The Hungry Mirror

by Lisa de Nikolits

  All my clothes are neatly pressed, hanging on their white hangers, evenly spaced, colour coordinated. My bank account is all up to date. My house is spotless. But the only thing that matters, this new job, is beyond my control. I can’t do anything about it.

  I nearly buy a book on eating disorders but I still can’t make that kind of admission. So I buy another calorie counter instead. Now I wish I had the other book; I want to read it instead.

  Miranda phones me. “I am sick and tired of women’s magazines perpetuating this non-eating crap,” she says, surprising me. “Everything you read tells you how to avoid eating bread and nuts and chips. But I like those things. When I have had my baby, I don’t want to stock my fridge up with carrots and mushrooms and cucumbers. I don’t like them. I hate them. I won’t do it, no matter how I look. And Nate and Dr. Lit can both get lost as far as I’m concerned. And yes, Dr. Lit is back on the scene. Don’t ask.”

  I say I won’t.

  “Imagine,” she says, “reading a men’s magazine where they tell men to get thin, live on fruit juices and carrot sticks, and never eat any of the things they want? Men wouldn’t even use that B.S. as toilet paper. But not only do we have to read it, we have to live it.” She sounds cranky and breathless. “I am so tired,” she says. “I am so wrinkled.”

  I am startled. “You’re just pregnant,” I try to reassure her, but she says she feels wrinkled and angry and she still won’t see me even though I try my hardest to persuade her.

  If I were a man, I think, putting the phone down, I’d be drinking now, during this weekend of waiting, and that’d be considered okay. I am binge eating whereas a man would be binge drinking. Men drink, women eat; men fight, women get depressed. Men do things publicly, women hide.

  I am confused by what Miranda has said, about how she is going to eat after the baby is born. Is she, of all people, giving up?

  I have no idea what to think so I return to my issue of pressing urgency; how am I going to get through the weekend? Well, as John Lennon sang, whatever gets you through the night, it’s all right, it’s all right, so if I have to binge my way through the weekend, then so be it. But what would the super cool Mr. Lennon have said if he’d known it is porridge that does it for me?

  “Way uncool man,” is what he’d say. “Your body is your temple man. And anyway, food’s uncool, who needs to eat really? Get with the prana program baby. The food we eat is a combination of a physical and spiritual entity.” He’d push his small, round glasses up his nose, get into the lotus position and continue. “The act of consuming food,” he would say, “nourishes the body and soul, and infuses us with sparks of holiness. Don’t abuse it; infuse it. You can eat your way to enlightenment, man. Listen to the teachings of the Ramana Maharshi who oft quoted the ancient Chandogya Upanishad: ‘when food is pure, the mind is pure; when the mind is pure, concentration is steady; when concentration is achieved, one can loosen all the knots of the heart that bind us.’”

  Then he might sigh. “We all eat too much if you ask me, we should eat less, and thank more,” and then he’d pass over a joint. Hard to imagine John getting down with the comforts of instant oatmeal. But who knows, maybe he’d be kind.

  Sometimes the only thing I want is the simplicity of a moment of kindness.

  I must go to bed. I have taken a few sleeping pills to help me stop this cycle, although sometimes my brain is stronger and won’t let me sleep at all, no matter how many pills I’ve taken.

  Until Monday all I can to is try to stop myself from eating myself to death.

  Wooden daisies

  ON MONDAY THEY SAY THEY need another two weeks to make the decision about the job.

  I’ve given up even trying to pretend like I am coping. At least I have momentarily stopped weighing myself because I just can’t bear to deal with that particular angst.

  “I weigh myself every single morning,” Colleen says, “but not on James’s scale, because his always reads three pounds heavier than mine.”

  “I never weigh myself,” I say self-righteously, it being one of my rare weeks to not weigh in. This is because I am convinced I have put on a terrifying amount of weight and I am too frightened to face that numbered truth. I need to lose some weight and stop this binge/purge nightmare before I can go near my scale again.

  I read in a magazine that if a person has been bulimic or anorexic for a period of five years or more then there’s no hope of a cure.

