Broiled Grapefruit
My mother burns her finger while pinching it off the oven rack. Charred sugar crystals in February kitchen air. Her black hair, braided like one of my toy ponies, curtains her side profile. She plates the grapefruit and asks me to get the aloe.
I pluck a juicy arm from the plant above the toilet in the pink bathroom.
Back in the kitchen, my mother wipes at the edges of her mouth with a paper towel. I peel the skins apart and glop aloe onto the side of her plate. She burrows her finger in, pulls it out, mouths thank you. With her spoon, I scoop out a fleshy red triangle. I think some of the spoon’s metal must have leaked into my piece because it is sour and shiny in my throat.
Cottage Cheese
From the Pizza Hut lunch buffet on Monday holidays paid for with Book-It coupons. My mother fills plate after plate with salad while my sisters and I swallow slices of deep dish. The four of us take turns seeing who can stack the perfect bite: lettuce, crouton, cottage cheese, cucumber, shredded cheese, bacon bits. Try some of ours now, momma, my sisters and I whine. She says we’re awfully sweet but she’s watching her carbs.
Magazines formulate equations like spinach cancels out ranch. Tomatoes plus cucumbers negate cheese and bacon. Iceberg lettuce is neutral. Unsweetened iced tea then add one sugar packet.
Red spaceship lamps dangle above our table. The windows are tinted so that beyond the strip mall, the October sky looks like it is always about to storm. My dad is at work, but even so, none of us want to go home.
Subway Diet
More for convenience’s sake than anything. My mother is too tired to cook. I write down my sister’s orders. Turkey and provolone on Italian herbs and cheese bread. I love the way the cheese is cooked onto the bread and can’t believe no one’s thought of that before. Even my dad approves, because five dollars is a good deal for a footlong sub.
Every Subway is pumped full of garlic air and features a deflated Jared cardboard cutout. I don’t believe he lost all his weight eating sandwiches. We stare through the thick plastic at the slimy rainbow of toppings. My mom orders unsweetened tea and specifies, “No cookie.” I copy her, even though I wanted to try the M&M chocolate chip.
Later, on the living room floor where my sisters and I kneel to eat at the coffee table, I sneak edges of their cookies until they swat my hand away.
Special K
This time I’m old enough to try it too. Our insides turn to cardboard, and we don’t mind it. Fill up on the blandest cereals and breakfast bars to patch up where it stings all over.
My dad’s moved out and I’m just learning to cut myself with anything sharp I can find. Scissors leave jagged, puffy stripes that ooze like the strawberry pastry bars.
My mother watches every season of Monk while my sisters do AP homework in the poorly lit dining room. The basement TV’s only channel is QVC. I stare at women with powdered perms, examining studded bags, blenders, the ugliest jewelry you’ve ever seen, until the treadmill tells me I’ve burned one thousand calories.
Drink when you feel hungry
She means water. She read that your stomach tricks your brain into thinking it’s hungry when it’s really just thirsty.
I surround myself with liquids. Green tea no honey, coffee, pink lemonade, flavored vodkas. Vodka has zero calories, an idea I must’ve internalized from the Skinny Girl Vodka label or something. I take shots in my closet on school nights. I’ve outsmarted the whole world.
My mother drinks water or sweet mint tea. I go to community college and come home still drunk at six am while my sisters huddle at the hair straightener. They inherited my father’s metabolism and with it, his acne-prone skin. Plastic cups stack up on my bedside table. The following year my middle sister and I flee to four-year universities. Two years later, my youngest sister leaves too.
My mother paints and repaints the walls of the house. Burnt orange, powder pink, cocoa brown with flecks of gold sparkles. She rescues a baby squirrel and feeds it powdered kitten formula. Bags of pretzels or kettle corn become dinner. Late at night, she gets hungry. She polishes off the pretzels or she just drinks water. There are gaping holes in the seams of her life that I don’t know how to fix.
Most nights I don’t call her.
Some days, when I swear off alcohol for the seventy-fifth or three-hundredth time, I make resolutions.
I won’t buy pressed Xanax from the bodega anymore.
This is the last time I call out of work.
I will drink spinach mango smoothies every day.
I will call my mother at least once a week.
I will drink water when I feel like liquor.
On my sixth third day without a drink, the phone rings loud and pixelated in my ear. She tells me she has been eating nothing for breakfast, a salad for lunch except on pizza party workdays, and frozen spinach stuffed chicken meals for dinner.
I want to ask: How do you do it, go on with living? How do you regain hope each spring, convince yourself the next diet will make it all okay? I want some dumb hope. I want it more than anything.
I want to say: My gums are rotting out of my mouth. I’m trying to locate prescription strength anti-nausea pills again so I can resume drinking. I can’t stop gaining weight so there must be calories in gin.
I watch my puffy, popped-blood-vessel face in the mirror while she speaks. A bag crinkles open beneath her thin voice.
Instead, I say: Please don’t heat plastic containers in the microwave, it causes cancer. I say Spinach and Avocado and Antioxidants. I say I’ve been eating so, so healthy, you wouldn’t believe it. Raw vegetables every night, in between study sessions. Grilled chicken too, or Alaskan Cod. Baked, of course, no butter.
Whole 30
Except we cheat with salad dressing and peanut butter.
I am twenty-five and once again living with my mother. I haven’t had a drink in two years, three months, and eighteen days. Over the past six months I’ve checked into the emergency room ten times for standard aches that have morphed themselves into life threatening illnesses within minutes of Googling symptoms. When I go to my half-brother’s house for dinner, he slips me a St. Dymphna prayer card. My half sister-in-law lends me “It Starts with Food.” Fall becomes winter, my psychiatrist has me try on antipsychotics like skinny jeans at the mall. None of them fit. I take a job shoveling snow for a dead woman’s property, funded by her estranged husband. My hands sweat through my gloves and my cheeks burst so red with cold and life and there is no way I can be dying, not now.
I return to the magical logic of dieting culture. Amazon lets me order Magnesium capsules in bulk. A carton of blueberries cancels out one pack of cigarettes. I can eat as much sugar as I want though, because it is far less carcinogenic than alcohol. Cranberries with granola in my plain Greek yogurt prevent UTIs. The kale and sweet potatoes and salmon scoop the potential precancerous cells right out of me.
Then it is April and in five months I’m moving six hours away for another school. Further from home than I’ve ever lived. Too far away to protect my mother from the Pennsylvania mid-winter. She reads Facebook articles and gets angry, then scared. She prints out instructions to my great aunt’s cabin in Sullivan County and tells me to memorize them, in case of emergency.
I’m trying to instill good eating habits in her before I leave. The 2020s, the magazines say, are all about making permanent lifestyle changes. I pan fry frozen Aldi Tilapia until we read that Farm Raised Tilapia from China is dangerous. I worry I’ve been poisoning the both of us with my insistence upon fish tacos. She says I’m like having her own personal chef. She says she doesn’t know what she’ll eat when I move. I tell her I can video call her; we can cook and eat together.
I’m standing in our humid kitchen, dog hair sticking to my toes, attempting a stir fry with riced cauliflower. Every meal is a prayer for the both of us. Please don’t die please don’t die please don’t die please don’t die.
Kayla Jean lives in Virginia where she is pursuing an MFA at Virginia Tech. Her work has appeared in Hobart, Rejection Letters, and is forthcoming from X-RAY.