Chapter 46

chapter 46

I look up the address.I’m early, but I’m in the right spot.

According to the pamphlet, there are meetings all over the city, but this one, the only one at this time, is in a claptrap playhouse in the West Village. I walk from June’s. I pass the bakery where I met Ivy, the basketball courts, and a slice spot across from a church. The Thanksgiving decorations are up. It’s perverse how Americans need their cartoon turkeys to seem thrilled at the prospect of being eaten. You’d think they’d slap googly eyes and cartoon smiles on smallpox blankets to go with them. On the corner where I hang a left, there’s a Chihuahua tied to a bike rack, an upturned U. He’s wearing a tiny lilac cowboy hat.

The location is sandwiched between two comedy clubs and features a narrow corridor, black sticky floors, and a rickety, uneven staircase with silver skid guards trimmed on the lip of each step. I want to leave but don’t.

On the second-floor landing, I pass a closed door, behind which someone’s singing a lusty rendition of “Be Our Guest,” that song from Beauty and the Beast. I have no expectations and I’m not a joiner, but the invitation to snoop in New York buildings I don’t know about is irresistible. There’s a bathroom on the third floor. There are two stalls and it’s just me. I’m never in the West Village, but I catch myself thinking that in a pinch, it’s not a bad bathroom to add to the collection. Even when I hope not to ever need them again.

Three thoughts persistently bang around in my head. That they’ll laugh me out of the room for not being fat or thin enough. That the lack of any cost of admission means it’s a cult. And that I’m not sick enough to be with sick people and that being with sick people might wind up being contagious. A truly diseased part of my brain wonders if I’ll be able to pick up any weight-loss pointers.

The room is bleak when I poke my head into the indicated door. I check the time—we’re only four minutes from starting and there are only two people in there. An older Black woman with bright-green eyes and her raincoat zipped over her lumpy purse and an Asian woman in workout clothes who seems like the type of Asian who folds all her underwear the same way.

They’re chatting amiably while setting up chairs, so I grab one off the pile and do the same.

Voices echo in the hallway, and three women enter. They have expensive blowouts and wear designer rubber boots and enormous engagement rings. They’re fancy, these women. I’ve never been to the Hamptons, but I’m willing to bet they have.

They’re followed by two men who smell like cigarette smoke. One has a neck tattoo, and the other, a silver-haired man of about eighty, wears his hair in a small ponytail. Bright hellos and hugs abound. In three minutes the room is filled with the most random assortment of humans.

All told, we’re a smiling group of about thirty straight from central casting, varying ages, races, and sizes. A heavyset man with a yarmulke on his head unravels an iPhone charger and plugs it into the wall. More hugs are dispensed, but they seem to have gotten the memo not to touch me. I position myself in the back for a swift exit and so I can study everyone from the rear. A figure sits next to me. She’s greyhound slender, a teen. In worn Stan Smiths, with a pierced nose and a thigh gap you could lob a softball through, she smiles at me with this beatific light and I feel as though I’ve been lied to.

No one looks like they’re in enough pain.

No one looks like how I feel.

No one looks like they do the things I do.

We gather in a circle holding hands, and the intimacy coupled with the praying in unison instantly freaks me out. At the mention of God, a door in my head shuts with a definitive no. These people—these weirdos—all take deep cleansing breaths. And as we sit down, I pull out my phone and mentally set a timer. After fifteen minutes, I’ll leave.

We take seats. There’s a row of six chairs in front facing the rest of us. It’s not unlike the configuration at church. The Hamptons lady sitting dead center reads a placard from a binder. There will be a speaker, she announces. I’m hoping for one of the fancy women, perhaps the one in a Moncler jacket and mink lashes, but it’s the dude with the beatnik ponytail seated next to her. I have no idea what this old white man can possibly tell me.

He smiles ruefully. He announces that he’s given up. He chuckles nervously and asks his higher power to speak through him, and I wonder if he’ll fall to the ground in a rapturous fit and ululate in tongues. The preemptive secondhand embarrassment radiates from my chest down to my arms and legs. I can’t look at any of them, but I listen.

“Hi. My name’s Cyrus, and I’m a gratefully recovering anorexic and bulimic,” the speaker begins.

“Hi, Cyrus,” they call back cheerfully.

I’m boggled that what I’ve seen of meetings in movies is real.

“I’m also an overeater, exercise bulimic, sugar addict, and laxative abuser.” I can’t believe this man who’s old enough to live through wars and probably protested against Vietnam would admit this to a roomful of people.

I didn’t know bulimics even came in male. Especially grandpas.

As he talks, my desire to leave dissipates. It’s like overhearing an argument or watching a fire. Witnessing a rando who could have come off the B52 bus enumerate all of his shameful pathologies is deeply fascinating. It seems so out of place in polite society. He may as well be naked.

Cyrus recounts how he’d always been a fat kid. He calls it husky, which makes a few of the attendees laugh. I brace myself, searching his face for indignation, waiting for ridicule, but Cyrus seems to light up at the amusement. He talks about how his parents were perfectly nice people. Suburban. His father was a doctor, his mother a fundraiser, and neither of them was particularly around. He confesses how difficult it is to find a reason for it, but he was always filled with a deep loneliness. He leans forward, and his knee starts to jog.

