In The Fat

By Sally K Lehman

Innocence. That's the real problem.

St. Ansbald Mental Institution is the new home for thirteen-year-old Skyler Canter Reems. She can't quite come to terms with why she's ended up in this place, strangely nicknamed "The Fat." Dumped on, cut, and too old for her own good, Skyler manages to find her way in The Fat alongside the oddest assortment of young women she's ever met. Before she can leave, their friendships brace her for a final wave of heart-wrenching misfortune.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Bomb Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780692530016

Sally K Lehman

Sally K Lehman likes math and dark places inside people's heads. Good thing, because in Portland, Oregon, her hometown, it's good to have more to do than curse the rain.

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In the Fat

Black Bomb Books, LLC

Asheville, NC

www.BlackBombBooks.com

[e-mail]

Copyright © 2015 Sally K Lehman

First Edition, September 2015

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without prior permission of the publishers, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright laws. For permission requests, contact the publisher.

Chapter One was previously published in Perceptions: A Magazine of the Arts, 2015

ISBN: 978-0692530016 (print)

Cover design by Jeanine Henning

www.jeaninehenning.com

Book design by Maureen Cutajar

www.gopublished.com

Trigger Warning: Book contains graphic scenes of cutting, incest, and suicidal behavior. Also, graphic language.

For Emmy

Table of Contents

1 Before The Fat – Friday, September 30, 2012

2 Monday, October 23, 2012

3 Stand Off – Stand Down

4 Gerbils

5 Before The Fat – The Wedding

6 Supper

7 Waking Up

8 In The Fat

9 The Real Problem was My Thigh

10 Waking Up Again

11 Day One

12 What the Fuck do Crazy Girls Do All Day?

13 Big Nose Girl

14 Before The Fat – The Phone Calls

15 Before The Fat – How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

16 The Poppins

17 The Dream

18 Before The Fat – The Honey War

19 Introductions Must Be Made

20 Getting to Know the Crazy Girls

21 Before The Fat – Doctor ‘You’

22 The Private Session of Skyler Reems

23 Not Playing with a Full Deck

24 What’s in the Pill, Bob?

25 Visitor Day

26 Before The Fat – Visitors at Home

27 Sex Education, That’s the Real Problem

28 Chimmy Chimmy Girl has Company

29 Goodbye, Chimmy Chimmy

30 The I’m-the-mother-here-look-number-482

31 The No Joan Confession

32 What With This and That …

33 Any Other Day

34 Before The Fat – Sunday, October 2, 2012

35 A Person’s Supposed to Love Their Mother

36 Rules of The Fat

37 All About Pretty Blond Girls

38 Sit In

39 You Can’t Hide Forever

40 All His Fault

41 Mommy

42 Before The Fat – Using ‘Like’ Extra-Prepositionally

43 Razors Versus Knives

44 Matata Matata Matata Matata

45 Crying is the Real Problem

46 This way to The Great Egress!

47 Crazy People Shouldn’t Go to Funerals

48 Rides Back

49 To Be or Not To Be Dirt

50 I am Slowly Going Crazy

51 Crazy Questions

52 Kick-Ass Sisters

53 They Keep Talking

54 No One is Off Limits

55 Being Invisible Can Hurt

56 When Things Get Fairer

57 Andrew

58 Saying Goodbye

59 Explode-a-Palooza

60 The Dream of a Lifetime

61 So It’s Saturday

62 Should Never Have Got to Know You

63 And This is How We Leave

64 After The Fat – The Visitors

[ 1 ]

Before The Fat –

Friday, September 30, 2012

After breakfast and I was ass on toilet seat, inches above water, one butt cheek pulled up to the right, one to the left. My white broomstick skirt with red paisley designs pulled up around my waist, white tank top, bare feet.

It didn’t help the constipation.

It had to be constipation, the pain in my gut. I’d gained weight, thirteen years old and 132 pounds, Mom nagging. I’d been on the Protein Only diet but it wasn’t working. Dieting but gaining weight anyway, and I needed to get the shit weight out of me before my self-imposed bedtime weigh-in, because scales don’t allow for shit weight.

