Plums, Eyes, and Other Round Things

Kayla Cayasso

Content Warning: Eating Disorders

Myra would have sworn it started with the prunes. Her daughter’s food journal told that Holly had two (2) scrambled eggs with salt and pepper, three (3) prunes, and coffee with cream. She ran a manicured fingernail over the word—Prune. It’s roundness in her mouth, unsettling. The hum of it shuffled across her tongue, from front to back then forward again. It buzzed behind her teeth—an angry wasp she refused to bite down on. Prune. Prune. Prune. It purred in her skull as Myra went about securing the locks on the pantry, refrigerator, freezer. Click. Click. Click. Her husband had shrugged when Myra had suggested the food journal. Barely looked up from the set when she’d suggested locking up the pantry and fridge. Keeps you from snacking all day, Georgie’d said with a pinching glance at his wife.

She had already told Holly to start taking her coffee black. Told her the calories and sugar in the cream were not going to help her waistline. And besides, black coffee fought off hunger for longer. Back in Myra’s day, a girl serious about keeping her figure took her coffee black and her cigarettes long. Holly had steeled and refused when Myra had offered her one. This new generation. Too soft.

But those prunes. Myra’d picked them up at the Piggly Wiggly without much thought. It’s just dried fruit, she’d mused to herself, of course it’s healthy. She’d been riding the easy, undulating waves of her most recent Valium refill, watching the dripping movements of the zucchinis and the bubbling of the corn husks in the produce section when she came to a rolling stop before a stand of cellophane-wrapped prunes. They’d glistened in the store’s yellow lighting. Myra’d recalled through the Valium-fog that prunes were good for bowel movements, and if Holly could expel the food as quickly as she ate it then they’d both be out of the trenches. No more embarrassing Sunday mornings watching her daughter’s cherry-red face huff and puff from the walk up the cathedral steps. No more letting out the girl’s clothes or shopping at the discount stores where the sizes went up to—God forbid it—extra large. Myra bought two bags.

Then today, halfway through her relaxer, Evelyn Nichols from Gilded Cove glided into the salon booth beside Myra. She was only one Valium deep then and too clearheaded—it was only nine, and Myra preferred to hold off drinking until noon. Evelyn, with her ugly upturned nose and too-thinly plucked eyebrows, mentioned how an article from some healthy living magazine she’d read in the dentist office talked about the fruit drying process. How dried fruit carried far too much sugar in their little wrinkled carcasses.

“Just pumped full of sucrose, they’re basically sweets,” she’d said in a whisper, like she was discussing something exceedingly impolite.

Sucrose. Myra hadn’t heard that word before.

“That’s sugar, dear,” Evelyn had said with an airy laugh and the flip of a hand.

The exchange had crawled under Myra’s fingernails and made her hands restless. Turned them to crabs that shuffled about the house, wiping clean surfaces, straightening perfectly balanced family photos that snaked the walls like vines, polishing crystal clear windowpanes. Myra blinked through the opiate haze, moving deftly, languidly. The tang of the apple cider vinegar dulled to an uncomfortable itch between the eyes. Too like the itch Myra felt when she watched Holly for too long. Holly’s lumbering, hulking amalgamation of softness and curvatures that clung to her arms, thighs, stomach gripped Myra’s eyes from the inside and bent them at the nerve. She couldn’t bear it, not without a pill.

Holly had been a limber girl. But she began filling out early. Girl breasts—just prototypes of what would come­­—rose from the calm, childish curve of her. Two dunes pushing out from behind her crisp, button-down school uniform. Myra was sure her daughter’s classmates could see how the stiff polyester shirt fought against the developing convexness of Holly Gould—her expanding stomach, the spreading of her hips. Sure that they saw the fabric screaming WRONG WRONG WRONG. Myra saw, too. Saw the tides of girlhood pull back from her little Holly too early. Then on her tenth birthday, Holly began to bleed, and her exponential expansion started soon after. That was when Myra had brought out the locks—an old trick she’d picked up from her own mother.

Myra’s body had similarly gripped every calorie after she’d begun her monthlies. But sixteen-year-old Myra had quickly found her motivation in the wandering of George Gould’s eyes. He was twenty-one when she met him, with a gleaming Cadillac and a job at her daddy’s coffee canning plant. Smitten, teenage Myra knew Georgie could have had any girl he wanted. Knew it in her marrow. Knowledge that nestled itself between his broad shoulders, under the whispery touch of his calloused hands, between the bow of his lips, poured into the divots of his dimples. In the only-sometimes smell of a perfume that wasn’t Myra’s.

