by Zaina Arafat
About a month into treatment, amid these anonymous evening interactions, Anna and I met. She was in for bulimia, an equal but opposite force to my anorexia. Our first coffee date led to drinks, which led to dinner at an actual restaurant rather than the center’s cafeteria, which led to sex.
After we started sleeping together, we would periodically smile at each other across the therapy group; rolling our eyes at the counselors’ false enthusiasm. We were careful to never leave at the same time—dating among patients was frowned upon, it could lead to co-conspiracy against the daily regimen and the recovery process.
When I left Boston and returned to school for my final year, Anna and I would text occasionally, usually about posts on the counselor’s Myspace or things that happened during group, as she was still a patient there for the next three months. By the time I graduated we had fallen out of touch. We didn’t reconnect until we both ended up in New York two years later, me in Harlem and her in Staten Island. We met up at a trailer-park-themed bar in Chelsea, and when I walked in and saw her, I sensed that we would resume right where we left off. She was wearing a checkered button-down and flat-front pastel shorts. I was glad to see that she had come into her own; until then she’d always seemed torn between chunky costume necklaces and full-on preppy boy. She was soothingly easy to be with, and it felt good to spend time with someone familiar in a city that still felt foreign to me. This time we attempted an actual relationship. On one of our first proper dates in the city, she took me to a sports bar in Murray Hill to watch a boxing match: Manny Pacquiao versus Miguel Cotto. We sat at the bar and drank domestic beers while she explained the rules to me. Before the final round, she leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I want to come in your mouth.” I shivered at the thought of it, and smiled.
The second time we had sex, she fucked me with a strap on. It was my first experience with dildos, and they became a regular feature of our relationship as she veered increasingly masculine. She’d wrap her towel around just her waist when getting out of the shower, slap Old Spice onto her smooth never-shaved cheeks, pack her jeans when we’d go out at night. I understood these behaviors—I had often fantasized that I had a dick, but I couldn’t imagine trading in my God-given breasts, not even for a straight married woman.
Anna and I quickly fell into a pattern of her giving and me taking, and for a long while, she appeared to enjoy it. In bed, I didn’t do much besides lie there and enact dramatic orgasms. She was working at a women’s health clinic, barely making a livable salary for New York—hence Staten Island—yet she often invited me for long weekends at the Standard, the London, the Bowery, shelling out hundreds of dollars for each stay. She helped me move apartments three times, from East Harlem to Alphabet City to South Park Slope. She gave in other ways, too; she sent me literature about cycles of abuse and internalized homophobia, documentary films about being queer and Arab, queer and Muslim. I read and watched none of it, and I now realize these weren’t intended for my benefit only.
Early on in our relationship, Anna had said that her attraction to me made her so nervous that all her spit dried up. It was a mistake to let me know how much she liked me. I couldn’t handle the responsibility—Anna’s feelings for me were things I would always hold against her. Every gesture of love I found fault with. When she tended to me when I was sick, I berated her for buying generic medicine instead of name brand. I constantly accused her of being sheltered. In truth, she was; she’d been raised in an upper-class family, her father an intellectual property lawyer, her mother an art history professor at Brown with inherited wealth. But her privilege ended there. She’d suffered abuse herself, which I only knew about because she’d once broken down and told the group during treatment. She never discussed it with me, and I never asked.
The day she called to tell me she’d gotten into law school at Columbia, I panicked. The Upper West Side was where the professor and I would meet for our coffee dates and lunches—activities that I thought might lead to her Riverside Drive apartment. The right response to Anna’s news was to jump up and down and squeal, take her out to a celebratory dinner, offer congratulations, at the very least. Instead, I breathed audibly into the phone and asked, “Does this mean you’re going to start hanging out at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, too?”
