Hunger Point Read online

  HUNGER POINT

  A NOVEL

  JILLIAN MEDOFF

  For my parents,

  Lewis and Naomi Medoff

  and my sisters, Kimberly and Mara

  and in memoriam

  my beloved Mary Sacks Boyar

  (1914–1991)

  I say unto you:

  one must still have chaos in oneself

  to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

  I say unto you:

  you still have chaos in yourselves.

  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE,

  Thus Spake Zarathustra

  CONTENTS

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  Look at these breasts! They’re huge!”

  PART ONE

  CHAOS

  1

  My mother, Marsha, claims she takes tranquilizers only as a…

  2

  Why is there so much traffic?” my mother whines as…

  3

  St. Mary’s is a psychiatric hospital nestled in a strip…

  4

  So why do you want to be in advertising?” From…

  5

  My father has a novelty sign Velcroed to the dashboard…

  6

  I hold ice against my head and suck on a…

  7

  I’m worried about her, Marsha. She’s so mixed up.”

  8

  The voice on the answering machine startles me. “Mr. Hunter,…

  9

  I’d like pizza for lunch,” Shelly tells me as I…

  10

  I spend hours fantasizing about Bryan. About him calling me.

  11

  Wearing the bodysuit was a mistake. The snaps are worn,…

  12

  My mother’s tranquilizers sit in a bag next to the…

  PART TWO

  THE DANCING STAR

  13

  When my grandmother died, it was very sudden. She had…

  14

  Far off in the deep recesses of my dream, I…

  15

  You really let me down,” my mother says the next…

  16

  Why are you wearing Mommy’s coat?” Shelly snaps. “You guys…

  17

  Shelly’s story opens with three sisters sitting with their mother…

  18

  One night, I dream about St. Mary’s. Shelly and my grandfather…

  19

  Your mother called,” my dad tells me at breakfast a few days later…

  20

  Frannie.” My father walks into my room. “The mail’s here. Abby…

  21

  There’s a corner office on my floor that has panoramic windows, a…

  22

  Have you ever thought about how much an anxiety attack resembles…

  23

  I dream about Shelly almost every night. I wake in a cold sweat, my…

  24

  Bryan Thompson, Dr. Demento, calls the next day. “I’ve been really…

  25

  I wake up to a beam of sunlight. I kick the covers off my naked body…

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  PROLOGUE

  Look at these breasts! They’re huge!”

  I grew up jealous of my mother’s love affair with food. Other families gathered around the dinner table to discuss report cards and whose turn it was to walk the dog. When I was a kid, the meal itself took center stage, and food was treated like a favored child.

  “Can you believe how big they are? They’re absolutely to die for!”

  The meal continued with my mother’s running commentary on every aspect of those breasts: how my father should have marinated them in barbecue sauce, not soy, because they taste too salty, no? and Frannie! Don’t eat the skin. You won’t lose weight if you eat the skin.

  “We’re eating, Mom,” she’d say to my grandmother, who had the uncanny ability to call just as we sat down. “Chicken. Absolutely delicious. Marinated in some soy thing. Yes, the girls are here, but some of us are on diets”—she glanced at me, a narrow eyebrow raised—“so no skin.” She nestled the phone in her neck to tell us that Grandma didn’t want us to worry about our weight, we’re skinny enough as it is.

  She got up, waving her fork in the air like a baton. “No, I am listening. I heard every word.” She lifted the breast from her plate and walked through the kitchen. Wrapped in the phone cord, she picked off the meat with her long red nails. She gnawed on the bone, sucking off what she could, then threw it out and hung up, the receiver streaked with a faint oval of grease.

  “Grandma says hi. God, this chicken is so good, it’s like a sickness with me.” She canvassed the table as we ate. “Frannie!” she yelped. “What are you doing?!” I froze in my seat. And slowly, so slowly, I loosened my grip on the forbidden skin and slid it palm-down onto my sister Shelly’s plate. “Dear,” she said with annoyance. “I love the skin more than you, but do you see me eating it? It’s fattening.”