She’d come to him raw, fresh. He’d brought sinful experience. He’d known women before. Myra had hardly known herself. Georgie could have claimed any girl, but it was Myra Nelson he’d knocked up. Myra Nelson who he’d kissed on the courthouse steps as she brewed their baby. Now, these things—his sharp shoulders, bladed hands, arrowhead mouth—were a slice between her fingers. A twisting behind her eyes. A hard pinch to the loose skin of woman-Myra’s midsection and a whispered getting chunky here.

The clock struck two. Myra felt clarity heavy on her back. She would wipe the clouds she’d made from the windows, make herself a neat gin, take a Valium, and start on laundry. In that order. Then a punch of vinegar. Georgie would be upset if he could smell it when he got home. Myra’s eyes stung, the smell too strong. Had she remembered to dilute it? The weight of the pail, not heavy but not nothing, began to settle into her shoulders. Lucidity crept its way from the corner like a ghost. The amber in the pail sloshed, too dark. She hadn’t. The windows were microscope slides. Between the panes, Myra examined her distorted half-reflection. Turned away. Made her way to the kitchen.

Georgie had not always been the most loyal and the pregnancy was difficult. Myra had ballooned. Her feet heavy with retained water, her eyes peeking out through rounded cheeks. Myra had cried through her pregnancy, the changing of her face, the thinning of her hair. Their baby was a thing pushing Myra apart from the inside. A chick in an egg, writhing and stretching, looking for weaknesses or else making them.

Georgie would not touch her while she carried their girl. Myra took this as the sacrifice of a considerate husband. The discomfort of the pregnancy left her swollen like a sponge and Georgie would offer to drive her out to spend the weekends with her family. Rejuvenating in her little sister’s school stories, old family recipes that her mother walked her through step by step, and her father’s controlled excitement. Kenny Nelson wasn’t keen on the necessary arrangement but was happy to see his daughter taken care of by a man who was doing the right thing, and he shivered with boyish excitement at the prospect of grandbabies.

Then she smelled the perfume that wasn’t hers, saw the bank statements. He began coming home later and later during the week. Myra, young and bloated with life, would flip on the television to watch leggy women sell home gyms and Pilates video collections, and if her mind drifted to the emptiness of their small house, reminded herself that at least he’d done the right thing.

It was the straight hairs in their bed—free of kinks or curls like hers and Georgie’s—that ripped Myra open one Sunday afternoon when she returned home from a weekend at her family’s. It was the first time she challenged Georgie. Ripping apart their pillows and comforter with the strength of two—her and Holly. By the end of the hour, Myra had struck out the rear window from Georgie’s Cadillac with his poorly-hidden bedroom whiskey. Not here. Not where my child will sleep.

He’d conceded.

Myra didn’t go to her family’s on the weekends after that. The affairs continued. Myra began relaxing her hair. Georgie got them a new bedspread. Fresh pillows. Repaired the rear window. He was a hard worker—now line supervisor at the plant. A good provider. And now, Georgie was home by four on weekdays. Weekends were another matter. A matter, Myra had long ago reasoned, for narcotics and gin.

Myra was holding the pail under the running faucet when the twinkle of the cellophane on the counter caught her eye, a collage of suffocated purple and dimly reflected light and black-and-white print. Herbert Walker Bush had manifested these specters into her home two years ago, the same year Holly began bleeding, and Myra was still not accustomed to the nutritional labels that now haunted the back of every food item she owned. She chanced a glance.

Twenty-three calories in one prune.

Myra choked.

How many had Holly swiped this morning? How many had she eaten since yesterday? Two this morning? No, three. Three times twenty-three? Sixty-nine? And she’d had two eggs. And a coffee. A coffee with cream. The prunes meant Holly only had nine hundred thirty-one left for today. And that cream. She’d told Holly about that damned cream. And what else? Lunch? What had Holly packed today? A sandwich? How many calories were in a sandwich? Probably more than one hundred. It was only just past two, so she’d have to eat again at dinner. Tonight’s dinner was pork chops. How many in one pork chop? Did seasonings have calories?

Myra opened the spice cabinet, small black-and-white print grinning from their shelves. Holly would have to make do on boiled broccoli and carrots. Myra had told her. If Holly would just pick up the smoking habit. Take her coffee black. She gripped the cellophane bags, the sound of it like the crushing of bird bones. Trash.

“Didn’t you just get those?”

Georgie’s voice was a gunshot firing off just behind her ear. She didn’t hear his car—a new Cadillac—pulling in, the opening of the front door. He was still all sharp edges under the approachable guise of polo shirts and slacks. Line workers wore polyester jumpsuits with their name stitched on a patch. Georgie’s polo said who he was without the need of a badge­—management.

“They’re not good for Holly.”

“What do you mean not good?”

