The Hungry Mirror

by Lisa de Nikolits

  I resigned and took two weeks off to get myself sorted out. I re-organized my wardrobe, cleaned the house, sourced magazine references for my upcoming designs, and took Freddo for long walks.

  I also tidied and neatened my emotions until they were at least presentable again. I tried to get my eating back on some kind of track, and safeguard my carefully put together life.

  They say forewarned is forearmed. I say fore-planned is forearmed. If you can plan for it, you’ll always be okay. If you have too many things that you can’t plan for, and if you keep adding to the balls you’re juggling, they are bound to start falling eventually. But I am in a better place now. All my ducks are in a row, all my juggling balls accounted for, my calories in neat little boxes, and all is good in my world. Well, maybe not good, but at least better, and more organized, so no one can see the mess behind the closet doors of my mind.

  This time, I am not going to get too friendly with anyone at work. I am going to keep people at a safer distance.

  I have a plan. I am going to be fine.

  A Hollywood miss is as big as a mile

  I’VE BEEN AT MY new job a while now and my life hasn’t improved as much as I had hoped.

  “Hi,” Meg says, startling me, and she sounds odd, her usually deep and sexy voice coarse and raw.

  I have been engrossed in my work and look up distracted, to be immediately washed by a relief of sorts; relief, and a definite embarrassment on her behalf.

  “I know,” she says, flushing. “My eyes are all swollen. I can’t believe how badly I slept last night; my eyes always get like this when I sleep really badly. I have been walking around with slices of cucumber stuck all over my face, trying to get the swelling down but it doesn’t seem to have worked. Anyway, that’s why I’m late, sorry.”

  I leap to my feet. My own shame and guilt vanishes and I am giddy with happiness. I thought I had sensed this about her but now I know for sure.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” I say to her. “Exactly the same thing happens to me. I don’t know why either. Maybe it’s the way I squash my face into my pillow when I sleep. I woke up this morning with the same thing and I had to put ice into a dishtowel and press it to my face – ten minutes on, ten minutes off – and that helped a lot. Hang on. I’ll go and get you some ice from the kitchen; I know there’s ice in the freezer.”

  She nods, relieved and grateful.

  “Your eyes are like that just from sleeping badly?” Kenneth, our editor, asks Meg with skepticism. “Wow, what kind of dreams were you having? I can’t believe they are so swollen just from a bad night’s sleep.”

  “It happens to me all the time,” I call from the kitchen.

  Insensitive moron, I think. Of course her eyes aren’t like that because she slept badly. How stupid can a man get? Oh, never mind him. I feel so much better, like okay, so it’s not just me. I wrap the ice in the dishtowel and hand it to Meg who thanks me, presses it to her left eye, and disappears into her office. Kenneth shrugs and goes back to his office.

  I think about what just happened. You know, the difference between Meg and me is that I’m a planner and she isn’t. I’m more organized than she is. I didn’t ice my eyes this morning like I told her, but last night. I knew my eyes would be swollen and so I timed it all perfectly, allowing for ice time before Mathew got home. I learn from past experience and I make plans, and that’s the difference between her and me.

  I feel superior and in control again. Yes, maybe I had slipped last night, having an episode when I was trying so hard not to, but so had Meg. And at least I hadn’t publicly lost face and now I knew about her, but she didn’t know about me.

  I hug the secret of Meg to myself. It is unkind of me but I can’t help thinking that Meg is quite weak really, not focused like me. Which is why, at nearly forty, all Meg has is a good-looking charmer for a boyfriend, a grifter-loser she has to support. She doesn’t have a car, new clothes, or money in the bank. She keeps telling me it’s because Jon spends it all. And she keeps saying that her life hasn’t turned out like she thought it would.

  When I first started the job, Meg was quite standoffish but after a while, she began to stop by my desk in the morning to tell me bad bar jokes. “A man walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder…” and next thing you know, she was giving me the history of her life.

  Meg was all set to be an actress, a real one on the big screen, pulling in the big bucks. She’s got the looks for sure; a perfect body, and an angelic face that is breathtakingly beautiful when it’s not swollen. When she was eighteen, she left cold, damp Portland and its dreary cement and went down to LA to seek fame and fortune.

