Milk Fed

by Melissa Broder

  “Ack-ack! Ack-ack!” I hammed it up. “Honey. Must have raw honey.”

  “You’re fine,” said my mother. “Honey is fattening.”

  It was like I’d spent my entire life trying to get honey and then trying to avoid it. I wondered what I would have done with all that life if it hadn’t been defined like that. The freedom seemed enormous, monstrous.

  I brought my bag of candy and the burrito into the office and put them in my desk drawer. Then I stopped at Ana’s desk to see if anyone had noticed I was gone.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Ofer is on a panel this afternoon, something about ‘queering the script.’ ”

  “Ofer is queer?”

  “No, he’s speaking from the perspective of the ally.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not that anyone wants him as an ally.”

  I laughed, feeling the weight of my stomach heavy with food. It was strange to be so changed yet know that I looked no different to her. I made sure she was on a phone call before I went and microwaved my burrito in the kitchen. I didn’t want her to see me using the microwave like one of the office commoners, stinking it up in there.

  After the burrito was microwaved, I placed it on my desk with a few of the salsas. The cacti that sheltered me from NPR Andrew’s view were still standing guard, but it didn’t matter. I felt so languid and self-contained with my burrito, already full from the rest of my feast, that I could simply take small pieces and dip them in the salsa like a normal person. I wanted him to absorb my portrayal of ease. Yes, I was performing a one-woman show about a person who could simply take or leave a burrito, no biggie, just coolly have a burrito at rest on her desk, no obsession, no fear, a sane food woman, a woman to whom food was only one facet of a very expansive life, the burrito simply a prop, a trifle to be toyed with, a second thought, a third thought, even.

  The day went so much faster with the burrito and candy to pick from. I imagined how much more pleasurable my life would be at work if I had this every day. Life was a lot less bleak when you were staring straight down the barrel of a burrito. Was this how some people lived all the time?

  At home, I continued to eat throughout the night: Easy Cheese in a can, SpaghettiOs, half a large bag of Cool Ranch Doritos—all purchased from 7-Eleven—plus the remainder of the candy and baked goods, and a large container of takeout pad thai. I ate and ate until the clock struck midnight, then threw away all of the remaining food. I took the trash bag out to the garbage cans on the street and let everything go into the trash.

  Then I got into bed, feeling like a blimp, a whale, but perfectly done: sated, tranquilized, as though I’d been fucked very well. The only thing left to do was pop a piece of nicotine gum. I smiled, parked the gum between my molars and my cheek, and drifted gently off to sleep.

  CHAPTER 18

  I woke up to my alarm in a great terror. I couldn’t remember exactly what had happened the day before, but I knew it had been bad. As I pieced together what I’d eaten, I could taste some of it in my mouth, in the sour, acidic parts of undigested food that came up: a hint of salsa, a lone SpaghettiO. My stomach hurt from the bottom to the top, like I had to take a massive shit that snaked itself in coils and knots and would never end. But the worst pain was in the middle, where I felt a strange emptiness despite the incalculable food that I had eaten. I had stretched my stomach, made too much space. I felt like I still needed more food, to return to what had hurt me, to soothe all that I had done.

  Put something in me, said my stomach. Give me something calming.

  But I could not and would not oblige. I no longer kept a scale in my apartment. In my laxative years, I’d weighed myself ten times a day: every time I shit or pissed. If I’d learned anything from that self-torture, it was that if I owned a scale I’d never get off it. But now I felt I had gained at least ten pounds. I made a resolution that for the next three days, I was only going to eat protein bars so I could keep perfect track of my calories. I felt disgusting. I imagined the food I had consumed simmering in my stomach, just beginning to make its way slowly out to different parts of my body: my hips, my stomach, my arms. Was I going to look like Miriam? Was I becoming a frozen yogurt girl: soft, sloppy, melting?

  I thought about Dr. Mahjoub and the missing clay figure. I didn’t believe in The Secret or vision boarding or creative visualization or any of that other LA drivel. And yet, I wondered if it was possible that I had somehow The Secret–ed this woman.

