Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,22
its way slowly out to different parts of my body: my hips, my stomach, my arms. Was I going to look like Miriam? Was I becoming a frozen yogurt girl: soft, sloppy, melting?
I thought about Dr. Mahjoub and the missing clay figure. I didn’t believe in The Secret or vision boarding or creative visualization or any of that other LA drivel. And yet, I wondered if it was possible that I had somehow The Secret–ed this woman.
That night, I googled voodoo doll. I ended up on someone’s Etsy page, featuring an array of ugly gingerbread-man-looking stuffed dolls—said to be handmade in Brooklyn. I googled Jewish voodoo doll and found an article about anti-Semitism in Turkey. I googled Jewish Frankenstein and read a biography of Mel Brooks. Then I googled Jewish monster.
A golem (/’goʊləm/ GOH-ləm; Hebrew: גולם) is an animated anthropomorphic being found in Jewish folklore that is created magically from inanimate matter—usually clay or mud. The golem possesses infinite meanings, and can function as a metaphor for that which is sought in the life of its creator.
Well, I certainly hadn’t sought out yogurt sundaes, that was for sure. I continued reading:
The most famous golem was said to have been created by Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the late-sixteenth-century rabbi of Prague, who made a golem to defend the Jews from anti-Semitic attacks. Some think the golem is real. Others believe it is symbolic and refers to a spiritual awakening.
In one picture, the golem looked like King Kong. In another, it looked like something of a hulk: the Jolly Green Giant or Andre the Giant. In no picture did the golem look anything like Miriam or me or a young me or the psychedelic woman I’d made or Dr. Mahjoub or even frozen yogurt.
I googled Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel and found a painting of him. He was old and had a beard down to his feet. He was smiling. He looked nice.
CHAPTER 19
They say the perfect is the enemy of the good, that if you strive for perfection you will overlook the good. But I did not agree. I didn’t like the good. The good was just mediocre. I wanted to go beyond mediocre. I wanted to be exceptional. I did not want to be medium-size. I wanted to be perfect. And by perfect, I meant less.
But enforcing my protein bar regime was not as easy as it used to be. I felt like I was moving through the stages of grief. In the morning there was pain, because of the emptiness. It was as though I had expanded the inside of my stomach to a giant stadium and I was dying to fill up the seats. Next came resolve, me feeling like a champion, slogging my way to my lunchtime protein bar, powered by self-hatred. In the afternoon came hunger again, then exhaustion. The hours between each protein bar felt endless. At the gym, I thought I might collapse. At night I lay awake, envisioning vegetables, tomato juice, pickles, salt—anything that wasn’t the sweet, cloying whey of the bars.
After two days, I returned to Subway and let the salad caress me with its vegetables. I walked back to the office slowly in the sunlight and decided that a few things were true. I decided that love is when you have food in your mouth that you know is not going to make you fat. Lust is when you have food in your mouth that is going to make you fat. Fear is the day after you had food in your mouth that is going to make you fat. Fear is when you eat your allotted calories for a given time and you find yourself still hungry. Fear is when you no longer trust yourself to stick to your prescribed regimen.
As I approached the front door of the office, I froze. My mother’s car was parked at a meter out front. I knew it instantly: a white Volvo with New Jersey plates. She had driven all the way across the country to come find me.
“Oh no,” I moaned.
But it wasn’t my mother’s car. It belonged to some dude who looked like Jay Leno. He was sitting in the front seat, vaping. The thought occurred to me that my mother had somehow transformed herself into a vaping Jay Leno, or that this dude had stolen her car. I checked the passenger door. My mother’s Volvo had a dent on the passenger door, but this one was dent-free. I felt an urge to