Page 50 of Playworld
“I’ll make it.”
“It’s twelve fucking pounds.”
He pinched the pudge at my waist and then pushed me off the scale. He punched the wall near my head and got in my face. “You put on a rubber suit. You practice in it. You sleep in it. You bathe in it. You piss in it. You don’t take it off until you make weight. And if you don’t make weight, you’re gone. For the rest of the season.”
Kepplemen kicked a locker as he left the room. Santoro, the team captain, was sitting on the bench. He’d been late to practice and witnessed the whole exchange. “Here,” he said, removing a rubber suit from his locker along with a roll of athletic tape. After I put on my jock and singlet, I pulled its first piece over my head. For a moment, everything was lightless. I smelled a stink so personal to Santoro it was as if I were inhaling his very guts. I put the pants on and then let him tape my ankles, then my waist, and then my wrists. “You can cut the weight,” he said softly. “Just no liquids. For the next two days.”
I was in something like shock during warm-ups. This gave on to panic. I redlined everything as practice proceeded, drills to rolls, as if I might outrace gravity’s pull on my increased weight. Twice I thought I might puke and welcomed it. What had I done to myself? At the end of practice, we did ten sets of sprints on the long straightaway between the upper and lower school. Afterward, Kepplemen made me run five sets of stairs. By the time I’d finished, nearly half the team had left the locker room; the rest were finishing their showers. Kepplemen handed me a jump rope and said, “Stay in there until I tell you otherwise, and don’t stop jumping until I say you can.” My teammates knew to leave the showers running. The room was filled with steam. I skipped rope for what seemed like an hour. My throat and mouth felt stiff as a dried rag. Kepplemen appeared and, one by one, turned off the showers until there was only the sound of the wet rope slapping the floor.
“Enough,” he said. Gently, almost lovingly, he added, “Arms up, please,” and when I raised them, he stepped so close our foreheads nearly touched. He peeled the athletic tape from my waist, wrapping his arms around me so that he might pinch the end piece behind my back. When he was done, I stretched the top’s tight elastic hem away from my belly, and so much sweat poured forth it was as if I’d slung a pail full of water from a window. Kepplemen removed the tape from my wrists. Liquid coursed in rivulets between my fingers.
I stepped onto the scale. Kepplemen slid the poises into place. I had lost over four pounds during practice. “See,” I said, “no problem.”
Kepplemen remained stoic. He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Jog home,” he ordered.
It was snowing. I had on my wrestling jacket and sweatpants. I was warm enough at first, but the perspiration between the layers only grew colder. My wrestling shoes, already soaked from practice, were no defense against the slush-filled curbs, and my toes were soon numb. I had no hat, and my hair was still wet from the shower and stayed thus because my scalp melted the flakes that settled there. I cut west to Columbus Avenue; a bus gargled past. The snow fell so densely that the buildings’ higher floors appeared shrouded, the illuminated apartments visible as if through gauze. By the time I reached Eighty-Sixth Street, I had so little energy that twenty more blocks even of walking seemed unimaginable. I was shivering and miserable, and yet, at the same time, I distracted myself from the discomfort calculating the energy my body was putting out to warm itself, all the BTUs and effort of respiration, imagining the arrival on my scale at home and all its progress.
Two blocks later, I caved and hopped on the bus.
I sat in the very back and had a view out all the windows. The snow was a cherished painting I had torn to pieces; it was all white yet somehow formed an image; it was the thing I most cared about, and I had dumped its torn bits in great heaps over the entire city and was now ordered to reassemble it on penalty of my life.
Mom had made meat loaf. I could smell it as soon as the elevator dinged open on our floor. I was famished, and I pictured the ground beef singed a darker brown beneath its layer of ketchup, the onions in each slice translucent and glossy as shrimp shells, the clear grease spreading on the plate toward the mashed potatoes. I hung up my coat, went to my room, greeted Oren, who was working at his desk, and then went straight to the bathroom to shower again. I hung up the rubber suit on the shower rod to dry and, with nothing but a towel around my waist, hurried to our bedroom closet and stepped on the scale, tapping the poises to the weight I was at when I’d left school.
I hadn’t even lost a half pound.
Now before me lay temptation. Dinner was a crossroads. Eat now,and the next two months organized themselves around this choice, every day issuing inevitably forward from it. As Oren helped himself to a full plate, I pictured the ref calling the opposing wrestler to the mat’s center and turning to Kepplemen, who would shake his head and, along with the rest of the team, not even look at me when our opponent’s arm was raised, amid sporadic applause, to accept the forfeit. Six points awarded to their team, the same as a pin but without a fight.