Anna hung up and avoided me for a week. I went crazy, calling dozens of times, leaving desperate, incomprehensible messages that I wept my way through. I was terrified at the thought of not having her, and I mistook the pain of losing control for love and compassion. I finally rode the ferry across the harbor to Staten Island, where I had never once visited. At her doorstep I held her for as long as I could. I invited her to live with me in Brooklyn, knowing it was a bad idea. What we needed was to break up. But I just couldn’t stand to be without her, entirely alone without the possibility of anyone else.
On her doorstep, Anna nodded through tears. “I’ll move in,” she said, then smiled and kissed me on the cheek. “Someone needs to tame you.” I felt my heart sink at the fatalism of her reasoning. Yet we laughed and kept holding on to each other. Besides, we both knew it was too late: we had already started to shatter.
•
Maybe I didn’t want the professor to end up like the real people in my life. The people I kept things from because I couldn’t face them myself. Maybe she offered the possibility of escape.
11
IT WAS OUR FOURTEENTH DAY, AND THE START OF A NEW two-week cycle. A fresh group arrived that morning—and they happened to all be women. The five of them banded together, eating their meals outside on the picnic tables where no one ever ate, waking up a five forty-five to go on pre-coffee walks, sitting in the porch rocking chairs during the morning meditation instead of on the couches with everyone else. “Who do they think they are?” I said to Molly. “Showing up to yoga in sports bras and little-ass shorts. Poor Greg was snapping away all morning!”
In addition to heroin addict, alcoholic, and weekend cokehead, Greg was a sex addict. Not only was he having an affair, he was also obsessed with porn and couldn’t stop watching it. After group the day before, Richard had given him a rubber bracelet to wear around his wrist, and whenever he was lusting he was supposed to snap it against his skin to remind himself to stop. I heard the incoming women talking about Charlotte, how great they thought she seemed based on what I assumed was her appearance and her adorable intro. “I often wish I could be a horse,” she’d said to the group after morning meditation, “and just trot in a field all day.”
Everyone laughed. “Oh my God, totally” sounded throughout the room. “I really want to work with her as much as possible,” said Nina, an alcoholic-turned-love-addict. “I feel like we’d really connect.”
I glared at her while forking lima beans into my mouth. Did Charlotte just make everyone feel special? I resented that. I also hated the idea of Nina getting close to Charlotte, working with her one-on-one. What if Charlotte liked her better than me? “Honestly,” I said to Molly as she paged through a contraband issue of Us Weekly, “someone needs to put them in their place.”
Molly looked at me blankly. “Well, I’m not gonna do it. I think they seem really nice!”
I decided I would confront Nina myself, after I walked into the bathroom the next day and noticed that my towel was covered in mascara and foundation. “What the fuck!” I yelled so loud that the mirror above the sink vibrated. I ripped the towel off the rack and marched over to the main lodge, bursting into the living room and interrupting every conversation. “Who did this?” I held the towel in the air as if it were a manifesto.
“Sorry,” Nina called out. “I thought that was the house towel.”
“And if it were, you’d smear makeup all over it and make it yours?”
She said she’d wash the towel for me. I told her not to bother, throwing it in the trash on my way out for added impact.
Unsurprisingly, all the new women hated Greg. Anytime he spoke they’d shoot one another looks, roll their eyes, exhale dra
matically. During coffee one morning, while Nina was stretching, lifting her leg over her head in a way that felt obviously suggestive, his chastity bracelet snapped in half and shot across the room like a rubber band. “Oops,” he said, snickering, as Nina pretended to ignore him. Later that day, she was eating a bag of peanut M&Ms, and Greg called out, “Melts in your mouth, not in your hands!”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she yelled. “Why does everything have to be a sexual innuendo?”
He scratched his head, appearing genuinely confused. “Wait a minute, how was that sexual? It’s the slogan!”
She threw down her leg and looked at me over on the opposite couch. “How can you stand him?”
Greg sat down beside me and peeled open a banana. “He’s pretty harmless,” I said as he chomped into it. “Really.”