  She said the high point of her career was being one of those life-size characters at Disneyworld. She was Goofy and she said it was stifling inside the uniform and hard work too.

  So she did that for a while and then she decided to take a job interviewing movie stars instead, hoping, she said, that one of them would say hey, you’ve got a great face for a film I’m doing … and then she’d have her career launched.

  “It didn’t take long,” she told me, “to realize that the stars are only looking out for themselves.” And then she kept herself financially afloat doing interviews and in the process ran out of time to do auditions. The next thing she knew, she was writing about other people and watching from the sidelines. She really liked James Spader. She said they’d really connected and she had been sure she’d hear from him after the interview but nothing.

  When she heard about this mag from a friend of a friend of Nieve, Kenneth’s girlfriend, she decided to head up north and see how it panned out.

  She got the job as feature writer and found an apartment downtown. Then, just like a maraschino cherry tops a big fudge sundae, she met Jon at the Brass Rail where she was hanging out one night, having a beer.

  At a strip joint? I thought.

  And the rest, as they say, is history.

  “Well, actually all my dreams were history,” she said dryly. “So much for all the beauty pageants, being Miss this and that, the gymnastics, ballet classes, and all hard work I did. Here I am, going on forty, and what have I got, huh?” Then she laughed like nothing was funny and went back to her office.

  But the real reason that Meg’s currently less-than-famous and certainly unfabulous life isn’t turning out like she thought it would is because she didn’t think about how swollen her face would be, or that she’d be needing ice.

  I realize that while she and I share a whole bunch of similarities, the bottom line is that I don’t just hope things will turn out okay. I have contingency plans for every disaster. It’s all about the importance of planning.

  “I’m doing a Starbucks run,” says Kenneth, who suddenly appears, wallet in hand. “You want anything?”

  Two biscotti, a pumpkin scone, an oatmeal muffin and a Caramel Frappuccino Blended Coffee weighing in at 500 calories all by its lonesome, I think without hesitation.

  “No thanks,” I say, because I am in control again.

  He pauses.

  “I’m sorry,” he says awkwardly, “for being such a pain in the ass for so long. This has just been very stressful for me.” He takes a moment to assume the look of an empathetic, casually chatting colleague and perches on the edge of an empty desk across from me.

  I stiffen nervously and wonder what is coming.

  “It’s just been harder than I expected,” he says. “The industry hasn’t exactly opened its doors to us and Nieve says all I do is work and she hates it.”

  Nieve, Cosmo’s fashion editor, is skeletally thin, 5’9”, with short, platinum hair and is pixie-like in a mannish way. She wears oversized tailored men’s suits with broad colourful ties, polished brogues, cuff-links, the works.

  Kenneth, our editor, is a short Chinese man, about 5’4”, as oval as an egg, with long black hair that hangs right down to his butt. His face is oval to match; in total he is a compilation of agitated oval moving parts.

  I think he a
nd Nieve are an odd pair but they seem happy enough. Nieve comes in on the odd occasion, and I am intrigued by her unusual style and beauty. I want to get to know her but she always comes and goes in such a hurry.

  Kenneth isn’t yet thirty while Nieve must be pushing forty-five. I often mean to ask Kenneth to ask Nieve if she knows Shanda – she must – and if she had heard anything from her.

  “So anyway,” Kenneth says, looking mournful, “I am sorry I’ve been so uptight. Nieve admitted last night that she’s been crushing Ativans into my bedtime hot chocolate. I thought I had been sleeping better than usual.” He stands up and smooths out the creases caused by his affected desk-roost. “Anyway I have some news that will make you happy,” he says. “We are getting two new staff members.” I wonder if Meg is listening to this. “Brit Hall will help with the editorial copy, the listings and all that, and perhaps an article here and there, if Meg doesn’t have the time to do them all. And Indira Dunmore will be my assistant as I very clearly need assisting.” He laughs his odd, high-pitched laugh.

