Choose Your Own Disaster Page 3

  “I was trying to get the registrar to change rooms. Hate these back-of-the-library rooms,” he says. No one responds. “Come on, gather your chairs around. Just…circle up.”

  You do. None of you have seen this professor before or heard any stories about him from upperclassmen. He is a visiting professor, you’re pretty sure. There is no mythology attached to him.

  “So I’m going to be your professor this semester,” he says, smirking to reveal perfectly straight teeth. You hadn’t known people smirked outside of romance novels before this. “I figured since it’s the first day you might as well just ask me any questions you might have about me.”

  None of you have ever begun a college class with the professor asking for an interview.

  The boy with his books out asks the first question like a cautious step onto a frozen lake.

  So, where are you from?

  —Florida.

  Where were you before this?

  —Teaching in Florida.

  How is this class going to be graded?

  —Just…do your work. Do the reading. We’ll workshop three student pieces a week.

  What kind of writing do you do, mainly?

  —I write books.

  What kind of books do you write? you ask.

  —That’s a pointless question.

  —Double-spaced, twelve-point font.

  —Yes, this class is mandatory pass/fail.

  —Ready? All right, let’s open the yellow book to page 131 and talk about Tobias Wolff.

  It’s only as you’re walking back to your dorm room that you realize the professor never actually said his name.

  You look him up later with your laptop balanced on your belly and find his profile on a Florida university website: a much younger picture of him, handsome and squinting into the sun, with a brief biography noting his two books, both no doubt celebrated among a certain circle of the literati at least for a brief moment. Their descriptions are almost parodies of their genre: neither poetry nor prose, neither fiction nor memoir—these are autobiographies of objects, manifestos of emotion, notebooks of erotica, handmade ceramic bowls of feelings. They transcend linear structure, the literary establishment, and the physical act of reading itself. You hate them immediately.

  And yet you admit to yourself, you desperately want this professor to like you. You want him to feel as though you and he are colleagues, on the same level. You, a vivacious, single-eyebrow-raising co-ed, precocious literary talent, and he the cynical, brilliant professor who sees something special in you.

  Because here’s the thing you can admit to yourself: You’re a good writer. Sometimes even a very good writer. It’s the one consistent thing about your identity that’s existed from first grade on, the way you’re able to sit down with a notebook and write something weird and fast and memorable.

  When you were eight, you wrote a book of rhyming poems about animals at the zoo.

  You were planning on illustrating each page, but the poetry-writing came faster and easier to you than the drawing. Someone would look at your drawings and know immediately you were a child; if your typed and printed words were good enough, they could be from anyone.

  Come to the zoo and see the giraffe

  The long-necker

  Tree-wrecker

  Star-checker

  Giraffe.

  “Mom, who is the publisher who does the Dr. Seuss books?” you asked one day while your mom was preparing turkey sandwiches for the next day.

  “I…don’t know,” she replied.

  Undeterred, you marched upstairs and found a Seuss book in your closet and identified the strange words in the bottom corner of its cover: RANDOM HOUSE.

  You asked your father for a big envelope from work and addressed it carefully with an address you found during your thirty minutes of computer time, and slid the pages inside. “Can you mail this tomorrow?” you asked your dad. He agreed.

  You would be a kid-genius, a celebrant of the literary world. You were trapped in the comfortable bubble of the suburbs, on the conveyer belt of high school, college, boring job, boring marriage—then having kids and watching the whole cycle repeat itself again but this time from the opposite side. But your writing can get you out. People will read your writing. You will make boatloads of money and live in New York when you’re not traveling the world to meet adoring fans. You will be like Dr. Seuss, read for generations, your life the fodder for endless elementary school oral reports. Your writing just has to be good enough—and maybe it is.

