The woman smears honey on herself and asks me to watch. I haven’t known her long. We share the same name, the same spelling. I wonder briefly if this is the good stuff—single flower, local harvest—or if it’s cut with corn syrup. It flows too easily to be fully real, but that makes it more tempting somehow, and that I can’t touch her. This is the most intimate I’ve ever been, me watching her in the art gallery as she test-runs the video, her hunched over the computer and her on the screen, spreading open an orange with honeyed fingers. I don’t understand the art film, but my body does. I watch her explore the pith, each ridge and fold. My skin is a hot sheet I can’t kick off. When she looks up at me, face over-zoomed so the eyes are a scatter of pixels, the real face in the real body smiling as she waves hello beside the screen, I refuse to meet her gaze. She says something, but I don’t hear it, already halfway out the door.
At breakfast the next morning, I pour honey on toast until the whole plate is covered. I only stop when I feel it fall on my leg from the counter, a warm pulling sensation that slides across the razor bumps there. I picture discovering that feeling in bed with her. I let myself imagine it for the first time, how she could make an orange of me and I could learn to let myself be opened.
I have too much shame in me, though, not just for wanting women but for the body they would have to touch. I throw the toast away, plate and all. I don’t eat for two days. I ignore the woman when I see her in the gallery. No matter how many times we clean the space, it still smells like oranges.
*
Two months later, I wander through New York searching for a certain shade of blue. I used to stare at oil paintings for hours, especially Turners, trying to identify colors. I wanted to touch each canvas, peel up the meringue and feel the dried paint in my hand. I was convinced the colors would only matter if I could hold them. I still want to touch everything I shouldn’t, but the colors seem duller now. I’m looking for the kind of blue I barely remember. The closest I’ve seen is the shadow on the ceiling when I wake up at 4 a.m., snow bouncing light through the window of the hotel.
My friend and I came to New York for a winter art colloquium, a program designed for young artists to visit art spaces with a professor guiding us through small lectures. We got a discounted room on the Upper West Side, rationing cereal and take-and-bake meals. The Met and MOMA were our first stops; we’ve visited at least seven galleries each day since. The art slides off me, doesn’t stick. Instead, I watch other people watching my body as I examine a painting, hands limp around my coat. It’s a performance, this looking. I don’t want them to actually see me, but to compare my shape with the other female figures in the room. I suck in my stomach, tilt my pelvis back, jut my shoulders out to make my arms slim. This is my best approximation of what they want to see.
In the Guggenheim, I walk the atrium’s spiral gallery and suddenly see a flash of that blue: an old woman’s scarf cutting a line down her back. The crowd swallows her before I can fully memorize the color. I hurry after the scarf, hide my unposed body behind my coat. The Agnes Martin paintings blend together as I rush through the retrospective, her life moving backward as I trail the stranger. She walks into a mezzanine, then a side room. By the time I catch up, she’s gone, and the blue with her.
*
It’s mold, not snow, my professor critiques, leaning over my shoulder as I draw the still life in the center of the studio. He takes his forefinger and smudges the top of the rotting persimmon on my sketchpad. More filament, not so dusty. Don’t let the charcoal do the work for you. I nod as he walks away, rub the heel of my hand across the drawing to get rid of the grain and make room for the new texture.
The professor brought peonies for the first still life of this course. He reviewed our pieces as unoriginal and flat, made worse as the blooms dried stiff. Soft rot, he decided, would be more dynamic, capture more than one life as the fruit shrinks into something new. Lunch became a distant nausea as the apples decomposed, the smell growing worse over weeks. It took almost a month before the custodians convinced the university administration that they needed to remove the health hazard. Another still life of persimmons and stone fruit was on the table by the next class, juice rings still on the wood beneath. Two weeks later, the new mold is turning green.
I bring the charcoal pencil to the pad but can’t make it touch—my right hand shakes too badly. I haven’t eaten in almost a week. The rotting smell is an excuse, one of many I use to justify skipping meals. It started this time when a drunk student barged into my dorm room and collapsed on top of me, his hands groping for purchase as I shoved him off. He hadn’t meant anything by it and apologized, but my reaction was to pull inward, find ways to control my body. Food offers the fastest tangible evidence of that control.
I draw the mold again and again. I can never make the strokes clean enough.
*
My mother taught me to never use gloves when cooking meat. She stripped fat in smooth cuts, and I imagined at ten years old the kind of knife that could do the same to me. I never told her, just watched across the counter as she pared off anything she didn’t want.
I stopped eating for the first time a few months before my eleventh birthday. I liked the way hunger made me feel, a tide receding to a single point in my body. I also liked the way people looked at me because of it. I wasn’t subtle. There was some pleasure in telling people how long it had been since my last meal; the shock was delicious. Then they would stare a bit too long and the magic would evaporate, making the shame more potent. In my first year of college, I told a friend I hadn’t eaten for twelve days and woke up from a nap with three police officers standing over me, asking for identification and if I had an object to harm myself or others. I understood starvation needed to be a solitary act.
I became obsessed with the idea of disappearing, dematerializing. With less and less of me in a physical space, philosophy and art theory became more appealing. I studied photography and eventually found Adrian Piper’s Food for the Spirit, a series of black and white self-portraits from 1971. She locked herself inside her New York apartment and read Critique of Pure Reason over and over, fasting and barely sleeping. As the days passed, she felt herself detaching from the world, a shade haunting her own bed. When this feeling overwhelmed her, she took photographs of her body in a mirror and chanted excerpts from Kant. For whatever reason, I discovered the fourteen scattered images in a progression toward nakedness: first with Piper clothed, then in underwear, then fully exposed. I could see her waist shrinking in each photograph. I was jealous. Not of her body, but her confidence to display it. I still am.
