Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,8

one eye and look at my phone, imagine it cracking in half, the way people sitting shiva ripped a piece of clothing. I didn’t want to mourn. I didn’t want to accept my loss—not only the loss of communication, but the loss of an idea that my mother was going to be the one to change. It made me feel like a loser. It meant I had wanted something and hadn’t gotten it, that I’d been, in some way, rejected. It meant my needs were too big for this world.

“This is a good first step,” said Dr. Mahjoub. “But if you’re really serious about getting free of your mother’s voice, we’ve got to work on your eating.”

I could tell by the breathable cotton tunics she wore, the cropped, wide-legged pants in organic linen, that Dr. Mahjoub was a woman who ate when she was hungry and stopped when she was full. Occasionally I spotted a package of Fig Newmans on her desk. She was probably someone who genuinely enjoyed a nice pear.

“Why can’t I leave things the way they are?” I asked.

“Are you satisfied with just surviving?” asked Dr. Mahjoub. “Or do you want to get well?”

I glanced at a papier-mâché elephant kneeling on her end table with his trunk in the air, then at a multicolored elephant triptych hanging on the wall. She’d definitely bought all the elephants at once.

“I’m well enough,” I said.

On my way out of the office I checked my phone again. No new texts. What would happen if my mother just showed up at my apartment? Rationally, I knew this was unlikely. She was terrified of flying and had not been on a plane in over ten years. But all night, I kept expecting her to materialize. In some way, I even wished she would just appear.

I was aware that the mother I truly desired would not be the one who appeared. I’d learned that from Dr. Mahjoub, who I never wanted to see again. I felt resentful toward Mahjoub, exhausted by my mother. I wished that I could procure, from nowhere, an incarnation of a mother I wanted. This interplay between hope and reality was also part of the mourning.

CHAPTER 8

Ana was the only maternal figure I had left. I wanted to please her more than ever. I wanted her to soak me in praise. I also recognized that I was physically attracted to her. This was something I’d tried to conceal, especially from myself, but it was bursting out of me. Every time I masturbated, Ana popped into my head; and when she surfaced—her giant breasts and slender waist, the little bulge just above her pussy, her heady white floral perfume—I always blocked her image out. I felt ashamed, as though it were my own mother I was fantasizing about. But on night four of the detox, as I masturbated drowsily in bed, I allowed myself to imagine being with Ana fully for the first time.

I was her daughter and had menstrual cramps. Mommy Ana had cajoled me into bed with a cup of Harney & Sons tea. I lay still under the cool sheets as she spoke to me in a hushed voice, almost a whisper.

“Can I rub your belly?” she asked.

She was wearing a pink bathrobe, which was slightly open, and I could see the length of her abundant breasts in the dim light.

“Yes,” I said. “That would be nice.”

She really wanted to comfort me. She was just aching to soothe me. She was dying for it. I felt beautiful and treasured as she cooed and rubbed my lower abdomen over my cotton pajamas (I was wearing cotton pajamas as I touched myself in reverie).

“I’m going to take this off,” she said of her robe. “So I can be more comfortable in rubbing you.”

“Okay,” I said.

When she opened her robe, a waft of her white floral perfume came toward me like a sweet and filthy wind. There was also the smell of her pussy in the air, salty and a little fishy. Her breasts were gorgeous pendulums with big nipples the color of dusky valentines, ample and perfect. But that bump below her waist, just above her pussy, where the flesh had gathered in her aging, drove me the craziest. I wanted to rub against it, then work my way down to her pubic hair: unshaved and unwaxed, a thick mound of dark and coarse femininity.

I could hear her breathing as she rubbed my abdomen softly.

“How does that feel?” she asked.

“Good,”