you please pass the salt?”; “Would you mind passing the vegetables, Mary?”
When my mother wasn’t asking me to hand her every edible item on the table, she was oohing and ahhing over every atom that touched her lips.
The twins were even less subtle. They kept waving pieces of food in my face and shrieking, “Don’t you want some, Mare? It’s
Recalling my Joan of Arc phase, I refused to be tempted, responding to the crass coercion of my family with stoic dignity and grace.
“Of course,” I’d say every time my mother asked for something. I’d smile gently as though it pleased me that her appetite was so healthy. “No thank you,” I’d whisper whenever Pam or Paula shoved a piece of garlic bread or a cookie in my nose.
On Friday, my mother brought in the heavy artillery: she made lasagne, my most favourite dish in the entire universe. Just the smell of it nearly made me swoon. But I was strong and resolute, and full of doughnuts, so her strategy didn’t work.
Great actors know what real determination and dedication are. Ordinary people, however, do not. They give up easily. By breakfast on Saturday my family had gone back to totally ignoring me as usual. They munched away at their pancakes, all three of them talking at the same time, as if a victim of oppression and injustice weren’t sitting among them, staring at her empty plate, as isolated from their food and trivial chit-chat as a prisoner in a Mexican jail.
I took this, of course, as a good sign. The twins were already bored with the game, and my mother, also bored with the game, had obviously decided that I’d give up if I didn’t get any attention. My mother’s understanding of the psychology of the gifted is pretty limited.
I wouldn’t give up. I would step up my resistance instead.
I sipped my glass of water and smiled at them wanly all through the meal, and when it was over I said I was going back to bed because I was feeling so tired.
I spent Saturday languishing in my room. I managed to stagger out to sip my water while they stuffed their faces with supper, but a sudden wave of dizziness forced me to leave the table halfway through. “I’m sorry,” I whispered apologetically, “but I’m too weak to sit here. I have to lie down.”
I was still languishing on Sunday. By then, of course, I was too weak and exhausted to come out to watch them eat breakfast.
“I can’t,” I called hoarsely through my closed bedroom door. “The room spins whenever I stand up.”
My mother was her usual cynical self.
“Why don’t you just crawl out, then?” she shouted back.
My father called that afternoon, but I was too weak to make it to the phone. By putting a glass to my door and my ear to the glass, I could just make out my mother explaining to my father that she was starving me to death.
“She’s doing Gandhi this week,” said my mother. “She’s on a hunger strike until I say she can go to some concert at the Garden.”
There were a few minutes of silence then while my father talked.
Although my father’s speciality is adorable rabbits, he is technically an artist. This makes him more sensitive and compassionate than my mother, the pot maker. My father would never be able to watch me waste away before his eyes the way my mother was. I had my hopes pinned on him.
Finally, my mother spoke.
“I’ll ask her,” she said. I could tell from her voice that she thought my father was being too soft. She always thinks my father’s being too soft. Attila the Hun would have seemed soft to my mother. “Mary!” she called. She put down the receiver and started walking towards my door.
I flung myself back into bed, jamming the glass under the pillow.
“Mary!” my mother called again. “Mary, your dad has an idea…”
My dad’s idea was that he take me to the concert and I spend the night with him.
This wasn’t the idea I wanted him to have. I wanted him to have the idea that I was mature and responsible enough to go by myself.
“Oh, ye gods!…” I moaned. “Isn’t it enough that you’ve practically killed me, now you want to humiliate me, too?”
“Well, what about this?” asked my mother. “What if Cal takes you to the Garden and then picks you up when the concert’s over?”
“What?” I shrieked. “Like a little kid being picked up from the daycare centre? Is there no end to the shame you want to heap on me?”
“Suit yourself,” said my mother. She went back to the phone. She told my dad that I’d rejected his offer.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Cal,” snapped my mother. “It’s been a couple of days, not six months. She’s fine.” She was silent for a few minutes and then she screamed, “Mary! Your father wants to talk to you!”
“I told you!” I rasped back. “I can’t get out of bed. My legs are too weak to hold me up.”
“She’s dying,” said my mother. “She can’t come to the phone right now.”
My father called at least two more times that afternoon. He must have gotten my mother worried, though, because when I didn’t come out for supper she finally cracked.
She marched into my room with a plate of food in her hands. I didn’t even try to lift my head from the pillow. A person melting away from hunger loses her natural curiosity.
“This has gone far enough,” announced my mother. “I want to talk to you.”
My mother said that she couldn’t stand by and watch me fade away before her eyes. What kind of mother was she, if she let one of her children make herself ill? She would never be able to live with herself if something happened to me. And there was also my father to consider. He was very upset. I knew how emotional he was, how stressed and pressured he was with work and everything. What was I trying to do, push him into an early crematorium?
“You’re going to eat tonight, or I’m going to know the reason why,” my mother concluded.
The long days of starvation made it hard for me to speak.
“The reason why,” I croaked, “is because I’m on a hunger strike.” I turned my haunted eyes on her. “Passive resistance,” I whispered. My mother is big on passive resistance; her brother spent the Vietnam War in jail.
“A rock concert is not worth starvation,” said my mother. She put the plate on the bed and helped me to sit up. Then she picked up the plate again, and put it in front of me. “Now, eat,” she ordered.
“I can’t,” I said in a choked voice.
My mother folded her arms. “Oh, yes you can.”
I glanced behind her. The twins were hovering in the doorway, devouring cornbread and giggling in their usual childish manner.
“Make them go away,” I begged.
My mother looked over her shoulder. “Go back to the table!” she commanded.
Pam spat a mouthful of cornbread down her shirt, but otherwise my sisters didn’t move.
I picked up my fork. Hesitatingly, as though I’d forgotten how to use cutlery. I slipped my fork into the mashed potato on my plate. I raised a small morsel to my lips. I paused.
“Eat it!” my mother commanded.
I slid the fork into my mouth. But my poor, frail body was unused to rich things like mashed potato with mushroom gravy – I immediately started to gag.
“Mary’s throwing up!” shrieked Pam. “Mary’s throwing up on her bed!”
“Oh, how gross…” squealed Paula.
My mother lost a little of her compassionate manner.
“Mary can’t be throwing up,” she assured them. “She hasn’t eaten anything in nearly three days. Remember?”
“Mom’s right,” I gasped. I figured that since I had an audience, I might as well play to them. “I’m just tearing my empty stomach apart.” Choking so much I was turning red, I spat the potato back on my plate.
“Why do I feel like I’m watching a tragedy in one act?” asked my mother.
Still choking, I started to cry.
“Make her eat more,” pleaded Pam. “I want to see her throw up again.”
