Yolk

by Mary H. K. Choi

  “Are you serious?” There’s no way I can afford seventy-five dollars. The worn leather back of Gina Lombardi’s very nice flat lifts off the heel of her crossed leg. I feel nothing but disgust at her four-hundred-dollar highlights.

  “It’s the policy for your health insurance. I could refer you to some colleagues who operate on a sliding scale, but…”

  “I make myself throw up,” I tell her. “Just so you know. I can’t stop doing it. And I haven’t had my period in a year.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. The corner of her mouth sinks slightly, but she’s otherwise completely composed. She swivels around to pull something out of the bottom shelf of her bookcase. “There are resources that can help you.” A xeroxed pamphlet is waved at my knee. I take it wordlessly despite the air bubble of laughter at my throat. I can’t believe this woman thinks a leaflet will save me.

  “I don’t have cancer,” I tell her, arms crossed. It vaguely registers somewhere in the hinterlands of my perception that I’m crying again. “Or the other thing.”

  “Jayne,” she says, eyes shining with infinite patience. “Please look into it.” She nods at the folded paper in my hand. “It’s where I refer all of my patients who struggle with disordered eating. They’ll help you. New York is just a place. It’s the people who will become a home for you.”

  * * *

  I force myself back toward June’s, stopping off at the deli on Broadway, the nice one, the one I like. I just need gum. I need coffee. I need TUMS for the coffee, and possibly more of those delicious chocolate-covered banana chunks. I could get some for my sister, too. She should probably also have something with iron. What has iron? I fling open the door, and my eyes immediately land on it. On me.

  It’s my picture by the cash register. There are three other people featured along with me—the WALL OF SHAME, as it says in black Sharpie. The others have their grainy black-and-white faces turned away from the security cameras, but mine is tilted at an angle, looking straight into the lens. The wanted posters are for various petty thefts. The balding guy in glasses above me has a yen for RX protein bars. The teenager to the left is a little more lowbrow, Cheetos and Arizona iced tea. The other woman, to the upper left of me, has a genuine need—she’s taken cans of sausages, sacks of dried beans, nutritious, filling, dense. And there I am: CHOCO-BANANAS, it reads under my startled, ghostly mugshot.

  The shame is so immense—instant and physical—the wind’s knocked out of me. I hide behind my hair, looking only at my shoes, as I elbow a woman, pulling the door open with such force that something in my shoulder clicks strangely in its socket. I can’t even mutter I’m sorry. I’m too desperate, too frantic, too repulsed. I sprint to the subway, body incandescent with humiliation, nauseated and frantic to burn off some of this horrible energy. The embarrassment scorches down to some essential wound inside me.

  I blindly pull out my card. I can’t believe I’ve ruined this neighborhood too. Everything I touch turns to shit.

  I’m shaking on the train.

  The roar.

  The gallop.

  I take a deep breath, searching the skyline as the train goes aboveground. The murky trench and soaring residential buildings of the Gowanus Canal. The Statue of Liberty the size of a grain of rice behind the dingy glass of the subway window. I peer down, searching for my piles of smashed building, but I see that it’s all but been tidied away. I’m filled with an awful regret. Why can’t things just stay where I want them?

  My joints are coiled with a hectic friction, and my body tingles in anticipation as I walk to my block. As I pass dollar stores, the Laundromat, and the man who sits out there on a plastic chair in a coat, with a cat. My mugshot rises up in my mind, and it recalls the blown-out security photo of June’s forehead at the cancer center. Various sense memories slice through my thoughts. Water warming my fingers as June tilts her head back, crying, as I rinsed her hair. Mom’s robe-clad arms flapping at us in church. Dad not meeting my gaze in the rearview, the rumble of highway beneath my seat. Jeremy laughing when the actor returned to the table. The abstract look on Ivy’s face when we’re both bleary-eyed and blissed out while randoms grope us through thin dresses. A flash of us giggling as we pull each other into a bathroom. Taking turns. Sharing sugar-free breath mints or Listerine strips. Spraying perfume on each other before we had to leave our bubble of privacy. Patrick can never know this side of me. His wholesomeness, the sanctity of his apartment, I can’t taint any of it, him, with me.

