Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen

by Hannah Howard

Life is big and scary. Food is constant, safe, dependable. Food blots everything out and calms everything down, draws the shades and tucks me in. Cozy. Miserable. Numb.

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

When my eyes meet my own face, my body, I fantasize about lopping off whole parts: the flesh of my preteen thighs, inches of height.

The boobs come next, and fast. I am less excited about them. When I run in gym class, in basketball practice, they tug at me. They are in the way. They make me take up more space, and taking up space is the worst curse. I blame them for feeling perpetually bulky and thundering. I feel like a cartoonish matron with a mountain range of a bosom. I long for cuteness. I am twelve.

They unwrap their burgers. Everybody is happy.

I feel grown-up, hanging out alone with book and bagel.

I am going to write the great American novel and have my own cooking show.

It's there a novel in the works?

We leaf through photo albums of before-and-after breasts. My mom and I pass the silicone model boobs back and forth, holding them up to my chest, trying them on for size.

My mom signs a clipboard full of papers, and we schedule the surgery for after poetry camp. There will be a few weeks to recover before my senior year of high school starts.

Example of the honesty of this memoir, dealing in straightforward way with intensely private experiences.

Are we all destined to be unhappy with our bodies?

I want a boyfriend more than anything.

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

All the activities. All the studying. I am proving something to myself. I am trying so very hard to prove it.

I jump up and down and up and down—my dream school, my dream. I try to play it cool in fencing practice but I can’t stop smiling. I will recreate myself, embark on my new, shiny, fabulous NYC life. I will be reborn. And so: a diet.

I’ll be eighteen in a month. I don’t understand why this is so important. It’s not my fault, my age.”

“Your face is a ten, but your body is a six,” he says, unprompted. “I’m only grading you harshly because you have such potential. You could be a ten, even, if you lost some weight, got in great shape.”

Food, my great love, my great tormenter.

Dating an old(er) man is thrilling, wonderful, and weird.

“being skinny is such a strange part of beauty. It’s not the most important part. It’s just the only part you can control.”

This is what it takes to work in this New York institution: smile, be skinny, and have an Ivy League education, even just one semester.

I’ve found my people, my place. It’s everything I thought it would be, reading Kitchen Confidential behind the gelato cart. When I get back to my dorm room after my shift, the buzz still surges through my veins.

“Hostesses are the trophy wives of the restaurant biz,” my coworker tells me. “The point is to be fuckable.”

Between walking aging hedge fund guys and tourists to their tables and directing guests toward the restrooms—with an outstretched palm, never point—I

Why?

Cheese possesses magic powers. Cheese makes people happy.

We swirl wine and pop champagne and take notes. My mind explodes. In this chandeliered restaurant with a coat closet full of furs, I feel alive.

Because I don’t believe I am likable, even for a second, attention from men surprises me, every time.

The lady always gets the banquette,

Love, dread. The foie gras, the caviar, the chandelier, the fresh flowers taller than I am, the love, the sex. I am eighteen and this is it, all there is, my enemies, my salvation.

subject. I am not ready to talk to anyone about what I do and don’t do with food. I am barely ready to admit it to myself.

My goal is to be so thin that it’s okay, necessary, that I eat. Once I get to some magical, impossible land of skinnydom, I will stop starving and start living.

I have that anorexic twist of the brain. Skinnier is better, always, when it comes to my own body, tall, unwieldy.

He rapes me in the parking lot of his home or wherever we are, then drives me to Hoboken. We do not exchange any words.

I don’t tell anyone about what happened that night, not even Urs, not even the therapist—a woman paid to listen to my problems.

Why not?

Anorexia is the most fatal mental illness.

The binges become longer, more epic, ferocious. I eat as an act of total self-destruction. I lose my iron will to starve myself. I gain weight. I hate myself more than I ever thought possible.

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.

All that fierce, exhausting, exhilarating channeling of all the willpower I can muster, and then letting it go, shattering it, the glee of the fuck it, the unyoking of myself from myself, from 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.

If only I could walk the tightrope, but over and over again, I fall on my ass.

“Can we go out for a drink?” Josh asks me. “And are you twenty-one?” “I’ll be twenty-one in no time.” Josh has just turned forty-one.

Josh is everything I want to be: welcome in all of New York’s best restaurants, a bon vivant, a brilliant, famous writer. And he is everything I fear: fat.

I am jealous of Josh. I want to be a famous glutton.

One day I will be in the center of this world. They won’t tell me, side-eyed, “Oh, you’re Josh’s friend.” They will say to Josh, “You must be Hannah’s friend.” And he will nod and say, “I knew her way back when.”

Has this happened yet?

I want to write things people talk about.

I am about to turn twenty-two and realize I don’t know anyone to invite to celebrate with me.

His advice—be more confident, know everything going on, set the pace, be relentless—is always right.

All subway ride home, the lights blur, my heart whizzes down the dirty subway tracks.

Serious chefs are apt to sneer at vegetarians, to regard them with a pure and fiery hatred.

My mom gives me good advice: “If he’s going to be your boyfriend, he’s going to be around during the mellow times and the busy times. He’s going to be part of your life, not separate from it. It’s okay that you’re busy. See if he can support you through

“You don’t understand,” he says. I notice I am starting to hate this man I thought I loved.

Since I have been no-longer-an-official-anorexic, I have not weighed myself. I know I weigh more than I used to, but I have no concept of how much.