Addicted

Home > Other > Addicted > Page 16
Addicted Page 16

by Amelia Betts


  Another overeater habit to which I was highly prone was the strange combining of foods. Most people don’t wash down cheese puffs with a peanut butter smoothie or shove red licorice sticks into their tacos. I was currently fitting chicken nuggets inside my cheeseburgers, more of a classic taste combination, but still unusual. At least I was eating slowly and had waited to touch the stuff before I arrived at the beach. Hardly ever did I let my fries get cold, but there they were, tepid by the time I had gotten to the bottom of the container.

  The meal was over within five minutes, at which point I fought the urge to crumple into a ball and weep. I had erroneously assumed that hamburgers and chicken nuggets might bring me some sort of clarity. Instead, the tidal wave of loneliness that had woken me up that morning came crashing back onto the shores of my consciousness the minute I pounded my last French fry.

  With some effort, I managed to stand up and do some haphazard stretching, throwing my trash into one of the rusted metal drums that lined Oceanside’s seedier beachfront sidewalks. I could hear my phone ringing inside my car but made no rush to answer it. By the time I made it back, Isabella had left me a message, begging me to save her from death by boredom. I could hear on the recording that she sounded weak, tipsy, not all there, and just knew that—unlike me—she hadn’t had enough to eat.

  * * *

  Every once in a while, Isabella got drunk in the afternoon. It didn’t take much, a couple of glasses of champagne or a particularly stiff Bloody Mary from her favorite brunch spot, and all 105 pounds of her was stumbling onto the patio and shouting at her neighbors for having “no style.” When I found her that day, she was stretched out on the couch, her television set to a classical music station.

  “You smell like fried chicken,” she said with disdain as I sat down beside her.

  “That’s an accurate assessment,” I responded. “What did you do to yourself?”

  “Why aren’t you working?”

  “Hey, I asked you first.”

  “I don’t know. I saw a charity auction on television and felt left out. So I had a champagne to make myself feel better.” She sat up and lowered the volume on the Chopin concerto that was blaring a little too loudly from the television speakers. “And then I had another one. You want some? Just a little drop?”

  Isabella’s cheeks were sunken and pale. She clearly hadn’t had a bite to eat all day, so I went directly to the kitchen to make her an omelet—one of the few dishes she never turned down. When I opened the refrigerator, I contemplated the bottle of champagne and decided to pour myself a glass, figuring I might as well add drinking in the middle of the day to my current tally of vices.

  “What’s wrong?” Isabella called after me weakly as she lurched into the kitchen. “I’ve been left to die in the middle of nowhere. What’s your excuse?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Fluffy, you’re not happy. Look at those lines between your eyes.”

  I glanced at her from behind the refrigerator door as I replaced the half-empty bottle of Moët & Chandon that she’d stuck a spoon in, handle-down. “Why the spoon?” I said, holding it up for her to see.

  “Keeps it bubbly. Pour me a finger why don’t you?” she said with her usual air of authority before sauntering outside to the patio.

  * * *

  The sun had slipped behind a series of dense clouds by the time I made it outside, lending an extra grayness to an already gray day. I placed the omelet and a drop of champagne before Isabella and sat down with my second glass. Despite her prodding, I told her I didn’t want to talk about myself and asked for a story instead.

  “Happy or sad?” she asked.

  “I don’t care, you pick.”

  “Fine.” Isabella held up her hands and studied her nails for a moment before launching in. “Oooookay. I pick happy!”

  I smiled and took a swig of the champagne, which—surprise, surprise—was helping my emotional hangover. “Good,” I said.

  “Did I ever tell you about Dick Richards? The American soldier I fell in love with?”

  “No.”

  “I called him Dickie, Dickie Richards. Private First Class Dickie Richards! He was from North Carolina, USA,” she drawled, doing her best impression of a bad Southern accent. “Oh my goodness, he was the best-looking man I had ever seen. I met him at a cafe in Vienna. He bought me an Aperol Spritz. He didn’t even know what the drink was, but he’d seen me having one before. He said to the waiter, ‘Git her one of them orange thangs.’”

