Heavy: An American Memoir(55)

“I don’t think I love my students in healthy ways,” I told you. “I don’t think I know how.”

? ? ?

Four days later, you called and asked me to send twenty-five hundred dollars for a medicine your state insurance didn’t cover. I didn’t even ask what it was for. I just wired the money, and waited for the now twenty-five-hundred-dollar leather living room set I didn’t want to be delivered in the first place.

I spent the next few months in my classroom, in office hours, writing, exercising, taking care of students, and sending you more money. I’d gone from teaching three courses at Vassar to teaching six to being offered a job there on the tenure track. A month after I was put on the tenure track, you left to do more work in Cuba. I was the only one in the family who knew you’d gone. You didn’t want Grandmama to worry. You called me as soon as you made it back. Instead of telling me about your trip, you told me the fireplace in the house was decaying and the house needed a new foundation as soon as possible. You said squirrels infested the house and you could hear them running through the kitchen at night.

“Ain’t nothing in that kitchen for them to eat,” I told you, “unless they eating spoiled buttermilk and old Bisquick.”

“The man is in there fixing the fireplace now,” you said, “but I don’t have enough money to pay him. Can you wire a thousand dollars, Kie? I need five hundred for the fireplace and five hundred for a new furnace.”

“Can I speak to him?”

“What did you say? You’re breaking up.”

“Can I speak to the person fixing the place?” I asked you. “Maybe I can get him to lower his price.”

The phone went dead.

I called you back. There was no answer.

I called Grandmama and asked her if you could stay with her until the fireplace got fixed, since squirrels were running through the house.

“What kind of squirrels and thangs you talking about, Kie?”

“I heard there were squirrels all in the house because the chimney cracked.”

“Naw,” Grandmama said, “I was over to Jackson yesterday and I ain’t see no squirrels. The air wasn’t working and the plumbing was broken, but wasn’t no squirrels and thangs running around. What in the world is you talking about?”

“That’s what I’m asking you,” I said. “How can the plumbing and air be broken when I sent her money for that a few weeks ago?”

“Kie.” Grandmama held the pause. “Kie, listen to me. That house is crumbling around her and something in this milk ain’t clean. You hear me? Somebody stole my checkbook, my credit cards, the little money I had in my closet, too. I wasn’t gonna say nothing about it, but this is getting ridiculous.”

“What are you talking about? Who is somebody?”

“I’m talking about don’t let somebody play you for no fool. God give you five senses for a reason.”

I closed my flip phone and sat on the tacky leather couch. Since working at Vassar, I gave you tens of thousands of dollars for mortgages, engines, groceries, and doctor bills. Sometimes I contacted the places you owed and paid them directly. I never asked myself how someone who made twice as much as I made could be broke the second week into every month. I didn’t care. You’d taken care of me for half of my life, and I wanted, as much as I could, to take care of you. But I wasn’t rich. And I just wanted to know where my money was going if it wasn’t going where you said it was.

You called me back from the grocery store and told me to wire the money immediately. I told you that something felt strange and I didn’t feel right wiring money without talking to the person I was supposedly paying. I’d just given you the fourteen thousand dollars I had in savings for a down payment on an SUV you said would make you feel safer, and if I was going to send you another thousand, I just needed to know we were getting the best deal we could get.

You hung up in my face again.

I called you back, but you still wouldn’t answer. I told your voice mail I could send more money but I needed to know what I was sending money for. I didn’t tell your voice mail Grandmama said somebody stole her money. I didn’t tell your voice mail I was starving myself, or that I was in the midst of confusing teaching with parenting and befriending and loving. “Please call me back,” I said.

I put on my shoes, took off my shirt, and told my body I was going to run twenty miles that night. My body did not want to run twenty miles that night because it played three hours of ball and ran six miles earlier. My body wanted water. It wanted its first good night’s sleep in five years. It wanted more than a thousand calories. I ignored what my body wanted because nothing my body wanted would get me beneath 160 pounds.

Twenty-three miles later, I limped in the house drenched in sweat, buzzing from endorphins. I stepped heavy on the scale and watched the number get smaller and smaller.

290.

275.

250.

225.

205.

190.

183.

175.

165.

159.3.

I was the lightest I’d ever been since I was nine years old. I checked my messages, hoping you’d called me back. You had not. I took a shower and sat on my bed. When I went to get up and call you again, I could not stand. The blood in my left leg, from the top of my ass to the tip of my big toe, felt like it was boiling. I told myself if I drank water and just fell asleep on the floor, I would recover.