  Another image surfaces: my ex-roommates, Megan in front, Hillary at my doorframe, unwilling to step into the squalor of my bedroom. It’s not usually as bad as this, I want to tell them, but they don’t care. Tones rising. Faces luminous with rage. I’m struggling to focus on their features, the contortions of their mouths; I know they’re mad, but I’m so tired. Tired enough not to get up, so tired that I don’t bother to upright myself and hide the empty bottle of wine that I’d stolen and the remnants of Hill’s demolished birthday cake on my bed.

  I was smiling then, too. Partly out of discomfort at having been caught but mostly with a curiosity for how far they’d take it. Initially, I’d been judicious about helping myself to their cabinet. Then I became more haphazard in what I’d replace. It started with passive aggressive texts. A single house meeting where I apologized profusely and privately rolled my eyes. The thick, ropey vein on Megan’s neck throbs with the higher registers as she shrieks. I’m impressed by her convictions. It takes courage to display such vitriol. I go silent. Remote. I back away from the scene in my mind.

  It was Hill that finally pulled her back, blinking slowly, allowing for unalloyed disdain to slide off her nose and down at me. She told me I had a week to gather my things.

  “Yeah, okay,” my sour mouth mumbled, heart reanimating as panic shot scratchy spidery impulses all over my skin.

  This can’t be all there is. I’m finally here.

  I envision June again. In the bath. The spatter of dark on white tile.

  My sister died.

  My sister died.

  My sister died.

  The supermarket doors slide open and I take a deep breath. The bright, glossy packages in the aisles call my name. My legs threaten to give, I’m so grateful. Relief is so close. I need donuts. I need the exact vanilla-glazed yeast donut that they had at the diner with Patrick. When it was raining, when we were matching, when it was safe. I also require an apple pie. A whole one. A happy family pie but my own. And real Parmesan. The kind that looks like a pink Himalayan salt lamp, the kind I’d never had before. I make a beeline for the refrigerated section of the grocery store. I don’t need a cheese grater; there are going to be teeth marks in mine.

  I’m scandalized and impressed by how expensive real Parmigiano-Reggiano is. Nine bucks a hunk. It lands heavily in my basket. The anticipation in my salivary glands make my temples ache, and by the time I’m at the cookies and cakes, I’m drunk with options. I could get Entenmann’s. I peer into the windowed box, but their donuts are the wrong texture. The dry cakiness, the way you can pack them in your guts like a drug mule swallowing condoms isn’t what I want. I need the greasy, fluffy, bready ones. I need the exact one I had with Patrick or it won’t work.

  Patrick.

  The thought of what he’d think of me skitters across my mind. It dawns on me that I left his apartment just this morning.

  I send him a heart emoji, and when he sends me one back, it feels like a blessing.

  In the bakery section by the bread, I spot a six-pack of donuts. According to the plastic dome, they were packaged four days ago. The top one has kissed the inside of the box, leaving a smeared ring of glaze. It looks obscene. They’re the exact ones I want. There are half pies packaged in semicircles, but I get a whole one. Apple. It’ll go well with my cheese.

  I select a sleeve of macarons. Not very nice ones. Not at all the kind you’d get for an aunt.

  I grab a coconut water for health. A tub of mac and cheese from the hot bar, becaus
e why the fuck not.

  I rove the walls of snacks. The metal basket handles pressing urgently at my forearms. I grab a box of Nilla Wafers and Wheat Thins because Triscuits by the box are too scratchy and pointy and because I want a snack I would never normally buy. One that feels as though it belongs to someone else. I also pick up an entire barrel of non-GMO cheese balls.

  I pay for it all on my own debit card. Rent is due in three days and I haven’t checked my balance in weeks.

  I hurtle myself to the apartment. Flying so I can’t change my mind. I shove my arm into the plastic bag twisting round and round my wrist and scratch the top of my right hand, trying to pry open the clamshell of donuts. I retrieve one and cram its cloying stickiness into my mouth. Press it in as I gnaw. Heaven. I lock eyes with a girl in a cheetah-print jacket talking on her phone. She has the decency to look away.