  I’ve been this way for about eighteen years, so that’s it for me. It’s all over Baby Jane; there’s no hope whatsoever. Yes, I finally have to give in and admit to my reality—this is not who I want to be, but this is who I am.

  While I am waiting to hear about the new job, our fifth wedding anniversary rolls around. Symbols for the fifth wedding anniversary are wood, silverware, or daisies. With the amount of warmth Mathew has shown of late, I think wood is sadly appropriate. My wooden, perpetually inebriated man, oh how I dream that you should come bearing daisies. But I hold out little hope.

  We have, however, been invited to an industry function for the weekend which ties in nicely with our anniversary. Mathew says it will be great, two days, all expenses paid, every luxury imaginable, in one of the most fabulous new hotels in Vegas. I am excited. I have never been to Vegas before and a trip out of town is just what I need to distract me from the job angst. And who knows, maybe Mathew and I can have some fun; it’s been so long since we just hung out together. I don’t tell Mathew but I wonder if maybe we can have an impromptu wedding ceremony in the Elvis Chapel, renew our vows. I picture us laughing and being silly together. Except that it turns out I hardly get to see much of Mathew at all.

  We get to the hotel and I go up to our room to unpack while he checks in with our hosts. Then I go down to the lobby to meet him so we can go for a walk. I wait for more than two hours and when I finally find him, he is leaving the casino. He says he is sorry, that he got caught up gambling and lost track of the time.

  “I wish I could hit you,” I say to him quietly. “You have ruined everything.”

  I go back to the room and lock him out. He apologizes to the closed door for a while, then he goes back to gamble while I cry. Then I order the most expensive room service I can and try to pretend I am having fun.

  My mother says Mathew has a problem with alcohol and gambling. Much to my sadness, I am beginning to agree. I have been aware for some time now that his drinking is way beyond anything that can be considered normal. I guess I have been waiting for him to get himself in check, get a grip. Sometimes I feel like Mathew and I have an unspoken agreement; that he will have his problems in one area of a room, while I will occupy another corner but as long as we are in the same room, it’s okay, we’re together, a team. But I, starving and bingeing at my end, am looking over at him, drinking and gambling, and neither of us seems able to take a step towards the other, to help. I guess I need to sort out my own issues, get a grip myself, before I will be in any kind of position to lend him a hand. But he is the one who left me all alone, downstairs in the lobby. Maybe if he just took that one step towards me, I’d be there, with all the support in the world.

  So much for the Elvis Chapel.

  Where we are

  BRIT HAS CUT HER HAIR really short and bleached it blonde. From the back she looks like an albino and from the front she looks plain weird with her thick black eyebrows, her long black eyelashes, and bright red lipstick painted thick on her wide mouth. She says she is making a statement.

  “I don’t care if I look odd as long as I get noticed,” she says.

  She tells me she keeps the sign in the fridge, and that Chris has been right, it is helpful. YOU’RE TOO FAT,” a daily mantra to live by, in big yellow uppercase letters.

  Meg just cries all the time now. She is planning her and Jon’s big social wedding. She seems to think that a shiny new ceremony will fix everything, and that their marital woes only came because they eloped. She buys Jon a huge square gold ring with diamonds from a p
awnshop. He wants one with white gold braiding on the side as well but they can’t find one like that.

  Mathew and I are going to the wedding but Brit says she can’t.

  Meg wants carrot cake for her wedding, so we have all been testing carrot cakes for weeks.

  Miranda is onto her second therapist. The first one told her she needed to start eating more fresh fruit and vegetables, not just chips and junk. The therapist said Miranda’s angry with life, that anger resides in the liver, and that Miranda feeds her anger with chips and grilled cheese sandwiches, and that if she ate healthier foods, she’d feel less angry. I seem to remember Madison’s doctor telling her a similar thing.

