[fic] alles was zaehlt { too much [jenny. 2100 words. pg-13.]
.too much
[jenny. roman. pg-13. 2100 words.]
notes; 'cause we never see jenny eat.
warnings; ed-nos.
summary; because the world is divided into right and wrong, good and bad, fat and thin.
I'm standing in the queue at a café, trying to figure out the fat grams, calorie content, and carbohydrate index of a fat-reduced blueberry muffin. All I really want, though, is a slice of double fudge chocolate cake. I'm irritable and confused, looking at the cake like a hypnotised lemming. Roman's asking me what I want so that we can order and the queue behind me's getting restless and the idiot behind the counter is rolling his eyes. What I want to do is to punch through the glass case and grab the whole cake and run howling into the street with it like a creature from a Hammer Horror film.
But I don't.
No, I do the right thing. Because the world is divided into right and wrong, good and bad, fat and thin. So I order a double espresso instead, with no sugar.
And when Roman asks, "are you sure?" because he saw me eyeing the cake, I snap at him, "yes, yes that's it!" like I hate him, because I do. I hate him and anyone else who can order anything they want without going through a thousand mental gymnastics--who can walk up to the stupid guy behind the counter and say, "I'll have an iced latte and a slice of double fudge chocolate cake, Schatz", without taking a rollercoaster ride to hell and back from waves of guilt and panic.
So. I order the double espresso instead, get completely psychotic on caffeine, and walk around in a sweaty, twitching cloud of resentment all day long because yet again I've denied myself. And there are three meals in a day, a day's twenty-four hours long and they follow each other, day after day after day, until you die. That's an awfully long time not to have what you want.
I went on my first diet when I was nine. Being a dancer, we were encouraged to starve ourselves. I remember our teacher sitting us down, talking to us about how it was time to start watching our weight. She taught us how to carry little jars of honey and teaspoons in our ballet bags so that when we'd been dancing all day with nothing to eat and felt like fainting, we could pop a teaspoon of honey into our mouths to keep us going. So we all carried leaky little jars of honey that came undone and coated our leotards in thick, sugary goo which made Frau Scholz tut and shake her head and say "God made you the way you are, Jennifer".
We used to sit in the changing room after lessons, listening avidly to the diet tips of the older girls. You must eat only low fat yoghurt, diet coke, coffee, and jacket potatoes with nothing on them. Or only protein and vegetables, as much as you want but less is better. However, all too often we ended up eating hamburgers at McDonald's after class, and if you were going to have a hamburger, you might as well have fries and a shake. But that was okay, because we'd all learnt from Alisa Bauer the wonderful art of throwing up everything after you ate. She'd only just discovered this magical solution herself and was now giving masterclasses on how to best achieve the results you wanted with the least amount of effort.
"Always drink a glass of water very quickly beforehand," she instructed us. "And then use your longest finger. A little nail doesn't hurt. And think of something gross. If you can think of something really gross, then you don't have to waste too much time and that keeps your mother from getting suspicious."
We nodded. How wise she was.
"Oh, and use a private toilet. Especially until you learn how to do it quietly."
Good one. We were, after all, as dancers always learning how to do things quietly--how to jump across a room and land without a sound, how to bourrée on bloody point shoes without so much as a whisper, how to stretch your leg up around your ear without screaming. Piece of cake.
By the time I was thirteen, I'd developed my own little variation on this theme. I'd have one meal a day, usually something completely disgusting and devoid of any nutritional value, like chocolate cake, covered in M&Ms, with ice-cream and chocolate sauce for breakfast, and I'd have coffee and Diet Coke the rest of the day. If I had any food after my one meal, I'd chuck it up in the guest room toilet.
This went on for quite a while until, one night, I scoffed down a whole box of nasty sugar biscuits and then threw them up again. I sat, shaking on the bathroom floor, certain that I didn't want to live any more. Or, at least, that I didn't want to live like this. I could no longer bear the twenty-four hour obsession about what I was going to eat, when I was going to eat it, and, worst of all, what I wasn't allowed to eat. (I'd already tried laxatives, with disastrous results.) So, I resolved that whatever I ate would stay down, for better or worse. And a new chapter in my dieting history began.
