“Fuck insight,” I said, and slammed the trunk shut.
CHAPTER 11
On day 7 of the detox, I went over to Yo!Good for my usual 16-ounce no-topping delight, only to discover that the Orthodox boy wasn’t working. In his place was a woman who looked to be my age—maybe a little younger, twenty-two or twenty-three. She was very pale, with light blue eyes and a braid of wheat-blond hair. Her eyebrows were gold, eyelashes nearly white. Her fair complexion made her other features seem surprising—as though I forgot that lips could be pink, and then, in looking at her mouth, remembered again.
On one of her round cheeks was a small brown beauty mark, like a caramel chip from the toppings bar. There was a rosiness to her cheeks, a natural flush that swept over the beauty mark, interacting with it, bathing it in a wash of color. On her neck was a triangle of three darker moles: a dark chocolate drop on her Adam’s apple, framed by two milk chocolate drops to the left. She looked both Jewish and not Jewish at the same time—but there was something distinctly Jewish about her, a shtetl essence that perhaps only a fellow Jew could detect.
Above all, she was fat: undeniably fat, irrefutably fat. She wasn’t thick, curvy, or chubby. She surpassed plump, eclipsed heavy. She was fat, and she exceeded my worst fears for my own body.
But it was as though she didn’t know or care that she was fat. If she were concerned with hiding her body, she could have worn something baggy and black. Instead, she’d stuffed herself into a straight-cut, pale blue cotton dress, modest in its long sleeves and ankle-length skirt, but otherwise revealing every stomach roll, side bulge, and back fold of her body. The soft fabric stretched and sheered as it detoured her hips and ass. Her breasts were enormous—an F cup? a G cup?—but the dress did nothing to flatter them. The dress was there and the breasts were there, and neither was cooperating with the other.
When she caught me staring at her, she said, “What can I get for you?” She said it nicely and briskly, as though she didn’t care that I’d been staring.
“I’ll have the sugar-free, fat-free cappuccino swirled with the sugar-free, fat-free cheesecake,” I said. “Medium.”
She reached for a large cup.
“No,” I said. “Medium. The sixteen-ounce one.”
She put the large cup back and picked up a medium cup.
“Oh,” I said. “Also, I—only want it filled to the top of the cup. Like, not over the lip.”
She nodded that she understood. Then she pulled the lever and I heard the whirr of the machine. I watched closely as she rotated the cup under the swirling yogurt. She was good, precise, leaving no pockets of air, just how I liked it. But as the yogurt approached the top of the cup, she showed no signs of slowing down.
“That’s enough,” I said softly.
She didn’t stop. The yogurt took a full lap above the rim.
“That’s enough!” I called out, loudly this time.
She released the lever on the machine, halting the flow of yogurt. Then she turned to me.
“It’s priced by cup size, not by weight. We won’t charge you for the extra.”
“Oh,” I said casually. “Okay.”
She pulled the lever again and the flow of yogurt resumed. The swirls piled higher and higher, forming a creamy, glistening castle that towered high above the cup.
“What toppings do you want?” she asked, clearly not yet finished with destroying my life.
“Um, none. That’s okay as it is,” I said.
“Nothing?” she asked.
“Yeah, I like it plain.”
She looked at me incredulously, but I couldn’t worry about what she thought, because I had other problems. There were 32 ounces of yogurt in my 16-ounce cup. I needed a strategy.
I could eat the Northern Hemisphere of the yogurt down to the rim, then throw the southern half away. But that seemed sad to me. Who wanted to stop? It would be much more pleasant to lop off the top half and then have the rest of the cup to enjoy. But where could I get rid of it? I couldn’t just throw the offending portion away in front of her. I was going to have to go outside to do surgery on the yogurt.
I found a trash can by the curb and was then met with another problem: it had no hole. It was one of those California-architectural sanitation masterpieces with a puny slot. There was no way to dump out the offending portion of yogurt all at once. I could scoop off small spoonfuls gradually, but then I needed leverage—something upon which to tap the spoon and release the blobs of yogurt into the slot. I wasn’t about to touch the spoon to the can.
I scooped a small spoonful of yogurt out of the cup. Then I rapped the spoon against my phone, just over the slot. This rapping motion provided enough friction to dislodge the yogurt. I scooped again. Then rapped. Scooped. Rapped. I became so focused in my work that I didn’t see NPR Andrew walking right by me.
“Hi, Rachel,” he said.
I looked up, mid-rap. He was wearing earbuds and sunglasses. He had a smirk on his tiny face. He continued walking.
So the little shit had witnessed my process. I felt violated, disgraced. I prayed that he couldn’t fully comprehend what he had seen. At the very least, he knew it was something freaky.
Well, my yogurt was ready. I could eat in self-disgust and peace. I stood in the sunlight, licking the melty parts first, then transitioning into the ritual of spooning and squishing it against my teeth. Coffee and cheesecake was a good combo. Sublime, really.
CHAPTER 12
The trash can incident marked the beginning of a new phase: the era of yogurt interruptus. In the days that followed, the Orthodox boy never returned to work. In his place was always the zaftig girl, and there was no controlling her.
Each time she reached the lip of the cup, I’d call out, “Okay!” or “All good!” or “Whoa Nelly!”
But my Mayday cries only inspired her to hit the accelerator. Then she’d bring me my heaping yogurt and remind me, “We charge by cup size, not by weight.”
I tried going to Yogurt World instead. The cup was the size of a fucking thimble.
An amuse-bouche, I said to myself. Petit, chic, just a taste, lovely in a Parisian way. But I was no Parisian.
I returned to Yo!Good with a new plan. After my yogurt was served, I would go around to the alley behind the store and eliminate the surplus in their spacious dumpster. Then I could enjoy my dessert blissfully, surrounded by flies and the stench of hot trash.
It was a vile, genius solution, and it worked as anticipated—until I got busted decapitating a peanut-butter-and-cake-batter swirl.
“The yogurt isn’t good today?” asked the zaftig girl.
She was carrying two big bags of garbage.
“No,” I said quickly. “Guess I should have stuck with coffee-cheesecake.”
She nodded, then pulled out a cigarette and put it in her mouth. It was strange to see someone smoking in LA. The cigarette was a clove, which was always one of my favorites. In my anorexia heyday, I’d smoked clove cigarettes with diet hot chocolate and counted it as a meal. But this woman probably wasn’t smoking as a meal. She was smoking because—she liked it.
I stared at the smoke moving in and out of her mouth. It looked as though she were exhaling a tree shape, one thick stream like a trunk and then little streams blowing off of it like branches.