You Exist Too Much. Zaina Arafat

schedule. “Well, you’re in group all day, then dinner, then meetings. On Tuesdays and Thursdays you’ll do an hour of yoga, and equine therapy on Wednesdays.”

      “Will I be able to drink coffee there?”

      “You’ll be able to drink decaf anytime. Caffeinated is only served from seven thirty to seven fifty a.m.”

      “Does that mean that if I’m not done at seven fifty, they’ll take it away?”

      Nancy paused. I imagined she’d hadn’t encountered many people who anticipated every hypothetical. For a moment I felt slight shame. “I doubt it,” she said.

      I then asked about food.

      “I think you’ll be quite pleased on that front,” she said. “We’re proud to offer a range of gourmet options. Our chef’s from the big city, Louisville.”

      Her reference to Louisville as the “big city” inspired skepticism. “Can we eat whenever we want?” I asked.

      “Breakfast is at eight, lunch is at noon, and dinner is at five.”

      “What if I’m not hungry at those times?”

      “You still have to eat.”

      “Will they force me to finish my plate?”

      “No, it’s cafeteria style, you can eat as much or as little as you want.”

      “What if I get hungry late at night?”

      “They usually keep yogurt and fresh fruit in the fridge at the women’s house.” Not true, I later discovered, when I snuck into the kitchen for a nighttime snack and found just a rotten apple and some Smucker’s jelly packets pilfered from the cafeteria.

      Still disgruntled about the early-bird suppers, I asked, “Dinner’s really at five? What if where I’m from we never eat before nine?”

      “Doesn’t matter, sweetheart,” Nancy said. “Here, we’re all Americans.”

      •

      The first thing I noticed when I walked into the main office at the Ledge was that Nancy was wearing short shorts. She stood by the photocopy machine and smiled a tight smile, and her shorts were at least eight inches above her leathery knee. The rules I’d received before arriving, along with a credit card authorization form, explicitly stated that tank tops and short shorts were forbidden at the Ledge. So I went to the Gap and bought knee-length shorts. I then scoured my closet for T-shirts and came up with three. They hung on me like curtains. I showed up looking like either a cabana boy or a seventh grader. And there, standing in front of me, was Nancy, tanned and glowing with an aura of recently laid contentment, wearing freshly cut Daisy Dukes. She extended a manicured hand and said, “Nice to meet you in person!”

      Nancy offered to show me around the main lodge. As she led me down a long corridor I was both surprised and annoyed by how unclinical the place felt. The carpeted floor was covered in redundant shaggy rugs. There were houseplants and skylights overhead that brought in lots of sunlight. There were paintings of dull-colored landscapes alongside motivational posters with random nouns like Persistence and Teamwork scrawled beneath droplets of water. I could’ve easily been at a friend’s summer cottage or a bed-and-breakfast. The warm home-style feel seemed suspicious—white walls and the smell of ammonia inspire trust. I followed Nancy to her personal office, which appeared to double as a bookstore, the shelves lined with books by authors whose names I recognized from the website, price tags dangling off of their spines. She directed me to a wooden desk at the front of the room, pulled out a file, and proceeded to read off the medications that I’d listed in my pre-screening questionnaire. “I’ll need the Adderall and Xanax from you now,” she said, the smile never disappearing from her face. I rummaged through my bag and handed her two green-tinted rows, both with seven separate compartments marked by letters, four pills in every slot, enough of each med to last a month. “You’ll need to give me your cell phone, too,” she said, and then looked down at my pocket, where white wires poked out. “And your mp3 player.”

      I asked where she planned to put them, how she would remember that they were mine. “What if someone else checks out before me and pretends they’re theirs?”

      •

      One summer a few years earlier, I’d stood against a fence outside the Israeli customs office at the Allenby Bridge, on the way to Nablus, my parents’ hometown. Depending on the political climate, some of our summer trips were worse than others when it came to crossing the Allenby, the main entry point into the West Bank for Palestinians living in the diaspora. In the late 1980s, during the intifada, it had been a consistently hellish process; the holding room a swarm of families all kept waiting for hours with no water or air-conditioning in desert heat.

      Though the intifada had long since ended, that particular summer had been an especially bad one for crossing, even for American citizens, which is how I would usually enter the West Bank. As an American. I’d tuck my Jordanian passport away, along with any visual sign of my Palestinian heritage. I would sport my Asics Tigers, flaunt my Hanes V-neck. I’d flash my American passport. Nationality is partly a matter of convenience.

      Still, a guard called me over that day and instructed me to hand my luggage to another guard on the opposite side of the fence, who took it and tossed it into a tube that looked like an MRI machine. He placed no tag on the bag, no receipt was printed, and no record existed to show that it belonged to me. The look on my face must have signaled worry. “Calm down,” he said. “You’ll find it once you get through security.”

      I was the last person to get through that day, likely because of my twentysomething, volatile, and presumably rebellious age. The Lebanese stamps that decorated every other page of my passport didn’t help, either. When I finally got to the luggage area my suitcase was gone.

      •

      “They’ll go in a safe,” Nancy assured me, “in a plastic bag with your name on it.” She handed me a roll of masking tape and a thick red marker. I ripped off a piece and wrote my name in all caps, and then pressed it onto the Ziploc. I was about to ask if I could at least keep my iPod when a man with a soft brown beard, bulbous red nose, and topaz-colored eyes walked into the room. He wore khaki pants with a hunter-green polo and Merrell shoes. He looked like one of those doctors you see in the movies, the kind from the 1950s, like he could administer shock therapy on you and make it home in time for a TV dinner and the six o’clock news. He knelt down beside me and spoke quietly, smiling. “Hi, I’m Richard. I’m the psychiatrist here.”

      I looked into his eyes and saw it, that familiar thing. Rage. I could tell he’d acted on it before, a number of times, but had since built his career on repressing it. I smiled back at him. He stood and patted me on the back. “Glad you’re here,” he said.

      “Well,” Nancy interjected. “It’s four thirty now, so dinner’s in half an hour. Why don’t you go out into the living room until then and meet some of the other clients?”

      I looked over my shoulder and into the other room. “Just go out there?”

      •

      On my first day in treatment for anorexia, nearly five years earlier, I walked in with my hoodie pulled over my face. The center was just a few blocks from my summer sublet in Porter Square, and I was afraid I might see someone who recognized me. It didn’t matter that I’d only been in Cambridge a few weeks and knew practically no one. During dinner a counselor tapped me on the shoulder and told me I’d put too much food on my plate, a move that propelled me to enact an independent seventy-two-hour hunger strike. Across the table a woman started crying onto her burrito. “Will I ever escape this?” she wailed.

      I turned and faced the wall to hide my laughter. We were all so perfectly absurd, so perfectly pathetic.

      •

      “Yup!” Nancy nodded. “Just right through there.”

      Suddenly I didn’t want to leave her. I wanted Nancy to take my hand, lead me into the living room, and introduce