The Hungry Mirror

by Lisa de Nikolits

  But this is immature and I know it. You can’t do whatever you want in life. You have to tell the child in you that it can’t have everything it wants. Life as an adult isn’t easy; it means working the room, making things happen, seizing the moment and helping your partner. I accept my responsibility to Mathew, but I can’t tell you my body is a helpful ally because it isn’t.

  I am like an eternal accountant, always adding and subtracting, dividing and borrowing, taking some of tomorrow’s calories for today, or saving some of yesterday’s lunch for tomorrow’s dinner.

  In a way, all of this helps me get through the mind-numbing nights of socializing with drunken ad men; they ramble on and I nod and smile, all the while comforted by the sums in my head.

  I also want to set the record straight; it’s not like I have ever been a real bulimic either. I read somewhere that to classify a person as a “bulimic,” you have to throw up at least three times a week for four months or something like that and I never do it that much.

  I only throw up when I really have to. Like I said, when I have to go to a dinner and eat more than I want to. Or sometimes if I get too stressed and binge, then I have to throw up. Or sometimes, if I just get so hungry and I eat everything in sight without really meaning to, then, I just have to throw up.

  You know what I mean?

  I have begun to wonder if Mathew has any suspicions about the extent of my difficulties but he seems distracted and anyway, he’s been awfully tense lately. I have asked him numerous times what was wrong until he just about snapped my head off and told me to stop asking. He says nothing is wrong; he is just under a lot of pressure at work and he has to go to Germany soon to attend a conference and how is he supposed to fit that in, on top of everything?

  I feel bad for having asked him, like I only made things worse. Everybody thinks I am so lucky, being married to Mr. Life and Soul of the party but he isn’t all that easy really. I feel like I’m stepping on minefields whenever I want to talk to him about anything other than our industry. Or, I feel like I’m just boring him with the things I want to talk about.

  Finally, realizing there is no way I can balance the books with a function every night, I ask him if he could try to schedule me for social things every second night, so I could have some calorie catch-up time. Of course I didn’t tell him the real reason, I just said it was making me too tired, all that socializing. But I said if there was an emergency or an important client dinner, then of course I’d go.

  He looked at me and nodded. “Tell Marcia to make a note,” he said. “You can work out with her which events you want to come to. You two get on really well, you can figure it out.” Marcia is his secretary. And then he continued with his story about how some media buyer had screwed up some ad placements and he’d had to rush in as usual and save the day.

  I wonder if I should talk to Miranda about my concerns about Mathew, how he seems more stressed and less communicative than usual, how he’s become Mr. Inaccessible. I even call him that, teasingly, just to try get a reaction from him, but all he does is smile absently and pat me on the shoulder.

  No, I can’t talk to her. I can’t admit that my marriage may be less than perfect. There has always been a competition of sorts between Miranda and me, and I am so clearly in the lead: I married an eligible man, live in a lovely home, and am successful at work. I can’t let her know I am feeling that something is not right.

  Besides, I have to admit I don’t like the way she is behaving lately. I have been trying not to think about that but it has been nagging at me. I don’t like to think about things that upset me but I can’t seem to drown out the niggling voice in my head. I suppose I need to figure out what it’s trying to say about Miranda.

  The admitted absence of morality

  MIRANDA HAS DECIDED THAT she wants what I have and that she’s going to make it happen, no matter what.

  It is fair to say she has been unlucky in love. Years ago, after she and I left university, she fell hard for an Indian fellow whose family was originally from Delhi. She met him at a Human Resources conference she was attending and fell in love with him immediately. He warned her from the start there could be no future, that his marital life was already all mapped out. But Miranda, flushed with true love, foresaw a happy outcome. She imagined herself wearing floating saffron saris decorated with sequins and tiny glittering beads and having cherubic little babies.

