Yolk

by Mary H. K. Choi

  “You got to wipe the remaining serum onto your neck and hands,” she instructs. “This shit is like twenty bucks a pop. Everyone’s using it post-op. It promotes healing.”

  “Wait,” I tell her, reaching for another pink packet. “Open your robe for a second.”

  Once I get the mask unfolded, I slap it onto her belly.

  “Holy!” exclaims June with a laugh in her throat. “It’s fucking cold.”

  “Can’t hurt.” Maybe it will absorb deep inside her. The face on June’s torso looks up at me as her slimy pancake face looks down.

  “So, what were you going to tell me?” June tightens the fuzzy belt of her robe.

  “I need a place to stay.”

  “Yeah, dingus, I know,” she says. “You’ve been literally living with me for almost a month.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  June picks at the edge of her mask and peels it off. Her face is slick, her baby hairs clinging to her forehead.

  I reach for mine, but she sucks her teeth in reproach. “You have at least another fifteen.”

  I peel it off anyway and hold it in my hands. Warmed by my face, the wetness makes it feel vaguely alive. “I’ll put it back on,” I tell her. “I just need to actually see you.”

  “Okay.”

  “I have to move out of my apartment.”

  “Also, to file under, ‘criminally obvious.’ ”

  “June!”

  “I’m sorry,” she says, eyes wide with impatience. “I’m waiting for the part I don’t know.”

  “Well,” I barrel on. “It’s filled with roaches, there’s sometimes no water at all for days, and the heat’s going to kill me if the cold doesn’t. You asked me a long time ago if I was on the lease.” I shoot a sidelong glance at her neck roll. “Anyway, I’m not. It’s an illegal sublet and I’ve tried to make it work, but I failed. I can’t do it. I’m a huge fuckup and I left for good and I need to stay with you for a while.”

  “Okay,” she says evenly. “How long would you need?”

  “Two months.”

  “Is that a real number or is it the longest you figured you could get away with asking for?”

  Fuck, she knows me so well. “The second one.”

  “You can stay here as long as you want,” she says. “But you have to do something for me.”

  She reaches under her robe, plucks the face mask off her tummy, and flings it onto the coffee table.

  “You need to quit doing the shit you’re doing,” she says quietly, crossing her arms.

  The inky horrible feeling drops over me again.

  “What are you talking…”

  “Stop,” she says, raising her hand. “You can’t lie to me if you’re going to live here. I know when you leave. When you go back to your apartment and what you do. And if you can’t do it there, you’re going to do it here. So we have to talk about it.”

  “June,” I plead. The morning’s shame rises up in me like bile. I close my eyes.

  I sense June approaching as the cushion next to me dips. When she reaches for my hand, I look down at it. Her palm is warm, smaller than mine, and covers my knuckles like a shell.

  “I’ve seen them,” she says softly. My sister’s eyes shine with a tenderness I can’t bear. “The bags of stuff. In high school, I kept finding so many of them in your room at home. Food wrappers, boxes, all those wadded-up pieces of toilet paper. The Ziploc bags…”

  “Stop.”

  “I’ve seen it, Jayjay.”

  “June, please.”

  “I’ve seen the bags of vomit under your bed.”

  I recall the warmth of the plastic pouches, heavy in my palms. I’d never meant to leave them there. Bags are my last option. They were only for when she was in the bathroom or if I’m having a really rough go and I can’t get out of bed. I must disgust her.

  I wipe my knuckle against my face, crying numbly.

  “I was so scared.” June covers her face with her hands and bursts into ragged sobs.

  Her crying makes me cry harder.

  “You scared me so much. Worse than Mom. Worse than anything. I almost didn’t come here,” she says throatily. “If anything had happened to you while they were at work and I was here…”

  I hadn’t known. And the shame of it throttles me.

  I hated June for going to New York. At the time, I couldn’t believe that she would. She knocked on my door as she was leaving. I was catatonic when the garage door closed, this time with my sister on the other side. I cried so long and hard, my shoulders cramped from heaving.

