Adi Magazine

I’m leaning over the kitchen sink, eating handfuls of cereal from the box when the ad plays.

“Eating is a disorder,” a confident woman states, sounding simultaneously pained and overjoyed, like she has unlocked the secrets of the universe and found they were available for free download. Her voice is pitched to appeal to straight guys like me, a little sultry, a little young.

I’m thinking how I need to either pay for the premium service or find an ad blocker. Also, now I want something salty to go with the sweet cereal. Chips? I don’t want to open the new bag. I go for the garlic-stuffed olives. It’s not that I’m hungry. It’s never that I’m hungry. I’m making a poem, a painting of flavors. A pleasure I can only indulge in alone. 

My son bursts in the back door, sixteen and tall and beautiful. It’s not because he’s my son that I automatically think so; he is, objectively, the sort of young man who turns heads. He has his mother’s lithe body, her lustrous hair. I sometimes feel like a racoon who woke up in a family of gazelles. I have one hand on the fridge door and one in the olive jar.

“Spoiling your dinner, Dad?” Alan reaches past me to snatch the chips from the top of the fridge.

I close the olive jar, and then the fridge, with debonair calm. At least I hope it comes off that way as I wipe my fingers on my shirt. “Isn’t it Tuesday?”

“Practice let out early. Going to play some Total War.” He waves and lopes to the stairs.

“Have fun killing your friends!” I shout after him, because you have to be supportive, even when you don’t like violent games.

The ad for the eating-procedure is on again, filling the emptiness of the kitchen. I remember teaching Alan to catch a ball, thinking this would be the beginning of a lifetime of games of catch, of frisbee, of MarioKart… but it feels like we only did that once before he moved on to games no one had ever taught me to play.

“We’re not designed to live like this. We’ve taken apes built to hunt and gather and given them supermarkets,” says the woman in the ad.

The actress sounds like that girl I wanted to be my best friend in college, the one who read all the same comics as me. Then she joined a sorority and I hardly ever saw her after that. I tried to get my girlfriend to join, too, just so we could hang out more. Meenoo. That was her name. A beautiful voice, layered like a well-planned garden.

I still want salt. Now Alan has taken the chips, there’s nothing salty left that I haven’t tried but salt itself, so I make myself take some fruit from the bowl on the kitchen table. I sit with my laptop on the sofa and get back to work, reading trouble tickets as I peel my tangerine and pop slender sections into my mouth. The tartness is almost as good as salt.

A stab of acid hits my gut; the tangerine slice has turned into a weapon. Damn, again? I rub over the heat, mentally listing what I ate, what’s currently on the watch list from my doctor.

Eating is a disorder. My whole life I’ve eaten too much or not enough or all the wrong things. I have suffered the aches and ailments consistent with an irritable bowel. No one believed me as a kid, they said I was picky. “You eat to live, you don’t live to eat,” my dad would bark at me. Why did he say that? I honestly don’t remember my part of the conversation, the whole scene, I just remember his disgust, as if I had said food was all I wanted out of life. He was rail-thin, my dad, one of those whipcord men, strong arms, strong hands, bragged about wearing the same size jeans he had in high school, but he had to get larger shirts for his broader shoulders. But even he had his Daddy Snacks: raw garlic, summer sausage, and blocks of cheddar, eaten with a pocketknife while watching the news. My heart burns just thinking about it.

I was built like Mom, not round but square, a cinder-block physique. It was harder on her, I know, as she tried on clothes with sighs of discontent, turning this way and that in front of the mirror like she could twist herself into an hourglass. Guys are allowed not to care. At least, on the surface. We’re supposed to pound down heroic heaps of carbs and raw meat and brag about how much we lift and… magically be trim, I guess. Masculinity is a set of rules you’re never told outright.

It’s almost five, and I haven’t taken anything out for dinner. I wish we had people chow, served once a day in a silver bowl on the floor. Bland and error-free.

My wife comes home as I’m rifling through the freezer. She touches my back as she drops her purse on the counter. “Can we order pizza? I’m exhausted.”

Ooh. I want pizza. Thick salt-sweet tomato sauce and gooey cheese. What I say is, “We need to eat healthier.” The cupboards are not bare, but they’re also not overflowing. The only meat is chicken thighs. I give up hoping there’s more under the ice cubes and frozen juices and throw the package on the counter. I prepare a hot water bath to thaw it.

Joanna kisses my cheek and goes upstairs to change out of her work clothes.

My dad never liked my wife. When they met, he said he’d rather challenge her to a basketball game than have her as a daughter-in-law. She’s not even that unusually tall. She’s five foot nine, which is two inches taller than me, and I think my dad expected me to have a problem with that; he was disappointed when I didn’t.

