The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018

by Sheila Heti

  Ebia sniffled and said it was time to eat. Everybody started filing into the kitchen, puffy-eyed but suddenly lighter and ready to tell stories. I glanced at the empty tote bag on the bench, and knew it was right to bring Lola back to the place where she’d been born.

  CARMEN MARIA MACHADO

  ■

  Eight Bites

  FROM Gulf Coast

  AS THEY PUT ME TO SLEEP, my mouth fills with the dust of the moon. I expect to choke on the silt but instead it slides in and out, and in and out, and I am, impossibly, breathing.

  I have dreamt of inhaling underneath water and this is what it feels like: panic, and then acceptance, and then elation. I am going to die, I am not dying, I am doing a thing I never thought I could do.

  Back on earth, Dr. U is inside me. Her hands are in my torso, her fingers searching for something. She is loosening flesh from its casing, slipping around where she’s been welcomed, talking to a nurse about her vacation to Chile. “We were going to fly to Antarctica,” she says, “but it was too expensive.”

  “But the penguins,” the nurse says.

  “Next time,” Dr. U responds.

  * * *

  Before this, it was January, a new year. I waded through two feet of snow on a silent street, and came to a shop where wind chimes hung silently on the other side of the glass, mermaid-shaped baubles and bits of driftwood and too-shiny seashells strung through with fishing line and unruffled by any wind.

  The town was deep dead, a great distance from the late-season smattering of open shops that serve the day-trippers and the money savers. Owners had fled to Boston or New York, or, if they were lucky, farther south. Businesses had shuttered for the season, leaving their wares in the windows like a tease. Underneath, a second town had opened up, familiar and alien at the same time. It’s the same every year. Bars and restaurants made secret hours for locals, the rock-solid Cape Codders who’ve lived through dozens of winters. On any given night you could look up from your plate to see round bundles stomp through the doorway; only when they peeled their outsides away could you see who was beneath. Even the ones you knew from the summer were more or less strangers in this perfunctory daylight; all of them were alone, even when they were with each other.

  On this street, though, I might as well have been on another planet. The beach bunnies and art dealers would never see the town like this, I thought, when the streets are dark and a liquid chill roils through the gaps and alleys. Silence and sound bumped up against each other but never intermingled; the jolly chaos of warm summer nights was as far away as it could be. It was hard to stop moving between doorways in this weather, but if you did you could hear life pricking the stillness: a rumble of voices from a local tavern, wind livening the buildings, sometimes even a muffled animal encounter in an alley: pleasure or fear, it was all the same noise.

  Foxes wove through the streets at night. There was a white one among them, sleek and fast, and she looked like the ghost of the others.

  * * *

  I was not the first in my family to go through with it. My three sisters had gotten the procedure over the years, though they didn’t say anything before showing up for a visit. Seeing them suddenly svelte after years of watching them grow organically, as I have, was like a palm to the nose, more painful than you’d expect. My first sister, well, I thought she was dying. Being sisters, I thought we all were dying, noosed by genetics. When confronted by my anxiety—“What disease is sawing off this branch of the family tree?” I asked, my voice crab-walking up an octave—my first sister confessed: a surgery.

  Then, all of them, my sisters, a chorus of believers. Surgery. A surgery. As easy as when you broke your arm as a kid and had to get the pins in—maybe even easier. A band, a sleeve, a gut rerouted. Rerouted? But their stories—it melts away, it’s just gone—were spring-morning warm, when the sun makes the difference between happiness and shivering in a shadow.

  When we went out, they ordered large meals and then said, “I couldn’t possibly.” They always said this, always, that decorous insistence that they couldn’t possibly, but for once, they actually meant it—that bashful lie had been converted into truth vis-à-vis a medical procedure. They angled their forks and cut impossibly tiny portions of food—doll-sized cubes of watermelon, a slender stalk of pea shoot, a corner of a sandwich as if they needed to feed a crowd loaves-and-fishes-style with that single serving of chicken salad—and swallowed them like a great decadence.

  “I feel so good,” they all said. Whenever I talked to them, that was what always came out of their mouths, or really, it was a mouth, a single mouth that once ate and now just says, “I feel really, really good.”

  Who knows where we got it from, though—the bodies that needed the surgery. It didn’t come from our mother, who always looked normal, not hearty or curvy or Rubenesque or Midwestern or voluptuous, just normal. She always said eight bites are all you need to get the sense of what you are eating. Even though she never counted out loud, I could hear the eight bites as clearly as if a game show audience were counting backward, raucous and triumphant, and after one she would set her fork down, even if there was food left on her plate. She didn’t mess around, my mother. No pushing food in circles or pretending. Iron will, slender waistline. Eight bites let her compliment the hostess. Eight bites lined her stomach like insulation rolled into the walls of houses. I wished she was still alive, to see the women her daughters had become.

  * * *

  And then, one day, not too soon after my third sister sashayed out of my house with more spring in her step than I’d ever seen, I ate eight bites and then stopped. I set the fork down next to the plate, more roughly than I’d intended, and took a chip of ceramic off the rim in the process. I pressed my finger into the shard and carried it to the trash can. I turned and looked back at my plate, which had been so full before and was full still, barely a dent in the raucous mass of pasta and greens.

