by R. Gay
Her mouth works soundlessly. The blindfold is damp with tears.
“So fucking lovely,” I whisper. Even smeared with makeup and tears and saliva, her face is matchless. I want to lift her in my arms and take her home, to my old apartment, cover her in my finest silk sheets and brush out her glorious hair while she sleeps.
I rest my fingertips at her wet, trembling cunt. I hear my voice breaking, my words interrupted by kisses to her irresistible mouth.
“Oh, Christine, do you want more? Do you want me to keep you tied here? Do you want me to fuck you until you beg me to stop?”
She sobs once, quietly.
“Answer me, angel,” I whisper into her mouth. I slide my pinky into her.
“Yes,” she squeaks.
I reach around and undo the waist-chain. I free her wrists. They’re only slightly marked; she didn’t struggle.
“I want to see you here again soon,” I say. “We can go somewhere else when you’re ready. Don’t you live nearby?” I watch her pulse in the hollow of her throat. We both jump when the pounding starts at the door again.
“Stay here for a bit, Christine. Don’t take off your blindfold until I’ve gone. I’m taking your top for myself.”
I lay her halter top on a sink, just in front of her.
I kiss her one last time and she rests her palms on my face. She breaks the kiss and strokes my hair. She lays her fingertips on my eyelids.
“Thank you,” she murmurs. “You don’t know, you don’t know how much—”
I kiss her hands. Then I climb on one of the urinals and lift myself to the window.
I look down on her before I slip outside. Her face is lifted toward me, as if she could see me now through the blindfold.
The door rattles. She covers her chest and reaches for her blindfold. I jump to the alleyway below.
CRAVING MADELINE
Shanna Germain
There is nothing crueler than bringing donuts to an eating disorder group. And yet, there they sit every week, two dozen of them—the good kind, too. Cream filled, chocolate topped, with and without sprinkles, iced pink and green, they’re sitting right next to the bad coffee and the nondairy creamer in little packets that have to be a hundred years old.
My group has anorexics, overeaters, bulimics, bingers—that’s me—and those who are all or none of the above, almost all of them women. There’s one man who comes sometimes, but he takes two donuts each time he’s here, two donuts without stopping to stress, without even hesitating or caring what kind he gets, and he eats them both, in the way that normal people eat. I think he’s faking it, for sympathy or women. After all, to someone with an eating disorder, donuts are never just donuts.
Maybe people think the same about me. In a group filled with bone people and fat people, and rarely in-betweens, I’m an anomaly myself, being average sized. If I work out and eat healthy most times, the binges don’t wreak as much havoc on my body. I haven’t binged—seriously binged—in almost six months. The group is helping, I think. Or something is.
I tend to get to the meetings late, partly because I can’t stand to be in the same room with those powdery, sugary temptations for very long. But I also show up right at the last second because I like to walk in and see Madeline sitting there. She always takes the same chair—the one right across from the door. She’s like a donut herself, all soft, pale curves inside a stretchy brown dress. She has this short, hot pink hair cut close to her head. I want to run my hands over it, pull her into my chest, beg her to lick the soft, sensitive curves of my breasts.
I doubt she notices me, though. I’m breakable, pale and blonde. I’m lipstick. It’s the plight of the bisexual married woman to be invisible, even if the marriage is just sitting there, waiting to be ended.
I take my seat across from Madeline, where I can watch her without seeming too obvious, taking small notes of her body, her movements, the way she fills the chair as though she is comfortable with her body, with the heft and bulk of her. Madeline’s got a bit of everything when it comes to eating disorders. She’s the most honest—and probably the most recovered—of any of us. If I had to guess, I’d say she has willpower like nobody’s business. Sitting across from her makes me feel both weak and strong. Maybe this is why she appeals to me so much; she is soft as dough and hard as the pan it’s baked in.
She wears a big wooden ring on her middle finger and a million thin silver bracelets on both wrists. There’s a little tattoo peeking from the inside curve of her right breast—reds and blues in a pattern I can never quite make out—but it looks like almostclear icing on grocery store cakes.