  “How old were you?” I asked. Piecing together Isabella’s life and all the places she had lived was like working on one of those impossible thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles.

  “I was eighteen, just a baby! And he wasn’t much older. He had dirty blond hair and big thick eyebrows and big blue eyes. And he had the softest skin. I fell for him like a cat falls for a dog. Is that a saying?”

  I chuckled. “I don’t think so.”

  “It was like Lady and the Tramp, you know? He was a scoundrel. My parents wouldn’t even have him in the house. They thought he might pee on the floor or something like that. But I was so sure he was the one for me, and we had the best sex! Anyway, one night, after a few months, we decided to run away together. He would quit the army and I would renounce my inheritance and we would start somewhere completely new. I called it our ‘American Dream.’” She smiled wanly as she took the last tiny sip of her champagne. “But then when it came time, I packed a bag and slipped out in the night. He was waiting outside with his duffel bag, all ready to go. We got all the way to the train station, and then he asked how much cash I had, and I said he needed to buy the ticket because I had none. I had taken nothing of value, on principle. That way, my parents would forever regret their decision… But that’s when I realized, good old Dickie hadn’t imagined me poor, not really. I think he thought I would never really be cut off. He didn’t understand the ways of the rich. His parents would have given him the shirts off their backs…” She trailed off, frowning at the sky. “Come back, sun! I need you today.”

  “So what happened?” I asked, worried that her story was taking a turn for the tragic.

  Isabella looked across the table at me and shrugged, nonchalant. “We never got on the train. He said he couldn’t leave his paycheck, that without it he couldn’t take the risk of going with me to God knows where—we hadn’t even decided where we would go.”

  “Did you keep seeing each other?” I asked, wanting her to say yes. I felt so embittered by my experience with Liam that I couldn’t handle the thought of somebody else’s heartbreak.

  But Isabella shook her head. “I was so young and full of ideals when I met him. I thought love was what you saw in the movies. But then I realized how right my parents were—it was a business transaction, two people measuring up each other’s worth. Sometimes it’s money, sometimes beauty, sometimes youth. Whatever it is, everyone needs to feel like they’re getting something out of it. It’s not spiritual; it’s materialistic. But the difference between me and Dickie was that I didn’t care. I truly didn’t. I wanted for us to be poor together, all the way up until that train station. Of course, after that, I knew better… I guess that’s not a happy story after all.” She forced a smile that quickly faded.

  I was on the verge of tears. “No, it’s not.”

  “Oh well,” she said, and repeated her catchphrase: “Every man who comes into your life is as an opportunity for adventure. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  * * *

  The afternoon at Isabella’s ended with me putting her to bed, with a Vanity Fair and a peanut butter smoothie on the nightstand. She had been nothing but cheery after telling me her sad tale, while I had gone in the opposite direction. Even though I wasn’t willing to talk about it, she could tell I was heartsick and kept promising I would grow out of it soon enough. She seemed to think that a natural part of growing up was accepting the ugly truth about love, like she had after her botched elopement with Dickie Richards, but
I didn’t want to think that way. Regardless of my recent failure, I wanted to believe in love as a spiritual thing—not as a material transaction. After her story, though, I wasn’t so sure. When I drove away, I felt exhausted and sad but ravenously hungry at the same time. I detoured to the nearest grocery store to stock up on every bad thing I could think of, certain that I deserved it after all I had been through. At checkout, the cashier asked if I was hosting a party.

  “Nope,” I said, “it’s all for me. I’ll probably polish it off by tomorrow.” I was incapable of smiling and certainly incapable of the usual fibs about who the food was for or why I’d bought only junk. A friend just had a breakup, I would normally have said. I don’t know what she likes, so I got one of everything. Just like drive-thru cashiers, grocery store clerks were always innocently drawing attention to a food binge, but I usually knew how to handle them.

  “Sounds like a party to me!” she responded—she was a heavy-set woman herself.