  You have two fantasies about the professor that reappear equally frequently. The first is his fucking you, over his desk. That one creeps through your ear and into your brain at 11:30 p.m. when you’re alone in your dorm room with the covers drawn up to your chin and one hand tracing the elastic band of your underwear and the red indent it made in your belly. The second fantasy is the two of you locked in a close discussion, staying for hours after class in this back room of the library after the rest of the students have gone, those peons whose analysis of Katherine Mansfield was almost comical in its simplicity compared to the commentary you were able to contribute in class, even though you only skimmed the assignment. The two of you would talk about literature and writing until the red sun sank behind the eighteenth-century wood houses that line the edges of Brown’s campus like soldiers, and then you would keep talking, in a bar, in his room, while he fucked you over his desk, and so on.

  A semester goes by with you attempting to impress him with oblique references to Twitter followers and the fact that you’re looking for an agent, and did he know you almost have an agent? “Oh, Professor, quick question. When I’m looking for an agent, what really should I be looking for?”

  “I wouldn’t really know,” he says, and slinks from the room after the class ends, at 5:01 p.m.

  Finally, you have your semester meeting with him, in which every student is required to sign up for a fifteen-minute slot in his office to discuss your final writing project. You wrote a maudlin, meandering piece about a teenage girl going to her cousin’s funeral and stealing from her dead cousin’s bedroom. Nearly every other student in the class wrote some Jack Kerouac–wannabe bullshit about a man who is dissatisfied with his married life and wonders if he should just get on a train and leave it all behind. (In half the stories, he did get on the train, and in the other half he didn’t. In one story, he jumps in front of it.) You want praise for your voice-y first-person, unpretentious story. A beginning, a middle, and an end. No loyalty to the up-its-own-ass literary establishment.

  “Some parts of it worked,” the professor says to you, handing over the printed pages with a few nondescript red squiggles. “Needed a more human angle. It was okay, though.”

  The professor’s office doesn’t seem fully occupied yet, like the condo of a newly divorced dad. He shares it with another visiting professor, but both desks are disconcertingly empty of papers or memorabilia. Only a few books with titles you don’t recognize take up the empty chair beside you, and his coat is on the back of his chair. Other than that, he could disappear and no one would ever know he worked here.

  “What does that mean?” you ask, the word okay expanding like a balloon in your brain and pushing everything else out. Okay. Just okay. Okay, but not great. Mediocre. Okay. Okay? “I mean, what specifically could I improve?”

  “The part in the cousin’s bedroom was good. I want more exploration of that sort of emotional conflict.”

  But his words might as well be the buzzing trombone of an adult in a Peanuts cartoon. He didn’t say it was good. He didn’t say you were a good writer. He was acting like you were just one more of the faceless and uninspired students he is burdened to teach between his own bouts of genius. He doesn’t care about you or your work at all.

  “But…but I’m writing a book,” you sputter. “I’m trying to write a young adult book, and it’s going to have a similar voice to this story. I mean…” And what else do you have to lose? It’s the end of the semeste
r and he’s given you nothing, not even the indication that he gives a shit about teaching this class. “Am I good enough?”

  “Look,” the professor says. His tan has faded a bit after six months in Providence and not Florida. His hair has gone gray around the temples, but unfortunately the effect is still “distinguished literary intellectual” and not “mediocre middle-aged man.” “I think,” and he hisses a bit, sucking air through his teeth, “you are probably going to be a very successful commercial writer.”

  The word commercial now reverberates through the small office overrun with papers. He says it like a shameful truth, like he hates to have to be the one to tell you this, but them’s the facts. Sorry, kid, I just call ’em like I see it.

  “Thanks,” you say. And fuck you, you think.

  Continue reading.

  WHICH LORD OF THE RINGS CHARACTER ARE YOU, BASED ON YOUR EATING DISORDER?

  “You say you don’t want to be losing any more weight,” the therapist said, tsking and ratatating at the clipboard in her hands with a pencil. The pencil was inscribed with her own name and office number. “And yet you’re down four pounds since last week.”

  “Last week it was also colder outside,” you say. “I was wearing a sweater, I think.”

