I’m eating ground glass from a silver spoon: it’s as delicate as spun sugar or shaved ice. As I swallow, the ecstatic friction begins, warmth welling up at the back of my throat and announcing its arrival, savory, on the tongue. I smile slightly: my lips turn vivid red from the inside out, my skin chalk-pale (with my dark hair, I’m Snow White, I’m an image floating up from a Pre-Raphaelite lake). My smile widens and a gush of hot blood runs out.
“How beautiful she is, doctor.”
“Yes. And she’ll never eat again.”
Dr. Frog is not happy. He wants to see a lot more “meat on my bones,” and soon. (Meat. Am I to resemble a pork chop? A leg of lamb? A bloody, dripping steak tartare?)
“We’re going to hold off on the hyperalimentation,” he explains, hunched forward in his chair, his small, chubby hands working, “because we really hate to do that—it’s a last resort. But if we don’t see some significant improvement in nutrition—and a weight gain of at least five pounds—we’re going to have to do something. The choice is yours, Josie.”
I say nothing, focusing on his hooded, baggy eyelids, the slight croak in his voice.
“Tell me something, Josephine,” he asks, in a confidential tone, leaning even farther forward in fake bonhomie. “What were mealtimes like in your house, when you were younger?”
Mealtimes. Perfectly normal, doc.
I would always arrive a little late, a few minutes after the bell had sounded. My mother, my father, and my brother would already be at the table, unrolling their napkins, filling their water goblets, with the maid discreetly setting down the last few dishes. As the others helped themselves, I would take my place, filling my glass to exactly three-quarters and taking dainty sips as they heaped their plates. I wouldn’t look at them; they resolutely avoided looking at me. As the lids came off the serving dishes, sickening steam escaped, the various smells of matter: mealy (baked potatoes), grassy (green peas, congregating plumply like alien life-forms), bloody (chunks of mutilated muscle and fat, seared in a watery seepage).
Shaking my head primly at each dish, I would continue sipping until my mother—always—could stand it no more. “Josie!” she would burst out. “Aren’t you going to eat anything?”
Coldly, triumphantly: “No thanks, I’m not hungry.”
“But you must eat something,” she would continue, two deep vertical lines scoring her oily brow, as if we had never had this conversation before. “I made all these veggies specially for you.”
“But I’m not hungry.” Another deliberate sip.
A deep sigh, and she would begin shoveling food into her mouth, stuffing in more before the previous mouthful was properly chewed. Avoiding her eye, my father concentrated on his plate, his long, delicate hands slicing the lamb. My brother, absently making tracks with his fork in his food, buttering his bread so thickly that each bite left toothmarks, was always somewhere else, his gray-green-blue eyes vacant and dreamy.
When I felt the beam of their attention wane a little— Dad might ask Anthony something about soccer or school—I would go into the kitchen and fetch myself a whole tomato, returning to place it exactly in the center of the blue and white dinner plate. The tension would increase again, though nobody would look at me directly. Excising its woody navel first, I would cut the tomato into four equal pieces and line them up, side by side, on the plate. Then I would take precisely half a teaspoon of mayonnaise from the silver dish; using knife and fork surgically, I would cut a tiny mouthful of tomato—it had to be pale and underripe, no oozing—dip it lightly in the mayonnaise, and transfer it to my mouth. By the time the others had wolfed down their second helpings, I would still be working on my tomato. Finishing, finally, I would close my knife and fork, bisecting the plate. Then and only then would my mother ring for the maid; as she cleared away the plates, I would ask to be excused.
“Won’t you at least have some fruit, Jo? I bought some beautiful ripe peaches.”
“No thanks, I’m not hungry.”
After folding and rolling my napkin in its engraved silver ring, I would head to the kitchen to make my coffee, unable to trust anyone else with the correct proportion of coffee powder to saccharin. Sometimes, in the bright, cluttered disorder, I would surprise the maid scraping out a serving dish and cramming the crispy residue into her mouth. Sometimes, I would surprise in myself an urge to do the same.
“Just normal?” he asks. “No problems, no tension?”
