Hungry (26 page)

Lisa and Scott fit immediately. He moved her stuff twice and then they moved into a studio apartment together, a feat that had to prove they were in love. He brought us lots more fresh fish, news of the seafood industry, and a heroic level of caring. How Lisa was just suddenly ready for a relationship, three months after nearly going into treatment for bulimia, we didn’t get. But they were so in tune. She made soup for him when he was sick, introduced him to more exotic fare, and waited up for him when he had a long film project for his major. They moved to a one-bedroom apartment, acquired furniture and kitchenware, and sweet memories. Until it all fell apart again.

 

lisa:
During my senior year, I began to feel the familiar intense loneliness return. I couldn’t really put a reason behind the loneliness, and this time I wasn’t actually alone. I had Scott, I had friends, I had a job. I baked and gave the cookies away. Trying to ignore the scent of fresh-baked morsels quickly encouraged the rebellious bulimic voice: “Eat a cookie,
do it
! You know you want it!” I refrained for what felt like forever but was most likely five minutes—until it was almost as if a sumo wrestler shoved me from behind, forcing a cookie down my throat. One bite and all sense of control disappeared. I felt so good to be so bad. Cookies broke so many of my anorexic rules: They’re full of fat, white flour, butter, sugar, and chocolate. But that was okay, even if I ate five because that “fear” disappeared with a trip to the bathroom.

I was purging again and with the purging came depression. I was crying daily and suddenly. There was this intense loneliness inside and no matter what I tried to do to escape it just grew worse and I would start to cry. Then I’d tell myself to stop crying, that I am okay, and I’d get it together, but that just made me cry more. I felt sure that no one else was going through what I was, that I couldn’t quit or recover from purging. There was a part of me inside that was always crying and reminding me of the horrible times I have suffered.

I became afraid of reliving my last semester of high school, when hunger kept me from sleeping and even if I did eat a satisfactory amount I was still too exhausted even to watch television. There were always noises in my stomach. Wherever I was, I was waiting to get through it. To do what? I had no idea. Thinking about it now, I understand why people commit suicide. I understand that intense sorrow and excruciating pain inside that no matter how hard you try to escape it, you can’t. It won’t go away, no one else can make it better. I once thought everyone would be better off with me dead, but I think I couldn’t face suicide just as much as I couldn’t face life. So I decided to stay stuck in the middle.

I was suffering every day from my bulimia, depression, loneliness, and intense pain inside, but I didn’t give up.

On Mother’s Day 2007, Lisa was working at a store in Santa Cruz. Ned, Jake, my mother, and I went to see a play in Berkeley that afternoon, and Lisa met us for dinner. Though tired from standing all day and dealing with customers, and the long drive, she was cheerful and brought me a gift. We enjoyed seafood at a cool new restaurant. The second time Lisa went to the restroom, my mom asked, “Is she all right?”

I laughed. “Oh yes, she just has a small bladder! She always has to go a lot.”

Two months later, Lisa had a breakdown.

There were signs, as there had been four years before, but none of them struck Ned or me as emergencies in themselves. That it was her senior year in college, and the previous disaster happened during her senior year in high school, had occurred to us. But she had come so far since then. She emerged on the other side of anorexia. She got a job, was doing well in school, and lived with Scott, her wonderful boyfriend. Nobody wanted to go back to that horror, so how could it happen? Please, let the plague pass over our house this time. Maybe what we were seeing was just bits of backsliding that wouldn’t stick. They would remind her of the worst time in her life, then she would bat them away.

At this point we were pretty familiar with the warning signs. Just about every book and website on eating disorders has a list of warning signs, but none of them was defintive. As with the possible side effects of medications, your experience may vary.

We’ve been reading and writing lists since we became parents, to help organize our thoughts and actions, and to draw comfort. Sometimes the lists and flowcharts telling you what’s an emergency can lead you astray. A friend will never live down having whisked her baby to Urgent Care because of the white spots in his mouth, an alarming sign of thrush, a fungal infection. The spots were drops of breast milk. On the other hand, your child spikes a fever but doesn’t have a stiff neck. Check the list. Okay, phew! Probably not meningitis. We print out lists, like Signs of Choking, and post them by the phone.

The warning signs of eating disorders can be trickier. There are so many possible symptoms, and they often describe feelings that aren’t out of the range of normal, or they are open to wide interpretation. At the very well-respected site
www.somethingfishy.org
, there are thirty-two signs and symptoms of anorexia/bulimia, and eighteen for compulsive overeating/binge eating. Some are helpful, others not. Who doesn’t, for example, occasionally “make self-defeating statements after food consumption”?

Parents might turn to page 21 in the book
Help Your Teenager Beat an Eating Disorder
by James Lock, MD, PhD, and Daniel Le Grange, PhD. There are two very specific lists. First are the heads-up signs, then the signs that mean it’s time to call in an expert.

Warning Signs of the Development of an Eating Disorder

Act-Now Signs and Symptoms

Our observations were limited to visits and phone calls, but in the spring of 2007, just before Lisa was to graduate from college, some of the most common warning signs were adding up.

Lisa started mentioning what she didn’t like about what other people ate. She had done the same thing in high school, in great detail, when she’d gone overboard into the sea of nutritional facts and figures. But since then she had pretty much stayed on the positive, nurturing side of food. She introduced Scott to fresh produce and stir-fries, and they now had a kitchen stocked with quality utensils and cookware. She replaced Ned’s ancient set of barbecue tools and gave me
The Essentials of Healthful Cooking
, to encourage me to cook a little more, now that I worked from home. She scouted out restaurants, selected places for her birthday dinners, and enthusiastically joined us when we went out for restaurant reviews. She called to talk about the great teriyaki chicken dinner she had made, and the one that flopped.

