Smart women are supposed to say certain things. You are supposed to say, “I care about being healthy, not skinny.” Or “[Insert female celebrity] looked better when she wasn’t so skinny. When she looked normal.” All women encourage one another to eat. They say, “I’m so jealous of your curves,” as they think, “Yeah, eat more, fatty.” I wanted nothing more than to be rail thin and say, “It’s so annoying. I eat so much and can’t ever gain weight.”
I opened a peach Greek yogurt. I had been subsisting on yogurt for the last seven days. I was tired of eating things with the consistency of baby food. When you are not eating, you are scared of yourself. Scared you will accidentally run out and buy a pizza. It’s important to eat something so the hunger won’t build to the point that you do something crazy, like buy a jar of peanut butter thinking one bite won’t hurt, and then you’re like, fuck it, and eat the whole thing. As soon as I ate a bite of the yogurt, I felt like a failure.
You are living on an average of 120 to 400 calories a day, and 800 calories a day is considered a starvation diet. You feel empty and light. You feel like a winner, above those losers who have to fill their hole three times a day and then complain they are fat. You have plenty of energy with nothing in your belly. It’s terrifying how fast this becomes normal. You can’t eat the peach ooze at the bottom.
The more you want to be free of food, the more obsessed you become with it.
Eating so little makes your taste buds restless. You crave salt, sugar, hot sauce, mustard, pickles. Your tongue wants to come out of retirement and be alive. Weird food combinations. Using a tomato to shovel spicy mustard into your mouth, and in between, a squeeze of honey. You are basically eating garbage.
Sometimes I felt like I was pushing against the day, and it wouldn’t go anywhere. I sat in the chair. Dust particles in the light. I stared into the mirror. I lifted my shirt. I sucked in my stomach and thought, This is how it would look.
Sometimes I sat around and hated my body. I hated how when I got fat it was all in my belly, so I looked pregnant. I was top-heavy, with my belly, huge tits, and fatty armpits being carried by two stick legs. If I were a doll, I would be falling over constantly. My armpits were fat and stupid. I hated how my thighs touched on the toilet seat. I hated how these giant hairs came out of my neck, like, “Where the fuck did that come from?” How so much of my life was spent tweezing and shaving and waxing. My big, sloppy tits. When I ran to the bus it was a scene. I had no ass. It was like a disfigurement, how my back had this little bit of fat hanging with a split in it. I wanted to tear my tits off and stuff all the fat into my ass so I’d have one of those asses men could imagine slapping as they fucked it.
Ogden said, “You’re cute.” Cute meant you were a chubby girl with a nice face. All his exes were around my age and looked horse-faced and like they would never stop talking about boring things.
One of Ogden’s exes wrote a memoir about her rich, boring life and her brief addiction to coke.
“Finally all the drug cliché memories, put in a blender and into one book.” —New York Times
“Good for killing small bugs.” —Chicago Tribune
“Another piece of garbage written by a privileged white woman with too much time on her hands, to whom the world somehow has given the impression that it gives a shit about her stupid life.” —Everyone who has ever read it
“Ogden, she sounds so boring I almost died,” I’d said to him after I read it. He stared at me blankly, and then said, “Nah, she was great.” He really did think she was great. If I were a guy, I wouldn’t have fucked her with your dick. He probably thought it was great how dumb and boring a woman could be.
It’s not fair how you could be this white girl with a busted face and still be picked in the gym class of life before all the pretty brown girls. It didn’t matter how smart and cool you were. All these chill liberal guys who were all PC but only wanted to put their cock in white girls. They could be unfair with their love and there wasn’t a damn thing you could about it.
The whole world wants young white girls.
You have to play dumb. Guys like being smart and funny. If you want to compete with white girls, the least you can do is learn to laugh at jokes, not make them up. To ask lots of questions and not tell stories.
Sometimes I wondered if there was a correlation between Peter always buying himself the crappy stuff and him choosing me: a thrifty, generic brown one, instead of name-brand white one with blond hair. He had rummaged through the bin and said, “This brown one will do. It has all the same parts as the white one.” He liked things that were a little damaged or messed up. It gave him some kind of weird thrill. He mistook damage for having character.
Peter picked me, and I was throwing myself at an old man who would never ever pick me over a white girl. Sometimes when I was with Ogden, I thought too long about how Peter had really meant his vows, and a terrible feeling came over me that made my heart race. It was scary to have that kind of responsibility. I wished I could just fuck it up already so he would go. The idea of being totally faithful to Peter and trying my best to make it work filled me with dread and anxiety, because what would I hold on to if he left me? I knew deep down that Peter would leave me, so why would I stay faithful to him? Ogden was my safety net. Hopefully that meant I wouldn’t hit the ground too hard when it all blew up in my face.
I woke up at 4:25. I had five minutes to get to work. I spent the first three with my face buried in a throw pillow. I spent the last two looking for the last of the “emergency” dope before I remembered I did it all before Peter left earlier.
I emptied the drawers looking for a T-shirt. You can never find the thing you’re looking for.
I felt like a mess in a mess. What if I were forty and digging through the same pile of clothes, looking for the same T-shirt, with no family or friends left? Do some lives stop like that? Everyone leaves, and nothing else happens.
You think, I only have this much time. I have to do important things. But then you can’t think of any important things.
I stared at myself in the mirror. What about this face made it mine? I scratched off an ice cream stain from my thermal. I felt a dread knotted in the back of my hair and ripped it apart. It was easy for everyone to wake up and shower and brush their teeth, but I lived between the days, so it was hard to know when to do these things.
The courtyard was a major selling point when I had come to see the apartment — large, grassy, with manicured rows of flowers and a few trees. The type of thing people in New York City made out to be a big deal. “Wow, look at this.”
I bought the apartment with the money I had inherited when my father died.
My father had been thirty years older than my mom. He died at the age of ninety. I kept waiting to feel something after he died, like maybe there was some love stored up for him deep in my psyche, but the only tears that came were for my mother, who looked so gentle and broken at the funeral.
I felt bad for not feeling worse. People always talked about not getting over the death of a parent. When I said my father was dead, everyone was so sympathetic that I felt like a fraud.