As a diversion, I dived into his lap, unzipped his pants, and took his cock in my mouth, almost gagging before I got it in, gagging at the very idea. To my surprise—and embarrassment—it wasn’t very hard. Nor was it very big—somewhat small and gnarled, in fact, with a strange kink in the middle. Nevertheless, I sucked away dutifully, trying to ignore its salty taste. He panted but seemed to be having trouble coming, and my jaw was aching and my throat gaping before he let out a little moan and filled my mouth with viscous slime.
The bitter, metallic taste made me heave, bringing tears to my eyes. I couldn’t swallow. (I’d done it before, yes. But that was before, when I would swallow anything.) Without raising my head from lap level, I pushed myself across his knees, feeling for the door handle in the dark. The door opened so abruptly that we both almost fell out. But I held on to the edge of the seat with both hands, stuck my head out, and half spat, half vomited, my mouthful into the gutter.
Now, back in my room, I feel the same gag reflex thinking about the tubes. The tubes: if I don’t eat these flakes. (How do they make them, I wonder—each one, if you look carefully, as rugged and pitted as a rock face.) I will eat them, I decide (five pounds and out), one by one, with my fingers, without milk (a whole enormous bowl of sodden mush is out of the question). By the time I reach flake number fifty-one, I feel sick, distended, filled with a dry, choking nausea. That’s it; that is it. Surely I must be on my way to—god, seventy pounds, perhaps even more. My heart is racing, my gut obscenely tight; a silent wail of panic wells up in me. Placing the tray on the other bed, I close the curtains around mine, roll over on my side, curl up, and yield to a black paralysis.
My toe shoes are very shiny, my mouth blood-dark. Attired as a nymph, I pick my way delicately over the shattered glass—no, they’re only snowflakes, ice crystals (but beware, they can travel to the heart and lodge there). The aroma of rosin intoxicates me; the lights are blindingly hot and white; beyond them, a velvet murmur. With a flourish, I unfurl a long, pale leg; my arm swims through space to hold me up. I could stay there forever, my being poised upon a single point, but the music tells me it’s time to come down, to gather for the final leap. This time I know I can do it. The audience seems to sense something, too; the darkness draws in its breath. I coil, I spring, and it happens: I’m strong and spare enough to soar, to keep soaring, my arched front foot slicing space like the head of an arrow. Up, up, buoyed by the air, buffeted through the flies, past the startled stagehands, and out into the infinite night, while the audience, amazed and then afraid, waits in vain for me to reappear.
“Would you like to take a look at today’s paper?” she’s asking brightly, rustling it in a way that scrapes all the nerves in my brainpan.
“No thanks,” I say (what do I care, people dying and killing each other) though perhaps I should glance at the business section for Macro. I ask her what day it is (the day nurse versus the night nurse, blue now behind bars).
“Tuesday,” she says, “the seventeenth.” I don’t ask of what month, in case she reports me to the doctor.
Tuesday: the food section.
“OK, hurl it on over.”
I turn immediately to the restaurant review.
Translucent slivers of scallop have the texture
of firm custard,
with a frothy oceanic flavor.
The veal chop is tempting, too,
thick and tender.
Try the juicy breasts of squab,
the succulent grilled quails
brushed
with hazelnut vinaigrette—
or a sole’s
snowy, crisp-skinned flesh.
It’s poetry: the only kind I read, tasting each word on my tongue.
The saltiness from the ham plays
seductively
off the sweet cognac.
Don’t miss the silken artichoke mousse,
boosted by a lusty black truffle sauce;
or the brittle lid of sautéed potatoes
atop
meltingly tender fruits de mer—
a rousing combination.
No, it’s pornography.
I read it again, then one more time, then throw the paper on the floor. Perhaps I should try to study instead. I haven’t even looked at the books I brought with me. I can’t concentrate: it’s the drugs, it’s the fear, it’s my belly swelling up and drawing blood from my brain. It’s bad enough trying to study at home, where constant restlessness agitates my bones, but there at least I can stay up all night. Here they make me go to bed even though I can’t sleep, and during the day they wheel me around, prod me, puncture me. Even when I’m alone, I can’t think straight because anticipation of the next meal tray gnaws at my mind.
