by JoAnna Novak
In the meantime, I refuse to frump.
I am not a math person, though I feel a kinship with statisticians, who deal in factors and odds, probabilities, curves and formulas, outlier conditions: isn’t that a poem? The most I bandy with numbers is when I sestina (soused, it’s been known to go down). Still I can’t account for the calories in microwave popcorn. I won’t even try to gloss the nutritional label. There are popped and unpopped calories, grams of sodium and saturated fat. Servings per bag, servings per box. Total mindfuck.
All I know is, whatever I ate, it’s too much.
My emesis is left-handed, my mimesis right. But seriously, I use my left index and middle finger the way a pitcher, off-duty, relies on the dud. Baby the moneymaker—that’s a Rolfism, something he mockingly reports his colleagues say about golf.
I hinge at the waist and close my eyes as the black nails disappear inside my mouth, wet and sicky hole.
I’ve chosen an ugly hobby—and a fuck up of a student. Rot. Three months of serious eye contact, hardcore fingertip brushing when homework changed hands, bracketed moments in class discussions when I felt myself talking to only one person in the room led up to the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, when I held all-day office hours since Park Junior High is the only school in the district that doesn’t allow for a civil holiday recess and what would I do all day at home when at work I might test my luck? That day was exciting and desperate. I’d arrived to find the sign-up sheet Scotch-taped to my office door a field of blanks until the last one—my 3:15 slot belonged to Rot. He wrote in left-slanting cursive. He’d shown up two minutes early.
Bending over the toilet zings me. I’m always frightened initially, the terror that mounts as a roller coaster ascends: how many more inches before the bottom drops out? Before I start, when there’s no way in hell I’ll be backing down, like a plane taxiing down the runway, about to take off: I’m onboard, knee shaking in time with my pulse, wondering why beverage service isn’t a right away sort of thing so I can be at least holding a glass stem as I wonder if the engine will explode, when I fantasize about yelling, let me off, motherfuckers! Let me off !
In other words: will this be the purge that kills me?
Ah, but you’re a writer, Anna, I tell myself. At times of upheaval, huzzah! Cling to your identity. Relish the risk.
I jam my fingers further, find the place where mouth becomes throat. The first physical effect is coughing. It’s genteel, clipped, a mealtime hack, raised hand, sip of water, no, no, it’s okay—wrong pipe. Nothing frightening. Nothing that would turn gourmandizing heads in a loud restaurant, nothing that would interest nosy students in Building 13’s halls or the lounge’s college-hour occupants, faculty microwaving smelly chicken potpies.
I feel supernatural, rational, brilliant: removing my own food? Mastermind. I am an adult woman, engineering—organically, sans substance or serum or chemical, snorts or injections or charge cards—an altered state.
Then the coughing becomes ugly. I’m not a math person—I’m not a biology person either. I don’t understand the mechanisms that usher cough from hack to expulsion—I only know the distension wrenches my cheeks. They puff—terrible fish—and I spit a dribble of clear oiliness into the water.
But not Sylvia Plath, now, more … Linda Blair-ish.
Have you ever licked a finger and rubbed the buttery salt out from the inside of a bag of microwave popcorn? Harsh fake flavor?
I pause. Tension vises my head, like it’s caught inside an ambulance strobe, red and loud and unavoidable. For a second, I remember why purging frightens me: it’s the only time my mind is wordless.
But my stomach bulges from black coffee and Butter Blasted. There’s no going backwards. Every so-called regression is merely an unfortunate step forward.
The popcorn comes up in three hay-colored hurls; it looks like coarse-ground cornmeal. The sound splats on itself in the toilet, like coital smacking: ass and cock, gut and gut. The sound emanating from me is a whelping howl.
Now I feel nothing.
I’m a body, a vessel, a husk.
Could this be death?
My mother passed with vomit: a pond of it in her lap.
My eyes burn. My fingers are cold: two of them are coated in half-digested snack. I’m shaking. Mirror-me is splotchy skin and gross, especially the cheeks. I vacuum them in, try for pinched. Then I relax. Are they normal? Am I mussed? I don’t think so. I don’t have to touch them to feel they’re sticky. My itchy eyes find my gaze, register some flintiness—shame, satisfaction—wander off.
After I purge, I savor improvidence: pump so much pink soap it pools in my palms.
