Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,20

put the half-eaten cookies and cakes in the boxes, then shoved them all under the passenger’s seat.

“See you soon,” I said to the baked goods, licking my fingers a final time.

I stopped inside Dr. Burrito. I had seen people eating burritos in there, so casually, and I wondered how they did it—just calmly ate something so fattening. The burritos always looked delicious, like warm babies swaddled up tight in blankets. I’d wanted to take a burrito and hold it to my cheek, or put it over my shoulder and soothe it.

I ordered the verde chicken burrito: strips of pulled chicken simmered soft and juicy in green sauce, guacamole, sour cream, cheese, Spanish rice, and black beans. I wasn’t physically ready to consume my baby yet, so I decided to just carry it.

“There there, sweet bundle of beans and cheese. You are wanted.”

Two blocks from the office, a cheese pizza called out to me from a window.

Rachel, said the pizza. We should be together.

I went inside and ate a huge slice in a front booth. I wanted the other customers to see what I was doing. I was a pizza-eating woman who somehow stayed slender. I was an amazing creature, a miracle. The sauce was sweet, and the crust was crispy. But it was becoming difficult to swallow. I felt like a landfill. Everything I’d consumed—the yogurt and baked goods and pizza—were piled on top of one another, teetering toward my throat.

I thought about ancient Rome, how they supposedly made themselves throw up so they could make room for more feasting. I had tried to purge many times, particularly when I was young and bingeing, but I’d never been successful. I’d jam my fingers down my throat and bring on tears, spit, mucus, a red face, the sensation that my head was going to fall off into the toilet. I’d come out with a few coughs into the toilet water, maybe a wet burp, but my guts refused to budge. Once a morsel of food made its way down my esophagus, my body took it prisoner and refused to surrender.

I’d been more successful with laxatives. I’d eat them just before bed at night, the chocolate-flavored ones, a hint of cocoa melting on my tongue as I eased into sleep. Then, in the morning, my ass would sound an alarm. I’d race to the bathroom still half-asleep, awaken fully on the toilet shitting forth streams of fire. For the rest of the day I’d be out of commission, hopping from toilet to toilet like a manic toad. Laxatives were a major time commitment, a second job, and the effort was never worth the payoff. I’d lose half a pound of water weight, only to gain it back the following day. In the end, I quit the purging game—revisiting it only very occasionally with diuretic pills or a lone secret suppository.

I was feeling sick. I threw away my paper plate and gathered up my burrito. But instead of returning to work, I found myself standing inside a candy store called Yummies.

I’d been there once and allowed myself exactly 180 calories’ worth of candy. Now I dove in without counting: jelly beans, Hershey’s kisses, candy corn, laissez sweets! I was exuberant in the Cadbury eggs, wild with the Haribo cherries.

I lingered over a bin containing little white and purple discs, chalky and nickel-size. The discs had appeared in a movie I’d once seen about a boy who was dying of a terminal illness. I’d forgotten what illness he had, but I remembered clearly the way his mother snuck the discs into the hospital to try and get him to eat.

“I brought your favorite cahndies,” she said, pronouncing it like that, cahndies. Was there a more melancholy way to pronounce anything?

As a child, I’d seen a wide range of nonterminal illnesses amongst my young friends, as well as the delicious food cures their mothers provided. I’d prayed that I would contract tonsillitis (ice cream), a stomach virus (ginger ale), chicken pox (oatmeal bath), the flu (chicken noodle soup), swollen glands (lollipops), tooth pain (Popsicles), the common cold (more chicken noodle soup), strep throat (raw honey). But I was cursed with perfect health.

I made retching noises in the bathroom, choked on faux phlegm, blew empty air into a tissue, clutched my throat.

“Ack-ack! Ack-ack!” I hammed it up. “Honey. Must have raw honey.”

“You’re fine,” said my mother. “Honey is fattening.”

It was like I’d spent my entire life trying to get honey and then trying to avoid it.