The Hungry Mirror

by Lisa de Nikolits

  I noticed though that Meg drank beer solidly the whole night while I only had one white wine spritzer followed by plain water. I also watched her get up from the table a neat twenty minutes after she had eaten – which gave her food enough time to get all nice and mushy – and excuse herself to go to the washroom. I could swear I saw Jon nod approvingly.

  Something in the way Meg had excused herself told me all I needed to know.

  I was angry with her for doing that because it’s not fair. It’s like she was abusing a privilege, betraying a trust. I remember thinking how hard I try not to throw up – to do it only when it is absolutely unavoidable.

  When Meg came back to the table, her eyes were red and weepy. I withdrew from her then and turned to Mathew.

  So, I don’t believe it at all, that Jon encourages Meg to eat three meals a day, no matter what she says. Maybe she wishes he’d say that. Or maybe he enjoys offering her food and then he rewards her with love, and gifts, and praise, when she is good girl and says no.

  Jon seems short on affection, and only too ready to tell Meg what an idiot she is. It’s like he has no idea how lucky he is. Meg has fluffy blonde hair, high, rounded cheekbones, huge wide-set brown eyes, an upturned nose and a pouty mouth with that sensual lower lip. She has perfect legs and she wears those incredibly tiny skirts every day, skirts that are more like a headband around her hips, and they look great on her, even though they aren’t really the fashion. And, she wears thick tights, which are unthinkable for me with my block-like legs.

  Jon is a photographer’s assistant, when he is working, that is. I did one shoot with him and I noticed he focused all his attention on the thinnest, tallest, most androgynous girl there. He calls himself a photographer’s assistant but he doesn’t seem to know a camera back from a lens if you ask me. I think Meg got him the gig.

  He has that missing-teeth, street-person look to him, ratty thin hair that resists style, and a pock-marked face complete with old scars from fights. His nose looks like it has been broken more than once but he is still compelling and beautiful in a broken sort of way, like a Calvin Klein model fallen to chrystal meth. He has startling blue eyes like the sea and sky coming together as one.

  Everything about him speaks of last night’s party and more to come. Yes, I can see what Meg sees in him.

  But he is also rude and unpredictable and accident-prone, constantly having to take time off to recover from bruises, broken bones, depressions, and miseries.

  He is selfish, surly, and insanely jealous. He is convinced Meg is unfaithful to him at every turn and he is constantly laying traps for her and arriving at odd moments to check up on her.

  He smokes a lot of pot and does a fair amount of coke, which does nothing to stabilize the anger that roils in his veins.

  So, no, I don’t believe Meg at all when she tells me that he wants her to eat.

  Meg has been forthcoming about having fat days but she hasn’t admitted she throws up, or even goes near the topic.

  I have made a decision. I refuse to call it a “purge” anymore. Purge is too good, too polite a word for such a dirty thing. A purge is a good thing. It means you rid yourself of something bad. You get rid of the trash, clean the clutter. Now, while I fear and hate food, I realize that getting rid of it in this way is not a good thing, and I won’t hide behind a nicer-sounding word and call this maggot a butterfly.

  No. I throw up. I vomit. That’s the truth of it. Anyway, I want to see if Meg will come clean with me, so I push a little harder.

  “Don’t you ever feel as if you have to get the food out of you?” I ask. “Say for example you’ve been out to dinner and you’ve been forced to eat, don’t you ever wish you could just get rid of it? I sometimes tell Mathew I hate having eaten, that I wish I could just make it go away, that I can’t stand the thought of it in my body.” I look at her and wait.

  “Hmmmm,” is all she says as she eats more cheese.

  I leave it at that. I already know the truth and one day Meg will tell me. And even if she never tells me, I already know.

  She and I suddenly have enough of the conversation. It’s the same old boring roundabout and besides we can’t help each other. All we can do is go off and continue to fight our own battles. It isn’t as if talking about it helps.

  I am happy that I have been okay around the snacks table. I have eaten a few cherry tomatoes, one soda cracker, and two chips. Meg has eaten about two trays of olives, cheese, pretzels, crackers, chips and dip. All washed down by three beers. Three beers. That’s like a whole week of food.