“For her figure,” Myra said in a shaky sigh and reached for the liquor cabinet. This one stayed unlocked.

“We talked about that.” He frowned. “Holly’s a growing girl. You’re worrying yourself about nothing.” Georgie’s hand swallowed Myra’s, a starving vice. Stilled her, like prey before the jaws of a predator.

“Nothing?” Myra balked, ripped her hand from his and went about retrieving the gin. What had happened to this man? “We’re letting her kill herself, you know.”

“Myra.” He spoke her name the way a man swings an axe. Hard, with intent. To cut down. “I’m telling you. Knock it off with this shit.”

Her hands shuddered. The ice cubes in her glass tinked against one another. Suspended, weightless, and dissolving fast in the gin. “You want our girl to be unhealthy? To die before us?”

They’d had this fight before, but quietly. In Myra’s burning stares when Georgie brought home ice cream and cake for Holly’s twelfth birthday. In Georgie’s looming scowls when Myra made Holly’s plate for dinner—much smaller portions than theirs. His eyes would dart between the plates, to the reddening and shamed face of his baby girl, and then he’d push half of his portion to her plate with a grin that was just for Holly. And again, Myra would watch as her husband made her the villain around their dinner table. Undermined by the man who had cosigned the destruction of her body.

Now, though, there was no need for quiet. Myra’s head was clearing, her thoughts gaining pace like a belching locomotive, and Georgie’s tightening fists told her he was catching up.

“Holly is fine. She’s doing the damn journal. She’s on the soccer team. She’s doing good in school. She’s not even making a fuss about the locks. So, she’s chunky.” He shrugged. “Who cares?”

Chunky. The word was a sword scything Myra off around the middle. A hard pinch a week after Holly’s birth. When had his eyes stopped seeing? They’d found Myra’s soft, sagging, and ugly parts like hounds to game. Circled them, barking, screaming, gnashing out a command to fix these broken areas. 

It had been Myra’s only demand and he’d met it. Now, though, as she thrummed with rage, she understood that simply wasn’t enough anymore. “Why’s she different?”

“Who?”

“Holly.”

Georgie chuckled, the heavy, wet sound of it pushing hard against Myra’s skin. Those eyes raked over her. A dismissal.

“It’s a problem if I am, but not if your own daughter is?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Holly’s a good girl,” Georgie said with a step toward her. “She’s not some rich kid jumping to open her legs to the first idiot with a factory job that looks her way.”

His words were a strike to her jaw. Those eyes had wandered from hotel room to hotel room, married woman to bachelorette since the beginning. The hairs and perfume just didn’t make their way home anymore. They laid in some other bed, crushed into the backseat of some unfamiliar car. Myra had resolutely remained loyal in the face of all his paramours and soothed the noise with Valium and liquor. She had venerated him. Sunken under his eyes like subjects before royalty. Had repeated the silly, antiquated mantra again and again when the absurdity of her life became too loud, that with all her husband’s faults, at least he did the right thing. No more.

Her crystal glass became a missile, careening across the kitchen, breaking through the window over the sink with the pail of vinegar and crash-landing in the mulchy flowerbed on the other side. Sunlight poured in. The groaning sound of an engine. The squeal of brakes. Holly’s school bus. The patpat-patpat of Holly’s footsteps paused halfway up the gravel walk, taking in the hole. The glass. The sight of her mother through the jagged, destroyed window.

In a moment, Georgie will meet Holly in the yard with a grin. Stand between her and the broken window. He will give Holly a playful shove. Ask if she wants to have pizza for dinner. That night, Georgie will cover the window with a piece of cardboard to keep the bugs out. It’s Friday, but he will stay home this weekend, take Holly to her soccer game Saturday afternoon. He’ll cheer her on from the sidelines, shouting her name until her face flushes pink. And when she makes a goal, he’ll shake the hands of the other soccer dads and say, “That one’s mine.” Sunday, he’ll put her on his shoulders and walk up the cathedral steps to the sermon, Holly’s own palanquin. Like he did when she was small.

But now, Holly holds her mother’s stare through the broken window, halfway up the walk. Holds it between her teeth. Swallows. The weight of it bulging, pushing, squirming around from inside. 

Kayla Cayasso is an Afro-Nicaraguan writer, poet, and editor from north Florida. Kayla graduated from Florida A&M University with a B.S. in African American Studies. She is a recipient of the 2012 Hollins Creative Writing Book Award, the FAMU Graduate Feeder Fellowship, and placed first in fiction in the 2021 FAMU Annual Writing Contest. Her fiction and poetry have been featured in CaKe: A Literary Journal. Currently, Kayla lives in Orlando with her two cats, Voodoo and Vigo, and is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida. Find her on Instagram: while.smoke.rises.

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