The Hungry Mirror

by Lisa de Nikolits

  So I ate. Not hugely by a lot of standards, but more than enough by my own. By the end of the day, I feel a strong band of tension gripping my chest, I have difficulty breathing, and all I can see are the numbers. The over-indulgence is only the start of the price I’ll have to pay; I’ll wake up tomorrow morning plump, which is nearly worse than fat.

  1500 calories. That’s what I’ve eaten today.

  The guilt.

  I am sitting on the sofa pretending to watch a movie while I count and recount and beg the numbers to have a different result. I feel swollen, guilty, and greasy. Knowing tomorrow is Sunday doesn’t help – at least at work my time is occupied but Sundays are serial killers with time on their hands and there I am, unable to move fast enough out of the way.

  My husband is already planning breakfast. “I’ll take you to Stephanie Belle’s new place for berry liqueur crepes and hot chocolate,” he says, looking up from behind his newspaper, his glasses halfway down his nose. “I need to check it out anyway, we’re taking clients next week. What do you say, little girl? We’ll celebrate our second anniversary in style.”

  My internal head shakes vigorously, no, no, no. Not now. There is no way I can do two days of eating in a row, no matter what the occasion.

  “Okay,” I smile brightly and begin to plan reasons to cancel.

  Yes, okay, I have somehow, miraculously, managed to get married and what an utter relief that is.

  Now, as long as I live, I will never be an old maid, a spinster left unwanted on the shelf, unused, and well past my “best-before” date. It never occurs to me that I have a choice in accepting these labels. I swallow them unthinkingly, unspeakably grateful to Mathew for rescuing me from the worst of public rejections, the modern-day equivalent of the town square hanging – being single.

  And he’s rescued me from so much more; the feeling I am somehow incurably invisible and destined for a difficult, lonely life of subdued, well-behaved depression and one-plated mediocrity.

  I had seen Mathew at various ad industry functions; he’s handsome, charming, inscrutable. He’s a man in a powerful position who accepts obsequious attentions with a lazy smile and moves as if he knows the answers to a fistful of secrets. His partying is legendary. Rumour has it he tied himself to a tree in the middle of a hurricane on an island, just to see what it would feel like to be in the eye of the storm. Later I realize it couldn’t possibly be true but it’s a good story anyway.

  I asked about him from the first moment I met him. I sensed he might be as interested in me as I was in him, but he had a girlfriend. I kept asking about him over the next couple of years and I eventually learned he and his girlfriend had moved in together and then later, shortly afterward, that they’d broken up.

  I was with Miranda one night at the Lemongrass café in Yorkville. Miranda and I have a tacit agreement; we are each other’s alibi for social normalcy. It has worked out well, each of us telling other people we see each other much more than we do, able to escape to the sanctuary of our private silence instead.

  We were both drinking green tea, with water and a slice of lemon on the side, when Mathew walked in, his dark hair falling across one eye. He was very dapper in a double-breasted suit and bright red tie, a folded newspaper under his arm. He stopped to say hello, I invited him to join us, and he and I have been together ever since.

  “Marry Mathew,” Miranda advised, when he proposed. I had already said yes. “He’ll leave you alone. It’ll be perfect.”

  But you know, I might be giving the wrong impression of me. Or, perhaps it’s the right impression of who I am when I am inside my head. But how the world sees me, well, now that’s a different story.

  Social butterfly

  HERE’S WHAT PEOPLE SAY ABOUT what they see:

  “You’re the most positive person I’ve ever known. When you’re around, there’s this amazing energy, this passion and enthusiasm. I love your way of thinking, your courage. Doesn’t anything ever scare you? You’re always so sure you’ll succeed, don’t you ever worry you might not? You are so sweet, so caring, so nice. You’re a good person. You’re so funny; you have such a great sense of humour. I wish I could be like you. You’re so petite and perky, everybody loves you. You’re such a social butterfly, don’t you ever get tired? You never seem to run out of energy.”

  Just in case I was coming across as an anti-social, lonely, wandering black cloud, which would be understandable from the picture I’ve painted so far. But no, I’m the indomitable Miss Joie de Vivre herself.

