Leftovers
On Monday, Meg threw away half a slider, eight Doritos, and a Twinkie missing a single bite. She’d been babysitting her neighbor’s toddler, Sammy, as a favor after work, and the neighbor left “treats,” junk food, pure garbage, all of it intriguing to Meg. She had been hungry and bored—Sammy fell asleep on the rug after crashing on sugar—so she decided to indulge. As she chewed carefully, math floated above her head. In consuming the other half of the slider (+70), four Doritos (+25), and one bite of that Twinkie (+15), she clocked in at only 110 calories but felt a bit wild, almost tipsy. In her wisdom, of course, she’d thrown out more than twice that sum in uneaten options. The Dorito dust on her blouse might not come out in the wash, but she was buzzing, because she was partway fed.
She dared herself to unwrap another Twinkie. But, no, no, that felt dangerous. She could eat a little food with pleasure when she was alone, when she measured the portions and conditions were right. When she found herself in a public setting, eating was lately impossible. She had been this way when she started puberty—her breasts arrived almost overnight, her hips spread doubly wider than her waist—and she longed to disappear. Adding and subtracting calories eased her discomfort. Now at 29, in the wake of her mom’s death, she was, to her disappointment, this exact way once again.
The condition seemed to come upon her the way that a flu takes hold, a flu that her own nerves served to incubate. Eating was an untold embarrassment, the math her only solace from starvation.
On Tuesday, her birthday, she got rid of the big bite of grocery store cake that had been forked into her mouth by the nosey office manager, Barbara, who’d also ordered the sheet cake pre-decorated with childish candy balloons whose cardboard texture Meg knew by heart.
“You’re 30, Meg!” announced the gloppy red icing.
Mouth full, Meg had blushed and nodded at the kitchen full of male attorneys and paralegals—her teeth screaming from the sugar—then dashed to the bathroom to deposit the cake into the turquoise toilet water. She rinsed her mouth and returned to the tight kitchen, where everyone began singing “Happy Birthday” to her at the top of their lungs.
Only Barbara seemed to notice Meg’s exit and return. Why was she always watching Meg so closely? She didn’t monitor the men. Barbara, who was unequivocally fat and always wearing obvious cat or dog fur on her dark trousers, smiled at her. Meg failed to smile back. She felt guilty for not being able to eat the cake, so she picked up a plate with a tiny sliver and walked over to Barbara to thank her, then discreetly replaced the cake where she’d found it. Paul, a paralegal with long, soft chestnut hair she wanted to touch came up to Meg from behind and asked shyly if they were still on for their date the next day. A dot of white icing clung to his upper lip. “Of course,” she said. She imagined having the guts to brush the icing away, to tug his ponytail. She still wanted to go ice skating with him very much, which surprised her. She would wear her long, green cardigan, the cardigan that made her feel more secure, but she might take it off. She might want to feel seen by Paul as they glided across the ice. Maybe. Paul always smiled at her when he got to work or made a point to wave hello; his authentic-seeming warmth eased her anxiety at being on display in the entryway at the receptionist’s desk. Or at least halfway on display—and thank God it was her top half. Maybe he only felt sorry for her having lost her mom. Maybe not, though. If she could work up to one day dining with Paul, she might understand him and he her; they might start to know each other. It might be nice to see him. If they could chew food together and swallow it, they could do other normal things like have sex.
On Wednesday, Meg threw away the chance to go on her date with Paul because he told her he was dying to try the new deep-dish pizza shop just down the street, its unpleasant name, Stuffed. The original plan had been to ice skate and get tea or cocoa afterward at the artsy cafe. Meg wasn’t going to be required to eat a slab of greasy pizza in front of someone she hardly knew and might like nor was she going to let on that she preferred the low-cal plan—absolutely not—because declining food made her feel more exposed than almost everything except eating it. Instead, she made up a story of a sore throat creeping in. She said, “I should go home and rest, or I’ll have to miss work.” Paul knew the small firm would be dead in the water without their phone answerer on duty. Meg knew that he might not ask her out again—he probably asked out lots of women—which did make her throat ache a bit.
If Paul had been willing to slip her carefully measured scraps of the pizza pie, ha, she might have been able to enjoy their evening out. She loved cheese pizza and often craved it. Cheese pizza was grade school. It was being okay. Her mother had fed her teensy morsels of their regular dinner foods, including pizza, when she was at her sickest during ninth grade; she in turn had fed her mother tiny bites of fried egg or hot cereal, whatever her mother’s chemo-shattered body could tolerate, during the final months of her life.
Meg stayed in that night, ate half a can of organic tomato soup (+80), spun the other half into the disposal (-80), read the boring end of a romantic novel set in Italy, and cried hard over her lack as she fell asleep—Paul, her mother, stuffed pizza, more than the sum of these things. That Wednesday felt more like a mountain than a hump.
On Thursday, after Paul greeted her at the office fridge, where she placed her yogurt and he his leftover pizza, he offered her an herbal cough drop. Had he brought it from home with her in mind? Or did he more likely carry these in his pocket at all times? Surely some people did.
“I’m better, but this lozenge can’t hurt, thank you,” she’d told him, popping it inside her mouth, hugging her green sweater around herself.
He looked at his watch; he didn’t smile today.
“How was the pizza?” she asked.
“Not bad,” he said. “Nice crust.”
“Yum,” she said.
