Zoe Letting Go

by Nora Price

  “Interesting theory,” Victoria observed.

  “It applies to every restaurant,” I said confidently. “If we had our phones, I could show you ten menus that fit the pattern.”

  “Give an example,” Haley said.

  “Okay. A dessert menu at your typical, nice-ish restaurant would be, like, nectarine cobbler, lemon pistachio tart, chocolate mascarpone cake, vanilla bean ice cream, caramel pot de crème. See? All the bases covered.”

  “I love it,” Victoria said. “You’re a geek. Just like me. Is that when your food thing started, Zo? With the desserts?”

  I paused momentarily at the abruptness of the question. I’d known all along that I’d have to answer a similar question at some point, but I hadn’t expected it to come this soon. Not having a ready answer, I deflected the question. “I dunno,” I said, turning toward Haley. “When did yours start?”

  “God, I remember the moment so well,” Haley began. “I could divide my life into ‘before’ and ‘after’ categories.”

  Victoria was nodding in agreement, and I mimicked the gesture. It was crucial for me to blend in at this point. Haley and Victoria might suspect me to be different from the rest of them—my appearance broadcasts this fact like a ticker tape at the New York Stock Exchange—but I certainly didn’t need to underscore my wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing status.

  “After my parents divorced,” Haley began, “my dad started a tradition of getting us donuts for breakfast every Friday. We called it Donut Day.”

  “Creative,” Victoria said.

  “My brothers and I would tell him what kind of donuts we wanted, and he’d write it all down on a Post-it note. My dad’s a dermatologist—very scrupulous. He took the Post-it with him to the donut store to make sure he wouldn’t forget anything.

  “At first I always got a pink frosted donut. The cake kind, with sprinkles, like a Homer Simpson donut. My brothers got chocolate devil’s food donuts and apple strudel sticks, which were somehow the ‘cool’ donuts.” She paused. “It’s funny how even breakfast pastries get divided into ‘cool’ and ‘lame’ categories.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “Jelly donuts are so dorky.”

  “Danishes are the worst,” Victoira said. “Someone’s dad is always eating a cheese danish and getting crumbs on his shirt. If you order a danish, you’re dead.”

  “So, Donut Day,” Haley went on. “My dad would run out and return fifteen minutes later with two brown paper sacks. My brothers would be waiting at the table, drooling, like a pair of mastiffs. My dad poured us all glasses of milk, and himself a cup of coffee, and then we’d rip into the donuts. It never took my brothers longer than four minutes to demolish three donuts apiece—not only because they were starving, but because they were popular and couldn’t wait to get to school.”

  “Ugh,” I said, thinking of my own brother. “I know the type.”

  “Seriously. So obnoxious. Anyhow, there was one day when I didn’t have any clean clothes to wear because my dad had, once again, forgotten to do the laundry. Fourth graders aren’t old enough to buy their own clothes, but”—she made a face of rueful recollection—“they are old enough to make fun of each other for wearing uncool clothes.”

  “Fourth grade is a minefield,” I said.

  “Every grade is a minefield,” Victoria corrected.

  “Yeah,” Haley agreed. “So, while my dad was getting breakfast, I dug through the hamper and tried to find a shirt that wasn’t stained with chocolate milk or dirty. I was in a panic. By the time I found a passable top and got downstairs, everyone had finished eating and left the table. The table was a mess of napkins, waxed paper, and squashed paper bags. I sat down and rifled through until I found my pink donut. A quarter of it had been amputated, and all the icing was sheared off.”

  “Aw,” I said. “The best part.”

  Victoria looked wistful, as though she were thinking of her own beloved donuts from the past.

  “It looked like someone had given my donut a buzz cut and then stepped on it,” Haley said. “Pathetic. I felt pathetic, too, in my dirty shirt. I looked down at the donut, this sad little puck, and realized that I didn’t want it after all.”

