I paced in front of the plates, looking around to see if anyone was watching me. With my fingers I scooped up some of the pasta tubes and placed them on my tongue. It was the first real food I’d had in more than a month. The texture was different, like cashmere instead of a scratchy polyester.
After the initial moments of bliss, the gravity of what I was doing began to spread over me in a feverish heat. I ran to the bathroom and spit the glob of food into the toilet, my eyes filling with tears. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Gladys had given me pamphlets on every eventuality: Dieting After the Death of a Loved One and The Dangers of Carnivals, Circuses, and Fairs. I had piles of these pamphlets, but they hadn’t been powerful enough to restrain me against the siren song of pasta and melted cheese. In the face of that, I decided I’d done well. I hadn’t even swallowed.
I started wanting to call in sick to work. I was sick, or at least I felt that way practically every moment of the day, but I couldn’t admit it. That would have given my mother a sense of satisfaction. If I told her how I felt she would try to ban me from Baptist Weight Loss. I began to worry about what would happen when school started and whether my grades would suffer, but I decided that I wouldn’t think that far ahead.
At work I continued to pick scraps off plates, delighting in the taste and then spitting the food out in the toilet or into a paper towel. Sometimes, though, when Luis was in the alley, I’d eat a few french fries off dirty plates, chewing and then swallowing. Just a few in my belly eased the pain in my head.
On the night of a retirement party, I worked extra hours to help Chef Elsa prep. The woman who did the baking in the restaurant had prepared macaroons earlier in the day, which Elsa asked me to arrange on platters. Alone in the kitchen, my hands sheathed in crinkly plastic gloves, I stacked the macaroons in a pyramid formation. Six weeks of systematic starvation had weakened me. For every macaroon that made it onto the platters, another went into my apron pocket. When I finished, Delia took the macaroons into the dining room, noticing neither the slightness of the pyramids nor the bulges in my pockets.
I went to the bathroom, but two waitresses were there, styling their hair and putting on makeup, so I went into the back alley and sat down on the concrete steps next to the trash cans. When my hand first grazed the macaroons in my pocket, I could have stopped for a moment and used my training; I could have written in my food journal or done jumping jacks, but I didn’t. One macaroon slipped into my mouth, and then two, and then as many as would fit. I consumed them so hurriedly that at first I didn’t enjoy the shock of creamy coconut against my tongue. I stuffed three macaroons into my mouth before stopping to catch my breath, and then I made room for two more. My face flushed and burned and I began to cry. I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I couldn’t eat the macaroons fast enough. A ball of coconut formed in my throat. I paused to swallow, then continued working through my stash, wiping my nose with my sleeve as I chewed. I was still wearing plastic gloves. I felt like a criminal.
As I swallowed the last cookie, my face stained with tears and mascara, I saw Luis and Eduardo nearby in the alley, smoking. I didn’t know how long they had been there. They were looking at me—they had seen.
After so many weeks without much food, my stomach, shriveled like a raisin, was struggling to absorb the explosion of calories. I felt a sharp pain at my center as I made my way home. I expected to be sick, but once the pain was gone, I felt better than I had in ages. My headache disappeared. I had grown so accustomed to having a headache that not having one felt strange; there was a feeling of release, as if a belt that had been fastened tightly around my head was suddenly loosened. I slept through the night for the first time since becoming a Baptist.
The next day when I awoke, the hunger was there again. I had slept late and missed breakfast, so I drank two Baptist Shakes, but they didn’t satisfy my hunger beast, and when he wasn’t satisfied he gnawed at me. I couldn’t bear being trapped in the house with him and decided to eat my dinner, though it was only one o’clock. Then I ate a second dinner, then drank another shake; then I heated up a Baptist pizza, which was just shavings of plastic cheese on a crust as thin as matzo. The kitchen counter was littered with empty pink trays and bottles and pieces of silver plastic, which were gummy and stuck to the countertops. I gathered up the evidence and took it outside to the garbage can so that no one would find out. As I made my way back into the house, I saw a woman with a camera pointed at me. She had seen.