“No, no tension,” I respond. “You know, just sit around, discuss the day’s events, what was happening in the world, family jokes, stuff like that.”
“No fights?”
“No, not really.”
“Not even when you wouldn’t eat?”
“Yeah, well, sure, they were worried, but there wasn’t much they could do. So they just kind of, you know, accepted it.”
He says nothing but looks skeptical (interesting effect on a frog).
She’s dragging me by the hair, my hair is coming out in handfuls, the carpet is burning the skin off my elbows, she’s trying to gouge my eyes with her other hand, with my teeth and nails I flail at her ankles, missing and screaming, screaming and screaming, the fire engine is at the door, false alarm, yes but what is that smell? In a sample of sixty cannibal societies, about thirty-five percent roasted the meat, regardless of whether it came from kin or from strangers. It’s the roast, officer (my daughter, skinned and burning); sorry to have bothered you. Out of twenty-six cannibal societies who ate only their relatives, only two actually boiled them. The cannibals not only unpredictably roasted or boiled relatives and strangers alike; they also baked them, smoked them, or ate them raw. Next time, gag her as well. I will, officer, I will.
As I’m wheeled back from the doctor—Squeaky is chattering away about something; did she really say “Art Therapy”?—I realize I have to make a decision. They seem serious about hyperalimentation—can they do it, against my will? Perhaps I could sue them, drag them through the courts, buy myself some time. They say I am dying, but I know I’ve never been more intensely alive (right now, for instance, how that honeyed square of sunlight on an olive tile pierces my retina, furs the edge of my tongue).
Yet here I am, “voluntarily.” I agreed to come: that is, I didn’t actively resist being put in the car. Sick leave. Leave of absence? You can even study at the hospital—rather, rest home—and come back to take your exams.
A seductive image: myself pale and languid, interestingly blue around the eyes, in a narrow metal bed, pinned down by weighty texts, subsisting on cups of bouillon brought by hushed, tender nurses.
Instead of which, this brisk, freckled woman, this Dr. Frog, these huge plates of food. This threat of force-feeding. I have no idea how it’s done, but my imagination irresistibly summons two fat tubes, one pushed all the way into my mouth, cramming in a thick, lumpy pap, another rammed into my dry cunt, forcing an even denser mix up into the belly, which swells and swells but always takes more, never bursting. The arms, I see, are handcuffed to the bed rails (tiny handcuffs, hospital issue, for wrists like birds’ legs), with a needle in each blue crook and a thinner tube through which drops a heavy red flow: meat. Put some meat on those bones.
At this point, hyperventilating, feeling already the pressure in the mouth, the belly, the veins, I make a decision: I will allow myself to gain the five pounds (five pounds!). I will gain them as quickly as possible—for a week this body will be somebody else’s, I won’t look, I won’t touch—check out of the hospital, and eat nothing until I’m back to sixty-eight pounds. Maybe sixty-five this time, for insurance.
I can’t lie still anymore so I pace around the cell a few times, counting the tiles (every other one, the café au lait ones), trying to factor the total into primes, but I can’t concentrate, so I look around for a mirror, wanting to see what I look like when I’m this agitated. But of course there’s no mirror in here—why not? afraid, when it shatters, that I might open a vein?—so I lie on the cold floor next to the bed and s
tart doing sit-ups.
When she bustles in with the lunch tray, I don’t have time to move so I just stay where I am, flat and limp on the floor. She doesn’t see me at first, looks alarmed, catches sight of me on the floor, draws in her breath, puts down the tray, heads over towards me, and then sees I’m all right. The blood floods abruptly back into her cheeks, but, ever the professional, she tries to keep the annoyance out of her voice.
“Josie, what are you doing down there on the floor? You gave me quite a scare.”
“Nothing. Just lying. Change of scene.”
“Aren’t you cold? At least put on your robe, dear.”
I won’t stand up while she’s there, so I stay where I am, staring at the ceiling, speckled like an eggshell, in other places—near the water pipes, I suppose—encrusted like Camembert. My spine and the two sharp bones at its base feel crushed by their encounter with the floor, but I don’t move. She stands looking at me, hands on hips; if she were wearing a dress, I would be able to see right up it. Instead, from this angle I’m struck by her enormous, looming breasts and a fleshy fold under her chin.
