Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,2

facing a stucco wall. I ate hungrily and greedily, sometimes shoving forkfuls of the turkey-pickle-pepper mixture in my mouth, other times seeking out a single ingredient, like just one olive on my fork.

The triumph of my lunch was that it contained two courses: the grand salad and then frozen yogurt. I loved food that came in multiple parts, prolonging the experience. If I could be infinitely eating, I would be. I had to restrict my intake, or I’d never not be putting something in my mouth.

Subway was flanked by two frozen yogurt shops, Yogurt World and Yo!Good. At Yogurt World you got to serve yourself. No one manhandled your yogurt or toppings, and checkout was even automated. The grace was zero social interaction. At Yo!Good, you had to order through a server, but their yogurt made it worth it. Yo!Good had banana, caramel, and cake-batter flavors that were fat free, sugar-free, low-carb, and just 45 calories for a half cup. This meant that I could get a 16-ounce serving for 180 calories. At Yogurt World, the lowest-calorie yogurts were 120 calories for 4 ounces. I had to get the kids’ size to rival Yo!Good’s numbers. So I sacrificed privacy for mathematic soundness and quantity.

I was grateful that the counter boy at Yo!Good had little interest in talking to me. He was an Orthodox Jewish boy who looked to be about nineteen or twenty. He was very quiet, polite, and wore a blue yarmulke and curly peyos. His gentleness made me feel sad—also, the way he pronounced the word yogurt as yuh-gort. I felt like I could cry between the two syllables. There was an innocence there, an earnest desire to please the customer, a recognition of yogurt as a substance of great import, a calculated precision with the yogurt machine that felt like care. You didn’t find that kind of focus in food service every day. He also possessed a contained isolation, never handing me the yogurt cup directly, always placing it on the countertop in front of me, pointing to the counter to receive my money, no hand-to-hand, our worlds not to touch. It was as though he were a ghost from a lost time. Or maybe it was just a time lost to me.

CHAPTER 2

The Reform synagogue I’d attended growing up in Short Hills, New Jersey, was way more Chanel bag Jew than Torah Jew. I felt most Jewish when my grandparents, also Reform but deeply obsessed with Jewish food, would drive me to New York and take me on a tour of all the old culinary haunts of our tribe. My grandparents were considered medically obese. They’d both developed diabetes as a result of their weight, but food remained something to be celebrated. There were delicious warm buttered onion rolls and creamed herring at the kosher dairy restaurants, cabbage borscht and hot pastrami sandwiches at Second Avenue Deli. There were black-and-white cookies from William Greenberg Desserts, pints and quarts of pickles—sour, half sour, and sweet—from Guss’ on Essex Street.

When I got back from New York, my mother would ask for a full report of all I had eaten. “Do you want to be a chubby or do you want boys to like you?” she’d say.

My grandparents were only a brief respite from the universe. My mother was what the universe was really about. My mother the sun, my mother the rules, my mother, god herself! My mother the high priestess of food, the religion of our household: abstain, abstain, abstain! My mother with her archaic ideas about dieting: melon and cottage cheese, tuna and carrot sticks, melba toast. My mother the judge storming into the dressing room at the children’s clothing shop, me age six, her whispering, “Look at Amy Dickstein in that dress. Now look at you.” It was a whisper that implanted itself in me, a whisper that stuck.

I was softly plump, like a dumpling, and short. She feared the shortness would lead to more weight gain, that it would make the weight show. She saw future pain, frightened that I would grow up to be like her parents, whose obesity had caused her shame, or her fat cousin Wendy, who was unhappy. I wondered, if I could go back and rescue myself from that dressing room, would I do it? I probably wouldn’t. I thought that soft little girl was disgusting too.

The more my mother restricted my food intake, the more I binged in secret. She didn’t understand why I was expanding, that I