When I started skating, I kept my eating habits a secret. But with my parents away every evening at meetings, it was easy to get into a routine of bingeing in their absence.
We'd just moved to Essen. We had a new place to live, my parents had new jobs, and I was on a new diet. It wass like the Hay Diet, only it was with organic food. Every day I ate about twenty-six pounds of grimy misshapen, hairy fruits and vegetables. I had wind constantly and smelt like a cabbage.
The rules were easy. (Diets have rules, like games. There's no difference really, this one was Twister with food.) You could have carbohydrates with vegetables and dairy but not with protein. And you could have protein only with vegetables. And fruit, well, fruit was so dangerous that you could only have it on its own, several hours before or after eating anything. So, that meant steak and salad, chicken and salad, fish and salad. But not cheese. Cheese was evil. The devil's work. I was allowed some strange form of organic goat's cheese curd but there was only one shop in the universe that seemed to sell it and it tasted like glue. And for lunch, salad. Salad with rice, salad with nuts, salad with bread. And when I say bread, what I really mean is a gluten-free yeast-free loaf of millet and linseed. It looked like a brick but if you toasted it, it was really quite crunchy. (In the absence of any taste, texture had to do.) And no sugar of any kind, no caffeine, and no fat.
The book made it seem quite simple. Actually, more than just simple; like you'd be an idiot to eat any other way. There was a couple in their seventies laughing hysterically on the front cover and running a marathon. Completely caffeine free. I felt inadequate just looking at it.
You were meant to eat as many things raw as you could. I was munching on a fortune's worth of crudités all day long and all I managed to feel was bloated and hungry at the same time. I was dreaming of hamburgers, chips, shepherd's pie. I'd wake up gnawing on my pillow. Watching other people eat became an erotic experience for me. Staring in the window of McDonald's like a Peeping Tom, I'd be glued to the spot, ready to kill for a Happy Meal.
It was meant to get better. I was meant to be full of life and energy. My skin was meant to glow. But all that happened was I got a vicious case of irritable bowel syndrome. I ended up doubled over with pain and Frau Scholz took me to the doctor.
"What are you eating?" the doctor asked after he'd examined me.
"Well, today I had gluten-free muesli and rice milk, broccoli and chicken stir-fry with ginger, some raw carrots, a little rye toast with soya spread and sugarless raspberry jam..."
He raised a hand to stop me; he was already late for his golf.
"Good God!" He looked at me in disgust. "Eat a potato, woman! Have a sausage roll! No wonder you can't stand up straight."
"But.... but...." I couldn't believe it. Didn't he want to be running a marathon when he was seventy?
Apparently not.
By the time I got together with Lars, I was so confused from a lifetime of dieting that I felt beyond repair or redemption. The only difference was that now there was no place to hide it. I stayed over at his and Roman's flat more often than not, often ate with them, and while Lars was happy to tease me about my strange meals and occasionally force-feed me pizza and steamed jam pudding, Roman observed my eating habits in silence, quietly noting all the things I would rather he'd forgotten.
Then, one night, he finds me in the kitchen.
It's half past two and I'm wearing one of Lars' shirts, stuffing biscuits into my mouth. They're Roman's biscuits; he'd been given them at Christmas, several months ago, and, not having much of a liking for them, let them sit there, going stale on a shelf above the sink. Normally I wouldn't touch his food without asking him, but I'd woken up, suddenly scared and absolutely starving. I hate myself for stealing stale biscuits. They're the kind I normally would've gone out of my way to avoid. But here I am, crouched in the dark, cramming them into my mouth when he comes in and turns on the light.
I blink stupidly, like a wild animal caught stealing from a wheelie bin. I can't bear to be seen eating, even at the best of times, but it's absolutely essential that these midnight raids remain secret.
"What are you doing?"