  I met Sanjiv a few times and I also wanted him to marry Miranda because he brought out the best in her – when she was with him, she was happy, even gentle. But Sanjiv went ahead with the arranged marriage his family had planned for him and took Rijuta to be his bride, much to Miranda’s heartbroken astonishment and fury. “I mean who even does arranged marriages anymore?” She was beside herself with grief. “Sanjiv told me all along that his father expected it but I thought it was such a ridiculously outdated idea that he’d never really go for it. But he did.”

  She waited for him to realize his mistake and come back to her. But he didn’t. Then she waited for the universe to send her due compensation in the form of her own man, but the universe failed to oblige.

  Pressed by loneliness and the sense that I am leaving her behind, Miranda decides to take matters into her own hands. She finds a young guy at a party, Nathan Robert Jameson, and tells me matter-of-factly that he’s the one. He is a beautiful, androgynous twenty-three-year-old boy, a passionate, recently-graduated math genius and she figures he has the genetics to give her a good baby and the career to keep her financially sound while she stays at home, looks after the baby, and completes her Ph.D. in English Lit. She marries him, poor pussy-struck lad that he is. Nathan wears a velvet suit with large French cuffs, bell-bottomed pants, and a tall top hat. Miranda wears a creamy, reed-slender backless gown that falls from her broad boxy shoulders in a sheath of heavy satin.

  She immediately works at getting pregnant and changing Nate’s life. She buys a house on our street, four up from ours. Without telling me. They move in and she phones and says, “Hey, guess what neighbour?” She gets Nate to take a job in IT support in computers. More money she says, and more stability. There isn’t a huge call for math geniuses these days.

  “Doesn’t he mind?” I ask, standing inside the future baby’s yellow room. She shrugs.

  But things don’t work out quite the way she thinks they will. She doesn’t get pregnant. Nate hates his new job. And she starts having an affair with the married professor who heads up the English department. She decides she loves the professor but he won’t leave his wife and besides, she’s determined to have Nate’s baby, what with all the great genes, future alimony, and child support.

  I can’t say I like what is going on. I have always made it my business never to judge or pry; that is the tenet upon which our longstanding friendship is based. I have never judged her, not even when she was involved in all sorts of experimental things when we were at university. This time it’s different.

  She has said to me, more than once, that she has no morals. She says it isn’t like she is immoral – in other words, positively bad – but more like she is amoral, which to her just means an absence of morality. In this way, nothing is good or bad, it just is. To me, immoral or amoral, this level of manipulation is harsh in the extreme and I am dismayed by the selfish intent with which she is going about her plans, and the utter disregard for all the lives she is affecting.

  So, no, I can’t talk to Miranda about Mathew. And I can’t talk to Mathew about anything except work and I certainly can’t tell my parents or my sister that I am lonely. Or any of my colleagues. There doesn’t seem to be anyone.

  So I reassure myself that these things happen from time to time, in every marriage, and all I need to do is keep my head down, keep focused, keep doing my bit, and everything will be fine.

  Fat is a family issue

  LIKE I’VE SAID BEFORE, I purge from necessity, not from choice. And as for the bingeing, well, I think that started when I was about twelve, a con
sequence of my having to diet so much. I was a really skinny little kid but then I layered on a lot of prepubescent baby fat, which worried my parents no end.

  My parents were only trying to be helpful when they put me on the first of many crash diets but it got to a point where my poor body couldn’t stand it any more and simply demanded the foods it wanted, the foods it could see other people eating. But I wasn’t allowed those foods unless my parents said it was okay, and they would, sometimes, say it was okay, and I could eat as much as I wanted for a day. Then, the following day, I had to start my diet all over again.

  I have always felt oddly separate from my body, like a landlord/tenant situation where I’m a careful resident with a lot of rules to follow. We have an uneasy truce. But for whatever reason, my body doesn’t really like me.

  In the beginning, I didn’t feel bad about purging because it meant that I hadn’t really eaten all of that food. I had just tasted it and enjoyed it but I hadn’t digested it, which would have been disgusting.

  Sometimes, in the early days, I worried I hadn’t got all of the food out, but I devised ways around that too. After every purge, I’d drink a litre of water and then I’d throw it up, a final rinse as it were, a stomach wash, a technique I invented. I thought it rather clever really.

