My Starving Years
My mom takes me to Mother’s Bake Shop in Riverdale. This is New York. This is me, age five, and my mom in her late thirties. This is a sunny afternoon in the fall with perfect weather. This is a mother and daughter in matching fleece jackets. This is a trip out of the house because my mom needed it. I'm too young to know what it means for a woman to need to get out of the house. This is how we lean against my mom’s car, the white Cadillac, the car that is part of a pair of matching white Cadillacs with my dad. This is how we leave our building, The White Hall, and disconnect from the rest of the world.
The awning of Mother’s Bake Shop has the same colors as my school: burgundy with white letters; the font a loose cursive with the tagline below, Always in good taste with Mother’s cake.
I love looking at all the pastries; the rows and rows of rainbow cookies, black and whites, sprinkle cookies, cookies dunked in chocolate, cookies frosted with icing, Rugelach, buttery Hamantaschen, Mandelbrot, kosher pastries with red gelatin centers, and my favorite: the cherry almond star—a sugary, shortbread cookie with a plump Maraschino cherry in the center. My mom’s favorite: the Chinese marble cookie—a sugar cookie swirled black and white and a dollop of chocolate hardened on top.
We lean against the passenger side of the car and my mom hands me my cookie wrapped in parchment paper. Even at five, I know this scene feels like it’s taken right out of a movie. I watch my mom’s hair blow into her face, the unbelievable blonde bounce becoming tangled in the breeze. She holds her own cookie package between her teeth while she skillfully puts her hair back in a velvet scrunchie. Her wispy bangs shudder and she looks out at the passing cars. I want so badly to know what’s on her mind, to be able to read it like how I think she can read mine. To me, my mom is all-knowing.
“Eat,” she says, and the trance is cut short. The truth is that I want to watch my mom forever, the grace of her, the fullness of her life, or at least how it seems so full to me right now. This is a woman who has traveled the world, who is married, who is still young and beautiful with two children. This is a woman who leaves the house with her daughter for a cookie, for a simple pleasure that life has to offer.
I eat around the circumference of the cookie, savoring each bite. I leave the cherry in the middle for last, waiting and waiting for it to present itself to me in all its glory. My mom bites right into the core of her chocolate cookie, taking it in center first.
***
Our family travels to Israel for my brother’s Bar Mitzvah. I'm seven, and all I can think about is how the hotel pool bar has a big freezer of Häagen-Dazs ice cream bars. While my mom sunbathes, I sneak over to peruse the selection through the glass: vanilla milk chocolate, vanilla milk chocolate almond, coffee almond crunch, chocolate dark chocolate.
My brother studies everyday with a Rabbi who comes to our hotel’s conference room while my dad works on his laptop up in the hotel room. Occasionally my dad comes downstairs for a dip in the water, but mostly it’s just my mom and me. As a reward for my good behavior, I am allowed an ice cream bar at the end of the pool day. I choose the chocolate dark chocolate and eat it while I'm still wrapped in a towel, wet from swimming. I love to chip away at the outer chocolate shell first, making a pile of discarded shell pieces at my mom’s request so she too can indulge in the treat. The real magic of the bar is the soft chocolate ice cream center; the way my teeth sink in ever so softly, how the chocolate is light and airy. I love when a small orb of chocolate remains on the end of the stick, like a little lollipop of chocolate, one last bite of this delicious dream.
This is the trip when my brother becomes a man. This is when I start to feel separate from him, from how adult he has become, how he no longer wants to always play with me, have me right by his side. On this trip, our family sightsees and takes many guided tours. In photos, I am lagging behind. My dirty blonde hair sweats and sticks to my forehead and my clothes look too big for my body. I remember inventing an imaginary friend to talk to on that trip but not truly believing in her. I want to be like my brother, on to bigger and better things. I want to know what my brother feels like when he says his final prayers and becomes the man he’s meant to be.
