Cookie Mania

            For me, there have been few events more terrifying than my former Iranian boss cornering me and making me kiss him on the head and tell him I love him. Two of these few things are death and causing a flood. Another is Cookie Mania.

            “Let me explain,” I tell my friend –– a homebody who bakes and sews and gave me the finger in Hot Yoga the time I dragged her there. Sunday afternoon, and she’s baking sugar cookies for the Farmers’ Market. While she measures and mixes, I’m sitting in a chair by the stove and rocking back and forth a bit, which is a motion someone said to make if you don’t want to be approached in sketchy public places like the laundromat at night in Detroit. In this case, it’s to keep from tampering with my friend’s baking ingredients. If my hands have free reign around dough, there might be a sticky situation. (Some people have this issue with the other kind of dough, but I only care about that kind in so far as it supports my cookie habit). 

            “I’m listening.” My friend smoothes her index finger over a teaspoon of baking soda to get the powder level –– a motion I’ve never made with my finger because I don’t care for recipes. ¼ teaspoon of baking soda? Who the hell says? Betty Crocker? And what gives Betty the authority to say? Betty is like the bossy girl in sixth grade who demands exactly ¼ of your Halloween candy.

            I begin: “After a soccer game in elementary school, none of us thought twice about eating a sleeve of Oreos.”

            “Oreos are the best.”

            “I want to kill the person who invented Oreos.”

            “Watch it. You say shit like that these days, and you end up in jail mumbling about Oreos and conspiracies and the injustice of it all.” She cracks an egg into a separate bowl –– another ritual I’ve never done. Separate bowls for the dry and wet ingredients? Hell no.

            Once I’ve surrendered to baking, there’s no fiddle–fucking around. I’ve deprived myself of sweets for days. In stores, I’ve shunned those at once demonic and divine sugar entities  –– sitting prim and proper in display cases like queens on thrones. The cupcakes are especially regal with their crowns of frosting, but they don’t intimidate me; I have genuinely rejected them since throwing up frosting in kindergarten. But cookies: I’ve avoided them around town like I do the friend with whom I fought using kitchen utensils, but with whom I wish I could make amends. But then I’m at a party where there’s no consideration for sugar addicts or compulsive eaters. I start with one, and then it’s Cookie Mania. I eat seven. Later, I bake without separating the wet and dry ingredients. The sooner I slap the batter together, the sooner I can lick the bowl and get the stuff in the oven. The sooner I can eat what I call ‘sugar pillows,’ which compel and overwhelm me as much as, perhaps, very large breasts do men. The sooner I can feel like shit and return to my “normal” routine exercising and restricting. The sooner I can feel in control again.

            Until the cycle repeats.

            Is realizing you’re on such a merry-go-round as disturbing as finding the first grey hair? How did this happen, and how do I reverse it?

            I hang my head and, more to myself: “It was a joke about killing the Oreo-maker.” When I’m sure no tears will fall yet, I lift my chin. “It’s just that, as an adult, eating a sleeve of Oreos is now called binge–eating. ” 

            “True.” She cracks another egg. I flinch. “But who cares?”

            “I used to love cookies.” I watch her ‘fold’ the wet and dry ingredients together and continue: “But now I don’t even taste them. I’m halfway through one, and I’m already thinking about the next. I’m devastated if I don’t have another but also if I do. Because I know that, if more than one is accessible, I might lose control and never be able to stop.”

            “Control.” She stirs, pauses, dips her finger into the batter, and licks. Tilting her head back and laughing, her matted hair reaches to her butt. She’s wearing pink, polka–dotted pajama pants I wouldn’t wear if it was the only remaining pair of pants in the world and I otherwise had to wear a tunic. (Polka dots have always reminded me of women who stay home and watch Days of Our Lives and cry). My friend looks down at me, still sitting on my hands: “Don’t let any of these measuring cups fool you, girl. I’ve never considered myself ‘in control.’ And when you don’t consider yourself ‘in control,’ you can never get out of it.  Take the path of least resistance; you’ll be happier.”

            I place my hands on my stomach now. Inhaling, belly rises. Exhaling, navel draws to the spine.  Repeat –– a cycle involving no shame, fear, panic, or delusion. But then I check my phone: 2:45pm. Good: I won’t be around when the cookies come out of the oven.  No Cookie Mania for this girl today.  In thirty minutes, I’ll head to the Hot Yoga studio to be the first to arrive when the doors open at 3:30pm. Before class starts at 4pm, I give myself enough time to do my rituals involving electrolyte powder, mat–placement, peeing three times and . . . a nap.  To myself I have at least started to give this gift of closing my eyes for fifteen minutes and breathing.  

            After pushing hard yesterday with a Hot Yoga class, teaching /practicing three Power Yoga classes, running on the treadmill at 6:24 average pace for a 19:04 5K, and then the stairmaster, I am sick today. So instead of Hot Yoga, I sit down to write. I am an Exercise and Cookie Maniac, but I am first and foremost a writer. Staying vertical and in motion until bedtime to avoid the compulsive cookie–eating that burgeons only in stillness for me, I have had a hard time slowing down enough to write. But today, while writing, I eat a lemon rosemary cookie from my favorite café. Just one –– purchased and consumed mindfully. Today I am starting new with taking the “path of lease resistance.” I’ve waited six months to return to this café after the embarrassment of eating an elderly woman’s molasses cookie, which she’d left crumbled on a plate on the counter while getting her coffee across the room.

            “I thought it was a sample,” I’d told her when she returned and demanded the plate. Four feet tall, waving a cane at me, purple lipstick, and Russian. Even more terrifying than the Iranian man, death, and cookies was this elderly Russian woman. 

            I forfeit the plate: “I’ll get you another!”

            She stuffs the remaining cookie–bits in her mouth. Chewing: “Well, that was the last one they had! But it will do. Now Good day to you.”

            I smile. Now through with my cookie, and satisfied, I continue to revise my story.