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Bad Enough

By Kristi Petersen

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 From where she was standing, it was a long way down.

 It was a good thing, she figured, that she wasn’t afraid of heights. She’d never been. Even as a five-year-old, when she was far too young to be riding rollercoasters by herself, she was able to get on without anyone stopping her. She was so big-boned that she was well above the height level marked on those Midway signs that insisted “you must be this tall to ride this ride.”

 Not that she was obese, or, what people would call “fat”—she wasn’t; she was just a big kid. Her meaty legs were powerful enough to kick out a window (she’d done it once when her family’s second-story apartment had a kitchen fire when her parents weren’t home); her breasts were two giant melons (do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, just on to a 34-B cup right away. Forget this “training bra” crap). As a teen, she’d never had the privilege of running around in midriff-open tops, and she envied the tan girls with little pouches of bellies who ran around bra-less on hot summer nights while she sweat a gallon under a hot cotton blanket of wires and thick straps.

 She knew she didn’t have to be thin to be sexy. She’d seen women who were considerably shorter and plumper than she, not having the advantage of height to spread some of it thin. Some of these women had elephant-trunk legs, and their knees dimpled and roiled with extra flaps of skin; some of them had cantaloupe breasts, beach-ball bellies and shelf-asses. But these women, confident and even daring, paraded in front of their men like they were every bit as sleek as last month’s centerfolds. And so, when she thought about it, she realized it wasn’t necessarily their thinness she desired—it was their comfort with their own portliness. She had tried many times to accept the way she was built (like a brick shithouse, her father had once said). She had told herself, “I should love me the way I am, and just control what I eat so I don’t get too heavy, and that should be enough.” She’d bought more expensive, tailored clothes, make-up that you could only purchase from a china-dolled-up beauty consultant and not in a department store like the Dollar Dayz an hour away. She’d even redecorated her bedroom windows with pretty, sheer curtains in silver, gold, and pink sparkly trim. But she had to confess that despite all these attempts, her skewed thinking hadn’t changed. So the only other alternative, which was the one she almost always arrived at after weeks of upheaval, weeks of breaking down whatever it was around her that she’d decided would do the trick this time, was to try another diet.

 She had tried every diet known to woman. The 2000-calorie-a-day thing. The packaged-frozen-meal thing. The super-teas-that-made-everything—even -her-eyelids—sweat thing. The box-of-laxatives-after-you-eat-a-big-meal thing, the low-carb thing, the two-shakes-and-a-sensible-dinner thing, the exercise-at-the-gym-two-hours-a-day thing, the citrus-fruit-and-dry-English-muffin thing, the smelly-cabbage-soup thing. She had tried them all: every supplement, every vitamin, every strict regimen. Nothing had worked. Despite her peering at herself in her bathroom mirror (the one that had cracked when she’d moved to her trailer next door to Rainforest Park, a five-dollar attraction on Route 501 that boasted exotic birds but was simply a sad display of shabby, lightning-burnt pine trees surrounding decrepit bird cages and a lone filthy goose poised on a mound of dirt) and resolving at the cusp of each diet that “in just two weeks, my clothes should start falling off me—well, if not that, then at least be a little looser”, five or six days went by and she saw nothing significant. Then she was back in the supermarket again, loading up her cart with foods that confused her because after the failure of every diet she didn’t know what to eat anymore.

 She stood in the check-out line behind some Twiggy in a bright red tank dress and matching heels yakking on her cell in such a way it brought squirrels to mind, and flipped through magazines beckoning purchase with promises of super-celebrity diets or “if I can do it, you can too! 14 days to a size 4.” And that was the day that it occurred to her, surveying her cart crammed with frozen meals, some of those shake things, a couple of pounds of raw steak, 80% lean hamburger and a bag of citrus fruits: the only thing she hadn’t tried was not shopping. Specifically, not eating. Oh, sure. She’d been warned about how that doesn’t really work, that the weight comes back in no time flat; she’d even seen a documentary on TV where a girl was so thin the bones in her rear-end could splinter if she was not placed by nurses on a couch in just a certain way. But that would surely never happen to her. That would surely never happen to her because she was only going to do it for a month or so. One month, that would be all. And if it worked, and it was sure to work because it was the only thing she hadn’t tried, she’d at last feel like she could buy any clothes she wanted. And then perhaps, when she went to the Lightning Rod—the bar decorated with flashing lights and garage doors that pulled up to let the heat of the South Carolina summer dissipate—men would turn their heads and think, ‘what a looker, I wish I could have a piece of that’. And then perhaps, she’d be able to drive her convertible with confidence, buy a bright polka-dot pink scarf to tie about her hair, get some dark glasses, put on some lipstick, and feel sexy.

