Eating slows you down.
This is basic biology. Evolution at work. Animals exert a lot of energy hunting and killing food, and afterward they find a nice place to curl up and doze off. High blood-glucose levels switch off the brain signals for alertness. Blood gets rerouted to the stomach and the intestinal tract to support digestion. Your mind and senses dull.
The diligent student of the Art of Starving will be strong enough to resist both evolution and emotion.
DAY: 1, CONCLUDED
My mother is a magnificent monster. Round and terrifying and able to shout louder than anyone you ever met in your life. When we were little and it got dark out and she called for us to come home for dinner, the echo of it boomed for miles. People made fun of us for it: our mother the foghorn. Muscled-up from a couple decades down at the hog farm, there’s probably no one in town she couldn’t pound into submission.
Except, you know, life. Life has got her down for the count, and it’s counting slow. The rent, the mice in the walls, the cold, the loneliness, the threat of the slaughterhouse shutting down, they all teamed up on her. And when life couldn’t beat her fighting honest: Maya happened. Maya running off might be the death blow. Ever since that, Mom seems to be losing her light.
When I let myself in to the low-ceilinged one-story house we call home, she was passed out on the couch. She was passed out on the couch most days when I came home from school. It was why she still hadn’t figured out I was walking home, instead of taking the bus. The air inside was smoky from the woodstove, and the cigarettes she said she’d quit. The television gurgled mindlessly.
“Food in the fridge,” she said, when the front door shut behind me. Even in her sleep, the woman doesn’t miss a beat.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said, and stood over her. She didn’t stir. Her hands smelled like blood. The smell never comes out, not all the way, no matter how hard she scrubs. But I like it. It smells like love, to me, and power. Her brow was furrowed, her lips pressed tightly together. Stressed out over something. She doesn’t set her burdens down, not even when she’s dreaming. I spread a blanket over her, but it was so warm in the room I took it right off.
And there I was, in the long wide gilded mirror on the opposite wall. Mom had found that ridiculous oversized thing by the side of the road and single-handedly wrestled it onto her pickup truck, something so big and beautiful it somehow made the rest of our home less shabby. As far back as I could remember, there he was: that boy, in the mirror, happy and laughing, until a couple years back when he started going all Portrait of Dorian Gray on me.
I shrank back from the sight of him now, that boy, that body, stooped and limp-wristed, doomed to never be desired. I envied Dracula, who at least didn’t ever have to worry about seeing himself and knowing how gross he looked.
“The power of Christ compels you,” I said, making the sign of the cross. My exorcism did not work. Probably because I’m Jewish.
Mom knows. She’s got to know I’m gay. Mom knows everything. Hears everything. It’s a small town, and she’s friends with everyone. I know I’m gossiped about. But until I actually tell her, she can convince herself it’s untrue. Malicious slander. Small-minded hicks who see a sensitive smart boy and say faggot. But to Know, to know for sure, I think, would kill her. Not because she hates gay people. It would kill her because she’s spent her whole life worrying about How She Messed Up Those Kids, and what better proof of her failures as a mother than a son condemned to a miserable life of abuse and loneliness?
Raising us on her own, everybody told her she’d Mess Those Kids Up. A boy needs a man in his life, they told her, again and again, like I couldn’t hear them, sitting in the shopping cart in the supermarket, building a wall of baked-bean cans. No telling how he’ll turn out otherwise.
Mom said, All he needs is love, every time; All he needs is me.
And she was right. But tell that to Hudson’s army of backseat-driver moms and men incapable of minding their own business, self-righteous gossips and SUV commandos. All of whom would have the final victory in the moment when I told Mom how damaged I was.
If Maya leaving came damn near breaking her, finding out I’m gay might finish the job.
Knife blades poked and prodded at my stomach. Hunger made me wobble. My stomach never really stopped hurting lately, but by now it was starting to worry me. The three tater tots from lunch hadn’t lasted long.
And then I saw it. The photo, stuck to the side of the fridge with a magnet I made in first grade (a crescent moon, made of dried macaroni spray-painted gold). A photo I’d seen a thousand times without truly seeing. Very small, very old; in color but so faded you could barely tell. My mom. My age. Smiling. Skinny.
“Obese” is maybe the wrong word to use to describe my mother now, but it isn’t completely wrong. How had she gone from super skinny to super . . . not? And did that mean the same metamorphosis was waiting like a genetic time bomb inside of me?
I couldn’t say why I noticed it now, when it had been staring me in the face for so long. Something to do with the pain in my stomach and the pleasure it gave me, that small bit of control when Maya’s absence made me feel so helpless.
I scurried down the hall, avoiding eye contact with the fridge—but I could still smell tuna fish in the air, smell the lime-juice-and-too-much-mayonnaise mom used, smell the soft challah sliced too thick.
Maya’s favorite. The day she left, Mom went out and bought a loaf of challah and made it all into sandwiches, so they’d be ready for her when she got back. Yesterday they were approaching the edge of staleness, so she brought them to work to share with her fellow grunts, and bought new bread, and made new sandwiches, so that when Maya walked in the door her favorite comfort food in the world would be waiting for her.
Even in my room, even with the door shut tight, the tuna smell persisted. I never liked the stuff, but I’d eat it when Maya made me. I always did whatever Maya told me to do.
She was no delicate flower, my sister. When she was around, no one dared to say a word about me. She cut her hair short at fourteen. She beat up a boy once. She has badass dropout friends. She has metal spikes on her jacket, on bracelets, on collars and boots. Spikes everywhere.
She’s had boyfriends, but none of them the assholes who go to our school.
She would have had a dazzling takedown in response to Ott’s lunchroom insult, a brilliantly delivered profanity-packed lecture about how boys are allowed to sleep around but girls get punished for feeling desire. And then she’d have punched him in the throat for good measure.
She’s in a punk-rock band, plays guitar, sings scary songs. She’s her mother’s daughter.