  Anyway, Miranda fired that therapist and found a new one who’s helping her rewrite the stories of her life. She even seems to be having fun with it. Apparently Dr. Lit.’s reappearance was short-lived and she told him to get lost. She says there is no hope for her and Nate but the child-support will come in handy. And, what do you know, guess who called her the other day but Sanjiv? She told him she’d see him but she warned him she was big as a house because she’s having a baby. Sanjiv’s got two kids with Rijuta so I’m not sure what Miranda thinks might happen, and I don’t say anything.

  My sister is seeing a therapist, a hypnotherapist who is digging into her past to find the root of all her unhappiness and all her problems. He thinks, right now, that it is her near-death experience when she drank herself into a coma at fourteen. She still believes she is Princess Isis reincarnate; I try to explain she means the goddess but she won’t listen. She is still seeing Greg but she has stopped running. She says hot yoga makes her feel sick and then she wants to smoke even more. She says this makes Greg very angry and she is not sure about their future. I miss her a lot.

  My mother has found a new cure for all the ills in life. It’s called Nutri-Green and she is sending me some so that I won’t even need to eat. She says if I just take this, I will get all the nutrients I could possibly ever need.

  I miss Janet very much. She has left to go to another job. She came to hug me when she left and I nearly cried. I was taken aback by my sadness.

  Before she left, Janet told me she and her husband had been discussing a slim woman friend of theirs and that he’d said he wished the friend would get pregnant because then she’d be fat like Janet and it wouldn’t be so hard for him to look at Janet.

  I was horrified but Janet just laughed. Then she left to go her new job and I went to the washroom and cried.

  And me, well, despite the endless hunt and the various job interviews, I never thought I would actually leave. While I seem to spend my whole life trying to exit whatever job I am in, when I do it, no one is more surprised than me. I tell myself I should be happy. I have got the clean slate I want, my fresh new start. I have a sneaking suspicion however, that unless I do something different this time, that this job will just be a new rug under which to sweep old problems.

  Brit throws me a party and Kenneth makes a really nice speech and they give me a potted plant and all I can think is that I have escaped without them ever knowing the truth of what a mess I am in private. Both the Miss World Contenders are there, Thin Lisa is thinking of moving to New York. Colleen has bought me a bottle of mineral water onto which she has stuck a bowtie and drawn a happy face.

  “Keep your water happy,” she tells me, and there are tears in her eyes as she hugs me.

  Brit also hugs me and tells me we must stay in touch but I think she knows I am no good at that. Meg says she’ll see me at her wedding. Kenneth says I am a legend and my new place is lucky to get me and if they ever need an editor…. They all seem really sad to see me go.

  And I am just numb, which is how I live most of my life.

  Somewhat better

  FOUR MONTHS LATER, SUNDAY MORNING. I am lying in bed, with a migraine the size of a planet for company, so I can’t exactly say I am alone.

  I am settled in my new job, art directing the business magazines. The environment seems to be the most stable yet and I am hopeful that I may actually be able to stay for a while. I don’t miss the daily manic highs and lows of Kenneth or the fashionistas of magazines past.

  Brit and I keep in touch almost daily, which surprises me, because I don’t usually maintain contact once I have left a job. She and I even went to Meg’s wedding together since Mathew had a trip away at the last minute. Kenneth and Nieve were there too and we had a really nice time. Brit wasn’t going to come, she said the whole thing was such a farce, given how Jon treats Meg but I told her I needed her, which was true. It was a first for me, to tell someone I need them.

  Meg looked incredible and the whole day was everything one would imagine the perfect wedding to be. No one got drunk or fell over and even Jon seemed happy.

  “Maybe this will make a difference to their relationship,” I said to Brit, optimistically, but she just shrugged.

  Things with Mathew aren’t great but they aren’t bad either. We are very careful around each other, politely considerate. He is trying to spend a bit more time at home and has even come for a few walks with Freddo and me. His drinking hasn’t eased off though – the other day he jokingly said something about being a “functioning alcoholic,” which just put the fear of God into my heart. I pretended I didn’t hear him, and then I pretended I was really enjoying my dinner of a wedge of baked potato on the side of a head of steamed cauliflower.