So I fell back to hurting myself, something to let go of the stress, to feel some of the pain on my skin instead of letting it eat up my brain. Like the joke my sister Zoe told me – "Guy goes to the doctor and says his hand hurts, the doctor stomps on his foot and says, ‘Does that take your mind off it?’"

That morning, in the blue bathroom, it was scissors.

The silver scissors I used to cut my toenails, curved scissors with the sharp sharp tips. Silver metal bowel relief. Scissors opened and one silver tip against my left wrist and I scratched. Back and forth along a path above a vein that’s next to a tendon that’s barely covered by my mega-pale skin. Two-inch scratch, give or take, the skin red, opening up. A small cramp in my intestines that meant something was moving. Meant the scissors were working.

So I kept scratching. Slid the silver sharp tip, a claw created between my thumb and index finger, along the path over over over. The skin bled, small drops, the sting that should be in my wrist was in my gut, shivers that meant things were coming along. The blood drops piled up on my skin until one red blob gave in to gravity and slipped around to the top side of my wrist and slow dripped onto my red and white skirt, another drip joined it and another.

No shit. Just rumbles and pain and I pushed my bowels down hard, straining masses inside of me looking for a drink of the cool water beneath me, and when I stopped pushing, the strain slipped back up into my stomach like reverse eating, filled me back up to full. My face covered in sweat, my hands covered in sweat, the scissor handles covered in sweat.

Shitting was never supposed to be this hard.

I pushed more silver metal into the top of my blue vein, but the vein wasn’t visible anymore, the red of blood pooled above my pulse, thump thump thump. The scissor edge slid, back forth back forth. More red. The scissors wet with sweat or blood or both and the need to push came and the pain cut up my stomach, into my chest, the pain in my arm nothing compared to the pain in my gut. My hand slipped, dug that silver point too deep into my arm. Blood splattered on the white tile, on the dark blue bathroom walls.

And I needed to shit reallyfuckingbad.

One sharp pain, a slice into my stomach and through my bowels and into my vagina and out of my body. I tried to hold my voice, focus on the silver metal and the blood and the dark red puddle by my foot.

But a scream came out.

Loud and high. Almost a growl. And was that really me?

Then Mom slammed open the bathroom door, mouth open, ready to yell, and why was she there because it was Friday and wasn’t she supposed to be working? But I was breathing too hard to ask.

Mom stopped. Looked at me on the toilet. Stood there for something like three seconds that lasted two years and she turned away. She left me there alone.

I dropped the scissors, sagged against the toilet lid, and yellpledbegged, Mom!

And tears, there were tears, salt and wet and tears and sweat and Mom!

Pain ripped through my gut and my arm. Blood came out of my arm, onto the floor and the toilet and the counter and my clothes and so damned much blood and Mom?

And Mom came back in. She didn’t leave me there alone, didn’t run away when I needed her, didn’t hate me for slicing myself open, for gaining weight, for being a miserable fat loser excuse of a daughter. She didn’t leave.

She grabbed the white hand towel off the rack and pushed it onto my arm, didn’t say a damned thing to me, just grabbed the towel and applied pressure like you’re supposed to when someone cuts their wrist with toenail scissors while trying to poop.

The towel was soaked through by the time the ambulance arrived.

I was still in pain, still hadn’t got that shit out of me, when the two ambulance guys put a bandage on my arm and asked me to stand. I pushed against my feet, but my legs were Gumby legs. The two ambulance guys lifted me off the toilet, the seat all drippy red and how did I get so much blood there? They laid me onto the white tile floor, looked down there where no one is supposed to look, and all I could think was that they’d see my poop.

The first guy’s voice was so normal. She’s crowning.

The second guy, also normal, I’ll get the gurney.

