I’d been there once and allowed myself exactly 180 calories’ worth of candy. Now I dove in without counting: jelly beans, Hershey’s kisses, candy corn, laissez sweets! I was exuberant in the Cadbury eggs, wild with the Haribo cherries.
I lingered over a bin containing little white and purple discs, chalky and nickel-size. The discs had appeared in a movie I’d once seen about a boy who was dying of a terminal illness. I’d forgotten what illness he had, but I remembered clearly the way his mother snuck the discs into the hospital to try and get him to eat.
“I brought your favorite cahndies,” she said, pronouncing it like that, cahndies. Was there a more melancholy way to pronounce anything?
As a child, I’d seen a wide range of nonterminal illnesses amongst my young friends, as well as the delicious food cures their mothers provided. I’d prayed that I would contract tonsillitis (ice cream), a stomach virus (ginger ale), chicken pox (oatmeal bath), the flu (chicken noodle soup), swollen glands (lollipops), tooth pain (Popsicles), the common cold (more chicken noodle soup), strep throat (raw honey). But I was cursed with perfect health.
I made retching noises in the bathroom, choked on faux phlegm, blew empty air into a tissue, clutched my throat.
“Ack-ack! Ack-ack!” I hammed it up. “Honey. Must have raw honey.”
“You’re fine,” said my mother. “Honey is fattening.”
It was like I’d spent my entire life trying to get honey and then trying to avoid it. I wondered what I would have done with all that life if it hadn’t been defined like that. The freedom seemed enormous, monstrous.
I brought my bag of candy and the burrito into the office and put them in my desk drawer. Then I stopped at Ana’s desk to see if anyone had noticed I was gone.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Ofer is on a panel this afternoon, something about ‘queering the script.’ ”
“Ofer is queer?”
“No, he’s speaking from the perspective of the ally.”
“Oh.”
“Not that anyone wants him as an ally.”
I laughed, feeling the weight of my stomach heavy with food. It was strange to be so changed yet know that I looked no different to her. I made sure she was on a phone call before I went and microwaved my burrito in the kitchen. I didn’t want her to see me using the microwave like one of the office commoners, stinking it up in there.
After the burrito was microwaved, I placed it on my desk with a few of the salsas. The cacti that sheltered me from NPR Andrew’s view were still standing guard, but it didn’t matter. I felt so languid and self-contained with my burrito, already full from the rest of my feast, that I could simply take small pieces and dip them in the salsa like a normal person. I wanted him to absorb my portrayal of ease. Yes, I was performing a one-woman show about a person who could simply take or leave a burrito, no biggie, just coolly have a burrito at rest on her desk, no obsession, no fear, a sane food woman, a woman to whom food was only one facet of a very expansive life, the burrito simply a prop, a trifle to be toyed with, a second thought, a third thought, even.
The day went so much faster with the burrito and candy to pick from. I imagined how much more pleasurable my life would be at work if I had this every day. Life was a lot less bleak when you were staring straight down the barrel of a burrito. Was this how some people lived all the time?
At home, I continued to eat throughout the night: Easy Cheese in a can, SpaghettiOs, half a large bag of Cool Ranch Doritos—all purchased from 7-Eleven—plus the remainder of the candy and baked goods, and a large container of takeout pad thai. I ate and ate until the clock struck midnight, then threw away all of the remaining food. I took the trash bag out to the garbage cans on the street and let everything go into the trash.
Then I got into bed, feeling like a blimp, a whale, but perfectly done: sated, tranquilized, as though I’d been fucked very well. The only thing left to do was pop a piece of nicotine gum. I smiled, parked the gum between my molars and my cheek, and drifted gently off to sleep.
CHAPTER 18
I woke up to my alarm in a great terror. I couldn’t remember exactly what had happened the day before, but I knew it had been bad. As I pieced together what I’d eaten, I could taste some of it in my mouth, in the sour, acidic parts of undigested food that came up: a hint of salsa, a lone SpaghettiO. My stomach hurt from the bottom to the top, like I had to take a massive shit that snaked itself in coils and knots and would never end. But the worst pain was in the middle, where I felt a strange emptiness despite the incalculable food that I had eaten. I had stretched my stomach, made too much space. I felt like I still needed more food, to return to what had hurt me, to soothe all that I had done.
Put something in me, said my stomach. Give me something calming.
But I could not and would not oblige. I no longer kept a scale in my apartment. In my laxative years, I’d weighed myself ten times a day: every time I shit or pissed. If I’d learned anything from that self-torture, it was that if I owned a scale I’d never get off it. But now I felt I had gained at least ten pounds. I made a resolution that for the next three days, I was only going to eat protein bars so I could keep perfect track of my calories. I felt disgusting. I imagined the food I had consumed simmering in my stomach, just beginning to make its way slowly out to different parts of my body: my hips, my stomach, my arms. Was I going to look like Miriam? Was I becoming a frozen yogurt girl: soft, sloppy, melting?
I thought about Dr. Mahjoub and the missing clay figure. I didn’t believe in The Secret or vision boarding or creative visualization or any of that other LA drivel. And yet, I wondered if it was possible that I had somehow The Secret–ed this woman.
That night, I googled voodoo doll. I ended up on someone’s Etsy page, featuring an array of ugly gingerbread-man-looking stuffed dolls—said to be handmade in Brooklyn. I googled Jewish voodoo doll and found an article about anti-Semitism in Turkey. I googled Jewish Frankenstein and read a biography of Mel Brooks. Then I googled Jewish monster.
A golem (/’goʊləm/ GOH-ləm; Hebrew: גולם) is an animated anthropomorphic being found in Jewish folklore that is created magically from inanimate matter—usually clay or mud. The golem possesses infinite meanings, and can function as a metaphor for that which is sought in the life of its creator.
Well, I certainly hadn’t sought out yogurt sundaes, that was for sure. I continued reading:
The most famous golem was said to have been created by Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the late-sixteenth-century rabbi of Prague, who made a golem to defend the Jews from anti-Semitic attacks. Some think the golem is real. Others believe it is symbolic and refers to a spiritual awakening.
In one picture, the golem looked like King Kong. In another, it looked like something of a hulk: the Jolly Green Giant or Andre the Giant. In no picture did the golem look anything like Miriam or me or a young me or the psychedelic woman I’d made or Dr. Mahjoub or even frozen yogurt.
I googled Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel and found a painting of him. He was old and had a beard down to his feet. He was smiling. He looked nice.
CHAPTER 19
They say the perfect is the enemy of the good, that if you strive for perfection you will overlook the good. But I did not agree. I didn’t like the good. The good was just mediocre. I wanted to go beyond mediocre. I wanted to be exceptional. I did not want to be medium-size. I wanted to be perfect. And by perfect, I meant less.