  “I thought maybe if I brought you here, if I kept you close by, you’d be okay.” She searches my eyes. “But I know you’re still doing it.”

  My sister grips my arm. “Jayne,” she says. “It’s your hands. You can’t stop smelling them. That’s your tell. That’s how I know when you do it. We can get whatever help you need. We’ll get you the best. You just have to get better.”

  chapter 46

  I look up the address. I’m early, but I’m in the right spot.

  According to the pamphlet, there are meetings all over the city, but this one, the only one at this time, is in a claptrap playhouse in the West Village. I walk from June’s. I pass the bakery where I met Ivy, the basketball courts, and a slice spot across from a church. The Thanksgiving decorations are up. It’s perverse how Americans need their cartoon turkeys to seem thrilled at the prospect of being eaten. You’d think they’d slap googly eyes and cartoon smiles on smallpox blankets to go with them. On the corner where I hang a left, there’s a Chihuahua tied to a bike rack, an upturned U. He’s wearing a tiny lilac cowboy hat.

  The location is sandwiched between two comedy clubs and features a narrow corridor, black sticky floors, and a rickety, uneven staircase with silver skid guards trimmed on the lip of each step. I want to leave but don’t.

  On the second-floor landing, I pass a closed door, behind which someone’s singing a lusty rendition of “Be Our Guest,” that song from Beauty and the Beast. I have no expectations and I’m not a joiner, but the invitation to snoop in New York buildings I don’t know about is irresistible. There’s a bathroom on the third floor. There are two stalls and it’s just me. I’m never in the West Village, but I catch myself thinking that in a pinch, it’s not a bad bathroom to add to the collection. Even when I hope not to ever need them again.

  Three thoughts persistently bang around in my head. That they’ll laugh me out of the room for not being fat or thin enough. That the lack of any cost of admission means it’s a cult. And that I’m not sick enough to be with sick people and that being with sick people might wind up being contagious. A truly diseased part of my brain wonders if I’ll be able to pick up any weight-loss pointers.

  The room is bleak when I poke my head into the indicated door. I check the time—we’re only four minutes from starting and there are only two people in there. An older Black woman with bright-green eyes and her raincoat zipped over her lumpy purse and an Asian woman in workout clothes who seems like the type of Asian who folds all her underwear the same way.

  They’re chatting amiably while setting up chairs, so I grab one off the pile and do the same.

  Voices echo in the hallway, and three women enter. They have expensive blowouts and wear designer rubber boots and enormous engagement rings. They’re fancy, these women. I’ve never been to the Hamptons, but I’m willing to bet they have.

  They’re followed by two men who smell like cigarette smoke. One has a neck tattoo, and the other, a silver-haired man of about eighty, wears his hair in a small ponytail. Bright hellos and hugs abound. In three minutes the room is filled with the most random assortment of humans.

  All told, we’re a smiling group of about thirty straight from central casting, varying ages, races, and sizes. A heavyset man with a yarmulke on his head unravels an iPhone charger and plugs it into the wall. More hugs are dispensed, but they seem to have gotten the memo not to touch me. I position myself in the back for a swift
exit and so I can study everyone from the rear. A figure sits next to me. She’s greyhound slender, a teen. In worn Stan Smiths, with a pierced nose and a thigh gap you could lob a softball through, she smiles at me with this beatific light and I feel as though I’ve been lied to.

  No one looks like they’re in enough pain.

  No one looks like how I feel.

  No one looks like they do the things I do.

  We gather in a circle holding hands, and the intimacy coupled with the praying in unison instantly freaks me out. At the mention of God, a door in my head shuts with a definitive no. These people—these weirdos—all take deep cleansing breaths. And as we sit down, I pull out my phone and mentally set a timer. After fifteen minutes, I’ll leave.

  We take seats. There’s a row of six chairs in front facing the rest of us. It’s not unlike the configuration at church. The Hamptons lady sitting dead center reads a placard from a binder. There will be a speaker, she announces. I’m hoping for one of the fancy women, perhaps the one in a Moncler jacket and mink lashes, but it’s the dude with the beatnik ponytail seated next to her. I have no idea what this old white man can possibly tell me.

