Few things are more frightening to the body than getting what it most wants. Because what are you, when you get the thing you’ve shaped your whole identity around wanting?
DAY: 30, CONTINUED . . .
Two hours later, Tariq took me home. We stayed till the party had mostly wound down, after most of the people had gone home. I hadn’t been looking at my watch every thirty seconds either or desperately wishing I was somewhere else.
“Admit it,” he said, pulling out of Bastien’s long driveway. “You had a good time.”
“I had a good time,” I said.
“I think you broke Ott’s brain, though,” he said. “That’s the best explanation I can come up with. He tried to pick a fight, wanted an excuse to beat the shit out of you, and you pulled that Gandhi nonviolence turn-the-other-cheek thing, and he just did not know how to handle it.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
And yeah, he was pretty much right. Maybe he didn’t know the whole story, but he didn’t need to. No one did. Ott’s problems belonged to no one but him.
Tariq was happy. I was happy. One in the morning, and the town belonged to us. Not even the reek of pig waste on the wind could bring me down.
“And you look sharp in those clothes. Who knew you had some preppy in you?”
“Shut up,” I said. “You know I’d never wear any colors this bright.”
But they were nice clothes. Way nicer than anything I owned. And I enjoyed the way they were too big on me. Like I was slimmer than even soccer-skinny Bastien.
“Pull over here,” I said when he’d turned off the main highway, and onto the narrow road through the woods where I lived. “I don’t want to say good night to you just yet.”
He unbuckled his seat belt and came across. We kissed in darkness, in silence, moving to the rhythm of the clicking of his hazard lights.
“I really want to get in your pants,” he whispered.
“I know,” I said.
“So? Why don’t we?” He put his hand on my thigh, then pushed it up to grasp me through the fabric of my pants.
“I want to,” I said. “I’m just . . .”
“Afraid?”
“Yeah.”
“Afraid of what? You want to get tested for STDs together? Planned Parenthood does it. I’ll do it for you.”
I’m afraid it can’t possibly be as good as I’ve been imagining it will be—
Afraid it will be better—
Afraid that once we do it, I’ll be your helpless slave forever—
Afraid you’ll see me naked and be disgusted and never speak to me again—
“I don’t know.”
He kissed my neck, put two warm hands under my shirt.
“Stop,” I said, praying he wouldn’t.
He slid one hand up, to grab my chest, and the other down, past my waistband, to grab me.
“Stop,” I said, pushing him back.
“Fine.” He gripped the wheel, hard, with both hands.
“I wish I was ready,” I said. “But I’m not.”
“Fine.”
Tariq’s eyes glared into darkness, the whole way to where he left me. And again I kept wanting to say something, and again I kept not knowing what it would be.
Mom was awake, waiting for me at the kitchen table when I came in at two in the morning.
“Didn’t hear a car,” she said.
“Tariq dropped me off down the block.”
“Why?”
“Thought you’d be asleep. Didn’t want to wake you.”
She looked doubtful. “Sit.”
I sat.
“Did you call any of those numbers for therapists the doctor gave you?”
“No,” I said.
She flung a tea bag into a mug, poured hot water over it. Then she stopped and sniffed me. “Oh my god. You smell like a—have you been drinking?”
“No, Mom. Some jerk spilled a bottle all over me.”
“And these clothes?”
“Bastien loaned me some of his.”
“Open your mouth,” she said. I did, and she sniffed, and then stared into my eyes like she could spot a lie there.
“I hate drinking,” I said.
“Good,” she said and sat. “Repeat after me: He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.”
I did so, swiftly and free of any slurring. I could have asked her about her own drinking. I did not. We sat in silence and watched our tea steep. This was the mother I remembered from my childhood: huge, unstoppable, a human bullshit detector. There was something comforting about being in its crosshairs. As a little boy, I had been in awe of those moments where she caught me doing something bad, and enjoyed, on some strange level, the stern punishments she administered. You will be better when this is over, they seemed to say, and when it was over, I was.
