Flesh Wounds (excerpt)
That one time at what was not exactly fat camp...
The first time I asked to be sent to boarding school was about 20 minutes after I finished my first Enid Blyton novel. I was about eleven. The first time I asked to be sent to fat camp was at the dinner table a year later, the evening after some girl at school had mentioned that her cousin went away to one and came back “almost normal-size.” I had no idea what either boarding school or fat camp actually entailed. I hadn’t bothered to think about it. What I did know was that it meant not being anywhere near my parents for weeks or months at a time, free of their words, their disapproval, the weight of their expectations, the blaming that went hand-in-glove with the casual cruelty. The idea made something in my soul thrum with promise, a sensation of “oh, if only!”, an almost unbearable lightness of spirit. Not only that, there was the possibility, maybe even the probability, that the experience might somehow magically transform my body into something almost, if not necessarily completely, acceptable.
The first time, when I’d asked and then begged to be sent to boarding school, my mother had said no, and then no again, and then had explained that she was a teacher and she knew that the school I was already going to was perfectly good, after which she angrily told me I was an ungrateful little shit and she wasn’t made of money. Thus I knew that the odds of her magically saying yes to fat camp were not on my side, but it had to do with becoming thinner, so I felt like it was still worth a try. It went about like you’d think, including a strident version of that old parental classic “Where do you get these crazy ideas? If your friend’s cousin jumped off a bridge, would you want to do that too?”
But then my mother’s gaze fell upon the booklet sent out quarterly by the city Parks and Recreation Division. It was the catalog from which she selected our summer swimming lessons so we wouldn’t drown and our winter ice skating lessons at the indoor rink so that she could get us out of the damn house for the afternoon every weekend when it was too cold for us to be sent outside to play. The spring edition had recently arrived. It was the catalog from which she chose the day camps to which we went during summer vacation, because one thing my schoolteacher mother was emphatically not doing was having her own children in her house all day every day during the one time of year that she did not have to deal with other people’s children all day every day. I had already thumbed through the booklet and dog-eared the page for the same arts and crafts day camp I had gone to the previous year, so as far as I was concerned the matter was settled. My mother, however, snatched up the catalog, furiously flipped pages for a minute, then slapped it onto the kitchen table, one finger pinning it down right below the words “Sports Camp.”
“There,” she announced. “You don’t need some fancy sleepaway camp, places like that cost the earth. You can do exactly the same thing right here. It’s inexpensive and it’ll be good for you. You’ll lose weight.”
I said nothing. There was nothing I could say. My mother had already grabbed one of the red felt-tip pens she used for grading and inevitably for everything else, leaving a trail of blood behind her. She was filling out the sign-up form inside the booklet’s back cover, and I was sitting speechless, looking down as the worst of both worlds manifested line by bright-red line in my mother’s prim chalkboard handwriting.
