Perhaps the tubes would be better, because then I would have no choice.
She’s watching me.
I can’t eat with someone else watching me.
“I can’t eat with someone else watching me.”
“I’m not watching you—I’m just here. And one of the things you have to relearn, Josie, is how to eat in public.”
I won’t. I can’t. Eating is private; only the body is public.
My hands—purple, pitiful, the way I like them—are shaking as I pick up the spoon. The psychology student ought to be here now, the one who wired me to electrodes to measure my “anxiety level” when confronted with food. She (earnest, sallow, smelling of stale coffee and unwashed hair) placed electrodes on my forehead, my chest, my leg, my thumb, and my stomach, where I’m softest, most vulnerable. These black probes, jellied against resistance, are supposed to measure heart rate, skin conductivity, blood flow, sweatiness, and such: this is, of course, how a lie detector works. Also sexual intercourse. Naturally I was tense: I was afraid to breathe in case one of the attachments came loose. Then she gave me a questionnaire about how I felt at that moment. Rate your feelings of tension, satisfaction, optimism, dread, hunger (ennui, apathy, absence, despair, numbness, vacancy, void). Write down your most prominent thought. My most prominent thought: why am I being asked to write down my most prominent thought?
Look at these landscape paintings and rate your response on a scale of 1 to 9. Look at these cartoons and rate your response. Look at this Snickers bar and rate your . . . ha! fooled you. Your heart leapt (see the graph). Now eat it. Yes, right now. See, she can’t. She’s too anxious.
My hands are shaking and I cannot pick up the spoon. The nurse is pretending to be absorbed in a People magazine (how Liz lost it, how Oprah did), but I know she’s really watching me. I want to start on the cantaloupe, to show good faith, but I can’t. I picture my stomach, a tiny, fisted pouch: these substances, these chunks of alien matter, don’t belong in there. They belong out in the world, where they are—other.
“I can’t,” I say.
“Yes you can, Josie—just take one bite of the oatmeal.”
It’s mucus, it’s slime, it’s snot. “It’s cold by now.”
“No it’s not, just give it a try.”
I dip the spoon into the slime—one spoonful, maybe 15 calories. How reluctantly the glaucous mouthful pulls away, adhering to the rest in glutinous strands. I open my mouth, but something fails, some neuron doesn’t fire, and I remain frozen, agape.
She’s starting to get annoyed, I can tell. She puts the magazine down decisively and says, “Josie, cut out the nonsense now and just eat.”
“I can’t,” I say, which is the truth. And then before I realize it, I have said the next sentence: “I want you to feed me.”
Among the Bemba, mothers squeeze the red juice from certain fruits onto their breasts; the juice looks like blood and frightens the child. Tonga mothers in southern Africa wean a child by covering their breasts with pepper; in Iran, children are told that a witch has eaten the mother’s breasts, which by way of proof are shown smeared with a black substance.
“Don’t be silly, Josie. You’re not a baby.”
“Please.”
“Josie, I can’t.”
She’s dragging me across the carpet; with my teeth and nails I flail at her ankles, missing and screaming, screaming and screaming. Only one desire consumes me: to rend her flesh. She’s panting with exertion, perhaps she’ll have a heart attack, her face is flushed and oily, her teeth clenched; with her free hand she’s whacking in the direction of my face: “Think you’re . . . so . . . smart, don’t you. . . . Think you’re . . . better . . . than everybody . . . else. . . . Think you . . . can do whatever . . . you . . . like . . .” I manage to get back on to my feet, my knees skinned and bleeding, yelling and sobbing breathlessly. “Let me GO you cow let me GO you fat bitch I’ll kill you let me GO.” There’s a soundless roar all through my body, a pounding, vertiginous abandon, and I launch myself toward her, embracing her cushiony flesh, obscene in its damp plenitude. Wherever I can reach, I dig my fingers in—the pads of the upper arms, the rolls of the back, even the puffy wrists—and twist and gouge and rend, grunting and sobbing, choking through my spastic jaw. She’s flailing but she’s too clumsy to connect; she’s off-balance, screaming, and I’m going to push her over. With vicious, delirious fear—what will happen next? can I really kill her?—I shove, and she lands beetle-style on her back, the air escaping in a sound somewhere between a whoof and a wail. I’m too far gone now to stop—a violent electrical swarm buzzes through me, from somewhere deep between the ribs—but part of my brain still registers, appalled. I’m going to kick her, hard, wherever I can reach, kick and kick until she shuts up, until she disappears, until she leaves me alone, I’m kicking at her resilient haunches, working up courage to go for her face, it’s not much fun, she’s screaming and trying to curl up, I’m hoarse and dizzy, my throat hurts, every muscle aches, I’m not sure how much longer this frenzy can sustain itself.