  I sat down again, picked up my fork, and had eight more bites. Not much more, still barely a dent, but now twice as much as necessary. But the salad leaves were dripping vinegar and oil and the noodles had lemon and cracked pepper and everything was just so beautiful, and I was still hungry, and so I had eight more. After, I finished what was in the pot on the stove and I was so angry I began to cry.

  I don’t remember getting fat. I wasn’t a fat child or teenager; photos of those young selves are not embarrassing, or if they are, they’re embarrassing in the right ways. Look how young I am! Look at my weird fashion! Saddle shoes—who thought of those? Stirrup pants—are you joking? Squirrel barrettes? Look at those glasses, look at that face: mugging for the camera. Look at that expression, mugging for a future self who is holding those photos, sick with nostalgia. Even when I thought I was fat, I wasn’t; the teenager in those photos is very beautiful, in a wistful kind of way.

  But then I had a baby. Then I had Cal—difficult, sharp-eyed Cal, who has never gotten me half as much as I have never gotten her—and suddenly everything was wrecked, like she was a heavy-metal rocker trashing a hotel room before departing. My stomach was the television set through the window. She was now a grown woman and so far away from me in every sense, but the evidence still clung to my body. It would never look right again.

  As I stood over the empty pot, I was tired. I was tired of the skinny-minny women from church who cooed and touched each other’s arms and told me I had beautiful skin, and having to rotate my hips sideways to move through rooms like crawling over someone at the movie theater. I was tired of flat, unforgiving dressing room lights; I was tired of looking into the mirror and grabbing the things that I hated and lifting them, clawing deep, and then letting them drop and everything aching. My sisters had gone somewhere else and left me behind, and as I always have, I wanted nothing more than to follow.

  I could not make eight bites work for my body and so I would make my body work for eight bites.

  * * *

  Dr. U did twice-a-week consultations in an office a ha
lf-hour drive south on the Cape. I took a slow, circuitous route getting there. It had been snowing on and off for days, and the sleepy snowdrifts caught on every tree trunk and fencepost like blown-away laundry. I knew the way because I’d driven past her office before—usually after a sister’s departure—and so as I drove this time I daydreamt about buying clothes in the local boutiques, spending too much for a sundress taken off a mannequin, pulling it against my body in the afternoon sun as the mannequin stood, less lucky than I.

  Then I was in her office, on her neutral carpet, and a receptionist was pushing open a door. The doctor was not what I expected. I suppose I had imagined that because of the depth of her convictions, as illustrated by her choice of profession, she should have been a slender woman: either someone with excessive self-control or a sympathetic soul whose insides had also been rearranged to suit her vision of herself. But she was sweetly plump—why had I skipped over the phase where I was round and unthreatening as a panda, but still lovely? She smiled with all her teeth. What was she doing, sending me on this journey she herself had never taken?

  She gestured, and I sat.

  There were two Pomeranians running around her office. When they were separated—when one was curled up at Dr. U’s feet and the other was decorously taking a shit in the hallway—they appeared identical but innocuous, but when one came near the other they were spooky, their heads twitching in sync, as if they were two halves of a whole. The doctor noticed the pile outside of the door and called for the receptionist. The door closed.

  “I know what you’re here for,” she said, before I could open my mouth. “Have you researched bariatric surgery before?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I want the kind you can’t reverse.”

  “I admire a woman of conviction,” she said. She began pulling binders out of a drawer. “There are some procedures you’ll have to go through. Visiting a psychiatrist, seeing another doctor, support groups—administrative nonsense, taking up a lot of time. But everything is going to change for you,” she promised, shaking a finger at me with an accusing, loving smile. “It will hurt. It won’t be easy. But when it’s over, you’re going to be the happiest woman alive.”

  * * *

  My sisters arrived a few days before the surgery. They set themselves up in the house’s many empty bedrooms, making up their side tables with lotions and crossword puzzles. I could hear them upstairs and they sounded like birds, distinct and luminously choral at the same time.

  I told them I was going out for a final meal.

  “We’ll come with you,” said my first sister.

  “Keep you company,” said my second sister.

  “Be supportive,” said my third sister.

  “No,” I said, “I’ll go alone. I need to be alone.”

  I walked to my favorite restaurant, Salt. It hadn’t always been Salt, though, in name or spirit. It was Linda’s, for a while, and then Family Diner, then The Table. The building remains the same, but it is always new and always better than before.

  I thought about people on death row and their final meals, as I sat at a corner table, and for the third time that week I worried about my moral compass, or lack thereof. They aren’t the same, I reminded myself as I unfolded the napkin over my lap. Those things are not comparable. Their last meal comes before death; mine comes before not just life, but a new life. You are horrible, I thought, as I lifted the menu to my face, higher than it needed to be.