  But one can seem to be one thing, and all too easily be another.

  That dark side lives inside me, a tiny core flame. The lighter side shines during the working day, and into the social night as long as I tell it to, as long as I’m forewarned about how long that might be. But don’t try to surprise me or make me stay longer than I planned to, because I’ll have to leave when my time is up, and leave I will. No one can leave as quickly as me.

  The trouble is, I don’t know how to balance my energies, and if I can’t control the pace, I run out of gas, and that’s when I binge. That’s when I need to purge.

  Somehow, strangely, the act of purging renews me, energizes me, gives my brain a drug it seems to need. Maybe I’m lacking in a chemical of some kind and I’m instinctively trying to fulfill that need. Why else would doing it make me feel better?

  An addict’s defense I know, but even addicts have chemical imbalances, not just emotional or habitual ones. I wonder what tiny aberration hides in my DNA that sets this craving alight? Am I genetically predisposed? Does such a thing as a genetic predisposition for an eating disorder even exist? There’s no denying I come from a long line of clinically depressed manic depressives, self-cutters, drug addicts, sociopaths, and more than one who committed suicide: death by gas for one, and simple apathy for those others who couldn’t be bothered to stay alive any longer but lacked the fortitude to select the door for their exit.

  But I’ve tried so hard to take precautions to not be that way. I have always known who I am. I’ve also known that I’ve done whatever I had to, to survive, but there are dangerous times, when sitting unnoticed in a life raft can feel safer than wading through shallow waters to the unexplored territories of new lands. Even if you know the life raft is slowly sinking.

  “You’re gutsy but vulnerable,” one of my cousins said to me out of the blue at a family wedding. She had been plump in her youth, with a large hooked nose. Then she dyed her long, rust-coloured hair pitch-black, lost thirty pounds, bought herself some sweet little upturned rhinoplasty, and became the oracle on self-enlightenment.

  Who asked you anyway? I wanted to say. But I’d smiled and thanked her and wondered why she’d said that and why I’d thanked her.

  So Mathew, poor Mathew, he didn’t see the vulnerable me. He only saw what I showed him: a fearless, feisty ball of energy that blazed through a room, then disappeared.

  And when I was with him, especially that first year, I thought that’s who I really was; the real me, the me who had been waiting to be discovered. And I believed with all my heart that when I married him, I’d leave all the darkness behind, like Sleeping Beauty, woken with a kiss to a whole new life, and a happy-ever-after.

  Isn’t that what we are all led to believe?

  A little doll girl

  MATHEW IS OLDER THAN ME. He’s forty-two. I’m twenty-seven. He’s been married before but he doesn’t talk about it much.

  After that night at the Lemongrass Café, I started going to functions and parties with him, and everybody thought we made such a great pair.

  “She’s like a little doll,” his boss said to him once. Six months later we were married and all my dreams had come true.

  I sold my loft and moved into his largely unfurnished Victorian home in the fashionable Annex area in Toronto. I renovated, decorated, adopted a battered old dog and a tiny aggressive kitten. I planted flowers in the front garden: violets, roses, marigolds, pansies, tulips, impatiens, pink and yell
ow ice plants. The backyard was dedicated to herbs and bushes – a shady, leafy enclave. I hung wind chimes in the sunroom. It couldn’t have been more perfect. A family, that’s what we were.

  So on Sunday, the day of our second anniversary, I cancel our breakfast date and eat nothing all day and count Mathew’s calories instead of my own because counting reassures me. I like the quiet recitation of numbers in my mind; it’s like saying the rosary. I encourage Mathew to eat, eat, eat. He’s thin although he’s not what you’d call “health-conscious”; he smokes to excess, drinks way too much, and eats a lot of takeout along the way.

  He says he loves me and I think he does, for now anyway. But what if I got fat? Would he love me then? Maybe he would but he’d tease me and squeeze my expanded areas for sure. He wouldn’t like me fat, but in all fairness, what man would?

  For me, fat is the worst social crime. It’s an expression of weakness and self-indulgence, a tangible sign of vulnerability.