I want to not want to watch the puppet shows the hotel staff puts on in the lobby each day. I want to not want the ice cream bar, the chocolate covering my whole mouth like a little kid. I want to become a woman, strong like my mom, tough and determined but elegant and womanly. I want to wear dresses and high heels and feel sexy, even though I'm not entirely sure what the word means. The word is alluring though. I want to feel closer to it but I'm not sure how.
***
I'm eleven on a trip to the Bahamas when I see someone take the cheese off their pizza for the first time. “It’s the Atkins diet,” my mom’s best friend’s husband says as he rakes a fork across his personal pizza, golden cheese glowing in the hot sun. The cheese is piled on a side dish while the crust is discarded, whisked away by the next waiter to approach our table. It seems evil somehow, like the crust did a bad thing.
My family and my mom’s best friend’s family eat at a restaurant called the Lagoon Bar & Grill. We sit in the open-air terrace under an aquatic themed painted dome adorned with giant pink seashells and orange and blue sea stars. A white whorl graces the top of the dome. The entire restaurant is surrounded by water.
Years later, this couple will divorce. This memory will not be mentioned when my mom and her best friend speak about reasons the marriage did not work, but I will remember the day vividly. I remember wanting to leave lunch early because I’d met a boy at the pool who had given me his room number. I wanted to go upstairs and use the hotel phone to call him. I feigned a stomachache so I could do just that, but when I dialed the number, a woman answered in another language and I quickly hung up. I realized right away the boy had given me a fake room number and that he hadn’t been interested in me at all.
I remember looking at myself in the hotel mirror. I stripped off my bathing suit and looked intently at my body for the first time. I touched my chest where there were no breasts yet and hated the flatness of my figure. I knew that if I looked older, if my bathing suit top had been filled instead of empty, if I had something to desire, then the boy would have wanted me. It was the day I recognized my body as a tool I couldn't use yet, my body as a thing not yet ready for love.
***
My best friend and I go to the beach with my mom when we are fifteen. We drive down A1A with the top of my mom’s silver Mercedes down and sing along to whatever is on the radio. I gather my hair in my hands to keep it from flying, but to no avail. I have to let go, let the hair twirl and spiral every which way it wants.
At the beach, the three of us eat sandwiches from the Publix deli on our towels. My mom sits in her foldout chair and complains her sandwich is too big, that she’ll have to save half for later. My best friend agrees with her, but I'm hungry and want my whole sandwich, every inch of bread and turkey and mayonnaise and lettuce and tomato and pickles dressed in oil and vinegar. I crack open a can of Coke and my best friend pokes my stomach, my skin bulging up over my bathing suit bottoms.
“You sure you need the whole thing?” she jokes and my mom doesn’t hear her.
“I'm sitting down,” I argue. “Everyone has skin like this when they sit.”
“I don’t,” she says and moves her arms to reveal her flat stomach.
I'm suddenly aware of my body, the badness of it, how wrong it is and how unfit I am. I'm self-conscious in my bikini at the beach. I want to leave, go home.
“Maybe you should start working out or like…join a team or something,” she suggests.
My mom does her crossword puzzle and ignores us, lets us girls be girls and have our fun.
***
When I'm seventeen, rows and rows of SlimFast shakes line the shelves in our fridge. The white bottle with red text, the purple lid. A wave of chocolate or vanilla splashing creamy promises of shedding inches, a smaller waist. The words “Advanced Nutrition,” and the “Fast” in SlimFast in bold.
I find a Thigh Master in my mom’s bottom drawer. I have no idea what it is and worry it might be a sex toy. But then I realize it’s from those old infomercials, the two J-shapes in spring-loaded steel covered with soft purple foam. When my mom is out of the house, I put the contraption between my legs and squeeze. I’ve never seen her use it, but I imagine her putting it between her own legs, pressing the two ends together as she watches Days of Our Lives while I'm at school. My mom stopped working when I was born. With my brother, she had been able to still work at the hospital as an administrative assistant, but with me, with two kids now, she wanted to stay home and be with us.