He says that from a young age he’d always felt as though he were observing all the people around him as if through glass. That everyone always seemed to know how to have friends and joke around and that he didn’t. That they all seemed to know what to do with boyfriends and girlfriends and that it all looked so easy.

When he gets to the part about an accomplished older brother who’d been a Rhodes Scholar, a genius and an athlete who excelled at everything, sweat prickles my scalp. When he says that his anxiety was so awful that he couldn’t even learn how to drive, I can’t catch my breath.

This man may as well be talking about me.

His parents divorced when he was a sophomore, the same age I was when my mom left. He says that liquor helped. He calls himself a double winner and says that he’s part of the “beverage program” and that he’s an alcoholic. But then drinking turned to drugs, which quickly became destructive, so he turned to food. His freshman year of college, he’d ballooned to almost three hundred pounds.

That’s when he took matters into his own hands. He’d vomited, chewed and spat food, tried every commercial diet possible. From eating only pepper-infused water, Weight Watchers, Paleo, meal-replacement cookies, eating for his blood type, Whole30, Atkins.

A memory bobs up from the time I tried Atkins in high school. I’d lost eight pounds but had eaten so much cheese and bacon, peeing every ten minutes until I realized I hadn’t taken a crap in almost three days, eventually passing a gruesomely painful bowel movement the consistency of a diamond after straining on the toilet for so long my legs went numb and I saw stars.

He’d had his ears stapled, his jaw wired. He’d even lost the deposit on gastric bypass surgery because at the very last minute he found these rooms instead.

He said he’d never forget how it felt to finally name these feelings. To learn that there are others like him. He recalls a checklist from his early days. And as he goes down it, reciting offhand the signals, I realize with a sickening clarity that we really are the same.

Have I eaten spoiled food? Yes.

Burned food? Yes.

Frozen food? Yes.

Stolen food?

More times than I can count.

It’s as if there’s a key turning in my heart. I picture myself groggily, helplessly eating my roommate’s brownies from the trash in the middle of the night. Chewing around the dish soap I’d squeezed onto them to thwart myself.

The stories around the room are astounding. I experience the repeated diagnosis of a feeling I had no words to articulate before. Secrets I didn’t even know I was hiding. They talk about how desperately they believed that if they only lost enough weight that they’d feel at home in their bodies.

That if they were skinny they’d finally be treated the way they deserved.

But it’s not the high drama or the gross-out stories of abused GI tracts that break my heart.

It’s the psychosis of knowing that your eyes are broken. That we all know what it’s like to look at yourself in the mirror one minute and then see something completely different the next.

Most of us have left our bodies in times of crisis. We’ve been stuck in scribbly, maddening thoughts of what to eat for lunch, paralyzed that a wrong choice will turn us down the road to a binge that ends with aching bellies and sour mouths.

A binge is defined as that freight-train feeling I know too well. That rush. The helplessness. The hostage situation. The compulsion to eat everything to blot out the feelings of anything else. The peace of feeling as though you’re choking because putting things in your mouth and then taking them out is the only thing in an unmanageable world that feel you can control.

Shit.

ShitShitShitShit.

I am them.

They are me.

I’ve canceled plans to eat or not eat. I’ve “called in fat” to work. I’ve gone to the gym instead of confronting someone. Eaten or gotten shitfaced instead of standing up for myself. I’ve been stunned and injured when I’ve lost the weight and not been given the respect or recognition I knew I deserved. I’ve starved myself skinny and been absolutely fucking miserable.

A notebook lands in my lap. There they all are. Everyone’s names and phone numbers, just like they said. There are no last names, but this blackmail collateral is breathtaking to me. It’s unbelievable, this trust fall. I can’t bring myself to add my name, but I’m moved by the gesture. It’s the stupidest, most touching gift I’ve ever known.

There’s so much laughter. Not mean-spirited, contemptuous mirth, but joyful, knowing laughter. Every invitation to an impending social event that necessitated the losing of ten, five, three, forty pounds in two days inspires the snapping of fingers. Chuckling at fights picked at the table so we wouldn’t have to eat pasta. Or so that we could eat the pasta and then storm off to buy secret ice cream on the way home.

There’s talk of cake. Leftover birthday cake. One of the mothers had gotten up to eat a sliver. Then another. And another, until the whole thing was gone. She’d had to put a rush order in at the specialty bakery with a slew of lies to have another one made. Another frosted intergalactic spaceship that she’d had to eat down to the same spot to make things right. I think of how prepared I was to go to H-E-B in the middle of the night for pie. And how the pie I’d eaten after hadn’t changed the perception of my childhood home.

I have never felt so known. So fucking spied on. It’s the limited-edition ginger ice cream. The loaves of bread, the peanut butter. Ramyun. Coq au vin. Ketchup.

There are stories of hope. How things have changed. Hollow teeth salvaged. Missing periods retrieved. Bridges burned and mended. Families left and returned to.

