“It’s the policy for your health insurance. I could refer you to some colleagues who operate on a sliding scale, but…”
“I make myself throw up,” I tell her. “Just so you know. I can’t stop doing it. And I haven’t had my period in a year.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. The corner of her mouth sinks slightly, but she’s otherwise completely composed. She swivels around to pull something out of the bottom shelf of her bookcase. “There are resources that can help you.” A xeroxed pamphlet is waved at my knee. I take it wordlessly despite the air bubble of laughter at my throat. I can’t believe this woman thinks a leaflet will save me.
“I don’t have cancer,” I tell her, arms crossed. It vaguely registers somewhere in the hinterlands of my perception that I’m crying again. “Or the other thing.”
“Jayne,” she says, eyes shining with infinite patience. “Please look into it.” She nods at the folded paper in my hand. “It’s where I refer all of my patients who struggle with disordered eating. They’ll help you. New York is just a place. It’s the people who will become a home for you.”
* * *
I force myself back toward June’s, stopping off at the deli on Broadway, the nice one, the one I like. I just need gum. I need coffee. I need TUMS for the coffee, and possibly more of those delicious chocolate-covered banana chunks. I could get some for my sister, too. She should probably also have something with iron. What has iron? I fling open the door, and my eyes immediately land on it. On me.
It’s my picture by the cash register. There are three other people featured along with me—the WALL OF SHAME, as it says in black Sharpie. The others have their grainy black-and-white faces turned away from the security cameras, but mine is tilted at an angle, looking straight into the lens. The wanted posters are for various petty thefts. The balding guy in glasses above me has a yen for RX protein bars. The teenager to the left is a little more lowbrow, Cheetos and Arizona iced tea. The other woman, to the upper left of me, has a genuine need—she’s taken cans of sausages, sacks of dried beans, nutritious, filling, dense. And there I am: CHOCO-BANANAS, it reads under my startled, ghostly mugshot.
The shame is so immense—instant and physical—the wind’s knocked out of me. I hide behind my hair, looking only at my shoes, as I elbow a woman, pulling the door open with such force that something in my shoulder clicks strangely in its socket. I can’t even mutter I’m sorry. I’m too desperate, too frantic, too repulsed. I sprint to the subway, body incandescent with humiliation, nauseated and frantic to burn off some of this horrible energy. The embarrassment scorches down to some essential wound inside me.
I blindly pull out my card. I can’t believe I’ve ruined this neighborhood too. Everything I touch turns to shit.
I’m shaking on the train.
The roar.
The gallop.
I take a deep breath, searching the skyline as the train goes aboveground. The murky trench and soaring residential buildings of the Gowanus Canal. The Statue of Liberty the size of a grain of rice behind the dingy glass of the subway window. I peer down, searching for my piles of smashed building, but I see that it’s all but been tidied away. I’m filled with an awful regret. Why can’t things just stay where I want them?
My joints are coiled with a hectic friction, and my body tingles in anticipation as I walk to my block. As I pass dollar stores, the Laundromat, and the man who sits out there on a plastic chair in a coat, with a cat. My mugshot rises up in my mind, and it recalls the blown-out security photo of June’s forehead at the cancer center. Various sense memories slice through my thoughts. Water warming my fingers as June tilts her head back, crying, as I rinsed her hair. Mom’s robe-clad arms flapping at us in church. Dad not meeting my gaze in the rearview, the rumble of highway beneath my seat. Jeremy laughing when the actor returned to the table. The abstract look on Ivy’s face when we’re both bleary-eyed and blissed out while randoms grope us through thin dresses. A flash of us giggling as we pull each other into a bathroom. Taking turns. Sharing sugar-free breath mints or Listerine strips. Spraying perfume on each other before we had to leave our bubble of privacy. Patrick can never know this side of me. His wholesomeness, the sanctity of his apartment, I can’t taint any of it, him, with me.
Another image surfaces: my ex-roommates, Megan in front, Hillary at my doorframe, unwilling to step into the squalor of my bedroom. It’s not usually as bad as this, I want to tell them, but they don’t care. Tones rising. Faces luminous with rage. I’m struggling to focus on their features, the contortions of their mouths; I know they’re mad, but I’m so tired. Tired enough not to get up, so tired that I don’t bother to upright myself and hide the empty bottle of wine that I’d stolen and the remnants of Hill’s demolished birthday cake on my bed.
I was smiling then, too. Partly out of discomfort at having been caught but mostly with a curiosity for how far they’d take it. Initially, I’d been judicious about helping myself to their cabinet. Then I became more haphazard in what I’d replace. It started with passive aggressive texts. A single house meeting where I apologized profusely and privately rolled my eyes. The thick, ropey vein on Megan’s neck throbs with the higher registers as she shrieks. I’m impressed by her convictions. It takes courage to display such vitriol. I go silent. Remote. I back away from the scene in my mind.
It was Hill that finally pulled her back, blinking slowly, allowing for unalloyed disdain to slide off her nose and down at me. She told me I had a week to gather my things.
“Yeah, okay,” my sour mouth mumbled, heart reanimating as panic shot scratchy spidery impulses all over my skin.
This can’t be all there is. I’m finally here.
I envision June again. In the bath. The spatter of dark on white tile.
My sister died.
My sister died.
My sister died.
The supermarket doors slide open and I take a deep breath. The bright, glossy packages in the aisles call my name. My legs threaten to give, I’m so grateful. Relief is so close. I need donuts. I need the exact vanilla-glazed yeast donut that they had at the diner with Patrick. When it was raining, when we were matching, when it was safe. I also require an apple pie. A whole one. A happy family pie but my own. And real Parmesan. The kind that looks like a pink Himalayan salt lamp, the kind I’d never had before. I make a beeline for the refrigerated section of the grocery store. I don’t need a cheese grater; there are going to be teeth marks in mine.
I’m scandalized and impressed by how expensive real Parmigiano-Reggiano is. Nine bucks a hunk. It lands heavily in my basket. The anticipation in my salivary glands make my temples ache, and by the time I’m at the cookies and cakes, I’m drunk with options. I could get Entenmann’s. I peer into the windowed box, but their donuts are the wrong texture. The dry cakiness, the way you can pack them in your guts like a drug mule swallowing condoms isn’t what I want. I need the greasy, fluffy, bready ones. I need the exact one I had with Patrick or it won’t work.
Patrick.
The thought of what he’d think of me skitters across my mind. It dawns on me that I left his apartment just this morning.