The Hungry Mirror

by Lisa de Nikolits

  “I admire her,” Magda insists. “She is her own woman. She does whatever she wants and I think she’s great for that.”

  “If she really was her own woman, would she be as totally promiscuous as she is?” I ask. “She’s jumped everybody there is, men, women, young, old. I heard she’d even got it on with Mr. Bullard. Her first job was with him, years ago.”

  “Yes, but then he fired her because he caught her having sex with his son, Hank, on the boardroom table,” Magda adds laughing. “You are right, no self-respecting woman would have sex with either Bullard, the flaking-skinned senior, or crossed-eyed junior, no matter what. But then, just when it looked like she was history, she clawed her way to a big comeback and was even gracious enough to help Bullard out when Jean left. She came back and rushed in firing all cylinders at once.

  “Fuelled by God only knows what,” I say. I think about what Magda has said about Maia and her clothes. I wish I could agree that Maia was right for wearing things that didn’t suit her or fit her just because she liked them. I look down at my ankle-length black skirt and my loose fitting thigh-length black top and I sigh.

  No, I think to myself, I like this, I chose this. This is my style. Hmmmm, maybe.

  “Hey Magda,” I finally realize something. “You don’t have your braces anymore. You look great. Butch must be so happy.”

  She smiles shyly. “Took you a while to notice,” she teases me, poking me with a glossy red fingernail and I apologize. I am always so busy thinking about my own body and wondering whether people are hating me for being fat and weak that sometimes I miss the obvious details of other people’s appearances.

  “Ah, here comes Jesus’s dietician,” Magda drawls and arranges her notepad on her lap. “Look, she’s got a huge rash all over the whole one side of her face, that’s hardly compelling advertising. All I can say is when do we get to test the food part of this? I am starving.”

  I agree and we sit back to hear all about What Jesus Ate.

  What would Jesus eat?

  AT THE FIRST LECTURE WE learn there is no place in Jesus’s heart for preservatives, sugars, fats, and acids. But, showing an appreciation for his Father’s handiwork, He is very into the goodness of natural foods, as well as the maintenance of an alkaline balance in His bloodstream, although it’s possible He did that unknowingly. We also learn to have the fear of God for colourants, flavourants, spices, ketchup, mayonnaise, vinegar, oil, dairy products, bread products, cakes, pastries, candies, colas, and carbonates – and most especially, that unholiest of evils, anything that comes in a tin can.

  Desserts are temptations from the kitchen of the devil himself. Coffee is possibly the most wicked evil-doer of them all; even one tiny cup a day. Margarine causes cancer, meat and chicken are unspeakable horrors. I am okay on those levels. I am already a strict vegetarian so I am fully in agreement with the meat, fish, chicken thing, but I am not so sure about the rest of it.

  Magda and I discuss it at length, on the final day.

  “You have to admit,” I say, “that Jesus was very skinny. Maybe there’s something to this?”

  “I totally beg to disagree,” Magda says. “If Jesus were alive to day, He’d eat exactly the same as the rest of us. I am going to write about this only because I have to, but we’ll put it in the back of the mag as an update of yet another fad out there. Ridiculous. And if Shanda tells me anything otherwise, I’ll tell her she has to try doing it, just for a weekend, and then talk to me about it again. Anyway, it’s not like any of the advertisers are going to like this. Pardon me for saying that, but where’s the financial backing in this idea? No condiments, spices, sugars, flavourants, yogurts, or sweeteners? There’s nothing left to sell.”

  “I’m just going to give the sub-editors the brochures and they can make of it what they like,” I say. “My head is hurting too badly for me to think of writing anything.”

  During the short lunch break I lie next to Magda on my deckchair in the sun and think that the whole weekend has been worth it just to hear the nurse say I am underweight. Also, the only food on offer is fruit and almonds, neither of which agree with me and shoot straight through my system. So, even though my head is pounding and there is a blackness to my vision, and I frequently have to excuse myself to rush off to the washroom, I figure there is no way I can be gaining weight. If anything I am only adding to my underweightness, which is a bonus.