Sometimes the group is talking about things—important things, like how eating disorders and heart attacks go hand in hand, or how not to rot your teeth out if you’re bulimic—and I realize I’m not paying attention to anything except the creamy skin of Madeline’s neck and chest. Someone will say something about how her mother forced her to diet at eight, and I’ll realize I’ve got my teeth closed tight, as though I’m closing my mouth over a fold of her skin, curling my tongue along it to pull the taste from her.
I call myself bisexual, but the truth is I’ve never been with a woman. And yet, I know how Madeline will taste—sugary without being cloying, refreshing as perfectly sweetened sun tea. I want to dip my head into that space between her thighs, the wet, soft place I imagine will look and feel like my own. I want to dip my fingers into her, stir her into a sweet frenzy and then taste her, suck her juice from my long fingers like the creamiest icing, the softest, most buttery frosting.
Someone shuts the door, and I lift my head with a start, realizing everyone has settled in with his or her coffee. Almost no one has a donut, though I notice Adriana, a young, pretty redhead whose fingers shake almost always from hunger, has taken a quarter of an old-fashioned (the lowest calorie of all the donuts, as I’m sure anyone in the room could tell you) and she is systematically picking it apart crumb by crumb, laying the crumbs back down on her napkin like a connect-the-dots puzzle. I tell myself I am not thinking of donuts. I tell myself I can have a donut anytime I want one, that they are not forbidden foods. This is something I’ve learned about binging. How counterintuitive: if I tell myself I can’t have, I must have. If I tell myself I can have, whenever and however I want, I don’t want. Sometimes this works.
Typically in group, we go around the circle and speak, or don’t speak, depending. Our group leader is Casey, a tall, thin transsexual, a former bulimic with gorgeous skin and long, muscular legs. She developed bulimia when she was still Casey the boy, as a way to keep control, and didn’t kick it until she became Casey the girl. Now, she tries to help, and I think she does a fine job, if not of helping, then of listening, which is sometimes as close to helping as someone can get.
“Well, you all know me. I’m Casey,” she says, and, as always, it takes me a word or two to get used to her voice, the low tone that slightly jars coming out of her thin, lipsticked lips. “I don’t see any newcomers today, so I won’t talk much. I’d like to hear what you all have to say.”
Casey looks to her left, where Adriana is dismantling her donut. “You want to start, please, Adriana?”
“I’m Adriana,” she says without looking up. “I’m a recovering anorexic. I weigh a hundred pounds.”
Liar, I think. She weighs eighty, maybe eighty-five if she wore a stone hat. And her teeth scream “throwing up,” with that grayish cast that results from too much stomach acid.
This makes me sound like I’ve got my disorder, my life, all sewn up with a pretty little bow, doesn’t it? Don’t buy it. I can see my own flaws just as easily as I can see others’. Perhaps too easily. As part of our recovery, we go through our assets, are forced to see ourselves as we really are. When I focus, I can do this. I can say, “I am a little underweight, but not unhealthy. I have small, pretty breasts with big, sensitive nipples. My ass is curvy and my legs are strong. My assets are my emerald green eyes, my big smile, my long, straight hair. I am smart and fu
nny.” Sometimes I even believe it, for a little bit.
And then someone like Adriana talks about how hideous she is, how fat, how out of control. Sometimes group is harder than the disorder. If she is all of those things, what does that make me? So many, many things I don’t want to be. I wish now I had grabbed a donut, two even, the ones with pink icing like Madeline’s hair. I could lick it off while I listen, think of nothing but the sweet melt of sugar on my tongue and how Madeline’s skin would taste in my mouth.
When Adriana is finished, Casey thanks her, then takes a moment to talk to her in a quiet voice that doesn’t carry to the rest of us.
After, Casey holds her hand out to Madeline, who sits on the other side of her. Madeline’s wide hand with its thick fingers wraps around Casey’s long, thin fingers, the nails painted purple, the veins big and blue beneath the skin, and then Madeline smiles at Casey, and I wonder who’s helping who, and if it really matters anymore.
