Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,56

and down the aisles, not wanting to face anybody at the office. I timed myself as I walked, trying to get up to ten minutes of exercise. I prayed some kind of truck would come zooming around a turn and just take me away, right there, one hit, so I wouldn’t have to feel. All of this suffering over a 13.5-pound weight gain! If Miriam had kept kissing me, I wouldn’t have weighed myself at all.

It was better that things had ended between us now, not some unknown time in the future when I would wake up suddenly and find my body blown up big as hell, orbiting the Earth like a wild balloon, my mind all the way out there too, no longer of this planet, no longer able to decipher the real from the not-real. I didn’t want to reach that point, did I? I needed to cut the thought of her out of me completely—cut me out of me too—chunks of my thighs and hips and arms and the rest of my exploding body.

I pulled out my phone and googled How to kill a golem.

In some tales, the creature has the word emet carved on its head. Emet means truth. In order to kill the Golem, its creator removes the e from emet so that the word spells met. Met means dead. This is how the golem dies.

It was strange that truth and death were so close to each other.

I pulled up Dr. Mahjoub’s number.

I need to see you, I wrote.

CHAPTER 48

The following afternoon at Mahjoub’s office, I noticed she’d acquired a new elephant: a three-foot rust-colored wire statue thing by the door. I was grateful that she was willing to see me on a Saturday, but the fact that she could fit me in so quickly made me suspicious of her skills, as usual.

“I’m sorry, Rachel,” she said, flipping through my file. “I used the last of the Theraputticals for some trauma work with another patient last week. But it should be easy enough for you to order online. Or maybe you want to consider taking ceramics classes—”

“Whatever,” I said. “You should just know that your little art therapy exercise has totally destroyed my life.”

“Do you want to talk about how or why you feel that it has been… less than beneficial?”

“No, I don’t,” I said.

I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing how many binges deep I was. This was what she’d wanted, right? I wondered if she could see it on me: 13.5 pounds of challah and egg rolls and cholent and noodles. We stared at each other silently.

Finally, I blurted out: “I was doing such a good job with my mother! I’m still doing a good job. It’s been thirty-seven days of total boundary holding.”

My mother’s texts had stopped entirely. If she was trying to smoke me out, it was working. The absence of contact made me want to reach out to her more than when she stalked me every day. I was scared she’d given up on me. All I’d ever wanted was to be left alone. Now I wanted to reach out and say, Wait!

“That’s amazing,” said Dr. Mahjoub. “I’m so pleased.”

“I know! But you had to push it. You had to push it with the body stuff. I told you I was well enough. What does it even mean to be well anyway? Is there some plateau of wellness—some place we are supposed to get to where we are, like, fine forever? Because to me that sounds like death!”

“Well—”

“Is death the best we can aim for? I’m starting to think it might be.”

I was feeling reckless. I wanted to fuck with her. But also, I was curious.

“Rachel, if you’re thinking of harming yourself or someone else, I’m required by law to report it. Are you thinking of harming yourself or someone else?”

I thought about how I wanted to take a knife and cut myself out of me. I thought about how I’d been praying for a truck to just hit me. I thought about death and truth and how, in some languages, they were just one letter apart. I wanted to ask her if she knew that.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m not thinking of harming myself or someone else.”

CHAPTER 49

When I got home that night, I pulled up to the curb of my apartment building and there was Miriam standing out front on the small, dirty lawn. I had told her I lived in the building with the