This is my senior year of high school, a few months before I turn eighteen. This is when I wake up every morning and run around my neighborhood, a 2-mile loop. I do it on an empty stomach. After the run, I shower, dry my hair, do my makeup for school.
This is when I eat fat-free strawberry yogurt with fat-free granola for breakfast every single morning. Between classes I fill up my water bottle at the fountain. I try to drink 6, 7, 8 bottles of water a day. This makes me pee a lot. Yes, this feels good. I feel the calories exit my body as I pee them out.
I ask my mom to make me grilled chicken that I can take for lunch. She bakes the chicken in the oven with no salt or pepper. It’s so thin and dry and this is what I think chicken tastes like. She wraps it in tin foil and puts it in my lunch box. Sometimes I don’t even eat the chicken she packs for me. Sometimes I throw it away and just drink another bottle of water instead.
These actions seem to have no consequence, except that I am often struggling to stay awake in class. The lack of nutrition somehow gives me energy though to play sports, to over-exercise, to stay up late and talk to my long-distance boyfriend on the phone. The emptiness comes with a lightness that moves through me like power.
My friends pay a dollar for a churro at lunch. They eat pizza slices. They go to Subway and bring back sandwiches. They order tacos and quesadillas and crunch wraps from Taco Bell. They take food out of plastic bags and lay it out on patio tables outside the cafeteria. They have sauces spread out like a buffet. I drink a Special K meal replacement shake or I smoke a joint with my best friend instead and watch her eat her lunch. I admire how she chews so carelessly as she talks with her mouth full, speaking about boys and grades and soccer practice and her parents and her car and college next year and the rest of her life.
Every day after school I have lacrosse practice. Sometimes I eat a nectarine, a burst of fruit sugar to my system. Then an hour of drills and running and sweating. After practice, I stop at the gym in my neighborhood and stay for an hour lifting weights, doing abdominal routines, walking on the treadmill and listening to my iPod. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Eminem, Dashboard Confessional. I smoke another joint before going home and making myself dinner while my mom is still at work and my dad has already eaten takeout or leftovers. I always make the same thing: a half-cup of whole-wheat spiral pasta with a dollop of cottage cheese. No salt, no oil, no butter.
I’ve stopped eating sweets all together. I’ve stopped caring about feeling left out of fun. At prom, our friend hosts the after party and there is a huge table of cookies and cupcakes and a giant cake with a fondant graduation hat that reads “Class of 2007!” I don’t have a single bite. I drink vodka all night on the stairs with two sophomore girls that somehow made it to the party. I can tell they are both avoiding the table of treats too and we compliment each other’s outfits and hair and makeup. We are really complimenting each other’s willpower to abstain, to sit out while our peers indulge. But instead we say, “I love your eye shadow, your skirt, your shoes.”
I want to ask if they’ve gotten used to the hollow pit at the center of their being.
***
When I’m a freshman in college, I use my meal-plan points to buy my boyfriend breakfast in the morning. He’s a sophomore, but he doesn’t mind staying in the dorms sometimes and he definitely doesn’t mind the free food. I pretend I'm not hungry and order a hot chocolate instead of real food. I watch him eat bagels with cream cheese, croissant sandwiches, cinnamon buns. When he leaves, I take pictures of myself with my digital camera, pictures of how thin my arms look when I turn to the side, of how my waist slims if I angle my body just so.
I befriend a girl down the hall who teaches me how to survive on one baked potato a day. “You can get anything you want on it,” she advises. “Except butter.” We discard the tiny rectangular butter packets in the trash and build our baked potatoes side by side at table by the window. Outside, students walk in the freezing cold to and from class. I have yet to declare my major but my friend is majoring in Nutrition and Wellness. The irony is not lost on me as we delicately spoon sour cream and chives and bits of turkey bacon into the piping hot centers of our baked potatoes.