Joanna comes back down as I’m plating up some pretty pathetic chicken thighs with red sauce and spaghetti.

“That’s not a lot,” she looks at my plate. My stomach burbles with hot and sour sensations and I know I’ve eaten more than enough in secret. Lately I’ve been grousing about my weight, and maybe she thinks I’m starving myself.

I say, “I kept hearing that ad today, the ‘eating is a disorder’ one?” I put more pasta on my plate, knowing I’ll pack it up again after dinner. “You ever think how much time we’d save, if we didn’t eat?”

“Doesn’t sound worth living,” she replies, and makes a show of inhaling the steam over her dinner.

Alan lopes in, noise-canceling headphones on, and picks up his plate. “Mind if I take this upstairs? The guys and me are doing a zoom study session. Thanks.” He turns and lopes away.

Joanna and I turn in united, affronted parent mode, too late to say anything.

“Has he sat down to dinner once this week?” Joanna asks.

It sounds like an accusation. I’m the work-from-home parent, the point man on kid problems. “I don’t want to force Alan to socialize with us. He’s just that age.”

She rolls her eyes. “When I was fifteen, I idolized my father.”

My father made me ashamed to want to eat. I don’t say this out loud.

And I was ashamed. Ashamed of every craving for caramel dusted with hard square salt like tiny modern art sculptures, for the suck of juice off a T-bone, for the lace of fried cheese on the edges of a croque madame. All of it hedonism, sensation, quickly experienced and gone.

I hardly touch my dinner. I make aborted forays to go check on the kid. Alan accused me of smothering, once. I don’t want to smother. But I go halfway up the stairs. Stop. Return to the kitchen.

Joanna asks if I’m coming down with something. I confess my stomach ache, and she pats my tummy. “We should get more Ensure,” she says.

I grimace, remembering the bland sludge prescribed last time it got so bad I had to go to the doctor. Maybe I don’t want people chow after all. But I say, “I’ll add it to the grocery list.”

After Joanna goes upstairs, after the dishes are done and I pack up the leftovers, I find the bag of chips is back on the fridge, still unopened. It feels like an apology from Alan. I devour half the bag, standing there, with French onion dip thick on each chip. I feel as ashamed and furtive as a junkie, freezing at every creak of a foot upstairs.

Stomach too upset to go to bed, I sit down to play some Mario. Alan trots down the stairs with a full trash bag and his dinner plate. I’m silently grateful he’s being responsible. After depositing both in the kitchen, he comes back and pokes my gut. “Am I gonna have a baby brother?”

The hard hemisphere of gut appeared a few years ago, as permanent as a stone. I’m annoyed. 

Do I have to suck it in on my own sofa? But I do. I straighten up. “It’s a beer baby,” I say, an old, stupid joke. I don’t even like beer. I hold my controller toward him. “Want to play head-to-head?”

“I have school tomorrow,” he says, and kisses me on the head, which gently destroys me. I hold still, enjoying the after-print of that kiss, as he lopes back up the stairs, so easy, like gravity has no hold on him.

In the morning, after Joanna goes to work, I check out the website for the procedure. There are testimonials, of course, and videos with slender, athletic people converting their kitchens into game rooms.

It’s a genetic virus cocktail, a surgery, a lot of small print sub-procedures, but they claim that in four weeks, you can kiss eating itself goodbye, your bodily needs provided by a machine implanted in your stomach. “Gain or lose weight as easy as turning a dial.”

There’s something insulting about the way they include “gain” like they’re not salivating at the diet market. It’s so obvious, by the size of the actors, by everything else in the ad, that this is about losing weight. That turns me against it. I worked so hard to like myself as I am now, to ignore the judgment of my father. I’m not passing on that stupidity to my son. I’m showing him that I don’t care what I look like, right? I’m showing him how important family is, more than earning big bucks. I’m a new kind of dad.

I close the website, but not before saving it as a bookmark.

***

Alan is in wrestling, and he comes home spitting into a cup. A technique to slim down before weigh-in, so he can get in the lightest class possible.

I hate it, for the wrong reasons. Spit is gross. “You know they call what you’re doing dehydration, right? It’s not good for you.”

“Dad, it’s just for a week!”

I watch him take the stairs three at a time. I think about how much I don’t want to go upstairs myself, to pick up the waiting laundry basket. My stomach hurts.

Another pair of long legs appear, strong and sturdy. Joanna is in shorts, carrying the laundry basket down for me. She smiles in passing, lifts one shoulder in a shrug that says she forgives me for leaving it in the middle of the hallway, no hard feelings.

But I have hard feelings.