  Magda, naturally suspicious of these events, has brought a suitcase of muffins, energy bars, chocolate, chips, and other goodies. She offers to share her stash but I say I am going to stick with the program.

  She laughs and wishes me luck.

  Later when Butch and Mathew come to pick us up, she bounces over to the car while I crawl towards Mathew, my face grey, my body riddled with pain.

  Mathew gives me a questioning glance as I climb in. “She cheated,” I protest and don’t have the strength to explain further.

  The next day, I get back to my desk and write a neutral piece saying the program has some good ideas but it would be hard to maintain and then I go back to listening to my body and eating small amounts of what I really want.

  But the whole thing, like an insidious virus, has crawled under my skin and I can’t help but wonder if there is something to it. I also can’t help but believe I should eliminate all fat from my diet. Imagine, I thought, if I used the Jesus diet to lower my fat, plus all my other techniques, then surely I’ll lose every ounce of excess dreaded weight? Of which I have none. The nurse had assured me. But one always needs to stay ahead of the game, change it up, catch your body unawares, so it doesn’t get complacent and settle into the plumpness it so desires.

  Of course, there is also a part of my reliable, guilt-ridden Catholic heart that can’t turn its back on Jesus. Who am I to say His Diet isn’t the one for me? Onward Christian soldier and leave that morsel of muffin be.

  Discipline is good for the moral soul and, besides, I don’t want to be like the fashion assistant who, by now, has even outgrown her fabulous bigger new Italian underwear and huffs slightly when she wheels the clothes racks at photo shoots.

  So I surreptitiously dig the Jesus diet book out of my desk drawer where I had unceremoniously shoved it after I finished writing the article. The health and beauty editor said the whole thing sounds ludicrous so I am sure no one will want the book in the future. I take it home to join my collection. Then I add everything I know to the mix. I throw in my inner child, my natural hunger, listening to my body, calorie counting, Mathew’s dinners, my family’s expectations, my own hopes and misguided desires, and I think there is no way I can do anything but win.

  Besides, I think, it isn’t only Jesus. I have been reading a whole bunch of stuff on Gandhi and he only ate a peach a day or something like that, to lessen his ego and achieve spirituality and increase his mental lucidity.

  I have no doubt I am on the right track. I am going to be fat-free and enlightened.

  Being Gandhi isn’t easy

  YOUR TOTAL FAT INTAKE SHOULDN’T be less than 15 per cent of your daily calorific intake or more than 30 per cent. I can tell you that getting it down to 15 per cent is a lot harder to achieve than one would think, even for one as dedicated as myself.

  The first thing I do is calculate my beloved muffin bits and of course, they can’t stay, not even an eighth of them. Then it’s goodbye to milk and cheese. I start eating my quarter of a baked potato with cayenne pepper and apple cider vinegar sprinkled over it, even though Jesus never ate vinegar. I have no idea where He stood on the cayenne.

  My days are filled with pieces of baked potatoes, boiled carrots, boiled zucchini, boiled broccoli. Sometimes, if I am desperate, I add a teaspoon of tomato and curry paste from a can. I know I shouldn’t do the can thing but there are limits.

  And I start eating fruit. I have never really eaten fruit because I always thought it would make me feel hungrier, so I never trusted it. But if it worked for Jesus and Gandhi, it should work for me. I start with appl
es. Apples contain borax, which is good for the brain. And that’s great since I can hardly think straight most of the time so all the apples will help. Wait, I am confused; Borax is a cleaning product. But anyway, I know apples are good for the brain and that’s all that counts.

  So fruit till lunchtime – and this way, I even manage to get some of the Fit for Life diet in. Then boiled vegetables with vinegar and a tablespoon of curried tomato sauce for lunch. At suppertime, a quarter of a baked potato with a can of French-cut green beans and a tablespoon of fat-free cottage cheese, even though the spa people had said it was bad, along with the beans from a can.

