Choose Your Own Disaster Read online

  Because, of course, this is going to be the last time. You are going to get it all out of your system, eat everything you’ve ever wanted, because if this is the last time, you’re going to need to try one of everything so you don’t want it later. Just go. Just go to the minimart. You don’t even have to put on a bra or makeup, just a big coat and a small, hidden, blank face. It doesn’t matter if it’s raining or if it’s snowing or if it’s the blizzard that they canceled school for and your mother is calling you to make sure you’re okay—you just need to get the black bag full of the things that will dull the ache in your stomach.

  You keep it a secret as best you can, but it comes out sometimes in ragged edges: parties where you can’t stop eating the chips and salsa in the center of the table, evenings with friends where you’re so focused on the pizza, first its presence—Are we ordering pizza? When will it get here? Has someone ordered the pizza?—and then eating as much of it as possible while still maintaining what you hope is an air of casual, normal twentysomething indulgence, that you can’t think of anything else. You leave early, always, to go home to your bed and your laptop and your filling yourself up until you don’t have to think about anything else.

  You are a junior in college and you go home to the Chicago suburbs for winter break. It’s a respite of clean sheets and fresh coffee in the morning. You get kisses on the head from people who pretend not to notice how much weight you’ve gained. But more importantly, it’s the latest artificial deadline you’ve created for yourself, because “I’ll stop doing this when I go back to school” became “I’ll stop doing this as soon as classes officially start” became “I’ll stop doing this as soon as finals are over,” but you never stopped. Going home will be the habit breaker. You remember reading somewhere that you need a change of scenery sometimes to break habits because it disrupts your routine. You won’t be two blocks away from a minimart that offers infinite permutations of sugar and trans fats, and your childhood bed is not one in which you would ever fall asleep watching YouTube videos with a half box of cereal spilling across the sheets. It would be different, and you would be safe, and go back to school twenty pounds lighter with clear skin and the discipline to work out every morning.

  Your doe-eyed optimism lasts one night. Your second night home, you make yourself a bag of popcorn while your family watches Dateline. Air-popped, kernels measured out by the teaspoon, completely acceptable under your mother’s watchful eye. But then the chewing reignites the stirring of a familiar animal.

  “Mom, do we have any desserts in the freezer?” you ask. It’s totally normal for a college kid to want to snack on desserts. It’s practically cliché: college kid looking for junk food in a house that her mother keeps infuriatingly carb-free.

  “I think we might have some brownies in the drawer,” your mom says.

  There are brownies, and you microwave one on a paper towel and while you eat, you perform a one-woman show about how delicious it is, and how good it is to treat yourself every once in a while, and dessert is okay in moderation.

  The rest of the family goes upstairs, turning off half the lights along the way and leaving long shadows on the tastefully decorated French-farm aesthetic kitchen. And it begins without you even needing to make the conscious decision, a perverse opera, a scene from The Nutcracker in semidarkness but instead of flitting about presents on pointed toes you rummage through the cabinets for anything you can consume quickly, anything that will satisfy whatever terrible habit you’ve created for yourself. Endless bowls of cereal (never finishing a box, distributing your scavenging among the variety, always leaving enough so no one can tell you took it); pseudo-healthy nut bars, their sticky wrappers buried so far in the kitchen trash no one will find them; half a dozen English muffins microwaved and smeared with butter and raspberry jelly; leftover pasta eaten cold from the fridge by the handful. When you are satisfied, or in pain, or left with nothing that appeals to you, you crawl upstairs.

  Sometimes you try to throw it up: curled over the toilet like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. Bulimia turned you into Gollum in a lot of ways—the conversations you have with yourself (“Maybe you could just take a walk, or a shower instead of doing this whole binge-purge thing again?” “Filthy habitses!”), the hoarding of your food like it is your Precious, and the way you look when you come up from vomiting—face ruddy, eyes bloodshot, hair hanging in stringy clumps. Andy Serkis would nail you in a motion capture role.

