A Lever and a Place to Stand

a lever and a place to stand

each life converges to some Centre.

Emily Dickinson.

things fall apart

the centre cannot hold

WB Yeats.

Parvati's been losing weight for the past three weeks. Padma can just see the glazed ceramic edge of her plate from where she's sitting, and she watches her eyes dart around the table at every mealtime as she piles food onto her plate. No vegetables or bread, but she's spooning the mashed potatoes and gravy onto her plate for a whole three minutes and when she gets up the edge of her robe shifts and Padma can see a whole pile of strawberry tarts stuffed into the inside pocket. Lavender mumbles something and they leave the Dining Hall before Padma can walk over and shake her little sister by the shoulders and scream.

"It's not like you've never done it, Padma," she says, her eyes slit and hostile.

"For God's sake, Parvati."

"It's nothing. It's nothing, really."

Parvati's been losing weight and soon they don't look like twins anymore, and when Padma confronts her about it she says, "Yeah, well. Maybe that's what it's all about."

*

Padma squeezes the quill between her fingers and writes:

The most atrocious thing about society is that it's image of beauty always has an element of hunger to it.

The slide of fingers around the hardness of bone underneath skin.

The slightly open mouth.

Emptiness.

And like most things, it implies its opposite.

Padma flips through the pages in the magazines, and the hunger of the models is symbolic more than anything else.

Emptiness implies expectation, and this is the generation of ellipses.

*

Lavender pulls the tape measure tighter around Parvati's waist and it flashes have a second helping of dessert at dinner and they laugh. "Ugh. I'm so jealous," she says, pinching the skin around her own stomach.

Parvati kind of nods but runs her fingers over the slight swell that's still there and grimaces.

"How do you do it, Parv? I mean. Ugh. I eat less than you do and I just don't lose weight!"

"You're fine, Lavender. You're fine as you are."

Lavender shrugs and then they just start talking about something else.

Someone died last week. Parvati used to take special care to remember the names announced each Monday, used to repeat them under her breath between gulps of pumpkin juice but now she's watching the war in the distance. The grating of her fingers against the back of her throat is all that's real, the sour triumph as she pulls down on the flush. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and cleaning flecks of vomit from her shoes before she leaves the stall. Sometimes it surprises Parvati just what human beings are capable of getting used to.

Late at night, when Padma's on the Prefect watches that have been going round-the-clock since the latest attack, she happens upon Parvati spitting blood into one of the girl's bathroom sinks.

"Are you spying on me?"

"I'm on patrol, you idiot," Padma closes her grip around Parvati's chin and tilts it upward. "What's wrong with you?"

Parvati twists away. "Nothing. Just coughed a little too hard, that's all."

But when Padma grabs her wrists and splays Parvati's hands there is blood underneath her fingernails.

*

Perhaps hunger also implies martyrdom.

The Yogis who sit in the forests for years upon years without only a few drops of water passing their lips. And yet others who eat only butter and sugar dissolved in milk and grow only thinner as time goes by, thinner and thinner until they disappear into the air.

But far from a surrender, hunger is a tight fist clenched inside your intestines. A reminder of existence, and the slice of cake is just something to hold on to which doesn't have a hold on you.

This is, of course, what Padma is all about. Restriction. Control. Precision.

Parvati is about the dissolution of consequence.

*

Padma can dismantle the mechanics of her desires and rebuild them again in the blink of an eye, but that doesn't make her any less prey to them.

She spent an entire summer after her fourth year slicing her food into thin strips and then cubing them and halving each cube with the tip of her fork and her father laughed and said, "how quaint."

Mother, on the other hand.

Mother catches her by the hand and says, "It's not a problem, is it?"

Of course not, mother.

"I don't mind. Really. To be honest. Just a bit. Because you want to lose weight, I mean? But. Not all the time."

Of course not, mother.

"It can get to be a habit, darling. And then, you know. Just. Not all the time."

When they go back home for the Christmas Holidays mother watches Parvati eat two helpings of rice and clears up chocolate wrappers hidden underneath her mattress while she loses and loses and loses weight. She catches her by the hand and says, "It's not a problem, is it?"

The Ibo, who are a tribe in Nigeria that Padma knows only a handful of things about, have a saying, and it goes: when the mother cow is chewing the calf watches its mouth. Even though she's Parvati's sister and not her mother, she has the gnawing feeling that Parvati has been watching her mouth.

Anyone who knows transfiguration can tell you that there are many ways to achieve the same result, many meandering lines leading from A to B.

From her days in Muggle classrooms, Padma knows that the Muggles think that the shortest distance is from A to B is a straight line but sometimes it's easier to follow the curve.

Padma can dismantle the mechanics of society and lay them bare and glistening in the blink of an eye, but some times when she thinks that Parvati can, too.

And maybe she's saying how absolutely stupid how absolutely fucking stupid you are to herself with her fingers clutching the rim of the toilet.

To the people that say that they're not alike at all, Padma always just smiles and replies, "There are many ways to get from A to B."

It must be the destination that counts.

*

Alternative theory:

Words like: displacement.

Perhaps our cravings are much simpler to appease if they are condensed into layers of chocolate and cream, distilled slowly into swirls of caramel.

*

Parvati comes to her shaking and scared one day because she can't see straight and her teeth have been eaten away so badly by the acid that spills up from her stomach that it hurts just to close her mouth. "So. Tell me some of your theories."

An space created for Padma's Ravenclaw precision to slide in between Parvati and her hunger.

A lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the world.

Archimedes.

Only Padma has no fulcrum.

But she pulls a thick, hastily-bound together book out from underneath her bed and on each page are cut-out pictures of waving models and lines of text snipped from articles from leading medical practicioners, fashion consultants, the british psychiatric association, the nutrition guides on the sides of packets of cornflakes. Every now and then, maybe, an inked in date and a current events story or one of those glossy pictures of food that appear at the tops of recipes. Her aunt works in photography and once she said to her, if you only knew the things they did to that pie to make it look like that you'd never eat again.

"How did you stop, Padma?"

Little theories about hunger and beauty and society scribbled into the empty spaces as if that will fill them.

"Help me, Padma."

Padma leans closer for a kiss over the open pages of her book, and a shiver of magic runs up Parvati's skin. Her hands fall through Padma deeper, deeper and Padma flickers under her touch, flickers and disappears and there is a skeleton in her place. Parvati skids back on the floor and Padma brushes a limp strand of hair from her face. The skin is stretched back, back so far that her lips don't quite close and you can just see a white sliver of teeth from between them.

She places a hand on her book and her fingernails are yellow and dented. "A page for every day spent hungry," she says, and it's like she doesn't even have the energy to smile.

"But I thought you- I thought-," she gestures helplessly to the words layered on words in Padma's book.

She says, "It's just symbolic, really. It's about the emptiness of existence."

Parvati looks at her twin with disgust for the first time and spits, "Does saying that make it easier?"

Padma slides the book back under her bed and says, "You're in no position to judge" as she recasts the glamour over her body.

*

The war just sort of slips Parvati's mind and on some days it seems like she can do anything; there are no consequences in her world. There is no difference between empty and full, which is why as Padma starts sinking deeper inside her skin Parvati learns how to tame the universe with two fingers.

But eventually.

There are two yogis who sit side-by-side in the forest; one lives on water and the other on sugar.

But eventually they both fade into the air.

*