After a while, the fat one on whose bike I had come stood up and went over to the one who had grimaced—a long time ago, in another life. They exchanged a few words, looking in my direction, and then came over to where I sat.
I knew what was about to happen but, in a stupor of disbelief, offered no resistance.
For dinner I eat everything on my plate: corpses, embryos, fluid from mammary glands.
If they had only been served, I would have savored the tongues of larks, the eyes of sheep, eels’ spawn, whales’ stomach contents, and the windpipes of pigs. Rodent fetuses, too, or the favorite dish of Emperor Vitellius, who liked to dine on peacock brain with flamingo tongue, pike’s liver, and—how did they ever find them?—the sex glands of long-suffering lamprey.
For dessert, I treat myself to ground glass, delicate as spun sugar or shaved ice, taking a dainty mouthful off a pointed spoon. As I swallow, the ecstatic friction begins: blood wells warm in the throat, spreading, savory, to the tongue. I smile and a hot gush escapes, meat red.
“That’s my girl,” he says, watching. “Now one more time.”
A common fantasy among young women, so I’m told (the motorcycle gang—how banal). Mine are all pretty classic; Herr Doktor Professor Frog, I mean Freud, would recognize the lot. Dr. Eighty-Bucks-an-Hour was armed with a list (fantasies: domestic, suburban, exotic) when, a year or so later, he labored—at Mother’s behest—to convince me that, of course, I’d imagined it all. (All of it, all.)
So perhaps what really happened was this: we sat around, staring into space, for the rest of the night. At first I was self-conscious, then bored, then desperate to leave. My left buttock began to hurt and then went numb, sending nasty ischemic messages down the leg. My back ached from its contact with the wall. My throat was raw from, I suppose, the smoky air.
Finally I saw Ice Blue Eyes, very stoned, searching all over for his keys. Trying to sound casual, I piped up: “Wanna give me a ride back?”
He looked at me as if he had no idea who I was or what I was doing there. “Back where?”
“To the party we were at. I have to get back there.”
“Why?”
“For my ride home.”
“Jesus Christ, I’m not a taxi service.”
I said nothing but simply followed him out the door.
As I was trying to climb on the back of his bike, hitching my skirt out of the way, I miscalculated and almost pushed both the bike and myself off balance. Reflexively, he put out his hand to steady me, grabbing me at the waist.
“Watch it, chick!”
With his other hand he righted the bike, and we both climbed on, more successfully this time. Just before he started it up, he looked back over his shoulder and said, “A little chubby there, aren’t we?” Or words to that effect (or perhaps that’s what I thought he thought when he touched me).
When I finally got home that evening—“You haven’t started smoking, have you, Josie? Your clothes smell awfully smoky,” my father asked, tentatively—I stood before the full-length mirror for a long time. I tried, in various poses, to see what anyone looking at me might see. I sat down in front of the glass, noting how the waistband bit into my belly. I tried to see what someone taller would see, looking down on me. I even tried to see what I looked like when I wasn’t being looked at. But mainly—obsessively, repeatedly—I placed my own hand on my waist, where his had been.
It was true: above the band of my skirt, even when I was standing, there was a palpable, rubbery bulge.
9
“I’M GOING ON A DIET,” I announced at dinner the next night—after dinner, to be precise, when dessert appeared, reminding me. (Strawberries with whipped cream—it was the season.)
For most of man’s fifty million years on earth, we have lived off the flesh and fat of other animals. When times were hard, the women would gather roots and berries.
“Oh, that’s ridiculous,” said my mother, briskly spooning cream over a bowl of berries, dusting them with sugar, and passing them on to my father. “You’re still growing —you need to eat properly.”
“I don’t need to be fat, though.”
“You’re not fat, for heaven’s sake”—squishing her own berries with a fork, bloodstaining the cream. “Whatever put that absurd notion in your head?”
“Look,” I said, standing up at the table, lifting my T-shirt, and grabbing a plump handful of my waist.