  Maybe all eating disorders are secretly characters from The Lord of the Rings. Bingeing turns you into a hobbit, thrilled by comfort and staying at home and coming up with as many excuses for meals as you can. A Bilbo Baggins: stout and antisocial and eating breakfast, second breakfast, and elevensies. And back when you were eating 400 calories a day, seventy pounds lighter and dreaming in calories, you definitely thought of yourself as an elf: thin, spry, delicate, and beautiful, but really, such an asshole when you think about it. I mean it was such a jerk move for the elves to leave Middle Earth on a giant ship when Frodo just worked so hard for three goddamn movies to save it. They’re just like, “Thank you for your hard work, I guess, but we were already planning on peacing out, so…” Beautiful, pointy-eared jerks.

  But, alas, now you have become Bulimia Gollum, and you deserve to live in a cave where no one will have to see you.

  It lasts like this at home for a week, a nightly ritual of a silent gluttony, witnessed only by the dog, scratching and whining in her crate, woken by the beeping of the microwave. Your hidden, terrible secret. The secret that you are transformed in the night like Dr. Jekyll into everything you wish you weren’t: out of control, unhealthy, indulgent, fat.

  And then, one morning, things are different.

  You come downstairs and your mom and dad are dead eyed and silent, standing together on the other side of the counter. And on the counter are the near-empty bags you’ve left hidden in the back of cabinets: the cereal boxes with only crumbs left, family-sized bags of chips that have gone from full to empty in the time you’ve been home, dozens of wrappers pulled out of the trash, hidden Ziploc baggies that once held a dozen brownies you thought everyone but you had forgotten.

  They didn’t say anything because they didn’t need to. You, for your part, went through all the stages of a washed-up celebrity on an intervention show. You deny, you pretend, you accuse, and then, when there is nothing left to deny or pretend or accuse, you cry and you concede. Maybe you don’t need to bear the secret burden. Maybe this bingeing is like a tumor that fixed itself to your brain, a medical malady that needs outside attention. Maybe it isn’t entirely your fault. Within minutes, you go from the character of steely Ivy League go-getter to sobbing inpatient who just gave up. Okay, okay, please help me.

  There is no magic solution. There’s no answer. You discover with tremendous guilt the next day that your mom cleared most of the food out of the cabinets, your regular binge food. Your parents watch you carefully. You oscillate between optimism and thrashing, guilty depression. Mostly, you just want another fix.

  It never goes away, not really. You get better, you eat less when you feel the urge, and the urge comes less often. You lose twenty pounds slowly and feel a bit better about photographs of yourself. But even now, writing this, your head hurts from the salt of the Chinese food you ordered with the small thrill of a misbehaving child, choosing fried dishes and pork dishes because they somehow still seem forbidden. Your brain still isn’t always on your side. All you can do is learn to live with the enemy, the begrudging respect of the police chief and criminal in a murder mystery, when they make long-awaited eye contact and nod at each other. We might not always see eye-to-eye, that nod says, but goddamn it, I can at least acknowledge you.

  You’re entering the living room of a friend’s house on campus when you see a stranger there, already laughing, surrounded by people. That’s not unusual: Alumni frequently come back to visit, sending an email out to friends and letting them know that they’ll be in the neighborhoo
d. Usually they’re not more than a few years out, so the older students still remember them, but once or twice potbellied men with shiny heads and pleated khakis ring the doorbell and look around, seeming a little bit dismayed that we didn’t all somehow remember them.

  This stranger looks young, maybe two or three years out of school, but you don’t recognize him. High cheekbones, clear light skin, and very blue eyes. He looks a little bit like an Adonis, a marble statue of a sinewy athlete with long limbs and a pretty face, but leaning more, you think, toward Benedict Cumberbatch.