The shit pain sliced through my gut again and I screamed, which I didn’t want to do. But Mom was right beside me, her hand warm on my forehead, on my cheek, and why I was so cold I don’t know.

You need to try and not push, the first guy said from between my legs.

I need to poop, I said, my voice trying for rational-normal, but coming out panicked.

No pushing, he said.

There was talking going on around me, but I couldn’t focus on the words.

I focused on the cold tile against my bare butt, and Mom’s face warm against my face, her voice a mumbled squish of words to comfort me. I focused on the bandage on my arm soaked through red and drippy, and fuck I had to shit.

I need you to – and the pain again and the ambulance guy right there and, Get out!

My whole body tensed with the need to get the shit out of me, to get the man away from where I was about to poop all over him, and he wouldn’t move.

Mom made these shh noises, her face wet next to my face, my face turned away from her without my thinking to, and it felt like there was a butcher knife slicing up the middle of my stomach.

The ambulance guy dug in his bag and came out with his own pair of scissors. And what the hell was he doing? He took in a breath, looked up at me.

I need to cut an episiotomy so your baby can be delivered.

My what! I said. I’m not – but I couldn’t finish what I was saying.

He fiddled around down there and the pain sliced up my stomach again. There was a swoosh kind of feeling and the pain stopped. My body empty and relaxed. The pain of all of it was just gone for one of those single, perfect seconds, and I could breathe again and I didn’t need the silver scissors to do it.

That’s how my daughter was born on the white tile floor of my Mom’s blue bathroom on top of a puddle of blood from my cut arm. Her little body was covered in white goop when it slid out of my body and it looked so incredibly gross.

The second guy came in with the gurney, the first guy put my daughter on top of me, red bloody baby on my white tank top, and they put me onto the gurney.

The baby gave up a first cry as the gurney clunked up to full height.

And Mom said, We need to go to Silver Falls Medical. It’s the hospital where I work.

The ambulance ride was full of baby things – the gulpy sounds she made on my chest that only I could hear, the color-cloudy eyes that looked at me, and how she gurgled and snorted. Sucking snot sounds. And my favorite poem started to wind its way through my head – Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me. The Carriage held but just Ourselves and Immortality. It felt right. So I decided to call her Emily after Emily Dickinson.

The ambulance ride was also full of tension. It was me not talking and the ambulance guy asking questions, and Mom quietly answering the questions.

What is your name, Miss?

When I didn’t answer after a few seconds, Mom said, I am Dr. Olivia Reems and she is my daughter, Skyler Canter Reems.

What is your date of birth?

November 24, 1998, Mom said, not waiting for me to answer anymore.

When was her last menstrual cycle? he asked Mom, meaning he also gave up on asking me questions.

I … I don’t know, Mom said.

Who’s the baby’s father?

Her name is Emily, I said.

The ambulance guy looked at me then. Who’s the baby’s father?

Silence. From Mom and from me.

When the ambulance got to the hospital where my mother works, Emily was asleep, Mom and I were silent, and the bandage on my wrist had soaked through to dripping.

[ 2 ]

Monday, October 23, 2012

Mom’s all stony silence while we drive. Not even the damned radio is on, and we get satellite radio so we have a ton of stations and it’s almost always on. I think I can actually hear Mom’s heartbeat it’s so quiet in this car.

And it’s not a long drive, I mean Troutdale is only about a half hour away from home, not cool enough to be PortlandLite, it’s more like PortlandRedneck.

I stare at the red Honda in front of us, the one Mom’s tailgating, and I wonder what the people in the Honda are doing and where they’re going. I’d look out the side window, but all I can see is the soundproof walls that edge the freeway and the swoop swoop of wall breaks is making me carsick like when I was a kid. Well, when I was a younger kid. I’m thirteen now. Thirteen on the outside, something like a million years old inside my head.

That’s the real problem. My head. My mother is driving me away from my home in downtown Portland and over to some loony bin for girls in the eastside suburbs because she thinks I’m crazy. Mom says it’s the most expensive private mental institute in Oregon as if that makes it better.

