How to Cook Your Daughter (21 page)

But I felt it was too late for us, that as much as I had loved him once, I had never really been intimate with him, not the way I was with Kurt. And there was the issue of my father. Pablo seemed afraid of what had happened to me; Kurt faced it head on. If I married Pablo, it would be unmentionable, and I would bear it on my own. If I married Kurt, there would be no taboos, particularly this one. I had never lived with him, known his family, seen his house, or met most of his friends. But I knew I needed him.

Pablo went back to Spain alone—and relieved, I suspect. Kurt stayed and formally proposed one afternoon while we were running side by side on the hotel gym's treadmills. We decided to get married straight away and gave ourselves two weeks to plan the wedding. After that I would move to Los Angeles, since I had little to offer in New York besides a studio apartment.

My mother seemed happy to hear I was engaged. My father was not. He favored Pablo. He knew Pablo admired him, and he sensed Kurt never would. It wasn't as though Kurt were antagonistic toward my dad when they finally met, but he wasn't warm either. Before we went to have a drink with my father and Carla one evening, Kurt warned me what to expect. “Jessica, I will meet Tony if you want me to,” he said. “I will even try to be nice. But there is only so much I can fake with a man who is capable of doing what he did to his own daughter. I don't like him, and I will never, never trust him.”

Privately, Dad made some not-so-subtle attempts to dissuade me from marrying Kurt, telling me what a better match Pablo would be. I was under his influence enough to almost believe him. But a voice in my head, for once louder than my father's, told me I was making the right choice. Dad said he would only pay for the wedding if I got married in a Catholic church—a ridiculous demand given that my father was divorced and had married Carla in the garden in New Jersey. Besides, Kurt was Jewish. But it didn't matter. I didn't want him to pay for the wedding anyway. I wanted the day to be only about Kurt and me. My mom paid for part of it, and Rudy, with his connections, got us the second best suite at the Mark Hotel on Fifth Avenue for the price of a room at a Holiday Inn. It helped that it was Christmas Eve, not a big night for tourists or weddings.

The ceremony came five months after Kurt and I had met. My mother and father were there, keeping their distance. Carla was invited but said she couldn't leave her children at Christmas, perhaps an excuse to avoid being in the same room with my mom. Rudy was best man; my sister, Kathy, was my maid of honor, and Krisztina, Iana, and other old friends were there too. Kurt and I found the Universalist minister by calling an 800-number.

My father announced to the congregation that he had had Kurt “investigated” before allowing us to marry. I assumed he was joking. Then he began reading a Biblical passage of his choosing—one that he hadn't told me about.

As he read from the “Song of Solomon,” my stomach turned. “Thy two breasts are like two young roses that are twins, which feed among the lilies,” he announced. And then: “I sleep, but my heart waketh. It is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled, for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.”

He didn't stop. “My dove, my undefiled is but one; she is the only one of her mother, she is the choice one of her that bare her. The daughters saw her, and blessed her; yea, the queens.”

And then: “How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights! This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes. I said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof: now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine, and the smell of thy nose like apples; and the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak.”

“I am my beloved's, and his desire is toward me…”

I tried my best to smile, but I couldn't believe my father failed to make the connection that was so obvious to me, to Kurt, and to my friends in the room that knew. I began to feel nauseated, as I usually did when those memories flooded back. I looked toward Kurt and felt better.

Anyone looking through the wedding album might think Kathy and I were two happy sisters with our happy parents. Sometimes, the thousand words a picture speaks are better if not truthful. Kurt and I stayed at the Mark that night. Early on a snowy Christmas Day, Kurt awoke to find his bride gone. I was up at 6:30
A.M
., had procured a cup of coffee from the downstairs staff, and was tromping through a snowy Central Park in my running shoes. It was the first of almost 3,700 mornings since we got married that Kurt has woken up alone.

My new husband now faced his greatest challenge yet: getting me to L.A. We were set to leave on New Year's Day, but on New Year's Eve, I made the mistake of talking to a friend about the harrowing trip she had just taken from Florida. They had flown through a thunderstorm. “I was sure the plane was coming down,” she told me. “The sky was blazing. I saw lightning strike the wings, and the whole plane bounced up and down. They even had us take our emergency positions!”