 She did not pretend that day after day of eating nothing would be easy. What she needed was to isolate herself from food of any kind. Beyond that: she needed removal to a world under her absolute control. A place where there would be no temptations, no cookies or candy, nothing that was bad for her, no social invitations with friends to the pizza parlor that could derail her diet the more and more beer she consumed (because the more beer she consumed, the more complacent she became, so the more she allowed herself to indulge, only the next morning to arise, hate herself, and vow to start over).

 When the experiment had first crept into her head, it had been an amusing proposition. Then it had grown into a fantasy, as in, “what if I could do that?” Then it had slowly mutated to seem, with her phone calls, plausible and affordable. She would station herself way up on the 16^th-floor balcony of a Myrtle Beach oceanfront high-rise, locked out of her $52/night suite (good rates—it was mid-August, after all), taking as her source of inspiration the skinny girls below who would surely one day be lamenting their own physical demise as a consequence of childbearing. She was convinced that she would be miraculously forty pounds thinner by the end of the month.

 The Golden Beach Pagoda, the hotel was called, so there were Chinese dragons on all the corresponding note paper, towels and matchbooks. She’d had more than a few initial reservations about choosing this particular spot for her experiment. She adored older places, but most of them had a hard time surviving in this era: the days of people knowing how to entertain themselves were long gone. The older places couldn’t afford all the stupendous features that kept today’s frenetics busy, so they very often lost money and became run-down, not even updating their signage. The Golden Beach Pagoda was one such place. It was clean, had just undergone a couple of fresh coats of paint, but it had a sign that had probably been painted five decades ago. The dancing dragon peeled in places so that when he was lit up at night, it was like his creator had changed his mind and erased parts of him. It also didn’t help that being un-politically correct seemed to be okay. Mr. Dragon was free to dance about in all his slanty-eyed glory and proclaim, by means of a cartoon-bubble, that his hotel was “Emperor favorite place by ocean!” But it had what she wanted: a high floor, and sliders that locked from the inside when you closed them.

 She was not as experienced as a competitor for the Guinness Book of World Records, but she was also not a fool: she’d been camping, and she saw to it that all of the necessary precautions had been taken, that as many comforts—what could be possible on a 10x12 balcony, anyway—had been provided. She had a tent, pinioned to the clearly-hurricane-battered and rusted air conditioner, its thin ribbings plied with crusts of reddish salt layers; she had three flannel blankets, a sleeping bag—though pink and slightly small because it had been a gift from her parents on her 9^th birthday—six cases of bottled water, four boxes of diet pills, and a Rubbermaid tub full of lettuce of every kind, tomatoes, onions, and low fat dressing (there was still a wisp of that “starving doesn’t work” advice present in her head, and so she knew she couldn’t subsist on nothing). She had a small library of material she’d wanted to read years ago, and a battery-operated television with four spare fully-charged batteries, in case she got really bored. She also had a notepad, pens, envelopes and stamps (she could address them and toss them over the balcony—someone below would pick them up and see that they got to a mailbox, she was sure of that), and a few ten-for-a-buck postcards she’d gotten at one of the gift shops—Wings or Whales—that advertised “free hermit crab with $20 purchase.” Yes, she’d run herself up to $20 with a couple of other items so she’d have the crab in a cage as a friend—someone to talk to—and she’d named him Antigone. She had also secured basic necessities—a dishpan, spring water to brush her teeth and some suntan lotion so she wouldn’t burn. She had a table and a chair. She had a carton of cigarettes too: even though she didn’t smoke, she’d heard it was a wonderful deterrent, something in the hand replacing something in the mouth—and even though the breezes coming off the ocean could be more than just a little disruptive, she figured matches could still be of use. The four-cup coffee maker was possible due to the hotel’s outdoor electrical outlet—she’d spent weeks making calls to ensure that particular amenity. She even had a make-up mirror so that when she got thinner, she could make herself pretty enough stand up and wave to the men below at 11:00 at night, feigning that she was just another partier doing something crazy. She was completely prepared—she’d even taken care to hook the flimsy plastic DO NOT DISTURB sign on her hotel room door, so she’d have no interruption by the minimum-wage maids and their carts mounded high with towels.