  That night, I googled voodoo doll. I ended up on someone’s Etsy page, featuring an array of ugly gingerbread-man-looking stuffed dolls—said to be handmade in Brooklyn. I googled Jewish voodoo doll and found an article about anti-Semitism in Turkey. I googled Jewish Frankenstein and read a biography of Mel Brooks. Then I googled Jewish monster.

  A golem (/’goʊləm/ GOH-ləm; Hebrew: גולם) is an animated anthropomorphic being found in Jewish folklore that is created magically from inanimate matter—usually clay or mud. The golem possesses infinite meanings, and can function as a metaphor for that which is sought in the life of its creator.

  Well, I certainly hadn’t sought out yogurt sundaes, that was for sure. I continued reading:

  The most famous golem was said to have been created by Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the late-sixteenth-century rabbi of Prague, who made a golem to defend the Jews from anti-Semitic attacks. Some think the golem is real. Others believe it is symbolic and refers to a spiritual awakening.

  In one picture, the golem looked like King Kong. In another, it looked like something of a hulk: the Jolly Green Giant or Andre the Giant. In no picture did the golem look anything like Miriam or me or a young me or the psychedelic woman I’d made or Dr. Mahjoub or even frozen yogurt.

  I googled Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel and found a painting of him. He was old and had a beard down to his feet. He was smiling. He looked nice.

  CHAPTER 19

  They say the perfect is the enemy of the good, that if you strive for perfection you will overlook the good. But I did not agree. I didn’t like the good. The good was just mediocre. I wanted to go beyond mediocre. I wanted to be exceptional. I did not want to be medium-size. I wanted to be perfect. And by perfect, I meant less.

  But enforcing my protein bar regime was not as easy as it used to be. I felt like I was moving through the stages of grief. In the morning there was pain, because of the emptiness. It was as though I had expanded the inside of my stomach to a giant stadium and I was dying to fill up the seats. Next came resolve, me feeling like a champion, slogging my way to my lunchtime protein bar, powered by self-hatred. In the afternoon came hunger again, then exhaustion. The hours between each protein bar felt endless. At the gym, I thought I might collapse. At night I lay awake, envisioning vegetables, tomato juice, pickles, salt—anything that wasn’t the sweet, cloying whey of the bars.

  After two days, I returned to Subway and let the salad caress me with its vegetables. I walked back to the office slowly in the sunlight and decided that a few things were true. I decided that love is when you have food in your mouth that you know is not going to make you fat. Lust is when you have food in your mouth that is going to make you fat. Fear is the day after you had food in your mouth that is going to make you fat. Fear is when you eat your allotted calories for a given time and you find yourself still hungry. Fear is when you no longer trust yourself to stick to your prescribed regimen.

  As I approached the front door of the office, I froze. My mother’s car was parked at a meter out front. I knew it instantly: a white Volvo with New Jersey plates. She had driven all the way across the country to come find me.

  “Oh no,” I moaned.

  But it wasn’t my mother’s car. It belonged to some dude who looked like Jay Leno. He was sitting in the front seat, vaping. The thought occurred to me that my mother had somehow transformed herself into a vaping Jay Leno, or that this dude had stolen her car. I checked the passenger door. My mother’s Volvo had a dent on the passenger door, but this one was dent-free. I
felt an urge to knock on the dude’s window anyway, to talk to him, as if having the same car connected them somehow. As if it connected us.

  I thought about how I used to watch my mother sleep sometimes, how innocent she looked with her hands tucked under the pillow. In those moments, I saw her as a little girl, and I felt that nothing was her fault—just a chain of fears and feelings passed down from generation to generation. In those moments I thought, You can show her how to love you better by being loving to her. But it was easier to be loving when the person was asleep.

  I took a step toward the office, then I looked at Jay Leno one more time. He was on his phone, yelling at someone. He exhaled in frustration, shrouding himself in a massive cloud of vape smoke: a Los Angeles apparition. I reached for the handle of the office door. Then I turned around and headed for Yo!Good instead.