I looked mournfully at Kurt, as if to say, “How can you subject me to a plane trip, you heartless man!” But he was oblivious. The next morning, I started getting edgy. I looked pale and cringed at the mention of the trip. My mother recognized the signs and took me aside. “Jessica, you had better get on that plane, Kurt is not someone who will take a lot of nonsense.”

She was right. A few hours before the flight, as we were getting
ready to leave, I started weeping, saying that I was scared to get on the plane and wanted to take the train instead. Kurt looked at me as if I were crazy.

“I'm getting on that flight,” he said, matter-of-factly. “But if you're nutty enough to spend three days in a train instead of five hours in a plane, fine.”

He didn't seem angry at all. He simply kissed me on the cheek, went out the door to get a cab to the airport, and arrived promptly in Los Angeles five hours later. I spent seventy-two hours by myself on a scruffy leather seat looking out of an Amtrak window and feeling like the biggest idiot in the world. Kurt picked me up from Union Station. He looked rested and chipper. On the way to the car, he made cracks about how I was a mail-order bride and suggested that next time, I might want to travel by covered wagon.

Kurt took me back to my new home, a townhouse in Santa Monica, long enough for me to drop my bags. It had been more than twenty years since I had left L.A. behind, heading out of Laurel Canyon in the VW with my parents. Now, I found the city vast and hard to understand. Was it a city, a suburb, or a mass of strip malls with sun and palm trees? We drove north to Carmel for a honeymoon and came back to Santa Monica on the afternoon of January 16. That night I went to sleep in Los Angeles for the first time in twenty-two years. Early the next morning, at 4:30
A.M
., I awoke to the sound of breaking glass. The bed tossed and bounced exactly as it had when I was five. This time I recognized straight away that Daddy wasn't playing a trick on me. The earthquake, we found out later, had registered 6.7 on the Richter scale. I had left L.A. after one major earthquake to return years later, just in time for another.

Being in L.A., being married, and having a person like Kurt in my life made me want to change, to make a real commitment this time. My bulimia was the most obvious place to start. Kurt still didn't know, and though I hadn't told him the truth, I rationalized that I hadn't really lied about it either. He just hadn't asked. I had been trying to control my eating for years. This time I was determined to get a handle on my problem. Eating disorders are tricky; you can't just cut food out of your life, as you might with drugs or alcohol. You have to find a way to manage what you eat.

I made a vow to change once and for all. For the first couple of months in L.A., I stuck to a diet and did not binge. I felt in control for the first time I could remember. But controlling what I ate—precisely and obsessively—became my new addiction. Starving myself made me feel “clean” and “good.” I was proud of not being bulimic anymore, but after a few months in which I dropped twenty pounds off an already thin frame, my sense of being worthy and virtuous became hollow. I had traded bulimia for anorexia.

I'd had an illusion as a bulimic that if I could master my eating, I was of value to myself. What I came to realize after I became anorexic was that I didn't value myself any more than I had before. Food was not the issue. I knew that. It was my past, my self-loathing. In one sense, trading bulimia for anorexia seemed a positive step, if only because I realized my problems needed real attention this time. Anorexia was the end of the line. If I had stayed wrapped up in the cycle of bingeing and purging, I might never have hit that wall.

And thankfully, anorexia showed. I couldn't hide the weight loss as I could the vomiting. After a few months, I was down to about ninety pounds, gaunt and boney. But like all anorexics, I still thought I was
chubby. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a woman who could easily lose a few more pounds. I was running six to eight miles a day, and most of the time, I was so exhausted and dizzy that I felt faint. It wasn't that I never ate. For months I ate exactly the same food at precisely the same time of the day, every day, seven days a week. I had an apple for breakfast, cut up into tiny pieces that I ate with a fork to make it last longer. I put a clock on the lunch table to make sure it took me at least forty-five minutes to an hour for me to finish a salad (without dressing, of course). Kurt got to the point where he couldn't bear to eat with me, the meals were so nerve-racking. I chewed every morsel of my salad fifty times, putting down my fork for exactly one minute between each bite. Kurt anxiously watched the woman he loved shrink away, but I thought I was doing fine. After being bulimic for fifteen years, anorexia seemed like an achievement. Everything about food was now strictly controlled, and as long as I stayed obsessively within the limits of what I could eat and when I could eat it, I would be able to ward off the danger of binges.