“I’m Mad,” Madeline says, like she always does. And then she flexes and growls in this way that always lightens up the group. She once said that when she stopped hiding behind food, she started hiding behind her sense of humor, that being funny was a wall to protect her from potential pain. I’ve never forgotten that. For weeks, I thought, What do I have to hide behind? and I didn’t find an answer. I still haven’t found an answer, but it’s something, I think, to be looking at least.
“I’ve got a little of everything,” she continues, “and I kick most of it in the ass and the balls every day with my steel-toed boots. Some days it stays down. Some days it don’t. Either way, it’s a little weaker when it gets up again.”
She shrugs, waves a hand through the air so that her bracelets clack-clack. “Guess that’s it.”
Casey touches Madeline’s shoulder. “Are you sure, honey? Because I feel like there’s something else in there today.”
This is what makes Casey so very good at what she does. Most people, I think, would be afraid to say that to Madeline, to this powerhouse of will and I-know-myself-ness. I would be afraid to say it to her. Hell, I’m afraid to say anything to her, and I’ve been coming to this group, watching her across the circle, for more than a year now.
Madeline is silent for a moment, her chin dropping to her chest with a soft inhale. And then Madeline, big strong Madeline, is crying. Not making any noise, not her, but tears are sliding off her dark mascara and running down her pale face.
“I’m.” She swallows away the rest of the sentence.
Casey leans in and lifts Madeline’s face in the softest movement, two fingers closing carefully over the heart-shaped point of Madeline’s chin. “What, honey?” Casey asks.
“I guess I’m a little lonely,” Madeline says. At the sound of those words, I feel my heart crumble apart, tiny sugar pieces that fall down through my lap. I want to crawl across the floor to kneel in the space in front of her chair, leaning my head into her thighs, asking her to stroke my head.
She smiles, a big flash of teeth and dimples, that improbably loud distress signal most people never read as anything more than pure strength, and waves away the attention focused on her. “It’ll pass,” she says in an almost steady voice. “You know it will.”
Casey holds on a moment longer—you can see in her face she’s trying to decide how hard to push, how much more to ask for—and then she nods and lets go.
“Thank you, Mad,” she says. “Anyone else feeling alone? Lonely? Just a little?”
Adriana picks at her donut. Pluck. Pluck. A few other women shift and move, but no one says anything. I think about doing something stupid—raising my hand, or speaking. But I never speak at these meetings; things don’t come out of my mouth very well. It’s better to stay quiet. My biggest fear is that someday Casey will call on me, that she’ll see right through me and make me speak, that my words will tumble and stumble in my throat until they choke me.
Casey leans back with a laugh, one of those long legs swinging through the air, big pump hanging on by the toes. There is a quiet teasing tone in her voice. “Well, since everyone else’s life is perfect and not lonely at all—I know mine sure is—let’s talk about the other things that are perfect with our lives, shall we? Who wants to start?”
The next week there are no donuts. There is no Madeline either, and I sit in my chair, staring at the empty space across from me. I have a brief moment where I wonder if it’s Madeline who actually brings the donuts, if she’s the one who has such a cruel heart. But somehow, I don’t allow myself to believe it.
Either way, I’m glad there are no donuts here. Usually, being in front of people is enough in itself to keep me from binging, but today, with the dull beat inside my chest at the sight of Madeline’s empty chair, I’m not so sure. I have coffee in a cup, and I break the Styrofoam bits off the rim, crack-crack.
All week long, every time I wanted to eat, I thought of Madeline, of Madeline saying she was lonely, of those silent tears. I’d close my eyes and pretend her big, curvy body was pressing hard to mine, her hands tracing the curves of my lips. I’d suck her fingers into my mouth, way back deep in my throat, groaning around them as her other hand fumbled with my jeans. I wanted to eat nothing but her body, nipples melting like nonpareils along my tongue, to crack open her legs and chew the soft fat at the inside of her thighs, to suck the tight pink flesh of her clit into my mouth like a tiny oyster.
Casey clears her throat and starts the session by talking about addiction and compulsion: what it means and how we cope. She doesn’t say anything about the missing Madeline.
“Caroline? You want to say something this week?”