Then a woman with a tidy brown bob and wire-framed glasses, wearing a preppy fisherman’s sweater, cries about her father who died a week ago. After eight years of freedom, she’d started throwing up and hasn’t been able to stop. Tears slide down her cheeks, and she calmly removes her glasses to wipe her eyes. Last night she’d slept for an hour on the bathroom floor next to her toilet. When her three minutes are up, I’m enraged that she’s not given more time. But she smiles and thanks the room and says she knows it will get better because it has so many times before.

There are only ten more minutes of the meeting left, but I’m desperate to leave. I need air. I grab my things to duck out, refusing to look over my shoulder.

In the narrow, airless hallway, I see her come out of the bathroom. Cruella. A vision in lilac with her dog in her arms. Up close she’s somehow younger than I thought even though I’d never assigned her an age. She was nothing more than a cartoon. A caricature of the unwell. She’s wearing a lilac sweatsuit with a matching fringed cowboy vest to match her dog’s hat. The ink slick of her hair is drawn into a bun so tight, it slants her eyes.

“I thought that was you,” she says. As when Jeremy first talked to me, it’s like a painting peeled itself off the canvas to address me.

Her voice is a revelation. It’s far lower and more mellifluous than I could have ever conceived. Cruella has NPR voice.

I’m so stunned that I don’t know what to say.

“Ingrid,” she says, placing her hand on her chest. “We don’t really know each other, but we also do. I see you all the time near my apartment. You must go to fashion school. I can tell because your eyeliner’s always perfect.”

“Thanks.” I’m overcome that I’m not anonymous to her. That she likes my eyeliner. That she’s collected me in some way too. “I love your clothes. The monochrome always pops in a crowd.”

She smiles warmly.

Her dog sneezes. “Christ Almighty, Duffy, bless you.” She hugs him close to her chest.

So, it’s Ingrid and Duffy. I remember now, how I’d seen the dog with the lilac cowboy hat outside. How she and her dog have always foretold good things.

“His allergies are insufferable today. Cranky old man.” She shakes her head. “So, are you one of ours?”

“Um.” I nod slowly. “I guess I am.”

“Uch.” She pats my hand. “The beginning’s the worst,” she says. “But keep coming back. I was a gutter, gutter bulimic. Worst of the worst. I’m still crazier than a treeful of cockatiels, but I’ll tell you what—you’re only as sick as your secrets. The second you talk about it, fffffffft.” She blows a raspberry and waggles her fingers into the air. “It all starts to get a little better. Humans need to share their darkest parts. Unburdening makes you closer to everyone. There’s that thing that all addicts have, that you’re a piece of shit in the center of the universe. That everybody’s obsessed with the ways you fall short. But the truth is, we all have the same, boring problems. Sometimes the best thing you can do is talk about it. It makes no sense, but glory if it doesn’t work like a charm.

“Oh,” she says, plucking a pen from the knot at the nape of her neck and pulling a note card from a pocket. “What’s your number, dear? I’ll call you. I don’t text, I’m old school, but I’ll call you since you’re new.”

I’m equal parts suspicious and flattered. I consider faking her out but don’t. I’m so curious about what she’ll say. She writes her number and tears off a corner of the card and hands it to me. With a sky-piercing “I” and a decadent swooping “G,” her penmanship is exquisite.

“Good luck, dear.” She slides the pen back into her hair. “Keep coming back. This is the only place that will help you. Don’t go floating off to Tahiti and think it’s a cure. It doesn’t work—I can tell you from experience. Florida doesn’t work, either.” She laughs at this. “Anyway, we’ll always be here.”

Her surprisingly warm hand pats mine again before she opens the door and lets herself back in.

As I walk toward June’s, I realize I’m hungry. When I cross Union Square, there’s a small protest, for universal healthcare. I think about the person with the van. Wonder whether they got their kidney. I pass by work. All the winking trinkets in the display window that I only know now don’t make for a home.

I have wasted my entire life focusing on the wrong things and the wrong people. I don’t know how it came to be that I believed changing everything about me would change the way people treated me.

I thought a polished appearance and stellar behavior would be the passport to belonging. And when I inevitably failed at perfection, I could at least willfully do everything in my power to be kicked out before anyone left me.

I duck into a narrow sandwich shop. It’s been a fixture since 1929 and features a lunch counter where I’ve always wanted to eat. There are black-and-white framed pictures all over the walls and a nice man who wants to know what I’m having. Until I establish a usual, I order a matzo ball soup.

I text Ivy and tell her I’m thinking about her. I ask her how she’s doing. I realize how superstitiously I believed that if I just got away from her, I’d stop. That maybe we both would. I tried to blame her for everything when all she did was remind me of the ugliest parts of me.

When my food arrives, it’s beautiful. Golden and steaming. The soft mound of matzo a gift. I take a picture and send it to Patrick.

I eat my New York meal in a New York restaurant all by myself.

When I’m done, I say a small prayer to be willing to keep the soup I’ve eaten. I pray that I’ll get healthy. That my mangled body will be restored. I speak the words in my mind with sincerity and hope. I don’t know if it works, but if it doesn’t, I know where I’ll go. I know who to call.