“Sit down, please, Josephine,” my father interjected immediately. “What on earth do you think you’re doing? We’re not interested in seeing your navel at the dinner table.”
(Maybe not at the dinner table, Dad.)
She went on dishing up, as if she hadn’t heard me.
“Mom, I said I don’t want any.”
“Josephine, this is nonsense. Strawberries aren’t fattening, anyway: you can leave off the cream, if you want to. Though”—licking her spoon like a cat—“it’s the best part.”
You, Mother, are not exactly the best judge of who’s fat and who’s not.
Stubbornly she passed me the bowl, heaped with fat, dark, and, if you looked closely, slightly rotting life-forms: scabrous, papillar.
“I’m not eating these. May I be excused?”
“Certainly not. You’ll stay here till you finish your dinner.
“Mom, I’m not going to eat these. I’m not hungry.”
“Just eat up like a good girl.”
“Mom . . .”
“Ginny, if she’s not hungry, leave her be.”
“Oh, sure, let’s let good food go to waste. Most people would love a bowl of fresh strawberries. But no, not little madam here.”
“Jo, pass your plate to Anthony. He’ll eat them.”
I did, and he took them uncomplainingly, crowning them with soft peaks of cream.
“Now may I be excused?”
“No, you wait until everyone is done. Have some manners, miss.”
I stayed, punishing them with my presence.
Later, when the maid brought coffee into the living room, I took it black for the first time—no more octoroon swirls, no more fat globules floating on the surface—and doctored it with saccharin tablets from a flat blue tin, bought that day. The tablets were tiny but had a powerfully sweet taste that faded almost immediately, leaving a lingering synthetic bitterness. Taken this way, coffee tasted vile.
I sipped it proudly.
“But sugar’s not exactly food.”
“Everything on the tray is food and not up for discussion: you know you have to eat some of everything. Food is medicine: try to think of it that way.”
“But sugar isn’t food, it’s poison.”
“That’s nonsense, Josie.”
“No, it is. White sugar’s the worst. It stresses the body, makes it produce more insulin. I read it in Pritikin. It’s, like, really insulting your body to eat white sugar.”
“It’s insulting your body to starve it, too, Josephine.”
“I’m not.”
We are overeating as we slowly starve ourselves to death on American junk food.
No response. I want to keep going, keep talking, so I don’t have to eat. There’s an orange still to tackle: before, it would have been my meal of the day; now I’m expected to chow down on it along with everything else. How can I?
“And they’ve discovered that junk food, which is mainly refined sugar, makes kids hyperactive, violent.”
“The Twinkie defense.”
“What?”
“Oh, never mind.”
I have no idea what she’s talking about (the word Twinkie carries a charge of anxiety, of shame: the sick aftertaste of a binge), and she’s pretending to be immersed in the paper. I look at the tray and the two sachets of sugar that provoked this discussion. I absolutely cannot put that in my coffee. Would she eat rat poison if some fat, freckled stranger asked her to?
“It also destroys your teeth, you know.”
She looks up, absent. “What?”
This isn�
�t going to work.
At breakfast the next day, I started reading the cereal boxes. Sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, wheat, oat flour, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (one or more of cottonseed, coconut, or soybean), salt, yellow dye #6, sodium ascorbate, niacinamide, zinc oxide, iron, pyridoxine hydrochloride, riboflavin, palmitate, thiamin hydrochloride, folic acid: 110 calories per ounce.
We’re innocent victims of carbohydrate-itis, the insidious, invisible, all-pervasive plague of our century. What causes it? Mainly, sugar.
“I’m not eating this,” I announced.
“What do you mean?” asked my mother, slurping tea into a mouth full of half-chewed toast. (Most languages use a different verb for the way humans eat and the way animals do: so they should.) “You always eat it.”
“Yeah, that’s probably why I’m so fat.”
She put down the gardening catalogue she’d been studying, sighed, and looked at me with her head cocked. She was not a pretty sight, my mother, oily and bulbous and unwashed in a shapeless floral housecoat. “Josie, I don’t want to hear any more of this nonsense. You’re a growing girl. You are not fat: you’re just developing.”