  “And all of that will hopefully help you out,” he says to me. “And we’ll try to get things to you in better time so that you aren’t left in the lurch, working here nights and weekends to catch up for our lack of making deadlines. It’s all going to run like clockwork.”

  He leaves and Meg comes out of her office, still clutching the ice to her face.

  “He went to Starbucks?” she asks, looking around. “Good, he’ll meet some buddies and leave us in peace for the rest of the day. I heard him say we are getting more people. Hey, I can’t thank you enough for this. I didn’t even want to come to work today but Jon made me. He said it didn’t look too bad when really, I know it looks terrible. Are my eyes less swollen yet?”

  “A slight improvement,” I say cautiously. “Give it a while longer.”

  “I am going to lie down on my floor for a bit,” she says. “Let me know if Kenneth comes back.”

  I tell her I will.

  A couple of hours later I get up to make myself a cup of tea. As I stand up, the big bowl of popcorn catches my eye and I wonder if I should have a handful, just one small, casual handful. I stretch my back and rub my neck while I eye the bowl.

  Meg walks by and yawns. “Need to get more ice,” she says.

  “The popcorn’s still here,” I say. “Do you want some?”

  She looks frightened.

  “Oh, no thanks,” she says. “I am all popcorned out from yesterday.”

  More proof, I think.

  “I am going to take it to the main kitchen,” I say to her. She looks relieved.

  I take the popcorn to the central staff kitchen, and leave hastily before I am tempted to take a handful and start the whole thing again.

  It was the popcorn that started the whole binge ball rolling. I’d been okay until the popcorn arrived.

  Well, maybe I wasn’t okay, and haven’t been okay for a long time. I just haven’t had the tools of destruction at my disposal. The advent of the popcorn changed all of that.

  The importance of planning

  MY FIRST THOUGHT, UPON waking on the day of the popcorn incident, the day before my suspicions of Meg’s eating disorder were confirmed, was that I was hungry, the kind of gnawing, animal hunger I fear the most. It’s the kind that never goes away, no matter how much food I give it.

  I struggled to clear the fog of sleep from my mind.

  Calm down, I told myself, in an effort to talk myself down. Okay, so you feel hungry. Well don’t worry, it’s alright, we will feed you so that you are not hungry. You can have as much free food all day as you like. And remember, as long as you acknowledge there is a problem, you have control of it. So don’t panic.

  But, panic I did. As I was getting dressed, my mind raced ahead. Past the fruit for breakfast, the arrowroot cookie for mid-morning snack, the boiled vegetables for lunch, the apple for mid-afternoon snack, the baked zucchini and salad – no dressing – for dinner, and ended up back in bed, right where I started, still hungry.

  After all that, I tried to convince myself, there’s no way you will still be hungry after all that food. Just relax and enjoy what you will eat today. Chew each mouthful slowly. Savour it. Don’t fear it.

  But I want real food, my mind snapped back at me. I want a proper sandwich with tuna and mayonnaise. I want bread, doughnuts, muffins. I want chocolate, I want cake. I don’t want fat-free, light-as-air-free, meaningless, feelingless food. For God’s sake, I want something real. I want mounds of food. I want to stuff my face until I don’t feel this God-awful hunger anymore. I would love to have just one single day in which I think about something other than food. Oh, God, I want cake for breakfast, lunch and supper. I want dough.

  I tried to switch my mind off but it raged on, demanding all the things it wanted.

  I finished getting dressed and went into the kitchen to get my fruit, boiled vegetables, and an arrowroot cookie. I made Mathew’s sandwich, peanut butter and jam, and I licked the knife clean. I wrapped his fat-laden, calorific nightmare up neatly and wished, more than anything, that I could eat it, and then make another and eat that too and then scramble some eggs and eat them with doorstep-thick slices of bread covered in thick butter.

  I swallowed my saliva and added a few Oreo cookies to Mathew’s lunch bag.

  “Peanut butter and jam, plus cookies,” I said, handing it to him.

  “Great, thanks,” he said. “I must try to remember to eat it today; there are about four lunch bags rolling around in the back of my car.”

