Out of sheer spite, my mother was trying to make me eat three times a day. But I steadfastly refused “junk food,” so after a week of my black-coffee-for-breakfast routine (how sophisticated it made me feel, how world-weary; how nauseated too, and how weak), she switched tactics and brought home some Special K cereal (rice, wheat gluten, sugar, defatted wheat germ, salt, corn syrup, whey, malt flavoring, calcium caseinate: 110 calories per ounce). Because it declared itself “lo-cal,” I was prepared to concede: the words “A Diet Delite” were magic enough. But the magic worked only if you prepared it a certain way: half a cup of cereal, exactly (or was it two-thirds, in the early, less-disciplined days?), with a quarter cup of skim milk, diluted with water up to a third of a cup, sprinkled with a teaspoon of sugar substitute. This watery, synthetic-tasting mush helped protect my innards against the coffee’s acidic assault; through its sheer unpalatability, it also primed me for another day’s abstinence. Its message to the taste buds every morning was “You’re out of luck—again.”
We’re prisoners. Prisoners! That’s right. We’re prisoners of our taste buds.
Lunch was easier, because I could throw most of it away and because, eating with the others at school, I had a reputation to uphold. Gradually, my apple or yogurt dwindled to half an apple or half a yogurt, then a third, consumed excruciatingly slowly, with frequent protestations of how full I was. It became the daily spectacle—how little I would eat, how strong my will, how few my needs —and I, the hunger artist, rarely disappointed my audience. For three days, Sarah Rosen tried to emulate me, but on the fourth, she gave in to greed, tearing with hands and teeth at a hunk of dead fowl. I never yielded—not in front of them, anyway. (And I wished for another witness, but she was a lazy letter writer and never, after that surly summer, asked me back to the beach.)
Dinner was the constant struggle. At first, I tried to excuse myself altogether, but there was no question of that: the family had to gather every night, nuclear, its charged particles within a single field of force. (My father tense and abstracted; my mother chewing vehemently; my brother playing with his meal and trying to keep his head low, out of range; myself painted like a ghoul, sullen and pouty, picking ostentatiously at my food, cutting it into smaller and smaller pieces until I provoked the desired outburst.) Since in those days I felt compelled to eat “normal” food at dinner (but no meat! no butter!), I saved most of my calories for the evening meal.
Peas were good, because you could eat them one by one, spearing each on a single tine. Brussels sprouts were good, because you could unwrap them leaf by leaf and make them last forever. Corn could be nibbled a few kernels at a time, but carrots tended to pop off the plate if you tried to section them any smaller. Beans could be diced up to a point, but then the fibers would resist the knife. Salad was bad, because the maid saturated it with oil before bringing it to the table. Potatoes were evil. I would never eat one, no matter what.
It’s sitting on the plate, looking back at me. (They have “eyes,” don’t they—they have skin, too, in which, wrinkled, brown, this one has been baked.) It’s plump, complacent, daring me to eat it. Eat me, it commands, silently, so that only I can understand. Go on, I dare you. Eat me for the sheer pleasure of stuffing your face, you pig.
If you make a pig out of yourself, you will become one.
Why can’t she hear?
I pick up the knife to puncture it—it’s the only thing left on the plate that I haven’t at least touched—but it’s completely sealed in its papery skin. I cannot decide where to slit it, stab it, spill its mealy guts.
“Josie,” she says, from the foot of the bed, where she has been filling out forms (my chart? does the graph plummet off the page, as in a cartoon?), “time’s almost up. Eat your potato.”
“I can’t,” I say.
“Sure you can,” she says, “just half.”
“I can’t,” I say.
“Josie,” she says, “it’s a plain baked potato. It has about the same number of calories as an apple. You’d eat an apple if I asked you to, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” I lie, “but I can’t eat this.”
“Why not?” She’s not supposed to be doing this: the handbook is clear: “Any discussion of food will be promptly terminated.” I should report her to Dr. Frog.
“It’s alive.”
If you want to be vibrantly and vigorously alive, you have to eat food that’s alive.