 Post-experiment arrangements had also occurred to her: what about, she’d thought, getting down when the month was up? No one would hear her cry for help over the beach winds; her voice would be spirited away like the seeds of a flower. She felt she’d also planned well for that occasion: she had a thick coil of heavy rope used for boating, and a stack of $1.99 bed sheets to tie on (to give the rope weight, so it wouldn’t blow about, and so it would hit its target more effectively), with a note that said, “Help—I’m locked out on the 16^th floor. Please send someone up to let me in.” Her note she’d penned with a permanent waterproof marker on thick paperboard she’d purchased at the craft store—it wouldn’t rip or blow around as much as paper would—and she’d taken care to get a neon color, something bright and sure to catch the attention, a construction-cone orange. The rope, at two-hundred and fifty feet (she’d done the calculations: a 16-story building in Cincinnati measured 210 feet tall, so she figured this estimate couldn’t be too far off), would reach the sandy concrete patio next to the pool where, at least most of the day, there would be people lounging, hats and clear plastic visors firmly crowning their heads, reading their books or watching their kids. It was assured. Someone would see it. Someone would send for help. 

 She had overlooked one thing: when she crawled into her sleeping bag, she wished she’d thought to buy an air mattress—she hadn’t realized that the Astro-turf covered concrete would be so slate-hard, and this lack of attention to detail only betrayed that her parents had been too well-prepared when they’d been camping. She was so used to sleeping on air mattresses, she’d actually forgotten that’s what it was that made sleeping out in the woods so comfortable.

 Despite the cool breezes in the morning hours, if she sat in the sun, she found she was quite warm. She could feel the chill associated with sunburn, that fever-type chill, that, instead of making her feel ill, made her feel strangely healthy. Like the sun had burnt every bad thing off of her skin, had melted every bad thing in her bones away until all that was left was raw and pure and sinless, and that was why the body shivered so, for it wasn’t used to being without its thickened blanket of iniquities. So when she was done here, not only would she be thin, she would be tan, too—perhaps not what would be considered a bronze goddess, but, at least, she would have gotten some color.

 She could tell she was hungry—there was a growl in her belly—but it was masked heavily by the appetite suppressants, so when she felt the desire for more salad, or when she felt she was going to threaten her meager food supply by ripping off the cover of the tub, dumping the entire bottle of salad dressing over the sixteen or seventeen heads of lettuce, two dozen tomatoes, pound of onions and four cans of olives, making a giant salad big enough, perhaps, to sit and soak in just as though she were in a jacuzzi, she popped another pill. The smoking thing wasn’t working well—she was having trouble figuring out how to light the cigarette—but she wasn’t desperate enough for that measure—yet.

 Most days she watched the surf roll in, roll out. Sometimes there was a dolphin, or what she thought was a dolphin, leaping in a gray arc over the water; sometimes, there were big shrimp boats, seesawing like rocking horses in the waves. Sometimes she saw something glowing in the water, a spot of pink or white that would be there and then vanish just as a blinking light would. She thought they were phosphorescent animals, maybe, or perhaps, she was just seeing the white sides of seagulls. She’d forgotten to bring her binoculars and was sorry she had—simply because there was another activity that would help the time to pass. She didn’t want to rip through her dozen books all at once, and she’d already finished one, a mystery about a famous poet’s body found walled up in the very museum that was supposedly his original home. The battery-operated TV she decided to only watch twice a day—for news. Nothing that wasn’t necessary. She knew she could re-charge the batteries by using the outdoor outlet, but had decided that, since she’d lost the unit’s AC adapter and therefore could no longer plug it in directly, she deserved punishment for being so irresponsible with such an expensive Christmas gift from her former boyfriend who’d confessed he liked his women “soft as a pillow”. She’d had a good one, there. He didn’t care that she’d towered over him or that she was a little dimply in the derriere. But she also hadn’t wanted to “settle”. She was still convinced she had a chance at finding her rock star if she were only thinner.