“Josephine, please get up now.”
“I can lie wherever I want.”
“You’re in no physical condition to be lying there on a cold floor.”
I just did two hundred sit-ups and she tells me I’m in no condition! I’m certainly not going to move now. She looks at me; I look at the ceiling; she gives in.
“Well, I don’t have time to stand here and argue with you. You’re not the only patient on this floor, you know.” Momentarily confused, I look around, half expecting to see a fellow inmate, hitherto unnoticed, also flat on her back. “I’ll be back in forty-five minutes to see how you’re doing on your lunch.”
Lunch. Am I really going to eat all of it, as I had planned? I have to gain those pounds, my exit visa. Maybe if I eat everything on the lunch tray, I will gain it all at once. Well, not everything: if there’s dessert, I definitely won’t eat that. No, everything: I must eat everything (not butter, though: I could never eat that), otherwise it’s the tubes, the pap, the meat. I must eat everything and waddle out of this jail to recover myself, to recapture my own clear shape.
Though I have decided this, though Miss Squirt is long gone, I can’t quite make myself get off the floor. A heavy, dreamlike languor has seized me—though my skin is puckered and purpled with cold, though my bones ache. The idea of actually standing up, of resuming the vertical, seems increasingly improbable. How does one become upright again, from flat on one’s back? How does anyone ever figure it out? Where would movement begin—at the head, so heavy and sodden, or at the feet, so lightly elongated? Perhaps the hands, but they seem numb and boneless, with a distant tingle deep inside, as if they were filled with laughing gas. I think I’ll just lie here for a while, feeling the earth roll below me through dense, lonely space.
I’m still lying there—floating and rolling, my long, dark hair adrift in the lunar wind—when she comes back, takes one look at me, squats down beside me, takes my hands (without asking) in her own damp paws, and says, “Come on, now, we’re going to roll up slowly. Take a deep breath and keep your head down as I pull you up.” I unravel upwards, the lunar wind is very loud, laughing gas, zero G, but then she somehow has me sitting on the side of the bed with my head in my lap. She has the nerve to leave her hand on my nape.
“Leave me alone, I’m fine,” I say crossly, rolling over on my side and curling up tightly into a ball. Closed for repairs. “Don’t bug me about the lunch, either,” I add. “I’m going to eat it.”
But I can’t. Even when she has gone and fetched me a fresh bowl of vegetable soup (240 calories) to replace the congealed slime that had grown cold during my space travel, even when she has left me alone again, curtains drawn tightly around the bed, to face this food, I can’t. I’m shaking: there is so much of it—a peanut butter sandwich (350 calories), a bowl of soup, a fruit salad, a glass of milk (140 calories)—and it squats there, daring me to eat it. Forcing me to eat it, forcing me to keep going until I have eaten the waffled bedspread and cream pillowcases as well, the dried flowers on the windowsill, the Vogue magazine, cramming it all insatiably into my mouth.
I must eat. I have to get out of here.
I can’t eat. I’ll die.
I must eat something. The tubes. (Thick stuff, like shit, forced into me.)
Still shaking, I start working on the fruit salad. The life force in fruit is unsurpassed by any other food. The rest, I’ve decided, is out of the question, five pounds or no five pounds. I separate it into piles: browning chunks of apple over here; hard, unripe pieces of melon there; hairy little orange segments; a few white-filmed blueberries, wrinkled like rabbit shit. I decide I will eat only the apple chunks, because nothing else seems possible (hard, hairy, wrinkled), but by the time I’ve cut each chunk into quarters and placed the first one on the spoon, I begin trembling violently, spasmodically, all over, and my gullet closes, opening only when I set the spoon down, in a loud gasp that I recognize, belatedly, as a sob. More come, and more, forced up from somewhere deep inside me, as involuntary as an attack of retching, as strenuous, as inexhaustible.
