Anika

Caroline Curran

My sister’s name is Anika, and she is very pale for August. We stroll in the freezer aisle at Safeway, all polished linoleum and sterile, seasonless light. My sister tugs one of the doors and holds it open for a while as the glass fogs up. She reaches for a Lean Cuisine and turns the box over in her hands. I watch the skin stretch over her shoulder blades—white, taut, goosebumps. She has spent the summer inside, trading tennis clinic for screened-in porches and playing cards, glazing her eyes at daytime soaps. Sucking on her hair, chewing.

“Orange chicken,” she says to me. “Five boxes.”

I mark it on the list from Dr. Rachel, whose last name is really a first name so it feels  intimate and strange to call him that to his face. Earlier this morning, he set the list atop the pile of brochures and a catalogue of local therapists, the hopeful farewell gestures of inpatient treatment. I tick the box next to Frozen meals (500+ cal. ea.). Anika puts the boxes in the cart and I push forward.

We continue, move on to the produce section. Baby carrots in watery slime, clementines in mesh, bell peppers in cellophane. Things Anika will eat. Sometimes Anika will skip from one aisle to the next, turning corners and startling the old women who shop for groceries at nine in the morning on Tuesdays. She touches everything: testing the avocados, weighing a jar of marinara, rolling a tube of Pringles between her palms. She examines labels. Dr. Rachel warned against this. Everything is a slippery slope, he said. You have to be vigilant.

In the magazine aisle, Anika says she has to use the bathroom. 

I look up from Cosmo. “Can’t it wait till we’re home?”

“You know my bladder is like this,” she says, pinching her fingers a thimble-width apart. 

I know that they did a final weigh-in this morning, and that her stomach must be sloshing. Anika has her tactics, like everyone else.

“You can hold it,” I say.

In line at the checkout we see Mrs. Katz, whose son was in my grade and who hasn’t matched her foundation to her spray tan.

“Beautiful girls,” she says. “I’ve been meaning to call your mother. What are you doing in town?”

“I’m back for the summer,” I say. “Working.”

“I just got back from camp,” Anika says, pulling her lips back.

“How nice of you to help out around the house,” Mrs. Katz says. “I’m sure your mother appreciates that.”

We look at her until she scrunches her eyes at us and says, “Well, it’s lovely to run into you girls.”

Fifteen minutes later we unstick our thighs from the seats of the car and carry the groceries to the kitchen. Our cat, Koopie, ventures in, and Anika swoops to pick him up.

“My baby,” she moons, cradling him. “I missed you so much, two months is far too long.”

I unpack the bags and put everything on the counter.

“Where’s mom?” Anika asks, putting the cat down.

“Work,” I say.

“I thought she might take the day off.”

A package of deli meat sweats on the counter. I reach for it. Anika sits on a stool and props her elbows on the counter and rests her chin in her hands.

“Why aren’t you at the boutique?” she asks me.

“They let me take the week off.”

“So you could watch me.”

“So we could spend time together. Before I go back to school.”

“Sure,” she rolls her eyes.

“So what do you want to do today?”

“Use the bathroom,” she says with a laugh. “I forgot I had to pee.” She pushes the stool away from the counter. 

I finish putting the food in the cabinets. Anika comes back to the kitchen and flips through the mail. “You know the bulimics can’t even go to the bathroom alone?” she says.

“Makes sense,” I say.

“It’s such an invasion of privacy. There was almost a coup.”

“Why wasn’t there?”

“Lack of adequate resources,” she says.

We sit on the couch for the rest of the morning, watching TV, our legs splayed across the armrests. We flip between reruns, but the timing of the commercials doesn’t align so the plots muddle and we miss who got cut from Project Runway. At noon I make peanut butter and banana sandwiches. 

“Honey?” I call from the kitchen, holding the plastic bear.

“Yes?”

“No I’m asking, do you want honey on your sandwich?”

“Oh. No.” Anika walks into the kitchen, pulling her hair into a ponytail. “I don’t even want banana, especially if there’s any brown parts.”

“Fine. I’ll eat it.”

Anika eats like a child, glancing at me periodically, as though for approval. She is sixteen but only five-two, and annoying, and she never sits in a chair normally. Instead it’s knees up or cross-legged, or perched vibrating on the edge of the seat. She comes off waifish. Silly, naive. When she got a perfect score on the PSAT everyone thought she cheated. I eat my sandwich and watch her finish hers in small bites.

“Do you need to unpack?” I say. I’d forgotten about the suitcase in the trunk.

“Not really,” she says. “They only let me wear my ugly clothes.”

She’s referring to the hand-me-downs from me, baggy things that hang straight from her shoulders. She looks up at me and grins. It’s like this sometimes. Fun. She’s smart enough to play dumb, twist words into pretzels, set her voice an octave higher, nudge me toward an edge where I just sigh and take out my phone and ignore her. 

“I’m sure there’s something to put away,” I say, and we go out to the driveway to get her suitcase. We lug it upstairs, bumping each carpeted step, and down the hallway to Anika’s room, a mess of teenage flotsam. She unzips the suitcase and pries it open. I plug my phone into the charger in the corner.

“Did you read this?” I ask, picking up a paperback Never Let Me Go from next to her dopp kit.

“God no,” she says.

“It’s not summer reading?”

Anika opens her closet door and turns on the light. “What? Oh. Yeah, it is.”

“You should read it. I liked it.”

“Of course you did,” Anika says, swishing hangers of sundresses.

“It’s actually good.”

“I believe you. I’m just saying, you always did summer reading, and you never had sex in high school.”

“That’s correlation.”

“I know. But I don’t think it’s irrelevant.”

“So what did you do, then, if you weren’t reading?”

“I made friends.”

“But you can’t hang out with them now, right? There’s a rule.”

Anika doesn’t say anything. I look out her window, onto the front lawn and the overgrown maple. We used to set up picnics on the grass, eating oatmeal cookies, leaving a mess of crumbs on the gingham quilt.

Anika turns the closet light off and closes the door. 

“You’re treating me like a little kid,” she says. She takes a pair of sneakers from her suitcase and arranges them along the wall.

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

My phone dings. I walk over to where it’s charging and step on a hair clip lodged in the carpet. It crunches like a cockroach and pain pulses in the sole of my foot. I pick up my phone. A text from Mom: Working late tonight.

“We’re on our own for dinner,” I say.