“Come on now,” I say, “do you mean to tell me that you don’t know the difference between food and garnish? For instance, if a lettuce leaf is served under something, as a mode of presentation, you’re not supposed to eat it. Likewise with parsley, though some people seem to think it’s good for them and munch it right up, not stopping to think that the chef may not even have washed it.”
I’m rambling, stalling, improvising, because while we’ve been talking about it, the orange slice—the garnish on my sandwich plate—has mutated, moving almost imperceptibly out of the realm of the edible. This happens. (Sometimes permanently—as in the case of meat, fish, eggs, and the opaque fluid excreted by bovine mammary glands.) This . . . slice now seems as grotesque, as alien, as a paper parasol in a glass of punch (would you eat that, nurse, gagging on wood pulp, drooling cheap dye?). The more I look at it, with its scaly, reptilian rind and colony of pustular sacs, the more it looks like a section from the dissecting room. It should be sent to the lab for staining, not served on my plate.
I cannot put that thing in my mouth.
I’m not playacting anymore.
But she doesn’t understand, she’s still irritated by the Emily Post routine, she’s just standing there with her hands on her (not insubstantial) hips, waiting for me.
“I can’t,” I say.
“You have to,” she says.
“Well, I can’t.”
“For heaven’s sake, Josie, you just managed most of a peanut butter sandwich, a glass of juice, and half a banana, and you’re throwing a tantrum about a slice of orange! Give me a break! Just take a small bite out of it, and I’ll walk you to the bathroom.” (She knows I always want to go to the bathroom, so I can wash and wash, scour this greasy, seeping skin.)
“What if it were an olive?”
“What if it . . . what the hell’s that got to do with anything?”
“Well, what if it were an olive? Would I have to eat it then? Olives can be either a garnish or an hors d’oeuvre, depending on how they’re served.”
“WE DON’T SERVE OLIVES HERE! THEY’RE TOO HIGH IN SODIUM!” she yells, for the first time really shouting at me, really losing it, flushing beet red, grabbing the tray off my lap and sending everything sliding, clattering, to the edge as she stomps out, bumping the door open with one tray corner, the other braced against her hip in a slovenly, violent manner that terrifies me.
She’s dragging me by the hair, my hair is coming out in handfuls, the tiles are searing 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 ambulance is at the door, false alarm, yes, but what is that smell? It’s the roast, doctor (my patient, skinned and burning), sorry to have bothered you. Next time, drug her and gag her as well. I will, doctor, I will.
I crawl under the covers (though this is forbidden, until bedtime) and curl up tightly, like a shrimp. In this position, my bloated belly presses against my thighs, reminding me, in a wave of loud despair, that I’m ugly, ugly, inside and out. Just ugly—ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly: nothing can change that.
STAFF MANUAL
FOR PROFESSIONAL USE ONLY:
NOT TO BE READ BY PATIENTS
• Patient may not choose her own food. This is the task of the dietician.
• Patient should achieve nutritional rehabilitation at an average rate of 3 pounds per week.
• Meal trays should be attractively presented, with real china, glassware, and linen, to recondition the patient to normal social eating patterns. Staff person is present at every meal to monitor consumption and to interrupt inappropriate behaviors.
• Patient must consume all food prepared for her (meals and snacks, flamingo’s tongue). If patient exceeds the one-hour time limit, staff person must stay to provide supervision and support until the meal is finished.
• Patient may not engage staff in discussion of meals, calories, or body weight. Any discussion of food will be promptly terminated. Manipulative and/or stalling behavior must not be reinforced.
• Patient is entitled to one cup of water and, in summer, one cup of ice in addition to the nutritive fluids on the meal tray. No artificially sweetened beverages or colas are permitted; fruit juices may not be diluted; milk or cream must be added to coffee.
• Patient is expected to consume the syrup that comes with canned fruit, but may leave the liquid from cooked vegetables (exception: melted butter).
• Patient is required to eat chicken skin.
• Patient is not required to eat ground glass.