  When we were very young the amount of food we could consume was an endless source of amusement. “A whole half a steak!” my grandmother exclaimed as Shelly fisted a piece of sirloin. “A whole half a steak! Where does she put it?” She shook her head in fascination and delight. “Shelly’s got your appetite, Marsha!” she said proudly. “Now stand back, let the child eat.”

  By elementary school, my ability to consume seven Twinkies in one sitting was no longer cute. “Frannie, you’re getting fat,” my mom said solemnly. “You’re too pretty to be heavy. You want boys to like you, don’t you?” The word fat assumed a meaning as deadly as cancer. Getting fat was worse than losing your job, worse than being jilted at the altar, worse than living in a trailer park and growing up without shoes. “You need to start watching yourself,” my mother instructed, “before it’s too late.”

  I went to my first Weight Watchers meeting when I was ten. Shelly, who was eight with soft creamy skin, blond angel hair, blue eyes the color of a cloudless sky, and “legs like a gazelle,” stayed home. “We’re a team, Frannie,” my mother said, lining up in front of the scale. “The first one to lose ten pounds gets a new bathing suit.”

  I wasn’t an ugly kid, nor, looking back, was I particularly fat. I have long, curly brown hair that kinks like moss when it rains, green eyes, and a lot of “those could become melanoma” freckles across my nose and chest. Not your All-American beauty, but certainly not Medusa. Rather than bicker with my mother, I carried the Weight Watchers passbook where they recorded my weight, I listened attentively to the lecture, I even raised my hand once to ask where all the fat went when you lost it. All the chubby women hunched in their folding chairs laughed at my precociousness, but I was genuinely curious. I wanted to know if there was a redistribution between the skinny and the fat; if I had a chance to look like the ladies behind the Clinique counter whose advice my mother sought, or if fat was predetermined like blue eyes and strong bones, and would eventually find its way back.

  My father was on the road a lot selling women’s sportswear, so my mother served us TV dinners. “Don’t eat the potatoes, Frannie. Potatoes are starch. Starch makes you fat.” Shelly rarely spoke during meals. She fixated on her aluminum tray as if afraid someone would snatch it away. “Why can’t I be on a diet?” she asked. “I need to be on a diet, too.” Defiantly, she laid down her fork. My mother reached over. “You don’t need anything of the sort. Here”—she scraped the gravy off Shelly’s Salisbury steak—“you’re dieting. Now eat.”

  At eleven, I was more interested in calories than in going to the Girl Scout Jamboree and sleeping in a tent. I cut out pictures from Seventeen of girls with perfect thighs, I counte
d bread servings, I made frothy shakes from powdered skim milk, water, and fifteen cubes of ice. I did leg lifts and donkey kicks on my bedroom floor. In the cafeteria at school, I sat with a turkey sandwich while everyone else ate fish sticks and macaroni and cheese, golden, gloopy, mouth-watering macaroni browned on top with crushed bread crumbs. I was good, so good, I was invincible until Friday nights when I would reward my week with rocky road ice milk, the whole carton, in front of the TV.

  When Shelly entered junior high, she was put in a special program for gifted children. She kept to herself, wrote impressive book reports, and started doing weird things with food. She wasn’t “shoveling it in,” but she did eat large quantities of only one thing. At first, it was turkey or chef salads. But then it progressed to spaghetti with margarine and giant bowls of rice. My mother got worried, especially when my sister fell in love with peanut butter milk shakes and, despite her magic legs, put on weight. I was still gaining and losing the same ten pounds, so my mother took control and helped us plan our meals. The three of us sat at the kitchen table; my mom used a calculator to tally our calories, and as she dictated, I wrote down our breakfast, lunch, and dinners neatly on a yellow legal pad:

  * * *

  Breakfast

  ½ cup raisin bran, 1 piece of dry whole wheat toast, ½ cup skim milk, ½ banana

  Lunch

  2 pieces of toast, 4 ounces of water-based tuna, 1 large lettuce leaf, tomato and cucumber slices, 8 carrot sticks, 1 tbsp. vinegar, 1 apple

  Dinner

  ½ dry baked potato, 4 ounces of chicken breast (no skin), string beans without butter, small salad with oil and vinegar, 1 chocolate Alba shake

  * * *

  With boy-girl parties and Seven Minutes in Heaven to deal with, I tried hard to stay on my diet. But sometimes I didn’t and always vowed in my diary to get back on track.

