Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,13

to go outside to do surgery on the yogurt.

I found a trash can by the curb and was then met with another problem: it had no hole. It was one of those California-architectural sanitation masterpieces with a puny slot. There was no way to dump out the offending portion of yogurt all at once. I could scoop off small spoonfuls gradually, but then I needed leverage—something upon which to tap the spoon and release the blobs of yogurt into the slot. I wasn’t about to touch the spoon to the can.

I scooped a small spoonful of yogurt out of the cup. Then I rapped the spoon against my phone, just over the slot. This rapping motion provided enough friction to dislodge the yogurt. I scooped again. Then rapped. Scooped. Rapped. I became so focused in my work that I didn’t see NPR Andrew walking right by me.

“Hi, Rachel,” he said.

I looked up, mid-rap. He was wearing earbuds and sunglasses. He had a smirk on his tiny face. He continued walking.

So the little shit had witnessed my process. I felt violated, disgraced. I prayed that he couldn’t fully comprehend what he had seen. At the very least, he knew it was something freaky.

Well, my yogurt was ready. I could eat in self-disgust and peace. I stood in the sunlight, licking the melty parts first, then transitioning into the ritual of spooning and squishing it against my teeth. Coffee and cheesecake was a good combo. Sublime, really.

CHAPTER 12

The trash can incident marked the beginning of a new phase: the era of yogurt interruptus. In the days that followed, the Orthodox boy never returned to work. In his place was always the zaftig girl, and there was no controlling her.

Each time she reached the lip of the cup, I’d call out, “Okay!” or “All good!” or “Whoa Nelly!”

But my Mayday cries only inspired her to hit the accelerator. Then she’d bring me my heaping yogurt and remind me, “We charge by cup size, not by weight.”

I tried going to Yogurt World instead. The cup was the size of a fucking thimble.

An amuse-bouche, I said to myself. Petit, chic, just a taste, lovely in a Parisian way. But I was no Parisian.

I returned to Yo!Good with a new plan. After my yogurt was served, I would go around to the alley behind the store and eliminate the surplus in their spacious dumpster. Then I could enjoy my dessert blissfully, surrounded by flies and the stench of hot trash.

It was a vile, genius solution, and it worked as anticipated—until I got busted decapitating a peanut-butter-and-cake-batter swirl.

“The yogurt isn’t good today?” asked the zaftig girl.

She was carrying two big bags of garbage.

“No,” I said quickly. “Guess I should have stuck with coffee-cheesecake.”

She nodded, then pulled out a cigarette and put it in her mouth. It was strange to see someone smoking in LA. The cigarette was a clove, which was always one of my favorites. In my anorexia heyday, I’d smoked clove cigarettes with diet hot chocolate and counted it as a meal. But this woman probably wasn’t smoking as a meal. She was smoking because—she liked it.

I stared at the smoke moving in and out of her mouth. It looked as though she were exhaling a tree shape, one thick stream like a trunk and then little streams blowing off of it like branches.

“Do you want one?” she offered.

I did want one and said yes. She lit the cigarette for me, and I thought about the fact that she was always giving me things to put in my mouth. Was this girl my worst nightmare?

My eyes went to the three moles on her neck. I felt a strange desire to suck on them.

As a kid I’d had three moles just like that. They’d lived on the inside of my right arm, below the inner elbow crease. Her moles were bigger than mine had been, but both hers and mine—if connected with a pen—formed a shape like the Big Dipper.

I’d hated those moles: their prominence, their strangeness, the way I felt they called attention to my arm chub. I always wished they were on the outside of my arm instead. The inside was such a soft, vulnerable place, more shameful than the outside.

It hurt when the dermatologist shot me with novocaine, then lopped them off with something that looked like a hole puncher. But I felt elated to have them gone, free. Now, on the inside of my arm, there were three little white scars—each a