  Haley sat up and stretched her shirt over her knees, creating a tent. “Then I thought to myself, Well, Haley, you need to eat breakfast because lunch isn’t until noon and your stomach will growl during class. So I lifted the donut up to my mouth. But then I put it back down again because another weird thought had occurred to me. I wonder what would happen, I thought, if I didn’t eat breakfast. It started as a sort of experiment. The option of not eating had never occurred to me before.”

  Despite being uncomfortably full from breakfast, I began to get the first stirrings of a donut craving from listening to Haley’s story. Humans are amazingly suggestible. Thoughts of maple icing, crispy fried ridges, and pillowy yellow interiors drifted through my mind. I could almost smell nutmeg and hot oil. But now wasn’t the time for donut fantasies. Somehow—quickly—I had to figure out a story to tell.

  “It was one of the first independent decisions I made,” Haley went on. “And it was intoxicating. I couldn’t control much in life, but I could control this. Instead of Donut Day, Fridays became the day that I didn’t eat breakfast.”

  “Were you hungry?” Victoria asked.

  “I was. I still wanted to eat the donut, but I no longer needed to eat the donut.”

  Haley stretched her nightshirt even tighter over her knees and drew her arms inside for warmth. She resembled a Jujube.

  “That’s when I first started drawing the distinction between foods that I wanted and foods that I needed,” she continued, her chin resting on the taut collar of her shirt. “I did more experiments. When my class went to the cafeteria at lunch, I would eat just one part of my meal—only the chicken fingers, or only the macaroni, for example. One day I’d eat only bread things, which meant my roll and my pizza crust and the croutons in a salad. On another day I’d decide to eat only round things, or only one bite of each thing on my plate, or only yellow things.”

  “No one noticed?”

  She shook her head. “My classmates didn’t care, and my parents were too busy. It became my own special, private habit. Something personal and cool, like a toy that I didn’t have to share with my brothers or anyone else. It was as though I knew a secret that other people didn’t know. The list of foods I wanted got longer and longer, and the list of foods I needed got shorter and shorter.”

  I sort of know that feeling, I thought.

  “And the rest …” Haley trailed off. “What about you?”

  Victoria pursed her doll lips. “I saw it like a game,” she said. “Like a crossword puzzle with right answers and wrong answers. And rules. By seventh grade I had the rules down. I had to be ‘good’ every day except for Saturday. On Saturday I could cheat and eat all the foods I wanted.”

  “And that worked?” Haley asked.

  “It was a psychological trick,” Victoria said. “By the time Saturday rolled around, my stomach would be the size of a peanut from eating so little all week, and the fact that I gave myself permission to eat everything made me not want to eat everything. It was thrilling, in a weird way.”

  “It was thrilling because that’s the definition of perversity,” I interjected. “Literally. Perversity means doing something specifically because you’re not supposed to. In other words, you starved yourself on Saturday specifically because you were allowed to eat anything on Saturday.”

  “Right. Totally,” Victoria said. “During the week, I would make lists of all the foods I ‘planned’ to eat on Saturday, even though I knew that I actually wouldn’t eat them. I did it during class. My teachers thought I was taking exhaustive notes, but inside my notebook it was just pages and pages of Lobster roll, almond croissant, crab cakes with rémoulade, and pommes frites.”

  “I kept mental lists,” Haley said. “Mint-chip ice cream, raw cookie dough, garlic bread from one of those foil packages that yo
u put in the oven and the middle comes out raw.”

  “Chicken paillard,” Victoria said. “Dark chocolate broken into shiny squares. Red velvet cake with cream cheese icing.”

  “Tater tots. Movie popcorn drenched in fake butter.”

  It was dizzying to watch them go back and forth.

  “I want a donut,” I said. “The lame kind. With jelly oozing out from the middle.”

  Both of them turned to me, each having had the same thought. “And you?” Victoria said. “When did yours start?”

  “Freshman year,” I said, picking a random time frame. I didn’t want to sink my brand-new alliances by announcing that I was an imposter who didn’t have any reason to be here. I mean, Jesus.

  “Really?” they both replied in unison.

  Shit. Apparently I picked the wrong answer.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “That’s so … recent,” Haley said. “I was ten.”

