“Did you visit her in hospital?” I ask. I have to know.
He shrugs no. “My function ran late and she was coming home the next day anyway. And it’s not like I could have done anything.”
He leaves and closes the door behind him.
The dog gets up and comes over to me. He lays his big head on my lap and I am grateful for his warm, hairy, doggy warmth. I lean down and kiss him, shaken by what I have just heard.
“But that was then and this is now,” I whisper to Freddo and hope with all my heart that it is true.
Inner child
THERE ARE NO FORBIDDEN FOODS, I repeat. If you want it, have it. Allow yourself this food. It doesn’t have to spark off a binge. You can have this, really you can. You’re entitled to have it, so eat it. I’m an adult and I give the child in me the right to have this food. There are no forbidden foods. If you want it, my inner child, you can have it.
I look at the chocolate. It sits there, looking back at me.
I hadn’t bought it, of course not. A thoughtless coworker had given it to me, “as a present.”
Yeah, right, I think. Thanks for nothing.
My heart begins to palpitate.
Slow down, I say to myself, take it easy, it’s only a chocolate. I’m okay, I’m fine, I am strong. Don’t panic now. If I really want it, I can have it; it’s 20 grams of fat. That’s 300 calories. Gosh, for 300 calories I can have an entire platter of vegetables! But I don’t want vegetables, do I? No, I don’t. I want the chocolate.
But, I think, would I have wanted it at all, or even thought about it, if it hadn’t been given to me? Would I sit here and think to myself, wow, I’d love a piece of chocolate right now? Well, yes, probably. But would I go out and buy it? No, never. Of course not. So, then, do I really want it? Yes. I do. I always want chocolate but I’m not usually this close to it; in fact, I always work very hard at keeping myself safely distanced from it. Oh, God. What should I do? I can picture it unwrapped. I can taste it.
I start to salivate.
I can have just a small piece of it, a tiny piece. Yes, I can have that. I bite my lip and study the impassive chocolate.
There are no forbidden foods, I tell myself tiredly, again, but the words are hollow and meaningless. I feel a certain numbness overtake me and I reach for the chocolate. I unwrap it and stuff it in my mouth in two bites. I don’t even taste it. Then I sit back in my chair, consumed with panic, and try to forget I have eaten it.
Thin people eat chocolate all the time, I tell myself, unconvincingly. I try to focus on my work but all I can think about is what I am going to eat next, and how long I will have to wait before I can get at more food.
There are no forbidden foods, I tell myself weakly, again. There are no forbidden foods.
Breakfast in London, supper in Paris
ANOTHER BIRTHDAY ROLLS AROUND. This time it’s the big three-o. Thirty. I decide that whatever we do to celebrate, we should do it as far away from home as possible.
“London and Paris?” I ask Mathew who checks his Air Miles.
“Okay,” he says. “Whatever you want little girl, no more than ten days away though, including travel.”
The day of my birthday I wake up in London, with Mathew on the narrow single bed beside the window. The room had come with two singles. When I had suggested we push the beds together, he had shrugged, so I left it.
I lie there, awake; he is fast asleep.
I dress quietly and go for a walk. It is damp. It’s London; of course it’s damp.
I have a bad sinus infection. I should have gotten some antibiotics before I left but at the time I thought I just needed time away from Shanda and Bullard and the circus of my life. I thought a change of scenery would do me a world of good.
“When a man’s tired of London, he’s tired of life,” that’s what Samuel Johnson said.
It seems like I have a dozen reasons to be tired; life is just one of them.
My face aches, my jaw aches, I am coughing up green stuff. I have more pills in my hand luggage than anything. I was surprised they even let me fly.
I fantasize about drilling a hole in my temple and letting the fluid drain out.
We’ve been in London for four days, and we’ve tirelessly done it all: theatre, movies, shopping, tours, museums, galleries, the Eye, nightclubbing in Shepherd’s Bush. I still haven’t felt that buzz though, and wasn’t one supposed to get a buzz from London? Therefore, not only am I tired of life, I am achingly tired by life and all things contained in the box therein. Samuel Johnson, I admit defeat.