• Patient must eat every item on the plate, even if it is served primarily as a garnish (e.g., lettuce leaves, grated carrot, orange slices). Lemon wedges do not have to be eaten, but must be squeezed. Note that, due to their high sodium content, olives are no longer a menu option on this ward.
• Staff must guard against countertransference reactions. A firm, professional, but humane demeanor should be maintained at all times; research shows that an irate or authoritarian approach increases resistance and jeopardizes the therapeutic alliance.
“I’m sorry,” she says, standing at the foot of the bed, clasping one elbow behind her back with the other hand. “I let myself get excessively annoyed. It’s what we call a ‘therapeutic blunder.’”
Still curled shrimplike in the bed, my head touching my knees, I say nothing. She says nothing either, and a vast loneliness overwhelms me, as if I’m zooming back into space but can still see myself on the bed, becoming smaller and smaller, with ever more vacancy around me.
Seconds pass and space continues to expand. I feel I may never make it back from this emptiness where sound doesn’t carry. But then I hear someone speak.
“Well, it wasn’t very therapeutic, was it?” It’s me, muffled, unfurling. A stricken look crosses her face, but then she realizes I’m attempting a joke.
“Well, nobody’s perfect,” she says briskly, unclasping her hand to smooth out the cover at the foot of the bed, then bending over to pick up a pillow I had tossed overboard in pique.
“Except me,” I say.
“Except you,” she says, and we both smile.
13
“GIVE ME SOMETHING to do, for God’s sake,” I say. “I’m so bored I could die.”
“You could read,” she says. “You could write letters. You could listen to the radio. The art therapist will be by later today, too.”
“Don’t make me laugh,” I say. But I don’t feel like laughing. I feel like emitting the sound that would come out of Munch’s painting, out of its black funneled mouth—a sound that perhaps does pour out, inexhaustibly, at a frequency too high and too horrible for the human ear.
What’s killing me now is time—as I lie here and listen, as I lie here and wait, paralyzed in its thick, stupefying sludge. I am allowed out of bed, but the chair is so hard that it leaves livid dents on the backs of my thighs. I’m allowed to watch television, but I don’t understand what’s going on, what the characters are getting so worked up about; their faces are alarmingly orange or blue, and every few seconds some kind of lurid food zooms into the foreground. I requested a novel from the library, but I’m having trouble making sense of it: “Getting to his feet, Vernon walked over to look through the window above the kitchen sink”—what’s that supposed to mean?
So there’s nothing to do but lie here and feel my body bloat and rot, rot and spread, spread and deliquesce, decompose. My ankles are enormous (“Elevate them,” she says), and I’m sure my thighs are becoming thicker than my knees. I can’t bear to look down at my belly, engorged like a giant tumor, sucking substance from the rest of me. But even if I don’t look at it, it occupies my mind with its vile inner life: violent growlings and eruptions; vicious pains, as if something had perforated; terrible sewerish smells.
“I’m dying,” I whisper.
“It’s gas,” she says briskly. “All part of the process. Perhaps we’ll cut back on the lactose for a
few days.”
Because there’s all this putrefaction, fermentation, and resulting acid, what actually is in the stomach is a mass of spoiled, rotting, foul-smelling food.
I gave up Biology after the first two lectures, stricken with squeamishness, and decided to seek understanding on a larger scale: Economics, History, Cosmology. I stuck with Math, too, because there was something reassuring about its rule-governed universe, one that wasn’t even supposed to reflect what human beings did, in their blundering way. (Poetry alarmed me: did those people really feel all those emotions, or were they only faking? And if they weren’t faking, how could they make such a spectacle of their sniveling need?)
I lived in the dorm, where my parents mistakenly believed I would be well supervised and well fed; instead, no one paid me the slightest attention. I was assigned a double room, but the designated roommate—Miss Ellen West from East Hampton—never materialized, as if repelled from afar by my self-absorption, like the field of dark force around a collapsed star. So I lived with a missing person —which gave me all the more space to make myself scarce.