I swallow back my hot coffee, letting it scald my tongue, and shake my head. I don’t know what I’d say even if I could say something. I want chips and cookies. I want to stuff and stuff myself until I can’t breathe or think or want.
“You sure?” Casey asks.
I nod, my eyes closing to shut out her voice and the way it doesn’t mix with the rest of her; to shut out pretty, tiny Adriana and her chipped blue nail polish; to shut out the empty chair across the circle from me.
My fingers are shaking as they pick at the cup rim and there is the thing I don’t want to admit—that perhaps it isn’t the group, or Casey’s quiet voice that’s been helping me. Maybe it’s just that I’ve traded one addiction for another, craving fats and sugars exchanged for craving Madeline.
I almost don’t go the next week. All week long I’ve eyed candy in bags, the kind that can be eaten one after another without thinking, cookies as big as a plate, thick slabs of cheddar cheese that could be torn into hunks and eaten with my fingers. I won’t. I won’t. But I wonder, what if I show up and there is no Madeline? What will I eat? The answer scares me.
Instead, I show up early, too early. No one’s there yet. The coffee hasn’t even been made. But there are donuts. And there is Madeline, setting them on the table at the back of the room.
“O-Oh,” I say. The air stutters out of my mouth, makes a sound.
She turns to look at me, bracelets clacking quietly. “Casey asks me to bring them. Says it helps her get a handle on where everyone’s at by how they eat or don’t eat the donuts.”
She lifts her shoulders. “Think it’s some kind of test for me, too. But I’ve been doing it for a year now. Hardly bothers me anymore.”
I can only stand there, stupidly, wishing I had something in my throat to make words with. Finally, I do the only thing I can—I move my body forward and I touch her wrist, the place where all her bracelets bend and clack together.
She catches her breath, quiet, not breathing at all, making the place where her tattoo rests go still. I bend my head forward, lick her blue-and-red skin like it’s the finest icing, and her exhale is warm against my ear. She makes my tongue taste like sweet salt, like caramel corn and coffee, and I swallow her flavor down, a quiet groan going with it, all the way to my stomach, all the way to the soft melt between my thighs.
Madeline’s hand is in my hair,
clack-clack of bracelets, and she’s holding me against her. I breathe her in, trace the outline of her design with my tongue. She tastes as good as I expected. Better. I want to eat her up. Oysters on the half shell to be sucked down, salted caramel to be licked into melting, the crunch of candy between my teeth. She is the flavor of everything I’ve ever wanted to stuff myself with but didn’t, sweet and sour, salvation and sustenance.
“Y-you don’t ha-have to be a-alone,” I say. I want to say more—I always want to say more—but words are so hard for me. The way I choke around them, crumbs that tickle my throat and make me cough each one into the air.
“Oh, honey,” Madeline says. “I’m no cure for you. I’m no cure for anybody.”
“I d-don’t,” I say, and the saying of it exhausts me. It’s all I have, these broken words. They’re not enough. They’re never enough.
I pull back, trying to swallow all the words so I can breathe again, but Madeline tightens her hands in my hair. She leans my head back so that I am looking up at her, and then she touches my mouth to hers. Soft, plummy lips mash against mine, her mouth sucking my tongue in until it no longer belongs to me, until she is eating me up and I want nothing more than the sound she is making right now, this hungry slurp as she swallows me whole.
CALL ME CLEOPATRA
Gabrielle Foster
It was autumn. I remember that, the smell, as if the desert were smoldering, creosote going to ash, the electricity in the air as the city filled up with students. I remember I was drawing—I do not remember what exactly, although I could probably go back and find the exact page in my sketchbook, that ink sketch of a passerby or fire hydrant. I might even be able to discern the moment, the fraction of a second when my pen skipped, a wobble in a previously straight line, when she asked to bum a smoke.
She was dressed like the street kids sprawled on the city sidewalks, haute vagabond, in a pale saffron dress embroidered with fraying fleur-de-lis. Her skin was tanned bronze, her hair titian. She had a tangle of necklaces at her throat and wide bands of leather on each wrist.