  I ordered a cavalcade of oysters. Most of them had been cut the way they were supposed to be, and they slipped down as easily as water, like the ocean, like nothing at all, but one fought me: anchored to its shell, a stubborn hinge of flesh. It resisted. It was resistance incarnate. Oysters are alive, I realized. They are nothing but muscle; they have no brains or insides, strictly speaking, but they are alive nonetheless. If there were any justice in the world, this oyster would grab hold of my tongue and choke me dead.

  I almost gagged, but then I swallowed.

  My third sister sat down across the table from me. Her dark hair reminded me of my mother’s: almost too shiny and homogenous to be real, though it was. She smiled kindly at me, as if she were about to give me some bad news.

  “Why are you here?” I asked her.

  “You look troubled,” she said. She held her hands in a way that showed off her red nails, which were so lacquered they had horizontal depth, like a rose trapped in glass. She tapped them against her cheekbones, scraping them down her face with the very lightest touch. I shuddered. Then she picked up my water and drank deeply of it, until the water had filtered through the ice and the ice was nothing more than a fragile lattice and then the whole construction slid against her face as she tipped the glass higher and she chewed the slivers that landed in her mouth.

  “Don’t waste that stomach space on water,” she said, crunch crunch crunching. “Come on now. What are you eating?”

  “Oysters,” I said, even though she could see the precarious pile of shells before me.

  She nodded. “Are they good?” she asked.

  “They are.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  “They are the sum of all healthy things: seawater and muscle and bone,” I said. “Mindless protein. They feel no pain, have no verifiable thoughts. Very few calories. An indulgence without being an indulgence. Do you want one?”

  I didn’t want her to be there—I wanted to tell her to leave—but her eyes were glittering as if she had a fever. She ran her fingernail lovingly along an oyster shell. The whole pile shifted, doubling down on its own mass.

  “No,” she said. Then, “Have you told Cal? About the procedure?”

  I bit my lip. “No,” I said. “Did you tell your daughter, before you got it?”

  “I did. She was so excited for me. She sent me flowers.”

  “Cal will not be excited,” I said. “There are many daughter duties Cal does not perform, and this will be one, too.”

  “Do you think she needs the surgery, too? Is that why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I have never understood Cal’s needs.”

  “Do you think it’s because she will think badly of you?”

  “I’ve also never understood her opinions,” I said.

  My sister nodded.

  “She will not send me flowers,” I concluded, even though this was probably not necessary.

  I ordered a pile of hot truffle fries, which burned the roof of my mouth. It was only after the burn that I thought about how much I’d miss it all. I started to cry, and my sister put her hand over mine. I was jealous of the oysters. They never had to think about themselves.

  * * *

  At home, I called Cal to tell her. My jaw was so tightly clenched, it popped when she answered the phone. On the other end I could hear another woman’s voice, stopped short by a finger to the lips unseen; then a dog whined.

  “Surgery?” she repeated.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said.

  “Don’t swear,” I told her, even though I was not a religious woman.

  “What? That’s not even a fucking swear,” she yelled. “That was a fucking swear. And this. Jesus Christ is not a swear. It’s a proper name. And if there’s ever a time to swear, it’s when your mom tells you she’s getting half of one of her most important organs cut away for no reason—”

  She was still talking, but it was growing into a yell. I shooed the words away like bees.

  “—occur to you that you’re never going to be able to eat like a normal human—”

  “What is wrong with you?” I finally asked her.

  “Mom, I just don’t understand why you can’t be happy with yourself. You’ve never been—”

  She kept talking. I stared at the receiver. When did my child sour? I didn’t remember the process, the top-down tumble from sweetness to curdled anger. She was furious constantly, she was all accusation. She had taken the moral high ground from me by force, time and time again. I had commi
tted any number of sins: Why didn’t I teach her about feminism? Why did I persist in not understanding anything? And this, this takes the cake, no, don’t forgive the pun; language is infused with food like everything else, or at least like everything else should be. She was so angry, I was glad I couldn’t read her mind. I knew her thoughts would break my heart.

  The line went dead. She’d hung up on me. I set the phone on the receiver and realized my sisters were watching me from the doorway, two looking sympathetic, the other smug.

  I turned away. Why didn’t Cal understand? Her body was imperfect but it was also fresh, pliable. She could sidestep my mistakes. She could have the release of a new start. I had no self-control, but tomorrow I would relinquish control and everything would be right again.

  The phone rang. Cal, calling back? But it was my niece. She was selling knife sets so she could go back to school and become a—well, I missed that part, but she would get paid just for telling me about the knives, so I let her walk me through, step-by-step, and I bought a cheese knife with a special cut-out center—“So the cheese doesn’t stick to the blade, see?” she said.

  * * *

  In the operating room, I was open to the world. Not that kind of open, not yet, everything was still sealed up inside, but I was naked except for a faintly patterned cloth gown that didn’t quite wrap around my body.

  “Wait,” I said. I laid my hand upon my hip and squeezed a little. I trembled, though I didn’t know why. There was an IV, and the IV would relax me; soon I would be very far away.

  Dr. U stared at me over her mask. Gone was the sweetness from her office; her eyes looked transformed. Icy.