  * * *

  November 11—BAD day. Debi Parker got her period in gym. You could see the blood right through her gym suit.

  Breakfast

  1 piece of toast—no butter, 5 handfuls of dry cereal, 21 M&M’s

  Lunch

  Skipped lunch (ate all those &M’s)

  Dinner

  3 chicken breasts with no skin; 3 pieces of sourdough bread; 12 string beans; lettuce, carrots, and celery with mustard; 1 chocolate Alba shake; 3 bites of pound cake and 3 spoons of ice cream; 12 diet candies; 2 bologna sandwiches with ketchup (eaten in bed)

  Dear Frannie, You are a FAT pig. You are TOO FAT. Tomorrow you CAN’T eat ANYTHING. I hate you, you PIG. Signed, Frannie.

  * * *

  My mother was so proud when I lost weight, she called my father in Des Moines, in Scranton, or in Newark while I stood on the scale. “Two pounds this week,” she sang into the phone, giddy with success. Shelly cheated all the time and never lost weight. “I thought you wanted to diet, Shelly,” my mother moaned. “I’m trying to help you. I have the same problem,” she added. “It’s genetic.”

  The best times I had as a kid were during the holidays. My mother got caught up in the spirit of the season and allowed Shelly and me to eat whatever we wanted from Turkey Day all the way to New Year’s Eve. My mother is Jewish and my father is Protestant, so we didn’t celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah like most people. We didn’t go to church, decorate trees, light candles, or spin dreidels. Our family celebrated by eating. We had honey-baked ham, eggnog, and reindeer cookies coated with green and red sprinkles, as well as latkes, matzo ball soup, roasted chicken with crispy, greasy, unbelievably delicious skin. We thanked God for my mother’s indulgence and ended the bacchanalia with ceremonial food hangovers and New Year’s dieting resolutions. Having no religion never bothered me because I, unlike most children, was exposed to so many culinary possibilities. Even now when people ask about my religion, I just say that in my family we worship the man who invented SnackWell’s.

  When Shelly and I entered high school, my mother went to work full-time as a real estate agent. She still watched our weight, and we still heard “I wouldn’t eat that if I were you,” but despite my mother’s eagle-eye, Shelly, once tall and gangly at 130, ballooned to 175 pounds. At first there was pleading; promises of new clothes; weeks on Pritikin and Scarsdale; trips to Overeaters Anonymous and the always forgiving Weight Watchers. She even sent my sister to Camp Galaxy, a diet camp in the Poconos. At Camp Galaxy, Shelly had weekly weigh-ins and aerobics. Shelly wrote that she and another camper set up a black market with the candy bars counselors brought back from town. A candy bar without nuts could bring in $7, with nuts or caramel, $9. At the end of the summer, Shelly came home from Camp Galaxy five pounds heavier than when she left.

  Horrified, my mother wouldn’t take her to the Forgotten Woman, the store for big-lady clothes. “Shelly,” she said, “you’re smart enough to realize that if we buy those clothes now, you won’t have anything to wear when you lose the weight.” Shelly shrugged. “And you’re retarded enough to think I’ll lose weight just because you said that.”

  I drove Shelly to the mall myself and bought her size eighteen jeans. She lived in those jeans and wouldn’t even try to diet. Furious at Shelly’s attitude; tired, I’m sure, of being called retarded; and disgusted by my sister’s lack of will, my mother retaliated by speaking about Shelly in the third person. “She can be any way she wants,” she told me. “I’ll just stay out of it.”