  So Sunday I eat nothing but I think about food all day. Heaven is a never-ending trifle, ha ha.

  Of course, come Monday, a binge is inevitable. I eat cookies, a yogurt, a sandwich, an apple, a packet of chips, and a muffin for god’s sake.

  I get home and Mathew is still at work. He had a function to go to and would be home much later. Good, I think. Then I try to fill the hole in my stomach with vegetables, huge amounts of them; fill me, fill me, fill me, I beg them. I try to feel full. I try to feel thin. But all I feel is ravenous.

  Autopilot kicks in and I head for the kitchen. I am still counting but I know it’s impossible to binge on 200 calories, so I flip on the off-switch of the calculator of my mind and reach for the cereal, the cookies, the cooking chocolate. I dig into the jam for good measure and then spoon Kraft cheese and butterscotch pudding and peanut butter into my mouth, just because I can.

  After a while I begin to slow down and start to feel nauseous. The dog has been watching me. He can always sense when something isn’t right. I put him out in the yard and head for the washroom.

  The problem is that the toilet in our house is old; it doesn’t flush well. Usually that stops me from at-home binges. That, and Mathew catching me, but I am past caring. I am numb; something else is in control.

  I stick my finger down my throat and purge. Like the dictionary says; atone, abrupt removal of, violent evacuation, clear oneself, purify. It is never fun. My eyes bulge, my throat burns, and bits splatter all over my T-shirt. I make a mental note to trash the shirt. I throw up until I can’t anymore, until there is nothing left but the tears in my eyes.

  Then I flush and I flush and I flush. I go back to the kitchen and I clean, sweep, dust, wash, and polish. There’ll be no evidence. I go back to the washroom and flush again. Then I go back to the fridge and rearrange what’s left so it looks undisturbed. Then I go and flush again. I floss my teeth and clean my face. I haven’t changed out of my T-shirt yet and it smells disgusting. I wear it on purpose while I clean; its stench my punishment while I atone and repent.

  It’s all made so much worse by the fact that I’m a spiritual individual, unashamed to admit I’m a believer.

  I say it like spirituality is a weakness, something I should hide, something I should be ashamed of, because so many people believe God is a naïve fiction, a fairytale figure designed to comfort the hapless who won’t take responsibility for getting themselves from one end of life to the other.

  But I feel close to the God of the universe, Creator of the stars and all that is good, and I hate myself for purging because it’s an anathema to my faith and the fundamental affirmation of life. It’s a violent act of self-hatred, but that doesn’t stop me, no. I feel bad about it; sure I do. That’s why while I clean I apologize to the purest of angels, “I am sorry,” I say. “I am so sorry.”

  Images of Jesus, crucified, come to mind.

  “Why was He so thin God?” I ask. “Are we all supposed to be that thin?”

  Well, thin is one thing, I think to myself in the silence of the post-purge shame, purging is another.

  I just need to exercise more discipline, get it right, stop this nonsense, Just Stop Doing It.

  Whenever I think Just Stop Doing It, I think of Jane Fonda. I remember an article in which she talked about having recovered from bulimia and she said something about having given it up cold turkey. I always remember the feeling of incredulous envy that washed over me when I read those words. Cold turkey. Like the quick, clean amputation of a diseased limb.

  But Jane did acknowledge the powerful force of the addiction, characterizing it as a disease of denial, the consequence of living a lie, of not being authentic and faking it, intrinsic to which was becoming a woman and then rejecting femininity. But, I tell myself, I am not living a lie. I need to Just Stop Doing It. If I remember correctly, Jane admitted it was sheer hell; that cold turkey was no walk in the park on a summer’s day. Maybe I am getting my leotarded leg-warmer clad pal confused with someone else but regardless, I know what I have to do. JSDI.

  My stomach is swollen. My throat burns.

  I am going to stop, too. This is my last time.

  I worry I have left a trace; was there anything I overlooked while cleaning? My heart races in a disturbing way and I am exhausted but I feel better. I do, yes I do. I am not driven by hunger anymore, not right now anyway. And I feel safe as I look into the toilet and see that it has been flushed clean.