Obesity never made it easy to take care of a household and a bunch of screaming youngsters.
“There. I knew you could do it.”
It was sickening: three spoonfuls of cold, gluey porridge. But I did it—slowly, with a pounding heart, with something squeezing at my throat, I did it.
“Now try some of the toast, Josie.”
“I can’t eat that . . . butter.”
“Just a little—look, spread it on and then scrape most of it off if you like, but just try a little. A small amount like this can’t possibly hurt.” With her strong, freckly hand, she butters the toast and then scrapes efficiently, but I can still see white grease in the blackened pores. Then she holds it out to me, a whole piece, an enormous tilted plane (about 100 calories, counting the—grease; for some reason, even to think the word butter seems obscene, lewd and oily on the tongue).
“I have to cut it up first.”
“OK, but only halves or quarters.”
I cut it into quarters, diagonally, and then pick up one of the resulting almost-equilateral triangles by one point. Can I really eat this much? A quarter of a hundred is only twenty-five, but I’ve already eaten all that oatmeal, and she’s going to expect me to eat the melon and drink the juice, too. I nibble at one point, rodent-style, and then put it down. She’s still looking at the People magazine and has even slowed her brisk, noisy page flipping—she seems to have found something she wants to read: I wonder what —but I can feel that the force field of her attention still includes me. So I nibble some more, mainly for show, but a larger chunk than I had anticipated breaks off in my mouth, which I then find myself compelled to chew. To masticate, another obscene word. The chewing seems very loud and crunchy, embarrassingly so, so I stop. She looks up, eyebrows lifted. I put what’s left of the toast triangle back on the plate. That’s it for today.
“Are we going to have to go through this every meal from now on?” I ask.
She nods matter-of-factly, scrunches her mouth. “Yup.”
“Don’t you get bored?”
“Nope. It’s my job.”
“Pretty boring job, if you ask me.”
A shrug. “I like it.”
“Why?” I’m stalling, but I’m also slightly curious about why anyone would do this—wheel sullen people around, try to stuff food into them, pretend to care whether they live or die.
“It’s good to help people get healthy again.”
“Even if they aren’t sick to begin with?”
She looks puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, forget it.” I’m tired of explaining. In fact, I’m just tired, I realize, terribly tired and increasingly nauseated; all I want to do is flop back on the pillows. I start pushing the tray away, but she puts her hand out gently to stop it.
“Uh-uh, Josie. The deal is you have to eat at least some of everything on the tray.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. I can’t. Leave it
here, and I’ll have some more later.”
“Josie, don’t be a pain. Just have a little of that melon, a few sips of juice, and then I’ll take the tray away.”
“Haven’t you got anything else to do with yourself?” I say petulantly, playing up my pique, playing for time. I don’t want to eat, but I don’t want her to go away either.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” she says, sharply. “You’re not the only patient on this floor, you know.”
“Who else? Who else is here?”
“Well, you might meet some of them, in group therapy, once we get you up to a functioning weight and out of here. Group therapy’s part of the outpatient care.”
