Coal to Diamonds Read Online Free PDF Page A

tried to impress Cool Gary from Little Rock with my vast knowledge of these important musicians, chattering on and on like a baby Ken Burns. Gary looked briefly at my mother and then fixed his gaze on me, asking,
Don’t you ever shut up?
I gave it a bit of serious thought. Did I ever shut up?
    I don’t, actually
, I said truthfully.
I guess I don’t shut up
.
    He scoffed at me and shook his head, his hair swinging up into his face. He cleaned his eyeglasses on his T-shirt and turned to my mother.
What’s there to do around here, huh?
Like a kid trapped visiting his parents in some dead-end suburb, Gary was over Judsonia and he was over me and my blues babbling.
    And I was over Gary, no matter how cool he was, no matter how infused with big-city glamour, dancing and smoking and loud, loud music. His affair with my mother ended after his visit to Judsonia, and I wonder if the reality of my mother’s life—a future of inevitable visits back to soul-crushing Judsonia, where he’d be set upon by a gang of unruly brats—was just too much for him.
    At first I was glad when Mom stopped seeing Gary and was spending more time at the house. When she left us alone my fearof the dark, always strong and constant, flared wider, seemed to eat me whole. My fear of the dark is an honest-to-God phobia. My body forgets it knows how to breathe and the guillotine of panic comes down on all air passages. If I’m in a dark room and have to walk across the length of it to reach the light switch, I count the seconds in my head to try to calm myself. I can never believe how long it takes as the darkness pushes against the numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4. The phobia ruins my sleep, gets in the way of most anything that occurs at night. Having my mother back in the house was a comfort, but just because she wasn’t rushing off to Little Rock every night didn’t mean she’d initiated a new era of order and calm.
    Mom’s dieting, a constant, got worse. My mother always suffered from a distorted body image. With Gary out of the picture and no new guy on the horizon, she fed herself less and less. She got bursts of high, manic energy as her body went into actual starvation—an evolutionary survival tweak designed to give you the gusto to go club a deer. My mother used it at work, making her rounds with a creepy speed and purpose, her body jutting and angular and increasingly unfamiliar. She grew more talkative but made less sense. Her body turned on itself, harvesting its own muscles for protein. People stopped telling her she looked great and started asking her if she was okay; their voices were concerned. It was a only matter of time before her body gave out beneath her, with no more evolutionary tricks up its sleeve. She collapsed one day and was taken to the hospital. My mother had always had a normal, healthy female body. But by the time she went to the hospital, her body had shrunk to something pitiful.
    No one, including her doctors, ever acknowledged that my mother was starving herself. My mother never realized what she was doing. Was it for the men? Because every single thing in this world sunk the message, deeply, that skinny was pretty, fat was ugly, and if you want a man—and Mom did—you’d better be skinny. Did it give her a sense of control to master deprivation? Did she get addicted to the secret rituals of starvation, feel proudthat at least one unruly thing in her life was under her management?
    Or maybe my mother was simply used to putting herself last. A person can get used to taking nothing. My little brother used to save her the crusts of bread because he thought they were her favorite, but my mother just insisted on giving us everything she had and living on whatever was left over. Even hunger, acute hunger, can start to feel so normal you don’t notice it. I’ll never know why Mom let her body get so emaciated that it stopped working, because she doesn’t like to talk about that. All I know is that my mom continued to party once