  I sighed and started locking up the house. I felt as if I’d already had a catastrophic and exhausting day and it hadn’t even begun.

  I drove to work, dreaming of thick chocolate puddings, lemon meringue pies, and carrot cake covered in thick, cream cheese icing. When I got to work I had to stop myself from eating all my food in the elevator on the way to my office.

  I forced myself to turn on my computer and set up for the day. Then I tore open my lunch bag and ate my small apple in two bites. I didn’t feel any better so I quickly ate another, crunching down so hard that my jaw hurt.

  I am usually the first to arrive at work and that day – tedious Tuesday – was no exception.

  I can eat my cookie now, I said to myself, and then I can pretend I didn’t bring one in at all and buy one from the vending machine later and no one will know the difference.

  God forbid anyone should actually see me eating so much food.

  I crammed the cookie into my mouth, swallowed, and immediately examined the desk for evidence of crumbs. Then I sat down to work, was soon engrossed, and I even felt a bit better about my hunger.

  Maybe I won’t have to binge today after all. I was still trying to talk myself down. I mean look, I was hungry but now that I have eaten, I won’t want any more food. That feeling of being out of control is gone. I feel okay again. I still have my veg for lunch and if I only eat that today, then it will all be great and nothing bad will have happened.

  At the mention of my Spartan veg, my stomach flipped uneasily, voicing its objection, and my mind reminded me of the tuna mayo sandwich I really wanted and my mouth watered involuntarily.

  No, no, I thought and I went to make some tea. I will fill myself up with tea.

  When I got back to my desk, I found Meg waiting, with the photographer.

  “I know we were just going to do the editor’s headshot this morning,” he said, “but I thought we could discuss that popcorn shot you’ve been talking about, so I brought a big bowl of it in. I thought we could at least do some tests.”

  “Great,” I said and my heart sank. Popcorn. The trigger food of all trigger food.

  Meg also looked glum.

  “I’ll just put it here for the time being,” he said. “Try some. You guys can tell me what you think of my culinary expertise. I’ve got a huge bag in the car too so don’t worry, take as much as you like.”

  I shrugged, surrendered to the day and took a handful, just a casual hand
ful.

  “It’s great,” I said, my mouth full.

  “So how do you want this headshot to work? I thought here would be good, because I can set up all my lights and have space.”

  I turned my attention to Kenneth’s headshot and managed to ignore the popcorn save for certain handfuls grabbed in what I hoped were unseen moments. I noticed Meg also surreptitiously cramming in fistfuls. As it turned out, Kenneth took much longer to shoot than the photographer had estimated. He was frozen like a rictus cardboard dummy and by the time we had exhausted all avenues to get him to loosen up, the photographer was scheduled to be elsewhere.

  “Man, that was hard work,” the photographer said to me after Kenneth had rushed off to a meeting. “It was really weird, how uptight he was. Glad I don’t have to work with him every day. So listen, keep the popcorn. We don’t have time to do that shot. I’ll do it at home. I think I know what you are after and I can get the bowl from you tomorrow when I come by with a disk of what I shot today.”

  “No, no, you take the bowl,” I was inwardly pleading.

  “Nah,” he said smiling. “It’s yours to enjoy.”

  He disappeared and Meg and I exchanged glances, shrugged and each took a huge handful.

  “This is making me hungry,” Meg said. I noticed she had very a sensual lower lip; it jutted out, soft and pouty over her round little chin. “You wanna go down to the caf and get some real food?” she asked.

  Yes I did, most absolutely. We headed down and I got a large tuna salad sandwich on a baguette and a slice of carrot cake with thick white icing. Meg got a veg wrap with pesto and mayo, a packet of chips, and an orange juice.

  “So thin and look at what you two eat,” one of the overweight secretaries said to me, bitterly. “How do you stay so thin? It’s not fair.”

  “No, it’s not,” another similarly large woman agreed.

  I felt my heart constrict and I looked over at Meg who was still at the cashier, paying.

  If only you knew, I thought to myself, how hard I work, how much I suffer. Make no mistake, I’m counting every single calorie here, and it’s eat today, repent tomorrow and repenting in my world means starving.