More Than You Can Chew Read online

  “Hello?”

  “Dad?”

  “Marty?”

  “Yeah…ah…I…”

  “Has something happened?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Are you alright?”

  “Not really…I want to…I need to…can I come live with you?”

  Silence.

  “Did you just have a fight with your mother?”

  “She’s drinking. A lot.”

  “Well, I don’t think it can be that bad or you would have said something before now. If you guys are fighting, don’t think you can drag me into the middle of it. Look, I’ve got a contractor here. I’ve got to go.”

  Dial tone.

  Mom comes back into my room. Holds me while I cry.

  “I’m happy you’re not leaving. Even if it isn’t your choice. I’ll get sober, Marty. I promise.” Her words reek of guilt. But it’s the last time they smell like gin.

  That was the day Dad said no. Mom quit drinking. And I stopped eating.

  Two Years Later…

  DAY 1

  JUNE 13

  7:50 A.M.

  I wake up all alone in my “cabin.” I don’t care where the other girls are–I don’t know them, and I’m not planning on staying long enough to get to know them.

  Every time I closed my eyes last night, something would beep or hiss or creak or be announced or slammed. The white noise of the hospital prevented me from blacking out and the light from the hall blinded me.

  I worm my way back under five blankets stolen from the supply closet. Maybe I could warm the room up by setting my bed on fire. Then the other “campers” could toast marshmallows (but not eat them), and I would be warm at last.

  “Time to get up, Marty. Breakfast: five minutes.” This voice comes out of the headboard on my bed. The mouth is somewhere around the corner, sitting behind a desk.

  “SHOVE YOUR BREAKFAST AND THE TRAY IT CAME IN ON!” I yell through the layers.

  “Nice attitude, Marty. Why don’t you bring it to breakfast–down the hall to the dining room, last door on your left. Three minutes.” The mouth has ears too.

  I get out of my talking (and listening) bed and put on six hospital gowns. I alternate the openings. There are always bum-lookers in hospitals and I’m not going to be one of their victims. The gowns are all stamped PROPERTY OF SILVER LAKE. The staff will probably stamp me somewhere too, while I’m sleeping.

  “Go back to your room and put some proper clothes on.” The mouth has a face and a chest with the name NURSE BROWN pinned to it.

  I check out the dress code. More than half the girls could be runway models. The latest haute couture consists entirely of baggy sweat suits. Black is big this year.

  “You wanted me to come to breakfast and I came. Now you want me to go and put clothes on. I’m not naked and I’m not here to make a fashion statement, so what’s your problem?”

  “The point, not the problem, is that normal people wear proper clothes to breakfast.”

  “If I were normal, then I wouldn’t be here. Here at Camp Eat-a-Lot, on Try-Not-to-Puke-It-Up Hill, in an institute called Silver Lake. I hear there is a private resort for nutbars, and a Club Med without the booze for alcoholics on the same floor. Sound normal to you?”

  Nurse Brown burns to red. “You can change after breakfast,” she says, “but from now on, hospital gowns are for weigh-ins only.”

  I turn away from the heat to check out the mess hall. The walls have posters of food tacked onto them. People smiling with perfect teeth at their perfect apples. Black type spouting nutritional facts. Not one piece of artwork has a calorie chart on it. There is no need. Anyone here can tell you the caloric value of an ounce of spit. Windows along one wall allow me to look at an outside world cut by little diamonds. I know the metal buried in the glass is for safety. I don’t know who they are protecting–me or the windows? The table in the center is standard issue, metal and plastic, with fake wood on top that’s never going to need polishing.

  There seems to be some sort of seating arrangement. Team A on the left, Team B on the right. Anorexics and Bulimics. Eating disorder patients with order to their eating arrangements. Pickers on one side with too much food. Pukers on the other with not enough. I walk to the far end of the table and sit at the head. If they knew the truth, I could be drafted by either team.

  “Marty. If you go across the hall to the nurses’ station, you can pick up your breakfast tray,” says Nurse Brown. She could have told me earlier, but I wasn’t in position yet.

  “When you go to hell, you won’t need someone to tell you how to get there.” Check.

  Eight smiles spread around the table like cheering fans doing the wave.