I open that bookmark.

I discuss the procedure with Joanna. It could be a solution, I say, for the IBS. No eating means no messing up. “It’s your body,” she says, pulling the freshly laundered sheet over the bed.

I move to the opposite corner and pull it slack to get the fitted corner all the way down, lifting the mattress that inch to trap it underneath. “You mean you don’t want me to do it.”

“I mean, it’s your body.” She tosses the pillows onto the bed. She’s irritated because I am putting words in her mouth.

Her permission is important. I don’t know why I feel like she has buy-in on my gut. “It could finally mean the end of all these stomach aches.”

“Then you should do it,” she says, sounding like she means I shouldn’t do it.

I shake a pillow into its case. “Would it be a bad image? For Alan?”

That stops her. She softens, comes around and squeezes me as I rearrange the pillows. “Baby, you’re the best father a boy could hope for.”

I don’t feel like a good dad, and I don’t like the way she rubs my round tummy, the way she pauses to squeeze the “love handles” at my sides.

I didn’t expect it to be covered by my insurance. I didn’t expect them to have an opening for me. Each step of the way, it’s like I’m lying to myself, assuming that there will be an out, a trap door ready to take me away from this without effort.

The only out is the pregnant pause as a harried nurse waits for me to sign the informed consent form. I don’t take it. Instead, I take the cocktail, in four injections, each with a day of feeling ill afterward. I go in for the surgery, and I wake up drugged and sore. The hospital suite is nice, new. There’s a modern art piece on the wall and a daybed for guests in front of a picture window showing me a wooded slope and  the old Christian Scientist temple sitting at the top like a relic from a distant age.

I am given a device to test the strength of my breath. I am encouraged to walk. I am not, however, given pudding or broth. I am labeled NPO – nothing per oral. My body can no longer handle anything taken into the mouth other than water.

“Take this seriously,” the surgeon admonishes at my bedside. “A single bite of cookie could jam the machinery, destroy the delicate system.”

“Will it kill me?”

He frowns like this question is evidence I’m a bad patient. “The damage could be unrepairable. You could end up on a drip, with a colostomy to boot.” He goes on for a long time, painting dire pictures. I pretend to listen, just like a kid getting lectured.

I think it was about money, my father’s rants about not living to eat. One year he got a twenty-pound bag of turnips, free, somewhere, and we had to eat nothing but mashed turnips and fried turnips for months. Eat to live, don’t live to eat. Suck it up and take what you can afford.

I feel so rich now, with the art and the picture window, lying on a bed that sighs and shifts under me, a living thing preventing bed sores should I be unable to move myself. This is the default these days, in the surgery recovery suite, whether you need it or not. I feel like I am being rocked in a womb, ready to be re-born.

At first, I like my new body. My beer baby melts away. I feel approval. From Alan, from strangers. Maybe I’m imagining it, but eyes that used to flinch away from me now linger. And it’s been so long since I had a stomach ache, it’s like a monster from a bedtime story, something I used to live in fear of, but now I know there’s nothing under the bed.

I do have more time, more energy, and the cravings are mild—mere memories of cravings, really. I get a lot more quests completed on my online games, and the house is immaculate. How much time had I spent eating? Or making myself cups of cocoa?

But I feel weird cooking dinner. I can sample, but I have to spit it out. After a month, I stop sampling. It’s not worth it. Having something in my mouth makes me itch to swallow, to feel it slide down my throat.

Every night, Alan grabs his meal and runs up to his room. Joanna picks at smaller and smaller portions. She says she’s worried about her weight, but I wonder if my cooking has suffered.

“Stop staring at me,” she says.

I try to make a joke of it. “Sorry, I’m eyeing the mashed potatoes. Used to be, if I didn’t eat, I’d die, now I’d die if I eat!”

Joanna drops her fork. “You don’t have to sit with us.” As if there is an “us” without Alan.

“I don’t mind. It’s a chance to touch base, to go over our days.”

Joanna picks up her plate. “I do mind,” she says, and goes to eat in the living room.

I start cleaning up. She only took a third of the potatoes I’d mashed. I pack what’s left and find there’s no room for it in the fridge. The bottom shelf is full of little gray canisters that I insert, one per day, into a soft slot in my belly. Joanna reminds me when she notices I haven’t done it, but she also doesn’t rub or pet my belly anymore.

I jam the potatoes in the door, by the ketchup, sideways.

What did I eat for, if not to live? 

I avoid cleaning Alan’s room because I respect his privacy and, honestly, I’m afraid of what I’ll find. Hampers full of sticky tissues, maybe. Joints. Republican talking points. You just don’t know with teens. They become aliens.