  “I was eleven,” Victoria chimed in. “But I guess it’s different for everyone.”

  “Eating disorders are all slightly different,” Haley nodded.

  “Like snowflakes?” I asked.

  “Or thumbprints.”

  “Or genetic diseases,” Victoria said.

  I needed to change the subject, so I lay down on my back and moaned, feigning an even worse stomachache than I had. It worked: Victoria and Haley frowned in sympathy, and Haley instructed me to roll up like a pill bug—“I swear,” she said, “it squeezes the pain right out.”

  I followed her instructions, trying to temper the nervous storm brewing in the back of my mind. I knew that I’d be expected to share the full version of my own story, too, at some point—and then what would I say, except that I’d never had a real problem with food and that I didn’t belong here at all? I need to have friends here, but I can’t get too close to them. I can’t let them ask me about my past. How could I even start to explain?

  The truth is that a small fraction of me is able to identify with their battles. I lost some weight last year—a lot of weight, to be precise. But I lost mine in the way anyone loses weight—and in the way that Elise lost weight—which was by eating slightly less and exercising slightly more. I am not even as skinny as the average model. And I certainly wasn’t refusing breakfast in fourth grade.

  But time was on my side this morning. Before either of my friends could dig further for my detailed personal history, Devon emerged in the doorway to call us in for cooking class. We brushed the grass from our legs and trundled over to the front stairs of the house.

  “Taco quinoa casserole,” Devon announced as we filed inside.

  I couldn’t imagine a more repulsive combination of words.

  After cooking and lunch (verdict: even more repulsive than anticipated), I arrived early for my session with Alexandra and took a seat outside her office. The day was halfway over, and already I had divided it into Good and Bad categories. The Good category contained one item, which was that I’d further solidified my friendships with Haley and Victoria. That deserved a gold star. The Bad category, unfortunately, was more numerous. One, I couldn’t get the dirt out from beneath my fingernails, and the dark half-moons were a visual annoyance each time I looked down at my hands. Two, I screwed up my minted zucchini soup in cooking class by forgetting to peel the vegetables. While the other girls produced silky, pale emulsions, mine turned a bilious green color, like a blended toad. Three, I could tell that I was starting to gain weight. As long as I don’t gain too much, I can lose it by the time school starts up again.

  Slouching into the chair, I ran a finger lengthwise along my thigh. Viewed from this angle, the contours weren’t flattering. What if I didn’t have enough time to lose the weight by September? There’s little in life that pains me more than the idea of returning to school in worse shape than I left it. There’s always one guy who comes back with overdue braces and one girl who comes back chubby. People talk.

  Just a few days ago, my body was running as smoothly as a machine. I’d gotten it down to a science, only to be snatched up and dumped into a place designed to reverse my hard-won habits. The timing could not have been worse: I’d beaten the odds and lost weight. I’d kept myself decently skinny for a whole year. I was still a giant compared to waif-like Elise, but still. And now this. If it is possible for a person’s brain to cringe, that’s what mine does every time my tongue locates some forgotten crumb of Twin Birch breakfast stuck between my back teeth.

  I shoved these complaints out of my mind and referred to the wall clock. Five minutes to go. The red lacquered box sat next to me on its wicker table, same as before. Since that first session with Alexandra, I’ve adopted a habit of peeking inside the box, just out of curiosity. It was empty the first time I checked, but it hasn’t been empty since. And as I stood today to look through the slit at the top of the box, an obscure part of me wished that it would be empty once more. It wasn’t.

  I straightened up and sat back down. One minute to go. When I initially asked Alexandra what the box was for, I thought her explanation sounded very queer. I still do, but the oddness is touched with a glimmer of logic.

  For the next sixty seconds I let my mind wander to golden Oreos, V-neck T-shirts, and Coney Island, in that order. Random things.

  “Hello, Zoe,” I heard from beside me.

  Alexandra’s door was open. She stood smiling, her black bob glossier than a licorice jellybean. It reminded me of an actress from the 1920s whose name I couldn’t summon. Lulu something? I wished that I had my phone back. It would take all of three seconds to Google the actress. Problems that a split second of Internet research would solve are arising here as a daily source of irritation. The lack of Googling privileges is another bothersome aspect of finding oneself locked away from the world.

