Hungry (36 page)

Years ago, when everything was splendid, Ned and I read a lot of John Cheever stories. Many of them delighted in the dark side of suburbia, where the residents lied, drank, slept around, and realized that no one really loved them and that they’d wasted their lives. We were so unlike these characters. We were blessed, along the lines of the Crutchmans of Shady Hill. As Cheever begins their story, “The Worm in the Apple”:

Exactly. When we were the Crutchmans of Palo Alto, I could think, “Life is sweet. We’re very, very lucky, and temperate as well. We don’t squander the happiness that comes our way. We work hard, contribute to the community, maintain good values. And we’re raising kind, ethical children (a girl and a boy, like the Crutchmans). People tell us they are jealous of our perfect family.”

In Cheever’s Shady Hill, jealousy of the perfect Crutchman family takes flight like this:

Uh-oh. Maybe
that
was the clue we missed. Our “midcentury modern” house has floor-to-ceiling glass. Also a flat roof—perhaps another architectural sign of moral decay. Rain puddles up there and pours off in sheets.

“The Worm in the Apple” continues in this vein, mining every possibility for the Crutchmans’ comeuppance. Surely it will happen, if not when their son fails his junior year of high school and has to repeat, then because their daughter has such big feet. Resentment abhors a vacuum.

The Himmels’ comeuppance was easier to find, though not by us. Suddenly, it seemed, we were expelled from the garden of happy families. Lisa’s last year of high school, we thought, was the low point. Discovery of anorexia. Paradise lost. But her first year of college—bulimia and suicidal fear—was far worse. Then we had three pretty good years until Lisa’s most devastating crash, involving people and places we never thought we’d see. The police, a halfway house, a psych ward, are you kidding? Now that our daughter’s illness has been diagnosed and re-diagnosed, tamped down only to flare up in different ways, we cultivate Cheever-worthy jealousy of apparently healthy families. And now that we knew how much luck is involved, we can’t help thinking, “Why them and not us?”

It gets uglier. It’s not just wanting others to suffer. They have to suffer in the exact same way. I remember feeling this way as a child, certain that every other household lived the
Leave It to Beaver
life, not that mine was terrible, but I was sure my particular anguish was unique in the world and no one would ever understand. At least once, in elementary school, I wished physical harm to my friends. I had chipped a bone on the ball of my foot and was put on crutches. This was mortifying because it wasn’t the normal sprained ankle or broken arm, and it sprang from no discernible event. My foot just started hurting and I made the mistake of mentioning it. Only time and lack of pressure would fix the foot. Having no plaster cast and no good accident story, I felt like an impostor of the disabled. Even the word
crutch
(like the name Crutchman) tortured me. Such an unbecoming word. A friend asked what she could do to help, and all I could think was, “If you are really my friend, go chip a bone in your foot so I won’t be the only fool on these stupid crutches!” In the end, my foot stopped hurting as magically as it had started.

Another ugly Crutchman episode: I met Jim in the dorm freshman year. He was the first guy—ever—I felt like myself with, riding bikes at midnight, getting stoned, gossiping about our dorm mates. I would have liked to call him my boyfriend, but it never happened. After freshman year we had dinner a few times, occasionally saw each other around campus, then totally lost touch. Nearly thirty years later, Jim emailed me at work. I had taken Ned’s last name, mainly because my family name, Highiet, was so hard to spell, but my paper trail made me “an easy Google,” Jim said. We started updating each other, in an alumni notes sort of way. My headline was Lisa’s illness, but otherwise life was good. I’d gone to graduate school but dropped out after one quarter. He remembered my parents, who were both alive at the time. His parents had died. However, he’d gotten a couple of graduate degrees, married a woman who was prominent in her field, retired to write screenplays, and loved to cook and go out to eat. Oh, and he had four outstanding kids, with closets full of scholarships and sports medals. Could my envy get any greener?

Still, he was going to be in the area, so we planned to meet for lunch. I learned that one of his children had been gravely ill, and that Jim had come out as gay. His wife, he said, “is patient with me.” I didn’t ask what that meant, but it sounded complicated. The little Cambodian restaurant near my office was especially noisy that day, and I didn’t want to shout. I already had a headache. His screenplays weren’t getting noticed, which was obviously bothering him. Maybe my agent could help? We made plans to meet again, but neither of us followed through.

I wished for worms in his apple and just got a big shameful stain on mine. What good did it do me to find that his life was not the polished work I had pictured? No good at all. I just felt remorse about my own bad character.

Still, I continued to look for suffering in apparently lucky families. What’s the payoff? Maybe it’s like watching
Jerry Springer
and thinking, “At least we don’t have
that
problem,” or “Thank God it’s them and not me.” It’s ugly. But it is one reason—not an admirable reason, but one nonetheless—that people attend support groups. Of course, the good and healthy reasons are to find that others have been through similar trials and to share sympathy and resources. Whatever got me there, thank heaven I went.

