Milk Fed

by Melissa Broder

  “Besides,” I said. “It’s twenty-first-century Los Angeles. If he were gay, he would just be gay.”

  “Not necessarily,” she said. “I mean, he is a TV star. Don’t forget, he has to maintain that heterosexual appeal.”

  “If he was looking for a beard, he would’ve chosen someone way more public, like one of his costars or something. There are a ton of women who would love to date him. No, he’s just, like, kinda into me.”

  I hated that I felt the need to puff myself up. I also felt bad about all of the sexual details I’d revealed about Jace—particularly the ass play and his proclivity for having his birth certificate orated. This was not the way girl talk should go. I wanted giggling, encouragement, cheering—not skepticism. I wanted conspiratorial comradeship, a walking diary entry. Instead, Ana seemed almost angry.

  “You obviously can’t date him,” she said firmly.

  “Of course. I know that,” I said.

  I couldn’t figure out what was making her mad. I wondered if it was sorrow from her past, or jealousy. Under her left eye, her skin was twitching. She tapped on her teacup with her pointer finger. I could practically feel her nerves, vibrating.

  “Should I not have told you?” I asked.

  “No,” said Ana, without smiling. “I’m very glad you did.”

  I realized, as she took a sip of her tea, that we no longer looked as much alike. Where we’d once mirrored each other physically with our long, woolly hair, now we had less in common. If she was trying to experience Jace through me, it wouldn’t be as easy. The weight gain, and now the hair, fucked with her conception of the way a woman was supposed to be—especially a woman who got the attention of a handsome man with a shitty TV show.

  I hadn’t spoken to my mother in forty-nine days, but she was still right in front of me.

  CHAPTER 70

  When I got back to my apartment, Jace had left a note on the fridge.

  Went to go run lines. That was cool. Let’s do it again really soon. Love, J

  I wondered how long he’d hung around. I was surprised when he’d asked if he could sleep over. I’d said yes because it seemed easier than saying no. But in the early hours, he’d tried to come over to my side of the bed to snuggle and I had to let out three loud, fake snores so he’d retreat back to his side.

  I popped a fresh piece of nicotine gum and used the note to dispose of my last one. When I was eating more, I chewed less. But now I was back in the chain-chewing game. I opened the cabinet and eyed my protein bar stash. Then the buzzer rang.

  Great. Touch a dude’s asshole once, and you could never get rid of him.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Hi,” came a voice.

  But it wasn’t Jace. It was Miriam.

  I scurried around my apartment, looking for obvious signs that a C-list, maybe B-list actor had been fucked there. I found a telltale Yeezy sock on the floor. I threw it in the trash. There was a condom in the trash. I flushed it. Fortunately, Jace had stripped the sheets and remade the bed. His grandmother would have been proud of him.

  I mussed up my new hair in the mirror, pushing it forward, then sideways. Then I buzzed her up.

  When she got to my apartment, we just stood there outside the door.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  It was like the first time she had come over. Only this time, I didn’t have to lead her into the living room. This time, she was the one who took my hand and led me inside. She was the one who kissed me.

  “Your hair,” she said, running her hands through it.

  “Do you like it?”

  “It’s so—sexy.”

  I felt nervous. I let her do all of the leading. She took me into the bedroom and lay down on the bed, beckoning me to climb on top of her. But I only stood there. So she stood up again, then sat me down on the bed, kissing me ever so gently, mostly with her lips and just the tip of her tongue: my cheeks, my forehead, my neck, my shoulders. I felt her hands go up my shirt and under my bra, grabbing my tits as though she were picking apples, clumsily, not sensual. Then she caught herself and stopped for a moment. I wondered if she would take her hands away. But she only seemed to focus more on the way that she was touching, remembering, perhaps, to touch me how she would want to be touched. She grazed little circles around my areolae with each of her fingers, making her way to the very center to pinch at my nipples, which stood upright, hard for her, making me gasp.

  I was even more surprised when she kissed her way down my belly, and then, looking up at me, said, “Can I?”

