The Hungry Mirror

by Lisa de Nikolits

  I explain about Angelica Rose being the new Kate Moss, and Shanda’s reaction to the covers.

  “Let me see them onscreen,” the publisher demands. He had once been an editor at Playboy and had some odd ideas about things. “Hmm,” he says, leaning in way too close for comfort. “Where’s the pussy? I don’t see the clitoral stimulation here. Where’s the sex?”

  Since Mathew had warned me before I joined this crew that it would be a weird ride and, since these kinds of comments were commonplace daily fare with Bullard, I’d quickly become acclimatized and learnt to ignore them.

  Not so with Magda. She swells like a balloon, almost hissing as she inflates, and turns purple. I can’t say her reaction is not justified.

  “This is not Playboy, Mr. Bullard,” she tells him through gritted metallic teeth. “We are a women’s health and fitness magazine!”

  I agree with her wholeheartedly but am too cowardly to voice my support.

  Bullard is unrepentant. “Sex sells,” he says. “We all want it, even you Martha.”

  “It’s Magda,” she says for the umpteenth time.

  “Well, at least you tried, a good effort,” the publisher commends me as he pats me on the back. He is trying out a new contraband skin-peeling medication and I worry he will leave flakes of dead epithelials all over me.

  Thankfully, he strolls out.

  I crane my neck and try to see over my shoulder.

  “Here, let me help you,” Magda offers, aware of my concerns. She gets strips of tape and cleans the back of my shirt.

  “I don’t even want to see what came off,” I tell her.

  “He makes me so angry,” she lisps slightly through her braces. “Sexist pig. I hate him. I wish I didn’t have to work here. They told me it was all about women and empowerment, about making us feel better about ourselves, helping us accept our individuality and now it’s like we’ve got Helen Gurley Brown editing Playboy. It’s hell.”

  “Well, look what happened to Jean, they obviously don’t want anything meaningful.” I stare at my screen. “Hey Magda, what do you think of Angelica Rose?”

  Magda pauses for a moment while she picks at her braces and makes tiny sucking noises. She is thoughtfully considering the scraps of Angelica’s face that she has gathered from off the floor, turning them over and over in her hands.

  “She’s bad for morale,” she finally says. “I look at her and all I can think is how big and solid I am and how I will always be big and solid, and I shouldn’t have had breakfast and I shouldn’t have lunch.”

  “I think she’s lovely,” I look at my screen again. “I know perhaps I shouldn’t because she’s so unreal but there’s something about her that’s just so graceful, ethereal, light … I don’t know.”

  Magda laughs. “She’s how you and so many other people want to look,” she says. “And you have more chance of it than I do but I tell you, trying to achieve that look will make your life hell. I am going to see how Shanda’s doing.”

  Just then Shanda walks in, still frowning, her short, feathered blonde hair doing a perfect flip-up at the ends. She picks at her nails, which are, oddly enough, always in bad shape; chipped, uneven, striated. Magda and I had discussed this anomaly before and come to no conclusions.

  “What did Mr. Bilious think of the cover?” she asks shortly.

  “Not in favour,” I say neutrally. “Not enough pussy, no clitoral stimulation.”

  She leans against the lightbox. “Sorry about that earlier,” she mutters. “I’m not in a great mood. I shouldn’t have torn those mock covers up.” She sighs and smooths her skirt.

  Or stomped on them, I think. “It’s okay,” I say, “No more Angelica.”

  And we never mention her again. I decide the best way to get us all on a united page is a mutual bitching session. When in doubt, find a new enemy. I never have to look far.

  “Why does this sales dude have to share with me?” I ask. “He’s useless, totally useless and I just don’t get it; why must he be in here with me?”

  We launch into a full-scale attack of the sales guy who is out trying his hand at a cold call.

  Twenty minutes later we all feel much better and the day looks brighter.