Actually, I take perverse glee in wasting all the college’s resources: photocopying submissions; filching good envelopes; green, felt-tipped pens.
It’s just one of those things.
I shut the tap. Reaching over to flush the toilet, I feel something, a nothing, the shiver that passes over you during a perfect sentence. There’s a plunk. So small a sound, if the bathroom weren’t the size of a phone booth, I probably wouldn’t hear it at all. If there’d been multiple stalls, I would hear, first, the rub of wadded toilet paper over some woman’s ruddy crotch. An ornery zipper.
I look around. On occasion, three or four times a week, for the past few years, I’ve been ralphing lunch. The atmospherics of afterward are trauma in miniature: How I am fine. How I am shaken. How I am haunted—as if by a churlish physician or a beggar-wraith scrambling for food or my more-sensible self, and yet there is no one in the room. How I deny the purge and replay it, and the binary of avoidance and repetition is not lost on me. I peer into the toilet bowl.
There is my wedding band, diamond diamond diamond, atop a float of masticated popcorn. Something with some sparkle, Rolf had said ten years ago, parading me like a Saratoga mare around Cartier. His effusiveness is so unconditional; he’ll come home with souvenirs for El, and gifts for me, deckled diaries, gold-edged agendas from stationers in Paris and Hamburg and London, ever since he’s been traveling. He’s FedExed silk robes, powder-blue tap pants, chiffon nighties, hand-tatted garters. All the affection is intimidating, when my feelings for him mute so easily, for whatever isn’t immediately before me. I’m a bad mother, and, wifely, a lackluster philandering Eve, and moreover, I find Rolf, his showiness, compensating, cliché, as though I am so provincially-minded that I won’t love him without parochial displays of materialism.
Still, panic burrows in my heart when I see the ring in the toilet. Rot aside, I don’t want to be an unwed woman. The ring is valuable. I have reached the highest salary step. I’m too old to radically reinvent myself: slowly, my habits either will or won’t erode me. I don’t want to be alone.
“Unbelievable.” I mutter it to make sure: first, that I haven’t died; second, that, provided I’m alive, I’m not overheard. I find it comfortingly uncomfortable to talk to myself. “Fucking brilliant, Anna.”
I asked for an epidural with Elliot. Ears, nose, tongue, et al.: I am unpierced. I won’t accept Rice Krispies treats prepared by colleagues for fear of Salmonella, Listeria, errant hairs, flea-flecked fur of cats and dogs. This is to say: I exhale with relief and pluck the ring from the toilet, lest it sink further.
My fingers are barfy. I am not repulsed by what I disgorge, which isn’t really so much. It goes down with one flush.
I rinse off the ring. Through the stream of water, the gold’s shape warps. My fingers are too cold-shrunk to put it back on. I slip the band in my back pocket and that’s when I remember the baggie I took from Rot. I pat it through the fabric; it feels like—how I imagine—a hemorrhoid.
In a flash, I see myself on a closed-circuit monitor: a topless woman in business-casual black, fishing around the toilet, talking to herself, tapping her own ass.
I check El’s third grade Casio, the only watch that works with my wrists. They have always been small. I have not purged myself into thin wrists. The minute and the hour hands refuse to stop waving. I pinch the bridg
e of my nose, squeeze my eyes, try again. There: five minutes, and I teach.
How should I handle Rot’s coke? If I were teaching creative writing, this could be a prompt: Invent a character. Interrogate someone who must decide whether or not to keep something she’s shoplifted. Write a vignette that stems from a middle-aged woman asking herself this. But I’m not teaching creative writing. I’m teaching Comp. My coke is intro paragraph, body, body, body, conclusion. Thesis reiterated throughout. And topic sentences, please. How I handle the coke is mine alone.
I have options. Time. My classroom is around the corner, down the hall. A professor has permissions, allies, occasions to be late, ways to make covert phone calls, last-minute options. A professor always does, but an attractive, female professor has more means of recourse. Men. Procedures. Handouts on mandated reporting inside plain black binders that sit unopened on the bottom shelf in an office. I could consult the protocol, never as juicy as the term’s opacity. Surrender the contraband. File a report.
I could go rogue, police on my own: flush the baggie, forget Rot. Lift the rug and sweep, sweep, sweep.