Molly tried to make friends with the incoming women. She’d sit outside with them at the picnic tables and they’d toss her scraps of attention, smiling tight-lipped at her comments before changing the subject. They didn’t invite her on their post-lunch or pre-coffee walks. They’d give her questions one-word responses without asking any in return. And they’d talk about her when she wasn’t around.
“Why does she pick at herself so much?” I overheard Nina say to the other women in the cafeteria one day. “I just want to tape oven mitts to her hands or something!”
As I eavesdropped on their conversation, I found myself wincing. I recognized her arbitrary, superficial judgments; they were just like the ones I came in with and applied to everyone there. I too had always felt repulsed whenever anyone tried to get close to me. But who was it I actually loathed? Who was I really judging?
“You know,” I said to Nina as we walked outside with our trays. “The picking is annoying. But maybe you shouldn’t hold it against her. She really hasn’t done anything to you except try to be your friend.”
Nina said nothing. And as my hypocrisy shined, it began to cast a light on other areas of my life.
“I think I know who you remind me of,” I said to Molly that afternoon. I so very much didn’t want to admit it. “You remind me of me. Or the me that I might’ve been, if my mom didn’t insist on whipping me into who she wanted me to be. I guess I miss that other version of myself, even though it sort of terrifies me.
A memory of standing barefoot on the cement balcony of my mother’s apartment in mid-December pops into my head. She had banished me from her living room for coming home from school for winter break with unpedicured feet. “I’d rather you bring home F’s than feet looking like that!” she called out as I stood hugging myself to keep warm, protesting that at least I’d gotten A’s. “What man’s going to look at you, with such feet?”
Later that same day we were shopping for formal dresses. I tried on a long Dolce & Gabbana gown that she’d chosen and that neither of us could afford. It was silk and beaded and hung from me in a way that made me feel sexy and stupid, like I was playing the role of a girl who could wear a silk and beaded designer dress that delicately draped her body. I stepped awkwardly out of the dressing room to show my mom, feeling completely foreign to myself. She stood up and walked over to me, then put her hand on my back and turned me around.
“Beyakhud el a’el,” she said, stepping back and smiling. Her words reverberated through my mind. In that moment, the morning’s pedicure incident no longer mattered—I’d gotten it right this time. The desire to hear her say that motivated me to get from moment to moment, day to day.
I continued as Molly stared at me. “And in a way, I’m glad she did, and I hate that.” I shrugged. “I guess I want to do the same to you, sometimes. You know,” I said, making air quotes, “for your own good.”
Molly said nothing, she just kept staring at me wide-eyed, until Greg called out from the landing above, “The upstairs rooms are unlocked!”
We ran upstairs to the group room, and I shuffled through the stack of CDs. They were mostly just affirmations and nature sounds, but there were a couple of normal ones in the bunch. We found a Billy Joel album, not exactly dance music, but it would do. I put in the CD and turned the volume all the way up on “A Matter of Trust.” On the platform above the living room, we danced and sang along. Some love is just a lie of the mind, it’s make-believe until it’s only a matter of time.
Greg took me in his arms and dipped me. I know you’re an emotional girl, he mouthed. Soon everyone below was dancing. The women formed a circle around Alex while he did the running man in the middle. At the end of the song the lights in the room flashed; I looked over and saw the security guard. “Time to lock up in here,” he said. “And you know you’re not supposed to play with the stereo.”
“Don’t tell Richard!” I said.
“I won’t tell,” he assured me. “Ain’t nobody watching.”
•
On Day 19 we wrote “goodbye” letters. I was advised to write two: one to love addiction, and another to my toxic relationship with my mother. When it was time to read them out loud, I volunteered to go first. Once again, Charlotte and Richard were sitting beside me, the empty chair facing me.
Still unable to visualize her, I spoke directly to the chair. “I’ll always remember the way you mix up your words, and ask me ‘what’s the count’ when we’re playing a board game, or for ‘IB-buffin’ when you have a headache.” I tried to keep it light this time, especially after the H.I.T. list. I looked up between sentences, expecting people to laugh, or to at least smile, but no one did. “I think I’ll stop here,” I said, folding up the letter and tucking it into my pocket.