I scramble up from the floor and try to smile. "I'm sorry. Really."
"But what are you doing?" he asks. Again.
I want to die, to disappear, to be sucked away into the ether. I'm still holding the packet, so I put it on the counter, my hand moving in slow motion as if not holding it will make it all go away.
"Those are old," he says. "Why are you eating them? And why are you eating them in the dark?"
"I was hungry. I'm sorry. I'll replace them. Buy some more."
"Jenny, the biscuits don't matter. But what you're doing is strange."
"I know. I'm sorry. I won't do it again."
He looks at me carefully. "Yes. Yes you will."
It's half past two and there's nothing, no noise of passing traffic, no distant drilling to whisk the words away. They hang there, solid between us, and for some reason I can't explain, I don't lie or wheedle, laugh or protest.
"You're right," I hear myself say.
How odd that you're saying that, I think in my head. No one's meant to know and now here you are, saying it out loud. But it doesn't stop there.
"I can't eat," the voice goes on, speaking through me, like a ventriloquist's dummy. "I don't.. don't really know how."
We stand there. A breeze blows in through the open kitchen window, out of the solid blackness that presses against the building. Cold and fluid, like mercury, it races between us, running its fingers through our hair and making mine dance around my face. My t-shirt billows up around me like a sail and for a moment I'm weightless and floating, like an apparition pasted against the poorly fitted kitchen cabinets. Then it darts away, brushing past us impatiently on its way to more exotic locations and we're alone again. My t-shirt drifts silently back around my thighs and my hair lands gently in place.
"Are you still hungry?" Roman asks.
"No."
"Well, why don't we go to bed then." He holds out his hand and I take it. "You think too much, Jenny. You're not really meant to think so much." And he leads me back through the darkness to Lars' room.
The world is full of advice about how to eat, but here's a novel idea: have three normal meals a day. Eat what you really want. Stop when you're full.
I'll admit, sometimes that's easy and sometimes it's very, very hard.
But, in Frau Scholz's immortal words, "God made you the way you are."
And in Roman's, "get over it."
[jenny. roman. pg-13. 2100 words.]
notes; 'cause we never see jenny eat.
warnings; ed-nos.
summary; because the world is divided into right and wrong, good and bad, fat and thin.
I'm standing in the queue at a café, trying to figure out the fat grams, calorie content, and carbohydrate index of a fat-reduced blueberry muffin. All I really want, though, is a slice of double fudge chocolate cake. I'm irritable and confused, looking at the cake like a hypnotised lemming. Roman's asking me what I want so that we can order and the queue behind me's getting restless and the idiot behind the counter is rolling his eyes. What I want to do is to punch through the glass case and grab the whole cake and run howling into the street with it like a creature from a Hammer Horror film.
But I don't.
No, I do the right thing. Because the world is divided into right and wrong, good and bad, fat and thin. So I order a double espresso instead, with no sugar.
And when Roman asks, "are you sure?" because he saw me eyeing the cake, I snap at him, "yes, yes that's it!" like I hate him, because I do. I hate him and anyone else who can order anything they want without going through a thousand mental gymnastics--who can walk up to the stupid guy behind the counter and say, "I'll have an iced latte and a slice of double fudge chocolate cake, Schatz", without taking a rollercoaster ride to hell and back from waves of guilt and panic.
So. I order the double espresso instead, get completely psychotic on caffeine, and walk around in a sweaty, twitching cloud of resentment all day long because yet again I've denied myself. And there are three meals in a day, a day's twenty-four hours long and they follow each other, day after day after day, until you die. That's an awfully long time not to have what you want.
I went on my first diet when I was nine. Being a dancer, we were encouraged to starve ourselves. I remember our teacher sitting us down, talking to us about how it was time to start watching our weight. She taught us how to carry little jars of honey and teaspoons in our ballet bags so that when we'd been dancing all day with nothing to eat and felt like fainting, we could pop a teaspoon of honey into our mouths to keep us going. So we all carried leaky little jars of honey that came undone and coated our leotards in thick, sugary goo which made Frau Scholz tut and shake her head and say "God made you the way you are, Jennifer".