  I am prepared to bet my life that Meg will go on to her dinner, eat everything in sight and be on starvation watch the next day. I am thankful I am okay for once. I try not to question it because if I do, it will immediately defeat me. Every time I think I am okay, it turns out I am headed for one of the worst binges ever.

  So I never probe the successes of a day.

  I say goodnight to Meg, who is still at the table, eating. I finish my water with a slice of lemon and pack up for the day.

  I know very well that tomorrow might find me at the snacks table, trying to cram it all in, in the fastest time possible, while Meg stands by and watches.

  So, I have been good. But still, as I walk to my car, my clothes feel too tight and I am filled with fury at this inescapable injustice. Then I wonder what to have for supper.

  Naturally thin means fun, naturally

  “I AM JUST NOT HAVING FUN anymore,” says Thin Lisa, Miss World Contender Number One. It’s an arbitrary Monday morning and I am getting tea in the office kitchen.

  Pablo has added yet another magazine to his melting pot of publishing mayhem. Namaste, a yoga journal. The new crew work right alongside our mag; our previously empty offices are filling up almost daily.

  I have, rather unkindly, dubbed my new colleagues on the basis, of course, of where they fit on the thin/beauty scale of things.

  There is the deputy editor, Lisa, Miss World Contender Number One. The art director, whose name escapes me, is Miss World Contender Number Two. Her assistant is Fat Janet, who is four feet wide by four feet high.

  I know I’m a bitch, it goes without saying. I’m too hungry to be nice and too tired to care.

  “Nope, no fun, nada,” Thin Lisa repeats, opening the refrigerator.

  I am stunned. While I experience daily the intimacies of a funless existence, this girl is beautiful, her family’s rich, and most importantly, she’s thin. So I don’t get it. How she can have all that, and be all that, and not be having any fun?

  “Two girls were raped in front of my building this year,” she says. “I didn’t know about it but the cops told me, the ones who came to see me about my burglary. They said whoever robbed me had been very vicious, very deliberate. They said this guy, whoever he was, actually sat and had a drink in my living room, looked through all my photographs and spread them around on the floor. Then he attacked my jewelry; he tangled and broke the silver and stole the gold. And all the stuff from my great, great-grandmother that I wanted to give my kids, when I have them, is gone.”

  I realize I should be focused on the violence of her story but I am distracted by her admission. She wants kids? I didn’t know that. But of course she would, having kids, having fun; it’s all part and parcel of a perfect life. I look at her. From her perfect Candice Bergen nose to her perfect high-heeled (though slightly large) feet that sit prettily at the end of a ski run of leggy perfection, is there any part of her that is not perfect? Of course she would want children.

  I, on the other hand, find it hard to imagine having a child. I also know that there isn’t one cell in my body capable of having fun. I sometimes tell Mathew I am not a fun person, and I can see he doesn’t believe me.

  “But you laugh a lot,” he says, confused.

  Anybody can laugh, I want to tell him, look at you.

  No fun is why Butch left Magda. I heard it at one of Mathew’s events, from an old school friend of mine who worked with Magda
and stayed in touch with her. Apparently Magda said it had been the worst day of her life when, after five years of marriage, Butch turned to her, quite out of the blue, and said, “You are not a fun person, Magda, and I’ve found someone who is.”

  But the good news, according to my old school friend, is that Magda’s having a blast. She’s having a lot more fun than she ever did with Butch.

  Anyway, so Thin Lisa, the tall, thin, blonde Miss World Contender Number One, is resentful because she isn’t having fun. And I am incredulous because her life, unlike mine, should be fun. Why? Because she can, and does, eat apple pie for breakfast. Imagine that. Apple pie for breakfast with ice cream.

  I watch her eat the pie, followed by two chocolate bars and a ham and cheese sandwich. Later, she goes out to buy lunch and comes back carrying all kinds of breads and cheese and toffees. Toffees. For after dinner, she says.

  Oh, dear God, how I want to eat all those things. Who wouldn’t be a fun person if every day meant a food party?

