6
I COULDN’T LIGHT a cigarette fast enough. In fact, even though I was scared that someone would catch me, I greedily inhaled a lungful of smoke before my car had driven off the lot. My first day had definitely been challenging, and not having a hiding place in which to smoke made it even worse. I hadn’t eaten all day either. But my need for food wasn’t from hunger as much as it was the need to fill a hole in my gut. Since I didn’t have to go to work the next couple of days, my brother Michael and I decided to meet at our favorite restaurant to celebrate my first day. When my husband left me, my brother moved in to my place. I loved that he lived with me. The living arrangement was to keep both of us company after my husband ran off with his wife. My husband ran off with his wife, so we kept each other company and we liked to go out for margaritas and Mexican food to commiserate. Or to celebrate. And after the day I’d had, I wasn’t sure which of those things I would be doing tonight. Naturally, he’d think we were celebrating and I wouldn’t let him think otherwise. He already thought I was a bit of a drama queen as it was.
“How did it go, Sissy?” He called me Sissy when he was happy to see me and the feeling was reciprocated. If I’d had a cute way of turning “brother” into something to express my love, I would’ve done it then, too. I just called him “brother.” Since moving to LA, he’d had to deal with a lot. He had married his longtime girlfriend, Renee, just before leaving Australia and the two newlyweds moved into an apartment in the same Melrose Place–style complex that was home to me and Mel. In the evenings, the four of us were inseparable, but during the day, when my brother and I were at work, Renee and Mel formed partnerships. They were professional partners in my husband’s cappuccino business and in his carpentry business. The fact that Renee would wear skimpy, lacy underwear clearly visible underneath her oversized, gaping overalls should have indicated to my brother and me that a personal partnership was also forming, but when Mel left me and Renee suddenly sabotaged her marriage to my brother to be with Mel, Brother and I were left idiotically scratching our heads in disbelief.
My brother’s first year in Los Angeles was tough. Apart from his wife falling in love with my husband, he had a great deal of drama in his new job as a manager of a biomedical engineering company. We had both come to the United States to pursue our dreams of a bigger, more challenging life. Either that or we were both really influenced by our father’s love of America after he came back from a business trip with stories of wide freeways and snowy mountains, fancy cars and Disneyland. In any case, the fact we both ended up here together was a blessing.
“It was great, Brother. The scene went well, the place is great, and the people are really nice.”
“That’s great. Table for two on the patio, please.”
“Certainly, sir, right this way.”
The Mexican restaurant was a dark, seedy place with greasy food and an outdoor patio where I could smoke. I started smoking when I was fourteen for two very good reasons: to win over the cool girl at school with the shaved head and to suppress my appetite—a tip taught to me by my modeling colleagues. While I never really became friends with the cool girl, I did learn that the more I smoked, the less I’d eat, which is particularly important when you sit down to dinner at a Mexican restaurant. So despite its average food, the fact that this restaurant was the closest one to our house with an outdoor patio made it my favorite.
As I smoked and talked and allowed the tension of my day to melt into my margarita, I made the decision to eat nachos. The blend of cheese and sour cream with the crispiness of the corn chips and creaminess of guacamole will always turn a sour mood into a happy one. A peace came over me when I ate food like that. Like life had no other purpose than pure enjoyment. I had nowhere to go and nothing to accomplish. For that moment, I could put life on hold and believe I was perfect the way I was. I was focused in the present—in the moment—and the moment was bliss on a corn chip.
I hadn’t eaten any bad food since the day at Banana Republic when I decided to get professional, and I really felt like I needed to reward myself for all the hard work that went into getting into that size 6 suit. Besides, I’d made too much of a big deal out of it, anyway. The suits were very conservative and would easily hide a pound or two. I didn’t need to be rail thin to wear them. So I didn’t feel bad when I ordered an additional meal of enchiladas. I simply wouldn’t eat the following day.
“So that idiot in lab went over my head today and told Chris . . .” As he talked about his lab geeks and his psychotic boss, I wondered how he’d take the news that I was gay. I hadn’t told him yet because it was too soon after my marriage to Mel and I was afraid he wouldn’t believe me. Of the few people I’d told, most didn’t believe me for some reason. Some thought it was a phase, some thought I was just saying it to be different, to get attention. It’s a particularly bad reaction because sharing that deep secret with someone takes a lot of courage, and disbelief feels like ridicule. Like two little girls together is something silly not to be taken seriously. I simply couldn’t risk my brother reacting that way. He was all I had.
I kept ordering margaritas and eating enchiladas, and when I was done with mine, I got to work on his. After the main course was over, I went back to the appetizers we’d been served at the beginning of the evening and ate the last of the corn chips with the puddle of salsa that was left in the stone bowl. I was amused at the thought that an appetizer was supposed to stimulate appetite and I silently congratulated ours for doing its job.
As my brother and I finished up our conversation, our watered-down drinks, the last drag of a cigarette, I knew I’d done some damage. There was a dull ache in my gut and a layer of fat on the roof of my mouth that proved it. It’s a weird sensation knowing that you’ve just altered your course. In a fleeting moment of arrogance, in one self-congratulatory thought, I decided I was good enough, that I could stop right there. My quest for perfection, for discipline, for greatness, was over. I’d reached my goal. I had nothing more to do. I’d completed one day of work, worn the suit with the character in it, and done a good job, and that was enough. As I got up from the table, I looked down at the wreckage. I saw the ugly plastic checkered tablecloth and the flimsy utensils for the first time that night. I saw the cigarette ash on the table, pools of water dripped from the glasses that were cloudy with greasy fingers, lipstick-tipped butts in an overflowing ashtray that wasn’t clean to begin with. And then there was the food. Food looks so ugly when it’s half-eaten and torn apart. The refried beans smeared on the plate looked like feces, and the browning guacamole and clumps of rice looked like vomit. What disgusted me the most in this grotesque tableau was that the cheese from the enchiladas had a wide greasy ring around it that separated it from the plate. Like a beach separated land from the ocean. I had ingested a beach of grease. I grabbed my keys from underneath a few grains of rice that had spilled over the edge of my plate during this mindless, repetitious act of filling my mouth with food and headed out to the car.
There’s a big difference between eating and what I had just done. What I’d done was an act of defiance.
I pulled away from the curb and lined up behind my brother’s car that was barely visible through the curtain of exhaust smoke that separated us. The bright red stoplight reflected off the black road and as I sat there on the cold leather seat, I wondered who I was being defiant toward. You’re only hurting yourself, was the phrase I kept thinking, and while I knew that was true, why did my bingeing feel like someone else was going to be pissed off and hurting, too? Was anyone else really invested in my weight and how I treated my body? All I thought about when I continued to eat after the initial rush of the food wore off, after the taste became familiar, and after my stomach was full was HA HA! You can’t stop me! But who was I saying that to? As I drove down the road toward home, now separated from my brother by several cars and a lane or two, I wondered if my little act of rebellion was over for now or if it would continue with a stop at 7-Eleven.