We used to sit in the changing room after lessons, listening avidly to the diet tips of the older girls. You must eat only low fat yoghurt, diet coke, coffee, and jacket potatoes with nothing on them. Or only protein and vegetables, as much as you want but less is better. However, all too often we ended up eating hamburgers at McDonald's after class, and if you were going to have a hamburger, you might as well have fries and a shake. But that was okay, because we'd all learnt from Alisa Bauer the wonderful art of throwing up everything after you ate. She'd only just discovered this magical solution herself and was now giving masterclasses on how to best achieve the results you wanted with the least amount of effort.
"Always drink a glass of water very quickly beforehand," she instructed us. "And then use your longest finger. A little nail doesn't hurt. And think of something gross. If you can think of something really gross, then you don't have to waste too much time and that keeps your mother from getting suspicious."
We nodded. How wise she was.
"Oh, and use a private toilet. Especially until you learn how to do it quietly."
Good one. We were, after all, as dancers always learning how to do things quietly--how to jump across a room and land without a sound, how to bourrée on bloody point shoes without so much as a whisper, how to stretch your leg up around your ear without screaming. Piece of cake.
By the time I was thirteen, I'd developed my own little variation on this theme. I'd have one meal a day, usually something completely disgusting and devoid of any nutritional value, like chocolate cake, covered in M&Ms, with ice-cream and chocolate sauce for breakfast, and I'd have coffee and Diet Coke the rest of the day. If I had any food after my one meal, I'd chuck it up in the guest room toilet.
This went on for quite a while until, one night, I scoffed down a whole box of nasty sugar biscuits and then threw them up again. I sat, shaking on the bathroom floor, certain that I didn't want to live any more. Or, at least, that I didn't want to live like this. I could no longer bear the twenty-four hour obsession about what I was going to eat, when I was going to eat it, and, worst of all, what I wasn't allowed to eat. (I'd already tried laxatives, with disastrous results.) So, I resolved that whatever I ate would stay down, for better or worse. And a new chapter in my dieting history began.
When I started skating, I kept my eating habits a secret. But with my parents away every evening at meetings, it was easy to get into a routine of bingeing in their absence.
We'd just moved to Essen. We had a new place to live, my parents had new jobs, and I was on a new diet. It wass like the Hay Diet, only it was with organic food. Every day I ate about twenty-six pounds of grimy misshapen, hairy fruits and vegetables. I had wind constantly and smelt like a cabbage.
The rules were easy. (Diets have rules, like games. There's no difference really, this one was Twister with food.) You could have carbohydrates with vegetables and dairy but not with protein. And you could have protein only with vegetables. And fruit, well, fruit was so dangerous that you could only have it on its own, several hours before or after eating anything. So, that meant steak and salad, chicken and salad, fish and salad. But not cheese. Cheese was evil. The devil's work. I was allowed some strange form of organic goat's cheese curd but there was only one shop in the universe that seemed to sell it and it tasted like glue. And for lunch, salad. Salad with rice, salad with nuts, salad with bread. And when I say bread, what I really mean is a gluten-free yeast-free loaf of millet and linseed. It looked like a brick but if you toasted it, it was really quite crunchy. (In the absence of any taste, texture had to do.) And no sugar of any kind, no caffeine, and no fat.
The book made it seem quite simple. Actually, more than just simple; like you'd be an idiot to eat any other way. There was a couple in their seventies laughing hysterically on the front cover and running a marathon. Completely caffeine free. I felt inadequate just looking at it.
You were meant to eat as many things raw as you could. I was munching on a fortune's worth of crudités all day long and all I managed to feel was bloated and hungry at the same time. I was dreaming of hamburgers, chips, shepherd's pie. I'd wake up gnawing on my pillow. Watching other people eat became an erotic experience for me. Staring in the window of McDonald's like a Peeping Tom, I'd be glued to the spot, ready to kill for a Happy Meal.
