the corn cob closet

it was the summer she starved herself to death. we went to her parents lake house in hiawassee, georgia in june, when she was still being held together by the tenuous threads of her bones and sinews. she had been my best friend since kindergarden, and the last time i had seen her, when we were back from college during christmas break, her broad swimmers shoulders had been replaced by lacy collarbones, the muscles above her knees that clicked every time she took a step were smoothed out and all that remained was a shapeless thigh, a prosthesis. her face had changed, it had a structure to it, parts. the most unsettling feeling was the jealous one-- she looked better than she ever had before, and had she not been killing herself, i would have told her so. but i knew, in the way she looked at food set before her, in the sad way she carried herself, as if every step and every breath were more and more bricks of shame being stacked on top of each other, walling her into her own early death.
over that christmas break i watched the way people looked at her- men in cars passing us as we waited at the corner for the light to change; women in retail shops, eyeing her up and down over the cashmere turtleneck they were holding up to examine; boys we had known from high school, delighted in her new shape, the way her hipbones peeked out from above the beltloops of her jeans, the way her body resembled the very ideal they were prodded into admiring. i watched them watch her, and though i wondered if it was all part of a vain farce, i noticed how indifferent she was to it. all of our lives we had complained about our bodies, even in 7th grade when they were nothing more than awkward molecules colliding. in tenth grade we stood in front of my bathroom mirror and pinched the soft fat that cushioned the place where our torsos met our hips, our senior year we went on liquid diets before the prom. we said "at least your legs arent so big that..." and "i would give anything to trade stomachs with you." we competed in a complteley silent way-- if one of us did start to lose weight, the phone calls would decrease and it would suddenly be less fun to hang out. what was there to talk about, really, now that one of us assumed the other one felt prettier. the dynamic of the relationship rested on the fact that we were incessantly giving the other compliments, because we werent intimidated, because we could stand to receive some ourselves. but that christmas it became clear that just as i did not want to admit how good and thin she looked, neither did she. it didnt make her happy like we always thought it would, it wasnt something she wanted to brag about or even show off. we never mentioned it over those two weeks, and any time someone else complimented her i acted like i hadnt heard and she looked down at her new body and shrugged.
the moment i saw her as i stepped off the shuttle bus in hiawassee, i knew that she was nearly dead. her parents, two professors who were teaching summer courses at emory, hadnt seen her in weeks, and werent the type to worry anyway. they had called to warn me, saying "we think shes going through a hard time, and you can definitely see that in her physically." standing by the black suburban, wearing jeans and a tank top, she looked obscene. her elbow looked like a bolt, jutting out on either side of the tiny wire that was her arm. the jeans didnt touch any part of her leg, the shirt, meant to cling, hung from her collarbones as if displayed on a hanger. her lips took up half of her face and her eyes the other half. she was a house that had just been destroyed by a tornado, the only peices remaining were the essential parts, the ones that didnt really matter.

in the car i told her how shocked i was, i asked if she was alright, how she was feeling, if she was getting help. she said it was fine, that she was working on it and that it had definitely gotten better since school. this was a lie, clearly, for she was as disentegrated as a human body could be without collapse, without starvation. she said she was eating but had to slowly regain her strength, it couldnt happen overnight. she asked me questions, she tried to sound animated. at one point she even turned on the radio and made a lassoing motion with her right arm to a country song. not even the skin shook as she did it.
the house was pristine and the refrigerator was, strangely, stocked. there were no dishes in the sink, no trash in any of the cans. there was one dying plant, a geranium that used to be pink but whose petals had become rusty and weak.
you need to water that thing, i said after i had unpacked and we were sitting in the living room, me drinking a beer and her picking at the label. she put the sweating beer down on the glass table and said as she walked to the back bedroom,
its more interesting to watch it die.

the next day she suggested we ride bikes, despite my disbelief that she could even pedal. she told me she had been doing it every day for weeks, and that there was one place she really needed to show me. so we biked off into the winding, green hills that bordered lake hiawassee, her, as always, going faster and harder than me. we biked for almost an hour, not saying anything to each other, hardly looking at all the healthiness around us, the round hills and the colors that screamed. finally she pulled over in front of a dilapadated old barn surrounded by knee high grass and a smattering of yellow wildflowers. there was no front door, and there were entire walls that had been eaten away by the passing of time. inside were carpets of dead grass that had grown up from the old weathered floor, bits of wood and the remains of old furniture.
this is stunning, i said, catching my breath as we stood just inside the door.
just wait, she said, and walked to a tiny door i wouldnt have even seen, embedded in the side wall. i followed her and, peering over her hollow shoulder, watched as she pushed it open.
inside were hundreds and hundreds of corn cobs. all of them had been completely ravaged, every last kernel devoured. in places they were piled to the cieling of the small room, which could have been a large closet or pantry or maybe a childs nursery. there was one window across from where we looked, and through it streamed the yolky afternoon sun. the corn cobs looked two dimensional, like this room and everything in it were a photograph hanging in a well air conditioned gallery, or a painting on someones kitchen wall.
"why?" i whispered, meaning why here, why all of them, who, how?
"i dont know," she whispered back, her mouth forming one of the few smiles i had seen in days. "but isnt it delicious?"