She looks up with an irritated grimace, but something about the expression on my face wipes it away. She comes over to the chair next to the bed and sits down beside me. Hunching up, I let my hair fall across my face so I don’t have to look at her. Frantically, in my lap, I’m ripping away at a cuticle that I’ve already chewed until it’s raw. The smarting brings tears to my eyes.
She has the gall to put her hand gently on my forearm, where it feels unexpectedly warm. I let it stay for a little while before I shake it off, muttering, “You know I don’t like to be touched.”
The potato has calmed down now; it offers no resistance to the knife. Strangely, its white flesh soothes me.
11
AT 105 POUNDS, I began to see what I might look like when perfect. Once you are perfect, you have your choice of anything. Once you have reached your ideal weight, you no longer have to deny yourself anything. People—schoolmates, friends of my parents—started complimenting me on my diminished self, and on the street, men’s gazes, scanning routinely, snagged a moment longer. But I knew that I still had much to lose. There was still fat on my stomach, a handful above the navel and a roll below. I pinched it hard several times an hour to remind myself that it was there, that nothing mattered more than getting rid of it.
There was also the thigh problem. My thighs were—to use one of the most obscene words in the language, but how else can I say it?—they were flabby. I developed a habit of hitting them hard, underneath, to watch the flesh quiver, to inspire me with disgust. For some reason, this habit provoked my mother more than anything else I did.
“Will you please stop doing that, for Christ’s sake. It’s driving me crazy.”
“I will if I feel like it.” (Sullenly, giving my right thigh another whack.)
“Well, go and do it somewhere else, then. I can’t stand to watch you doing that every five minutes.”
But I followed her around, examining myself minutely in every reflective surface (the toaster, the kettle, my knife at the dinner table), kneading my calves and upper arms, pinching the soft excess at my waist, whacking my thighs. I also spent hours inspecting my hair for split ends. When that failed to enrage her, I would do jumping jacks in the kitchen while she cooked.
“Will you get out of here before I go nuts!” No response, just heavy breathing and the thump-slap of my stubborn perseveration.
“You’ve got to be the most self-obsessed person on the face of the earth,” she would yell, throttling the dish towel as she dried her hands. “Do you ever think about anything except what you look like?” I wouldn’t respond, thinking only: What about you, all of you, who do nothing all day long but gratify your desires? What about you, who just take up space?
“My, we are looking better, aren’t we,” he says, putting down the stethoscope, crinkling the bags under his eyes to simulate a smile.
My heart speeds up immediately because I know what he means: fat. In that instant I decide not to eat again for the rest of the day. This has gone far enough; they won’t be happy until I look like everybody else—solid, unexceptional, resigned to being plain. I see them all the time, women hauling their carcasses around as if that flesh were somewhere they just happened to live, real estate they had merely to maintain. As if janitorial services were enough. As if they had no choice but to live in that particular, imperfect form.
Not I, though. Anyone looking at me would know instantly that I was an artist: my medium myself, my materials air and bone and will.
Lunch causes a little contretemps, a little brouhaha. (The manual, surely, bans brouha
ha: “All brouhaha will be interrupted by the staff”?) Since Dr. Frog told me I looked fat, all I’ve done is pinch myself frenziedly: belly, thighs, cheeks. I slap my thighs to feel them shiver (they do), I slap my face to see if the flesh feels loose (it does). If I had something hot—an iron, a match, a curling rod—I would touch it to my skin: just a touch.
When she brings me the lunch tray and sits at the foot of the bed as usual, I look at the dense matter heaped on the plate—hummus with pita bread, only the finest international cuisine for us inmates, penned in for plumping like battery chickens—and something in me revolts, as it should have weeks ago. With a convulsive heave of my knees, I send the tray crashing to the floor.
It hits the tiles with a satisfying boom; apple juice arcs across the wall; the hummus plops into a pile like shit; chips of china and shards of broken glass spray sharply up. I’m exhilarated by this sudden surge of power—why didn’t I do this a long time ago? I look around for something else to destroy—but part of me is appalled, stricken. Look at the mess I’ve made: brown liquid and lumpy stuff smeared everywhere, broken glass.