The first bite of the potato always feels like coming to after a dream, like a hallucination fading back into the ghost of itself.
After our potato lunches, we hit the gym for a few hours. The gym has become ritualistic, temple-like. This is a place where it’s okay to be the way we are. We use the elliptical for hours on an incline. We interlock our feet for sit-ups. We lift weights over and over and over again, not counting reps but instead waiting for sweat to pour down our faces, our arms, our backs. We carry the sweat home with us back to the dorms. We shower and go our separate ways; me to my boyfriend and my friend I'm not quite sure where.
Sometimes I lapse with late night burritos or dollar slices of pizza. Sometimes I cave and mix my drink with regular soda instead of diet, with juice instead of drinking it straight. After these lapses, I increase my time in the gym the next day; I decrease my intake the next day, which is already so little, almost nothing. But most of the time I sip tequila and feel my body take flight, the high that comes with not eating or eating so little. These are the starving years. I am learning how to be someone else, how to become something else entirely.
I never think about another way of living. To me, this is the only way. Happiness and joy and ease are for other people. I feel like I have to earn anything good, and more than earn, that I should have to suffer for it. I was never taught to love my body, but instead I was shown how to make it disappear.
My boyfriend tells me I'm “hot,” “sexy,” “cute.” My boyfriend tells me he loves me. He brings me packages of Oreo cookies and waits for me outside my classroom. He writes notes that say, “You are beautiful,” but I still can only eat one cookie and throw the rest away. Sometimes I toss the whole package into the trash, full and wasted. Sometimes I feel guilty for this, but mostly I feel pride.
***
My graduate school boyfriend ends our relationship with a final phone call. I am twenty-five. I stand in our shared apartment and peel a hard-boiled egg from a bowl in the fridge. I salt the egg and eat it. I feel sick, but head to the gym anyway to my personal training appointment. When I arrive, I break down in tears and my trainer asks me why the hell I’d come to the gym directly after a breakup. I tell her I still want to work out and she gives me a look, the look that normal people give to sick people like me. They don’t get it, I know this, and they never will.
I lose fifteen pounds in almost two weeks. I weigh myself and feel again the soaring sensation of lift off, of leaving myself and entering into the air. The number on the scale is below 100 and I take a picture of it on my phone. I send it to no one. Knowing is enough of a thrill.
Weeks later, my ex asks me to come over and I lie to my mom. I had to move back in with my parents temporarily and I tell her that my friend’s car broke down and I'm going to help. I wear short shorts and a big hoodie with nothing underneath. My mom makes pot roast for dinner but I tell her I have to leave immediately.
My ex is eating pizza when I arrive at his place. Pizza boxes from days past line the entryway and his world has also gone to shit in some way. But the beauty of male pain is that it leaves out all vanity. My ex can eat pizza. He can gain back healthy weight from the stress weight he lost of wanting to break up with me. My ex and I fuck on his couch and he tells me how good I feel. His hands are up underneath my hoodie. They graze the bones of my protruding shoulder blades. He wraps his arms around my waist and tells me I’ve never felt so good. He goes down on me and I come quickly, embarrassingly fast, but this is a thing that’s okay to want, okay to have. This is an insatiable appetite I'm not ashamed of in this moment.
I am far from Mother’s Bakery, far away from my family vacations and my teenage body feeling out of place. I am a woman, the woman, perhaps, I willed myself to become. And this is my center, my core, the part I wished to save for last. This is the love I have to give. This is the love that was always inside of me.
***
My mom and I meet in Las Vegas for a mother-daughter trip. She flies in from Florida and I fly in from Los Angeles, where I’ve been living for just over a year. I'm twenty-seven and things have just gotten serious with the guy I'm seeing. He will someday become my husband, but for now, I text him when I land at the airport to meet my mom. One of the things he loves about me, he says, is how much I love food. He finds it sweet how much I appreciate each meal we have, how I am always looking online at restaurants or Googling recipes, how I take pictures of how food is plated and presented. I know that this has taken a lot of recovery to get to this place, a lot of acceptance around eating, both in front of people and alone.
