milk fed | melissa broder
notes:
The arugula salad that I requested as my contribution to the smorgasbord was but a slippery cadaver: death by oil, goodbye.
Ofer was an eternal frat brother.
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.
My mother persuaded me to stay thin by insulting me. Ana did it by insulting everyone but me. This absence of rejection felt like an embrace.
My therapist in Los Angeles, Dr. Rana Mahjoub, wore sensible clogs and said insight-adjacent things like “put on your oxygen mask before helping others,” but I didn’t entirely respect her because she accepted my insurance.
I laughed, as they say, out loud.
“You were going to the hardware store for milk again,” said Dr. Mahjoub.
I tried to give the crowd a version of my life seasoned with enough “but really it’s fine” bravado to make the underlying desperation that compelled me to stand there in the first place seeking validation from strangers a palatable experience—delightful, even! When they laughed at my sort-of truth, I felt the thrill of being sort of seen.
Sometimes, when no one was looking, I would stand there and touch all the food: stroking a bun, caressing a stuffed potato, massaging a warm flour tortilla.
When she opened her robe, a waft of her white floral perfume came toward me like a sweet and filthy wind.
the types of adults who acted ironically anti-intellectual but were maybe just dumb.
At times like this, I longed to break the fourth wall, to whisper, Hey, just between us: Is this a performance or is it really what you believe?
It’s nice to see someone who isn’t afraid of cancer. I mean, life is long enough.”
She gave me a huge smile, her face flashing like a candle. I felt my anxiety dissipate. Gone was the fear that she was out to ruin me, the suspicion that she wanted to disappear me from myself, to make me hate myself, to send me spinning out into infinity, a nothing, a blob, so big I could be seen only in fragments, so unwieldy I could never be held, just an overwhelming void, just devastated, just dead. I looked at her smile, and I thought: love.
There was an innocence about it, a childlike quality. It was a treat that a child would receive from a caring older person who wanted to reward them just for existing.
It would be like cutting off my head because of a headache. But I was so tired of my head.
I wasn’t physically ready to consume my baby yet, so I decided to just carry it. “There there, sweet bundle of beans and cheese. You are wanted.”
Life was a lot less bleak when you were staring straight down the barrel of a burrito. Was this how some people lived all the time?
Maybe this was how normal women made friends with other women. They invited them to do shit like eat in public.
But if she’d be willing to put Ruský Rouge on her lips, what else would she be willing to try?
I knew how she made me feel, which was full of confetti instead of blood.
It was exquisite, like drinking a neon airbrushed rendering of a fruit punch island.
“I mean, how can I know? God isn’t, like, texting me Hi or anything.”
“What do you think all this is?” she laughed, pointing to the lights and the dragons and the mirrors and the lanterns and the other diners and her and me. I was silent.
Her eyebrows were the color of lions, lazy ones, dozing in sunlight or eating butter at night with their paws by lantern.
but her inner mouth was easy—Valentine hearts and hell.
The waiter blew air through his lips, as though doubtful we would eat all that food—or concerned that we might.
“More duck sauce,” she said, thrusting the bowl at him, as though it were his fault for not knowing we’d decided to bathe in it.
I felt like I was putting an exquisite bed in my mouth.
hoped I wasn’t pushing it. But I was in such a blissful space, and if I couldn’t touch her, then I wanted the room filled with her words.
I realized that in my fantasy, Esther was not saying a word (it figured since she’d been so passive with the evergreens).
I looked at my hands and they didn’t even look like my hands. I felt in that moment that I did not know myself at all, that the Schwebels, who knew nothing about me, somehow knew more about me than I did.
But on the inside, I reveled in Ana’s taste: coppery, like a shipwrecked chalice at the bottom of the ocean.
Miriam picked up the phone. “Oh, good, it’s you,” I said. “I didn’t want your family to think I was a stalker. Anyway, I’m just calling to say thank you for such a lovely Shabbat.”
“It’s Ayala,” said the voice on the other end.
“Oops,” I said. “Hi, is Miriam there?”
Stop fucking thinking for one second and try to have a good time, I said to myself. Never in my life have I had a good time, I replied.
I looked at her face in the glow of the movie screen, swaths of light and shadow flickering on and off her pale skin. She was like a moon cycling through all its phases in rapid-fire.
I wanted to be mommied by a woman who was kind only to me. I wanted her to be a completely different woman than she was.
“Everyone is always trying to change you in this town.”
“I think that’s part of the job,” I said. “It comes with celebrity and getting shit for free and making lots of money and getting to have people look at you all the time and tell you how great you are.”
“I don’t even care about people looking at me.”
“If they weren’t looking, you’d care.”
I was excited that they’d seen him touch my cheek. The thought of it made me feel giddy, much giddier than the actual act of him touching my cheek.
Acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances, I thought, remembering my college textbooks. More like behaving imaginarily under truthful circumstances.
It had no eyes, but it winked at me. It had no mouth, but it smiled.
Certainly, my time in the womb had ended, harsh and abrupt in the cold hospital, bright light, a stranger’s pair of hands, searing consciousness.
“Oh, my daughter,” I said. “You will forget that I am here. This is the way of human beings, to forget. But you found your way back to me once and so can find your way back again, because I am always here. The world will hurt you again and again. You will hurt yourself again and again. And when it does, and when you do, you will remember me again and again. You will drop to your knees. You will hold yourself. You will be your own daughter again.”
janet change 