“Is that…” Abby’s heart was beating very hard.
“Me,” said Eileen. “When I was six years old.”
Abby stared at the photograph, shocked into speechlessness. Eileen could have confessed to being an alien, sent to live among the humans, or told Abby that she had a secret life and another family, or that she was considering running for president, and Abby would have been less stunned. Each of those scenarios felt more plausible than imagining her mother as a former fat girl, a girl who’d looked like Abby’s almost-identical twin. “I don’t understand.” She looked up. “I didn’t know.”
“I didn’t tell you.” Eileen sat her hands flat on the counter. “I was ashamed, I guess. And I was trying to help you.” She looked down, staring at the tomato, which was spilling seeds and juice into the cutting board’s gutter. “I remember how hard things were for me. How my mother would criticize. How awful the other kids were. The names they called me…” Eileen paused. “I was lonely,” she said quietly, looking off into the distance, not meeting her daughter’s eyes. “I was very lonely for a very long time. And I thought that losing weight would fix it.”
Abby’s tongue felt thick and heavy. Her brain felt waterlogged and slow; her emotions a tangle. She wasn’t sure whether she was angry, or sad, or disappointed, or something else entirely. “How long were you…” Don’t say fat, she reminded herself. Abby might have gotten comfortable with the word, but Eileen still thought it was a horrible insult, a borderline slur.
“For a long, long time. Until after I was married and became a mother.” Abby felt her mouth fall open. Eileen shrugged. “I’d show you pictures from when I was a teenager and a young woman, but there weren’t many of those to begin with, and I think I burned the ones that were left.” She pursed her lips. “I always wondered if you’d ask to see the wedding album, from when your father and I got married. Or pictures from when you were a baby.”
“You’re overestimating my interest in weddings and babies,” Abby said.
Eileen pressed her hands together. Abby saw her mother’s wedding band and diamond engagement ring—a significant upgrade from the one she’d worn while married to Abby’s dad—hanging loosely on one finger. There were a few age spots on her mother’s hands; a few veins, prominent under the skin. Her mother’s fingers and wrists were precisely the same shape as her own. Why hadn’t she noticed that before?
“When I was a girl, I was lonely,” Eileen said. “And then, when other girls started dating, I didn’t have as many options as they did. I think there were boys who didn’t mind the way I looked. They just didn’t like the way their friends would treat them if they asked me out.”
Abby, who’d experienced this phenomenon herself, found that she was nodding. It took an effort to make herself stop.
Eileen picked up her knife and began cutting her tomatoes again. “There were places like Camp Golden Hills when I was growing up. They advertised in the back of Seventeen magazine. These tiny little ads, like they were secrets. I begged my parents to send me. I thought, if I could just lose weight, it would fix everything.” She made a face, shaking her head. “And they told me if I wanted it badly enough, I’d do it myself. That all I needed was some discipline. ‘Eat less, exercise more,’？” she recited. “Like that ever works.”
“But that’s what…” That’s what you told me. Except had Eileen ever said those words? Or had she simply sent Abby to a summer camp where the management believed them to be true?
Abby thought of every tasteless, joyless meal her mother had ever served; the years of every plate being half filled with vegetables, the grilled chicken breasts and sweet potatoes with the merest gloss of butter. She thought of how there were never cookies that weren’t SnackWells in her mother’s pantry, how there was only ice milk, never ice cream in her freezer, and how any cake—apple cake for break-the-fast at Yom Kippur, yellow sheet cake with chocolate frosting for Abby’s birthday—would disappear the day after it had been served, even when there should have been plenty left over. “Gone,” Eileen would say when Abby would work up the nerve to ask about it, and Abby knew better than to make further inquiry. She just understood that the cake had been disappeared, and that she was wrong, and weak, for asking, for wanting more.
“It worked for you, didn’t it?” Abby asked.