Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (10 page)

11Hilde Bruch (1978), viii—ix.

In sixth grade, I began to “take days off” from eating, to “cleanse my system.” I tossed my lunch in the lunchroom trash can, keeping only the carrot sticks or the apple. When I think about it now, I can see how I began to withdraw into myself, away from the laughter and noise of my friends, focusing instead on the sensations of hunger, the lovely spinning feeling in my head, the way I would veer in and out of conversations. While my mouth jabbered, my eyes wandered off into space as my thoughts returned to the ache in the pit of my stomach, the heart-pounding feeling of absolute power.

Eventually I'd break down and eat. And eat and eat and eat. I'd stop off at the neighborhood market on my way home from school to buy jars of hot fudge, caramel, marshmallow cream, eating each jar with a spoon. The binge provided a perfectly reasonable excuse to stop eating again. Or I'd walk home with two neighborhood friends and go to Sarah's house, to sit in her cozy kitchen. There, we'd have a small communion of hysterical laughter, followed by sudden silence and food. As we talked over homework, or lay sprawled on the white couch in front of the television, we'd eat: little white buttered buns, ice cream with chocolate syrup, potato chips, Double Stuf Oreos, microwaved frozen hamburger patties, Fruit Roll-Ups, Flintstones vitamins. Eventually, the two of them would stop eating. I wouldn't. Just before dinnertime we'd part ways. I'd go home, throw up, eat dinner with my parents, fight with one or the other, do homework, snack, bathe (throw up), and off to bed.

I lay sleepless. Tossing. Head pounding. Fingers swollen, throat puffed up like a bullfrog. The light flipped off, the dark and the racing thoughts flooded in. The fears. The prayers. I After purging, the bulimic individual will sometimes retain fluid…causing edema of the hands and legs.…Electrolyte disturbances cause a constellation of symptoms that patients must guard against, including generalized weakness, confusion, memory and thinking impairment, and emotional lability.12

12Zerbe, 26l.

I was friends with some amazing girls, most of them a little quirky, all of them strikingly intelligent and imaginative. And sad. There was a clique of girls that grew over the years, fumbled our way through a doll-house-size world, told secrets and had sleep-overs and maybe once or twice touched. Girls who laid out select pieces of the family's dirty laundry in careful, hushed voices. The families of our group had secrets that none of us ever really knew for certain: a mad mother, an incestual father, money that caused more pain than joy, a little virulent Catholicism, a dash of this and that. My own family was a mystery to them, as theirs were to me. They knew I fought with my father and spoke little of my mother. They knew that I hated my body. They knew, about five years into it, that I had an eating disorder. But what's a girl to do? We turned our heads and wished there were something we could say, but there never was.

We lay close together on beds and spoke of the usual topics of teenage angst: boys, school, future, sex, bodies, life. They helped me maintain relative sanity for a very long time.

Childhood, such as it was, ended, and with it, the immediate experience of fear. Fear, looking back with perfect hindsight, was sublimated, swallowed, puked, starved away. The summer between grade school and junior high, I metamorphosed into a young woman and became Impossible. I don't remember what happened that summer. But my first-day-of-school photo from sixth grade shows me standing in a knee-length blue skirt and a plaid shirt, bobby socks and tennis shoes, ponytail, ribbon, smiling for the infernal camera. One year later, I am leaning against the house, my hair down, wearing a long black skirt and a tank top, unsmiling, face thinner, lipstick, morning light. I am twelve years old. I look about twenty-two.

During my transition from grade school to junior high, I remember seeping into the mirror. My mother told me I looked like a tramp, my father vacillated between anger and worry and silence. My face was fading from that of a child into something narrower, more defined. My bones were twisting into something almost pretty, my body losing the snub awkwardness of breasts on a childish frame as I stretched taller. I stood for hours in front of the mirror, putting my hair up and letting it fall, trying on dress after dress. Watching the infinitesimal motion of skin

tighten on a leaner frame, listening to the strange hiss of a silk blouse on the bare skin of a back. I saw all this and said it was good.