It was meant to get better. I was meant to be full of life and energy. My skin was meant to glow. But all that happened was I got a vicious case of irritable bowel syndrome. I ended up doubled over with pain and Frau Scholz took me to the doctor.
"What are you eating?" the doctor asked after he'd examined me.
"Well, today I had gluten-free muesli and rice milk, broccoli and chicken stir-fry with ginger, some raw carrots, a little rye toast with soya spread and sugarless raspberry jam..."
He raised a hand to stop me; he was already late for his golf.
"Good God!" He looked at me in disgust. "Eat a potato, woman! Have a sausage roll! No wonder you can't stand up straight."
"But.... but...." I couldn't believe it. Didn't he want to be running a marathon when he was seventy?
Apparently not.
By the time I got together with Lars, I was so confused from a lifetime of dieting that I felt beyond repair or redemption. The only difference was that now there was no place to hide it. I stayed over at his and Roman's flat more often than not, often ate with them, and while Lars was happy to tease me about my strange meals and occasionally force-feed me pizza and steamed jam pudding, Roman observed my eating habits in silence, quietly noting all the things I would rather he'd forgotten.
Then, one night, he finds me in the kitchen.
It's half past two and I'm wearing one of Lars' shirts, stuffing biscuits into my mouth. They're Roman's biscuits; he'd been given them at Christmas, several months ago, and, not having much of a liking for them, let them sit there, going stale on a shelf above the sink. Normally I wouldn't touch his food without asking him, but I'd woken up, suddenly scared and absolutely starving. I hate myself for stealing stale biscuits. They're the kind I normally would've gone out of my way to avoid. But here I am, crouched in the dark, cramming them into my mouth when he comes in and turns on the light.
I blink stupidly, like a wild animal caught stealing from a wheelie bin. I can't bear to be seen eating, even at the best of times, but it's absolutely essential that these midnight raids remain secret.
"What are you doing?"
I scramble up from the floor and try to smile. "I'm sorry. Really."
"But what are you doing?" he asks. Again.
I want to die, to disappear, to be sucked away into the ether. I'm still holding the packet, so I put it on the counter, my hand moving in slow motion as if not holding it will make it all go away.
"Those are old," he says. "Why are you eating them? And why are you eating them in the dark?"
"I was hungry. I'm sorry. I'll replace them. Buy some more."
"Jenny, the biscuits don't matter. But what you're doing is strange."
"I know. I'm sorry. I won't do it again."
He looks at me carefully. "Yes. Yes you will."
It's half past two and there's nothing, no noise of passing traffic, no distant drilling to whisk the words away. They hang there, solid between us, and for some reason I can't explain, I don't lie or wheedle, laugh or protest.
"You're right," I hear myself say.
How odd that you're saying that, I think in my head. No one's meant to know and now here you are, saying it out loud. But it doesn't stop there.
"I can't eat," the voice goes on, speaking through me, like a ventriloquist's dummy. "I don't.. don't really know how."
We stand there. A breeze blows in through the open kitchen window, out of the solid blackness that presses against the building. Cold and fluid, like mercury, it races between us, running its fingers through our hair and making mine dance around my face. My t-shirt billows up around me like a sail and for a moment I'm weightless and floating, like an apparition pasted against the poorly fitted kitchen cabinets. Then it darts away, brushing past us impatiently on its way to more exotic locations and we're alone again. My t-shirt drifts silently back around my thighs and my hair lands gently in place.
"Are you still hungry?" Roman asks.
"No."
"Well, why don't we go to bed then." He holds out his hand and I take it. "You think too much, Jenny. You're not really meant to think so much." And he leads me back through the darkness to Lars' room.
The world is full of advice about how to eat, but here's a novel idea: have three normal meals a day. Eat what you really want. Stop when you're full.
I'll admit, sometimes that's easy and sometimes it's very, very hard.
But, in Frau Scholz's immortal words, "God made you the way you are."
And in Roman's, "get over it."