Free Eating Ice Cream With My Dog by Frances Kuffel

as close to an orgasm as I was going to get that day.
    My Amazon blog turned this sour day into a thing too many of us had shared not to laugh at in retrospect. “Eating while hiding in the bathroom sucks. Eating while hiding in your OWN bathroom sucks even more,” I wrote and M. added, “I’ve been there, hiding in the bathroom, and yes, it’s creepy. It goes to show to what lengths this addiction will take us.”
    I was hanging on to one new dream. My parents had returned to Montana after their winter in Arizona and my mother was reading the classified ads for litters of Labrador retrievers that would be available when I went home that August. She raised Labs when I was little and would pick out a winner for me, help me housebreak it, and get me started on the great adventure of finally having a dog.
    Unfortunately, Montana is the birthplace of my compulsive eating and the last place on earth I could regain my abstinence. The yellow peasant loaf–sized baby we picked out turned out to be a stubborn, human-flesh-eating brat. I couldn’t leave Daisy with my elderly parents, and I couldn’t take her to the beach before she even knew her own name, let alone liked me enough to learn to come when called. Suddenly I was imprisoned with this adorable monster that hated being held ( crash! there went one dream) and had actual tantrums.
    Two scenes stand out in my mind from that summer. One is of scooping Daisy up in my arms and running to the bathroom with the liquid bowels of half a box of laxatives, holding the puppy as I shit so that she wouldn’t take her own dump on the carpet.
    The other is of standing at the kitchen sink, looking into the old apple tree heavy with fruit and bowed to the deck, while shoving a package of molasses cookies, one whole cookie after another, down my throat. I am sorry to say— gulp— your services will no longer —gulp— be needed. Those cookies set a precedent. That voice, the way Alix chewed the inside of her lip as she waited for me to justify this or that thing I hadn’t known she wanted, her giggle when she wanted to impress a client or important editor—scenes real or pulled from possibility continue to haunt my dreams when my food is out of control.
    Six weeks later, I returned to Brooklyn with Daisy and forty pounds I didn’t have when I boarded the plane in Newark. What being fired hadn’t taken from me, food had reclaimed. Thoroughly in its thrall, I have been a whore for it, a thief, a liar, a magician, a juggler, a soldier, and a spy. Each of these roles had a different relationship with food, the world of things, and the world of people. If this story seems like so much navel-gazing, consider the analysis I’m forced to go through in sorting it out. Jesus, with which self do I start?
    This compulsion has been my best friend, whipping post, lover, and god since the age of three or four. It has ruined my ability to be automatically generous with others. My sense of my own worth, my health, my confidence, my discipline (clouded as it was by the fixation on and/or the sleepiness of food), my market value have been mown down by it even as food promised one more night of comfort against all those shortcomings. I was no longer an agent, no longer thin, no longer attractive as a slut, my German Slut Boy informed me. I was the owner of an energetic dog, in possession of a diagnosis of clinical depression and anxiety attacks when I had to leave the Bat Cave (what I called my small, dark apartment), and, if not a writer, an author.
    There were grand moments and terrible ones in the next three years, variations on these themes of being fireable, inept, a liar when speaking about weight loss. My body bobbed up and down between 190 and 220 pounds, and my moods bobbed in tandem despite big doses of Zoloft, Wellbutrin, and when I developed problems breathing when I had to leave my house, Klonopin.
     
     
    It was noon on a Saturday in January 2006, in a colorless church basement. It