Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen

by Hannah Howard

I am Odysseus and the cookies are sugar sirens.

I use the food because it works. It is an instant cure to whatever ails me, save the paltry price of the morning after—waking up and needing to barf and not being able to, vowing to eat nothing for a day, a week; the self-imposed, relentless suffering.

Sure, food is my answer to anxiety, sadness, boredom, anger, but also to excitement, possibility, and joy.

Food blots everything out and calms everything down, draws the shades and tucks me in. Cozy. Miserable. Numb.

After devouring the cookies and the complete contents of my kitchen, I am still anxious and lonely.

My trusty companion has let me down. All that food has done nothing to quiet my demons. I cannot escape myself.

On my best days, I don’t want to be like everyone else.

I am the tallest, towering, ungainly. The only Jew in my class, and then one of only two. In a sea of blondes, my hair is nearly black. I am a city girl among suburban princesses. But most importantly, I am not thin enough. This sums it all up. This is my curse, my refrain, true as my name.

The cool girls don’t worry about weight, or so I imagine. They are effortlessly, magically skinny.

She tells me about Helen, her own mom, who died a few months before I was born. I have her Hebrew name. Helen chain-smoked and drank martinis and read libraries worth of books. She was stylish, with wrists as thin as reeds. When my mom gained weight, Helen panicked. Her criticism was razor sharp and stinging.

When I visit Steph or Amanda or Jen for sleepovers, my mind explodes with the bounty of junk food: crackers, cookies, sugary cereal, chips, gummy things, chocolate goodies, rows of brightly colored packages that contain immense promise. My childhood friends’ cabinets are the stuff of my wildest dreams.

After a few minutes, Steph, Jen, and Amanda lose interest in the brownies, the Cheetos and Cheez-Its and Oreos we’ve been nibbling. I never lose interest. I finish the last of the brownies, scraping off the icing that has hardened around the tray’s edges while they move on to debating who is the most popular, or the best songs of Third Eye Blind, and weaving gigantic, serious plans for the rest of our lives:

I read. No matter how lonely I feel, how much an outsider, how fat, I am welcome in the world of words, stories, poems.

Skinnier, of course. Skinnier is everything. Skinniness is next to godliness.

I sign up for a commercial diet program and count my food. It doesn’t feel like enough, not even close, but hunger seems a small price to pay for liking myself, for not dreaming of carving away the flesh below my belly button, the sides of my butt.

Cheesy days win over cheeseless days, every time. Cheese is a living, breathing food that coagulates, ferments, molds, breathes, ages, oozes, and sings.

I pass out in Pilates class, which I go to every morning, pumping my arms until they feel not like arms but like angry ghosts.

I wonder if he has rejected me because I am getting fatter, fat. I wish I could take back that dining hall meal.

No matter how thin I get, it is not enough. I know what these people do not: at my core, I am a fat girl, and always will be.

I’ve heard society described as bulimic. I buy it. All and nothing. Extremes, full tilt, full blast. Excess and deprivation and then more excess to ease the agony of all that deprivation. Holiday feasts and New Year’s resolutions. Steak dinners and juice cleanses. Cronuts and colonics.

my ruthless taskmaster who taunts and scolds and reviles me all day, every day, chanting “you fat piece of shit” until I vibrate with the echo of its torment.

I am empty of everything I crave: good food, meaning, love.

Slowly we get Ari’s crew together. They come and they actually stay. They move like dancers in the tiny kitchen. They know all the steps, they finish each other’s sentences, fight with their hearts flung open, would fuck up someone for each other.

I take the pictures from her hands. “Thank you so much, Margot.” I slip a disk into the computer in the tiny office I share in the hotel across the garden. Oh my god. Oh my god. I have to eject the disc immediately I am so mortified. I see a whale, a monster. My arms look like Ari’s homemade sausages, overstuffed in puckering skin. The flesh of my belly folds over my jeans. I wish I could unsee these photos, take it all back. Why did Margot say I looked good when I look grotesque?

Her hair is big and she is tiny, her waist maybe the size of one of my thighs, if that. She wears a suit with a jacket super-cinched to show this off. I think her organs must be miniature to fit inside her pinprick body, like bird organs.

“I ate to fill the God-sized hole in my soul. I kept eating and eating and it was never enough.”

“Hi, this is my first meeting. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to eat until it hurt.

When my coworkers are around, the box of vice and torture stays quiet. But when the chocolate and I are left alone, anything is possible.

Being wounded isn’t wrong. Being wounded is human. That is my beginning.

know my eyes are broken because I see the picture from a college party. It is senior year, and so there are more parties than ever. Facebook tells me today is seven years later. Seven years ago, seeing that picture was a hot slap. My arms! They looked fat as the sausages hanging in stout rounds in windows in Little Italy, I was sure. I was sure I looked less like a human girl and more like a bovine. Because of the picture, I forbade myself the indulgent luxury of dinner. Because of that picture, I ran on the elliptical until I ran out of songs on my little green iPod. I swathed myself in my red quilt and read and read and stopped to cry and then to pass out. The next morning, I threw away the dress, the evidence. As if it were the dress’s fault. Seven years later, I look again. My arms are wrapped around Urs, and they look like fine arms to me now, good human arms, not even particularly fat. Our smiles are wide and true. I am sad for my former self, sad that I missed seeing all that love, riding its waves. All I could see were my arms, and, I now realize, I couldn’t even see them.

Still, I wake up with that feeling that I am a monster. Even my organs are monster organs, my monster kidneys and monster spleen cry out. My monster body is a betrayal. I try to remember that I felt a monster seven years ago, felt it to be true as anything, and yet I was not a monster, not even close.

What would my life be like if I believed I was beautiful?

I hope that if I have daughters, children, I won’t pass on this particular pain. I’m sure they will have their own problems, but I hope they see me licking a cone of gelato with joy. I hope when they look in the mirror they smile.

I notice that the people who love me do not love me more or less if I am thinner or heavier.

My eating disorder is all about me, me, me. A selfish beast. It tricks me into thinking that if I can shrink enough, I will be safe and loved and admired. But I am safe and loved and admired just as I am, no matter what size I wear, even if I have to tell myself this a million times over to half believe it.