She saw it coming, saw me shove, and sprang up with a small grunt but couldn’t get near the tray in time. For a second she stood arrested in mid-gesture, mouth agape, hands poised for the catch. Now, exhaling, she caves in, spine slumped, arms flopping to her sides. She shakes her head slightly, and color—too much of it, she’s mad—floods back into her face.
“What the hell was that for?” she exclaims, but then catches herself and switches into professional mode. “OK, Josephine, I want you to clean up that mess, right now please, and then I’m going to get you another lunch tray, exactly the same, and I’m going to sit here with you while you eat it calmly.”
I say nothing.
“When you’re calmer,” she adds, “we can discuss why you did that.”
“I am calm,” I say, though my heart is pounding.
“Good,” she says. “Now get down there and clean that up.”
“You clean it,” I say sullenly, without much conviction; I feel I should sustain this over-the-edge behavior for as long as possible, get as much mileage as I can from being out of control, though the initial impulse has long passed. It’s a cold urge—old news, light from a distant star— that I recognize from binges.
“I most certainly will not,” she snaps.
I say nothing, concentrating on my cuticles, letting my hair fall over my face. She looks insistently at me for a moment and then walks out of the room, leaving me deflated: that was too easy. But within seconds she’s back, clutching a wad of paper towel. She holds it out to me but, chewing frantically on a hangnail, I refuse to meet her eye. She takes a step closer and rips the bedcovers back, exposing my stick legs, which pucker purple and ivory.
“Get up now and clean up that mess,” she says, articulating each word very distinctly, as if at elocution school.
“The rrrain in Spain falls mainly on the plain,” I respond, in a haughty British accent. I think this is hilarious and snicker with half-suppressed glee while she stares at me, disconcerted.
She stands there for a while, holding her wad of institutional off-white paper towel like a shield, then half drops, half throws, it onto the bed. “Boy, am I sick to death of you,” she mutters, and, picking up the empty tray and an unbroken plate from the floor, makes her way gingerly through the debris to the door. I notice that her fat white shoes, normally immaculate, are spattered with sticky brown.
Once alone, I feel the spasms of hilarity phase out like hiccoughs. Emptiness flows in again. What does she mean, she’s sick to death of me? She can’t be; she has to put up with me, pretend to care: it’s her job. Is she going to ask to be transferred to another patient, someone sweeter-natured, someone without a vein of black, violent evil inside her? I would if I were her; I wouldn’t be able to stand being around me either.
I climb out of bed but have to lie down again immediately because standing up so fast makes my head soar, sending the room jiggling and lurching about. After a few minutes, I try again, cautiously uncurling, tensing my abdominals to force the blood upwards. It works and I stand wobblily for a second, making sure everything has stopped. Yes, even the mess of food on the floor is back where it was, as if it hadn’t been spinning around seconds ago (as if it weren’t spinning right now, as I am, with the earth’s relentless rotation).
Penitent with my paper towel, I kneel down and start sopping up the juice, the yellowish mush, the limp remnants of a salad. I put an intact orange on my nightstand and retrieve a fork and spoon from under the bed (the dust balls! it’s a disgrace). Then I start collecting the shards of broken glass, one by one, placing them delicately in a cupped palm. I’m using my forefinger and thumb as pincers, but a splinter so small I can barely see it pierces the skin, causing a tiny shock of pain. Squeezing the fingertip’s fleshy pad, I force out a single, perfect bead of blood, and then, watching closely, fold my fist tightly, deliberately, over the entire handful.
At first there were only a few drops of blood, which I expected, both from the dry, searing pain that had made me cry out and from what I knew of folklore—the nuptial sheets draped over the balcony, displaying the red petals that had bloomed overnight. Then, as I walked stiffly up the stairs to my bedroom, having sent him on his way (satisfied but abashed), I felt a sudden hot wetness between my legs. It wasn’t until I went into the bathroom and pulled down my underwear—cautiously unsticking it from myself, where I was tender and raw—that I realized what it was.