Third option: let’s call it the Sartre. Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being—like a worm. Nothing is what I decide to do. In this way, I will tempt danger. The bag could rupture, the powder seep through the fabric, into my skin: farfetched, not absurd. Absurd is Russell Edson—a poet who’d imagine a situation to an unimaginable end. What’s so terrific about fantasy? Every three years, in Contemporary Lit, they go gaga over Edson, poetry’s kooky Tom Hanks. Am I spiteful? Only afraid to abandon myself to my own writing. That’s what I’d discovered that Soho summer with Elliot.
My sweater’s hem covers the pocket’s bulge. I’ll keep the baggie close. I’ve known Rot since I called roll last August. He corrected the roster: “My name is mad pretentious. Carlos Rottingham Junior? Douchebags and douchebags. Call me Rot.” Rot will come. It’s been since Thanksgiving that we partied. Too long. He’ll be looking, for me, his coke. In his first essay last semester, a personal narrative in response to the question, “What drives you,” Rot submitted a two-page response another professor would’ve interofficed to the Dean of Students. Rot wrote about the chase. That’s when I knew I wanted him. Alone in my office, my green pen hovered over his words: how he was always searching for the next high, the one that would put every one preceding it to shame, the one “deleterious enough to destroy him.”
Oh baby, I thought, feeling motherly and uncapped. I dropped my pen. Me too.
3 ·· LISA
“I DON’T RELY ON MIRRORS, so I always take Polaroids.”
The line has been racing like Sonic the Hedgehog through my brain. Now it clicks. My hand is still hot from the phone. My parents totally need to upgrade their portables: this one practically sweats.
Sweats, like, behind my knees and under my arms and between my legs when I heard and then hung up on Elliot, sweats to infinity when I realized why Clueless was ringing weird bells, sweats to infinity times infinity when out of nowhere I worked up the nerve to curveball an ultimatum. But I’m done concerning myself with Elliot’s effluvia (vocab points?). My sick day has become so sick: no parents, just me with my smoky, snagged-up voice and Junior Carlos chilling, villainous, on the couch.
Elliot Egleston does not know what’s best for everyone.
Junior Carlos puts down his pager. He seems distracted, somewhere else. He needs to work on his resting face: his eyes kinda cross. Otherwise, he looks like Brad Renfro in Apt Pupil, but taller and with shoulder muscles like T-bones and chiseled-out cheeks and eyes like highlighters, the rare blue shade.
“Was that your mom?” he says. “How’s your grandma?”
“Denial,” I say.
“Denial?”
“Negative, I mean. No, not them. No one.”
I’m shaking, sweating. What’s wrong with me—I haven’t really been thinking about my grandma. She has congestive or congenital heart failure, needs fluids but also has edema. In a hospital room, my mom is sitting with her at this very moment. My grandma is legit going to die.
My terror is so big I can’t think about all its parts: it’s like dumping a pouch of marbles in a dark room and trying to tiptoe. I can accept death, but not without my brain cramping, not without having to gulp for air. I really don’t want Junior Carlos to leave. I want to be normal enough, recovered enough, that I can grow up and spend all day with him, forever. I really don’t want to be alone.
I’m on speech team, though, so my face is good at transforming. I relax into a smile. “You can press Play.”
Alicia Silverstone’s voice returns, inviting and girly, a sequined armchair in the living room. Junior Carlos holds down Volume, and the sound increases: a half-way blue bar on the TV screen gets bluer and bluer, like a cartoon thermometer about to explode. An explosion. That happened once: my mom and I were arguing over Lifetime—by arguing I mean having the silent-movie version of what junior high boys call a cat fight—which was me on one half of the leather sectional, her on the other, each of us with a remote, and she was turning A Secret Between Friends off and I was turning it on and we went back and forth, until the bulimic girl-buds were swallowed up by a black hole and the TV pffed like candles blown out on a birthday cake, then a low, zangy hum. My dad was at the station—I think it was March of sixth grade, when WBEZ did big coverage for the Domestic Partner Ordinance, which, like all gay matters, divided our family. My mom thought equal rights were an honest-to-Christ sin and my dad thought they were only fair and I thought something, like, it’s up to each person to do what—or who—they want.
