![]() ![]() ![]() She smiled with a strained, hesitant warmth. Her eyes were a deep brown, and I think of her as unblinking, as if she were always looking at something suspended between horror and sadness. My mother was fair-skinned with a delicate, bony strand of a nose and dark, straight hair. I taunted my mother with the word as if anorexia were something she might desire, not something she already had. I added it to the lyrics of popular songs and sang them while my mother slowly pushed her food around a plate, rarely lifting the fork to her mouth, every morsel a lame horse on a track, never reaching the finish line. At the dinner table I inserted it into the conversation. The word “anorexia” was like a prize I had won in a draw someone entered on my behalf unexpected, sure, but I would find a use for it. What it described was what we had just seen: a skeleton in Nikes. The driver of the car, my friend’s mother, said the word that we did not know. From the burgundy insides of a Chevy Blazer, we all turned to look at a jogger, a woman, a sinewy form devoid of curves, angles only, rib cage and clavicles protruding, like some sort of moving body diagram, inside out. ![]() I first heard the term “anorexic” in the back seat of a car on the way home from the movies. ![]()
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