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Edited on Thu Sep-06-07 06:28 PM by BlueIris
"Bulimia"
A kiss has nothing to do with sex, she thinks. Not really. That engulfing, that trying to take all of another in for nourishment, to become one with her, to become part of her cells. The way she must have had everything she wanted in the womb, without asking. Without words, kisses have barely the slurp-sound of a man entering a woman, or sliding back out—neither movement with even the warning of a bark. The Greek word "buli," animal hunger. Petting, those kisses are called, or sometimes necking. She read this advice in a sex manual once: "Take the man's penis, slowly at first, like you are licking melting ice cream from the ring of a cone." But the gagging, the choke— a hot gulp of tea, a small chicken bone, a wad of gum grown too big. That wasn’t mentioned. It's about what happens in her mouth past her teeth, where there is no more control, like a waterfall— or its being too late when the whole wedding cake is gone:
She orders one from a different bakery this time, so no one will remember her past visits and catch on. She's eating slowly at first, tonguing icing from the plastic groom's feet, the hem of the bride's gown, and those toothpick-points that kept them rooted in pastry. She cuts the top-tier into squares, reception-like. (The thrill she knew of a wedding this past June, stealing the white desert into her purse, sucking the sugary blue gel from a napkin one piece was wrapped in. She was swallowing paper on her lone car ride home, through a red light, on her way to another nap, from which she hoped her prince’s kiss would wake her.)
The second tier in her hands, by fistfuls, desperate as the Third World child she saw on t.v. last week, taking in gruel. Her head, light like her stomach is pumped up with air. She can't stop. She puckers up to the sticky crumbs under her nails. Then there are the engraved Valentine candies: CRAZY, DREAM GIRL, ACT NOW, YOU'RE HOT. She rips open the bag, devouring as many messages as she can at once. They all taste like chalk. She rocks back and forth.
She has to loosen the string on her sweat pants, part of her trousseau. The bag of candy is emptied. The paper doily under the cake's third layer, smooth as a vacuumed ice-skating rink. What has she done? In the bathroom, like what happened
to the mistakenly flushed-away bracelet, a gift from her first boyfriend—the gold clasp silently unhooking as she wiped herself, then, moments too late, noticing her naked wrist under the running water of the rest room sink’s faucet...She's learned it’s best to wait ten minutes to make herself throw up. Digestion begins at this point, but the food hasn’t gotten very far. As ingenious as the first few times she would consciously masturbate, making note of where her fingers felt best, she devises a way to vomit that only hurts for a second.
She takes off her sweatshirt and drapes it over a towel rack. Then she pokes a Q-Tip on her soft palate. Keeping in mind the diagram in her voice class, the cross section of the mouth showing each part’s different function, the palate, hidden and secret as a clitoris. The teacher's mentioning of its vulnerability, split-second and nonchalant like a doctor with his tongue depressor. It’s a fast prayer—she kneels in front of the toilet. Her back jerks and arches the way it might if she were moving her body to meet a man's during intercourse. She wipes what has sprayed back to her chest, her throat as raw as a rape that's happened to someone else. She cleans the seat of the bowl with a rag, and cleans her teeth with a second toothbrush she keeps for this purpose. Her sweatshirt back on, she gets to the kitchen to crush the cake box into a plastic garbage bag. And leaves to dispose of it, not in a trashcan downstairs, but in a dumpster way on the other side of town.
—Denise Duhamel
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