  I said, “I want you to,” though I was scared. I hoped that my pussy would not frighten her or make her run, as though she had been in some kind of trance that would be broken once she saw me fully naked.

  But instead her eyes widened in the light as she softly stroked my crease with her finger, doing exactly what I’d done to her in the past. I felt some moisture leak out of me and grew embarrassed. Just let yourself, I thought, as I felt myself get more and more turned on. It’s okay.

  Gently, she spread my lips apart and ran her tongue lightly over my clit, teasing it. I’d never imagined she would do it. I wanted to thrust my pelvis in her face, say, Suck me, please, but I remained still because I wanted her to do everything.

  I wondered what I tasted like to her, if I tasted like what she’d expected. But when she began to pant on my clit, I stopped thinking. I was overcome with electric goodness.

  She thrust her middle finger up inside me, and I could no longer contain myself. I fucked her face to the rhythm of her sucking and came all over her, coming for a long time, longer than I had ever remembered coming.

  I moved her face away quickly, too sensitive now. Then I lay back with my eyes closed, very peaceful. My head seemed to be filled with space, more space than I’d known it could hold. She lit a clove. I chewed a piece of nicotine gum. A breeze floated in through the window.

  CHAPTER 71

  In the morning, Miriam was Rubenesque in my bed—her hair spread out on my pillow, body placid in the sheets. I said, “Good morning,” and she put her arms around me, whispered “Good morning” back, and pulled me on top of her.

  I looked up at the clock.

  “Oy,” I said. “I have to get up and take a shower, get ready for work. But you stay here!”

  “No! Don’t go!” she said. “Stay here with me.”

  I looked at her rosy cheeks, her lips plump and pink. She could have anything she wanted from me.

  “All right,” I said.

  I called the office to tell them I was sick. Strep sounded official. Ana picked up at the front desk, and while I delivered the sad news of my illness Miriam tried to kiss me slurpily.

  “Stop!” I whispered to her.

  “What’s going on?” asked Ana.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m feverish, and it’s making me loopy.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  I knew she thought that I was in bed with Jace.

  After I’d hung up the phone, Miriam said she wanted to go to Doughy’s to get us a little feast.

  “I’ll come with you,” I said.

  “You stay in bed,” she said. “Let me get it. I want to do it for you.”

  So I watched her get out of bed, savoring her naked figure from behind: the cascading flesh of her back, her ass its own planet. I would paint her if I could paint. I’d carve her in stone if I could really sculpt. I’d make all kinds of Miriam idols and I’d worship each one of them. But all I knew how to do was sit there grinning stupidly, thinking. I wanted to freeze time right here, in this moment when she was leaving, only to come right back to me.

  When I heard the door close, I began projecting a slideshow in my mind of future Miriams and Rachels. There was Miriam on the toilet in the bathroom of a shared apartment, door not even closed, pee tinkling. Miriam and Rachel on vacation in the Russian forest gathering mushrooms. Miriam as nurse administering Jell-O, ice cream, tea with honey to a sick Rachel. I saw M
iriam in a blue coat and matching hat, standing outside the mall, in the suburban New Jersey winter. Miriam, knife in hand, ready to deliver the verdict on my first attempt at cooking pepper steak. Miriam the mother clutching candlesticks at the head of a long dining table, though I could not picture our children. Miriam and Rachel as crones playing mah-jongg in Boca Raton and reading fortune cookies.

  She returned with a feast: chocolate-covered cake donuts, bagels, cream cheese and lox. Also hot chocolate. I lay on the bed watching her unwrap all of the delicacies and thought, Mama. Then I thought, No, sister. Then I thought lover and friend, but none of those words felt completely right.

  We ate breakfast in bed, naked. Miriam fed me and I fed her. I wondered if one day I would tell her what I had been like before, about the eating disorder, all the years with it. I wondered if she would understand. I felt there was a danger in sharing the real details of that sickness—that it would taint the lovely way we ate together. I wanted our throats to stay free, not clogged with diagnoses from my history. There were other words I didn’t bring up for similar reasons. I didn’t want to diagnose the relationship. I never used the word girlfriend, as in, Are you my girlfriend? I never asked, What are we?