My parents did not think it was good. In retrospect, this is understandable—when your child is growing up way too fast, you get scared—but at the time, I did not understand. All my life, my parents had acted as if childhood should be a state of constantly acting older.

When I finally and irrevocably began to, in fact, be older, their response was one that I read as disgust. They seemed to avoid looking at me. I feinted and jostled for a spot in their line of vision, I argued with them, LOOK! I said, LOOK, I'm growing up, why is that so awful? Where have you gone? Why won't anybody look at me? Just as I had always feared my body would defect (and it had), my fear that my parents would one day disappear without warning came true.

One day I went into the bathroom, pulled open my mother's makeup drawer, pulled my hair back, and did a strange revival of what I had done as a very small child: I painted myself. Black eyeliner applied Cleopatra-style, green eye shadow, brilliantly red lipstick, thick mascara. I stood back and surveyed my work in the mirror. I licked my lips. On my way out the door to school, my father looked at me and said, Are you wearing makeup? Yes, I said. Take it off, he ordered. I walked out the door and sashayed away while he stood on the front step in his pajamas, hollering after me.

They sniffed me as I came in the door. Is that perfume? What are you wearing? My mother would repeat her own grandmother's phrase: You may be dressed, but your butt don't know it. I stood in my bedroom, piles of clothes on the floor, on the bed, on the chair, trying on this and that, every possible combination of clothes, anything to make me look older, anything to speed up this interminable lag time between here and there.

Looking back, I can understand my parents' fear. They will tell me later that they were worried I was on drugs, that they weren't sure where the normal mood swings and rebellions of adolescence ended and real disturbance began. They kept stretching the boundaries of normal, my mother tells me, wanting to believe that I was really all right. In truth, I was too young to look as I looked and talk as I did. When I think about this now, I feel torn between an adult's prissy disapproval of a child in heels and teased hair (slut), and my own memory of that time. I

did not look or feel like a child. Something else was going on, some poison had crept into my blood. In my mind, things go dark: The colors of this time are deep and pervasive, blood reds and shadows, dark rooms, dark halls, a very dark desire.

I stood in the kitchen after school, scarfing down food without tasting it, staring at the television without seeing it. I would go through the perfunctory motions: washing my dishes, going into the bathroom, puking. In the bedroom, I'd stare at the mirror. When I entered junior high, at twelve, I'd been throwing up almost daily for three years. In seventh grade, it increased to two or three times a day. I began to do it whenever I got the chance.

Until I was twelve, I was probably still afraid of bulimia, though my bulimia became increasingly serious, to the point where I was bingeing and purging every day after school in the morbid silence of my parents' home. My mind pulls away from the early years, doesn't want to watch. My brain says: This is still the warm-up. Still prep school. Things were okay. I had the usual crushes, school yard catfights and melodramatic crises. I had plenty of friends, tight friends whom I loved very much and eventually lost. Nothing was so bad, I kept telling myself. Nothing that losing weight couldn't cure.

But I became less afraid, and there's the rub. One really ought to be afraid of self-torture. But it tempted me. It begged. The dark place that my mind was fast becoming blends, in my memory, with the dark womb of church: the chant, the fugue of prayer, the strange erotic energy that carving a very small cross into my thigh with a nail had brought.

In the garish glaring picture book sun of that small town, I was carefully constructing my own private hell.

Here is where the film begins to heat and melt, white absent spaces on the screen. Chronology ends—time and language twist upon themselves and become something else. Tenses, past, present, and future, lose their meaning. Here my life became a living theater of the absurd: the mistaken identities, the terrible coincidences, the exaggerated gestures, inane arguments, two plots circling each other, missing contact by the theatrical split second. There was self by day and self by night. There was life, within the four flowered walls of my childhood bedroom, and life in the echoing, spotless, white hallways of my parents' home, in school, at church. Backstage and onstage. Behind the velveteen curtains of the wings, I sat facing my mirror, took the cold white cream and tissues, first wiping away the dark black of the eyes, then the rose blush and white powder of cheeks, then the blood red of the lips. I sat staring, in silence, at the blank white nothing that remained. The oval absence, framed by wild black hair.

