be fine. Marti was a smart girl. She wouldn’t do it again. So then, the second time, in the same upstairs bathroom, I closed the door behind me and squatted beside her on the balls of my bare feet.
Grabbing tissues from the toilet lid, I delicately wiped Marti’s hands like a mama lion grooming her young and captured her tears with my thumb before they could touch the floor.
And for the first time in my life, I heard Marti say, “ I need help.”
In the soft light of a bland office, I watched Marti talk to Brittany, her new eating disorders counselor I found via the internet, about what dad had said. I was flattered that she asked me to join her, but not surprised. We did everything together.
She recalled our father’s words from a Saturday lunch in downtown Montpelier one week before I first found her in the bathroom. “Everyone has their battles, their brick walls,” he’d said to us. “Things are going well for you both. You’re so successful. You seem to excel at everything you try! But, one day, you’ll hit your brick walls. It’s how you recover that I’m excited to see.”
What dad and I hadn’t known was that Marti was about to excuse herself to the lady’s room to throw up the rather large portion of the Italian sub she had destroyed in a matter of minutes. She had stood over the toilet knowing her battle was an Italian sub and a porcelain bowl that day. Tomorrow, it might be a box of Girl Scout Thin Mints or my leftover pizza sitting the fridge. She’d been dealing with this for months now.
With only the muted floor lamp in the corner of the office to illuminate us, I could tell she’d been thinking a lot about her issue because she was eerily calm and unemotional, like she was talking about someone else’s battle. She was sitting politely, legs crossed in the comfortable arm chair, wearing her favorite leggings and a long, grey sweater that she couldn’t stop fingering the edges of. Did she look thinner? A box of Kleenex and a smooth, black stone that read “patience” lay on the side table next to her.
For the next forty-five minutes, I listened to Brittany ask a lot of questions with the words “feel” and “think.” Mom and dad came up a lot, how they always expect so much of us.
“What do you think about your sister’s role in this?” Brittany asked.
Marti grew quiet and evaded the inquiry. Brittany told me not to come with Marti the next week.
The third time I found Marti puking in the bathroom, it was May 2nd, and mom had beat me to it. I looked down into the toilet, like Marti had God knows how many times, and identified a salad, probably Greek from the looks of the black olive bits and what appeared to be red tomatoes. This worried me because Marti usually only purged foods she deemed “unhealthy.” Mom was crying, and her arms wrapped so firmly against Marti I could see them shake with each inhale she managed through her sobs. We stayed in the bathroom that way for nearly an hour, Mom holding Marti, and me sitting on the edge of the tub.
“Mom? When you have a chance tonight, would you mind looking at one of my college application essays?” I finally asked.
“Really? Right now? You want Mom to take care of that right now? Not everything is about you! I know that’s shocking!” Marti screamed at me.
I left the bathroom and went to bed.
After mom and dad found out, Marti stopped eating all together. In her mind, she was now the Brosnan blemish. Somehow, we were all so successful, so perfect, except for her. When no one knew about her disorder, she had thrust on her sweet smile, so that even our family, those closest to her, could never suspect the battle brewing within. But now there was no pretending. She was broken.
With the bulimia, she hadn’t changed much physically because she wasn’t throwing up everything she ate, but now, the anorexia started to ravage her healthy frame. Her cheeks didn’t show the arc of concavity, like most people think of anorexics, but her forearms shrank so that her watch would slip backward on her wrist.
It was soon summer, and I remember one day specifically we drove to the beach in Cape Neddick, Maine. Her black hair was so long, nearly covering her entire back. I laid out the towels and for the first time in weeks saw my old sister again, the sweet girl who laughed at my jokes and sang in the shower. Despite her shrinking body, she had never appeared more beautiful than in the sunlight with all that blue sky and water behind her. She clasped her tank-top from the bottom and pulled it over her head, and I could see the ridges in her spine.
We laid on the beach for seven hours that day, until the sun set and the chill in the wind was too much for us to bare. It was one of the only times we were together that summer. With every passing week, Marti grew more distant and cold toward me. There would be days at a time where she’d ignore me all together, staring past me frigidly when I asked her questions or offered her something fun to do. My parents worried about her incessantly: her doctor’s appointments, her counseling, her eating habits, and her social life.
I did my best to pack myself for school. I think the family had forgotten I was moving to the University of Pennsylvania at the end of August, but that was okay. A week before my departure, mom tripped over a newly-bought comforter I had placed in the hallway. She peered into my room and asked why I needed a new one.
Everyone was in a daze.
At 5:30 a.m, I shoved the last pile of clothing on top of the boxes in the trunk and threw down the hatchback. The drive to Pennsylvania would take ten hours, but I could hardly wait. Mom pulled water bottles out of the garage refrigerator for the ride, while dad did the final check on the straps holding the suitcases down on top of the SUV.
“I’m going to check my room one more time to make sure I didn’t forget anything!” I yelled as I skipped into the house.
It felt especially empty with Marti gone. She had left three days prior for a six-week long rehabilitation program in New York, the best in the Northeast, according to Mom. She never even said goodbye to me.
I stood in the center of my room, turning slowly, waiting to eye something I absolutely needed, like the three dozen t-shirts and fifteen pairs of shoes I had already convinced myself I couldn’t live without. Then I saw it, a white envelope on the carpeting by the door. It was from Marti. I must have missed it with my room messy from packing. I picked up the letter and read it twice before leaning against the doorframe. My spine prickled as I couldn’t help but cry.
It’s October now, and Marti will be back from New York soon. Her letter lies on the bottom of my underwear drawer, where it’s easy to reach, although I could recite it to you by heart. With thick bullet points, she had listed every time I had made her feel inadequate, flawed… Fat. Last fall when I told her a homecoming dress she tried on made her look pregnant; at Lindsey’s 16th birthday party when I asked her if she really needed another piece of cake; freshman year when I laughed at her for getting a B in biology. She had written about my perfect body and my perfect friends and my perfect job and my perfect life. She said Brittany was right, that she had felt the need to compete with me since birth. And when she thought she failed, she turned to bulimia. It was my fault.
We have a lot to talk about when she gets back. Maybe we’ll even bundle up and take a drive to Cape Neddick, Maine. It might finally be my turn to tell her something. I’m broken, too, and I’m sorry. But mostly, I won’t let her stop fighting for her life.