We turn off the freeway, and there’s new stuff to look at – a McDonald’s and hotels, gas stations and a half-dozen furniture stores. I guess Troutdale people like their furniture.

A few more turns and we’re sitting in front of this big building made of red bricks with a red brick driveway and a black wrought iron fence with spikes on the top. We’ve left Portland circa 2012 and driven into Suburbia USA circa 1950. The place to leave your crazy daughters, folks; away from the public at large; scary scary girls who slice up their skin and try to kill themselves and have to be locked away. Modern day Frankensteins.

And shit, "Mom is really going to leave me here, that’s all I can think. What do I have to say? I promise it’ll never happen again? Cross my heart, tried to die, stick a needle in my eye?"

But I won’t say any of those I’m sorry things. I mean, I said them before, or something like them at least, but I promised myself that I won’t say any of that ever ever ever again, because she’s not listening. Because I can talk and talk at her but it’s like she forgot English or like I’m talking at that stupid frequency only dogs can hear.

A long wet drip comes off my jaw and lands on my shirt.

I wipe my eyes and suck in the snot and make myself stop it, except I’m scared and my leg jitters up and down. Mom’s got to see the leg, but she doesn’t say anything about it. And I can’t stay quiet any more. My voice can’t just be lost inside me, so I clear my throat, and this wussy-little-kid voice comes out.

Mom, this is so fucking stupid, but I’m talking more to my hands on my lap than to her.

Skyler, when you use that kind of language, it makes me feel disappointed, Mom says. But she’s talking more to the windshield than to me.

She turns off the engine and we sit while the leftover energy in the car ticks away around us. The fine hairs on Mom’s arm right next to my fine hairs on the armrest, and I smell Mom’s perfume. She always wears Obsession and it smells like warm oranges and home. Her smooth dark-red hair hides part of her face from me, frames her green eyes and that small bump along the bridge of her nose. I don’t know how long we can sit here and I feel like this could be the last time I’ll have her all to myself again, and the only thing to say is please take me back home, but that’s stuck in my throat like a whole bag of chewed-up caramels and they turned into a solid mass of unswallowable shit.

Mom opens her car door just as the front door of the building opens and this tall black guy dressed in blue doctor-scrubs comes out, and while Mom opens the trunk and grabs the backpack with the little bit of stuff I’m allowed to have, the black guy opens my car door. I figure he opened the door for me so I won’t run off or something, like I could with my new bum leg. I consider trying to run for about a second, like it’s some mandatory crazy girl thing to do. Finally, I just unbuckle my seatbelt and get out.

The black guy has a name tag that says Andre then right under it Orderly. So I say, Hi, Andre Orderly. I’m Sky Crazy-girl.

Mom slams the trunk closed and gives me one of those looks that all Moms have, that they must have gone to Mom School to learn.

Andre Orderly just laughs and says, Hi, Sky.

I half expect Mom to say Don’t talk to strangers Skyler because she still thinks I’m five, ready to say something like Yeah, well you’re leaving me with them so how strange can they be, but Mom says nothing so I say nothing and we follow Andre Orderly up to the front door.

My backpack with pairs of underwear and a brush goes into Andre Orderly’s hands and Mom steps up to the admittance window. I walk along the black and white checker board floor tiles, the childish rhyme of step on a crack and you’ll break your mother’s back sings in my head while I look around. While I avoid cracks.

The walls aren’t white. I mean, isn’t there a rule that hospital walls are supposed to be white? The walls are this tea-stained-beige color that’s probably supposed to be all calming, but I don’t think I calm that easily. And there are no pictures. Not even one that could show me who the Employee of the Month is supposed to be.

Across from the window Mom’s at is this metal plaque hung on the wall.

Dedicated this Twelfth day of July, 1962, in the Memory of St. Ansbald Abbot and Benedictine builder, Ansbald served as Abbot of St. Hubert. He then became Abbot of Prum, which he rebuilt in 882 through petitions to Holy Roman Emperor Edward the Fat.