At the first group I attended, parents had been dealing with their children’s serious mental illnesses for ten and twenty years, while I had put in only two. How do they do it? A single mother didn’t know for sure if her son was alive. He didn’t answer his phone and when she went to his apartment, in a sketchy subsidized building for people on State Disability Insurance, nobody appeared to be there, and the neighbors hadn’t seen him. A month later, she still didn’t know. How do people live like that? Another couple returned to the group to report that they could sleep again, after many years, because their son agreed to return to treatment. Ah, that’s how they do it. They stand around, as Annie Proulx put it, and eventually they get to sit down. Oddly, though, I remembered this phrase as being about an admirable character’s stick-to-itiveness, and when I reread “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World,” it turned out I was very wrong. Old Red, the grandfather who said it, was sick and nasty, and he outlasted everyone through sheer meanness. Does that mean you have to be an asshole to survive? I didn’t have to find out right then. Lisa got stable and I stopped attending groups.

Three months later, Lisa ran away. I’m sorry I ever thought, “How do people live like this?”

Back at the family support group, the woman still hadn’t seen her son, but she knew he was alive. He sometimes responded to her by email. A widow with two mentally ill children in their thirties told us about a momentous upcoming court date, about a conservatorship to care for her daughter, and while she was hoping for a good outcome, she rated the chance as fifty-fifty or less, and sighed. “Then I’ll have to find another path,” she said, without losing the sweet sparkle in her eyes. We learned that there is an actual personality disorder, listed in the
Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, that causes patients to obsessively file suits and contentiously engage the legal system. I admire the way this woman has learned to shove anger away and save her strength for battle.

Also attending that night was a slightly bent man who must have been in his eighties. At first I thought he must have wandered into the wrong meeting, or he’d come on behalf of a grandchild. But no. He had a severely disabled son, fifty-five years old, who’d been diagnosed and re-diagnosed with mental illnesses including schizophrenia and Asperger’s since kindergarten. The son lived with him, had never been able to work, and likely never will. The man’s wife died three years ago. In her last decade she had Alzheimer’s disease, so he was caring for both. Even among parents who’ve shouldered a lot of heartache, we wondered, “How does he go on?” Somebody asked him.

“You love them,” he said. “You may be the only one who does.”

That’s it, exactly. The answer I’ve been seeking, even though our family situation is mild and blessed by comparison. Love is the hunger that matters, why we go on. All the parents there would give anything to heal their children. We have to be reminded that their impossibly complex illnesses aren’t who they are, that they don’t choose to suffer, that sometimes letting go is all we can do. But love survives. I wanted to cry, for this man’s heroism and my flaws, and the great, lucky truth that I am not the only one who loves Lisa. We have a lot of hope. Lisa is young, she has mourned a wonderful relationship and found another, she recovered from a breakdown and wrote this book with me. We are talking and laughing and sometimes eating together again. Hungry? Not so much. But I can go home and hug her.

 

lisa:
There is no happily ever after to my story. Like everyone with eating disorders, I look at food and feel conflicted. Sometimes I feel genuine hunger. I have, however, come to a point where I know I can do something else with my life, and I don’t want to waste all of my energy retreating to the bathroom to punish myself for doing something as necessary and everyday as eating.

We all need food to live, to survive and thrive and grow. Our bodies are vehicles that require fuel to operate efficiently. Running on empty, everything shuts down.

I will always think about it, my relationship to food, and probably won’t ever have the most normal eating habits, but I will be able to have a stable, consistent, and healthful life.

There are times when I just want to eat a whole mess of food and throw it all up. I feel a surge of anxiety. My whole body begins to feel the familiar craving and I need my fix. In the past I would have dived headfirst into an uncontrolled binge. Now I have learned to live with the urge and avoid it, although certain circumstances make this easier than others. For eight years my life revolved around the bingeing and purging and pizza and ice cream and late-night fast-food stops, candy, donuts, fried food, luxury dinner indulgences, dieting for weeks, exercising until my ankles bled, and taking diet pills and laxatives. I don’t remember my college years and the two years thereafter as most of my peers do. Sure, I went to parties and celebrated my twenty-first birthday in a typical drunken escapade. I had roommates and moved many times and smoked pot in the dorms and then in the bathroom at work. I passed out in bars and dated many guys, then fell in love with one and gave him my heart. I had difficult schoolwork and lectures I fell asleep during, and lengthy papers to write that I usually saved until the last minute. I got A’s and B’s and C’s but always tried hard. Teachers liked me and when I was motivated, and not sick or in the bathroom, I loved to participate.

And yet, I missed out on so much. All around me classmates grouped in cliques and tight circles that did everything together and called each other and made fabulous photo albums on Facebook. I longingly gawked, wanting so badly to have my own. I did not have super-close constant friends, but instead I floated from group to group never knowing who exactly to include in my posse. At dinner parties I retreated to the bathroom while everyone else talked and ate and laughed and drank wine. I’d come back and try to join in, start having fun, and then go purge again. I did have some great times, but mostly bad memories.

What I remember about college is trying to ignore the horrible stomach pains—from overconsumption of coffee or sugar-free candies or from hunger—as I sat in class. I woke up ridiculously early to work out before going to my job or school, beating myself up mentally and physically to go further and do better. I got pneumonia and bronchitis, and I saw too much of several hospitals. I remember wanting to die.

I know some days will be easier than others, and I will forget about my insecurity around food and my body. Other times I will probably have to work hard to keep myself from diving into a horrible binge. I’ll need to figure out how to allow myself to eat something I might deem risky. I have learned to take hormones into consideration, that sometimes I want to eat all day and I can’t get rid of the hunger—and it is genuine hunger.