The morning of my birthday I go for my walk and tire quickly. I decide to take a bus to Camden Lock and have a weave put in my hair, just one. I choose the cottons carefully; gold, silver, forest green, aqua. My hair is down past my waist and it too is feeling the effects of the sinus woes; it is lank and dull. I like my weave though. The dreadlocked guy who did the weave takes a photo of me afterwards. I think I look dreadful, all sallow, half dead. I eat an ice cream for breakfast. Yay. Happy birthday to me.
I trudge back to the hotel and find Mathew in the dining room, drinking coffee.
“Happy Birthday little girl,” he says, looking cheerful.
I show him my weave.
Last night, we went to a five-star restaurant with live jazz. I don’t like jazz or French cuisine but Mathew wanted to treat me to something special for our last night in London.
The restaurant was nearly empty which I thought made it feel quite dismal. That and the fact that it was in a low-ceilinged basement with smoky mirrored walls hung with gold and dark green tasselled drapes. The intricate food, course after course of it, was too rich and creamy and I had to resort to a washroom throw-up – only one visit – which made me feel miserable, but I had no choice. The dinner had been more than a week’s worth of calories.
Mathew loved the music, disregarded the food. He was allowed to smoke up a storm in the restaurant and he did, while he drank snifter after snifter of fine cognac.
“Here’s to your birthday,” he kept saying, as he ordered another round, seemingly oblivious to what it was that I might have wanted.
My idea of fun was to go to the Hard Rock Café and have a veggie burger and a diet Coke. Oh, and buy a T-shirt along the way.
But Mathew said that wasn’t very special and besides, he said, the Hard Rock was way too over-priced, everybody knew that.
So we ended up in a gloomy, smelly, high-class restaurant with linen napkins and I felt like I was out with my grandfather.
But Mathew was there for me, that’s what counted. I don’t know why I can’t be depended on to have a better time. Here I am, in London with my husband, who is treating me to the finer things and all I can think about is that the restaurant is empty and that I don’t care for the food. And my head is aching, and how I wish I were in bed.
I smile across the breakfast table at Mathew who says it is time to leave. I push myself to my feet and follow him.
I feel like I am dragging myself around, like the ghost of me has my body on a rope and I am bumping along behind myself like a heavy tin can.
They get our tickets confused on the Channel train. They are sorry they say, so they move us up to First Class. This cheers me up. Especially when they bring me chocolate-covered strawberries and a bottle of champagne. I am all set to tuck in when I catch Mathew looking at me. I really wish he’d eat more.
“What?” I ask him. “It’s my birthday?”
He shrugs. What is he trying to tell me? Not to eat? This is odd. I thought he didn’t care. I thought he wanted me to eat. I thought I was the one holding myself back.
I decide to have just one small sip of champagne and one strawberry. I try to enjoy the rest of the trip but we are underground and I feel claustrophobic, as I do a lot in closed spaces, and the strawberries are in my face calling out to me, eat me, eat me, and the champagne wants to be appreciated too. I wish I could give it all the respect it deserves. My claustrophobia gets so bad in the tu
nnel that I take a Valium; I need them for flying and any situations where I am trapped for a period of time.
I’ve told my doctor about how I sometimes feel claustrophobic in my body, like I need to claw my way out of my flesh, and I can’t breathe.
She said I am having a panic attack. I corrected her. No, it isn’t that. I don’t panic. I have claustrophobic attacks. But, I asked her, how many people actually get that from being inside their own bodies?
She said I was obviously very anxious. I said yes, she would be too, if she wanted to get out of her own body.
She asked me if I ever wanted to kill myself. I said no, of course not. I just want to step out of my body, in the same way one would take off a suit of clothes, that’s all, or crack open the doors of my rib cage from the inside, push them apart, and step out. I didn’t tell her that last bit, about the ribs.
I could see she didn’t get it.
I told Miranda. She got it.
“We are just more highly evolved than most people,” Miranda said, “more in tune with our spiritual selves and painfully aware of the dichotomy between the metaphysical and the physical.”