 In the mornings, the sun rose white over the gray-green sea and moved behind pale purple clouds, bleeding through them like the ray-hand of God upon the sea’s creatures; in the afternoons, she caught her tan, and in the evenings, especially on the weekends, she amused herself—following the news, of course—with watching young lovers walk off their romantic meals, staunch men with dogs shining their flashlights about, looking for treasure or shells, and later, after midnight, drunken revelers back from the bars who always seemed underdressed for the weather running into the breakers and the surf, howling like mad wolves and jumping about. These she liked best. It was like watching a car accident—she knew half of them, if not all, would go back to their lives and just two days later would more than likely be sick with pneumonia or some other damn thing. Adults could still be as stupid as children.

 By the second week, the waistband of her denim skirt was loose. This thrilled her, and she wished she’d brought a scale. She was starving, but this, if she was seeing results, was as good as if someone had presented her with a three-tiered chocolate cake.

 It was also, however, when she was beginning to regret this decision.

 Things were not going as planned. Despite all of her efforts, she was bored. And lonely. Antigone the crab had given up the ghost toward the end of the first week (she had offered his pathetic remains to the seagulls and terns) and even though the postcard/letter trick seemed to be working (she was composing great fictions about what a lovely time she was having on vacation, telling her recipients about bars and restaurants she was eating at, roller coasters and Ferris Wheels she was riding in her mind) she’d used up her ten-for-a-buck postcards and was running out of paper and stamps. She was already through her sixth book, and if she worked harder at spacing out her reading periods, she supposed she could make them last longer. The salad, because she had neglected to figure out a way of bringing and keeping a constant supply of ice to her corner of seclusion, was beginning to wilt, and the tomatoes and the plastic in the bin took on the strong odor of onions; when she opened the bin, the hot stink would rush upon her like the breath of a baloney-feasting dog. But there was something else unsettling about her predicament, something she hadn’t planned on as well: time to think.

 She was not the sort of person who liked thinking. For that reason, she had not gone to college, choosing instead to work her way up to district manager at a local chain of craft stores. Numbers and profit margins, ordering and supervision came much more easily to her than did trying to solve the complex problems faced by, say, a nurse, or a teacher. And since she had management experience, she thought, if she got bored with staring at catalogs full of yarn and deciding, based on supplier price, what that yarn would cost, she could work at a hotel. There were plenty of hotels—like this one—not even an hour from her house. And that was the way her life went, following the same pattern it had when she’d gotten her first dollhouse. Her mother had it gotten second-hand, and it had chipped wallpaper in its kitchen and a bathroom toilet that had a broken seat, only it was glued to the dollhouse floor and it couldn’t be replaced unless the entire floor and all of the other furniture—claw foot tub, sink, and dresser for linens—were to be replaced as well. So she’d lived with it. Any problem that was too daunting to solve, any problem that required too much thought, was a problem to be avoided.

 Her favorite part of the news was the weather. There were never any problems, so she wasn’t required to think about it. Weather this time of year, save for the occasional storm, was pretty clear, warm until the end of September when it cooled down slightly, and she was looking forward to cooler afternoons, believe it or not, because she was, most definitely, getting too much color. She laughed, thinking of herself as a crispy chicken, probably because, after the fourteenth salad, she had spotted a family way down on the pool patio with a take-out bucket of the stuff. She also thought of herself as a bright pink spare rib or an angry red lobster, probably because of the advertisers that sponsored the weather reports: “come on down to Pork’s Beach BBQ!” “Snap into some crazy crab legs or NEW fried lobster tail bites… with or without butter.”

 It was then she realized she had to stop watching the weather for awhile, not because she wasn’t curious, but because of the commercials. The enticement of what she knew were really just plastic models of food was too upsetting and tantalizing for her to watch, sending her stomach into paroxysms of spasms. Spasms of hunger. She supposed she didn’t need the weather reports anyway; she could deduce the changing of seasons from what went on at the beach.