  CHAPTER 20

  When I opened the door to the shop, the bells jangled and I thought I was going to faint. I was accustomed to light-headedness. This was the price of calorie restriction. Sometimes I even enjoyed the experience, because it was proof that what I was doing was working. There could be a physical high too, from the actual sensations, when I let go and agreed to just be there. Other times the stars took a while to clear and I worried that I had been blinded. But this time, my vision cleared quickly, or so I thought, except what I saw when the stars dissipated was something of an inner vision projected outward.

  What I saw was an enormous braided challah. The loaf of bread was taller and much wider than me, maybe seven feet tall and four feet wide—a giant. A challah golem. It was a plain challah, no raisins, and its outsides shimmered and shone with honey. The challah did not have a face, but in all other ways I felt it to be smiling at me, each shining cord of the braid like a smile itself. The challah shook and shimmied back and forth as if beckoning me to come dance with it.

  I saw myself move toward the challah as if to take up its offer to dance. I wanted to hug the whole bread, to rest my face against the glazed crust, to dive into that eggy, doughy center headfirst. But the challah, magic as it was, had something even better in store for me. The closer I got to its honey-scented body, the more weightless I became. It was as though the challah was some kind of moon that was disrupting my sense of gravity. I saw myself rise up into the air, levitating, rotating sideways, then upside down with my feet over my head, flying above the beautiful top of the bread. I was merely a satellite in the challah’s orbit. I felt at once celestial, mystical, part of a magical painting, like a Chagall, where people soared over one another in glorious dance. Except I wasn’t dancing with a person, but a bread.

  I heard Miriam call out, “Hello!”

  The bells on the door were still chiming. I realized that my feet were on the ground. In place of the challah stood Miriam. Her face glistened with sweat, prismatic, as though she herself had a honey coating. I felt happy to see her.

  “You couldn’t resist my sundaes, could you?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, grinning. “I could not resist your sundaes.”

  “I’m going to make you an even better one,” she said. “Think you’re ready for the Plotz?”

  “Let’s do it,” I said.

  I watched her survey her kingdom of yogurt. She licked her lower lip several times, and with each lick, I felt something course through me that was greater than the peace of her presence, greater than the joy of my challah vision. It was desire. I felt a desire to put my mouth on her mouth, to suck on her lower lip, to bring her close to me, her body against my body, to smell her neck and know what she smelled like, to feel her big belly against mine, to sway against her a bit, rubbing up on her.

  Oh fuck, I thought. I like this girl.

  CHAPTER 21

  I had only slept with two women in my life. The first was Zoe, a theater acquaintance in college, during my second year. By graduation she’d fucked everyone in the theater department, and my turn came the night of a cast party for Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. I was excited. I had fantasized about women and wondered if I was bisexual, or even a lesbian. I’d always preferred masturbation to having sex with men.

  Zoe wore a newsboy hat over her blond bob. I remember taking the hat off her head and putting it on mine, feeling like I had swagger. I liked the way her neck smelled when I kissed it, musky and aromatic. But when we went to her house, I quickly grew bored with the experience. Her skin felt strangely gummy. She was skinnier than I was, and her hip bone kept stabbing me. Her pussy didn’t taste like I’d hoped it would. I had imagined her to be mossy, cheesy, maybe oceanic. But she was tangy, almost bitter, like a kumquat. I tried to avoid putting my tongue deep inside her and just stayed on the clit. I did well. I gave her two orgasms, which I knew were real, because I could feel her pussy muscles clenching as she came.

  By the time she got to me, I was ready to go home and eat the nine pretzels I counted out for myself each night. She honestly tried to get me off and I honestly kept thinking about those pretzels. Finally, I faked it—pretended to come in her face the way she had in mine, clenching my vaginal muscles intentionally so that she would think it was really happening. I wanted my snack.

  In my third year at school I pursued a woman named Cait for half a semester in a state of complete infatuation. Cait was a vocal activist on campus, and I followed her to climate change protests and conscious capitalism symposiums. I took on a timekeeper role at the LGBTQ alliance meetings, promoted an electro Arabic Dabke concert sponsored by Students for a Free Palestine, and helped facilitate a video installation project in the cafeteria called “Spring Forward: the eMPower Sessions” aimed at “exploring the relationship between emotional trauma, synesthesia, and the tyranny of the iPhone.”