Time to weigh myself down with heavy books, arrange them around me on the bed cover so they will hold me down, keep me in place, prevent me from expanding sloppily, yeastily, over the edges. The Topology book has a glossy red cover, like lipstick, like lollipops: I would like to put it to my mouth and lick it. But I open it instead. Topology: the study of those properties of figures that remain unchanged even when under distortion, so long as no surfaces are torn. No surfaces are torn, but there are tiny pinpricks all over my arms and a hole in my heart, where a thin wind whistles through.
“Psychotherapy is not useful to starving individuals,” says Dr. Frog. “So I’m just here to see how you’re doing, to chat.”
I say nothing but stare into my Topology text, as if the marks on the page meant something to me. I have no desire to converse with anyone, least of all a frog. It seems ironic that those trying to regulate my diet are themselves in need of a little self-control: this doctor, for instance, has quite a belly erupting over his belt. I focus on that and try to imagine him naked, with this mound of pale flab jiggling as he moves. I wonder if he’s married—of course he would be, to some lumpy middle-aged lady: I envision their doughy coupling, his tired dick poking into her wobbly thighs. The image makes me giggle; for comparison, I caress my own elegant limb, nothing but muscle and tendon and bone.
He seems to be waiting for me to say something, so I inform him: “I ate my breakfast. I ate fifty-one flakes.”
“Good, Josie,” he says, “it’s a start. But we still have a long way to go.”
I still have a long way to go—no excess baggage, no deposit, no return—but I’m not going to talk to him about that. He wants to drag me down, bury me in flesh, obscure the clear, sharp lines of my self. He wants to take me back to the days when, driven by a ravening restlessness, I would roam the streets looking for something to devour. The nightmarish days, before I learned control.
“Maybe,” I say.
“What?” he asks, confused. (How much time has passed?)
“Maybe we have a long way to go still.” Or maybe I’ll just vanish before your eyes.
“I’m not sure what you mean by that, Josephine,” he responds, carefully.
No, you wouldn’t, would you. How could a person like you understand a person like me? Perhaps, like the rest of them, you would like to whip out your dick and probe me with that, thermometer-style, to find my core temperature, the deep, red heart of things. Everything else is cold and blue, betraying nothing.
Dicks I have seen in my day: let’s take them out, boys, and line them up on the examining table. A blunt-headed, bluish thing, shifting and drifting in response to the bathwater’s private tidal system (“Next time, please knock”). Then something like a tusk nudging my thighs; an insistent, perpetually engorged one; a broad one with a bruised mushroom head; another one I never saw, and barely felt; the small, serviceable one, veering slightly to one side; the gnarled one, with a kink.
From all of them, though, the same slime (9 calories per teaspoon).
Halibut
(with cream, of course)
on baby vegetables.
Linguine coupled with sweet young clams
and tender squid.
Bite into the plump shrimp-and-scallop dumplin
g
and watch the juice spurt out.
The chocolate cake is hauntingly rich,
(so dark and sweet)
with a lingering
afterglow.
Time to run. I cannot lie here any longer and listen to my body decompose; run in place, fast, faster, until nothing matters but lifting the next foot, filling the burning lungs with air, fighting off the urge to drop like a stone.
Think of nothing: keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going.
Just in time, I hear the clattering food cart stop outside my door, and throw myself, panting, back onto the bed. This time I am not going to eat anything at all. (But the tubes.) On the menu card, I asked for a tomato, knowing they wouldn’t give it to me, so I’m curious to see what she has brought instead.
“Hi, Josie,” she beeps, “lunchtime.”
I don’t respond, staring instead at the cover of my Topology text (how I’d love to lick it, so candy-apple sweet).
“And after lunch,” she continues, “I’m going to introduce you to our art therapist.”
It’s hard to suppress a snort. “I don’t need ‘art therapy,’” I tell her. “I have plenty to do here”—indicating the Topology text. “Besides,” I say, “therapy is not helpful to starving individuals.”
She looks at me sharply but says nothing.
I look at the tray, merely for the record, as I have no intention of eating anything. Some scarlet soup, with archipelagoes of oil. A big glass of milk.
