Forty-five minutes later, Lily strolls into my apartment.
When she sees her new instrument, she says, “Ah. Good. It’s here.”
“We were worried to death!” I scream at her.
“I’m sorry. I was busy.”
“With what?”
“Same project. But I’ll be practicing on myself now instead of on Jack.” She sits at the piano and starts hitting single keys, listening to the sound quality. “I bought this piano thinking it might inspire me. My project is so insanely difficult. Impossible, probably. But I’ll work on it until I croak, if that’s what it takes.”
“Why don’t you just give up?” Penelope says.
“Because then life might not seem worth living.”
“See, that’s the project you should be working on — making life worth living for reasons other than Strad,” Jack says.
“I can’t. I need love.” Lily starts playing scales very rapidly, testing the piano. She stops, says, “Sounds good.”
We’re all standing around the musical instrument, our scowling expressions reflected back at us.
BEFORE BED, I call Lily at home to get a better sense of how she’s doing and ask if she’s had any more trouble with things like her hands becoming reflective.
“Yes. Yesterday I was in the pits of depression and then the hand thing happened again a couple of times while I was playing the piano. I stopped it each time from spreading, but I was so tempted not to.”
“It spreads?”
“Yes. Up my wrists and arms.”
“How do you stop it?”
“I will it to stop. I refuse to let it overtake me — out of fear, I guess. Even though it feels good. I mean, it feels good because it feels like nothing, which is good compared to how I feel, which is terrible. Death is the ultimate painkiller. When I will it to stop, it recedes, and the pain comes flooding back.”
“I’m glad,” I say quietly. “That you make it stop. And since yesterday, it hasn’t happened again?”
“No. So far it’s only happened when I hit bottom. But today I’m okay. Buying the mirrored piano cheered me up a bit.”
On Friday is the meeting of the Excess Weight Disorders Support Group, which I promised my mother I’d attend and have been dreading.
When I arrive I see there are about twenty people in the group, all overweight or obese, mostly women. And there is a leader, fitting the same description.
The meeting begins. A woman shares her story. A few people make comments. Another woman shares. More comments. I wait for an opening to tell them the truth about myself. I’m nervous.
For a long time, I see no opportunity until finally a woman says, “Ever since my first child was born I’ve been struggling with my weight. I gained a lot and then lost some and then gained back more than I lost, and then lost some again, but whenever I lose any weight, I gain back all of it and more.”
Another woman jumps in with: “I’m a total yo-yo dieter, too! I take the weight off in the summer and fill my closet with skinny clothes, and then I put all the weight back on in the winter.”
Heart pounding, I say, “Same here. I take the weight off at night and hang it in my closet and put it back on in the morning.”
No one seems to hear me.
Someone else says, “I guess I have a really slow metabolism. I gain weight so easily. And it gets worse as I get older. Anything I eat goes directly from my lips to my hips.”
“I totally know what you mean,” I say. “For me it’s even more direct. It bypasses the lips altogether.”
A couple of chuckles and puzzled looks, but the group doesn’t pause, keeps on talking. I’m not sure my mom would be satisfied with my efforts.
I finally see my opportunity when a woman says, “I mean, I know I’m thin on the inside.”
“Me too! See?” I spring up and flash the assembly. Everyone stares inside my fat jacket, gaping at my thin torso and shoulders.
“What are you doing? Why did you come here?” the leader asks, not looking happy.
“My therapist says I have a serious weight issue, like the rest of you, and that just because my way of getting fat is unusual doesn’t mean the source of the problem isn’t very typical.”
“You don’t belong here,” another woman says.
“But I’m fat.”
“Yours is removable.”
“So is yours. It just takes longer.”
“You’re a thin person.”
“So are you, on the inside. Like me.”
“I assume you don’t even have an eating disorder, right?”
“No, but I’ve got a weight disorder,” I insist. “I engage in unhealthy, compulsive behavior like everyone here. When you guys go to the store to buy your fatty things, I go to a store and buy a different kind of fatty thing. And then I go home, and instead of eating mine, I put it on my body. My brain and emotions have the same need as yours to be fat, but my body is unable to manufacture that fat for reasons of taste. I hate the taste of fattening foods. I hate overeating. And I hate being inactive. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a very serious weight problem. I can’t stop putting on the weight. When I take it off, I can’t keep it off. Either your way or my way, the fat ends up visible to everyone, and the result is the same in the eyes of the world.”
“Okay,” says the group leader. “Let’s move on… Sally? Would you like to share?”
I sit in silence for forty more minutes until the meeting finally ends.
GEORGIA TELLS US her agent wants to know if our whole group would be willing to appear on TV, on News with Peter Marrick, to be interviewed about our Nights of Creation and our creativity in general.
“They want us on Wednesday night at six,” Georgia explains. “They’re doing a segment on creativity. They read about our Nights of Creation in that Observer article last year.”
We agree to do it. We’re particularly excited that the great Peter Marrick himself, America’s favorite local news anchor, will be conducting the interview. Even if he weren’t so charismatic and charming on camera, the incident a few years ago when he ran into a burning building and saved three children would make him America’s sweetheart. His cameraman captured the spectacle of Peter running out of the burning house, his hair on fire, carrying a baby in one arm and dragging two small children in his other hand. The only injury he sustained was to his hair follicles. His decision to continue anchoring the news with singed hair and then with a shaved head drew even more viewers. And when his hair grew back nicer and more unusual than before, that didn’t hurt the ratings either. He looked angelic — almost ethereal with his hair floating around his head, light and airy, like a halo.
“You should all go on the show without me,” Georgia says. “I’ve got nothing to say about creativity anymore. When you lose your faith in your work, what have you got left as an artist? Nothing much.”
“Haven’t you done any writing in the last week since you got your laptop back?” Jack asks.
“I tried.”
“And?”
“I’ve become an expert at backing up my laptop. I’ve set up three different backup systems. The first is manual. The second is automatic, hourly, wireless, in the apartment. And the third is automatic, daily, in the cloud, which means that all of America could blow up and I could still retrieve a backup from the Internet in Europe, assuming I wasn’t in America when it blew up.”
Chapter Seven
I discover a new letter from Gabriel waiting for me in my mailbox.
That letter shocks me so deeply that I’m not able to call my friends right away to tell them about it. I do research online for about an hour. Then I think. I spend the entire night thinking. I don’t even try to sleep.