  He smiles ruefully. He announces that he’s given up. He chuckles nervously and asks his higher power to speak through him, and I wonder if he’ll fall to the ground in a rapturous fit and ululate in tongues. The preemptive secondhand embarrassment radiates from my chest down to my arms and legs. I can’t look at any of them, but I listen.

  “Hi. My name’s Cyrus, and I’m a gratefully recovering anorexic and bulimic,” the speaker begins.

  “Hi, Cyrus,” they call back cheerfully.

  I’m boggled that what I’ve seen of meetings in movies is real.

  “I’m also an overeater, exercise bulimic, sugar addict, and laxative abuser.” I can’t believe this man who’s old enough to live through wars and probably protested against Vietnam would admit this to a roomful of people.

  I didn’t know bulimics even came in male. Especially grandpas.

  As he talks, my desire to leave dissipates. It’s like overhearing an argument or watching a fire. Witnessing a rando who could have come off the B52 bus enumerate all of his shameful pathologies is deeply fascinating. It seems so out of place in polite society. He may as well be naked.

  Cyrus recounts how he’d always been a fat kid. He calls it husky, which makes a few of the attendees laugh. I brace myself, searching his face for indignation, waiting for ridicule, but Cyrus seems to light up at the amusement. He talks about how his parents were perfectly nice people. Suburban. His father was a doctor, his mother a fundraiser, and neither of them was particularly around. He confesses how difficult it is to find a reason for it, but he was always filled with a deep loneliness. He leans forward, and his knee starts to jog.

  He says that from a young age he’d always felt as though he were observing all the people around him as if through glass. That everyone always seemed to know how to have friends and joke around and that he didn’t. That they all seemed to know what to do with boyfriends and girlfriends and that it all looked so easy.

  When he gets to the part about an accomplished older brother who’d been a Rhodes Scholar, a genius and an athlete who excelled at everything, sweat prickles my scalp. When he says that his anxiety was so awful that he couldn’t even learn how to drive, I can’t catch my breath.

  This man may as well be talking about me.

  His parents divorced when he was a sophomore, the same age I was when my mom left. He says that liquor helped. He calls himself a double winner and says that he’s part of the “beverage program” and that he’s an alcoholic. But then drinking turned to drugs, which quickly became destructive, so he turned to food. His freshman year of college, he’d ballooned to almost three hundred pounds.

  That’s when he took matters into his own hands. He’d vomited, chewed and spat food, tried every commercial diet possible. From eating only pepper-infused water, Weight Watchers, Paleo, meal-replacement cookies, eating for his blood type, Whole30, Atkins.

  A memory bobs up from the time I tried Atkins in high school. I’d lost eight pounds but had eaten so much cheese and bacon, peeing every ten minutes until I realized I hadn’t taken a crap in almost three days, eventually passing a gruesomely painful bowel movement the consistency of a diamond after straining on the toilet for so long my legs went numb and I saw stars.

  He’d had his ears stapled, his jaw wired. He’d even lost the deposit on gastric bypass surgery because at the very last minute he found these rooms instead.

  He said he’d never forget how it felt to finally name these feelings. To learn that there are others like him. He recalls a checklist from his early days. And as he goes down it, reciting offhand the signals, I realize with a sickening clarity that we really are the same.

  Have I eaten spoiled food? Yes.

  Burned food? Yes.

  Frozen food? Yes.

  Stolen food?

  More times than I can count.

  It’s as if there’s a key turning in my heart. I picture myself groggily, helplessly eating my roommate’s brownies from the trash in the middle of the night. Chewing around the dish soap I’d squeezed onto them to thwart myself.

  The stories around the room are astounding. I experience the repeated diagnosis of a feeling I had no words to articulate before. Secrets I didn’t even know I was hiding. They talk about how desperately they believed that if they only lost enough weight that they’d feel at home in their bodies.

