? ? ?
At home, I eat the other half of my salad with the other half of the honey Dijon dressing it came with. I make sure to draw the curtains first. I didn’t used to, but then I caught the owner of the Turkish restaurant next door staring at me from his upstairs window, smoking, just as I had finished my post-salad ritual of dragging my finger pads over and over again across the empty plate and sucking the oil off them one by one. It used to be he would say hello when I walked past him in the street. Now he looks at me like he’s familiar with the details of my most unfortunate pair of underwear. Has fingered the fraying scalloped edge. Waggled the limp pink bow. Held the MADE IN CAMBODIA tag between his teeth.
Post-salad, I try on the French Connection bodycon, followed by the Bettie Page pencil skirt and the Stop Staring! halter. In all cases, I’m no closer to my goal but I’m also no further from it, which is no news at all. Twenty-five days. That’s how long I have left before I fly out to visit Tom, my boyfriend of sorts. Two weeks ago, when he pushed me to pick a date for a visit, I picked one in what I thought at the time was the distant future so that I could be closer, much closer than I was when he saw me last time. But then I remind myself that it’s been fifty-seven days since he last saw me, since I waved good-bye to him from the departure gate, wearing my father’s old jeans and a Joy Division T-shirt in men’s XXL. Fifty-seven days ago, I was further according to not only the pencil skirt, bodycon, and halter, but the scale and the measuring tape and those fat-pinching pincers they use at the gym. There is a considerable difference between the girl he saw fifty-seven days ago and this one. Could you even compare the two? You couldn’t. You really couldn’t. That is a consolation, I think, as I stand in front of the mirror now in my bra and my French cuts and attempt, as I do each evening, to come to grips with certain irrevocable truths. Then I eat several handfuls of flax cereal and fifteen raw, unsalted almonds.
After noting my progress and calculating my daily intake, I decide to phone Tom and see if he’s actually booked the plane ticket.
“I did,” he says. “Earlier today.”
“Oh, great,” I say. “That’s great.”
“You don’t sound very excited.”
“Of course I am. How could I not be? It’s been so long.” When he says nothing, I add, “Fifty-seven days.” To show him that I’ve been counting. It matters, this absence.
“You wanted to wait,” he says.
I met Tom nearly a year ago on the Dirty List, this online music forum dedicated to fans of Underworld, and we’ve been in this long-distance thing ever since. I told everyone, including the girl I hate, that Tom and I met at Underworld’s last live show in New York before they stopped touring, which is where we actually did meet in person for the first time. Even though I was at my fattest then, he just looked at me, took my hand, and said we should probably line up. Since then, I’ve seen him every few months. I use most of what I make from my temp jobs after rent to pay for flights, which he splits with me. My mother thinks it’s absurd to spend so much money going to see a guy I barely know—or who she thinks I barely know—but since I started losing weight she hasn’t said anything. Obviously seeing Tom is good for me. Still, I don’t want to see him again until I’ve broken this, whatever this is. I’m hesitant to call it a plateau.
“Not because I didn’t want to see you sooner, though,” I tell Tom now. “I just couldn’t get away. Because of work.” I think of how I Liquid-Papered bitch across my stapler in that long stretch before lunch. The paper-clip porn I make in the afternoons. How I killed yesterday looking up Bettie Page screen savers just to torture myself.
“I know,” he says. “Well I’m looking forward to it.”
I’ve turned out the light so I can’t see the mirror, but it’s there, and so is my shape in it, dark and vague in the glass.
“Me too,” I say.
Later, after I’ve hung up and I’m lying awake in bed, I think of the perfect comeback to the salady remark. I put us both back in the bakery and I make her say that I’m salady with clotted cream in each corner of her lips. But instead of replying, Am I? I lean in and in a low voice I say, Listen, you little skank! Not all of us can eat scones and have it turn into more taut littleness! Some of us are forced to eat spring mix in the half-dark of our low-ceilinged studio apartments and still expand inexplicably. Some of us expand at the mere contemplation of what you shovel so carelessly, so dancingly into your smug little mouth. And the way I say it, leaning in like that, with all this edge and darkness in my voice garnered from months of restraint, makes her bow her head in genuine remorse.