But the ER doctor’s sentence still echoed in my head: Since you’re a minor, we do have the power to force you into a treatment program with your mother’s consent.
“Being a parent is terrifying,” she said. “You have no idea. Every day, you live with the possibility that you’ll make some terrible mistake that will ruin your kid’s life forever. You wonder if you’ve already made an awful mistake and not even known about it, passing on some gene that’ll cause cancer or Alzheimer’s or something. There’s never a clear answer. No one else can help you because no one else has ever been in the exact same circumstances with the exact same kid. You do too much, you cause a problem. You do too little, you cause a problem.”
“You’re a great mom,” I said.
“I’m an alcoholic,” she said, and sipped her tea. Me, I came damn near to choking on mine. I was touched that she’d trust me that much, but disturbed, too. That kind of trust was terrifying. “I’ve been mostly sober for about seventeen years.” I am almost seventeen. “Sometimes I falter. Lately, I’ve been faltering.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve been causing you—”
“Shush,” she said. “That’s not why I’m telling you all this. I’m telling you because lots of doctors think alcoholism is genetic, and since I’ve kept it a secret from you and your sister all these years, you don’t know that you have that predisposition. You might start down a road you don’t otherwise know to avoid.”
“I hate drinking, Mom. I’m not in danger of starting down that road.”
“It isn’t just alcohol. Addictive personalities are addictive personalities. It means you don’t know when to stop. If something makes you feel good, you’ll do it until you’re sick. Or worse. Like with eating.” And here she patted her own ample stomach. “Or not eating.”
Or love, I thought, thinking back to Tariq and my terror when he put his hands on me and begged for it.
“That’s what I mean when I say being a parent is terrifying. You’re always on the lookout for how you’ve failed. When you were little, I was constantly looking for signs that you’d inherited my problem. Do you remember when you had that ancient cassette player, and I got you that Beyoncé single you liked?”
“Yeah,” I said. “‘Crazy in Love.’ I listened to it over and over again, for hours, every day, until you had to take it away from me.”
“And spent weeks worrying about whether I’d made it worse.”
“You totally did. I was so mad at you.”
She laughed, then got quiet again. “You and your sister were always so different. I only ever had to tell you something once. She used to pester me about the same things all the time. I told you your father was a crab fisherman in Alaska, and that was enough for you. She asked me every other day where he was, why he wasn’t with us, how she could get in touch with him.”
“Lobster,” I said, trembling. My voice was barely audible. “You said Dad was on a lobster boat.”
“He was probably on both,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Or neither. Anyway, your sister always wanted a relationship with him, and over the past year, as she got more an
d more unhappy with Hudson and school and her life, I started to realize that I had hurt her by keeping her in the dark. So I gave her his mother’s old mailing address, which was the only connection I had.”
“Tell me about him,” I said.
“Your father.” She looked at her hands. Shut her eyes. “Your father was strong and smart and handsome. Confident. The world was his. He was never in doubt about anything. Which is actually an incredibly frustrating trait for someone who is wrong all the time. Full of big ideas about how to change the world, but never wanted to do a damn thing to make them happen. Convinced everyone was out to get him. Hated society, whatever that means. Wanted to go his own way.”
“Am I like him?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I see him in you, physically. But I can’t be objective about either of you. I’m convinced you’re a hundred percent Perfect, and that he’s a hundred percent . . . the opposite of that. There’s no rulebook for being a parent, Matt. Rulebooks are bullshit.”
I looked around the kitchen, at the rabbit-shaped saltshakers and the Salvation Army mugs with faded witty slogans, at the dirty stove and the sink full of dishes, the garbage can so full the lid wouldn’t shut, and I realized that for all its smallness and its shortcomings, it was home. It was safe and warm and full of love.
“Everything you’ve done as a parent has come from a good place, right? And overall I think Maya and I both turned out pretty well.”