  I nodded, my cheeks red with humiliation as I glanced at the lanky teenage boy behind me in line.

  This time, when I got back to Julien’s house, I didn’t make any efforts to hide my contraband. Conveniently, Cecile was there to watch and judge as I shoved my bags and boxes of processed foods in the pantry and freezer, opting for a frozen pizza as my first meal. But after our unspoken truce that morning, she went easy on me.

  “That looks like what I would buy if my dad let me get everything I want,” she commented.

  “Think of me as a cautionary tale,” I joked, and shoved the oven closed a little too enthusiastically, causing the teakettle to rattle on top of the stove.

  After the requisite sixteen to twenty minutes, I retreated to the guesthouse alone and ate slice after slice of pizza in a half-reclined state, my head propped on several pillows, my shorts unbuttoned to make room for my bloated belly. My thoughts bounced from Liam to Isabella and her sad story and finally to Julien, who was due home from the office any minute now. What would I say to him the next time I saw him? Could I hide out here for the rest of the night and erase my memory of the past twenty-four hours by the time we reunite at breakfast tomorrow morning? Why did the thought of him coming on to me scare me so much? Could it be that somewhere, buried underneath my industrial-sized crush on Liam, I had been harboring feelings for Julien too? Strangely enough, I had never imagined myself with someone older, despite my background; most girls like me had tried to replace their father with a boyfriend old enough to be one by the time they were out of high school. I wondered if it was possible that I had given off that vibe without even knowing it—the vibe of the girl with daddy issues. Or maybe, just maybe, Julien was the one I should be pining for, but I couldn’t see how perfect he was for me through the Liam haze…

  Figuring it out tonight was hopeless. I examined my last bite of pizza crust before stuffing it past my lips, already filled with regret.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Friday, July 2: Ocean View Baptist Church Overeaters Anonymous Meeting

  Topic of discussion: “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places”

  Calories imbibed: 4,000… at least

  After forty-eight hours of the most out-of-control food binging I’d ever engaged in—which involved, most shamefully, an entire box of frozen corn dogs—I turned myself in to the Friday night meeting like a wanted criminal. In classic comic timing, the topic of discussion just so happened to be “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places.” I had to laugh, even though I felt like throwing myself off a highway overpass.

  Marie, the meeting’s appointed speaker, was a tall, big-boned woman who looked more “athletic” than overweight. She stood as she spoke, her hands laced together in front of her abdomen in a controlled manner. Her voice was raspy, her accent a pleasant Southern lilt. “A lot of us seek disapproval instead of love from our significant others,” she started. “It’s what some call a reverse codependency that keeps us stuck in our overeating patterns. As long as that other person is making us feel bad about the way we eat, we don’t have to feel bad ourselves. Heck, we have a great excuse to keep doing it because that other person is being so cruel, right? But sometimes it’s more subtle. Sometimes we just fall in love with people who are emotionally unavailable—maybe they don’t ridicule us, but they shut us down whenever we talk about things that are important, our feelings for instance.”

  Bingo. Emotionally unavailable men—that was me. I hated feeling like a cliché, but there it was. The problems I’d been trying to stuff down with food the past couple of days could be summed up with those three words: emotionally unavailable men. The topic couldn’t have been more relevant to my sad state of affairs. I leaned in to pay extra close attention as Marie went on to talk about her own experience. Her first husband, some human stain named “Bogey,” had tormented her by rigging their refrigerator with an alarm that went off whenever the door was opened. He also wouldn’t allow her to serve her own food, insisting that he doled out healthier portions, and forced her to wear pants that didn’t fit to remind her what size she had been when she married him. Luckily, her story had a happy ending, but her descriptions of a long dark period of secret eating and binging and purging after her divorce gave me chills. To call it a cautionary tale would be an understatement.

  When it came time for the “free share,” my hand shot up, acting independently of my conscious thoughts, and by some miracle, I was called upon. By another miracle, I actually spoke.

  “Hi, I’m Mischa, and I’m an overeater.”

  “Hi, Mischa,” the room responded.