That one channel battle is emblematic of my relationship with my mom: I’m not budging and she’s not budging, and polite as we may be in public, at home neither of us will even think about backing down. Sometimes I try to imagine the sadness I’d feel if my mom died: Would I talk to her portrait the way Cher talks to her stunner mom, aka the total Betty, she of the ’70s hair? Would I feel guilt for not conceding more, for all the fights I picked on Dr. Ogbaa’s fainting couch? (It’s a divan, Lisa, Dr. Ogbaa always told me, tapping her manicured nails on the mahogany arm.) Would death repair my relationship with my mother, the way the threat of it seemed to with her own mother? As if.
··
Here’s Clueless: Cher has worn her yellow-jacket plaid blazer and miniskirt; Travis has left his Cranberries CD in the quad; grades have been argued, and Cher’s father is proud, very proud; Cher wants to be five ten like Cindy Crawford, so no delicious Italian brew, thanks; Josh has read Nietzsche; Cher and Dionne and Murray and Elton and Tai and Amber have partied in the valley; Amber has worn Cher’s yesterday maroon dress. Murray has cut his hair. Dionne’s grandchildren will be horrified by his yearbook photo. Tai has rolled with the homies. Cher has wrecked her Alaïa and been mugged and rescued; she’s schooled that Alanis Morissette lookalike hanging out with Josh about Shakespeare via Mel Gibson.
It’s my fifth absence of the year. My mom is being extra-compassionate, letting me stay home with just a ninety-nine-degree fever. I know it’s because of my grandma; I know I should appreciate that, but my mom aggravates me. I acknowledge my bias.
It hurts to swallow: my throat feels like a Brillo pad. Junior Carlos is not legitimately sick—he’s legitimately sweet. He rushed to his nine a.m. at College of Cook County and then turned his Bimmer around, called me from the car phone, asked me what I wanted from Blockbuster, or more specifically, did I want anything else besides Clueless and did I have enough blankets and if so were they warm enough or the annoying scratchy kind and did I like down quilts because he always keeps one in the trunk, and most importantly what snacks would help me feel better: ice cream, ice cream, sherbet, or ice cream.
OJ, said the sensible, recovered-but-not-quite part of me, the girl who’d spent summer in in-patient treatment for an eating disorder. But then, when I heard him use coo and baby talk, I remembered that I didn’t need to use a sick day to lose a couple pounds. I was done being Elli
ot’s little sidekick. When Junior Carlos said, Lee-Lee, you need a lil’ som’n som’n, the lover-of-all-treats-frozen inside me perked up at his wannabe gangbanger slang. Dreamsicles?
Your dream is my command.
I’ve eaten one Dreamsicle. I was contemplating a second before Elliot called. Before the phone rang, I was snuggled next to Junior Carlos, the two of us bugs in a rug under the heavy, knit Last Supper blanket; his arm around my shoulder the way the snake trainer at Brookfield Zoo wore a viper like a shrug.
Now, though, after lying to Elliot, I’m shivering and sticky and witnessing myself, beyond myself, disassociated, out of it, whatever you want to say, sweaty, hot, the swamp girl from Alaska, freezing in my flannel pants, still as a statue by the phone.
I mean, look at me: dirty-blonde hair alligator clipped in a side ponytail, puddle-blue eyes rimmed in lots of black. I’m wearing a cute tank with adjustable lace straps, with the plastic clippies like on a bra. You’d think in a state like this I’d be self-conscious about having V-town visitors, but Junior Carlos is persistent, demandingly kind, just the sort of aggressive I like, which, in an adult man (which, technically, he is), if Cosmo is right, might be called take charge.
In a girl, that’s bossy. Ambitious or aggressive. But I don’t care what I’m called—my recovery mantra is about piling my confidence so high you’d need a helicopter to peep the top.
I. Do. What. I. Want.
And if what I want is to cease communication with Elliot Egleston, that’s my prerogative. And if what I want is to eat Dreamsicles all day, drink Strawberry Crush floats all night, and meld my bodily soda with Junior Carlos’s, so be it.
Cher is offering Christian, the James Dean lookalike, some wine. Junior Carlos snorts at Christian’s deflection. And even though I’m sick, I’m the one standing, and what I want is to be hospitable. It’s the least I can do.
“Do you want a drink, babe? My throat feels like a … a bad thing. Hitler!”