She looked at me, hard, a look that said, Really? You think so? You with an eating disorder you think I’m too stupid to see and your sister a runaway? Or maybe she was just exhausted and had said what she needed to say to me and was out of things to say. I had to work hard not to read her mind or her body language or her pheromones, but I managed.
I checked my phone. Maya’s bassist, Ani, had posted a status update that said Destroy All Monsters! RIP and my first thought was sadness for my sister’s sake, because of how much that band meant to her, and my second thought was hope that maybe this would mean she might come home.
Me and Mom drank our tea. I dropped a spoonful of honey in. She didn’t see me, didn’t know what a sacrifice it was, what a great concession I had made to her.
But it didn’t matter. I knew it.
RULE #41
A wounded animal can only hide its damage from others for so long. Sooner or later, someone will see.
DAYS: 32–33
AVERAGE DAILY CALORIES, APPROX.: 2100 150
“Got you a present,” Tariq said, picking me up to take me to school Monday morning. His hair, scooped up into a fauxhawk, still glistened with gel. His truck smelled like Dunkin’ Donuts and gasoline and his sweet spicy aftershave. He handed me a book-shaped rectangle wrapped in an Arabic newspaper.
“Can you read this?” I asked.
“I barely know the alphabet,” he said. “There’s no place around here that does Arabic education or even Islamic religious schooling. Mom tried to teach me for a while, but I hated it. This newspaper is from Syria. My father subscribes.”
He tapped a grainy photo showing tanks in a street.
“News from home is rarely good.”
“Holy shit,” I said when I unwrapped it and found the Hudson High School library’s copy of On the Road. “What are you doing? You can’t give this to me. It’s not yours!”
“I checked it out, it’s under my name,” he said. “I will accept the consequences.”
“You’re ridiculous,” I said. I looked at his forehead and wanted to kiss it but didn’t. “And anyway, aren’t you rich? Couldn’t you just buy me a new copy?”
“Sure,” he said. “But where’s the sentimental value in that? Anyway, it’s a great book. I know you’ve been waiting for me to finish it.”
“Did you?”
“Only five times. It’s very helpful for planning our Great Escape Road Trip Across the Country.”
“Shut up,” I said, not daring to hope for such a thing.
“So. Speaking of pride and confidence, I need to tap into some of that. Wednesday is Christmas, and since we don’t celebrate it, we have a family tradition of going out for Chinese food. I figured since you guys don’t celebrate it either, you might not have plans, so you might be able to . . . come out to dinner with us. The book is not a bribe.”
I laughed out loud. “You want me to sit down with your mom and dad and somehow keep from jumping your adorable bones right in front of them?”
“It’s asking a lot, I know. And actually I know it sounds perfectly dreadful. But I need you there. Dad’s been coming down hard on me lately. About my soccer performances—unacceptably weak—college and my future—I’m not taking it seriously enough—what he wants me to be—him. But he’ll behave himself if there’s an outsider present.”
“It totally does sound dreadful,” I said. “But you know I can’t say no to you.”
“Yeah, you can,” he said. “You say no to me all the time.” It was clear, his meaning.
“A pleasure postponed is a pleasure magnified. Or so a fortune cookie told me once.” Thinking about fortune cookies woke my stomach up. It was not happy.
“So you’ll do it?”
“The dinner, yes. The other thing . . . maybe.”
Tariq beamed. He was the sun. “If you did both, it would be the best Christmas present a Jew ever gave a Muslim.”
Which is how it happened that my mom dropped me off at the Spring Garden on Christmas and then went to ShopRite to pick up challah and tuna fish. Which is how I took a deep breath and walked inside to a restaurant empty except for a couple of Jewish families and some lone lonely diners for whom Hudson’s only halfway classy Chinese restaurant, with its red decor and fading ornate felt wallpaper, was the most festive spot they could find.