Well, be that as it may, in the meantime, I swallow valiums when the feeling becomes too intense.
The train flies through the tunnel and I play with my hair weave, hold my champagne glass, and try to feel as fabulous as I think I should, given the First Classness of it all.
The truth is I am not looking good. My sinus infection has cast a grey pallor on my face and there are dark shadows under my eyes. I look like fresh putty and I’m beginning to feel very odd indeed.
It’s probably the combination of sinus meds, Valium, and champagne that has gone to my head, making me feel spacey. Everything is moving in slow motion and some of the frames between the images are missing and I have to connect what it is I am supposed to be doing, fill in the blanks as it were. This is, in its way, quite entertaining and I have a good time trying to spot the missing pieces.
Mathew reads a newspaper and doesn’t notice my oddness.
We arrive in Paris. Our hotel is perfect. It has a view of the quaint jumbled rooftops covered in ancient shingles and old-fashioned TV aerials.
I commandeer the tiny green-tiled washroom and steam my face over the washbasin. I inhale the Vicks VapoRub that I had put into the boiling water in the hopes of melting down the steel bar of solid pain that has wedged itself behind my eye sockets. I kneel with my head under a towel for an hour but feel no relief. I get to my feet groggily and pop all the pills I have.
“We must go up the Eiffel Tower,” I say to Mathew. “I want to be up there, on my actual birthday.”
He is having a nap, having neatly unpacked all of our luggage.
We trudge along to the Eiffel Tower, propelled by the sheer force of my desire. I want to make a wish at the top of the tower. It’s important to me that I do not miss this moment. We make it to the top and the tower sways in the strong wind, or maybe it is just my head. I can’t be sure. The day is blustery with dirty clouds and a smattering of rain. Paris, like London, isn’t warm either. The temperature was supposed to be in the mid-twenties but it feels more like a cool ten. I try to make my wish but I can’t remember what it is I want. So I just send out a general request for a blessed life.
We head back down to the bottom of the tower and go for a walk along the edge of the Seine. The wind starts to pick up and my head feels increasingly worse, my energy sorely lacking. My lower back and knees ache horribly.
Mathew and I hold hands as we stroll along, eating ice creams. Isn’t this the definition of a perfect moment? Me and Mathew in Paris, holding hands, walking along the edge of the Seine, eating ice cream. It doesn’t feel like I had thought it would though.
Time to go home. My head is killing me and staying vertical is an effort.
“I think I need an early night,” I say, to which Mathew has no response. I have no idea if he is angry with me for being such a wimp but I am too spaced out to care. I crawl into bed as soon as we got back to the hotel and console myself with the thought that at least I am actually in Paris, even if I’m not out there seeing it. Mathew found a bunch of English newspapers and spread them out on the bed. He is enjoying bread and cheese and drinking red wine. I am feeling too sick to care about food, which should make me happy, but I am too sick to feel happy about anything.
The next morning I feel worse.
“Let’s find that café where Sartre hung out,” I say. I swing my feet cautiously over the bed and an ominous throbbing fills my skull. “Les Deux Magots. We can have breakfast there.” As I stand up, the thick fluid shifts its weight in my head, like liquid lead flung to the far side of a cavernous container. I dip my head forward and feel my eyeballs bob against the pressure.
“I don’t feel so good,” I say.
Mathew doesn’t say anything; he just regards me with alarm.
“Perhaps we’ll find a walk-in clinic along the way,” I say, “or I can talk to a pharmacist.”
He looks relieved.
We find the café and drink coffee. I want to put my head on my arms and sleep until someone carries me home.
“Let’s go and find Jim Morrison’s grave,” I say to Mathew who is gazing around.
“The only thing I want to do is see the Louvre,” he says.
“And so we shall,” I agree. I feel horribly disoriented.
I think we find the grave and it is smaller than I had imagined.
Then I drag Mathew into the Chanel store where I pretend I can nearly buy a pair of shoes but say I have to take some time to think about it.
Up the Champs-Élysées.
