The sick monster living inside my stomach sat down with me to dinner. I could hear the sick monster rumbling, hoarding my food in a secret stomach pouch under my stomach. The rumbling grew louder. I decided to starve the sick monster. I refused to eat. But the sick monster punished me. At night he braided my stomach with wires. Every time I moved the braids cut into me. The sick monster got angrier and hurt more. I decided to have it out with him.
The next night I said, “I want you to go away so I can eat again.” I‘d lost ten pounds and was turning into a scarecrow like the one in the Wizard of Oz.
“Why should I care?” laughed the sick monster. “You’re nothing but a little girl. Beside, once your stomach is covered with my meanness, I’ll make you give up breathing. So you see, Lenore” —the monster even knew my name—“there’s nothing you can do.”
The next night the sick monster braided my stomach with twice as many wires. “Stop it,” I said. “You’re hurting me.”
My mother took it as a personal insult that she had a sickly child. How could she have a child who you could blow over with a single breath? She took it upon herself to nurse me back to health. Any time the doctors prescribed a new food regimen she discovered health food stores for my new diet, places outside of her usual shopping route on Hunts Point Avenue.
I went through a gluten-free phase since the doctors thought I was allergic to wheat products. When that didn’t work, I graduated to all-protein diets, eating broiled meat, cottage cheese, and raw vegetables. The doctors finally decided that I didn’t have a food allergy. I knew all along it was the sick monster.
In junior high school, the doctors told my mother that they wanted to send me to a hospital “for observation.” But they couldn’t find anything. I thought that maybe the doctors and nurses had scared away th sick monster. But on the morning when I was being discharged, the sick monster jabbed me with a fingernail. “I will follow you wherever you go. You will never escape.”
I went back to school and tried to forget about him, discovered the library where I found collections of Greek mythology, stories about Psyche whose husband was invisible at night; Grimm’s fairy tales about three tasks that must be accomplished before a prince can find love, or Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid who dissolved into a sea of foam, sacrificing her silvery tail for stumpy legs. I knew love was not going to be easy. All the songs on the radio said so. But I thought love had to be the most wonderful thing in the world, the moment when Emile De Becque in South Pacific spots Nellie Forbush across a crowded room. I also dreamed about making the world a better place. But I couldn’t find books to tell me how I was supposed to do any of this, especially how to find the person who was going to share a roll-away couch with me every night. I figured it was something I’d have to learn when I got older, like studying algebra in the seventh grade.