Sex and Bacon (26 page)

I AM OFFICIALLY
care-worn
, like the Velveteen Rabbit. I am missing one button eye, and my velveteen fur is matted and worn away in spots. My stuffing is coming out in clumps, and there is nobody who wants to love me, not a single person to stitch me up and brush me off and make me their own soft, huggable possession again. My best days are behind me. I’m ugly as sin, greasy, discarded. I’m like those sad stuffed animals in pediatricians’ waiting rooms—handled cavalierly by many but not good enough to belong to anyone. I can only distract the querulously sick and, even so, my extremities bear the vicious bite marks of frustration. I have been chewed ragged.

I DON’T £AT
for two days. On the third day, I have two beers and an entire frozen pepperoni pizza for dinner. The grease gives me a stomachache, and after half the pizza I don’t even want any more, but I make myself finish it anyway as punishment for giving in to my hunger.

I resolve to do better. Starvation feels like the corporeal manifestation of heartbreak, and when I am physicallyweak and dizzy, it is a relief to wear my pain on the outside. All of a sudden I think I understand the people who cut themselves, forcing their pain into a visible, quantifiable state. Razor slashes and hunger are like controlled burns: They take the pressure off an unworkable system. And when you are desperately hurt, substituting another kind of hurt can feel like relief.

IT’S BEEN THREE
weeks since my door slammed shut, sealing me into my sad little apartment with my new roommate, Negativity. Negativity doesn’t have a job and never goes out, so we’ve been spending a lot of time really getting to know each other. We both like
Flavor of Love
on VH1. Negativity has pointed out to me repeatedly that no matter how awful the ladies on the show are, they’re still more loved and desired than I am.

I breakfast on a handful of multivitamins then ride the bus to the gym, where I run on the treadmill until I’m panting for breath. For the first time in my life I am without appetite—food holds absolutely no interest for me. I am light, I am lifted. As my brain chemistry shifts from the endorphins being released by my workout, I feel good for the first time in days. Food has nothing to do with it! Who needs food?

I drink water from my bottle and feel pure, blameless. I can live through the next few months if I can just maintain this feeling. I need it—it’s my heroin and I am high, sailing above pain like a dove. At the same time I realize that the good feeling is about as real as the weaves worn by the
Flavor of Love
ladies, and underneath that light, lifting sensation, I’m losing my mind with sorrow and self-loathing.

I add another hour to my time on the treadmill anyway. My plan is to run until I’m too tired to feel anything at all.

While I run, I imagine the following scenario: My lover calls me up, says he needs to see me—he can’t stand to be apart from me, he can’t stand the separation. I allow him to come to my apartment, where candles are burning and I just happen to be wearing my tightest pants and a skimpy tank top, both of which are loose on my suddenly tiny frame. I am physically vulnerable. I am
little
.

Seeing me so small (and yes, I am barefoot—I mentally add movie star red toenail polish, though I haven’t had a pedicure in months), my errant lover sweeps me up in his arms, lifting me effortlessly.

“My God,” he says. “You’re so
thin
. I can feel every bone in your rib cage!”

(Wait—actually, instead of
rib cage
, how about
spine? Rib cage
reminds me of poultry—split breasts sheathed in Saran Wrap on little plastic trays, with tiny meat maxi pads beneath to sop up the blood and fluid. Poultry is not what I want to be thinking about. Yes,
spine
is definitely better.)

“My God,” he says. “You’re so
thin.”
(That’s my favorite part right there.) “You’re so
thin
. I can feel every bone in your spine!”

I smile bravely. I have wasted away like a Victorian heroine without the nourishment of his love, locked away and forgotten in a dusty attic. I could have died without ever uttering a single word of reproach or complaint.

“God, Sarah, I missed you so much!” he says, burying his face into the intersection between my bony shoulder and my willowy, swanlike neck. Then he lifts me into his arms and carries me to bed, where he carefully undresses me, revealing my delicate frame.

Mentally I add white, lacy underthings. I am innocent. I am tiny. I am a tiny innocent victim of love. I starved without his affection, drooping like a lily when he took the light of his love away.
That
is how much I love him—I am an ethereal being; I live on affection and batten on kisses.

Then he fucks me and I come during missionary position instead of afterward with him using his hands. Somehow my lacy underthings are still in place, undisturbed and unsullied.

I nest in his arms peacefully, feeling protected and adored.

My toenails still look great.

THEN THE FANTASY
is over, and I snap out of it, and I know that this is
complete bullshit
.

Starving myself-will not bring my lover back.

The solace it offers is fake and venomous, like ugly razor scars on inner arms. Starving is not my friend. Starving does not want me to feel better. Starvation wants me to continue feeling shitty about myself. Starvation knows that the hungrier I get, the less ability I have to analyze, to explain, to
think
. And if I’m not doing those things, starvation can stay curled up like a snake against my
rib cage
. Telling me lies. Making me do its dirty work.

That lifted, light feeling? That’s from exercising—not from starving. And if I starve, I can’t exercise. That’s just simple math without a single x or y variable—and even though I failed algebra twice, I can still add and subtract.

I cannot punish or atone this pain away. I have to walk through it. It’s all mine—nobody else can come with me. Anesthetizing the pain away by mainlining hunger will not get me through. I cannot be a coward. I do not have that luxury.

My heart? Broken, sure, but there’s nothing wrong with my brain, and my brain says,
Knock that anorexic shit right off, lady, and eat some fucking food. You need all your energy to figure out how to stay alive right now
. And you know what? My brain is right, I do.

I step off the treadmill. It’s time to go home and eat.

I START WITH FRUIT
.