What would your reaction be if you were driving down some country lane and you happened to see a well-dressed man or woman down on his or her knees suckling from a cow? Would you make your way through the droppings and go right up to a cow and take the milk directly from her udder? No? But you will let someone else get it and bring it to you in a glass, right?
An orange (50 calories) and a banana (100 calories). And a GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICH. Cheese is the hardest food to digest and it contaminates everything you eat it with. Enough grease and fat and cholesterol to kill me. That seems to be the plan: to choke me with food, to fill my veins with waxy death.
“I want a Tab,” I tell the nurse.
“We don’t allow Tab, Josie, as I’ve already told you. The dietician doesn’t think artificial sweeteners are good for people. Also, as we explained, the idea is to eat a normal diet.”
“I want a Tab,” I say.
“Sorry, Josie.”
“I want a Tab.”
She’s not going to play, I can tell. But I’ll win, when she comes back for the lunch tray and finds it untouched (though maybe I could save the orange, just in case; no, I don’t want to give her the satisfaction). In the meanwhile, I’ll just lie here, flat on my back, fingering my perfect bones.
I think of all the things I will never eat again. All the flavors so fragrant on the tongue: cinnamon and coffee and clove; apricot, raspberry, nectarine, and rye; ginger and chocolate, nutmeg and pear; almond, guava, sorrel, and plum; butternut, hazelnut, tangerine, thyme.
Tangerine, thyme. Time to tango. But the air is too thick and it’s hard to tango lying flat on your back. Besides, it takes two.
Raising my robe to thigh level, I turn my legs out at the hip sockets, in ballet’s first position, and lie there, a dancer on my back, like the magician’s spangled, air-suspended accomplice. I lift one leg in the air, the foot elegantly arched, and admire the tense tendons, the sharply etched shinbone, the long, fibrous quadriceps. With a flat palm, I hit the back of my thigh and something quivers; I hit it again and again, harder and harder, watching it quiver, hitting and hitting until my palm stings, hitting and hitting, harder and harder. I’m panting now and my throat is choked; why not just run to the tray and devour everything on it, cram it in, shove it down this spiraling tunnel, keep shoveling to prevent the wail from making its way out? It’s not fair, after all I’ve done, that this body, this bag of blood and blubber, should so insidiously soften, so stubbornly refuse to hold firm.
This is what happens when you think about anything else for a moment: the body seizes its chance and sags.
But I can stop it. Down on the floor again, hands beneath my lower back to protect my spine, I lift both legs off the ground, turn them out, point my feet, and open and close them slowly, repeatedly, like scissors. Two hundred of these, at least, maybe more, since I haven’t taken ballet class in a week. Three hundred.
This is, after all, my body.
“So you just take it like this and squeeze,” she says, manipulating the ball of clay in a big, broad hand. “Go ahead, squeeze.”
She must be kidding, this large woman in a grubby smock (even such a loose garment can’t conceal her fat belly, sectioned by her belt and bulging out under her bra). She wants me, sitting up in bed with a battered wooden tray over my lap, to take a ball of dirty-looking clay and squeeze it.
“What for?” I ask. I cannot imagine taking my dry, brittle hand from under the blanket, putting it on a ball of clammy earth, and squeezing.
“It’s fun,” she says. “It feels good. You soften it up a bit and then you can make something with it.”
“I don’t want to make anything.”
“Sure you do.”
I just lie here, looking at this ball of dirt, pitted like a planet. If I squeezed it, it would squeeze back; it would ooze between my fingers; it would insinuate itself beneath my nails. I could stuff it all into my mouth and be full forever, like someone buried alive whose intestines are later discovered filled with dirt.
I cannot bring myself to touch it. She squeezes and kneads it some more, and then slaps it down against the tray, her eyes inviting me to try, as if I were a dog that must learn through mimicry. I’m afraid that if I don’t do anything, she will reach over, take my hand in her clayey grasp, and force it on to this lump of matter. So I take out my left hand and with the index finger pick off a tiny piece, about the size of a dime. Not knowing what else to do, I roll it, like snot, under my fingertip; it makes a thin strand, slightly thicker in the middle, about an inch long. She’s watching me, but I don’t want to meet her eyes. With my fingernail, I sever the strand in two pieces so that one is about twice as long as the other. Then I take the shorter and place it across the longer, about a third of the way down.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“It’s a person, can’t you see.”
