Foster by Athena Vasquez

Before the second home in Montebello, I was placed in my first foster home, where my hunger for thinness was conceived and grew larger in size than I had ever been.

The same social worker that uprooted me from my home in Huntington Park drove Anthony and I in the middle of the night to a house in Palm Springs so big I thought it was a mansion. It was the first time I ever stepped foot into an actual house. It had a fancy tall door, a slice of semi-blurred glass above it where you could see the silhouette of the wide and long spiral stairway that led to the room I eventually shared with my brother. A living room used for actual leisure time and relaxation and not used as a bedroom. Functioning faucets and shower heads. The front lawn stretched out for about 1,000 square feet. If it wasn’t for the driveway next to it, you would’ve thought that most of the front lawn belonged to the city, not an actual person, and was a miniature park. Here’s another thing: there were no sidewalks. People didn’t go places on foot.

I had only known rundown apartment complexes and back-alley homes. Or those small garages turned into homes. Where I came from, the little front lawns, if you could call them that, were turned into business lots where residents held yard sales. And the only time I ever had that much space to relax was when I was at a friend’s house. But still nothing near that castle of a home.

For a place adorned the way it was, I thought that I’d eat five star meals. Ditch the microwaved frozen foods and packaged snacks that I accounted for as meals and eat food I wouldn’t have been able to afford back home. The kind of meals that require a laundry list of ingredients: saffron and thyme and lemon zest and molasses. Of course, I didn’t know what those things really were or how to use them, but I’d heard of them in the cooking shows I’d watch when there was nothing else to watch. ”Close your mouth,” I’d hear being shouted from the other end of the tiny apartment when the pool of drool that had welled up in my mouth was on the brink of spilling through the corners of my mouth.

But in the coming days, the Lady, whom I never officially knew her name, had lifted the veil she wore when she retrieved us at her front door like a parcel delivered by the social worker. It was past midnight when we got to her mansion, but I remember her welcoming Anthony and I in a whirl of warmness.

It was all a facade. She was mean. No. I was going to speak the truth when my mom asked me months later during our first visitation with her at McDonalds. There was no other way of putting this without sugarcoating the truth or minimizing the magnitude of despicable that was her character.

 “That lady was a bitch,” I would say to my mom, in retrospect, when Alice left Anthony and I to enjoy the two hours we had with her. And she really was. A first-class, making-your-life-miserable-brings-me-joy type of bitch.

It would be the first time I’d see my mom in three months. She didn’t have visitation rights until my second placement was declared a permanent place, at least until my mom was one hundred percent sober, completed some drug-related classes, and had a spacious and clean home for us to live in.

I woke up crying and went to sleep crying, so it wasn’t unusual that I approached the Lady in the kitchen with tears running down my cheeks and snot oozing down my nose.

“Si sigues llorando, nunca verás a tu mamá,” the Lady said.

I practically had to plead and beg the Lady for the phone when I wanted to talk to my mom.

“Please. Kiero hablar con mi mama,” I said, wiping the snot running down my nose with the inside of my solid green t-shirt. “Please.”

“Al rato. Les voy a cocinar algo de comer,” she said.

I didn’t know why she bothered cooking. No one in that godforsaken place, beside her and her husband, ate her expired-tasting food; oh, and the boy in the other room across from the room that I shared with my brother that hardly did anything but breathe. But that was because he’d been there so long, ate her flavorless food for so long, that his taste buds were probably dead. I thought that the only way I could ever eat her food was if my taste buds were dead like his.

As a result—I scarcely ate— and it pissed the Lady off. Not because she was concerned for my well-being or worried that I’d die of malnutrition. She just didn’t want to look like an inadequate guardian when the social worker eventually transferred Anthony and I to a more permanent home.

The silver lining was that I was losing weight rapidly, from not eating and from exhausting my body through all the crying. Depression had a way of nibbling away my body fat. It’s a peculiar mixture to be depressed about one thing but at the same time be blissful about another. That’s what it felt when I was trapped in the Lady’s house missing my old life while simultaneously experiencing bliss in looking less like a wide circle.

Growing up I struggled with my weight. I got rude stares in public spaces from people that couldn’t believe their eyes. A ten year old as big as a white elephant. I was indeed the elephant in the room wherever I went, and it made me more self-conscious as I got older.

It hurt me more when my relatives weaponized my weight. Judgment pierces deeper when it comes from the people you least expect. “Muffin top” and “atomic bomb” and “fat bitch” and “albondiga con patas” were insults that fed into the act of starving myself.

Seeing the way my body was morphing day-by-day into something more symmetrical and light, as if a baker with his dough scraper cut out and smoothed out all the parts I loathed, made me feel less bad about trashing the Lady’s disgusting meals when she wasn’t looking.

One Wednesday afternoon, the Lady let Anthony and I watch a couple of hours of iCarly and bought us Dominos. I thought maybe a mare might’ve come to her in the middle of the night to give her a taste of her own medicine. But her steel heart was only so malleable. Her kindness didn’t go past letting us eat only two slices each despite having bought several boxes. And because of my lack of eating, it merely tickled my appetite. Besides the two slices of pepperoni pizza I couldn’t remember my last meal.

“Let’s go,” I whispered.

“We’re gonna get caught,” Anthony said.

“They’re old. And asleep.”

“Yeah, but, what if we’re too loud.”

“We won’t be.”

My body and mind could take it no longer. I was beginning to feel too fatigued and too lightheaded and too incredibly hungry. I had to eat. If not, my stomach would turn inside out and devour itself along with the rest of my organs like some kind of carnivorous Pac-Man.

“C’mon,” I said. “I’m hungry.”

“Okay, okay,” said Anthony.

Anthony knew I was hardly eating, and that same night I convinced him to commit two crimes with me. The first was sneaking downstairs with me into the kitchen to eat another slice of pizza. The second was simply being in the kitchen without the Lady’s permission. She was ultra particular about the way things ran in her home.

I didn’t feel guilty about sneaking into the kitchen because for the first time in a week and a half—I felt full.

Two days after operation “sneak into the kitchen” a social worker rescued Anthony and I from that torturous place in Palm Springs. To my relief never to hear from the Lady again.

We set off on another dreadful car ride to another mysterious location. In these uncertain and unpleasant car rides, which were the firsts of many, were the moments I was filled with so much angst and worry I forgot about my relationship with food and the distorted image I had of my body.

It wasn’t until I saw, from watching passing cars through the car window, the WELCOME TO MONTEBELLO sign that I knew more or less in which region of Southern California we were headed. A memory of my grandpa, Apa, taking me with him to a Bally Total Fitness somewhere in Montebello formed in my mind. I always knew when I was near or far away from home. I could tell just by looking at the buildings, streets, and the pedestrians.

Athena Vasquez

Image Pixabay.com. White tape measure coiled on a table.