Into what?
Into you?
“Well, I’m not eating breakfast today. I’m not hungry.” I was, of course, but felt light and virtuous, my stomach flatter already.
The night before, after my bath, I’d stood naked for a long time in the mirror’s unforgiving gaze. How had this disease crept up on me for so long unremarked? How had I failed to notice deformity’s spread?
What I saw was a squat, stocky body, with short legs, a short neck, and a short waist (thank you, Mother, for those genes). The solid ankles and wrists betrayed peasant stock, as did the chunky calves. A thick aspic of fat coated everything, especially the thighs, which were curdled to boot, and the belly, bulging in three gelatinous rolls. But the breasts were the worst: pneumatic and pendulous at the same time; full, formless, and flaccid.
I took off my watch, earrings, and hair clasp, then emptied my bladder. Inhaling deeply, I stepped on to the scale and stepped right off, as if my feet had been scalded by hot sand. I knelt down, jiggled the scale, checked that the needle was indeed pointing to zero, jiggled it again, moved it a few feet, checked it again, climbed on once more. Same reading. That was it, then.
One hundred and twelve pounds, at five feet two.
It was time to take matters in hand, to take myself in hand—so that nobody else could (in handfuls).
I began to study the diet books. They gave me hope. The instructions are simple and easy. Follow them religiously. They also contradicted each other, so, to be safe, I decided to follow every rule in all of them. It is time to take control and responsibility back from those who are arguing about the right answer. This didn’t leave much that was safe to eat.
I discovered that my mother had been systematically poisoning the family for years: it was a miracle she and my father were still alive, after what they had been doing to their bodies (and ours) all this time. According to my sources, they couldn’t last much longer; I daily expected one of them to keel over from high blood pressure, clogged arteries, diabetes, or cancer. It was only a matter of time—but not soon enough for me.
All I had for breakfast the next morning was black coffee, a bittersweet chemical brew.
When my father dropped me at school, I made a quick detour to the garbage can before class. There I deposited the lunch my mother had made for me: a peanut butter sandwich (300 calories), two oatmeal-raisin cookies (100 calories), an apple (65 calories), a bag of potato chips (150 calories), and a bottle of orange soda (125 calories). Grand total: 740 huge, enormous calories.
Remembering that I didn’t always eat all my lunch, I retrieved the cookies from the trash, for verisimilitude’s sake, and put them back in the bag for her to find that night: a stale reproach.
Don’t feed me. I’ll feed myself.
At the dinner table, she loaded up my father’s plate with steak, mashed potato, peas, gravy, and an ear of corn (an ear, a hunk of muscle, thick brown blood: something dismembered). Then she started loading up mine.
“No thanks.”
“What do you mean, ‘no thanks’?”
“I’m not eating meat anymore.”
Animals in nature eat one food at a time. Not like us. We eat everything we can get our hands on, including them!
“Why on earth not?”
“It’s unhealthy. Red meat is unhealthy.”
“Josephine, what has got into you lately?”
“Nothing, I’m just not going to eat meat anymore.”
“But why not?”
“Because it’s unhealthy, it’s full of fat. It’s about the worst thing you can eat.”
“Well, what do you suggest I do with your dinner? Feed it to the dog?”
“Yeah, feed it to the dog. I don’t care what you do with it, I’m not eating it.”
“Josephine, don’t speak to your mother like that. If she doesn’t want the steak, Gin, just give her some veggies.”
She served me a huge mound of mashed potato, shaking it angrily off the spoon, as if into my face. Then she piled on the peas and added a ear of corn, cooling and frayed by now. After she passed me the plate, I simply looked at it, keeping my hands clasped in my lap. In India, the hand you don’t eat with, the unclean one, must remain on the lap at all times; both hands seemed unclean to me now, as did the food.
On her plate, she piled two steaks, mine and hers, all the remaining corn and peas, and a mountain of gravy-soaked mash, which she immediately attacked.
