Milk Fed

by Melissa Broder

It seemed strange that mothers like Dr. Mahjoub existed in the world—mothers who supported their daughters.

I began dating him by default when one night, in his car, he put his hand on my thigh and I was too hungry and tired to deal with moving it. I ended things a few months later, when I got the energy to move it.

I could never tell if other people genuinely believed their own bullshit or not. I felt genuinely perplexed about it—especially at work lunches, but frequently in my nonlunch life too. At times like this, I longed to break the fourth wall, to whisper, Hey, just between us: Is this a performance or is it really what you believe?

What I wanted most was for this certified hot person to see a hotness in me, thereby verifying, once and for all, that I was hot.

It was a treat that a child would receive from a caring older person who wanted to reward them just for existing.

It would be like cutting off my head because of a headache. But I was so tired of my head.

It was strange to be so changed yet know that I looked no different to her.

if I owned a scale I’d never get off it.

I thought about how I used to watch my mother sleep sometimes, how innocent she looked with her hands tucked under the pillow. In those moments, I saw her as a little girl, and I felt that nothing was her fault—just a chain of fears and feelings passed down from generation to generation. In those moments I thought, You can show her how to love you better by being loving to her. But it was easier to be loving when the person was asleep.

She really exists, I thought, as though up until this point I’d thought the yogurt shop were an alternate reality, which vanished along with everything in it when I left.

“More duck sauce,” she said, thrusting the bowl at him, as though it were his fault for not knowing we’d decided to bathe in it.

I knew that I wanted to taste each of her moles: the caramel one on her cheek, the dark chocolate drop on her Adam’s apple, the two milk chocolate drops on the left.

People in LA were always recommending things that were more about themselves than the recipient. They recommended obsessively—films, Netflix series—as though their association with a piece of media imbued them with sex appeal, intelligence, an irresistible whimsy.

But in my desire to curate Miriam, I’d become just another version of an obsessive recommender. I wanted to show the world how beautiful she was, to present a different type of beauty, and in doing so, to own part of her. I felt that if the world embraced Miriam, I’d be healing something in me—making amends with young Rachel. But I didn’t entirely trust the world to grasp her beauty. So I sweetened the pot with little aesthetic upgrades.

Now she wanted to introduce me to her family? This seemed very intimate, kind of fast. Or was it just an abundance of platonic friendliness in her, a kind and generous nature, nothing to do with romance?

I smelled something roasting, some kind of meat, and immediately thought, Turn around Run. The intimacy of it, the smell of another family’s life, was terrifying.

Could you will the darkness away? Could you banish it and say, No, this does not exist for me? Was it okay to dissolve in the beauty of fantasy if you found yourself able?

Maybe we were remaking each other.

This one was empty too. Now I really wanted a pistachio.

She was rejecting that world before it rejected her again. But that didn’t mean she didn’t secretly want to live there.

The hand-holding had felt like an arrival, an answer to a question, a resounding yes. But the dropping of my hand seemed like another, more final answer.

We were just two girls holding hands and eating candy in a movie theater, that was all. But my desire: I was sick with it.

If you weren’t Orthodox, then would you want to continue kissing me? Oh, Miriam, maybe that was enough, just that you wanted to. I wondered if you wanted me, and you did!

If I did not love Miriam, if it was purely attraction, then I felt that I would never know what love was—and I did not care to know.

“Crickets,” she said finally. “What?” “There’re crickets outside. In the grass.” I had never noticed them before. But now that she’d pointed them out, they were all I could hear. I felt enveloped by their chirping.

I felt that all that had ever happened before was happening right now—and that everything happening right now would happen forever. There was a love that had always existed between women. It would continue to exist. We were propagating that love. It was radiating out my apartment windows, through the city, across the canyons, over the hills, and into the night sky.

“Even if she is dead wrong?” I asked. “Wrong about what?” asked Miriam. “That two women together are… disgusting!” “Yes, even if she’s wrong,” she whispered. “But she isn’t.” I felt like she’d punched me in my throat. My tongue was thick and furry in my mouth.