  I lick my lips and grab another. Gorging. The streets are packed with commuters. Flocks of moms. Some are even jogging. Jerks. That’s what I both love and hate about Brooklyn. It’s so densely populated, I’m camouflaged. They barely see me. And if they did, they don’t care. By the time I’m back in my lobby, I realize my mistake. Six donuts is not enough. I should have gotten twelve.

  I race up the stairs, pulling myself up with the banister handle, calves complaining at the fourth-floor walk-up.

  Galloping.

  Thundering.

  I’m so, so close.

  Cumbersome fingers fumble with my keys. Part of me wishes Jeremy were home when I crash through the door. I would vaporize him if he tried to obstruct my course in anyway.

  I kick off my shoes. I lock the door even though I’m alone. I peel off my coat and my sweatshirt, dump them into the tub, tie my hair up, and sit on the floor in my bra. It’s dirty and it’s exactly what I deserve. I gather my companions around me as I eat and eat as fast as I can, before the rest of me notices and tries to stop.

  Adrenaline is shunted straight into my heart.

  Gratitude floods my nervous system as the sugar takes hold. I eat so fast that it doesn’t count. I eat as a velveteen curtain of serenity descends over me, the mechanics of my jaw hypnotizing me the way competitive marathon runners hit a rhythm. I swallow and swallow until my stomach is distended and my head aches from repeatedly grinding away at the mouth-fucking. I stack Wheat Thins three high and bite into them. I put the flattened part of the Nilla Wafers together and make little spaceships and destroy them and do it ten more times. Twenty.

  Sweat gathers at the small of my back and seeps into the waistband of my jeans. At some point I’d undone the top button and unzippered them but at no point do I personally witness this occurring.

  The macarons look like those cupcakes that are actually soap, but they’re pretty. Colorful and like jewels. I hold the glassine box to my nose and smell nothing. The pads of my fingers are impossibly sensitive, trembling, and I’m gripped by a singular purpose. I eat them in order. Begin too bright, tart, or even too dark and robust and you’ll deaden your taste buds for everything else. Green is pistachio, and pistachio is perfect. The sensation of my teeth piercing the delicately crispy outer layer, easing into the ganache, the viscid chewiness, makes me close my eyes—it’s too narcotic, too pleasurable, and still I can’t even tell if it tastes good. Orange. Brown. Lilac. I’m bludgeoned by sugar. I can’t discern perfume from texture.

  I’m thrilled at the devastation. Destroying beautiful things so carelessly and so fast.

  The mac and cheese is a paste. It’s gloriously gluey, sticking my mouth together, cementing all the sharper foods, lending a contrast. Some cushioning. I crash-land a Nilla spaceship into the tub and scoop it into my mouth. I eat a fifth donut. And then just the top of the last one. I dig into the glaze with my thumbnail and rip it off and scrape it into my mouth.

  It’s almost time.

  I run my tongue on the roof of my mouth. It tastes metallic. It’s pulpy and stinging, cut up from all that’s going in.

  The cheese balls are a mistake. They dissolve too quickly, so they don’t provide that choking feeling as they’re going down. But they taste great after vanilla glaze. The whole ritual feels as though I’m being run over by the slowest-moving train. I can’t get off. I vaguely want to, but it’s overruled. Because truly this is the only thing I can count on. This has never left me no matter where I am.

  I polish off the last macaron, and there is no enjoyment. Finishing is drudgery and it’s still all in my teeth. I’m still chewing when I crawl out on my knees. This view I hate. Looking at the toilet bowl from this angle. Directly into it. As if at an altar. I retch into my hand, another kind of sacrament. I do this so the telltale splash doesn’t give me away. Even when I’m alone. I’ve always been a little proud of this. How quietly I can hit reset. I keep going, putting my mouth where people shit and abasing myself the way I always do, trying to exorcise the hate and anger and never managing to get it all out.

  The Korean word for punishment is “bee.”

  When I flush again, the swirl is still a sour, hazy rose-orange.

  Blood.

  Body.

  I sit in the tub, on top of my clothes, knees gathered to my chest. The faint whine of tinnitus tethers me to reality, alerting me to my movements. It feels like the high-pitched hiss of air escaping my head. It’s only then do I notice how cold the room is. That the heat is out.

  I hoist myself up and I look in the mirror. Eyes watery, panting, cheeks purpling, bright-red lips wet. Flecked with slick clumps of undigested food.