  Who the hell can be expected to have fun when life is an apple until lunch, then boiled vegetables with no dressing for lunch, then a plain baked potato and a slice of tomato for dinner? And I have been this way since I can remember because I wasn’t born naturally thin.

  Oh God, the envy I have for those two heavensent, heaven-blessed words. Naturally thin. Thin Lisa is, of course, naturally thin. If I could drink wine every night, I’d have fun too. I love my wine but do you know that even though wine has no fat, it gets metabolized as if it were pure liquid fat? So there goes my one glass of exquisite, ice cold, dry white wine at the end of a bad day. God knows I can’t drink liquid fat because I am not a naturally thin person.

  So, here I am, in my imagined Hallmark moment, sitting on a deck on the edge of a lake. It’s summertime and the living’s easy. I raise a glass of water with a slice of lemon and say, here’s to fun times, baby. No doubt about it.

  Fat Janet and Thin Lisa

  FAT JANET USED TO BE fun. She’d have us in stitches all day long with her sense of humour. Then she went on a diet. She’s getting married in a couple of months and her fiancé and her mother want her to be nice and thin for it. So she went to an expensive place paid for by her mother, where they put her on some weird diet, wrapped her in scalding, hot towels and massaged her fat cells away. They just squashed the buggers out of existence, pop, pop, pop. Where did that squashed fat go? I wonder.

  Fat Janet was dedicated too. She stuck to the regimen they gave her; she tried really hard.

  On the third day of her seventh week she comes to me. “I am really so depressed,” she says.

  I ask her why.

  “Because I have been on this diet for seven weeks and three days and though I have stuck to it religiously, I haven’t lost a thing, not a single thing. And yesterday all I was allowed to eat was cream cheese. Cream cheese with fruit in the morning, plain cream cheese for lunch, and cream cheese with melon in the evening and I just thought enough already, I hate this. And now I feel so depressed. And I’m being so awful to John. I’m even being grumpy and I’m not a grumpy person at all. I am snapping John’s head off and I wake up in the morning and I don’t have any reason to get up. So I’m not going to do it anymore because it’s making me into a person who can’t have any fun at all. And besides, I am not even losing any weight.”

  I tell her she is absolutely justified in giving up the stupid diet. I tell her it isn’t natural; diets like that are demeaning, the antithesis of our empowered female selves. They are designed by men who want to think they can break us and make us pliable and weak. I say if one can’t wake up in the morning and look forward to a nice lunch then what is there? What is the point of life anyway?

  Sure, like I have a nice lunch. I betray my empowered feminist self every single day, but what can you do?

  My memories slingshot back to the very first love of my life. I was seventeen. He was an incredibly beautiful Greek boy, exquisite in the way only young Greek boys can be.

  “Here,” he had said, “it’s ready.”

  “It” was an exercise bicycle he’d bought me. He had assembled it and adjusted the settings.

  “Okay,” he said. “If you can do two miles in two minutes twice a day, in two weeks your thighs will be as thin as Charlie’s.” Charlie was a girl at our gym, with legs like twigs. She was also nearly six foot. I was five three and a half. It was going to be difficult for me to have legs like Charlie’s but hey, if two miles in two minutes twice a day for two weeks was all it would take, I was game.

  So I tried, of course I did. I followed the instructions to the letter. But nothing happened. Two months later I’d practically cycled to China and back but my legs were much the same.

  Actually no, they were bigger.

  Stavros measured them. “That’s unbelievable,” he said, disappointed.

  I shrugged. “I told you,” I said. “I build muscle.”

  “But this exercise is designed to break it down.” He was bewildered.

  “My legs are thinner if I don’t exercise,” I told him. Then I went to my room and cried.

  Stavros swallowed his disappointment stoically and comforted me, said he’d love me no matter what.

  It was ironic really, that he became a fat, bald, blob of a man; a pantyhose seller at flea markets. I heard he made and lost a fortune and his beauty vanished like it never existed.

  I met up with him fifteen years later and under the folds and flaps of skin and fat, I could still see the boy I loved. I knew his loveliness would never vanish for me. I could see it in the tilt of his head, the length and curve of his eyelashes when he looked down and sideways, in the way he did.