After he left the kitchen, Meg crunched the lozenge into pieces, into bits. But she didn’t want to swallow it, so she did not. Just then Barbara came trudging in, hairy trousers as usual, once again seeming to spy on Meg. Had she seen Meg spit the lozenge into the trash? How disgusting an act, spitting. Was Barbara one of those older women who would want Meg to celebrate her showy childbearing hips? She suspected that Barbara meant to pry or admonish her when she said, “Let’s take a walk tomorrow at lunch! The food trucks will be there—including TGIF Hotdogs— and it’s supposed to be warmer.” Meg politely declined the invitation hoping it wasn’t a command. “Oh, thank you, but unfortunately, I have to watch the phones,” she said, which was conveniently true. Just then a phone rang, ha, which gave her an excuse to dash and answer it.
Friday morning, Meg was back down to 105 pounds, her scary weight, which felt excruciatingly meaningful. When she fell below 105 in high school, her energy fell too. It would be hard to turn back to normal if she kept losing herself now. She knew this number would concern her mother, and wondered if her mother, wherever she had disappeared to, in whatever weightless form, had any sense that Meg wanted again to disappear. She remembered a high school counselor, young Mr. Nadler, saying, “You could use a hearty meal, Megan; you’re growing,” which had made her feel like a cow.
That Friday, her head woozy, she knew well she required real nourishment, but she was running late—the conditions were not right.
Meg got a hunger headache while managing the calls, which were lighter even than expected that Friday. Hunger headaches caused her to see not stars but seashell shapes, oddly enough. Too distracting to be abided. So, Meg closed her eyes and fed herself an entire emergency banana (+100), measured in quarters, sliced with a plastic knife she found in the kitchen. She’d forgotten that closing her eyes could help her eat, even in public. Now she remembered that eating nutritious, homecooked foods without clear nutrition information attached was also soothing way back when, Thanksgiving-type cuisine. After her stay in the treatment center, Thanksgiving and all of its leftovers had been her breakthrough, her salvation. Her mother, she had cried with relief.
Perhaps she could roast a turkey this weekend. A turkey for one, who did that?
Dreaming of food (mainly cheese pizza), the office calm and quiet as a tomb, she lay her head down on her desk, intending to rest for a mere moment. Paul passed by and placed his hand on her head. She popped up, frightened. “Only me,” he said. “Ha,” she said, feeling stupid. She frowned. “You okay, Meg?” he asked her. She’d fallen asleep for a couple of minutes and was mortified. Yawning, not once but twice, she felt sillier still.
As Barbara walked up, Meg worked hard to smile and look extra alive, extra healthy. Maybe Barbara was trying to schedule some alone time to fire her. Ugh. Meg’s mother had left her no money, every cent gone to medical debt, the last year of Meg’s life devoted to caregiving—Meg needed this job. It certainly wasn’t like her to do something like nod out in the workplace, and she hoped to God Barbara had no clue what she’d done.
“How about that walk now?” Barbara asked her.
“Sorry, I’m on the phones,” Meg reminded her.
“I can cover,” Paul said, annoyingly cheerful. Were the two in cahoots?
“Let’s walk and talk,” she said to Meg, whose stomach dropped.
She and Barbara walked into the bright sun, the silver food trucks glistening in the distance. It was January. Meg’s stomach growled; her breath shot white against the blue sky. Barbara bought a footlong, gluten-free hotdog made of vegetables and chickpea protein.
“I’ve already eaten an entire lunch,” Meg told her.
“I wish I had your metabolism, girl,” Barbara told her.
As Barbara ate, Meg thought how much she’d like to try this kind of hotdog, maybe the next time she was alone. It smelled heavenly; she craved one, despite her awful nerves. The two sat together on a bench while Barbara chewed and swallowed. Chewed and swallowed.
When would Barbara drop the bomb, whatever it was?
“You wanted to talk?” Meg asked. Might as well get the bad news out of the way, so she could go home and rest her aching head before applying for basically every job listing she could find.
“Yes! You’re doing a terrific job, Meg—thank you for always being so prompt.”
Meg waited for the “but.” Barbara took another bite.
“That’s what I wanted to tell you,” Barbara added with her mouth partway full. “That, and I could use a friend in the trenches. We’re the only women, have you noticed?”
Meg nodded, relieved and downright stunned. The sun dimmed, clouds covering it over, like something in a book she might read and like at first. She decided to remove her sunglasses. She wouldn’t remove her sweater. But she felt glad to be outside.
“How’s the hotdog?” she asked Barbara to be friendly.
“Some vegan food tries too hard, but not this dog,” Barbara said.
Meg didn’t have a chance to answer before Barbara had yanked off a sloppy section of the footlong and handed it to her on a brown napkin.
“Try if you want,” Barbara said. “Sometimes my eyes are even bigger than my stomach.”
They sat in silence watching passersby. Meg felt the food’s warmth in her palm.
“Paul was awfully happy to take those phones for you,” Barbara observed, elbowing Meg gently.
A tiny young woman with blue hair looped arms with her much taller girlfriend, then stood on tiptoe to kiss her cheek. Meg had the strange thought she might ask Paul for a beer after work. People did that all the time. They just took a big chance the way they took big bites of food in front of everyone else. Then Meg looked at the cat hair on Barbara’s trousers.
“How many pets?” she asked her.
“Many,” Barbara said, laughing. “All rescues.”
After a minute or two, the sun reemerged bright as an egg yolk; Meg closed her eyes and ate the hotdog segment in two modest bites. She had no idea how to quantify this particular food, so she told herself not to, and then somehow she didn’t even try.
© Betsy Boyd
Betsy Boyd’s fiction has been published in The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Five Points, StoryQuarterly, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. Her short story “Scarecrow” received a Pushcart Prize. “A Random Strike” was a Wigleaf top 50 for 2023. Boyd directs the Creative Writing and Publishing Arts MFA program at the University of Baltimore and is the recipient of two Maryland State Arts Council awards, an Elliot Coleman Writing Fellowship, a James A. Michener Fellowship, and residencies through Fundación Valparaíso, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.
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