  Freed, Shelly ate Snickers and put the wrappers in my mom’s purse. At dinner, she wolfed pizza while my mother sat in indignant silence. I developed a respect for my sister’s stoicism that has haunted me since, especially when she got a scholarship to Cornell, came home for winter break a stunning 135, and went immediately to Loehmann’s, where my mother joyfully outfitted her in new mini skirts. They buddied up after that, and Shelly was treated differently, with admiration, and perhaps a little fear.

  I didn’t see much of Shelly during college. She hung out with girls who wore black turtlenecks, quoted Proust, and talked about setting up grassroots women’s coalitions. I, on the other hand, went to Syracuse, learned how to use a beer bong, prided myself on my ability to drink seven Kamikazes without throwing up, and had a lot of sex. Not a lot of good sex, but I made up in quantity what I lacked in quality. Needless to say, my sister and I didn’t have much in common. Except our weight.

  One summer when we were both home, we spent the day at the pool. Having gained a few pounds like everyone else in college, I was very self-conscious, and wore a long shirt over my bathing suit. Shelly told me to take the shirt off, that I wasn’t fat.

  “I’m a cow,” I told her. “And you can say that because you’re skinny.”

  “I work at it.” She stood up and shook out her towel. “It’s not as hard as you think.”

  A few days later, I walked into the kitchen and found Shelly standing at the freezer, gobbling my mother’s secret stash of frozen Girl Scout cookies.

  “Jesus, Shelly.” Startled, she looked up, then sauntered into the bathroom. Through the closed door, I heard her gagging, then the sound of the toilet flushing. When she walked out, I accused her of making herself throw up. She laughed. “Who doesn’t?” she said. “I told you: I work at staying thin. It just takes discipline.”

  A few days later, I was alone in the kitchen. I’d been skipping meals, trying to stay on a turbo-charged Weight Watchers diet. I felt lightheaded and dizzy, but loved the ache in my belly, the low rumblings of hunger, the sour nausea that rose within me. I ate lettuce with mustard, gnawed a few carrots. When I put the lettuce away, I spied some diet pudding. I took a few spoonfuls, just for taste. Then I ate a piece of cheese and two slices of turkey and a spoonful of peanut butter and a big glob of Cool Whip. Perspiring, I shut the refrigerator, opened it, shut it again. I peered in the freezer, and saw the Girl Scout cookies.

  I left the freezer open. Mist rose from the ice, cooling my face. I imagined the cookies melting in my mouth, the sweet taste as they slid down my throat, the salty nut rolling on my tongue. What was one? I thought. I clos
ed the freezer door. NO, I told myself. NO. I opened the freezer again. Then I reached into a box and nibbled on a cookie. My mouth filled with the chocolate taste, and what’s one more? I’ll just have one more. As I bit into another, relief flowed through me, warming me, seducing me. Released, I ate the cookie in two bites. Then seized with sudden panic, I ripped the box open, using my teeth to tear the cardboard. I gnawed on the frozen cookies until they were mushy and I could gulp them without chewing, then I tore into two more boxes and gobbled them all, one after the other, desperate to fill myself. I didn’t taste the chocolate, I didn’t taste the nuts, I just watched my fingers working, not attached to my hands, not attached to my body, not really attached to me at all. I gulped milk, and the cookies expanded in my stomach, the nuts grew big as acorns. I felt everything rising so I rushed into the bathroom and lay on the floor. I thought of Shelly hovered over the toilet, the curlicue of her ponytail as she dipped her head. I imagined her body in a bathing suit; two long tapered legs; a tight, flat stomach; the slender curve of her waist. I could feel myself sweating the oily chocolate, could feel it seeping out of my pores and coagulating into lumps of dimpled fat. I stuck my finger in my mouth, tentatively at first, then harder, so hard, I jabbed the back of my throat. I gagged until I spewed milky brown water and I kept gagging, heaving chunks of unchewed cookie. A few times I missed the toilet, and spots of chocolate sprayed the clean white tiles like droplets of blood. Exhausted, I rocked on my haunches, promising myself that I would never, ever do this again. I lay on the floor and didn’t move until I heard my mother calling, “GIRLS! Who ate all these cookies?”