  So I guess it’s no wonder really, that I am hungry. When I ate what I wanted to, I had brown bread, pieces of muffin, tiny bits of chocolate, even a sip of wine here or there. But I learned that bread turns to acid in the blood, that wine is toxic, and muffins are full of fat. So all of that has to go, gets banished; food non grata.

  I get hungrier and hungrier. I stop drinking coffee and drink green tea instead. I stop all carbonated diet beverages and drink water.

  It gets so bad that I binge every second day, because I am so hungry. But what else can I do? I can’t start eating all those evil, fat-laden, health-destroying foods again, can I? No, I can’t, because now I know the truth and there is no way of unknowing.

  But how can I live like this? Hungry all the time? Guilty all the time? Afraid all the time?

  I feel overwhelmed.

  I have also decided it is time to do the magazine musical-chair dance again and look for another job. Maia is out of control and I am too tired to handle her with the delicate bomb-detonating techniques required. Last week, she sacked half of the magazine in a sweeping move, announcing to the media it was due to matters of “natural attrition.” But I saw a letter she left lying around, addressed to head office, explaining the firings, and I can’t be sure I won’t be next. It is time, she wrote, for fresh blood.

  I’ve been here just over a year. I am used to having to get up and go. It’s the way of the industry.

  Mathew doesn’t want me to leave. He says all his clients love my work and everybody is happy, so why do I have to rock that boat? It would be hard, he says, for me to find another magazine with as high a profile and really, why can’t I just stay?

  I look at myself in the mirror, my ever-hungry mirror, at my grey skin, the black shadows under my eyes, my bony chicken-gizzard neck and my hair that seems to be thinning.

  Why indeed, I think. When it’s all working out so well?

  Scatterlings

  MATHEW DOESN’T GET IT, ANY of it, while I just feel like the stresses are raining down on me from every side, with no respite.

  Like last night. We go to a concert with lots of free food. Guess where my mind is, the whole night. I do okay until we are walking out and I pass a table of cheese and dried fruit. I cannot tell a lie and say that I don’t like cheese and dried fruit; I love both.

  In the few minutes it takes us to pass the table, I consume at least 300 calories and God knows how many fat grams. Needless to say, I am repenting today at long, hungry leisure.

  Now, here’s the thing.

  Mathew’s away for a week, he leaves today. His bosses have sent him down south, on an all-expenses-paid, luxury vacation. They say he is getting dangerously close to burnout and they need to look after him.

  Mathew said I could come if I paid for myself although he would pay for half of my share. But I’m too busy at work. I can’t go because even though I’m planning to leave my job, I need to stay on top of things. Let it never be said that I slacked off, not even on my way out.

  So Mathew leaves with a small suitcase, to lie in the sun and sleep and read and eat nice things. My bet is that he will find a casino and spend the entire time smoking, drinking, and gambling, never seeing the swimming pool or the buffet tables, hardly even seeing his own room, after unpacking neatly of course.

  When I first heard he was going away my immediate thought was for a strawberry and rhubarb pie, all my own. I will go past the bakery on the way home and buy the pie and a carton of fresh cream, and a big tub of fudge ripple ice cream. Then I’ll sit on the sofa, and eat the inside of the pie first, then I’ll fill the pie case with the cream and ice cream and wait for the pastry to get all nice and soft. I’ll eat that too and then get rid of everything.

  And, while I am waiting for the crust to get soft, I’ll snack on some peanut butter mixed with milk, to make it easy to get up later. But, I promise myself I will be good, all week.

  Never mind being stuck between a rock and a hard place; I’m stuck between a pie and a craving, and I don’t know which way to turn. They’re both hell.

  How can I fix any of this? Maybe I can’t, in which case I must remember I can wear baggy clothes for the rest of my life. I don’t ever have to wear a bathing suit again, and no one ever has to see the pale, fat, ugly truth.

  I think about the pie and the cream and the ice cream so as not to think about some upsetting news I heard earlier today.