We humans eat the diet of a lion, a giraffe, a pig, a horse, and an ape. And not only do we eat the different diets of all these animals, but we do so at the same meal!
There was a long, loud silence, filled with the sound of chewing. Then my father took a sip of water, dabbed his lips, and remarked, to no one in particular, “I had a call from C C & A today.”
This accomplished what had seemed impossible: she stopped chewing and looked up, knife and fork arrested, perpendicular, in her fists. “You did? Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Well, you were busy.”
“So, what did they say?”
He met her eyes and glanced away at my brother, at me. “I’ll tell you about it later.”
“Do they want you to come in for another interview?”
He looked down at his plate, pushed a pea around with the tip of his knife. “No . . . I’ll tell you the details after dinner.” From the pucker between his eyes, I already knew. No job with C C & A, a big advertising company.
It seemed to be taking him a while to find a new job, although of course the situation was never described as such. He still left the house at the same time every morning, smartly dressed in a suit. Sometimes I suspected that he simply got in the car, dropped us at school, drove around the block, and came home again.
Dad, I wanted to tell him, watch your diet. It’s the lean, strong, well-tailored person who is admired today. My sources say, Dad, Your business associates are going to have stomachs full of rotting food that will hold them back.
When she had finished eating—wiping down her oily brown plate with a hunk of buttered bread—I was still picking at my vegetables, pulling the kernels off the cob one by one. My father was politely interviewing Anthony about his homework. I was hoping that if I took enough time, she’d lose patience and ring for the maid, but she didn’t: she just sighed, leaned back in her chair, waited awhile, and then cut herself another slice of bread.
“How can they give me cookies?” I ask the nurse. “Cookies are empty calories. They contain no nutrition at all.”
“They contain energy, which keeps you alive,” she responds wearily, warily, not wanting to be drawn into another long wrangle. (Once I happened to catch sight of the staff handbook—NOT TO BE READ BY PATIENTS—open on a pile of clean linen: “Patient may not engage staff in discussion of meals, calories, or body weight. Any discussion of food wi
ll be promptly terminated.”) “Now just eat up.”
“Do you eat cookies?” I ask her.
“What I eat is not the issue here, Josephine. But, as it so happens, yes, I do, occasionally.”
“When?”
“When I feel like it. When I bake.”
“You bake cookies and then eat them all yourself?” I’m flabbergasted: I cannot conceive self-indulgence so shameless, on such a grand scale.
“No, I don’t eat them all myself. But I eat as many as I feel like.”
I cannot believe that anyone would admit to this. “What kind?”
“Oh—it depends. Sometimes oatmeal-raisin, sometimes chocolate chip, spice sometimes, or ginger.”
I try to imagine what it would be like to think, Oh, I feel like some oatmeal-raisin cookies today—without immediately suppressing that thought, as if obscene—and then go out and buy the ingredients (imagine standing in the checkout line: everyone would know what you were going to do), come home, mix it all up (I’d eat most of it, raw, before it even got onto the baking sheet), dollop it out, bake it, take the cookies out of the oven (the fragrance!), let them cool (I’d wolf them all down hot, blistering my mouth, tearful, tasting nothing), eat a couple, put the rest away in a tin, and then not think about them anymore. Or perhaps even offer them, with tea, to a visitor—thereby brazenly admitting that you are someone whose desire for cookies was so strong that you went out and bought the ingredients and baked them, shamelessly keeping them in your house, where you can eat them any time you want to, merely to gratify your appetite.
How could someone have so little restraint?
The sugar demon grabs you by the throat and you can’t shake loose.
I ate precisely half the corn and half the peas, mixed in with a quarter of the mashed potatoes, licking the lumpy stuff very slowly off the fork. All my attention was concentrated on what I was not going to eat (the rest of the corn, the rest of the peas, the rest of the potatoes, the bread, the butter, the dessert, the cereal the next morning, the sandwich for lunch the next day).
It was simple: you decided, once and for all, that you weren’t going to eat and then there were no further decisions to make.
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