  I pursued the idea of Cait so doggedly that the real Cait could never compare. When I took off her bra for the first time, I discovered we had the same exact tits. It was crazy! Our tits were literally replicas of one another: about the size of large tangerines, with small red areolae and big gumdrop nipples. When I pinched and sucked on her titties, I felt like I was pinching and sucking my own. I didn’t like myself enough to suck my own tits.

  Cait sensed my reticence and became clingy. The less I texted her, the more heart emojis and u ok?? messages she sent. It was like being asphyxiated by a part of my own self—the need for approval and validation I so despised. More of me? That was the last thing I wanted!

  I began dating men again, usually fantasizing about women while I was with them. It was easier. If the actual experience of being with a woman wasn’t as good as it was in my fantasies, why bother coming out as bisexual or pansexual or whatever the hell I was? Nathan would eat my pussy for a full half hour in the back of his Kia Sorento and I could fantasize about Cait, only with different tits and ignoring me, until I came. It seemed that as long as I wasn’t actually having sex with a person, I could get off to them. But once they embraced me it was over.

  CHAPTER 22

  The Peppermint Plotz was a Candy Land fantasy, using chocolate yogurt as a base with a swirl of peppermint around the border. Miriam piled on the hot fudge again, jacked it up with Junior Mints, sprinkled chocolate chips on top of that, then finished with marshmallow sauce on top. It was what a magic winter fairy would make if she had the pleasure of serving herself at Yo!Good.

  I felt giddy as I ate, like a kid. I felt more like a kid than I did when I was a kid. All of my childhood interactions with other children were about going to their houses and trying to get a taste of their junk food. Often there was shame in it, because the other little girls were skinnier than me or cared less about food. Amy Dickstein would bribe me with different foods so that we could play “prom” together. Amy said that every prom had “refreshments.” She promised we could have something delicious to eat, but only after we did the other parts of prom night. She promised potato chips. She promised apple fritters.

  She let me be the girl. She was the boy. I had no problem with that. We would slow dance in her bedroom, and she would tel
l me I looked very pretty. She would ask if I was having a good night. Then we would have an after-prom moment, before refreshments, and she would lay me down on her bed and softly brush the hair off my cheek. This felt good, it really did. Then she would put toilet paper between our mouths, lie down on top of me, and kiss me. One time, she kissed me without the toilet paper, and it was nice and soft. Sometimes she moved against me or rubbed our pelvises together. She said that since I was the girl, I was not required to move.

  I enjoyed the caresses and attention. But what really turned me on was the anticipation of getting to eat forbidden foods after. As Amy kissed me and rubbed up against me, I thought: apple fritter apple fritter apple fritter.

  “Good?” asked Miriam.

  “I’ve plotzed,” I said, spooning up a bite of melted yogurt and a bit of hot fudge.

  “Good.”

  “What do you do when you aren’t yogurting?” I asked.

  “I go to the movies,” she said. “Old movies.”

  “With friends?”

  “Usually by myself.”

  I imagined her in an antique movie theater, sitting up in the balcony, smoking. Of course, you couldn’t smoke in any theaters in Los Angeles, but that was how I pictured her: blowing rings into the light from the projector as it cut through the darkness of the theater. Between puffs I imagined her eating a bag of Red Hots, spicy like the clove cigarette.

  “I’m going tonight,” she said. “Charade. A late showing, ten p.m. Do you like Audrey Hepburn?”

  When I was seventeen, at the apex of my starving, I had a big, vintage poster of Breakfast at Tiffany’s in my bedroom. My goal had been to become as narrow as Audrey, but no matter how little I ate, I could still feel meat on my abdomen, cushion on my thighs. Audrey was practically sculpted from bone. She was starved during childhood, World War II in Holland, which was why she was so skinny. I knew it was fucked up, but I found myself envious that she’d had skinniness fully thrust upon her. An enemy had inflicted her starvation, which made it heroic. She hadn’t had to starve herself to become a star.