  My parents promised me gifts of jewelry and clothing; all kinds of incentives to help me drop the unlovable fat; the fat that would see me rejected by my peers, made boyfriend-less and lonely, stuck in the dead-end rut of an unremarkable life, all because of the unsightly padding of my hips, thighs, and stomach.

  At one time, I really believed that when I got married everything would automatically get better. I had thought marriage would solve so many things but somehow I feel more alone and more confused than ever before.

  All my life I have been taught by my parents, and by the western First World, that if I am thin, I will be successful, which in turn means I will have a good marriage, a good job, and a lovely home. In other words, my life will be perfect.

  I have all of that, and I worked so hard to get it. So, what I can’t understand now is why my life isn’t perfect. It’s like having all the ingredients for a perfect cake and then somehow ruining the final confection.

  It has to be me who is ruining it; why else is it failing to deliver? I must be doing something wrong because only an imperfect person could be so unhappy in such a perfect life.

  I decide it’s time to return to the Nutritional Alignment Coach. Her way of doing things worked before, hopefully she’ll get me back on track.

  Bingeing her way to recovery

  I TELL MATHEW I HAVE JOINED a book club and instead take a two-month course given by the Listen To Your Body Nutritional Alignment coach who counselled me on the “the theory of small bites.”

  After the initial group session, I make up a few stories about crime novels and discussions thereof, for the sake of appearances, but Mathew doesn’t seem interested one way or the other and I stop worrying about that aspect of things. What does worry me though, six weeks into the course, is the number of people who put on weight when they go through their “experimenting with foods stage,” which is the part where they are supposed to get in touch with what their bodies really want. But they don’t really listen to their bodies. I have semi-befriended a girl in the course, Deane, who eats four chocolate bars with breakfast every morning. She says that’s what her body wants. But when she puts on weight, she can’t understand why.

  I am more disciplined than she is, more disciplined than all of them. I listen to my body carefully. I work hard at it. Deane just hears the coach say, “eat whatever your body wants” and she goes crazy. If you ask me, she listens to her cravings and her anger, not her hunger. Also, her husband didn’t have sex with her on the first night of their marriage and hardly at all since then either. She tells me that she really likes sex. She can’t admit the marriage is less than perfect, but it’s not my place to tell her that this is the reason she eats four chocolate bars with breakfast every morning.

  And then, to make matters worse, she finds a book that to my mind is dangerously irresponsible, or maybe she just interprets it the wrong way. Either way, it makes me nervous.

  The book tells her she has to eat her way through her eating disorder. It tells her to eat whatever she wants, and eventually her desire to binge will diminish. All will even out and the weight will just drop off. The eating disorder will be gone, and, bonus, she will have been able to eat all the foods she wants along the way. And then, in the happy-ever-after, she’ll be cured and at a normal weight. All very nice and tidy.

  Deane tells the group about her plan to try this out. I am astounded to hear the coach say she’d heard of the book, and that Deane should experiment with this for a while and see how it works out for her. I am horrified. I start avoiding Deane in case what she’s doing is contagious. She gets bigger and bigger and never makes the breakthrough to normal eating, and she never loses the weight. Eventually I have to stop seeing her, which is a pity because I like her.

  Anyway, so here I am, the course almost completed. I am a good A-student, doing well, one could say. I am back in control, listening to my body again, happy as a vigilant clam, eating tiny crumbs.

  And yet, why do the horrors come back? Yes, again, Mathew’s dinners play a part for sure, but it isn’t just that, and it isn’t fair for me to blame Mathew’s work responsibilities for my weakness.

  The reasons for these things are never simple. For me, and people like me, a cupcake is not just a cupcake – it’s a weapon of war in daily combat, and I am compounding injury upon injury in the line of duty. And my duty is being Mathew’s “doll-wife,” a successful magazine art director, and a perfect daughter who makes all the right choices and does all the right things.