“Group therapy? You must be out of your mind. There’s no way, no way in hell—”
“OK, OK, we don’t have to discuss that now. You’re still a long way from that. Now have a little melon, Josephine, please.”
I don’t respond, but a few minutes later, when she’s absorbed in People again, I scoop myself a teaspoonful, very deliberately gouging the vivid flesh.
7
SHE WANTS ME to eat straight glucose, one hundred grams of it, mixed with egg and milk. I tell her I will vomit, that the very thought of it makes me retch. She says, “No you won’t, my dear, just give it a try.” I’m back with the shriveled endocrinologist, whose own hormones seem to have quit on her, leaving her dry, grasshoppery.
“I can’t possibly.”
“Sure you can. Go ahead and try.”
It’s white, sticky, revolting-looking stuff. I take a tentative sip and gag: it’s sweeter than anything I’ve ever tasted, putridly, chokingly sweet.
“See, it’s not so bad.”
This is the kind of talk that makes me sick. Why does everybody have to be so condescending, as if I were a child? Why don’t they recognize my strength: how much it’s taken to make so little of myself?
But the nurse is there, and I want to demonstrate my new cooperative attitude (otherwise, the tubes), so I try to force more down, fighting my throat’s convulsive closing. I manage about half the beakerful before I yield to nausea, a raw, sickly thirst. Sinking back in the chair, eyes closed, I shake my head, afraid even to begin calculating the number of calories I just swallowed.
Then she has to take blood, struggling again to find a vein, manhandling my fragile, hairy arms. I don’t look, I keep my eyes tightly closed. At first the sting comes every fifteen minutes, then every half hour, then every hour. I’m afraid to lose so much blood, I’m dizzy, but she assures me in her patronizing way that the amount of blood drawn is minuscule: “Not enough to make anyone’s head swim, I promise you.” Then why is mine swimming?
The purpose of this vampire feast is, allegedly, to measure the levels of a hormone that makes one feel full. I can feel full of emptiness, satisfied with nothing: what hormone determines that?
“Absolutely not. She’s only thirteen.”
“But Michael—”
“It’s out of the question, Virginia.”
“But Michael—”
“The answer is no.”
“Michael! Will you listen a moment? All the other girls are going to be there. Carol’s parents will be there. There’ll be supervision, it won’t be just—”
“Boys. She’s too young to go to a party with boys.”
“No she’s not, Michael. All the other girls are going.”
“Well, she’s not all the other girls. There’ll be plenty of time for boys later.”
But later that night, behind the bedroom door, my mother won on my behalf. She wanted me to be “normal.” She wanted to buy me a new dress.
I wore something short and frightful, with bright yellow shoes. In this floral ensemble (daisies everywhere, daisy earrings), my legs were short and stubby, leading nowhere. My hair was tortured into a ponytail; thick, monochrome make-up threw pores and pimples into pasty relief; chalky blue-pink coated my lips like an unhealthy tongue. My eyes were ringed and spoked with black, a doll’s painted sockets with fearful blank orbs.
It had taken me three hours to achieve this effect.
Carol’s basement had been transformed—ruby light bulbs, piles of cushions in corners, and posters that glowed black-green in the dark—but as soon as I walked in, I knew I had not. Neither had the boys, who leaned against the walls in small clusters, affecting nonchalance, though (if I’d known how to read it) hormonal havoc was written all over their lurid skins. The girls, eyes roving, commented on each other’s outfits, stuffing in potato chips and fruit punch when conversation failed.
As soon as the music started, these two species would pair off and spring into self-conscious, spasmodic motion, avoiding each other’s eyes and disbanding again when the needle reached the blank grooves at the end of the song. Few words were exchanged, until the grappling began.
Weary of standing there—an eyesore with sore feet— I withdrew to the den, where I scanned The New Yorker and hoped some soul mate would find me.
Within the normal range?
Calcium and potassium levels: within the normal range.
Other vital minerals: ditto (surprisingly enough— though this proves my point about the body: how little it really needs).