 It seemed there were fewer and fewer families picnicking on the patios below, fewer people lounging around the pool, but it didn’t concern her. Then one day, she noticed that the usual staff—the gentlemen who drove white “Beach Patrol” trucks who set out the small, snail-shell-like cabanas every morning well before dawn, then repeated the process in reverse every evening around dusk—did not come around. The cabanas reminded her of escargot—well, blue and yellow and striped and polka dotted escargot, of course—especially when a guy with a shovel piled sand along their broad backs, possibly to better steel them against the oncoming surf, and tides, and winds. She had seen beach goers swarm around them, then at eight o’clock, empty them, calling it a night and coming inside to shower and perhaps dress themselves nicely for dinners at seafood shacks or fine steakhouses on the pier. But on this day that process didn’t happen. There were none to be found. Where were the cabanas?

 The jeans she climbed into at night were now getting loose. For the first time in many days, her gaze fell upon the coil of rope and piles of sheets, her escape route, in the corner at the bottom of a dribble of rust that plummeted from the air conditioner down the sand-textured paint. It beckoned her, as though it was a coy snake and she was its charmer, but somehow an ancient spell had reversed and she was under its pull. Perhaps, she thought, she was just crazed with hunger. She was certain she hadn’t reached a goal weight, and she cursed herself again for not getting herself a scale in which to keep track of it, but she supposed it would have created a problem if she’d begun this process at 160 pounds and after two weeks of starvation the needle was stuck at just 158. She could get down, consider getting down. Perhaps she’d lost enough weight, and it was time to abandon this silly balcony and get back to her life. Something inside her was telling her, in fact, like an alarm in the middle of a dream, that there was a problem, that something wasn’t right. Up here, not only could she hear the sound of the wind from the sea, she could, if the day were calm, hear the roar of traffic out on Ocean Boulevard, at the opposite side of the hotel. (She had specifically requested that she not be able to see the road from her room just in case there were too many enticements, like ice cream shops or people walking by with fast-food cheeseburgers in their hands, happily munching away.) But she couldn’t hear traffic. Also, she seemed to notice a lack of seagulls and terns. They hadn’t kept her company so much as they’d been a nuisance, swooping into her 10x12 every time she pulled out her meager rations. But now there seemed to be so few of them, and smaller, weaker ones, too. She didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but she sensed that it meant something, this clearing out of the brutish birds that bullied and even fought over the occasional piece of quickly-wilting onion that she dropped on the patio floor.

 After a week with no television and no revelers to watch in the night, two days after she didn’t see any more cabanas and she had to chuck one of the tomatoes that had been at the bottom of her bin for it had gone soft, mushy and heavy with black-white mold, she heard something like construction—hammers banging, even the occasional yell or jackhammer cutting through the wind and the waves. These sounds of progress were a sharp reminder that life was going forward without her, and it made her lonely. She wanted someone or something to keep her company. And so, even though she would be tempted by food commercials and surely it would drive her right into the arms of the hemp and cotton snake in the corner, she turned on the battery-operated TV.

 The man she recognized as her friendly Channel 8 Beach TV Weather forecaster didn’t look right. He had ditched his usual suit and tie for a bright red Hawaiian shirt, and he wasn’t in front of a traditional weather map. Instead, he sat in what looked to be a beach bungalow, and his long gray hair wasn’t tied back; in fact, he looked a little unkempt, as though someone had roused him from a face-down sleep in a bar named after an exotic bird. He rubbed his eyes and told the audience—tourists and residents alike—that Hurricane Vortigern was almost here. And this hurricane, true to its violent usurper of a namesake, was not a Category 1 or 2, but a Category 5. The likes of which has never been seen in these parts since the worst one, Hazel, which was only a Category 4. “If you have not already evacuated, then you must do so, for it is predicted to make landfall in just a few short hours, and the last of the windows should be boarded up.” The TV showed cars crawling past HURRICANE EVACUATION ROUTE signs, the ones with the white symbol that looked like a pizza cutter blade. They were all up and down Route 501, near where she lived.

 Where she lived. Where she lived that she probably wouldn’t see again. Category Five! And she was on the beach-side. She’d be killed! Crushed! Pummeled! What if the building were simply blown away or swallowed by the vomiting sea? What if a wave truly could reach the 16^th floor? What if that were possible? There was no way, no way she could go through with her plan now to drop the rope and hope someone saw her; they were all gone. Back from whence they came or, if they lived nearby, probably with relatives in other states.

 They were gone, and she was in very big trouble.

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