I have not mastered this practice, but living on my own has in turn made me appreciate cooking as an art, as an act of love. I find it a miracle that I can crack an egg into a pan and fry it up for breakfast, that I can marinate meat and grill it on my stovetop, that I can nourish myself with food and busy myself with cooking it. I have found a deep love for baking as well, for bringing baked goods to events or friend’s houses—an act of kindness.
In Vegas, my mom wants to share food. She asks what I'm going to order and then says, “That’s going to be a lot. Let’s just share.” Sometimes she’s right, the portions in Las Vegas are so large, meant to be campy and over the top. I remember sometimes when my mom would order soup at restaurants as a meal, how my dad would urge her to order more telling her that she will be hungry later if she only has soup for dinner. But my dad didn’t understand that was the point.
I still feel the pull of that voice, the desire to half my portions, to discard food, to be empty and light and thin. But there is another voice now too, one that wants the whole hamburger, the whole ice cream sundae, more bread, more fries, more.
At an Italian restaurant I eat my own portion of pasta. I eat the whole thing while my mom checks her guidebook for show times. I eat the whole thing to prove something to her, to myself. I hear the new voice telling me to enjoy food, to enjoy my life. The voice is quiet, but it’s there.
***
I'm in town for a friend’s wedding. Disoriented by time change, my husband and I can’t sleep. We watch episode after episode of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, one after another. They keep coming and we keep watching.
I shovel handfuls of peanut M&Ms into my mouth while the show plays on the TV. I alternate the peanut M&Ms with fistfuls of Rold Gold pretzel thins. It’s okay because in the morning I will go to the hotel gym and run on the treadmill for 30 minutes. I will build heat in my body and sweat out these late night treats along with my jetlag. I will wear the bridesmaid dress that I love, but hate the way my arms look in it. I will hold my bouquet out in front of me, my arms open wide like I'm hugging a tree, so that my body looks acceptable in pictures.
The bride’s dress is beautiful, and she is beautiful in it. It’s strapless and she’s lost so much weight, the stress and anxiety of wedding planning, that she keeps pulling her top up, worried it will fall and expose her during the ceremony. She adds a layer of undergarment to bulk up, but still feels uneasy.
I think of my own wedding day. I had somehow managed to not obsess over every inch of my body looking perfect. Yes, I had hired a trainer for the months leading up to the big day. Yes, I had dieted and exercised and yes, I too had shed a few pounds underneath the pressure of the imminent event. But I had been so happy to be married, to finally be seen for my heart above all.
I talk to my therapist about my own ego, about how I think there will be some great thing in my life that will fulfill me, something that will make all the suffering worthwhile, give it meaning, purpose.
“There is nothing in this life that can do that,” she tells me and I believe her. “If only you can be present and enjoy your life for what it is, look at all the wins you’ve had, all the success, all the good things.”
I wait for important emails, for interviews, for job offers, for responses, for guidance, for friendship, for the love of others, for my own self-love. I am waiting, skirting around the edges of life while life continues to happen, all the time.
When I am relieved of my bridesmaid duties and all the photos have been taken, I meet my husband for cocktail hour. A woman approaches with a tray of coconut-crusted shrimp and some kind of sweet looking dipping sauce. I take a shrimp off the plate and eat it. It’s delicious and warm and perfect.
“Thank you,” I say. “I was starving.”
Brittany Ackerman is a writer from Riverdale, New York. She earned her BA in English from Indiana University and graduated from Florida Atlantic University’s MFA program in Creative Writing. Her work has been featured in Electric Literature, Jewish Book Council, Lit Hub, Entropy, The Los Angeles Review, No Tokens, Hobart, Cosmonauts Ave, and more. Her first collection of essays entitled The Perpetual Motion Machine was published with Red Hen Press in 2018, and her debut novel The Brittanys is out now with Vintage.