I’d been there a billion times before. Everything was familiar, down to the man behind the bar waving at me when I walked in. But now I was terrified. The giant fish tank was still there, packed with dozens of ageless koi I’d been tapping the glass to annoy since I was five years old. Through it, distorted by the glass and the water, were stretched-out, shrunk, warped fun-house-mirror versions of the boy I loved and the people who gave him life. Being with my mother always made me feel like a child, but seeing Tariq beside his parents I saw that he was an adult.
“Hi!” Tariq said, rising when he saw me, with a joy that made me swoon with happiness but also fear that his parents would know from that one syllable everything that was between us.
Introductions were made. Hands were shaken. Mr. Murat’s grip was tight and almost painful. Mrs. Murat’s was delicate, ladylike. I sat down knowing exactly what a criminal feels, sitting in the courtroom before the judge and jury who will decide his fate.
“Matt’s mom works at the slaughterhouse,” Tariq said.
“Ah,” his father said. “I know many men who work there. Terrible thing what is happening now. So many people losing jobs. But what can you do. It is the way of business.” His voice was terse, tight, controlled, accented. He was a man uncomfortable with language, I realized—not English specifically, as an immigrant, but language in general. Trees, chainsaws, trucks, business, money, books, and balances—these were where Mr. Murat felt most comfortable.
“But it shouldn’t be that way,” Tariq said. “Aren’t there more important things in life than the bottom line? Doesn’t a business have a responsibility to its workers?”
“No one owes anyone anything in this world,” he said and smiled apologetically at me. “An ugly truth, perhaps, but one you are better off knowing. We are all on our own. We work hard, or we perish. Look at me. I came here with nothing. I worked hard. And in time I was able to save money, make smart decisions, own my own business.” He was Tariq. The same height, the same nose, the same overall sense of mingled pride and humility. The same dense lovely beard, though Mr. Murat’s was much longer and more grizzled. But where Tariq was strong and handsome his father was fat and frayed, looking like life had hit him hard, and he’d put up
a good long fight.
“You got lucky,” Tariq said. “Didn’t you? Plenty of people come here and work their fingers to the bone and never get a pot to piss in. And anyway, capitalism doesn’t actually reward hard work. The guy who picks the tomatoes for Taco Bell makes twenty cents an hour sweating in the hot sun, and he works a hell of a lot harder than the CEO, who sits in an office and makes four million a year—about two thousand dollars an hour. Or am I wrong about that?”
His father rolled his eyes. They really were the same person. “Matt, do you pick fights with your mother in front of other people?”
“No,” I said. “But that’s just because we’re never around other people.”
His father laughed. “Well, if ever you are in such a situation, do not do this. It reflects poorly on the people who raised you.”
Tariq’s mother intervened, her voice bright and incisive, asking what my favorite subject was—English—what my favorite book we read this year—Macbeth—and why—because I liked Lady Macbeth—and had I ever seen a movie of it—I hadn’t. Her favorite was the one with Patrick Stewart, though the Roman Polanski one was also good. I got the impression that she spent a lot of time diverting attention and defusing conflict between her husband and her son.
And then something very strange happened. I realized I was having a great time. I was laughing and sitting next to my boyfriend, out with his parents, like grown-ups, and instead of the lonely-sad feeling I always got on Christmas, knowing that everyone else was celebrating something without me, I had found people like me, even if they were also nothing like me.
And then the food came. Pork lo mein, my childhood favorite. And I didn’t even remember ordering, that’s how pleasant the conversation had been. I didn’t look at the menu or stress out about how to order something that would be easy to fake eating.
There it was, in front of me, a steaming heap of delicious-smelling fat and starch and salt.
A nest of noodles. Impossible to shred into a pile of “maybe half eaten, but really all there.”
I stared at it for a good long while before picking up my chopsticks and poking at it. Conversation subsided as everyone dove into their food, and I prayed for it to start again, for distractions, for time to think about what to do. I could spread my napkin on my lap, plop clods of food into it when no one was looking, fold the napkin up and leave it under my seat . . . but Tariq was sitting too close, he’d see, he’d—
The Art of Starving Page 18