  I am ruptured.

  I’m crying. And watching myself cry only amplifies my sadness. I’m filled with devastating pity for every single mirror version of me, all those times before, the youngest ones making me saddest of all. Watching myself have compassion for me in the absence of anyone else makes me cry harder.

  I wash my hands with soap. Thoroughly, front and back. I dry them. I bring my fingers up to my nose. They still smell of ruin and spoil. I rub toothpaste all over them, hating myself, hating the way it feels. Hating that I have to watch myself do it. Unable to tear my eyes from this horrible shadow version of me that gets its way every time.

  My phone rumbles on hard tile. It’s still in the plastic bag where I’d chucked it. I reach over and drag the bag toward me by the handle.

  It’s Jeremy. He wants to know if I’m in the apartment. I listen for sounds. A jangled key, creaking floorboards in the hall, but it’s quiet.

  Three dots. He’s thinking.

  When the dispatch comes, a burble hints at the back of my throat. I’m confused at the list until I realize it’s a series of his records that he’d like me to look for.

  He asks if I can meet with him today to deliver them. He reminds me that there’s still no hot water. As if this would inure me to his request.

  In the mirror my face cracks open into a smile of genuine amusement. My eyes are blood-shot but my lips stretch wide with glee and then I’m laughing.

  It feels good.

  Deleting the text feels even better, and when I go to my contacts and delete him entirely, I feel a floating sensation in my arms.

  I pull my rumpled sweatshirt out from the tub and throw it on.

  Surveying our collective possessions, the threadbare couch, the stained mattress, stray clothes and books and the milk crate of records, I feel peaceful. Finally, nothing is missing.

  I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop hurting myself in this way, but I don’t want to keep doing it for Jeremy’s sake or anyone like him ever again.

  I fish my coat out from the tub by a sleeve as the folded-up pamphlet from Gina hits the floor. I clutch the sink, steadying myself as I pick it up, seeing stars as blood rushes into my body and out of my head.

  I unfold it and read.

  The air is redolent with the smell of flowers. I’ve emptied both spray bottles of Ylang Ylang shower cleaner. The mattress is suffused with it. Couch, too. I lift sofa cushions and crop dust the springs. I darken all of Jeremy’s cloth
es with layered mists of the fragrance that makes him gag.

  I hitch the box of records on my hip with my coat slung over it and a bag of books at my shoulder.

  I lock the door and slide my key under. My regards to David Buxbaum. Regards to the management company that I couldn’t find online to fix the heat or the water, no matter how many monthly TexStar bank checks I dutifully sent to a P.O. box in Canastota, New York.

  I carry the box of Jeremy’s precious vinyl out to the curb. An offering to the New York City sanitation system should they have an interest.

  * * *

  I’m at June’s door. Again. With nowhere else to go. She’s on the couch watching TV in her pink bathrobe. My sister has a white Korean sheet mask on her face, head tilted awkwardly toward me so as not to drip. She looks like a Japanese Noh theater actor with pancake makeup. “Is it possible that I’m still drunk from last night?” she asks. Gilmore Girls plays in the background.

  I check the time. Absurdly it’s just 8:30 in the evening, of a day that seems to have so many days nested into it. I dump my bag and shoes.

  “I have to talk to you,” I begin.

  She sits up as I take my place on the love seat.

  “Wait,” she says, and tosses a foil package from the coffee table onto my lap. “If this is serious, you have to wear one too. I have another ten minutes.”

  I pick up the envelope. It features a tasteful macro shot of flora with dew droplets on it. I flip the pink packet over to read the back.

  “Wait, this one has actual stem cells in it?” I ask her, picturing microscopic bits of fetus. “Is that legal?”

  “Apparently snail serum is passé,” she says, shrugging. “This is the hot new shit.”

  “Can I just have five minutes and then I’ll put it on?” I’ve been practicing my speech the whole way over.

  Her masked face nixes it.

  I tear the package to extract the slimy white parcel and unfold it. Gingerly so I don’t drip on the couch or on my clothes. I carefully peel the mask off its plastic backing and position it onto my face, matching it up to my hairline. It’s cold and unpleasantly wet. I dock the holes over my eyes, nose, and mouth, pulling errant strands of hair out from under it.