  Bulexia

  SHANDA AND MAGDA LEAVE AND I clean up the mess on the floor. I wonder, as I often do, if Kate Moss actually did those infamous drugs to keep her weight down, rather than for recreational pleasure. She had gone from being a skinny adolescent who loved to publicly scarf huge plates of fish and chips, to a period where she was quite hefty, in supermodel terms anyway. I would not be surprised if drugs, for her, were nothing more than a necessary weight loss device. After all, my favourite gossip mags claim that O’Neal got Tatum hooked on coke just to help her drop her unsightly pubescence weight. So if Kate Moss used wayward white powder to manage her weight, she’d hardly be the first.

  I once befriended a bank manager, a neat and tidy woman in her fifties, who told me she did coke to keep her weight down. Green tea, hoodia, and apple cider vinegar – none of that crap hacked it, she said. It took serious chemicals to keep her figure nice and trim and she’d do whatever she had to. It was purely medicinal, she said. She was hysterical about gaining even an ounce, which I could relate to, of course. But I sure hope that the age of fifty won’t see me behind the closed door of a washroom cubicle feeding two destructive addictions.

  Everything I ever read about Kate Moss had her denying she ever had an eating disorder, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t have to resort to other ways of keeping her figure as she got older. I guess I am just looking for a reason to explain why I can’t be as thin as Kate – you see, it isn’t my inferior generics or my lack of control, it’s just that I don’t do the drugs.

  So I clean up Shanda’s mess and turn back to face the day. I am still angry but the focus of my discontent has shifted back to having to share my office. I like to be alone.

  “So, you’re pretty good at all this then?” the sales guy asks me later, an obvious sucking-up move on his part. He is back from his cold call, full of good cheer, having sold a quarter-page black-and-white ad that I will have to make up for him. I had already done a mockup for him which he now says was the ace up his sleeve.

  “I’m not just pretty good,” I say shortly. “I am great.”

  I shouldn’t be so mean to him, I think. It’s not his fault he’s old-school and been away for a while and so much has happened. Maybe Bullard’s right; he needs to be in here so I can update him on what’s going on. But whatever the reason, I prefer to be alone.

  Several days later, I look at him across the room and realize that he’s no better off than when he first started. Plus, I am getting really tired of hearing about the wheels having fallen off. Also, there’d been no follow-up to the auspicious quarter-page black and white ad. I look at my watch. Eleven a.m. The wheels are going to be falling off for some time yet today. I try to concentrate on my work again.

  “Thursday the eighth? Wonderful,” he says. “Oh, not Thursday, of course, Thursday is the second, what was I thinking of? Well, back on the job after a few years’ sabbatical and it takes time really, what can one expect? Ha ha. Right, so Thursday the second, noon. Wonderful. Yeah baby, Bill’s back. Back in the driver’s seat!”

  He puts down the phone and stares at his diary again. He gets up and ambles out of the room. I am happy when he’s gone; he seems to bully the room. I can hear him in the hallway, just outside my door. He’s explaining to someone that he is giving me “some space”; he sensed I needed “some peace and quiet.”

  I resolve to be nicer to him.

  He comes back into the office and stands behind my chair, much to my annoyance, and stares at my screen.

  “Don’t mind me,” he says. “I’m just watching you.”

  “I don’t really like being watched,” I say, and he shuffles back to his desk.

  “You’re married to Ken Shipley, aren’t you?” he asks.

  “No, I’m married to Mathew Ke
ndrick,” I say, irritated that he has confused the two men who are not similar at all.

  “Oh, right. Sorry. Mathew, yes, he’s been married before right? Yes, I remember, he got married, then he got divorced.”

  “And then he got married again,” I say curtly. “To me.”

  “I remember his wedding,” he says, reminiscing. “He bought a station wagon, a big old Chevy I think it was. I remember, he was so excited.”

  He sounds like he’s going to carry on with his story and I feel a moment of fear that he’ll tell me what Mathew’s first wife was like, something Mathew and I have taken great pains to never talk about. In the beginning I wanted details but Mathew had been firm.

  “The past is the past little girl,” he’d said. “It’s like a hat you hang up when you enter a room; there’s no point in hashing over it.”

