The Hiccups

Lbs.

A few years ago my mother was up to almost two hundred pounds. Four months later she was half that. She believes something strong and good inside her helped to starve the compulsion even then. But the compulsion is stronger than my mother, and soon she'll be back up to almost two hundred. She says, "The bigger I get, the bigger it gets; the bigger it gets, the bigger I want to get."

My mother has a strong craving for apples. McIntosh and Red Delicious. She eats a bowl of pasta with so much sauce it looks like tomato soup. French fries with so much ketchup you can't see the fries. She says it's the compulsion wanting to eat anything red. It wants chilies, but my mother doesn't like chilies and can't give the compulsion what it wants. "The compulsion needs to be fed and the only way to get rid of it is by the doctor in Toronto clearing it," she says.

What made my mother decide to try the doctor in Toronto was the night a few weeks back when she woke with a pain in her neck and was having trouble breathing and took off her clothes and went outside and lay in the snow and thought that maybe I wouldn't find her until she had frozen to death. But I heard the door downstairs open and close and from my bedroom window saw her walk across the street towards the field from where we live. I tracked the path of her footprints until I found her collapsed in a snowdrift—her white hot breath fuming out from her sopping mouth and runny nostrils. I helped her up and we walked home. I shivered just looking at her swollen feet in the snow. When we got inside I rushed her into the bathroom and told her to stand in the tub. I ran the hot water and watched her skin turn red. She stood there, slouched, and let the hot water hit her face and run down her body.

A week later we drove to Toronto to see a doctor she read about on the internet. He was a psychiatrist who studied in Switzerland and was awarded a medal for his research. He was somewhere around my mother's age and wore glasses and smiled even when he passed along bad news. "This is a very aggressive condition," he told my mother. "It's probably been inside you for years."

It was snowing outside the doctor's office, and the flakes ticked against the windowpanes. The radiator pipes clanked and hissed.

"Are you surprised?" the doctor asked.

"No," my mother said.

"Are you disappointed?" The doctor reached forward to stroke my mother's hand. She snapped it back from him. She didn't like to be touched. The winter wind shook the windows.

"I'm frightened," my mother said. "I don't like to think there are things I can't control. This thing has attached itself to me and made my life miserable."

"For the next two weeks," the doctor explained, "you have to record everything you're doing or thinking whenever you get the urge to eat." Since my mother often has headaches that make her hands shake I asked if it was okay if I wrote down whatever she says she's doing or thinking. The doctor nodded, then grinned, and handed me a thin paperback book with his name on it. He said, "You came for this too."

*            *           *

My mother doesn't like to be alone. Some days I stay home from school and the next day she gives me a counterfeit note that says I was sick. My mother says being alone makes her nervous. She walks around the house counting backwards from one thousand. She takes baths and sticks her head under the cold water and counts. But today she says it's too quiet under the water and she can hear the compulsion humming inside her. It reminds her that she needs to keep moving.

So she goes outside. My mother takes walks around the neighbourhood and sometimes talks to strangers. She asks them how their day is going, that sort of thing, and mostly people are pleasant in return. Even my friends, when my mother talks to them, they say hello, though they don't like to look at her. My mother tries as much as possible to keep the conversation going, but eventually it ends and she keeps walking. Sometimes she finds herself in the grocery store. She'll try to take her time buying only a few things—"Only the necessities," she says—but she always ends up in the red meat section, or near the tomatoes or red wine vinegar.