  “You,” you say by means of introduction, “look so much like Benedict Cumberbatch.” This being 2012, neither he nor anybody else really knows who Benedict Cumberbatch is. “You know, the guy from Sherlock.”

  There are a few murmurs of half-recognition but no one really gets it.

  “Come on. You know!” you try again, and then noting the blank faces, you pull up Google images on your phone, scrolling mostly until you find a good picture of the Cumberbatch with similar light brown curls. “See?”

  “Yeah, I see it,” someone says, but you’re waiting for the stranger’s verdict.

  He looks at you, a half-smile across his lips (he’s the only man outside a clichéd screenplay who can actually pull off a half-smile) and he says, “Definitely.”

  He’s looking at you and smiling and now you want to know everything about this stranger. This handsome, older stranger with the perfect face who appeared with his hands in his pockets in the foyer of a home like a suitor in a Jane Austen novel. You study him, and you see the thick silver band around his ring finger, but it maybe has a Celtic pattern on it, and then you see him smiling at you again and you know he almost definitely, probably, isn’t married.

  You pull up his Facebook profile discreetly on your phone just to see if you can discover, if not a wife, then maybe a girlfriend. There’s no relationship status, although there are a few photos of him in a suit, dancing with a woman who might be in a wedding dress but also might just be in a dress. “Hey, Grace,” you say, pulling one of the older students toward you. “Is that alum guy married?”

  “Yeah, I think so, actually,” she says. “Why?”

  “Oh, he just seems so young,” you say, hoping the disappointment in your face doesn’t come through.

  “I mean, he’s in his thirties,” she replies, and rejoins people talking in gossipy clusters.

  So, probably married. You take a deep breath. That doesn’t mean you can’t spend time with him, talk with him, do some harmless flirting. And so you join the conversation. You listen to him talk about books you’ve never read and try to interject with remarks that you hope are winning and witty. Your favorite thing about him is his voice. It’s soft and lilting but very deep, with vowels that curve around with patrician, almost British-sounding Received Pronunciation. Even surrounded by people, Married Guy keeps making eye contact with you and smiling. The two of you keep finding excuses to pull each other aside. It’s almost like he thinks you’re special.

  “Have you heard the podcast Welcome to Night Vale?” you say to him finally. He’s talking about H. P. Lovecraft and how Providence’s prince of horror was buried in a cemetery not too far from campus. “You’d love it,” you say. You already know what he’d love. “It’s like H. P. Lovecraft meets slightly steampunk conspiracy theories meets…Jack Handey.”

  He hasn’t heard any of it, and you have it on your phone, and the two of you pull away, down the stairs until you’re sitting side by side in the basement. You retreat into darker and darker corners as people keep walking through and interrupting, until the two of you are in a back room—a library-cum-storage-closet—on a sunken half-broken couch, almost touching in near darkness. The two of you share a pair of headphones and listen to one full episode of the podcast, both with a performative look of concentration. So he’s married, but that doesn’t mean you can’t flirt. In fact, it probably means you should be flirting, because it just sets the game’s parameters. He can’t do anything; you make him want it. Older men are supposed to fall in love with lively college co-eds who make them realize that they need to be living life to the fullest or something. You’ve read The Western Canon. There was a Josh Radnor movie about that, wasn’t there? If you can’t make him want you, then it’s a massive failure on your part.

  When the podcast is done, he removes his bud from his ear but he doesn’t stand up.

  “Have you read Lovecraft?” he asks. You haven’t. Usually you lie about this sort of thing when a cute boy asks, especially at Brown. Never show your weakness, that you don’t belong. But with Married Guy, you want him to know everything. You can’t lie to him. You just shake your head and he smiles.

  He stands and paces the room’s bookshelf walls until he finds what he’s looking for, seizing it with a triumphant, “Aha!” It’s a book of Lovecraft, of course. “You showed me something, and now I get to show you something.”

