Zippered Flesh 2: More Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad (6 page)

1973

“Is that you, Maggie?” Iva turtled (her breasts had shrunk to the point where they were no longer an inconvenience), smoothly rolling onto her back to look up at the face of a young woman whose hand lightly skimmed her own. “No, of course not,” she said, “Margaret was twenty years older than I am and she’s been dead a long time. And your skin is soft ...” Iva paused, aware that she was looking at short brown hair, asymmetrically cut. Bareheaded. No cap. Instead of crisp whites, a peasant blouse. “You’re not a nurse.”

“Jill Davis. I’m a reporter. Well, a stringer, really.”

“Come to unravel something?”

“A stringer is a sort of freelance journalist—”

“My dear. I’m merely old, not ignorant.”

“Of course. I meant ...” She stopped, cheeks reddening.

In the brief silence that ensued, Iva pressed the electric button near her right hand and the top third of the bed glided upward until she was sitting, and now she could see the girl was wearing blue jeans. Sandals. Every year since she’d turned 99, about a week before her birthday the local paper sent someone to interview the oldest woman in Melton Lake. When she hit a hundred, there’d been articles written up in
The Portsmouth Herald
,
The Manchester Union Leader
—even
The Boston Globe
. But an old woman was old news, she guessed. So here was this hippie—this
stringer
—to ask the same tedious questions about whether she drank liquor (a weak champagne cocktail at five p.m., a glass of wine with dinner), smoked cigarettes, (only when she could cadge one; these days, alas, they gave her indigestion); exercised (absolutely—on warm days she pushed a wheelchair in front of her and walked to that pathetic little fountain out back, then sat and read a book in the sunshine—and that was surely exercise aplenty when you hit one hundred two); what she ate (anything that didn’t hurt her teeth when she chewed); what she did for amusement (the main thing was avoiding the nursing home’s idea of arts and crafts which consisted of gluing a mirror in the center of  a paper plate, cementing macaroni around the rim, then spray-painting the whole shebang gold and attaching string to hang the monstrosity); and most importantly what did she—Iva Fredericks—believe was the secret behind achieving her great age?

But Jill Davis surprised her.

“I’m supposed to be writing a spec piece for the
Millerton Record
about the root causes of anorexia; and then, you know, throw in some historical background about turn-of-the-century fasting girls, tie it into new trends in teenage fad dieting—but the feature editor over there has about as much imagination as a humphead wrasse. I did some digging, read about the trial back in 1912 and—”

“And I guess you found out the term aphorism is a complete misnomer,” Iva said. Jill pulled out a pack of Tarreyton 100s, extending it toward the old woman, and Iva took one. Jill lit them both. Iva dragged on hers but merely let the smoke roll around her mouth briefly before she exhaled. “Truth is hard to come by, lies are easy. Maybe I wasn’t ‘too rich’—but I was definitely ‘too thin.’”

Jill nodded, absently blowing tarnished gray smoke downward toward the steno pad perched on her knee. Iva caught the wink of a small gold ring on the pinky of the hand the reporter used to rapidly flip through what must have been fifty pages of notes in tiny, precise handwriting.  “There’s something missing. I must’ve read a thousand damn articles on microfiche
and
the court transcript, and the story’s out of whack—completely off-kilter.” Her eyes were ink-colored and Iva saw herself haloed inside their hard, bright shine. “And that’s before you take into account that despite the murder charge, Gretchen Burkehart was convicted only of manslaughter, before you consider that she was pardoned by the governor and that she only served two years out of twenty.”

Jill had wheeled Iva’s chair outside to the grounds of the small, old-fashioned hospital, while Iva clung to the younger woman’s arm and ambled slowly alongside before sitting down where they’d parked under a huge maple.

“What’s missing,” Iva said, “was stricken from the official record.”

“Well, I just assumed
that
naturally; but what’s really goddamn odd is that usually you can get a whiff of what happened or what was said from books or newspapers—especially contemporary newspapers.”

Iva shook her head. “Money can buy a lot, Jill. A lot more than someone your age truly realizes. I paid—or, rather, through me my lawyer paid—a great deal to keep the details you so cleverly inferred from showing up anywhere—”

“Bullshit.”

“Did you know that after Lizzie Borden’s trial, Lizzie bought up the entire edition—the entire printing run of thousands of copies, that is—of a book called
The Fall River Tragedy
? Lizzie was rich, but I had a great deal more money than she had.” Iva saw Jill’s gaze narrow and she could read that the younger woman was considering the idea
. Local scribes, okay, no problem. Guys who, back in 1912, earned maybe ten bucks a week and were probably bought off regularly by hometown politicians for a few beers, a whiskey, a good meal; but what about reporters from Boston or New York? Could she have scuttled them, too? She had the means, though ... not to mention the Wren county prosecutor said there wasn’t enough money to go to trial, so Iva picked up the tab.