A slight thrill of fear went through me, but I focused on the nuisance value: underwear to rinse out and conceal from my mother at this time of night; a wad of toilet paper to stuff between my legs while I waddled to the bedroom and found another pair of panties, and, just to be safe, a sanitary pad, though I didn’t really expect more bleeding. The toilet paper was soon saturated; when I pulled it away, red, it conformed to the shape of the space it had plugged. Staunched by the pad, I went back to the bathroom and blotted a few dark splotches from the floor.
The pad turned meaty and sodden within minutes; growing giddy, I removed it and a scalding gush pulsed down my leg. Panicking—none of the books had said anything about this, about hot, unstoppable seepage—I grabbed a towel (the stains! too late, this was an emergency) and pushed its entire rough bulk between my legs. I realized it would stay in place only if I sat down, so I closed the toilet lid and pressed myself on the bunched-up towel, my feet on the edge of the bathtub and my head between my knees, watching in disbelief as the dense wetness crept through the jungle of tiny loops, which sucked it in, I recalled from science class, through capillarity.
By the time the towel was almost soaked through, I was still sitting there, hunched, staring, my mind empty of anything except the word capillarity. Slowly, almost abstractly, it occurred to me that if I stayed there I might bleed to death.
“Oh, Josie, what have you done to yourself?” The resentful mask she’s wearing when she walks in with a fresh lunch tray—exactly the same as the first, pedantically so —crumples immediately and, dumping the tray on the nightstand, she crouches next to me on the floor.
I’m sitting cross-legged, my fist still clenched in front of me, watching the blood trickle out through the runnels in the folded palm flesh (even now, there’s fat there, otherwise it wouldn’t pleat like that). The course the blood takes illustrates some of the basic laws of physics.
Taking my brittle fist in her warm, living one, she gently unfurls it. We both regard the mutilated palm with interest: in most places, the shards have barely pierced the skin and are hanging in precariously by their narrowest point. Others, though, have wedged themselves in well, opening up purple-edged mouths.
She gets to work with tweezers, making little sounds of compassion. Before she applies antiseptic, she warns, “This will sting,” but, even so, I can’t help a sharp hiss, some hot smarting tears. Looking up, she blots one with a pad of gauze.
Leaving the sodden towel where
it was, I climbed off the toilet seat; where a corner hung down, it was starting to drip. I took the matching bath towel (sorry about ruining the “designer” set, Mother) and bundled that between my legs as best I could. I realized that I was light-headed (whether from fear or bloodletting, I couldn’t tell) but completely calm.
For decency’s sake, I put on a short nightgown, though I knew it too would soon be ruined, and, with the word capillarity still running monotonously through my mind, made my way down the stairs, clutching the towel with one hand between my thighs.
My parents’ bedroom was dark and I bumped into a lamp table near the door, which immediately woke my mother, a light sleeper. My father, I knew, was on a business trip (he had a new job at last, putting the best face on it); perhaps that had nudged me to choose this night, for no other particular reason.
“What? Who is it?” she barked, fear roughening her voice (burglars, murderers, rapists, black men: she knew they were out there, she knew it was only a matter of time before they got her).
“It’s me, Ma.”
“Josie? What’s wrong.”
“I’m bleeding, Ma.”
“Bleeding? What do you mean?” she asked, sitting up and turning on the light.
We both shaded our eyes, blinking and watering, against the sudden brightness. What she saw was her sixteen-year-old daughter clutching a bath towel to her crotch.
“Mom, Peter and I tried to . . . have sex. And now I’m bleeding.”
It was obvious that her brain was failing to process this information. She stared at me. I tried again.
“Mom, I’m bleeding a lot. I think I need a doctor.”
“Bleeding? Peter . . . did he . . .” (whispering) “rape you?”
Would that have made it more acceptable?
“No, no. I’m just . . . bleeding, I don’t know why, but it’s a lot.”
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