  She had barely finished eating when I climbed on top of her. I slid my way up and down so that our bare pussies were pressed against each other. I imagined our clitoral hoods conjoined, our clits giving each other kisses in the friction. I looked on the nightstand and saw the clay figure: the swirls of pink, blue, yellow and green. It had no eyes, but it winked at me. It had no mouth, but it smiled.

  CHAPTER 72

  All afternoon, we napped. I dreamt that I was as big as Miriam. We flew around together on the gold dragon as it exhaled light and steam. We sailed over the Hollywood sign, swooped past Griffith Park Observatory, two gorgeous fat women on display. We both wore the same long, black silky dress—like the yellow one she’d worn the first night we’d gone for Chinese food, but in black. We both wore the same Ruský Rouge lipstick. The lipstick was everywhere, smeared across all the straws and stars and forks and moons and Twizzlers and movie screens and televisions and buildings and money of the world. We swapped lipstick from mouth to mouth, totally open for all the world to see. We turned on men and women alike. The men wanted us, and the women wanted to be us. They envied our gorgeous freedom. We were a double mirror, reflecting their own deep desires. The mirror was framed in gilt bamboo.

  We kissed each other between sips of Scorpion Bowl. We kissed each other between bites of sesame chicken. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel sat on a giant scallion pancake in the clouds. He nodded approvingly.

  “So it’s all real!” I said to the rabbi.

  “Real, shmeal,” he said. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. There are emanations of god we can’t even see. What’s important is that you feel it.”

  “But I want to know.”

  “You think anyone knows? A mother loves the way she sees her child. A people love their myth of a homeland. You love your Miriam.”

  I offered him the Ruský Rouge. He wrote the word LIFE in the sky. Then he playfully tossed a fortune cookie at my head.

  “Remember,” he said. “The spiritual world and the physical world go hand in hand.”

  CHAPTER 73

  When I awoke, Miriam was playing with my shorn hair.

  “It’s almost sundown,” she said. “I have to go home for Shabbat.”

  I had forgotten it was Friday. The clock said 4:27. I didn’t want to let her leave. I took her hand for a moment, then I let it go. I couldn’t ask to go with her. I was not welcome there. I wished there were a version of reality that could embrace us all: Mrs. Schwebel and candlelight and challah and song and wine and Miriam and me as we were. But it was better to stay in bed and dream of her than to be together in a realm where we had to pretend that physically we were strangers to each other.

  “When will you be back?” I asked.

  “Tomorrow night,” she said. “As soon as the sun goes down again.”

  I was afraid. I had no control. I took the clay figure off my nightstand and held it, hoping it would make me feel more courageous. I still felt afraid. So I handed it to her.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “It’s a gift,” I said. “A sculpture. Something I made.”

  “Is it supposed to be… me?” she asked.

  I was surprised by the question. I sat there for a moment and wondered what I should say.

  “Yes,” I said finally. “It’s you.”

  “The boobs are wrong.” She laughed.

  “I know,” I said. “But the hair is right.”

  CHAPTER 74

  On Saturday evening, I went to Doughy’s and bought another incredible feast: bagels, cream cheese, whitefish salad, sliced tomatoes, Jordan almonds, chocolaty mints. It was the kind of dairy feast my grandparents used to make after Yom Kippur to break the fast, and I knew that Miriam would love it. I liked these echoes of the past, the way a food could rouse a memory from death. As I walked home it was still light outside. Then I waited in my apartment for the sun to set.

  By 7:30, the sky was totally dark and Miriam had not arrived. I began to worry. Had she changed her mind about coming? Had her parents stopped her? In her temporary absence, I began to dread a more permanent absence. I could do nothing but lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. It was strange how we traveled together in my mind so easily across space and time, but we couldn’t just be here together. My vision of our future, the slides I’d allowed myself to play, were fading fainter. Soon, the only light would be my clock in the darkness, ticking.