* * *
DIAGNOSTIC PROFILE
Thank You for Your Voluntary Cooperation
DEMOGRAPHIC INFORMATION
Age: Late industrial capitalism
Sex: Rarely
Race: Opted out
Religious affiliation: None
Marital status: None
Current living situation: Barely
Highest level of education: The Pritikin Program for Diet and Exercise
Highest occupational level: 122 pounds
Current occupation: Wasting away
* * *
3
WAKING UP, I feel huge, my distended limbs spreading in all directions. I have to get out of bed and start running. But first, the inventory, the naming of parts: wrists, knee hollows, quadriceps, outer thighs, inner thighs, iliac crests. The hipbones still arch upward, pure and sharp, but between them—what’s this? a definite swelling, a tautness.
This is what happens, once you start.
I made myself eat a whole tomato and a whole orange last night (the memory sickens me now, so much watery blood). I told them that’s what I wanted, that’s all I would eat, so eventually the night nurse brought it, whisking away the loaded plate in an exaggerated show of pique—the doctor says just this once, to get some calories in, but after that it’s normal food, Josephine, we’re warning you—and now look at me, beached whalelike on this bed.
I can’t continue with the inspection, knowing only too well what I will feel: the heavy, sagging breasts scored with stretch marks; the swollen gut; lumpy gluteals yielding to gravity; wrists coarse; fingers stubby; face like a stupid moon. Dense and polluted, this immense mass of flesh swells like dough as I lie here; raising my hand to the light, I see only my mother’s fat paw.
Day nurse brings in the breakfast tray—the same as yesterday’s—and seems surprised to see me still in bed, sullen and greasy, unable to drag my bloated carcass to its feet, let alone stretch (how would I bend over?), pace, run.
“Sleep well, dear?”
“Would you for god’s sake please stop calling me dear? And I need you to walk me to the bathroom.”
I scrub and scrub but cannot remove the film from my face; even my hair, normally so brittle, seems lank, scummy, this morning.
“Can I take a shower right now?” I ask, panicky.
“No,” she says, “after breakfast, at the usual time.”
“But I have to,” I insist.
“I’m sorry, de—Josie, but you’ll have to wait. Come on back to the ward now”—offering me her arm to hold on to, as if I would ever touch it: meaty and tight, like a sausage.
Swimming slowly back to my room through the green fluorescent air—she is asking about “bowel movements,” what next—I try to remember the last time I actually reached out to touch another perso
n’s flesh. In recent years, fewer and fewer people have dared touch me, fearing, I think, to snap my bones; even my mother, who for years stubbornly offered an awkward embrace (as recommended by the family therapist) eventually gave up, sensing my panic as a mound of inflated flesh enveloped me.
Then a blurred image revisits me, as if from a homemade porno movie. Somebody did touch me, yes, more than a year ago—when I was still in the fat eighties. How could I even have appeared in public like that, let alone lend my limbs to another’s touch?
He was a fellow grad student, a runner, ostentatiously lean, drawn to me, I think, by a sense of our kindred compulsions. By the time I understood what he was after, three margaritas were braying through my blood (750 calories: two days’ starvation) and I couldn’t find the wherewithal to care. So we did it in the car, where I was grateful for the dark, the soon fogged windows, the cramped confusion that precluded any ritual of undressing and appraisal.
Clothes twisted awkwardly, half on and half off, we grappled angrily like gymnasts in heat. His arms were very hard—harder than mine, hairy and bony—and their unforgiving angularity unnerved me. He had my top off and was palpating me, methodically checking the tone of my upper arms, pressing my breasts with flat palms, tracing the corrugations of my ribs with a downward finger. After a while, he whispered, “You feel good,” and I relaxed (I pass! in the dark). But he didn’t: he felt tense and unyielding, no softness anywhere, no contour, no place to rest my head.
Trying to get my jeans off, he succeeded only in twisting them halfway down my thighs, so I couldn’t move. He began rubbing briskly at my sex, hurting me with dry friction on delicate tissue. Although I was somewhat aroused, it was mainly by the feeling of his feeling me, and by knowing, from my own obsessive explorations, exactly what his hand encountered. But he carried on with his scratchy, uninflected rubbing, and I grew bored, then self-conscious, despairing of pleasure.
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