  I was upset at the time but later I understood and now, a couple of years down the line, I don’t want some boozy old stranger shattering my life with his thick-skinned stories, told indiscreetly because he’s trying to score points with his “remember when we did that, remember when we were there” stories. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a has-been clinging to the life raft of “when-we’s.” I realize I am getting angry, and anxious. I know this conversation is headed nowhere good.

  “Does he have any kids?” the sales guy asks. “I seem to remember Mika being all excited about being pregnant.”

  I feel the proverbial icy hand grab my heart and give a good squeeze. Mika was Mathew’s first wife. Pregnant? This is really too much.

  “Well, no, they didn’t have kids. Look, that was then, this is now,” I say firmly, glaring at him. For once he doesn’t misunderstand and turns his attention back to his old phone book.

  Kids? I think, flustered. Mathew had always said they’d never wanted any, and he’d certainly never mentioned anything about a pregnancy. I am thinking about this and not feeling too happy when Shanda rushes into the office.

  “What’s on page 52?” she shrieks. “Because now they want an ad there and there isn’t space, oh God!”

  I reach for my pagination sheet.

  “It’s okay,” I say and point out various options. I reassure her that the catastrophe isn’t really a catastrophe at all, when we both become aware that Bill is staring at us.

  “Yes, can I help you?” Shanda enquires sharply of Bill’s looming whiskers.

  “No, nothing, just watching, carry on, carry on.” He remains standing there, quiet. I am silent and angry. If looks could kill, maybe he’ll finally get lost. Shanda loses her momentum, mutters “oh, well that’s fine then,” and escapes to her office. I am still fuming over his earlier remarks. The nerve.

  I ignore Bill who plods back to his desk to give the phone another go and tell yet another hapless sod about the wheels of misfortune falling off. I try to process what he’d told me about Mathew and his first wife.

  Later, I am so numbed by his repetitive tales of woe that all his conversations have become no more than white noise. In fact I get so used to it, that when it stops, I glance up to see if he’s all right. “Are you okay?” I ask him in the silence, before I can stop myself. Not that I really care.

  “That was the wife, on the phone now,” he says heavily. “We’ve just found out our daughter has bulexia.”

  “What?” I ask. “She has what?”

  “Bu … bulexia,” Bill stumbles over the word and makes throwing up motions to illustrate his point.

  “It’s bulimia or anorexia,” I say matter-of-factly.

  “Yes,” he sighs. “Those. Well, you know, she’s a big-boned girl really and her sister is thinner and prettier but she keeps trying to lose weight, won’t eat this, won’t eat that.”

  “So what happened?” I ask. “How did you find out?”

  “She went to a concert on Friday night, collapsed, and spent the weekend in hospital.”

  “Ah.” I say.

  “Those things are not easy to cure you know,” I add, cautiously, not wanting to get involved in this discussion but unable to stop myself. “How old is she?”

  “Twenty-eight,” he says dispiritedly.

  “That’s more serious then,” I say, biting my lip, knowing this won’t make him feel better. “She’s not just some adolescent in a phase. It’s part of her self-image now and that’s what will make it much harder to change.”

  But Bill isn’t listening to me, why would he? He is gazing across the room, blank-eyed. I get on with my work. Later that afternoon I hear him talking to his daughter.

  “So, are you alright now?” he asks her.

  Oh yes, right, I think sarcastically. Bulexia one minute, right as rain the next. I’ve got news for you, old man.

  “So, mum brought you chicken soup and noodles and you ate them? Good girl. Listen, you just rest up and we’ll chat later okay? No, it’s fine, really, just a bit strange after being away and thinking I’d never have to come back. Now are you sure you’ve eaten? Do you promise me?”

  I sit, hidden behind my computer, and listen. I can imagine it all exactly. No doubt the daughter is tucked up in bed, wallowing in the delicious permission of being allowed to eat, no, even better, she is being ordered to eat. Finally, frail and vulnerable, people are saying things to her that she has longed to hear her entire life.

  I imagine her hunger – her rare, legal hunger – and I picture her enjoying her meal as she has no other, enjoying the attention, the love, the warmth. I am sure too, that in this fleeting moment, the daughter, doubtless heavy-boned and lumpy, even feels thin. Slender and momentarily willowy, she’ll be stretched out under the cool crisp covers.