A cup of frozen raspberries. A cup of plain, whole-milk yogurt. Half a cup of water. Two scoops of wheat bran. Into my blender it all goes.

Now I have a fruit smoothie. I pour it from the blender into my special Guinness pint glass. I add a straw. I am suddenly ravenous.

As I suck down cool delicious raspberry slush I take back everything bad I’ve ever said about raspberries. For a while I’d gotten so pro-strawberry I’d forgotten all about raspberries —they seemed played out, overused, ubiquitous. For a long time strawberries just seemed nicer to me—more traditional, more complex and subtle, more
adult
—whereas raspberries were flashy and mainstream, kid stuff.

But this smoothie is blowing my mind because it tastes like real raspberries, and the creamy yogurt is a perfect foil for their sharpness and sweetness. It’s like my palate is waking up again after a long period of being battered by a diet of frozen pizzas and pills and tap water and sadness. These raspberries are
perfect
. I’m gulping them down in big greedy swigs, my straw pushed to one side of the glass.

Raspberries, I’m sorry I ever disrespected you. You are so good. I was wrong
.

After finishing my smoothie I take my blender apart and clean each piece with warm sudsy water. While screwing the crown of blades back into the base of the glass pitcher, I’m thinking about one thing:

Cooking
. For one. For me.

HEARTBREAK 2:
SUSTENANCE

I’M ALONE. I’M WALKING AROUND MY APARTMENT PICKING
things up and putting them back down again. Nothing I pick up or put down makes me feel less alone. Some days are harder than others. Today is Mount Everest. It is an effort to breathe.

I open the fridge and see four tall, cool bottles of beer. They’re so cold, each bottle sparkles with precipitation. They look so much like a beer commercial that I am half-tempted to don a bikini. They are ridiculously inviting. I want to stand in front of the open refrigerator and drink them all down, one after another. It is ten o’clock in the morning.

Breathe
.

I close the refrigerator door.

I open it again.

Hello, beautiful!
sing the bottles of beer in a tinkly chorus.
Why don’t you just drink us? We love you! We don’t want you to feel lonely!
It’s so nice to have friends again that I almost accept their invitation.

The only thing stopping me is the promise I made to myself yesterday after the gym—to call off the desperate self-sabotage, and cook something for myself. I can’t afford a midmorning beer stupor. As lovely as it would be to stand in front of the refrigerator gulping down my frosty friends one after the other, I have to cook.

THIS IS ABOUT
staying alivewhen your whole body is telling you to go back to bed, pull up the covers, and sleep until you’re dead.

First, go to the store and buy yourself one of those big containers of mixed organic salad greens. Throw a handful of greens on a plate and drizzle them with the store-bought dressing of your choice. Magically, the leaves morph into salad and voila, you’re eating your vegetables. Do this once or twice a day.

Try draining a can of tuna and dumping that onto the greens before adding the salad dressing. Now you’re not only eating your veggies, you’ve also added a big chunk of protein. See? Not hard.

Reduce your expectations—don’t expect food to cheer you up right now. It won’t. But eat it anyway. Keep eating.

Buy some fresh fruit—s apples, oranges, bananas, whatever. Get a mix if you like. Take the fruit home. Wash it, dry it, and put it in a bowl on your table or kitchen counter. Kat a piece once a day or so. It’s already been washed and dried so it’s zero effort. All you have to do is eat one piece and you’re done.

This is life support. This will keep you alive until your heart mends enough to keep you out of bed and away from midmorning booze-a-thons. This will help you put one foot in front of the other, plodding forward, breathing the thin air of Mount Everest and staying sane enough to know that sometimes a girl’s just gotta cry, and it doesn’t mean she’s losing her mind—it just means she’s sad. So
be
sad.

But cook while you’re crying. That way you’ll have a hearty meal all ready to go after you finish blowing your nose for the umpteenth time.

Put about two or three cups of dried black beans into a large-ish pot. They will sound like ball bearings when you pour them in. This may or may not amuse you.

Cover them with water, up to a couple inches above bean level. You can always add more water as you go. Turn the range heat to high until the water starts boiling, then cover the pot and reduce the heat to low so the bean-water is simmering in a relaxed, nonurgent -way.

Don’t salt the beans yet or they’ll stay hard. You want the beans to soak in the simmering water, softening from ball bearings into squishy little pellets of carbohydrate-y goodness. If you have some, toss in a few bay leaves.

The softening process will take several hours.

Check on the simmering beans every now and again, and add more water if needed. Stir them with a wooden spoon to make sure the beans aren’t adhering to the bottom of the pot. They probably won’t be, but I’m a compulsive stirrer and you may be too, so indulge yourself and stir that damn pot to your heart’s content.

After a few hours, test the softness of the beans by squishing one against the side of the pot with your wooden spoon. If it squishes easily, they’re soft enough.

Take the cover off the pot and turn the heat up a little bit. Now you’re boiling off any excess bean-soaking water that may be in the pot. You want the beans moist and soupy, but not watery. (Stick your face over the bean pot and steam your pores while you’re at it. Your poor skin could probably use some relief.)

Here are some things to throw into the pot while you’re adjusting the liquid. Pick a couple, or all of them, or include other ingredients that aren’t on the list but seem like they might be tasty to you. Remember that black beans aren’t exactly packed with flavor on their own, but because they’re neutral and starchy they carry other, stronger flavors very well. Think of them as plain bread—a culinary tabula rasa, an efficient vehicle for deliciousness as opposed to being delicious by themselves. Now’s your chance to make your beans taste like whatever you want them to taste like. Knock yourself out!