  “Water? Tea?” Alexandra offered. She wore her usual outfit of white pants and tunic, but without the scarf or costume jewelry I’d come to expect. Her uniform, I should note, follows a distinct pattern: All of her garments are white with the exception of a single splotch of color. It’s the same every time. White, white, white, and then a dab of brightness—never more than one—by way of a red headband or an electric-blue shoe. Secretly, I looked forward to seeing where the color pops up each day. It’s a private game for me to play, like a treasure hunt. Another way to distract myself.

  Today’s accessory was a pair of poppy-orange flats that were pointy at the toe. They reminded me of traffic cones.

  I declined the offer of a drink.

  “What’s on your mind today?” Alexandra asked, after we’d arranged ourselves on the chair and couch respectively.

  “Tricks.”

  “Tricks?”

  “Yeah. For eating,” I said. “Did you know that Haley used to slice grapes into slivers to make them last longer? She told me all about her strategies during breakfast. So did Victoria. Grape slivers.”

  “Hmm,” Alexandra said.

  “And Victoria set her alarm for five a.m. so she could run for an hour before school,” I went on. “Then, she did the same thing after school every single day. Two runs of four miles each. Her rule was that she ate all of her food for the day before eight a.m., so she had time to burn it off.

  “She ate the same thing every day, which was a protein shake that she made in the blender with almond milk and peanut butter. She drank it after her morning run, intentionally swallowing it fast so that the protein powder would expand in her stomach and make her queasy. The queasiness would stop her from eating anything else for the rest of the day.”

  As I relayed these things to Alexandra, I marveled at my ability to perfectly recall the details of the conversation I’d had the day before. Unlike most things, Victoria and Haley’s tricks remained vivid in my mind, down to the flavor (cookies and cream) of Victoria’s protein powder.

  “After a while,” I continued, “she started dreaming about protein shakes at night. She woke up with drool on her pillow from anticipating the shake. And when she went on her
first run, that’s all she thought about: the cold, frosty breakfast that lay ahead.”

  “Hmm,” said Alexandra.

  “And Haley—holy crap. Haley was even worse. At the beginning of the week, she’d buy seven containers of low-fat rice pudding and mark them with a Sharpie: M for Monday, T for Tuesday, W for Wednesday. Then she’d steam up a batch of vegetables and portion those out into seven plastic Tupperware containers, one for each day. She’d put those in the fridge with the pudding. And then she took seven Ziploc bags and put, in each one, ten cashews, ten pretzels, and two rice cakes. Every day of the week she would eat a rice pudding for breakfast and a container of vegetables for dinner. For the rest of the day, she carried the Ziploc bag around and nibbled from it.”

  “You find these details interesting,” Alexandra observed.

  “Don’t you?” I said. “Obsessiveness is fascinating.”

  “How come?”

  “For the same reason that anything is fascinating. Because it’s different.”

  “But Zoe,” Alexandra said, “I’m not so sure that it is different.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “When I spoke to your mother, she mentioned that you and Elise developed some restrictive eating habits.”

  “When did you speak to my mother?” I asked, my voice unexpectedly sharp. One look at Alexandra’s face was enough to tell me that she wouldn’t divulge the information, so I waved my own question away. “Never mind. But you can’t compare Elise and me to these girls. There’s a huge difference in our situations.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We ate. The difference is that Elise and I ate.”

  Alexandra made a note on the legal pad in her lap, then trained her eyes back on me. “It sounds as though you ate little and controlled your diet strictly, Zoe. You controlled your intake to the point where it became a source of concern to those who cared about you.”

  “Losing weight isn’t the same as anorexia,” I rebutted, repeating the same point I’d made before. This was exasperating. “You know what? It really annoys me when adults pretend not to see subtleties. Just because a teenage girl wants to drop five pounds, doesn’t mean she needs to be incarcerated at a clinic.”