I lost an acting job because I was too thin. I looked so bad that the casting director asked my agent if I had a terminal illness. I had no energy for anything but my early morning run. Kurt tried everything. Compassion, jokes, begging, even tough love. Nothing worked. I was starving myself and felt panicked by the thought of breaking the “food rules” that I'd made. My priorities were a mess—it was more important for me to eat my salad in fifty-chew increments than to be able to function. Kurt must have wished that he had never set foot in Williamstown.

Then one day, I collapsed. I was leaving our condo building and fainted outside the garage door. No one was around. I must have come to pretty quickly, but I was still too dizzy to stand up. I crawled from
the garage to our unit, stood and held on to the door jamb as I unlocked the door. I staggered inside and lay down on the sofa. I was scared.

Everything spun slightly, and I had a terrible headache. I found the phone and tried calling Kurt, but he was working on a set somewhere. Then I tried Laura, a New York friend who had migrated to L.A. and who also suffered from an eating disorder.

“Laura, I just fainted downstairs.” I'm sure I sounded weak.

“Oh my God, Jessica, are you okay?”

“I am now,” but I didn't sound like it.

Then she asked me the question all anorexics hate.

“Jessica, did you eat anything today?”

“I ate an apple this morning.”

I said this as if the apple were a full stack of pancakes with a side of sausage. “Jessica, you have got to see someone about this. You are going to die if you don't.”

Yes, yes, of course, I told her, though as soon as I put the phone down, I made no effort to follow through. But Laura did. That evening, she called Kurt and told him she had spoken to the head of the eating disorders unit at a Los Angeles hospital. His name was Dr. Jason Shaffer, and he was expecting me to call to make an appointment. I didn't want to, but I agreed to see him. I knew my marriage would be in serious danger if I didn't.

I arrived at the hospital the next day. The eating disorders unit was in the psychiatric wing of the hospital, which already freaked me out. Worse, Dr. Shaffer's office was adjacent to the in-patient unit for anorexia. As I got off the elevator, I saw a bunch of teenage girls talking in quiet, exhausted voices. All had rail-thin frames, sunken checks,
and sagging clothes. Their hands had turned to claws, and their heads seemed disproportionate to the rest of their sunken, starved bodies. Kurt and I came to call them “the big headed girls,” and “big headed” became our euphemism for anorexia.

I walked down the hall to Dr. Shaffer's office. The girls straggled back through the swinging doors and into the in-patient unit.
Well, at least I'm not one of them!
I thought defiantly. The office was locked, so I sat outside on a bench waiting for the doctor to arrive. I watched the swing doors of the unit to see if I could catch sight of any more anorexia patients. I was fascinated by these girls and their POW physiques. In some ludicrous way, I admired them. They were even better at anorexia than I was.

Then a small man with dark hair appeared and began opening the door. I got up and introduced myself. Dr. Shaffer and I shook hands and walked inside. The office had a dark brown sofa, matching brown chairs, and a desk. On a side table, tissues had been set out for patients. Around the room were photos of Dr. Shaffer's adolescent daughters who, in my expert opinion, did not look like they had eating disorders. Books on anorexia and bulimia filled the shelves.

Dr. Shaffer and I went through the preliminaries—age, medical history, and, of course, weight. I stood 5-foot-5 and weighed 90.4 pounds. I pretended I didn't know it; in fact, I knew to the ounce. It was 10:00
A.M
., and I already had weighed myself three times that day. Dr. Shaffer took me into the unit, and my heart pounded as I stood on the scale, trying to see what it said. But Dr Shaffer knew better. He had me stand on the scale backwards.