Every night I ate lavishly, discovering a drawerful of strawberries and cream in my file cabinet, or opening door upon door until I happened upon the right one, which disclosed an endless buffet. Its centerpiece, an ice-carved ballerina, was the sole witness as I strolled along, using both fists to scoop up and stuff in whatever caught my fancy: avocado mousse, crème caramel, fettuccine Alfredo, sherry trifle, vichyssoise, Sacher torte. I stuck my tongue lewdly into éclairs, probing the cream filling with grunts of lust until, appeased, I moved on, leaving the pastry shells vacant and violated on the plate. Sometimes, I wept as I ate and wept as I woke.
After a while, I began jolting awake just as the dream began, just as the door was opening.
“I was an outstanding student,” I tell him. “I made straight A’s all the way through college.” Not surprisingly, since I was awake much of the night, driven to pace and study, perform sit-ups in the dark, pace some more, study some more, consult my double in the dark pane.
“Yes, I see that,” he says, shuffling papers in a file, holding one at a distance, head cocked, in the middle-aged, presbyopic way of one too vain to wear reading glasses. (What does he have to be vain about, with his age-spotted, amphibian features, I wonder?)
“What’s in that file?” I ask. “Can I take a look?”
“Uh, no. This is confidential—medical records and such.”
Once, when he was paged during one of our sessions and had to leave, I waited until he reached the door, and then, riding a wave of sheer desperation, leaned over and flipped open the file he’d left behind. I hoped to find, reduced to a few lucid sentences, the knowledge that he was withholding from me, that they were all withholding: the words that would explain me to myself.
Instead, the first page was in code, with letters and numbers cunningly scrambled—Heme-7, SMA-6, SMA-12, LH, FSH, T4, T3, RU, EKG, MMPI, IQ (WAIS), EDI —and, finally, this jeering annotation: ZING (or was it ZUNG?). I didn’t read any more because my own daring had terrified me and I had to sit back before my heart battered its way out. But when he returned, I slyly dropped a clue. “Quite a ZING-er, huh, doc?” I added casually —and, admittedly, inconsequentially—after some trivial remark. He showed no reaction at all, except perhaps a flicker of puzzlement.
Now he’s looking at me, eyebrows arched.
“I’m sorry?”
Rueful grimace. “I asked, Josephine, what else you could tell me about your college years.”
“Well, I made straight A’s.”
“Yes, I know. We already talked about that.”
“Well . . . that’s about it.”
“That’s it? Surely not. What about boyfriends? Extracurricular activities? Were you involved in politics or anything like that?”
“Please,” I say.
Our laws must be changed to provide a proper way of eating for everyone. Political action can cut carbohydrates for you.
Yes, I was involved in politics—and economics, too—but not the way he meant it. I lived under an absolute dictatorship, with myself as both subject and tyrant. Maintaining this rule of law consumed all my attention, so I had none to spare for the groups of loud, ill-groomed others who registered at the edges of my consciousness. Some of them always seemed very upset about something, gathering in large crowds, yelling through bullhorns, chanting, waving signs that attested mainly to their poor spelling and worse penmanship. They scarcely seemed real to me, indistinguishable from similar images I saw on TV (7:00 to 7:30 P.M., though I soon gave that up); besides, I never had time to loiter. I strode along speedily, despising the sluggish pace of my fellow students. Attending only to the drumbeat in my head, I glimpsed their obscure agitation as if in an aquarium, through thick muted glass.
Now and then, something would catch my eye: an exhibit of photographs in the student union documenting the plight of people in Ethiopia (or was it India? Biafra? Angola? I forget—there’s no shortage of famine). I studied these images intently: how much simpler life must be for them. How easy for them to attain the perfection I struggled so hard for; how strikingly pure their bodies; how luminous, how knowing, their eyes. How beautiful the bone-mother, sheltering in the sweep of her scarf her child’s fleshless corpse.
