Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,21

I wondered what I would have done with all that life if it hadn’t been defined like that. The freedom seemed enormous, monstrous.

I brought my bag of candy and the burrito into the office and put them in my desk drawer. Then I stopped at Ana’s desk to see if anyone had noticed I was gone.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Ofer is on a panel this afternoon, something about ‘queering the script.’ ”

“Ofer is queer?”

“No, he’s speaking from the perspective of the ally.”

“Oh.”

“Not that anyone wants him as an ally.”

I laughed, feeling the weight of my stomach heavy with food. It was strange to be so changed yet know that I looked no different to her. I made sure she was on a phone call before I went and microwaved my burrito in the kitchen. I didn’t want her to see me using the microwave like one of the office commoners, stinking it up in there.

After the burrito was microwaved, I placed it on my desk with a few of the salsas. The cacti that sheltered me from NPR Andrew’s view were still standing guard, but it didn’t matter. I felt so languid and self-contained with my burrito, already full from the rest of my feast, that I could simply take small pieces and dip them in the salsa like a normal person. I wanted him to absorb my portrayal of ease. Yes, I was performing a one-woman show about a person who could simply take or leave a burrito, no biggie, just coolly have a burrito at rest on her desk, no obsession, no fear, a sane food woman, a woman to whom food was only one facet of a very expansive life, the burrito simply a prop, a trifle to be toyed with, a second thought, a third thought, even.

The day went so much faster with the burrito and candy to pick from. I imagined how much more pleasurable my life would be at work if I had this every day. Life was a lot less bleak when you were staring straight down the barrel of a burrito. Was this how some people lived all the time?

At home, I continued to eat throughout the night: Easy Cheese in a can, SpaghettiOs, half a large bag of Cool Ranch Doritos—all purchased from 7-Eleven—plus the remainder of the candy and baked goods, and a large container of takeout pad thai. I ate and ate until the clock struck midnight, then threw away all of the remaining food. I took the trash bag out to the garbage cans on the street and let everything go into the trash.

Then I got into bed, feeling like a blimp, a whale, but perfectly done: sated, tranquilized, as though I’d been fucked very well. The only thing left to do was pop a piece of nicotine gum. I smiled, parked the gum between my molars and my cheek, and drifted gently off to sleep.

CHAPTER 18

I woke up to my alarm in a great terror. I couldn’t remember exactly what had happened the day before, but I knew it had been bad. As I pieced together what I’d eaten, I could taste some of it in my mouth, in the sour, acidic parts of undigested food that came up: a hint of salsa, a lone SpaghettiO. My stomach hurt from the bottom to the top, like I had to take a massive shit that snaked itself in coils and knots and would never end. But the worst pain was in the middle, where I felt a strange emptiness despite the incalculable food that I had eaten. I had stretched my stomach, made too much space. I felt like I still needed more food, to return to what had hurt me, to soothe all that I had done.

Put something in me, said my stomach. Give me something calming.

But I could not and would not oblige. I no longer kept a scale in my apartment. In my laxative years, I’d weighed myself ten times a day: every time I shit or pissed. If I’d learned anything from that self-torture, it was that if I owned a scale I’d never get off it. But now I felt I had gained at least ten pounds. I made a resolution that for the next three days, I was only going to eat protein bars so I could keep perfect track of my calories. I felt disgusting. I imagined the food I had consumed simmering in my stomach, just beginning to make