  “I should have married you,” he said to me over lunch. I think he wanted to find out if I had ever stopped loving him. I still had feelings for the much younger him, but I had learnt to tell the difference between being so in love it hurt and being in an adult, dependable relationship, which is what I had with Mathew.

  “I should have married you,” he said again, mournfully.

  Thank God you didn’t, I thought, playing with my lettuce. We were out at an expensive, deserted restaurant where the meal seemed without end.

  “You look really good you know,” he said and he smiled with that flashy habitual charm that no longer worked with his ruined face. “You look great. Look at you, all thin. You’re thinner than you’ve ever been.”

  “Uh, no, not really,” I said and I wondered if he’d always been this boring.

  Later, after the lunch, I wondered why I hadn’t said to him, hey Stavros, reality check for a moment. You’re a fat slob who needs cocaine and a hooker to get it up. You lost every cent of the pantyhose money you made. And, you looked so hard to find me, so I would what? Validate you were once a beautiful and remarkable boy I loved? And where, in all of this, do you get off telling me you should have married me and congratulating me because I’m finally thin? I should have got up and walked away.

  Stavros cheated on me for the last two years of our relationship with a tattooed, multi-pierced, skinny Goth girl. He betrayed my every confidence in love and myself. He loved her because she attacked him viciously whereas I tried to build him.

  I had gone to lunch with him because I didn’t want to think I had wasted my love or the four years of unspeakable grief and mourning I suffered when he left me.

  It’s funny how you can remember all that in the flash of an eye.

  I am thinking about it, while I talk to Fat Janet, telling her to ignore it all, to do what she wants and I think I manage to cheer her up.

  The truth is that Fat Janet’s a naturally very fat person, not like me who’s a naturally plump person. She’ll never even be naturally just round or pleasantly plump but always fat. Amazing how I can accept it so matter-of-factly for her but not me.

  But you know, even though she’s big like that, I don’t think she feels big at all. I mean, I don’t think she feels half as big as I do. In fact, no matter how much weight she m
ight carry, she’ll always feel like she’s not really big at all.

  She only agreed to go on the diet because her mother begged her and paid for it and her fiancé said if she lost twenty-five pounds, he’d buy her a whole new wardrobe.

  “Ditch the fucker now and send your mother to therapy,” I want to scream at the top of my lungs but of course I can’t.

  So instead I say, “New wardrobes are overrated.”

  Anyway, so now she is off her diet and she’ll go back to being fun and having fun.

  I seem to have lost track; what am I saying? Sometimes it’s hard to think straight; hard to keep all my ducks in a row when they’re so hungry, and it’s even harder to keep my hungry ducks thinking when they are trying so hard to stay in a row.

  Well, here’s the bottom line, the crux of the matter.

  I’m not fun because I can’t eat or drink. And I can’t be with people because when people are together, having fun, there’s always food and beverages involved.

  Fat Janet and Thin Lisa have fun every day because they are always down at the caf buying treats. Then at lunchtime they rush off to try a new restaurant they heard about and then they dash home to supper. What food do I have to dash home to?

  And there’s no way I can live with my bigger, dashing-to-eat-self; that wouldn’t be fun at all. That person would hate herself for having lost control. Everybody would see her lose control and how can she live with the shame of that? She can’t. She can tell other people about their empowered selves but she herself can’t be empowered because for her that means disgrace.

  Sometimes I try to pretend I love the things I eat, in the same way Thin Lisa and Fat Janet love their food. I delude myself into thinking I really am eating all the things I like but it’s only a delusion.

  Sometimes I believe it though, and then it’s easier.

  Mathew’s crusts

  MATHEW SUGGESTS DINNER. NOT AN industry thing, just the two of us.

  I panic. Oh God, where can we go? Everywhere is laden with butter and dressings and hidden fats. Even if I try to order the plainest things, I can sense the hidden fats. So if we do go, where to? Maybe the pasta place is the least of all evils. I can pick around a half-portion of Fettucine Arrabiata, which has tomatoes and garlic and chillies. Chillies speed up the metabolism.