On the Sly

                                                            On the Sly

           

   

England, the land of my childhood, of summers spent walking along the moors with Wuthering Heights tucked underneath my arm, listening for Catherine Earnshaw’s imagined howl ribboning through the wind.

            

England the place I sit while writing this small creature into existence. A creature I fear might sprout arms and legs. Might stand up one day all on it’s own and turn into something more hideous than I ever imagined.

 These words press on to some unknown point, a jam stain on a napkin.

   

England, my half place, my mother’s country; the one she left so long ago to escape her violent father.  That story, the one of my mother’s childhood, with the crumbs I’ve managed to piece together from that distant meal, could be a gothic novel all in itself. But I won’t be talking about that story today, although the yearning to escape a captor will remain a prevalent theme within this small creature.

I want to talk about something I’ve tried to flee. A burning barn I’ve been trapped in for years, eating smoke like air, bags of chips like they were vegetables.

            

Eat to live. Don’t live to eat. This is an old adage I’ve often heard. But what if you can’t seem to grasp this. What if you wake up in the morning and think about food the way Heathcliff thought about Cathy?         Lets talk about hunger. About her large, wet fangs.

             

This particular creature takes place in England, although it might as well take place anywhere. England, America, this is no difference. I’ll overeat. I’ll fill myself like a limp doll in need of stuffing until my seams break. 

            

But England it is, although my appetites never change. England is where this particular snippet of my overindulgences took place.

           

Quavers, Hula Hoops, Mini Cheddars, Crunchiest, Tiger Bread, and Red Leister smothered in Bramston Pickle, when I step off the plane at Newcastle Airport to visit my family, these are the first words, and tastes, that cross my mind. And greedy saliva grows, a thick weed in my mouth.

       Hello, family.

       Hello, Laura.

       I can’t believe it’s been two years.

       It’s so good to see you.

           

We dispense with the pleasantries and immediately I open my Grandmother’s cupboard, discovering Flakes, a chocolate stick that seems to melt before it even touches your tongue. I close my eyes. The flake’s cocoa bark falls into the forest floor of my mouth. I’m home, I think. My families in the other room and I am happy to see them, but can’t go back yet.  There is something to do first. A chore, a short prison stay, and I close the kitchen door, devouring ten Flake bars. Doing the math after those two or three minutes. Nine grams of fat in each bar, I think. 9x10 = 90 grams of fat.

      

How often do you exercise? He asks.

Does eating count?

            Tonight my English uncle, whom I rarely see, pet my stomach and said, "You've been sneaking food on the sly, eh?" and gestured towards the baby-sized-bulge that is my midsection. I must admit that with clotted cream still heavy on my lips, and chocolate cake fragrant in my mouth, I was not ready for this comment. But lets be honest here, I mean, who is ever ready for a comment like that? Put bluntly, he outed me. "I went in your room the other day to fix a light for your Gran," he said, with the rest of my family paying close attention, “and saw the crisp and candy wrappers stuffed underneath your bed, hidden beneath your mattress."

             "Oh," I replied, and looked nervously towards my Uncle's thin, health conscious wife.

            My uncle’s wife attempted to fiberize the bad smell away, but the stench of my uncle’s words remained. "I used to do the same things,” she said. “When I hit puberty I just ate and ate, and I ballooned up, too." Too. I guess I’m a balloon.

            "Oh," I replied, wondering what color balloon I would be if I were a real balloon, pink, yellow, purple… Then, imagining a small child trailing my balloon body around with them, and letting go of my strings, freeing me. I felt myself float away, up and up into the sky, and then zigzag at the smell of French fries, detouring myself from some unknown paradise, towards a restaurant where I could eat until I felt whole.

             I had also gained weight in my youth, I wanted to say, but was too afraid my uncle might take this Fat Girl self-deprecation as another invitation to tap at the padding around my middle as if something unexpected might pop out like a garden gnome. 
           
            "Yes, I used to be quite heavy as a teenager," my uncle's second wife continued. "Then I learned all about nutrition. Once I knew about nutrition and about what to eat and what not to eat I was fine."

            I didn't respond to. What was I supposed to say? That I knew all about nutrition. That I knew half your plate should be vegetables and that only a quarter should be starch and a quarter should be protein. I knew that I shouldn't eat Snickers bars, and Mars bars, and Cadbury's Fruit and Nut Bars at three a.m. while I watch an episode of Chopped on the Food Network and that I'm still 100 pounds overweight. 

            "What can I say," I replied. "I'm a bulimic who doesn't throw up." The moment I said it I realized how insensitive, how odd this might sounds. I also realized that this was a lie. Lately I had been throwing up. Not a lot. But occasionally for the past few months, here and there, one meal flushed down the toilet, then maybe a snack the next day suffering the same septic fate.

            My uncle's second wife did not respond to my odd comment about being bulimic but not being bulimic and I didn't blame her. What was I trying to say? I didn't know. Most people might have thought it prudent to just stop talking then. You've said enough, they might tell themselves. Don't say another word. But I'm not the kind of person who knows what's good for them, and so I continued. "Sometimes I just eat until I feel sick. I like when food makes me feel sick. I like when my stomach feels so full it could burst." 

            My uncle's second wife didn't respond to my comment about eating to the point of illness, and why should she? She just looked at me and I at her, and then we both looked at my Uncle, the instigator if this entire awkward repertoire, hoping he would say something to help divert the conversation to another path. But my uncle was paying no attention to the odd course this dialogue had taken and instead had moved onto better things, watching Ice Age 3 with his grandchildren. "The penguin! The penguin!" my little cousin screamed at the screen, and I couldn't help but feel envious at her two year old self, at the freedom that comes from not knowing your body will never be good enough yet, of not finding that special addiction yet, the special something that might bring you to the precipice, the edge of the arctic glacier, that both I and the Ice Age 3 Penguin now seemed to occupy.

            My Gran called my uncle’s wife into the other room, and she gladly went. Both of us, no doubt, relieved that we didn’t have to continue our strained conversation. My little cousin looked up at me, chocolate staining the sides of her wide smile, and then back at a wooly mammoth on Ice Age 3.  “No do that!” she screamed at the screen, to the large extinct creature. “You going to get hurt!”