Iron: within the normal range (not bleeding it away, dark and wasted, every month).
Liver: normal.
Heart: normal?
Everything normal? How can that be? Surely my survival is miraculous? Surely extremity can be read in the blood?
But then, at last, chloride level: dangerously low.
Fasting glucose level: low. This means, she tells me, that I’m producing too much insulin. “So that’s why you feel hungry even after you’ve just eaten.”
“But I don’t,” I tell her.
She just looks at me.
“I don’t,” I insist.
She shrugs.
I never feel hungry, as I’ve already told her, nor do I ever feel tired, thirsty, or cold. Above all, I never cry—though I used to. It took me a short, stormy detour, between numb childhood and now, to become untouchable again. Now I know nothing can harm me, that I can withstand any kind of want.
Most women live their lives in a state of starvation. Why should I be any different?
I’d had my suitcase packed for three days, smoothing and refolding its contents (colorful shorts and halter tops; a new white bathing suit, consisting mostly of holes), but when the car crunched into the driveway, shyness overwhelmed me. I heard the doorbell, followed by a falsely animated adult exchange, and then my mother’s voice: “Josie! Josephine! Where is that child? I swear, she’s been ready all morning, driving me crazy, and then the moment you arrive, she disappears. Josie!”
Yelling, “OK, OK, I’m coming!” I clattered down the stairs, bumping my case behind me. There she was: a taller, somehow stretched-out stranger. Her hair was longer, her face thinner. We made as if to hug each other, then stopped, shy.
It was her first summer back from boarding school. Picking up, perhaps, the radar of my longing, she had invited me to spend a month at their beach house.
In the car, under her father’s jovial chatter, we stole sidelong glances at each other. She wore no make-up, except for a touch of rose on the lips—but then she didn’t need to, with her flawless golden skin. She wore a cotton skirt and soft-washed sky blue blouse that made my outfit, fresh from this month’s Seventeen, seem garish all of a sudden. She rolled the car windows all the way down and leaned out into the restless, sparkling air; I held my hair down with my hands.
At the beach, we shared a bedroom, a bungalow, really, away from the main house. While I was unpacking my snazzy vacation wardrobe—even more incongruous in this summer house atmosphere of faded bed linens, mismatched chairs, and dresser drawers that stuck, swollen with salty damp—she disappeared into the house with her mother, who’d been down for a couple of days, “opening up.”
It had been a long drive, and I was hungry, headachy.
I sat down on one of the beds (it sank al
armingly), thumbing through an old Reader’s Digest from the bleached-out pile beside it. I didn’t know whether she was going to come back out to get me, or whether I would have to wander over to the house and look for her. Everything suddenly seemed a problem in etiquette. It never had before, when, flushed and giggling from some private game, we would stampede through the house, or yell for each other across cool, darkened halls.
Unsure what to do, I consulted the mirror, mottled and yellowish, eating away at my image from the edges. I took out my tweezers and plucked a few hairs, though I’d already given my brows a good going-over before leaving home. I squeezed at an incipient pimple, bringing tears to my eyes. I combed my hair again, parting it dead center, taking three tries to get it perfect. I applied another coat of pink lip color. She still didn’t come, so I put on my sandals and went out to look for her.
I found them in the big, slate-floored kitchen, she and her mother, setting out olives and cheese on toothpicks, to be nibbled with drinks on the porch before dinner. Amanda Jane had two brothers, eighteen and twenty, who occasionally put in an appearance at this hour, sun-flushed, freshly showered, and crisply dressed for their evening’s foray into town. Otherwise, we hardly saw them: they inhabited a parallel universe (cars, girlfriends, private jokes), sleeping late and spending their days on a different beach.
I sat down at the kitchen table, where Manda was chopping smoked Gouda into cubes. Without thinking, I scooped up a few in my palm and stuffed them in my mouth before she had a chance to impale them. Then I picked an English digestive biscuit off the cheese plate and crunched that as well. She looked at me oddly.
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