Page 20 of Guy's Girl
“Bye,” he says.
She pulls away from him and steps out the building’s door. She doesn’t look over her shoulder.
Outside, Chelsea is uncharacteristically quiet. The bars, normally boisterous and bustling, sit silent on their street corners. Ginny cuts across Seventh and starts walking south. Inside her chest, a hole, patched over by years in the safety of solitude, reopens.
Rejection. She could choke on the word. She can’t believe she’s spent six months thinking about someone who doesn’t even want to kiss her good night.
“Fuck this,” she says aloud.
“Yeah, fuck this!” echoes a man across the street, pumping a fist.
Ginny cries. Warm tears stream down her cheeks. They stream into her open mouth, which gasps softly in and out, spreading a familiar saltiness across her tongue. She cries until her head aches and her cheeks are stained. She cries until she finally accepts the truth: that Adrian is simply, obviously, painfully uninterested.
She wants to hit herself. The crying was supposed to end with her move away from Minnesota. New York was supposed to fix her.
“Fuck this,” she says again, a whisper this time, the words intended only for her.
Why didn’t I go for the kiss?
Adrian stares at the back of his building’s door. At the cold metal that, seconds before, framed Ginny’s warm smile.
Back at Sullivan Street, Ginny pushes open the door to 5E. She kicks off her shoes and wraps her arms around herself as if they can somehow protect her from her own anxiety.
It’s just past eleven on the West Coast, where Heather lives her perfect life with her perfect husband. Ginny could FaceTime her now; she’d probably pick up. But she doesn’t. She never calls her family when she’s sad or anxious. She doesn’t want them to know.
In her bedroom, Ginny strips naked and stands before the mirror. There they are: growing hills at her breasts, gentle protrusions at her hips, and—worst of all—a soft layer of fat around her stomach.
For Ginny, it’s been five. Five years of keeping her weightjustlow enough for her body to be permanently uncomfortable, but not so low that it would raise any eyebrows. She’s never been Ginny Murphy, Scary Stick of a Woman. But she shaved away her butt, her boobs, her stomach, her thighs. Just enough to satisfy that deep craving for emptiness.
When Ginny came home after sophomore year, her mother opened the door with a big smile, ready to receive her daughter. It slipped from her face when she took her in.
“You’ve lost weight,” she said.
“And?” Ginny said, shouldering past her with a duffel bag in tow.
“And I thought you were supposed togainweight in college.”
“Old wives’ tale.”
The bag disappeared from her hand as her mother scooped it up. “Sweetheart.” Ginny stiffened. Her mother hadn’t used thatword in years. “You didn’t have any weight to lose in the first place.”
At school, she could avoid her mother’s worry—out of sight, out of mind; her momdidhave two kids still living at home, after all—but whenever she came home, the issue resurfaced.
It all came to a head a few weeks ago, when she spent some time at home in Michigan between her move from Minnesota to New York. Ginny’s mom tried to force carbohydrate after carbohydrate upon her, bringing home all the treats she’d loved as a child: glazed twists from The Queen’s Tarts, cupcakes from Thyne’s, boxed brownie mix that burbled thick chocolate when it came out of the oven. Ginny did whatever she had to do to avoid eating them. Sometimes she made excuses and feigned a stomachache. Other times she put them into her mouth, chewed and smiled for her mom’s benefit, then spit them out into the sink when no one was looking. Ginny became an expert liar. A world-class cheat.
At the end of the two weeks, Ginny’s mom gazed at her, tearful, as she packed her bags for New York. “I don’t understand,” she said, voice cracking. “I fed you so much.”
Heather was home that week. She drove Ginny to the airport. When she dropped her little sister off, she looked Ginny dead in the eyes and said, “Get your fucking shit together and gain some weight, or I will fly to New York and beat your ass. Got it?”
She got it.
On the plane back to New York, afloat in that in-betweenness of air travel, a state in which anything seems possible, Ginny made a vow—No more.That period of her life is over. She will throw down her walls. She will eat bread and rice and candy and all the other foods she hasn’t allowed herself to touch in years.
The room swims before her. How did she let this happen? Sheknewthe risk of eating carbohydrates. She knew that things like burgers and bagels and beers would cause her body to grow.
And yet—she grew lazy. She allowed herself to indulge in the newness of New York City, in its many delicacies and delights, and she did not exercise. She did not run, bike, lift weights, or do any of the other activities that kept her body an obsessively tight, muscled board back in Minnesota. All she had done was rollerblade, hardly enough exercise to keep herself skinny. Of course her body grew. She did this to herself. It is her fault. All her own.
Ginny is dizzy. So dizzy. The angular body bends and swims before her. And all the alcohol in her stomach—it begins to inch back up her throat.Shit.She knows what will happen next. She’s seen it countless times, performed by countless drunken college kids, all of whom drank so much they hurled the contents of their stomach over Mt. Auburn Street.