  That if they were skinny they’d finally be treated the way they deserved.

  But it’s not the high drama or the gross-out stories of abused GI tracts that break my heart.

  It’s the psychosis of knowing that your eyes are broken. That we all know what it’s like to look at yourself in the mirror one minute and then see something completely different the next.

  Most of us have left our bodies in times of crisis. We’ve been stuck in scribbly, maddening thoughts of what to eat for lunch, paralyzed that a wrong choice will turn us down the road to a binge that ends with aching bellies and sour mouths.

  A binge is defined as that freight-train feeling I know too well. That rush. The helplessness. The hostage situation. The compulsion to eat everything to blot out the feelings of anything else. The peace of feeling as though you’re choking because putting things in your mouth and then taking them out is the only thing in an unmanageable world that feel you can control.

  Shit.

  ShitShitShitShit.

  I am them.

  They are me.

  I’ve canceled plans to eat or not eat. I’ve “called in fat” to work. I’ve gone to the gym instead of confronting someone. Eaten or gotten shitfaced instead of standing up for myself. I’ve been stunned and injured when I’ve lost the weight and not been given the respect or recognition I knew I deserved. I’ve starved myself skinny and been absolutely fucking miserable.

  A notebook lands in my lap. There they all are. Everyone’s names and phone numbers, just like they said. There are no last names, but this blackmail collateral is breathtaking to me. It’s unbelievable, this trust fall. I can’t bring myself to add my name, but I’m moved by the gesture. It’s the stupidest, most touching gift I’ve ever known.

  There’s so much laughter. Not mean-spirited, contemptuous mirth, but joyful, knowing laughter. Every invitation to an impending social event that necessitated the losing of ten, five, three, forty pounds in two days inspires the snapping of fingers. Chuckling at fights picked at the table so we wouldn’t have to eat pasta. Or so that we could eat the pasta and then storm off to buy secret ice cream on the way home.

  There’s talk of cake. Leftover birthday cake. One of the mothers had gotten up to eat a sliver. Then another. And another, until the whole thing was gone. She’d had to put a rush order in at the specialty bakery with a slew of lies to have another one made. Another frosted intergalactic spaceship that she’d had to eat down to the same spot to make things right.
I think of how prepared I was to go to H-E-B in the middle of the night for pie. And how the pie I’d eaten after hadn’t changed the perception of my childhood home.

  I have never felt so known. So fucking spied on. It’s the limited-edition ginger ice cream. The loaves of bread, the peanut butter. Ramyun. Coq au vin. Ketchup.

  There are stories of hope. How things have changed. Hollow teeth salvaged. Missing periods retrieved. Bridges burned and mended. Families left and returned to.

  Then a woman with a tidy brown bob and wire-framed glasses, wearing a preppy fisherman’s sweater, cries about her father who died a week ago. After eight years of freedom, she’d started throwing up and hasn’t been able to stop. Tears slide down her cheeks, and she calmly removes her glasses to wipe her eyes. Last night she’d slept for an hour on the bathroom floor next to her toilet. When her three minutes are up, I’m enraged that she’s not given more time. But she smiles and thanks the room and says she knows it will get better because it has so many times before.

  There are only ten more minutes of the meeting left, but I’m desperate to leave. I need air. I grab my things to duck out, refusing to look over my shoulder.

  In the narrow, airless hallway, I see her come out of the bathroom. Cruella. A vision in lilac with her dog in her arms. Up close she’s somehow younger than I thought even though I’d never assigned her an age. She was nothing more than a cartoon. A caricature of the unwell. She’s wearing a lilac sweatsuit with a matching fringed cowboy vest to match her dog’s hat. The ink slick of her hair is drawn into a bun so tight, it slants her eyes.

  “I thought that was you,” she says. As when Jeremy first talked to me, it’s like a painting peeled itself off the canvas to address me.

  Her voice is a revelation. It’s far lower and more mellifluous than I could have ever conceived. Cruella has NPR voice.

  I’m so stunned that I don’t know what to say.