  “Start eating, girls,” Nurse Brown says. The smiles fade.

  Nurse Brown sits down at the other end. She clasps her fingers tightly in a church-and-steeple formation. And then tries to hide her religion under the table. She doesn’t want me to see the white anger of her knuckles. She stares at me across the sea of food.

  “What happens if I don’t go get my tray?”

  “We strongly encourage you to eat norm…solid food.”

  “And if I won’t solidify?”

  “You can consume your daily calorie prescription in liquid form.”

  “And what’s my magic daily number?”

  “Five thousand calories.”

  “You’re NUTS! I’m not eating or drinking FIVE THOUSAND of anything!”

  Nurse Brown’s eyes tilt up at the corners.

  “Then we will have to tube you.”

  I know what that is. I’ve seen them do it to a horse that went off his feed. The vet shoved a hose up the horse’s nose, down his throat, and into his stomach. Then someone else poured gallons of slop into a funnel at the other end. And I watched the animal’s gut slowly fill and bloat. The tube had blood on it when they pulled it out. The horse didn’t like it. They sedated him.

  “What ‘we’ thinks they’re going to do that to me?” My hands start to shake, but I keep them on the table and my sights on Nurse Brown. She retreats to her natural state. Silent and patient.

  “WHAT WE?”

  The girls push back their chairs and swallow hard. One girl rubs the side of her nose.

  “Actually, it’s not a ‘we.’ It’s a ‘who.’ And it’s me.” Nurse Brown smiles, revealing perfect teeth. Checkmate.

  Shit.

  The breakfast in front of me is only half of what I used to make myself after swim practice. But, that was forever ago.

  I think this meal was made in that time period. And they are still going to make me eat it. Two slices of cold greasy toast, cut in half. One week’s worth of bread at one meal. Can’t do anything about the butter. Plastic astronaut packets of peanut butter and jam. That’s a double pass. What looks to be six powdered eggs, probably from one cardboard chicken. I haven’t eaten a real egg in two years. I guess that record won’t be broken. Orange juice with a bendy straw. I can handle that. Maybe this place is a test kitchen for NASA. Except for one thing. There are no pigs in space. But on a scratched side plate lie five pieces of bacon. Real bacon. Real fat. And beside it, stamped with today’s date, are two cartons of homo milk. Pig and cow stuff are impossible for astronauts. They’re arsenic for anorexics.

  I look around. Some of the girls are half finished. Some are already done. They’re the bulimics. What they had to eat was nothing for them. One minute’s worth of eating on the outside. But in here, here they are counting to ten or higher between bites. Now they are eyeing my tray.

  “Eat your breakfast, dear,” Nurse Brown says and lifts her mug.

  Drink your tea. Bag.

  Stop jousting and think. What’s the plan? Eat this one meal. Get out of this room. Into the bathroom. Throw up their breakfast. Throw on my clothes. Call Mom. Tell her the doctor was wrong, she was right. She’ll like that. She’ll come get me. Take me back home. A couple thousand sit-ups, leg lifts, jumping jacks. Nothing but coffee for three days. Perfec
t.

  I open both of the milks. Take a deep breath. Barely move my chest. Control is key. Half-piece at a time, I cram the toast in my mouth and sluice it down the shoot with one of the milks. One girl stares at me. With my spoon I shovel in the eggs, three loads, and chase them with the other milk. Another girl gives me the why-are-you-here…you-don’t-belong-here look. I don’t, I look back. “I’m going home,” I want to say. I leave the bacon till last. That way it will be in my system the shortest time. And maybe the acid in the orange juice will eat away some of the fat. The pig on a plate is not so easy. I look around. All the anorexics save their bacon till last. The bulimics never had any. Just Special K and nonfat yogurt. I’d trade in a minute. So would the girl a couple trays away who is sawing her bacon into one hundred pieces. Twenty pieces a slice. I know why the plates are so scarred. She starts to eat the pork one one-hundredth at a time, using one point of her fork that she wipes after each crumb has left it and entered her mouth without touching her lips. She chews slowly. Ten times. Across the table from her, a bulimic has a death grip on her knife. And murder in her eyes. I don’t want to be her next victim. I want to go home. Follow the plan.