  The therapist just gives you that “I’m not sad, I’m just disappointed” look, as you shuffle back into your Birkenstocks and return to your perch on her couch, across from her chair.

  “Why do you think you’re losing weight, Dana?” the therapist asks in her calm, even therapist voice. You wish she wouldn’t use the therapist voice. You’re pretty sure she isn’t even a therapist; the plaque on her door actually says DIETICIAN. NUTRITIONIST. CONSULTANT. And yet here she is, with a waiting room filled with anorexic teenagers and back issues of O Magazine and a couch with a box of tissues next to it. You and your mom just call her by her first name, Lisa, as in, “Did you make another appointment to see Lisa next week?” The answer is always yes. Going to Lisa is part of your defensive strategy that allows temporary reprieve from your mother’s constant monitoring, which she calls concern.

  Here is the game you and Lisa play every week:

  She weighs you.

  She says you’ve lost weight.

  You feel guilty—the slightest bit relieved, but mostly guilty. It would make the rest of the hour go by so much easier if you had just held in your pee this morning before you came and drank a full glass of water and ate a bigger-than-usual bowl of oatmeal. But since you’ve lost weight, and Lisa’s job is to make sure you don’t lose any more weight, you now have the pleasure of spending upward of forty minutes smiling and pretending to take notes as Lisa makes insane suggestions: “How about add another slice of cheese to your sandwich at lunch?” “A milkshake is a good dessert to increase calories!” “Have you considered eating a midmorning snack?”

  Thank you, Lisa, for your brilliant insight. Please, could you repeat that last one so I could write it down? Miiid-mooooorning snack. Maybe yogurt, you say? Got it. Wow. Brilliant. Life-changing. You’re a miracle worker.

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. Agree to everything, change nothing, come back next week and repeat it all over.

  There’s another strategy you try sometimes, the one you’ll try today when it feels like agreeing one more time to “using whole milk in your coffee instead of skim!” will cause your organs to crawl out through your mouth and strangle you: You’ll be honest.

  “Look,” you say. “I’m not actually, medically, underweight.”

  She agrees. You have about ten pounds left before a doctor might formally rebuke your BMI as worrisome, and ten more beyond that before a stranger on the street might think you look sick instead of just a pretty, teenage size 2.

  “But,” Lisa counters in a well-practiced tone—her attempt to sound halfway between Mary Poppins and Mr. Rogers, “we’re less concerned with your weight and more concerned with your thought process surrounding it. You’ve become paranoid about your weight and restrictive in your eating in a way that doesn’t reflect the truth of the real world.”

  “Okay, but doesn’t it, though?” You know you’re not going to be productive; there is no endgame in which the therapist declares You win! and sends you home with a signed certificate that says GIRL ALLOWED TO EAT HOWEVER SHE WANTS NO MATTER WHAT BECAUSE SHE’S SO SMART but now that you’ve started, you can’t stop. “The truth of the real world is that it sucks to be overweight. Especially when you’re an overweight girl. Being thin is like the most boring superpower in the world: Villains cower in fear from Everything-Goes-A-Little-Bit-Easier-For-Her Girl! Clothes fall correctly on her! Boys pay attention to her! Strangers don’t give her weird looks! Yowza! Pow! (Useless as her powers are for fighting crime, they’d still probably let Everything-Goes-A-Little-Bit-Easier-For-Her Girl join the Avengers. I mean, they let bow-and-arrow guy join the Avengers.)

  “It sucks, yes. It’s the actual worst that this double standard exists, but it does. Everyone on this planet is biased in favor of skinny people. We think they’re smarter and prettier and more competent. And as a young person trying to succeed, I want people to think those things about me. So, no, I don’t think me trying to be skinny is something that ‘doesn’t reflect the truth of the real world.’”

  Lisa twirls the pencil in her hand, but she doesn’t pause before she responds. “You’re a feminist, Dana. Surely you know that a woman’s weight doesn’t reflect anything about her.”