In spring, a former classmate invites me to look at the proof of her new art book. I go and she shows me the square hardback full of digital photographs, diptychs of food and bodies in colors so intense I can only associate them with childhood candy. One image startles me: a thick cut of beef sitting on a paper plate, the porcelain full of blood in the middle of an empty refrigerator. It seems abandoned, no hand to prepare it for a meal or throw it out.
I keep thinking about the book as I try to fall asleep. There had been abstract images of sheets with self-portraits of my classmate’s stomach, the heavy folds around her navel pinched to match the sheets and suggest sex. I had never seen anything quite like it. Most artists use fatness as social critique or calling card or radical statement. This was just her body, implying touch.
Her body and mine are the same shape. By reason, this means mine can be touched.
I still can’t stomach it.
*
Are you sure you’re alright with this? I look at the woman below me, her eyes wide and trusting. She nods, then plugs her nose with her left hand and submerges herself in the milk bath. The liquid rushes up the side of the tub, makes my feet slip a little as I stand on the edges. The camera swings from the strap around my neck. By the time she surfaces, her nipples are hard from the cold. The model is used to sharing her body with me, but our other sessions together were more traditional, standard studio work.
How do you want me? Émilie asks, gesturing with her shoulders so the milk slides off her skin. Despite knowing her for months since she moved to the city from Montreal, her openness still surprises me. The space between us is different here. Before, photographing her felt like a performance: her standing under the studio lights and me on the other side of the room offering directions. Now, there is no distance. Émilie lets me turn her chin, place a few drops of milk into the shell of her ear, her mouth. I’m too close to hide.
Just as I feed a new roll of film through the camera spool, I lose my footing and fall into the tub. My legs land between hers, arms wheeling so I catch one hand on the tile and one right above Émilie’s head, our faces a breath apart. Everything thins to a single line of static inside me. She laughs, big swells that send the milk splashing up my thighs as she kisses me on the cheek and laughs until milk spills from her nose. I hesitate there, camera just above the waterline, and then I’m laughing with her, so hard I don’t hold in my stomach. Émilie wipes milk from her eyes, still chuckling in between phrases of Quebecois. What a way to make beauty, she says, shaking her head with a smile.
The next morning, she brings me breakfast in exchange for me teaching her how to develop photographs. We eat on the grass lawn outside the studio, and I don’t feel bad about the food, at least for now. An ant crawls inside my sleeve and back out, stitching my skin over and over, but I’m too absorbed watching Émilie’s mouth to care.
Inside the darkroom, we stand over the basin as the developer pulls her face and body into visible shapes on the blank paper. She squeals with excitement and presses her hand to the small of my back. I imagine someone observing this scene: two women looking at the nude image of one of their bodies coming to life in water, close enough to be lovers—the shared gaze, the mouths parted, just so—but not close enough to be certain. It’s easier to step outside myself like this, view the scene like an academic applying theory and analysis, mental bridges I can run across and draw up behind me. But I focus on Émilie’s hand, the shape of it on my skin sinking deeper, and force myself stay in the moment, in my body.
For once, I want to just feel things as they are without thinking about what they might mean.
*
I come out for the first time to a stranger. Both on the same week-long research intensive in Spain, I knew I wouldn’t have to face her again if it went badly. She sat beside me at dinner one night and mentioned her sexuality in passing, how she’d dated a Finnish woman long-distance for years and an Indigenous activist who would present at the GLAAD Awards. She ate her food with zeal and was unapologetic about seconds. Everyone in the dining hall received unpasteurized yogurt cups for dessert after each meal—within two days, a black market had been established for the pineapple flavor. On the fourth night, I swapped with Diana, offering my pineapple for her vanilla.
An hour later, her and I sit on a short wall at the edge of the university. She tells me about her research, how she’s investigating Jewish archives and excited to see the synagogue while she’s here. Twice my age, she’s the most vibrant person I’ve ever met.
Can I ask you something?
Sure, she answers, leaning back so her shirt reveals a strip of skin.
When did you know?
She doesn’t need me to explain. She smiles. Around your age. I probably knew a lot earlier, but that’s when I first used the label. She chuckles, lets the sound roll through her stomach. You know, I thought you would ask me something like that.
Why?
She scoffs and pats my thigh. Nobody likes the vanilla. I blush and bring my knees up to my chest. You don’t have to label yourself if you don’t want to, she says, softening her voice.
It’s not the label so much that I can’t see why it matters. I don’t think anyone would want me like that.
Because it would be your first time with a woman?
No, I just—I gesture to my stomach, clamp my hands tightly around my waist.
Do you have a mirror in your room?
What? I feel my hands twitch and release, sliding into my lap.
A mirror, do you have one? My room doesn’t but yours might.
N-no, I don’t think so, I say. She grabs my hand and squeezes it.
You need to undress every day and look at yourself, really look in the mirror. Start with just your collarbone if you have to, or an ankle. Do it in pieces. Do your makeup naked. Each day will get easier. The more you show yourself to yourself, the less you’ll feel like you need to hide.
What if I end up hating it even more?
You might at first. But eventually you’ll see something beautiful and it won’t be a lie. You like women’s bodies, so there’s something about you that’s already appealing. Think of it like a model you’re drawing again and again, so many times you start to fall in love with her just because her body is so familiar.
We stay outside for another hour until it starts to rain, a comfortable silence between us. When I get back to my room, I realize there isn’t a mirror, but the lights from the city are bright enough that I can see my reflection in the window. I strip out of my shirt and look at the small panes.
She was right: the collarbone to start.