  I was sent to the launch of a men’s aftershave, nothing Maia wanted, and while I was there, I heard that Magda and Butch are getting divorced. She’s already moved to the west coast to work for the YWCA. She never said a word to me. Admittedly, the spa weekend was a good couple months ago, and we didn’t stay in contact, so really, why would she tell me anything? I’ve tried to find out why they split and rumour has it that Butch found a girl he has more in common with, or so he said. Magda just packed up and left.

  And, at the same launch, I heard that Shanda has breast cancer and the prognosis isn’t great. They already have an acting editor in place and although Bullard said he was holding the position for Shanda, no one is confident she will return.

  I try to find out where she has gone so I can call her or send a card, but no one seems to know where she is. The last anybody heard, she’d had a double mastectomy and vanished.

  That’s just like Shanda, I think. She won’t let anybody see her when she’s in pain. She’ll go into hiding until she can come out looking fabulous, pretending nothing ever happened. But maybe this time not even she will be able to pretend nothing happened. I miss her suddenly, and I miss Magda, and the odd camaraderie the three of us had. We’d been an unusual lot for sure and Shanda was volatile to say the least but I liked her.

  I feel awfully alone and tired.

  Hungry ducks in a row

  FOUR MONTHS LATER, I AM at my new job, a film and entertainment magazine. I think it will be a good place for me to be for a while. It has a much smaller team, with a lower mag-industry profile, and I won’t have to deal with high-strung fashion photographers, chemically-altered editors, neurotic assistants, and the like.

  It is another launch publication, and my goal is simple: to sit behind my computer and design, headphones in place, and enjoy the peace, serenity, and emotional privacy from the world and ever-prying eyes.

  Mathew hasn’t exactly been supportive. When I was offered the job, he said it wasn’t a bad move, as long as we could get the magazine making money within a year, which even he knew was unlikely. Launch magazines do nothing but lose money for the first four years, which is why so many of them fold.

  I pointed that out to him at the time, and he shrugged. “Plus of course, film mags never do well anyway,” he said. “It’s all a question of the numbers and those kind of entertainment publications just don’t reach the right people. I wouldn’t recommend that any of my buyers place ads in it.”

  “Gosh, thanks,” I said. “But the ads aren’t my concern anyway. I’m just in it for the design. I want to do some fab stuff, some innovative typographic artwork. I have a lot of fashion shoots under my belt, so now I need to focus on the graphic side of things.”

  He wasn’t convinced.

  “Hmmm,” he said. “The publisher and I go way back, and if you ask me, he doesn’t think things through. He’s trying to expand too quickly.”

  Now, months later, I recall Mathew’s concerns
. Not my problem, I think again. I just want to be somewhere nicer on a daily basis. I need to regroup a bit, get myself back on track. I feel like it all got out of control back there, what with all the diets and the people, the never-ending people. For me, it’s more about trying to get my life together again than making a great career move.

  Things have been a little frosty between Mathew and me ever since he came back from his luxury vacation, which was at the same time I was offered this job.

  I’d been right. He came back as pale as when he had left. He said he’d had a great time, won and lost money, drank too much, and had a huge bag of gifts for me. We had a wonderful time the first week of his return. But then I showed him a cover shoot I had done with a famous model; a glorious high with which to exit Maia’s camp. When I showed Mathew the shots, he looked at them for a while in silence, and then frowned and said, “Sorry, so what exactly am I looking at here?”

  “It’s not a trick question.” I was furious. “And you know, exactly. It’s only the cover shoot I’ve been talking about and planning for months.”

  “Well, I can’t comment without context,” he said, and didn’t really look.

  I’m still finding it hard to forgive him for that one.

  No, I’ve done the right thing by moving jobs. I know I have and I don’t need his approval even though it’d be nice to have some support.

  I think back to my period of semi-hysteria in the months following the Jesus diet, my confusion about what to do, my binges and increasing purges, and my sadness about Magda and Shanda. Adding to that, having to go to all of Mathew’s dinners and events, with everybody wanting to talk about why I had left such a great job and then all of them adding a tidbit about Maia and my having to listen enthralled as though I’d never heard it before.