  “Of course I know that,” you fire back. “It’s just everyone else that doesn’t know that. So if given the choice, I’d rather count calories and be skinny and reap all of those unfair advantages. It’s like a cost–benefit thing. Yes, counting calories all the time is annoying, but it’s an overall better way to be compared to how the world treats being a fat girl.”

  “You know,” Lisa continued, as if she had planned her response before you had even said a word. “You can have a good figure without obsessing over calories. Eating intuitively, for example. I promise, if you bring your weight up just five pounds, your brain chemistry will return to a state where you aren’t always obsessing about what you eat.”

  Thin People always say shit like that. “Eating intuitively,” is Thin Person garbage, just like “I’m addicted to exercise!” and “This is just too sweet for me. I couldn’t possibly finish it.” You, by contrast, are a Fat Person who just happens to be thin at the moment, and your body is fighting at every opportunity to return, like entropy, to its natural resting state. If you tried to “eat intuitively,” nothing would stop you from having a bag of chips at lunch. And then a cookie. And then a second cookie. And then cupcakes for someone’s birthday. Before you knew it, there would be nothing keeping your calories in check at all. Within a week, it would be The Purge and you’d be wearing a pig mask and threatening people with a baseball bat for a couple of Mallomars.

  But you can’t explain any of that to a Thin Person.

  “Yeah,” you say. “Okay. Maybe you’re right. What were you saying about whole milk again?” It’s useless. You spend the rest of the hour taking inane notes and nodding and half-smiling with an expression you designed as “rueful, resistant teen finally opening up to the light.”

  Lisa is just doing her job, but so are you. You are doing the job of a girl who wants to be successful in the real world. The counting calories, the lying in bed and pressing your palm against your hip bones to make sure they jut out far enough, the way you yank at your jeans until they’re baggy enough to fit a full fist in the waistband—they’re just the price of admission. You’re doing as you’re told. You’re living as a human woman in all her exquisite misery, exactly the way you’ve been taught.

  Back when you were a sophomore in high school, you read in a magazine (one with Women’s cheerfully in its name, a B-list celebrity on the cover with a swatch of glowing abs emerging from a pair of Lycra booty shorts) the number of calories a woman should eat to maintain her weight. The answer is a clean, even 1,800 calories. The number itsel
f is ripe like a fruit—two full zeros at the end, the eight pinched in the middle like a perfect hourglass figure. The magazine advises 300 calories for breakfast, 400 calories for lunch, and 500 calories for dinner, with one 200-calorie snack and one 200-calorie dessert. It’s that easy. If you obey those rules, you will be a normal, thin woman. Any calories you eat over that amount will be stored, like wheat in a silo, to create lumps of bulging fat and unhappiness in your life.

  You become obsessed with the terror of pulling on a particular pair of jeans; these pants force you to pull the fabric tight across your stomach to coerce them into buttoning. You see the red marks left beneath your belly button at the end of the day and knead at them, half lovingly, half loathingly. You are five foot six in a Jewish community and you were tall fast: taller than your mom, taller than your older sister, taller than most of your friends by at least several inches. It makes you feel big, like a lumbering oaf escorting your petite friends, brought along as a mission of goodwill between the pixie fairy and the ogre communities. You are never the ingénue. You are smart and you are loud about it, raising your hand every question and debating anything, anywhere, with anyone who would make the mistake of engaging you. You imagine your manner with boys to be the flirty, aggressive banter of a romantic comedy heroine; you don’t yet realize playful repartee doesn’t work on suburban teenage boys, especially if you don’t look like Kate Hudson.

  In third grade, you and your friend sat in the hallway outside your classroom. Your friend planted her feet in front of her and pulled her knees to her chest, showing you how even when she presses her knees tight together, her kneecaps always hit before the dangling flesh below could touch. You tried it. The flesh of your thighs flowed together and closed the space between your legs. Your friend looked over at you pityingly. “Strange,” she said before turning back to her own still-bony child’s legs.