“How do you feel?” Charlotte asked.
I shrugged. I felt nothing. “I feel nothing,” I said. I got up and returned to my seat in the circle. Greg read his letter to heroin, Molly to her meth-addicted and manipulative boyfriend, and Alex to his martyr habit, of which we’d managed to convince him. The three of them wept while reading their letters. Once we were done, Richard and Charlotte suggested that we give one another hugs. They both joined in and made their way around the room. I stood with my arms crossed, finding this all somewhat sentimental and unnecessary. By the time Richard pulled out the stereo and put on R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts,” I felt entirely embarrassed by the gratuitousness of this spectacle. I watched Alex sob into Charlotte’s arms as Michael Stipe whined in the background. Greg cried into her, too, though I figured he just wanted her boobs pressed against him. When he finally let go, Charlotte started walking toward me. I sat down as she approached, and she veered off to hug someone else.
As I watched the others, I felt something swirling around inside me, like leaves before a storm. I was breathing heavily and starting to shiver again. Bubbles were once again popping in my throat.
“Why don’t we take a twenty-minute break,” Richard said.
I exploded out of the room with my notebook. I ran down to the basement, found an isolated corner, and scribbled out another letter. I wrote with fury and without punctuation until I heard the bell ring: break was over.
Back in the group room Charlotte started explaining another activity. I interrupted her.
“Charlotte,” I called out, “I’m not feeling well.”
“Do you want to lie down?”
“I wrote another letter to my mother,” I said. “Can I read it?” I didn’t wait for her to answer. “I can’t believe I’m still trying to protect my image of you.” My voice was an octave higher and quivering like a frightened bunny. “You have taken my weaknesses, insecurities, and confessions and used them all against me.” My hands were shaking, I could barely read what I had written. “I won’t ever let you near my heart again,” I said, and I threw my notebook across the floor as if it were on fire.
“Good work,” I heard Richard say.
I felt completely exposed, as though my clothes had been suddenly stripped away. “Do you want to take the bat and beat the cushion?” Charlotte asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m okay.”
“Do you want to sque
eze my hands and scream?”
I did want to. “I don’t,” I said a little too loudly. Then, softer, “I just don’t. I’m sorry.”
When it was time to break for dinner I called my father from the client phone. It was the first time I’d called since getting to the Ledge. “I need to talk to you about something,” I said after he answered. “Do you have a minute?”
There was silence on the other end. “Dad?”
He coughed, then cleared his throat. “Ash just put dinner on the table.”
I could sense he didn’t know what to do, that he was afraid of upsetting me, but more concerned about upsetting Ash. His uncertainty made me want to scream. “Fine,” I said, “so, we’ll talk next week, then?”
“Yeah,” he stammered. “Okay.”
I hung up and stepped out of the booth. Molly, Alex, and Greg were all huddled around the ping-pong table. They immediately stopped talking when they noticed me. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing really,” Greg stammered. “We were just saying how pissed you got, reading that letter. It was pretty shocking!”
“So you were talking about me behind my back?”
“No,” Molly chimed in. “We just—”
“You know, I really don’t need this right now.” I turned around, opened the door that led outside, and slammed it behind me. As I trudged into the woods, I could hear Molly calling out my name. I kept going. Everything inside me was beating: my heart, my chest, my throat. This wasn’t normal: I shouldn’t have gotten so upset, I shouldn’t have lost control the way I did. I needed help, I thought to myself, and then remembered that I was getting help. But it just didn’t feel like I was getting any better. I thought of that slogan: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I never confessed; I just hoped the feelings would go away. But instead they spread like a disease, rushing through my veins and lining my stomach until I felt nauseated. I then stopped and stood still as another slogan seeped into my head: Secrets keep us sick.