At the table, Dad said, “Eat already,” and Oren, glancing at me with an expression of apology—he could tell something was wrong—dug in. I cut myself a small square of meat loaf and speared it. I took a bite. The juice flooded my mouth’s cracked Mojave; the ketchup’s sugars coated my tongue. I closed my eyes while I chewed, wine-pressing the ground beef with my tongue so its grease flooded my palate. If I was going to do this, I thought, if I was going to fail, then best to enjoy every bite. The phone rang.
“That’s probably the agency,” Dad said, and pushed back from the table.
I made a decision and took the opportunity to wipe my mouth with my napkin and deposit the bolus into its paper. And in this fashion, I was able to make it appear as if I ate something close to a meal.
Later, lying on the top bunk, I did corporeal calculus, a metabolic math. I weighed just under 129 pounds. If I lost my usual one pound overnight and then four again at practice, that put me at 124. If I neither ate nor drank until Wednesday morning, and assuming I dropped at least another pound overnight, that would put me within a couple of pounds the day of the match. I’d have until the afternoon to cut the rest.
From the bunk beneath me, Oren said, “How much do you have to drop?”
“Eight pounds.”
“By when?”
“Wednesday.”
While Oren contemplated my predicament, I was recalling when we filmed the intro and outro sequences forThe Nuclear Family,on location in Van Cortlandt Park, shots of us running in slow motion, leaping from what appeared to be great heights, throwing fake boulders, standing on cranes with their baskets just out of the frame to give the illusion we wereflying. And then breaking for lunch, two foldout tables covered with a smorgasbord of crudités and bagels and breads and every kind of cold cut and condiment imaginable, pasta and potato salad, broccoli salad and fruit salad, and, for dessert, doughnuts and Danishes to be washed down with hot coffee. Was that, I wondered, really all so bad?
“Let me help,” Oren said.
I woke to a blue-gray morning. In our sliver of a view, I watched the ice floes on the Hudson nose south. The entire river looked the color of slush. It appeared as if it might freeze over at any moment. What I felt was not soreness, although there was that in my neck and arms, but rather an overwhelming fatigue. It was a cousin to sadness, closer, in feeling, to guilt. Gingerly, I climbed down my ladder and hopped on the scale.
I had lost nearly two pounds overnight. This might’ve filled me with hope, but my mouth was so parched that my spit, what little I had, was the consistency of caulk. Oren entered the closet, had a look at my weight, and, without derision, said, “It’s going to be close.” The hunger pangs had already started. They were signal flares, slowly arcing from some barge floating in my deepest gut toward my diaphragm, with the acidic hiss that sputtered into my esophagus. I welcomed them, but each one also seemed to leave a contrail that hollowed out my limbs and emptied my mind, so that I did not so much long for sleep as for stillness.
Dad had WQXR softly playing on the stereo. He stood in the living room wearing a turtleneck, briefs, and black dress socks. He said, “Your breakfast is on the table.” The central air unit that was half the window’s length rattled. Snow had painted our terrace’s railing, the building’s ledges, the trees’ branches, and the fire hydrants’ caps. Cold radiated from the glass. Overnight, the temperature had fallen even further. The drier air had spun the snow to sugar, pedestrians shielding their eyes against the stinging gusts. My father had poached an egg atop my mound of corned beef hash, and with my knife I punctured its yolk and watched it slowly run down the ridges of cubed potatoes. He’d added green and red peppers, which gave the food a more delectable palette. My mouth watered and then absorbed the moisture. Oren sat and glanced at our father’s back and then took my plate and forked half my serving onto his. I allowed myself one sip of café au lait. It was the sweetest thing I’dever tasted, and the milk, which had formed a skin across part of the top, had, in my mouth, the consistency of food. Dad, who finished washing the pan, said, “I’m headed to the Y,” and left us. Oren, who watched me drink with no small worry, said, “You better get going before you set yourself back.” I licked the froth from my lips and departed.
At Boyd, I lay with my eyes closed on one of the pews in the front hallway before the first bell rang. Cliffnotes was there along with Tanner, and they framed my outstretched body so that we formed an H.
“Kepplemen’s looking for you,” Tanner said.
“What does he want?”