  With my fingers, I tear all five pieces of bacon in half. Take one-half of the pile and push it into my mouth. Big swig of orange juice. And I start to choke. Blow chunks of bacon halfway across the table, and OJ all the way out my nose. I finally stop coughing. I should have thought of this earlier. Nurse Brown is at my side with something bulging under her arm. I can’t see, my eyes are watering so bad.

  “Wipe yourself off and finish your bacon. Do that again and I’ll place another order,” she says, and drops a wad of paper towel in my lap.

  I clean myself with the scratchy brown paper that is about as flexible and absorbent as concrete. Then eat my bacon, one piece at a time. And drink my juice. Through my straw. Slowly. Done. Time to go home.

  I put my tray back in the slot that has my name in red marker on masking tape. I rip the tape off and start down the hall. Behind me I hear a tray get jammed into its slot on the cart hard enough to make it yelp.

  “Where are you going?” A nameless voice.

  “Disneyland.” I keep walking.

  “You can’t go back to your room yet.”

  Five more steps till I can slam a door on that empty tray and nameless voice.

  “They’ll just come and get you.”

  Two more squares of blue-gray carpet to go.

  “And nobody gets to leave that table until all of us have sat there for thirty minutes.”

  I stop at my door. Tilt my head back and talk at the ceiling tiles. “Why thirty minutes? Are we going swimming?”

  “No…that’s just how they do it.”

  Great. More rules someone forgot to tell me. Either that, or what goes on here is a national secret. I turn around. The shepherd’s hook. She’s gone. I walk back and sit in the chair closest to the door. The seat is warm. This had been Nurse Brown’s chair.

  Nurse Brown comes in, stops, wobbles, then walks to the far end of the table. She grabs the chair that used to be mine, scrapes it all the way back along the black-and-white squares of linoleum, positions it right beside me. This makes her closest to the door. In this weird chess game. I am now the pawn next to the tube queen.

  “Trays back? Okay. Now that we are all here, I can start timing,” Nurse Brown says and checks her watch.

  Everyone checks their watch.

  “Why don’t we use this time to introduce ourselves and give Marty a chance to get to know us a little? I’ll go first. I’m Celeste Brown, head nurse for this unit. I’ve been here at Silver Lake for nine years.”

  I’ll bet eight of them were spent as a patient of the other units.

  “You all know who Marty is, so we’ll start to my left and go around.” Nurse Brown turns her head and nods.

  “My name is Nancy,” the girl says and drops her eyes.

  Then nothing. No “hi, Nancy” and a big wave from anybody. Even that wouldn’t be as stupid as the silence.

  “Okay, next?” Nurse Brown practices her lines.

  “I’m Victoria, not Vicky,” says not-Vicky, with the corpse-blue lipstick. And that starts the roll call.

  “Elizabeth.” Yellow eyes with black eye shadow on top and purple moons underneath.

  “Rose.” Saran Wrap skin around the bones of a carcass picked clean.

  “Jamie.” Blonde hair down to her waist, but half has gone down a drain.

  “Bonnie.” Pimples she picks at with blood red nails.

  “Katherine. And this is Mrs. Burns. She doesn’t talk. She’s catatonic,” says chatty Kathy, pointing to her left. There is more fat on a french fry than there is on Mrs. Burns.

  After Mrs. Burns is me.

  “Marty.” So stupid. They already know that.

  But Katherine. Katherine is the one who got me to come back. The voice that loves to answer questions that haven’t been asked. “That’s just how they do it.” She wasn’t reciting a rule, she was passing on inside information. On how they get you back to the table. On how they keep you from letting your breakfast join the rest of the sewage before it can be properly introduced. On how they torture you by making you sit. I should have seen it coming and kept going. Too late. Plan B. I need a Plan B.

  “I don’t feel well,” I say to Nurse Brown.

  “Just sit quietly. It will pass.”

  Hot under my arms and the backs of my knees. I never sweat. I’m always cold. I must really be sick. “I think I have a fever.”

  “It’s just the food. Your body isn’t used to it. Yet.”

  No way out. Just words. Just food. “Yet. Just sit quietly.”