We always criticized food. Constructively, I like to think. It is my job and my nature, as well as Ned’s, to tease out the details of good and bad meals. We encourage people to try new foods, although as a writer I keep in mind that what you eat is like how you pray: your own business. Not to be forced on others. Worship at Burger King or Chez Panisse, depending on your tastes, wallet, and personal needs. It may be that you need a mediocre Thai restaurant to stay open, because you like the owners and there’s nowhere else to eat in your neighborhood. Just don’t make me go there.

Around Christmas of Lisa’s senior year, her tolerance of other people’s tastes and needs started slipping. It was especially evident around food.

“Can you believe
this
?” she called to tell us. “They like casseroles made with cream of mushroom soup!” And after a holiday party she ranted, “There were five giant desserts for six people!

Everyone ate way too much and the leftovers were gross!” No kidding! Had she ever been to a holiday party? Except for that horrible anorexic time in high school, Lisa used to laugh at food quirks, like we did with my father’s fondness for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.

Lisa worked at O’Neill, where the employee discount allowed her to buy lots of clothes. There were mirrors everywhere, feeding a young woman’s insecurity and self-consciousness. As she started losing weight that winter, she went to a consignment shop with clothes that had become too big for her. The rest she brought home, bags of them, for us to take to Goodwill. Sometimes we said, “No, you have to take them yourself,” and “Isn’t this the blouse you got last month?” But mostly, we cringed. I wondered, “Have we ever seen this jacket before, or these shoes? Does Lisa ever wear the same outfit twice?” And when I recognized a sweater, “Phew, she doesn’t have clothing bulimia, if there is such a thing, which I don’t want to know.” Later I learned that overbuying clothes can be a way to fill up the emptiness inside.

During the three years since Lisa had started recovering, we were on alert, oversensitive, and ready to panic, as I assumed my mom had been on Mother’s Day in the seafood restaurant. Just because Lisa went to the restroom a few times didn’t mean she was bulimic. Young women check their appearance constantly. When she did this, we would worry about it until the next time we saw her or talked on the phone, when we could feel out her mood. Most often, through the spring, she’d have a funny story about a customer at O’Neill, or a progress report on her anthropology class, which meant, to us, that she was engaged in the world. Good, if true.

That spring, when Lisa came home, she made no effort to get in touch with old friends. She claimed they weren’t interested.

She did go the YMCA. Rodney Aley, the Y trainer who had noticed Lisa overexercising in high school, had kept in touch with her. He noticed all the anorexics and exercise bulimics at the Y, and intervened when he could. He was especially sensitive because he had worked as an orderly at Stanford Hospital’s ED unit, and he’d been close with a young woman who died. Lisa had a photo of Rodney on her wall. One day in May, Rodney was going to be in Santa Cruz visiting with his daughter. Lisa had told him to call. Now she didn’t answer the phone, or even call him back. When Rodney asked me if Lisa was okay, I made excuses: “She must’ve been at work.”

But when she was home one weekend and went to the Y, Rodney tried to talk to her. Later, he told me he could see the change in her eyes. She listened politely but he could tell she was thinking, “Get this jerk out of my face.” She flashed the same look at me the day we went to the gym together and I said one round on the elliptical trainer was enough.

Earlier that year, Lisa had stopped going to the gym on campus. She said it was crowded and she had to wait too long, so she joined 24-Hour Fitness.

We argued: “The gym on campus is free. You have to pay for 24-Hour Fitness.”

“I’m working thirty hours a week, I can afford it.”

“We don’t want you to work thirty hours a week. It’s too much when you’re in school full-time.”

So far she was doing well enough in school. She said she didn’t like to have free time, and this was a healthy way to fill it. Scott was working in San Francisco and was away a lot, and except for a handful of work friends, Lisa’s social circle was tiny. Maybe joining a gym wasn’t a sign of exercise mania.

Lisa’s menstrual cycle had been erratic since her anorexia in high school. After getting her period back, she went on birth control pills for a while. When she started menstruating again regularly, she got severe cramps and heavy flows, and never resumed a dependable cycle. Then as she started losing weight again, her periods became lighter and less frequent. Alarmed, I encouraged her to eat better and go to the doctor. The latter she did. That spring, she went back on the pill.

Lisa’s phone calls increased. Often she said, “I can’t sleep.” She called at two in the morning. We would put down the phone and she’d call again.

We sympathized, Ned more than I, since he knows what it’s like not to sleep. We tried to think of concrete solutions, like a hot bath and cutting out coffee. We tried to be calm and supportive, understanding that it’s natural to be anxious at this time of life, leaving college and going out into the world. Most everyone goes through something like this, we said. “It must be nerves. Let’s just focus on finishing spring quarter.” We helped with schoolwork where we could, coaching her through assignments, devising a schedule for studying.

A million little things happened, as they always do, until one put Lisa over the edge.

The previous summer, in July 2006, Lisa glowed as the flower girl at her cousin’s wedding. Being older than the usual flower girl made it even more fun, getting a beautiful dress and having her hair done with the bridal party. It was a wonderful weekend in the wine country. Scott came, met the whole family, got the seal of approval. They were so sweet together.