  I sat up straighter, fueled by adrenaline just from saying my own name. “I’ve never shared before—” My voice immediately began to shake and I fought the urge to go silent. “I’ve been coming since I was fifteen, when I first decided I had a problem because I had stopped hanging out with certain friends just to eat more and not feel so bad about it. Pretty much all the skinny girls I knew, I had to stop being friends with. Just seeing them made me hate myself. And I was never that overweight, but it’s all relative, I guess. Ever since I can remember, I’ve needed two sets of clothes for my weight fluctuations. Right now, I’m so bloated I can’t fit into any of my pants. I’ve been eating pretty much nonstop for the past two days…”

  Some knowing hums greeted me as I glanced around the room. “But today,” I continued, “I really want to give it up. For good. I didn’t know I was going to say that just now, but I think I mean it.” I laughed and felt comforted by the scattered laughs from others in the group. “This last binge ended an hour ago, and it was pretty bad.” More knowing hums all around. “What started it was… well, I got involved with a sex addict. I mean, I was fucking him I guess. I’m sorry, excuse the harsh language. I just don’t know how else to say it. I thought we were making love, but now that I know better, I think it was just fucking.” The words that flowed out of my mouth felt somehow out of my control. It was as if someone had pushed me onstage at an amateur comedy night and I had unexpectedly taken to the microphone.

  “We only got together twice, really, but in my pathetic excuse for a love life that is like an epic romance. And ever since he told me he can’t be with me because of his sex addiction, I’ve been driving myself crazy with thoughts about how I’m inadequate… how, if he really liked me, he would find a way to be different. Which is really backwards, and I know love doesn’t work that way, and the fact that I’m even calling it love shows how messed up I am. But I don’t know.” I shook my head and noticed my commiserators doing the same. “The last time, it felt different. For me at least. So for a second I was the idiot thinking, ‘Maybe this is good.’ But why would I think that? And then, this other thing happened with my boss, who I also live with. We sort of held hands the other night, but he’s hardly spoken to me since. He’s way older, and he has a fourteen-year-old daughter who thinks I have a crush on him, even though I really don’t. Although, now I’ve been thinking about it and wondering if maybe I do. He has this aura about him and he
’s so sophisticated, I feel like if he were to choose me, that would mean I was special. But I don’t know, I thought I just looked up to him… How food is supposed to solve any of this I have no idea, but I’ve been eating enough for a goddamn army.”

  I paused for a breath. A couple of the women around me seemed to be in minor states of shock. I had forgotten this was technically a Baptist church, and some of the words I had been throwing around certainly did not qualify as reverent. What a jump I had made from nonparticipating wallflower. “I’m sorry for my language. But that felt really good. Thanks for listening.” I sank back into the pew, exhausted from my mini-catharsis.

  To my surprise, the next person who spoke thanked me and offered her own similar story of unrequited love, sans the salty language. The things she said struck a chord, and I found myself really listening and caring about another person’s experiences in a way that I hadn’t before. Despite all the hours I’d spent in meetings just like this one, I had never fully grasped the sense of community and support OA had to offer. Before it had been a one-sided experience in which I listened without participating, observed without exposing my own flaws. But today I felt like I’d been split open, and some strange version of happy was starting to replace all my sad.

  When the meeting came to a close, we all said what we were grateful for, and I gave an answer that, again, surprised me as it came out of my mouth. “Everything,” I said. And even though it drew some suspicious looks, I really, really meant it. I was inexplicably thankful for every single great and terrible thing that had led me to this point. Maybe it’s why I’d said I was thankful for my dad those weeks ago when I’d been caught off guard by the first “gratitude share.” If it hadn’t been for him, after all, I wouldn’t be here. And if it hadn’t been for Liam and Julien and Cecile, and my unclear future, and my problematic eating, and my extra fifty pounds, I wouldn’t have reached my breaking point today. All of it was what made me “me” at this very moment, and if I didn’t choose to like myself now, I may as well tie a trip wire to a doorknob and wait for the next prison guard to relieve me of my shift.

 

‹ Prev