  HOW? When I have to sit here while the waistband of my underwear becomes a cinch of razor blades slicing into my distended belly. And I feel I can’t breathe ’cause all my lung space is being used by my stomach. And every nerve and fiber has a stopwatch that is counting the seconds that all that food has been inside me. I must be gaining a pound a second. Thirty seconds–thirty pounds. Three hundred seconds–three hundred pounds. And I’m going to explode. Every cell sucking back all those calories. Sweating. Celebrating. Doing what a weak body does best. And there is nothing I can do about it. I have no control. I hate my body. It was never my friend, but now it has buddied-up to the enemy.

  This place is boot camp–with terrorists that make you do what they want by holding a tube to your nose. And they won’t hurt any of the hostages if you’ll just sit quietly.

  Well, I know someone higher up. One phone call and this hostage is going home. Two minutes to freedom.

  Nurse Brown checks her watch. 8:50 A.M. “Okay, time’s up. You’ve got ten minutes before GT starts; it’s in the lounge today. You’re free to go.” She puts her hand on mine. The one I was using to push the chair away so I could get up. Away. “You’re free to go.” But the hand says sit. Stay. The girls silently stream around us and out the door.

  Brown’s hand is lukewarm and wet. I can’t stand it and jerk my hand out from under her hold. “I need to use the phone.”

  “Marty, if you could just stay behind for one minute, I’ll be right back.”

  “I have to call my mom.”

  “In a second, dear,” Nurse Brown says and glides out into the hall.

  I move slowly. Don’t make a sound. Get to the phone. Nine minutes to GT. Whatever that is. Probably Group Torture. I turn and my knee bangs the chair and the chair scrapes the floor and Nurse Brown’s tentacle slides itself around the door frame, feeling for the wall. Her cupped hand comes to rest. Let’s me know my only escape is blocked. I sit. And wait.

  If I were arrested, I’d get to make a call. I have committed all the crimes that got me here. They were perfect crimes in a perfect system that kept the world safe. I was the murderer. The victim. The judge. And the jury. I took care of everything. They have no right to keep me here. I have to make –

  Nurse Brown’s head swims back in the doorway. “Marty, you don’t
need to call your mom.”

  “Yes, I do. I told her I –”

  “She’ll be here in ten minutes. You can wait in your room,” Nurse Brown says and disappears.

  I remember now what a zookeeper said to me when I was little and didn’t know anything and tried to stick my fingers into the fish tank. He laughed at me and said, “Oh, you don’t want to be doin’ that, honey. Octopuses are smart, and they’re good hunters…and they like to play with their food.”

  “Hi, babydoll, how you doing?” Mom says and wipes the hair away from my face, but I’m sitting on my bed looking down, so the hair falls back. She tries again. Her hand, cold and smooth. Makes me shiver. She pulls away.

  “I brought your schoolwork and I talked to Mr. Riada. He says whenever you get this done will be fine and not to worry about it being late, but I think the sooner you do it the better. Anything that needs to be typed, I can take to work and have Marjorie do it up. I can get books from the library if you need them.”

  “I won’t need them.”

  “Marty, you have to finish these three papers.”

  “I’ll finish them at home.”

  “You won’t have time.”

  “Yes, I will. I won’t go back on the swim team. I’ll study instead.”

  “It doesn’t matter. By the time you get out of here, school will be over. I know what you’re asking, Marty. You can’t come home. Just three papers and then you’ll have your diploma.”

  “You mean, the real estate salesperson of the year and co-chair of the PTA can’t have a daughter who is a high school dropout.”

  “No, I just think if you want to go somewhere…”

  “I do. I want to go home.”

  “You said you wanted help…”

  “This isn’t what I meant.”

  “When you said to me that you wanted to see a psychiatrist, I thought it would be a waste of money. I was able to stop drinking. You could eat if you wanted to. But after you left his office, and I went in, he said you needed to be checked in to the hospital immediately. I told him it wasn’t possible now; you had to finish school first, but he said, ‘Dead girls don’t graduate.’ He said if I didn’t admit you that, when you died of a heart attack or kidney failure, he would bring me up on charges of neglect. I don’t know what you told him, but it’s you who got you in here, not me. I’m in a corner, so now you’ve got to stay and do what they tell you and finish those three papers.” Her voice is colder than the room.