To the Louvre. We don’t actually go inside the Louvre. Mathew says he just wants to say he has been to the Louvre and if he thinks standing outside counts, well, I feel too awful to argue.
Back to bed.
On the final day we go to Sacré-Coeur where I ask God to help me be a better wife and have a long and happy life with Mathew. I climb the thousands of stairs to the top and pray hard all the way. I watch a woman beside me who is going up on her knees. She is obviously praying harder than me; her prayers have way more chance of being answered.
Mathew stays in the square far below to check out the art on display. He is pretty good at caricatures and thinks he might turn his hand to that in his old age. During our time together, I have bought him a lot of art equipment, but he hasn’t used any of it yet.
At the top of the stairs, outside the immense chalk-white church, I admire the view of Paris. I say more prayers, and thank God for life as I know it, then I crawl back down.
Mathew is excited when I get back down. There’s hope for his art, he says.
We go back to the hotel and while he packs and repacks, I steam my face again.
By the time we get to the airport, the next morning, I am not sure I can fly. I leave Mathew to guard our luggage and locate the airport doctor through dogged determination. I lie on the examination table and think I could happily stay there for the rest of my life.
The doctor gives me antibiotics and painkillers and says I should be okay to fly. I feel as though my head could easily burst open in an explosion of terrible fluids. I feel like my eyeballs are ready to blow.
I down my pills and head back to find Mathew who is reading a newspaper.
He looks up. “All good little girl?”
“Fine and dandy, Jack,” I say hollowly. He must finally realize I am not having the greatest time because he heads off and comes back with an armful of my favourite trashy magazines, the biggest bar of Toblerone I’ve ever seen, a bottle of Paris by Yves Saint Laurent, and two sugar-free Red Bulls.
I thank him, and hope I sound the right level of appreciative but I am feeling too ill to read and the thought of carrying another bag of stuff makes me feel exhausted.
“I’m just going to doze for a bit,” I say and manage a smile. He really is trying and I am being ungrateful. “Thank you immensely for the gifts. I’m just going to r
est my head a bit. Sorry I am being so feeble.”
We land, get home, and I have to go straight to the office – a deal I had made with Shanda before I had left. When I made it, I had no idea how awful I’d be feeling when I got back.
I drive to work in a daze, do twelve hours straight, meet the deadline.
“Will you check the colour proofs for me?” I ask Magda. “I must go home and sleep, I feel awful. I hope Shanda doesn’t fire me but if she does, for a sinus infection, then honestly, I don’t care.”
“She’d never fire you,” Magda assures me. “Go home immediately, you look terrible. Take a few days. If we need any help I’ll get a freelancer in, don’t worry about it. So anyway,” she asks, “how was London, how was Paris?”
“I don’t really remember,” I say. I get up and find my car keys. “But I’m sure they must have been lovely.”
Eating by numbers
I DON’T KNOW WHY THE HUNGERS have come back, because I’ve tried so hard to do everything I can to stop them. I started a new journal, and in it I write down every single thing I eat; the exact time I ate it; where I was when I ate it; and how I felt when I ate it. I added another column, a calorie chart, just to reassure myself that even though I feel so fat, I can’t really be, because I simply am not eating enough for me to be fat.
Maybe it’s because I started focusing on the numbers again, instead of the feelings, that it all started to unravel.
If I eat more than I should have, then the next day, I readjust accordingly, and I cut down where necessary but it’s increasingly tough to keep the balance as low as I want to, what with all the dinners and parties that Mathew likes me to go to. I try to avoid as many as I can, telling myself Mathew prefers to go alone so that he can bond with his boozy buddies, but I am just kidding myself. He wants me there and I really am trying to be a good wife.
When I think about it, I have no choice but to eat by numbers again, simply to get through the dinners and functions. I survive by eating pounds of raw carrot sticks, celery, green pepper, cucumber, and cauliflower, instead of the teaspoonfuls of ice cream and tiny bits of muffin that I really want. Then I get angry, because I don’t want to be there. I don’t want to be eating carrots. I want to be at home, eating tiny pieces of whatever I want.
The Hungry Mirror Page 5