Between my mother’s third and fourth husbands, she decided to go vegetarian. There must have been a boyfriend in between or something. Someone I have forgotten, that practiced yoga and charged crystals and stocked up on the green tea that crowded our cupboards for a year. The tea must have lasted much longer than the lover, now absent from my memory. It lasted after my mother’s manic stretching and chanting and broth consumption had settled into fitful tears and then, finally, the quiet, defeated return of milk and eggs and cartons of ice cream, in the freezer one day and gone the next. The steaks and chicken cutlets and crabs screaming in the pot, prepared for husband number four, who laughed from his belly and licked his lips when I walked into the room. Who had my mom snapping about my lacrosse skirt being too short or my lip balm being too tinted or my eyes being too closed, too open, too something.
While my mother was vegetarian, she sent me off to this hippie camp upstate. Something this forgotten boyfriend must have recommended. Something to get me outdoors, get me healed, get me away from their tantric yelling for a summer. Which really, I don’t remember minding much at first. But then I was there, and it was all these girls who no one taught to shave or use deodorant, and these boys that were somehow ten times worse, just across the lake. They had us saluting the sun, burning sage, hiking through the woods on just some canned beans and these measly vegetables from the garden we were meant to tend to. Through the exertion and the heat and the heady smoke scrubbing us clean every fifteen minutes, I can’t begin to explain the delirium. It really was the first time I remember feeling high.
It was my first kiss too. My bunkmate Sara had pulled me to the lake one night, through the woods that were even more taxing in the dark, to meet with some boys from the other side of camp. She, of course, took the half-cute one and left me with his overplump, overripe, overbitten buddy, who lurched at me like a bug he was trying to squash. And when I jolted back, they all acted like I really was some pest, some ingrate, some inconvenience to be sorted. So Sara took me back into the woods. Took it upon herself, nobly really, to right this whole thing.
“It’s easy,” she said, leaning in. “Just move your lips like this…”
Her mouth crashed into mine before she could finish the thought. It tasted floral, somehow. Slightly bitter underneath. And I was just so hungry at this point, you have to understand. I mean it had been weeks of this shit.
Sara was fine in the end, just a real baby about it. The lip healed okay. It’s not like she lost it or anything. I couldn’t believe it, honestly, when she told the counselors about the whole ordeal. I mean, she tried to spin it like it was just all my fault. Like I had lured her out there and attacked, and sure, I got sent home. But in the end, she did too, because clearly, she hadn’t gone to the lake kicking and screaming. And at least I wanted to go home. They made us share a bus back, and she cried the whole way about her half-cute boyfriend.
It was my mother’s fifth husband that taught me about the hunger. I had spent a couple years just starving at that point, and it didn’t matter what I did, I just couldn’t fill up. For him, my mom prepared lasagna and calamari and eggplant parmesan, and I gained about five pounds. But still, I went to bed every night aching and empty. The husband must have noticed something, because it takes one to know one and all that, and he came into my room one night with a gift wrapped up proper. A plump, purple finger, with a bow and everything.
“A little midnight snack,” he said with a wink, and he left.
Well, I sucked every bit of that phalange clean, let me tell you. Washed it down with the marrow and kept it under my pillow to gnaw on if I ever got hungry at night again. It got me through high school, really, that finger. It got me through two more boyfriends.
But dorm food is honestly no good. Whether they tell you it’s the number one campus dining facility or they have a Sunday crepe station or to-go sushi, it doesn’t matter, it’s all crap. I watched my roommate put on the Freshman fifteen, as I basically just wasted away. Fantasized about how her shoulder or her thigh or her neck might taste. I came to satisfy myself with Frat guys, guzzling beer and shooting cheap vodka. They all tasted the same, rye and stale and bitter underneath. I reasoned they deserved it. After all, they were at worst date rapists and at best boring. And I never took too much. Only things they wouldn’t really notice were gone. A thumb, a pinky toe, once his cock, cause it really was that good, but just the tip.
The thing is, it’s harder to find the disposable ones once you graduate. People get older, they get smarter, it gets more difficult to tell the good from the bad. Sometimes you’re a fist deep, and they start telling you they love you and asking to see you again, talking mournfully about their wife, who may just notice a tip or two missing, even if they don’t. But you’re already five fingers in, and there’s no going back now. And really, you are just so hungry.
Because that’s the thing they don’t tell you… Or maybe they do, and I just wasn’t listening. The more you eat, and the hungrier you get, the more they all start to taste the same.
Dining hall monotony, canned beans, and something bitter underneath.
Grace Waichler writes in New York, New York and is a Fiction MFA candidate at Columbia University.
If you want to keep EDF around, Patreon is the answer.
