Apples Never Fall

Each time she fell out of love with him, he saw it happen and waited it out. He never stopped loving her, even those times when he felt deeply hurt and betrayed by her, even in that bad year when they talked about separating, he’d just gone along with it, waiting for her to come back to him, thanking God and his dad up above each time she did.

Joy shielded her eyes to watch the plane disappear on the horizon. She dropped her hand and looked back at Stan.

She said, “Let’s play.”

Chapter 71

“If you hear the cabin crew say, ‘Evacuate, evacuate, evacuate,’” said the flight attendant, “first check that the area outside the aircraft is safe.”

She said “Evacuate, evacuate, evacuate,” in such a bored, bureaucratic monotone, it was funny. You couldn’t find the horror in the words.

The girl in 12F stopped listening to her exit-row responsibilities. No plane would crash during a pandemic. That would be too many disasters for the nightly news. Anyway, in the unlikely event of an emergency the muscly guy seated next to her would shove her aside and fling the exit door free.

She tugged at her mask. It itched.

Everyone fiddled incessantly with their masks, trying to adjust to this strange new world, only their frazzled eyes visible. Glasses fogged up. Some people kept pulling their masks down under their noses for refreshing sniffs of germ-scented air. Two women across the aisle scrubbed at their tray tables and armrests with disinfectant wipes as if they were cleaning up a crime scene.

The girl looked like a member of a nineties girl grunge band. Her hair was dyed inky black and shaved on one side. She wore ripped black jeans, chunky buckled motorcycle boots, and a lot of clanking jewelry that had set off the metal detectors at the airport: a bangle coiled with snakes, a skull necklace.

The girl was flying to Adelaide to visit her mother.

Her flight had been delayed multiple times so as to ensure bad moods for all. By the time she picked up her car rental and drove out to her childhood home, it would be past nine. She assumed her mother would be tucked up in bed, warm and cozy, don’t let those bed bugs bite, just as she’d left her in the gold-tinged light of dawn many months before.

“Bye, Mum!” she’d called. “Love you!” There had been no answer.

The night before that morning, she’d cooked dinner for her mother, as she always did when she visited. A tiny, exquisite, calorie-controlled meal on a big white plate. Two herb-encrusted lamb cutlets (all fat excised with surgical precision). Eight green beans. One small, perfectly shaped scoop of mashed potato. Her mother still watched what she ate.

You must never stop watching! Insidious calories can creep onto your plate and onto your body. Sometimes calories can find you in your dreams.

Her mother, dressed as though for church, although she’d never been to church, polished off everything on that big white plate. Afterward, she picked at the pieces of meat between her teeth with a toothpick while proclaiming the meal to be “quite good.”

Then her mother showered for a long time, cleaned her teeth, and changed into her nightie and dressing gown, after which she sat on the couch to watch television with a small glass of vodka (the lowest calorie alcohol, no carbs, fat, or sugar) and two yellow sleeping tablets. The doctor had said she should take only one tablet thirty minutes before bed, but what did he know? The girl’s mother said, “You should make your own decisions when it comes to your health.” She took two tablets every night and slept like the dead.

The girl stood in the kitchen for a long time staring at her mother’s plate before she scraped the gnawed bones into the bin.

Then she went out to the living room and spoke to the back of her mother’s head. “Didn’t you teach me to never eat everything on my plate?”

Her mother said, “You’ve got that topsy-turvy! You teach your children to eat everything on their plates.”

The girl said, “Your rule was the opposite. Never, ever finish everything on your plate.”

She looked at the shelves where all her ribbons and medals and trophies were displayed. She picked up a trophy. It was one of her least prestigious—just second place in a “tiny dancer” regional competition—but it was one of the largest and most impressive-looking. A gold-plated pirouetting ballerina on a chunky white marble base.

The girl remembered dancing for that trophy because she remembered everything. She remembered her mother’s tiny smile for her tiny ballerina. The tiny smile was the girl’s tiny reward for the blistered toes and bruised toenails, the shin pain, the ankle pain, the back pain, but above all, the pain of unrelenting hunger.

She said to her mother, “Don’t you remember? If I forgot to leave something on my plate you locked me in my room. Good dancers must learn to control their calories.”

Her mother continued to watch the flickering television. “I don’t know why we’re talking about this now.”

The girl didn’t know why she was talking about it now either. It had not been her plan. She was here to say goodbye. She was moving interstate with her new boyfriend. He was Irish, a painter. He thought she was normal. He thought it was sweet that she’d been a ballerina. His sister had been a ballerina too. The girl knew his sister’s ballet experience had been entirely different from her own.

The girl said, “Sometimes you locked me in my room with only water. I had to ration the water. That was a terrible thing to do to a little girl. I thought I would be there forever. I thought I would die. I think I might have come close to dying. A few times.”

Nothing.

“I have an eating disorder,” said the girl. “I’ve got issues with my thyroid, my iron levels, my teeth, my digestion, my brain, my personality. I’m not … right.” She paused. “You wrecked me.”

Canned laughter rose and fell from the television.