  I am increasingly sick and tired of my issues with food. I am so tired of being so hungry all the time. I am so tired of feeling so fat and being so afraid. So afraid of being alone with food. Which, I think, explains my headache; sometimes it all just gets to be too much.

  I have no idea what to do though, where to turn.

  Help comes from an unexpected source; Madison comes up with a plan.

  Madison’s gift

  THE PHONE RINGS. “I HAVE bought you a present,” Madison says. “And please don’t say no. It cost me eighty dollars. Just imagine how many vodkas I could have had for that.”

  “What is it?” I ask. I imagine a makeover, a massage, a clothing voucher.

  “It’s a two-day course on body image, an expressive art workshop,” she says. “It’s right up your alley. These workshops are all the rage nowadays. You go and play with paints and clay and stuff and you work on body image issues, which I really think you need. It’s run by this woman called Ondine who’s apparently really great at it. She has excellent credentials; she studied in Europe. Please don’t say no, just go, even for one day. If you hate it, you can leave at lunchtime, or you can go only for a day. Just try it, please.”

  I am touched by her concern.

  “Okay,” I say and I may have sounded reluctant but, in reality, I am relieved.

  Madison’s timing is perfect. I am going to be cured. I will go and do all the things this Ondine says, no matter how hard it is, and then I’ll then walk away, a free woman.

  I have had enough of the angst. I know I would never have found the course myself, never have made such an acknowledgement of need on my own but my sister has done it for me. All I have to do is go and finger-paint and get better.

  The day of the course arrives and I force myself to go. Heart pounding, feeling stupid for being so nervous, I find the building, and of course I am early. I lift my heavy canvas tote; I have come prepared for any eventuality.

  So this is what it feels like, I think, “to have your heart in your throat.” Get back heart, get back into my chest cavity, please, so that I can breathe again.

  I push my way inside; the building is old with polished yellow hardwood floors, no elevator, and a dark curved handrail that leads up narrow stairs. The clinic is on the second floor. I nudge the door open with caution, expecting to hear mocking cries that I am in the wrong place.

  But it is quiet inside, with a lone woman sitting on the blonde wood floor at the far end of a vast airy room. She is leaning against a white sunlit wall.

  “Hello,” she says, getting up. “I am Ondine.”<
br />
  She is close to six feet tall and hardly a lightweight. She is more like a stacked Venus of Willendorf with a shy smile and a head of shaggy black curls.

  I try very hard not to let her non-slenderness upset me. I wonder what I have been expecting, Heidi Klum?

  She has an accent that makes it hard for me to understand what she is saying, so I just kind of nod, make agreeable noises, and head for the furthermost corner of the room to be by myself.

  I dig in my bag, and keep my face buried while the others arrive and get settled.

  “Let us make a circle, a nice small one in this big room,” Ondine calls.

  We gather with reluctance.

  “So, I am Ondine, welcome. Please forgive my very strong accent, I am newly come from France.” She smiles. “I am an expressive arts therapist and I also have a degree in biology and sociology. What we do here, our approach, is all based a lot on phrenology,” she explains.

  Huh? Oh wait, she said, phenomenology. Phrenology is the study of bumps on the head. I haven’t heard her right. Good thing too since I have a really weirdly shaped skull, which, in itself, could explain a lot I suppose.

  In the phenomenological world, eating disorders and body image issues can be cured by Sartre and existentialism.

  Okay.

  “To begin, we will introduce ourselves,” Ondine says.

  “Hello, I have been bulimic for more than eighteen years, anorexic for about six, have body dysmorphic issues, obsessive compulsive disorders, generalized anxiety and my friend Brit thinks I may be othorexic too.”

  I want to say that but of course I don’t.

  “Hi, I have some ‘body image’ issues,” I say, using my fingers as quotation marks around the words “body image.”

  Amelia, thirty-five-ish, is a tall, heavy-hipped blonde with blood-red lipstick, a thick lustrous bob and antique cat’s-eye glasses. She is wearing a black and red silk tunic over black leggings, a black cardigan, and black ballet shoes. Amelia is cheerful in her presentation of herself but she punctuates her optimism with staccato hints of aggression.