“Only one leg and no head?” she asks, teasing.
“It’s an abstraction,” I reply, wanting to cry. I pick up the ball of clay—it’s warmer and grittier than I expected—and smash it down on my person. Then I hand her the tray and say, “Thanks, that’s enough now.”
When she’s gone, I pace, rubbing my filthy hands together. I’m suddenly afraid that all my hair has fallen out, so I alternate rubbing my hands with touching my head to assure myself that it’s still there. Then I’m afraid that anyone seeing me would think me deranged, but the rhythm has taken on a life of its own: I can’t stop rubbing and touching and pacing.
I need a mirror. I have no idea what I look like, because what I look like depends on which mirror I’m looking in. In the ballet studio, all four walls are paneled with mirrors, but each is slightly different, so I always stand in front of the one that elongates me, Modigliani-like. The next panel, which I avoid, compresses me into a troll.
In class, at the break between barre and center, when we’re supposed to be stretching, I always sit in one particular corner, where the mirrors meet. The other women use this time to gulp water, wipe sweat off their rank bodies, gather on the floor to gossip and to strain, grunting, as they reach for their feet. I’m cool, immaculate, without a drop of sweat. Sometimes, yes, there’s a speedy, shaky dizziness, an acrid dryness in the mouth, but I won’t even take a sip of water until class is over, until I’m home, until I’ve showered. Then I’ve earned it.
When someone opens a window, I pointedly close it; the others are always hot because they’re swathed in fat, but I’m always cold. I don’t ask anyone, I don’
t look at anyone, I just get up and slam the window shut.
I sit in the corner where the mirrors meet, my back to the rest of the class, the soles of my feet meeting like hands in prayer. And I stare, without blinking, straight ahead, as if meditating on something mysterious. (I could never bring myself to join their idle chatter: how would I ever break in? what would be the “natural” thing to say?) Aloof, on a higher plane altogether, I stare straight ahead—at my reflection, at the reflection of my reflection, at the reflection of that reflection.
I haven’t seen myself from head to foot since I got here: all I’ve seen is a haggard, grayish face in the bathroom’s institutional glare, which etches deep grooves around my mouth. I know that can’t be me: my own mirror tints me hazel and ivory and rose. On the streets, anxiously scanning store windows and parked cars, I don’t always recognize the waif peering back (such a sharp frown, such black shadows under the eyes). Three-way mirrors in department stores offer shocking glimpses of unfamiliar, puckered flesh—someone else’s, surely, left behind by the last customer? And the hall closet, which I hate, stores a bulbous dwarf, my jeering Doppelgänger.
I pick up a knife from the dinner tray and examine my eyes in its blade, then my lips (mauve, with mulberry scabs where the skin’s chewed off).
How will I ever know what I look like?
I can’t eat another mouthful until I’ve weighed and measured myself, until I’ve looked at myself in all the positions I’ve developed, like an inverse bodybuilder, to display each part. Only I know what kind of shape this body is in, only I can appreciate its various perfections. What lover, in his urgent rush to ram himself into me, could properly appreciate what I have created here—the lean skid of the flank, the poignant ridging of the rib cage, the tiny bones of the feet?
As the diet book says: “Make your scale your best friend and your lover” Its cold metal embrace and—in emergencies—my own apprenticed hand: no need, ever, for the lewd rubbing of one carcass against another.
4
SOMETHING is eating me. Gnawing away with tiny rodent teeth, nibbling blank spaces around the edges of my consciousness, making it impossible for me to think a whole thought, one thought at a time, all the way through. She’s wheeling me to be weighed, but I can’t focus on what she’s saying: there are lapses, blackouts, as if someone is playing with the sound on a remote control somewhere. Perhaps it’s something to do with the acoustics of this corridor, airless and muffled, a seemingly endless stretch of shiny avocado floor and intermittent doors, some ajar, offering split-second glimpses of someone else’s pain. Or perhaps it’s the constant “ping” and “paging Dr. So-and-So.”
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