Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,16
From one bite to the next, it would be impossible to calculate a caloric load.
Panicking, I spun on my heel and headed for the door. I hoped that I could keep the concoction in my mouth long enough without swallowing to get to the trash can on the curb. But when I reached the can, my lips would not open to relinquish the mouthful. I stood there and swallowed it down my gullet.
Then, to my horror, I found myself sticking my tongue into a crevice between yogurt and cup, where a small pile of naked sprinkles had fallen. I licked them out. I didn’t stop, but pressed on to where the sprinkles and some drips of melted yogurt had formed a viscous union. I chewed these bites up quickly and swallowed again and again, as though this were the fastest way to get rid of them.
While I ate, I watched myself—like I was hovering up above, split into two beings. One of me was the one doing the eating. The other observed myself in shock as I continued to devour it all. Stop! Stop! called out the observer me, but it was no use.
I was consumed by the yogurt, all five senses bathing in its drips and swirls, as though I had entered some yogurt door, no thought, no vision or sound but the yogurt and its sprinkles, any fear or hesitation fully eclipsed by sensation, the crunch, the slurp, the melt, the heavenly feeling of cleaning each side evenly with my tongue—hardness and softness, sweetness and more sweetness—a prism of beauty on Earth and above it, and me, the me on the ground, nothing but a giant mouth and tongue, eating and eating for nothing, not one thing, except sheer pleasure alone.
I don’t know how long I stood there in front of the trash can: devouring, licking, swallowing. I only knew that when my mind and body were finally united again, the first thing I noticed was the sour smell of trash in the warm sun. I felt afraid, then a hot shame. It had really happened. I’d eaten the whole thing. All that remained was a dribble at the bottom with two sprinkles floating in it: one pink and one blue. I dug them out with my spoon and put that last little bite in my mouth.
Something had taken me over, possessed me, some phantom transmitted from Miriam to me, or a demon lurking latent all these years, now suddenly awakened. I had not lost control like that with food since I was sixteen. I’d thought the demon was dead.
No, that wasn’t true. I’d sensed the demon in me all along, waiting for the right moment to open my mouth, suck the world down my throat. All of my restriction, my efforts at control, as I tiptoed daily around the edge of hunger, were enacted in the name of keeping that demon shut up: sleep late to delay calories, write everything down, eat ice, avoid friends. But in all that busywork, I’d forgotten what made the demon space so dangerous in the first place. When you were in it, it felt fucking great.
On the way back to the office, I stopped off at my car in the parking garage. I opened the trunk and rifled angrily through the trash bag of clothes where I’d dumped the sculpture I made in therapy. Fucking Mahjoub. I’d show her honoring the work! I pulled out two black dresses, a dirty black T-shirt, and a pair of old Nikes. No sculpture. I took out a black blouse with a hole in the sleeve, a bralette, one black patent leather high heel, a black skirt. Now the bag was empty. Still no sculpture. Maybe it had fallen out of the bag and gotten loose in the trunk?
My trunk was filled with so much shit. The thing could be anywhere under all of that crap! I began pulling items out and placing them on the floor of the parking garage: sunglasses, a box of broken planters, my college diploma, a case of Coke Zero, wiper fluid, a spare tire, my missing copy of The Fran Lebowitz Reader, three empty cans of Coke Zero. No sculpture. It was gone.
CHAPTER 15
We were invited to a party for the cast and crew of Breathers, to celebrate their second season renewal. I dreaded these kinds of events. The rooms were always filled with the professionally skinny, the skinny-for-pay, the ultra-ultra-skinny. I knew it would be impossible to shrink