There was Bobby Sands, too, whose progress I followed with interest, learning for the first time precise statistics about how long the human body can survive without this or that (food, water, salt)—but then he overdid it and died.
I was happy to put my lunch money into the Oxfam can at the cafeteria door once a year, like everyone else, and forgo my daily yogurt (or half yogurt). It was a good pretext to test my will. But I refused to give even a penny to the bulky young woman collecting for—what was it? ERA? NOW? “I’m not a feminist,” I said firmly. “I’ve never suffered because I’m a woman. I’m tired of people using that as an excuse.”
“Suzanne,” I ask suddenly, as she walks in, “do you have a boyfriend?”
She purses her lips and pops out her eyes, mimicking prissy surprise. “Do I have a boyfriend? Aren’t we nosy today—”
“No, but do you?”
“Nosy, nosy,” she replies, pointing a finger, school-marmish, at me, while with the other hand she casually pulls up a chair.
“Ah, come on, tell me.”
“Well, why do you ask?”
“I just want to know. I just want to know what it . . . what he’s like.”
She examines her thumbnail—it’s ridged—and I can almost hear Dr. Frog’s voice in her head: Inappropriate behavior. Manipulation. Countertransference. Then she looks up at me, no more mugging, and decides to respond.
“There is someone . . .” she says, eyes elsewhere, as if picturing a face.
I knew it. “I can’t even imagine,” I interrupt, shaking my head.
“Imagine what?”
You, naked and lewd. “Oh—you know. Boyfriends. That whole routine.”
“It’s not so bad,” she says, “having someone around.”
“Breathing your air . . .” I reply, making a strangling gesture with both hands.
She opens her mouth, then her palms, to respond, but for a while nothing comes out. I wait, hoping for some clue—how does she live? how does anyone?—but then I begin to feel ridiculous: what am I, the family dog at the dinner table, waiting tensed, eyes fixed on her face?
Leaning back, I look around for something else to do. On the nightstand, where she dropped it on the way in, is my mail—a new “privilege,” paid for in pounds. A letter from the university, inquiring whether I, ID number 071158, wish to extend my leave of absence into the spring (please complete this form). A membership renewal notice from the gym. A bill from the bookstore, last chance. A change-of-address card, forwarded by my mother (though I note that, of course, she’s misspelled the institution’s name).
Amanda Jane would like to inform you of her new address in the city; she and Bruce have decided, with
regret, on a “trial separation.” (But the blond babies: where are they?) I try to believe it. I try to imagine her alone after all these years; I imagine her, in the long black insomniac night, staring into the mirror as if it might tell her something (is she still lean and golden, I wonder, or has she— no, impossible). I imagine her like me now, with emptiness all around her, so independent that there’s nothing left to hold her to the earth. Don’t do it, I want to cry out; I’ve tried separation and it doesn’t work.
Perhaps I might call her.
No; what would I say?
I return to the mail (how long have I been staring at that tiny noose of wire, where the window mesh has pulled away from the frame?). In the same envelope—as if merely by chance—I find five photos and a note: “To our dearest Josephine, Hoping these remind you of happier times, and that your recovery is going well. Did you get the flowers? Your loving Mother and Dad.” Dr. Frog, I’m sure, requested these as part of the “therapeutic process”; they all show me at my most grotesque—two, which I refuse to look at, at over a hundred pounds.
“Is that you?” Suzanne asks, shuffling through, picking one.
“Let’s see.” I have to inspect it carefully because I never recognize my own face on film (does anyone?). This one shows a pale girl who bears no resemblance to me, with long dark hair and blackened eyes; she’s wearing a chocolate-colored corduroy jacket over faded denims and high-heeled boots. “Freshman year, near the beginning: ninety-two pounds,” I decide. “Look how fat my face is!”
“You look beautiful,” she says. “Were you menstruating at that weight?”
“God, no.”
It was the stench I couldn’t stand, that of the body’s dark red rotten interior. The exterior—with enough effort—could be kept under control.
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