Fiction: Caterpillars in My Stomach

Waking up at 8am. It’s not very early but it’s before any of my roommates. I go on a walk. I read my new bright pink book. Alexander Chee writes, “Food is our first experience of care, a child psychiatrist tells me.” I shut the book and I cry profoundly yet silently, as to not wake up my roommates. I inhale through my mouth, covered with a tissue and the tight cusp of my hand. 

The mornings after Friday dinners. Saturday morning, waking up at 8am with my brother. My brother and I sleep in different rooms during our weekly visits to my father’s Victorian home, but our circadian rhythms work the same anyway. We get out the iPad and sit quietly on the living room couch together. The mauve plaster walls smell like yesterday’s meal. We watch Youtube and play Minecraft and destroy each other’s block castles. It's 9 am. 10:30am. I hope my father will wake up soon. My stomach grumbles so loudly that I start feeling dizzy from its own convulsions. Poking around the kitchen, I eat half a box of mini chocolate-covered ice cream cones. I get why they put a little chocolate at the end of the cone now, to not let the ice cream melt out. But it doesn’t matter anyway. I scarf them down so fast that they don’t have time to melt. I look in cabinets, rearranging ziploc bags and sealed packages. I find a rectangular tupperware with a blue lid, full of little brown pellets. I know now it’s Vietnamese mushroom seasoning. They look like they could be food for a petting zoo. Pay a quarter and twist out the crumbs into your little hands. The oriental soup spoon left in the tupperware makes it convenient to squat down on the kitchen floor and scoop the pellets into my mouth. No quarter needed.

He wakes up by 11:30am.

Why were you eating ice cream in the morning??? You can’t be eating that much sugar. 

When I’m at home, my real home with my mother, she’s not the best cook, but she's learned to stir fry. Stir fry it all: noodles, vegetables, beef, rice. It can all be made in one pan if it’s wide enough. The plate is a thin, ceramic white. It’s almost see-through thin because the plate is shaped like a running track, wide and long. It’s piled high with brown noodles, green onions, bell peppers, carrots. It’s enough food for a nuclear family, but as the plate is set down, there is only me waiting at the table. 

Eat as much as you can. Eat until you feel sickly full. Don’t waste food. 

My mother doesn’t eat the same food as I do. We rarely eat at the same time. She spends the hour or two before serving, sweating away in the kitchen. But when it’s time for me to eat, she pulls out her phone and has a few gummy bears. I already ate. This is my dinner, she holds up a gummy bear and laughs. 

I can’t say she loves me too much. I don’t think it’s possible to love someone too much. My mother loves me loudly. Her love is all-encompassing. It is without direction. Without hesitation. Without thought. It gets louder until it is drowned out by my own nausea, so sickly full of stir fry in my stomach. 

My mother always tells me a story if I mention her food doesn’t taste very good. I was never really taught how to cook, she says. Your grandmother was always gone at work. I’m only a year older than my brother, and four years older than my sister. But I had to feed them. And I didn’t know how to use the microwave right. The food I’d feed them was sometimes ice cold. And they ate it all and always said, “Thank you,” anyways. My mother always does what is necessary. She is a survivor and a protector.

It’s 6pm and Wednesday night dinner. My brother and I are picked up at the local Jamba Juice and driven 15 minutes downtown to the Victorian home. After trying to do my math homework on the stained couch, we’re called over to eat. It’s a large bowl of vegetable soup with a few bundles of noodles. We eat, making small talk, until I gasp. A soft, uniformly lumpy green figure floats out of a displaced piece of cabbage. It’s a large caterpillar laying on the surface of my soup bowl. Ew, look there’s a caterpillar in my soup. I almost start to laugh. 

I don’t want to eat this. 

Finish your soup. 

He’s serious. I cry and my tears drip down onto the caterpillar. Its eyes stare at me in blurry vision. 

I’m nineteen. The guy I spend all my Fridays with learns everything I know about me. How I am scared of the dark. How my mother loves me. How I made myself overly salty shrimp. Eating the whole bowl until my tongue is numb and my stomach is in knots. I always eat- too much. Always sickly full beyond what I can bear.

You know you don’t have to eat rotten or bad food. 

I just feel bad wasting it. 

But it’s bad, don’t force yourself to eat inedible foods. 

I reluctantly toss the shrimp out after forcing down half of it.

When he disappears for a week, I slowly get more and more anxious. The knots come back. They take sharper twists and turns than ever before. The knots pull themselves tight in their own tug-of-war. I stop eating for two weeks. I start to cough from the sickness so much that I gag into the toilet, hoping my roommates don’t hear me. They do. Nothing comes out to vomit because I have not had anything to eat. Serena drags me to a café in the basement of an old building. The line of students wrap around the cement poles. It’s a popular restaurant to get bowls of rice and fish. We sit down with our bowls and she’s staring at me across the sticky table. 

Just eat a little. You need to eat. 

I use the plastic spoon, my hands shake trying to lift it to my mouth. I cry in the basement café and she sits, quietly, consoling me. 

It’s eleven o’clock on Halloween night and I wonder where he is. I lie completely horizontal on my raised twin bed. I have never felt so empty before. I feel the bed open into a vicious nothingness, swallowing me whole. I grip the sheets to find some ground but I can’t feel the earth. He is my first love. He comes back but leaves again. I often grieve this stomachache. 

In college, I learned to cook very well. More than my mother ever knew how. I have a keen eye for making new recipes and flavor combinations. Food is richness; hunger is abandonment. Spice is tight embrace. I gather my friends, and we enjoy the dishes I spent hours concocting. It’s worth it to see the excitement on their faces. I rarely find the energy to cook for myself. I do not nourish myself with the lavish meals I make for my friends.

If food is our first experience of care, I have surely felt it. I have learned about care, but more about love. When food is not provided, I am small. I am floating in the darkness, wondering if anyone can hear my stomach groan. When it is piled too high, I cannot escape. It smothers me and I am expected to be grateful. At times, I am, but I am distracted by the pure weight of it suffocating me until I scream back in her face. For others, I would cook all the food in the world if I could. I would ration it all out and leave myself the scraps. One day I’ll return to making food for myself. Not a feast, but just enough.