You reading about The Saint?

Andre Orderly is back. On the side of his head, he has stripes shaved into the sideburns, and I want to ask why but don’t.

So, why this dude? I ask. What did he do?

He was a priest. The German family who founded this place honored him by naming the hospital after him.

So, this place’s called Ansbald’s?

Saint Ansbald’s, he says, at least by those of us who work here.

Other people don’t call it that?

Naw, the girls who live here, well, don’t tell anyone I told you, and he darts his eyes back and forth like he’s worried someone will hear, even though no one else is around. He tilts his shave-striped ear to me and says, They call it The Fat.

It makes me smile. Really? I say. After the Emperor?

Yep, Andre Orderly says, and he smiles back.

When Mom finishes the paperwork, Andre Orderly takes us upstairs. The stairs are old wood and in sets of seven. Seven steps up then turn, seven steps up and we’re at the second floor, seven steps up, turn, seven steps, third floor, and stop. There are seven more steps and another turn so we could go up to a fourth floor, but we don’t.

We step into this open area, more calming-beige walls and no art. The floors are all wood and the only things in this whole monster-ass room are a desk, two chairs, and a white guy with longish brown hair and the tattoo of a red rose all the way around his left forearm. He’s also wearing blue scrubs. Welcome home to me.

The white orderly with the tattoo comes over to us, dips his head down to talk to me, and he talks really slow, like I’m Japanese or stupid or something. I’m Howard, he says.

I answer back the same way, real slow. Hi, Howard.

He smiles, which either means he thinks I’m funny or a lot more crazy than I really am.

Andre Orderly stays behind at the desk and Tattooed Howard gives us the tour – through an arch to a big Ward room with ten beds and ten little plastic tables, into a hallway with six open doors to six rooms with six beds and one of the beds is unmade, out into another big room with four big tables and a television set and a group of girls sitting at the far end. The girls are in a circle with a woman dressed up in a doctor’s white jacket. I don’t want them looking at me, so I don’t look at any of them. And at the far side of the room are these double doors with this old red and white stripe of tape and a sign that says Authorized Personnel Only.

Mom and Tattooed Howard turn away from the double doors and look at where we came from. He’s still talking, …and this is where we have meals and Group Sessions, and Mom’s nodding and I’m staring at the double doors and it’s like some freak on the other side knows we’re here, because there’s this big crash and the doors sort of bulge like someone’s coming out.

And Mom gasps.

I want to say sure you can be all afraid of the place, but who cares if you leave your kid there but I don’t, because whatever’s on the other side of that door makes me sort of afraid too.

Don’t worry, Dr. Canter, Tattooed Howard says to Mom. The nurses in there will take care of things.

Mom’s all recovered then, like she never flinched. She smiles at me with what is supposed to be a reassuring smile, but I don’t think I reassure that easily. Then the realization slams me that Tattooed Howard knows Mom’s a doctor. And why didn’t anyone introduce themselves to Mom? She acted like this was all some Gosh, this seems like a place to look into kind of thing, but it’s actually a I’ve signed the paperwork and it’s a done deal thing, and why the hell didn’t the clues jump out with the backpack full of my stuff that we brought along?

I look hard at Mom and say, How do you know my mother, Howard?

Mom blushes. I mean, she’s in her fifties, had to work her ass off to become a surgeon when she had two little kids to raise, then had me when she was a full fledged Doc, has never in my lifetime been embarrassed about a single thing, and she’s blushing about this? I try to glare at her, but all I can think about is when I used to look in the mirror to practice my glare and I just looked stupid and kind of tired.

We prepared your room on the Wednesday after you hurt yourself, Skyler, Tattooed Howard says.

A week and a half ago? I look at him, look at the girls in their chairs at the end of the big room and they’re all looking my way, then I look at Mom again. Then I make this way overdone arm swing and point at the double doors with their red-stay-away tape. And my voice is way