But I’m restless and out of other tasks and, frankly, I know I have to go in there once a year to keep it from becoming a fire hazard. What I find is a trash can full of moldy food. I find bags from McDonald’s, the burger and fries still nestled inside, intact as if in Tutankhamun’s tomb. I find the dinner I cooked the night before, still on its plate.

I want to confront him. I want to hold the plate out, ask, why? I don’t. I go to Joanna. 

Joanna stares in non-comprehension at the plate. “What did we do?”

What did I do? I was the one at home. The one too focused on himself. Who went to the hospital to become thin. Passing all my father’s flaws passively, like electrical current.

We pull up Alan’s medical records. We look at things we’d never really looked at. Underweight, underweight, underweight. When were they going to warn us?

I drag him to a specialist in pediatric eating disorders. Alan’s furious to be there, sulking. The doctor, a plump middle-aged woman in black, smiles. “His hair isn’t falling out, he’s fine. You know, your life-expectancy halves if you’re overweight.”

I’m furious. I feel the Man Rules bunch up in me, conflicting: It’s okay to want to kill anyone who harms your child; it’s wrong to hit a woman. I hate the Man Rules. I leave. 

I go somewhere to be still until the red retreats from my eyes. It’s the parking lot.

Alan speaks low, like I’m the child. “Dad, it’s fine. Don’t do this again. I just….I need to stay in this weight class.”

“Wrestling season is over.”

He shakes his head. Like he’s preaching a gospel, he says, “It’s not just a season.”

“You’re underweight. You understand that? Ignore that woman up there. You’re killing yourself.” I love you, I don’t say. I love you and I don’t want you to leave me. I silently beg him to let me love him.

He crosses his arms and drops a hammer on my heart. “You don’t have a right to judge me. You don’t eat at all, and you don’t even have a good reason.”

“I get stomach aches.” The words barely come out.

He rolls his eyes. “Gee, I wonder why? You used to stuff your face every day.”

My father pops out of my mouth, loud and full force before I know I’m speaking, “You do not talk to me like that!”

Alan stares, not recognizing me. I don’t recognize myself.

We have to get in the car and drive home together. The silence is a solid thing around us, only punctuated by his busy fingers texting something to someone I don’t know.

Insurance does not cover undoing the procedure. Everyone I call acts dumbfounded that I’d ask. Joanna isn’t home. She has taken to getting dinner at restaurants. We used to use dinner as our staff meetings in the business of parenthood. Now Alan is locked into his room, and I’m alone, and the fridge is full of energy-cans.

I can’t eat. My son won’t eat. I wander the kitchen like a nomad, like a supplicant in search of a god. I see a package of Nilla Wafers. I open it. They smell stale. I don’t even want to eat them. The texture is too spongy, artificial. But I cram one in my mouth. I chew, I force it down. It feels like there’s nowhere to go. Bile rises up my throat. I force that down, too.

Will I die now? I feel the cookie like a hard lump behind my heart. I feel robbed by the pettiness of the act, by the way the pain eases. I open the fridge. Garlic-stuffed olives, next. Miniature dill pickles. Hard salami, folded and folded into little cones. The mashed potatoes are still there; they come out like clay, firm yet malleable in my fingers. I pop in a wad. Orange juice, next. It dribbles out the sides of my mouth. That adds to the poetry. A spoon of brown sugar. Salt. Garlic croutons. Something snaps behind my ribs. Pistachios. Why didn’t I know we had pistachios? I break the shells with my teeth. My tongue is bleeding. Something hurts, deep in me, a knife blade in my diaphragm, a tearing. I vomit hot acid and blood into the sink. I don’t care.

Alan stands in the kitchen door. “Dad, what are you doing?”

I start some tomato basil bisque. I search for asiago and provolone to grill on rosemary focaccia. Boil water. I’ll make spaghetti Bolognese with fat chunks of mushroom and too much parmesan, like my mother made.

He looks in the sink. I nudge him out of the way, rinse the mess down the disposal. I can make crispy fried egg rolls as tight as a banker’s sleeve of dimes. My mother-in-law taught me, patiently, while oil sang on her stove. My vision blanks, I fall against the counter, but I get up again. I pull down mixing bowls, thinking of light sauces with diced cucumbers floating like koi, thick sauces with dill, matzo and potato pancakes as rich as new-plowed earth, golden as the beach, foaming with sour cream waves.

Alan runs away. I call out, “Come back! This is almost done!” This is for him. All the sweet and crispy and the hard and soft. Bread like a favorite pillow, freshly turned to the cool side. This is why I live. This is what I earn money to buy. This is pleasure and warmth and it used to be family and togetherness and I want it back. I want it all back.