  I put my pillow on top of me, to try to conjure her. She was breath and moan and hips. I could replicate, to an extent, the feel of her breath by breathing on my own hand, the sounds of her moans by moaning into my pillow, but I could not fashion her hips: not with my pillow, or by touching my own hips, which I had so feared were growing wider, but now realized were not wide enough at all.

  I thought about the story of the trees, the woman who chose her family over the evergreens. But I had felt Miriam’s blessed desire for me so clearly. I looked out the window and saw something moving on the lawn in the darkness. It was just a woman with a dog. Miriam would be here any minute.

  At 9:15 I got up and made myself a bagel with cream cheese. At 10:08, I ate another one. At 11, I placed a piece of Saran Wrap over the giant block of cream cheese, wrapped it up, and put it in the fridge. As I closed the refrigerator door, I remembered being a little girl and asking my mother if I could taste sugar and cream cheese on the same spoon.

  She had said I could try it in a few weeks if the weigh-in at my annual pediatrician checkup was good. But I was dying to try it, and so I snuck into the pantry and refrigerator while she was in the shower and made it for myself. It was like a small, beautifully granular cheesecake. I couldn’t wait until I grew up and had my own apartment, all to myself, so I could eat cream cheese and sugar whenever I wanted.

  A few days later, my mother noticed grains of sugar in the cream cheese container. Nothing escaped her.

  “Do I have to put a lock on the pantry and the fridge?” she asked.

  But now I had my own apartment and could do what I wanted. I took the cream cheese back out of the fridge and ripped off the wrap. Then I searched the kitchen cupboards for sugar. I didn’t have any, but I did have packets of Splenda.

  I kneeled down on the kitchen floor with the cream cheese and emptied out a few packets of the Splenda onto the big hunk. With my fingers, I scooped out chunks. I thought about kneading the chunks into shapes, like the putty at Dr. Mahjoub’s office. Could I shape a woman out of cream cheese, say a prayer, and she would appear before me? Could I conjure Miriam out of dairy? I thought about singing “Etz Chayim.” Instead, I said, “Amen,” out loud and stuck the chunks in my mouth, one after the other, like I was taking the wafer—only Jewish. Miriam wasn’t coming. It was over between us. I was on my knees. I was alone, but I still felt
watched.

  CHAPTER 75

  On Monday morning, as I headed to the office, I got a series of texts from Jace.

  Yo can you call me?

  Call me when u can

  Call me

  Did he understand that I had to work? Not all of us got paid to be in a post-apocalyptic coma.

  When I got to my desk, there was a note on my computer from Ofer. The note said: Rachel, come see me immediately.

  I stepped into Ofer’s office, and he motioned that I should sit down. Then he got up, slammed his door shut, and began pacing around my chair.

  “I just want to know,” he said. “How little respect do you have for me?”

  “I don’t have little respect for you,” I said.

  “And how little respect do you have for what I’ve built? This family. Our office culture.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” I said.

  I was afraid I knew exactly what he was getting at.

  “Don’t fuck with me, Rachel!” he yelled. “Do you know how lucky you are? You could be working at Management180, where the only company values are packaging deals and agent reciprocity! You could be in a mailroom somewhere!”

  A little fleck of spit flew from his mouth onto my hand. I wiped it on the sofa.

  “Jace told me what happened,” he said.

  My stomach dropped. I knew then that I was fucked.

  “You are terminated immediately, in breach of contract,” said Ofer.

  “But—”

  “It’s an ethics violation, no severance. You’ve completely disappointed me.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You don’t even want to hear my side of the story?”

  The truth was, I didn’t really have a side of the story. I had fucked Jace, and it was a breach of contract. I wondered what Jace’s contract stipulated. He was probably allowed to fuck all of us. Of course, he wasn’t going to get in any trouble.