“So what was the big, deep, dark secret you suppressed, Iva?”

“It’s very easy to grind someone into submission when you’re starving them,” Iva said. “And it’s even easier to hem them in if you convince them—if they believe—you have occult power.”

1912

“Miss Fredericks, can you tell us about this picture?” Vining asked, handing it to her.

“That’s a picture of me and Maggie. Margaret Woodbridge. When Callie and I were growing up, Maggie was our nursemaid, and even after we were adults she stayed on with us. She was like a second mother, really. And ...”

The photo had been taken a few weeks after Maggie had come all the way from Australia to rescue her and Callie. The telegram. Callie sent it—somehow sneaked it out of the filthy cabin they shared at Lakemere Rest Sanitarium. Maggie, bless her, had sailed immediately, but she wasn’t in time, because Callie’s weight had dropped to 40 pounds.  Iva felt her face flush. Is that what
she
looked like almost a month
after
Maggie had taken her away from that terrible place? 

Her face was nothing more than a skull thinly layered with dark flesh. The eyes themselves were vacant, glittering; her gaze, empty—as if impossibly remote and infinitesimally tiny stars had been caught inside the deeps of her eye sockets and flickered there indifferently ... meaninglessly. Her cheeks were smudged hollows with the sere look of ancient parchment. Her pale hair lay in knotty clumps, barely concealing huge bald patches. Her starched dress—size four—had been pinned, but it was still so oversized it appeared as if it might fall from her slight frame the instant she stood up.

Vining passed it to the jurors and Iva could see them cringe with revulsion. Looking at the picture was like looking at a ravaged mummy that had been spelled back to half-life. Worst of all, Iva clearly remembered how she carefully primped—so she’d look her best.

His voice startled her. “Miss Fredericks, how did you come to be in this condition? In this photo you weighed sixty-eight pounds—not kilos,
pounds
. And before you began “treatment” with Mrs. Burkehart, your weight—completely normal for someone who stands five feet, two inches tall—was one hundred four pounds. How did it happen, Miss Fredericks?”

Iva’s chest heaved, her stomach knotted, but she took a deep breath. “She advertised—the only
doctor
, she called herself—who was a licensed fasting specialist. She advertised that she’d cured everything from syphilis to ulcers to blindness. Over and over, she told us and stated in writing, ‘All functional disease is the result of improper diet,’” Iva said. In her mind’s eye, grim sequences and flashing images unspooled.

Callie unwrapped the pamphlet with such excitement, she tore the paper
.

Iva read it, but Callie studied the damn thing and within hours of its arrival could quote whole passages verbatim. Iva knew that some of their relatives thought the girls had too much money and too much time and that, as a result, hobbies and interests became fads with them. Aunt Caroline said as much when the girls refused meat at her table: “Being a vegetarian is a luxury—those who work for a living can’t pick and choose what they eat. If you girls were shipwrecked, you’d soon enough be eating fish and fowl.”

So, when they decided to take the fasting cure, they told no one.

Gretchen Burkehart professed to be uncertain about whether they were candidates for her cure. Callie told the osteopath she had a tipped uterus that caused awkward pains. Iva complained of a feeling of torpor in her limbs.

They expected massage and a carefully controlled but bracing diet that would cleanse them. They expected to be in a lakeside rest home with awning-covered balconies. They got nothing but a cup of watery broth made from canned tomatoes served twice a day and hot water enemas that lasted six hours at a time. Within a few weeks, neither of them could really walk ... they were stinking, wasted scarecrows lying on narrow cots listening to the rain patter  against the metal roof of the “cabin” that was really a shed, listening to Gretchen Burkehart and her “nurses” rifle their trunks for clothes, shoes, jewelry, books—anything they could lay their hands on. But even that wasn’t the worst of it ...

1973

“I know one of the medical doctors testified that you and Claire would have needed to drink fifty quarts of that broth a day—just to survive. And I’m not sure he was taking into account those enemas,” Jill said. “It’s pretty clear Gretchen was a klysmaphiliac—you know, someone with an obsession for enemas.”

“Humiliating.” Iva shook her head. “And worse was having her or one of her assistants check the contents—like someone sieving for precious metals.” In her mind’s eye she felt the rude shock of the rubber tube, the onrush of the hot water, heard the ugly spatter of liquid feces pouring into an enamel pail.