  But I also know, with the same, absolute certainty, that this sense of rightness will be short-lived and once the meal is eaten and the room empty of supportive family members, that the disgusting digestion process will begin and the stomach will start to feel as though it has been pumped full of gluten, the thighs will spread and balloon and swell up against each other.

  She’ll begin to feel dirty and weak and her sense of self, so intact only moments before, will dissolve and she’ll feel nothing but remorse and guilt for her uncontrolled binge. She’ll lie there and open her legs wider so her thighs and knees won’t touch, and she’ll calculate the calories consumed in her hasty and greedy feast, and she’ll plan the next day’s atonement for the crime.

  She’ll wish she was home, alone, so she can go throw up. She knows it is not a real sickness that she has; it’s just that she needs to do this one more time, to get herself back in control and then she’ll be fine, and then she’ll never do it again, promise. She can’t help needing to do it this one time because she did not mean to eat all that food, but she’d been so hungry and everybody made her do it, and now all she wants is to get rid of it.

  I shake myself back to reality, focus my attention on my work, and tell myself repeatedly that it’s Bill’s daughter I am thinking about, not me. It is Bill’s daughter who has eaten, not me. Besides, no matter how bad my day gets, I’d never eat noodles anyway.

  I was at the pub he said

  LATER THAT NIGHT I AM sitting next to Mathew on the sofa, trying to pluck up the courage to ask him about what Bill the sales guy had said.

  I glance at him. He is reading a report, tapping a pencil against his porcelain veneers, his bifocals halfway down his nose. He is still in his work clothes, shirt sleeves rolled up, tie loosened. He is frowning and doesn’t look happy at all.

  Miranda once commented that Mathew has the most beautiful forearms. She has a thing for forearms. I suddenly realize she and I haven’t spoken for quite some time and I wonder what’s going on with her. But we go through periods like that, particularly if she is in love, which I hope is currently the case.

  Sensing Mathew isn’t in the best of moods, I think now might not be the right time to mention what Bill said. I sigh, and turn back to my book. My legs are curled up under me, and I am tucked into the corner of the sofa, snug against the cushion
s, under the warmth and light of my reading lamp. Freddo, the dog, snores slightly and our little Siamese cat, Cleo, is sphinx-like on the chair opposite.

  All in all it is a scene of perfect domesticity and familial contentment and why would I want to ruin that?

  But if I am not able to ask my husband such an important question, then how real is our serenity? I realize I have no desire to follow that line of thinking.

  “Mathew,” I say, I just have to ask, “you know old Bill? Well, he said an odd thing today.”

  Mathew looks up distractedly. “Huh?” he says.

  “Bill, the old sales guy, that friend of Bullard’s who sits in my office. He said you bought a Chevy station wagon when you got married before and that Mika got pregnant. Is that true?”

  “Stupid old fool,” Mathew says. He looks irritated. “I was going to give him a pity-ad but I don’t think I will now. Yes, I bought a station wagon and, yes, Mika got pregnant but she wanted it, not me.” He thinks for a moment and smiles. “I haven’t thought about that car in years; it had wood-paneled sides.”

  He turns back to his papers.

  “So what happened to Mika and the baby?” I persist.

  “Well, she lost it, obviously,” Mathew says, still reading.

  “When she was how far along?” I ask.

  Mathew loses his patience. “Little girl, I don’t remember.” He sighs and gets to his feet.

  I am sorry I said anything. It is so rare for him to be at home at a nice hour, and now I have sent him away with my stupid questions.

  “Don’t go,” I say, and sit up.

  “I need to have a shower anyway,” he says. “And then I’ve got to check those numbers again, something’s not right.”

  He walks over to the door then stops.

  “I didn’t want a baby and I told her that,” he says, his face closed. “But she got pregnant anyway, thinking I’d be happy when it happened. But I wasn’t. I was in the pub at a work thing when I got the call that she’d lost the baby. She stayed in hospital overnight and she came home the next day and we never talked about it again.”