  I tell myself, and I believe it, that none of this is Mathew’s fault. He is a good husband to me, and a good man who has his own struggles. Marriage is never easy. And he is the constant, while I am the moveable discontent, the irrational and unstable one.

  And then, to make matters worse, I am sent into the direct line of media fire, and there isn’t a thing I can do to avoid it. I just have to do my job.

  The fashion mag hag

  I LAND A FABULOUS JOB ART directing one of the highest profile, glossiest, international consumer woman’s magazine. Yes, I help sell all those unrealistic images of women that can’t possibly exist. I sit for twelve hours with a retoucher to get rid of the blemishes on a supermodel. Yes, the very one who won’t get out of bed for less then ten thousand dollars a day. Of course, her body isn’t retouched for fat. We just have to clean up the clusters of blackheads around her nose and chin area, but I have scrutinized and digitally smoothed the thighs of fourteen-year-old girls, so if anybody knows what a myth it all is, it’s me.

  So, if I know that none of this is real, why do I buy into it? I remember how, for a time, we used male models for pantyhose ads because their legs were better – and still, when I looked at the finished ads, I wondered why my legs didn’t look like that and I felt like a failure.

  Talk about unrealistic expectations.

  I have left Bullard’s health and fitness magazine and moved on to bigger and better things. This magazine is famous, syndicated the world over. The head office is in France and their team has come over to help us launch. They are lovely, the French; strong women with kind, even gentle souls, not your usual industry folk at all. They get us on track and leave. The editor-in-chief, Evie, shakes my hand and wishes me good luck while she looks over my shoulder at my editor.

  “You are so thin, you lucky girl,” bug-eyed Maia Rosenthal says to me, some months later. She is hunched over, eyeing me from behind her desk with a nasty look.

  Yes, I am with Maia. For better or for worse. Maia landed the big one she’d always dreamed of, and she’d plucked me from Shanda, thinking I’d be good to lead her art team. Pliant, hard-working, passionate and faithful – that’s me.

  Having worked with Maia be
fore, I thought I knew what I was in for, but she seems to have changed. While she’d always been single-mindedly obsessed about having her name right at the top of a power masthead, and was already an addict of several kinds, her infrequently seen sunny side had vanished entirely.

  It could be that the realization of a dream didn’t bring her the happiness she’d thought it would, or perhaps life has disappointed her once too often, or she’s just become tired, but her bad habits have increased and her carefree, ringing laugh has flown the coop, leaving room for swift-striking paranoia.

  Her father is a famous psychiatrist who appears to have done a great job in screwing her up, succeeding in making her a melting pot of volatile, brilliant insecurity.

  Rumour currently has it that she does a lot of coke to keep her weight down, and heroin and ecstasy to keep her happy. The result is a psycho mix; you never know what to expect.

  I mumble something in response to her comment about my weight.

  “Have you noticed the fashion assistant’s put on a lot of weight?” she asks me, staring, hardly blinking her immense, black tar eyes.

  I tell her I have. We are all aware of the reasons but I know Maia is going to thrash through it again. Whether it’s a pointed accusation at me or just a general women-bitching-about-each-other session, I can’t be sure.

  “She was bulimic,” Maia tells me as she studies my face carefully, looking for any kind of reaction, but I am ready for this one. I don’t twitch an iota.

  “She was only skinny because she used to throw up everything. She told me she decided to stop after she went to visit her boyfriend’s family. Did she tell you the story?”

  I sigh. Of course, I have heard it but Maia is intent on telling me herself.

  She pushes her black leather chair away from the polished expanse of a desk littered with Hindu statues, bubbling water fountains, Montblanc pens, Godiva chocolates, large crystals on swatches of purple fabric, perfume bottles, and a multitude of anti-ageing skin creams she’s pilfered from the beauty cabinet before we’ve even had a chance to photograph them. I can’t count the number of times we’ve had to ask Estée Lauder or Lancôme for seconds. All the beauty editors hate Maia for turning them into unwilling gofers, and for stealing way more than her fair share.