  If Jane stopped, just like that, I will, too.

  If tomorrow is a good day, I won’t be hungry. If I am a good girl, I won’t be hungry.

  Married the vida loca

  MATHEW AND I HAVE BEEN married now for two years and my perfect life is exactly that: perfect.

  Sure there are lonely moments. Mathew has to work long, hard hours. His job is stressful, and he may drink too much from time to time. He seems to go out on a lot of liquid lunches: drinks after work, drinks after functions, drinks after parties, drinks after events.

  In the first year of our married life, I went to all the various functions and parties and events with him. But over time, I couldn’t keep up. Sometimes I think it’s easier for him when I don’t go although he says he prefers it when I am there. But when I am not there, he can drink as much as he likes and hang out with his old industry pals who I find a bit old-school, sodden in nicotine and beer, and sharing jokes about the past I don’t understand, nor find funny.

  I never criticize him for his drinking. It isn’t my place. And besides, it’s just his industry – everybody knows ad men drink a lot. I am lucky, in terms of husbands. He is easy-going and doesn’t expect me to cook for him, which is good because I really don’t know how, or have the interest given how I feel about food. I can boil, steam or bake, but I can’t follow a recipe and I don’t understand why people want to prepare such intricate food in the first place, when all it does is rack up calories and make you fat. And then the meal is done in no time and you’re punished by getting fat. Where’s the enjoyment in that?

  Mathew takes his own laundry to the dry cleaners so I don’t have to do that and we go dutch on everything. Of course, he earns about four times as much as I do, maybe more. I have to admit that I sometimes think it isn’t quite right, the way he splits our expenses exactly down the middle, but fair is fair and Mathew is perfectly fair. He organizes his money and I do mine. I know he spends quite a bit on gambling, but it’s his money. He can do what he likes with it, right?

  His sex drive fell off a bit after we got married. I asked him once, several months after our wedding, if he had lost interest. He got really quiet, as he tends to do when I catch him off guard. Later, that same night over dinner, he told me that statistically speaking, couples have sex 2.5 times a week and that we were well within the average. I couldn’t help noticing, after that, that we had exactly 2.5 episodes of sex per week. I can still count on that.

  He gives me a lot of helpful advice work-wise.

  “I am always bragging about you,” he likes to say proudly. “Everyb
ody always wants to know what you’re up to. I tell them I never know what to expect but you’re always up to something; there’s never a dull moment.”

  Whenever he gives me that speech I can never think of anything exciting I’ve done recently at work, but I guess one of those talked-about less-than-dull moments was the time I took us both to Hungary for a Christmas holiday. I’d made a small profit when I sold the loft and I suggested we go and look up some of my obscure relatives in Budapest. It’d be winter, but so what, we were used to the cold, and it’d be an adventure.

  Mathew agreed. Great idea, he said. I got the names and addresses of some of my cousins from my father and agreed we’d also stop in at his sister’s, my aunt Emilia who’d moved back with her family to a place in the country.

  It was Mathew’s and my first holiday together.

  He spent a lot of the time in the hotels, packing and unpacking our suitcases. He was oddly obsessed with this and I wasn’t quite sure how to handle his preoccupation.

  In the end I just left him to it and did a lot of sightseeing by myself, which was fine, because I got to see more of the things I wanted to than if he’d been with me. This is the one area he can’t keep up with me; I love sightseeing and can walk for hours.

  We met my long-lost cousins for dinner in Budapest, and my word could they ever drink. It’s true I’ve never been known for my capacity but all I can remember is feeling sicker than I’d ever felt in my life. We were drinking raw alcohol, and it was like my stomach, my esophagus, and my head were all simultaneously on fire. Mathew had a good time though.

  I managed to say goodbye to them without disgracing myself. Then I threw up in a gutter and wished I were dead. Mathew seemed to find the whole thing quite hilarious.

  We got back to the hotel and I couldn’t believe it when Mathew said he was up for one more drink in the bar; that he’d meet me up in the room soon.

  I made it to the bathroom, was sick again, and then fell asleep against the cold, hard tile. I woke up three hours later, groggy and disoriented.