Something changed the year I entered junior high. For one thing, bulimia took over my life. It stopped being a moonlighting gig, something I just happened to feel like doing when things in my head were particularly crazy, or when I was angry or lonely or sad or flat.

It began to have a force and took on a life of its own. From this point on, there are no memories that are not related to food or my body or barfing. It became a centripetal force that sucked me in, something I knew and needed. Badly. All the time. I did not put a bite of food in my mouth without considering if, when, and where I would throw up. I did not ever look in the mirror without thinking,
Fat
.

Consider, for instance, junior high parties. They started at seven and ended at ten. If you were lucky, they ended a little bit later. You wore a dress that made you look thin. You tried on every single piece of clothing you or your mother owned in search of the thing that would make you look thin. Fifteen-odd kids gather awkwardly in the basement of someone's gorgeous, enormous house. You all start eating. This is relatively normal, this is what people do at parties. They eat the Doritos and pretzels and Ruffles and nobody eats the veggies. You nibble on cookies and Hershey's kisses that somebody's mother has put in a cut-crystal bowl. Somebody's mother is hovering in the doorway, nervously glancing at the mixture of boys and girls. A pizza is ordered. Someone puts a movie in the VCR.

However. If you are bulimic, when the lights go out and cute kiddie couples pair off, slurpily kissing and fumbling on the couches, you will walk up the plush-carpeted stairs, heart pounding, face flushed with fear that the food is going to be digested before you can get it out. You will ask the sweet perfectly-made-up hovering mother where the bathroom is. She will point it out to you, smiling sweetly. You will go into the bathroom, take note of the brass fixtures on the sink, the Laura Ashley print wallpaper, the fresh flowers in a Waterford vase, the wicker magazine rack holding
Condé Nast
Traveler
and
Forbes
. You will take a mental inventory of all of these things and scrutinize your face in the mirror.

You will beg God to keep your face normal after you puke as you turn on the water full force to drown out the retching and splashing, hoping to hell that the walls are thick so nobody hears. You will lift the toilet seat, carefully slide your fingers inside your mouth and down your throat, and puke until you see orange. The Doritos. You ate them first because you, like most bulimics, have developed a system of “markers,” eating brightly colored food first so you can tell when it's all out, and it all comes out, in reverse order: the pizza, cookies, Ruffles, pretzels, Doritos, all swimming in dark swirls of Coke.

You straighten, flush. You turn the water down, put your hands under it, scrub with the Softsoap in a special matching Softsoap cover. You scrub hard, sniffing your hands and forearms. You look at your face. Thank you, God. No puffiness, eyes a little watery, but not red or bulging. You rinse your mouth with water, then look under the sink for mouthwash, find it, slosh it around. Redo your lipstick. Smile at the mirror, eyes bright and wide. Open the door, go downstairs.

Your friends turn and say, laughing, “Why was the water on?”

In Minnesota houses, water pipes run downward through the center of the house and end in the basement. Three floors away, you can hear water running. You laugh, and say, “I'm paranoid about people hearing me pee.” Everyone laughs. Your boyfriend, teasing, says,

“We heard anyway.”

You freeze, still smiling.

“No, I'm kidding,” he says. You laugh nervously, take your place beside him, sit on your hands to hide the shaking, the nicks on the knuckles of the first two fingers of your right hand.

Self-induced vomiting…causes abrasions on the back of the dominant hand or knuckles. Calluses form, creating what in medical parlance is called “Russell's sign.”13

My boyfriend was sweet. We had a little puppy love. My parents and his parents panicked. You are too young for all this, they said.

“All this” amounted to teddy bears at Valentine's Day, Saturday afternoons spent

13Ibid., 263.

sitting on the couch holding hands, watching movies while my father found countless excuses to traipse through the room, peering at us suspiciously. Kissing when he left, whispering dramatic things in long late-night phone calls, passing love notes in the halls. All was very chaste. I began to feel like I was wearing a sign on my forehead that said FUCKED UP in big neon letters. There was no visible reason for his parents to distrust me, nor for my parents to distrust my involvement with him. I had the feeling they knew something was wrong with me, some reason why I was problematic, but they couldn't pinpoint it.