  And so the two of you sit, now alone in a room surrounded by hundreds of books and mismatched furniture, a collection accumulated by decades of students contributing what they no longer wanted or couldn’t pack at the end of the school year, and Married Guy opens up a book of H. P. Lovecraft and begins to read aloud to you a story called “Nyarlathotep.”

  It’s all purple prose, horror movie nonsense really, but you don’t care. You can barely concentrate on the story so distracted are you by his voice, that voice you loved from the start, and wondering whether you could rest your head on his shoulder or whether that would be crossing some invisible line. You lean your head in anyway, so you can read over his shoulder.

  “‘And I saw the world battling against blackness; against the waves of destruction from ultimate space,’” Married Guy purrs, and you let your pinkie graze his.

  He’s one of the most handsome men you’ve ever seen in person, maybe the most handsome. In profile, you can make out the perfect lines of his profile and Lord Byron curl. His skin is so pale he practically glows, inhumanely devoid of any blemishes or imperfections. Just being this close to him makes you feel electric, a pulsing slug of adrenaline with its origin source your hand, just barely touching his skin. And he’s choosing to spend time with you.

  “‘Trackless, inexplicable snows, swept asunder in one direction only, where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls,’” he growls, and you put your whole hand on top of his, scratching softly with your fingers.

  Married Guy hesitates, closing the book but keeping his place. “Dana,” he says. “You are so sexy. Really. And honestly, if I weren’t married I would be flirting back with you so hard right now you have no idea.”

  You pretend to be insulted. “Flirting?” you say. “This is just how I normally act. I wouldn’t be flirting with you.”

  And maybe he believes it, because he keeps reading.

  “‘Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell,’” he murmurs, and now you are all but nuzzling him, your head resting in the crook of his neck, your hand almost fully in his. He doesn’t move to welcome you, but he doesn’t stop you either.

  Finally, he finishes. And the book is closed, and the two of you have no more excuses to be alone in a darkened basement room. You can’t let this moment end. Everything else in your life is out of your control—you live at the whim of your cravings and your impatience, but if you say the right things tonight, you’ll get to spend more time with this stranger who makes you feel wanted and seductive in a way you always dreamed you could be.

  “Let’s go to the cemetery,” you say. “Let’s spend the night. Come on; I’ve never been there.” Your blazingly bright phone screen says it’s almost midnight. It seems incredibly romantic to sneak into a cemetery at midnight.

  “I cannot,” he says, sounding like a Shakespearean protagonist. “I am exhausted.”

  “That’s no fun,” you say. “Come on, you only live once, and all that. How much longer are you in town?”

  “Not long actually,” he
says, looking directly into your eyes. You feel the creeping heat between the two of you and you drum your fingers on your thigh to keep from wrapping your arms around him. “Leaving tomorrow.”

  He must read the disappointment in your face because then he says, “But I’ll be back. You’ll see me again.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise,” he says. And the two of you stay in that room, broken off like an escape pod hurtling through space away from the rest of the house, from the rest of the school, from the rest of your lives. And then one of you opens the door and it all comes rushing, screaming back.

  Turn here.

  You don’t think you’re depressed, but then again you also didn’t think that you had an eating disorder even though you spent 85 percent of your brain power calculating and recalculating how many calories you consumed or planned to consume on any given day.

  If you were depressed, would you be able to rationally question whether you were depressed? It’s the catch-22 of mental illness: How can your brain not be working right if you’re as goddamn self-aware as you are?

  But then again, there were the nights in high school you spent sobbing so hard you were gasping for air on your bathroom floor, your face pressed onto the cold tile. You like the idea of killing yourself but hate the idea of being dead. You just want to not exist. Would that be possible? Who could you see about arranging that? The groove between the tiles leaves a ridge in your cheek. If you could just stay there forever, that would basically be like disappearing. You could just never move and starve to death unless they force-fed you, in which case you would stay alive as long as they thought it was worth it. You could literally just stay on the floor forever and never move no matter what anyone tells you to do.