Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (12 page)

And no, it doesn't work. But it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Anorexia was my Big Idea, my bid for independence, identity, free-15Frederick and Grow, “A Mediational Model of Autonomy, Self-Esteem, and Eating
Disordered Behaviors and Attitudes,” Psychology of Women Quarterly, v. 20 (1996): 218-19.16Casky, 180.

dom, savior,
etc.
etc.
It's astonishing how many eggs you can put in one basket, how much symbolic and emotional interest you can vest in one little disease. Anorexia—not just a “diet,” not just losing a little weight, but a full-blown, all-out big bang die-of-starvation Problem—looked like the path to my salvation. This is relatively common in bulimics who jump the fence. Bulimia disgusted me, and I was disgusted enough with myself as it was. When I was thirteen, I began inching my way toward anorexia.

You don't just
get
it, the way you just
get
a cold; you take it into your head, consider it as an idea first, play with the behaviors awhile, see if they take root. Most people develop anorexia more abruptly than I do, but a lot of people travel seamlessly between bulimia and anorexia, torn between two lovers. This is what I did. I wanted to be an anoretic, but I was already seriously addicted to bulimia and couldn't just up and leave it. I felt like I was going out of my mind.

My head was never quiet. Quiet is an in-between point, implying a balance between noise and silence, between the strange blackouts I began to have—pure silence, not sleeplike but deathlike—and the hellish shrieking jumble of my own thoughts and the voices of the world.

And the sharp hiss of one voice that started out softly, as though below layers of moss, or flesh, and gradually became so loud it drowned out everything else:
Thinner
, it said.
You've got to get thinner
.

But you know, even then, that word was wrong. It is more than Thinness, per se, that you crave. It is the implication of Thin. The tacit threat of Thin. The Houdini-esque-ness of Thin, walking on hot coals without a flinch, sleeping on a bed of nails. You wish to carry Thinness on your arm, with her cool smile. You wish for that invisible, vibrating wire that hums between lovers, implying a private touch. You wish for such a wire, humming between you and Thinness, at a party, on the street, humming softly between you and death.

In the lag time between now and thinner, I went looking for some thing else to fill the void. In the summer of 1987, I lost my loose grasp on a sort of self-respect, and with it fell the last of my caution.

I stopped caring about much of anything at all, save for self-destruction. That interested me plenty.

In eighth grade, I grew tired of vacillating between dual personae—good student/troublemaker, nice girl/mean bitch—and I threw in the towel. I dove into sluthood with vigor. I dyed my hair a darker black, bought new lipstick, pleaded no contest to the rumors at school. My eighth-grade class picture shows me glassy-eyed, glossy-lipped, black hair curly and falling sexily over one eye. I was thirteen. Over the summer, my boyfriend and I had broken up over the fact that I'd been messing around with (fucking, though no one knew that) a true jackass while I was away at camp. My new persona forced up my chin in the halls when my ex-boyfriend's friends called me a whore. I swished by. I got stuck in a revolving door of crushes and fucks. The crushes my friends knew about. They were junior high crushes, the cute new kid with cool glasses and a funky name.

The fucks I didn't mention. They were extracurricular. They were skanky morons from the city or from neighboring suburbs who wore duck-tailed hair and obscene pubic mustaches. I met them in malls or movie theaters. They skulk over to the suburbs looking for jailbait.

The conversation always goes like this: Hey/Hey. Routine flirtation occurs and you stand there batting your eyes thinking how butt-ugly they are. Phone numbers are exchanged. Meetings are arranged.

They say, Hi, you look nice. Then they stick their tongue down your throat and the rest is history.

Choices, choices. So many means of self-destruction, so little time.

I branched out. I expanded my horizons. Why be just bulimic when you can be fucked up every day in school without anyone ever noticing? Why not carry vodka in a mineral water bottle into choir and drink it between songs? Why not, since everyone seems to think you're a slut anyway, just prove them right? Why not flirt and fuck around with strangers? Why not sleep with strangers who deal drugs, or who have a friend of a friend who deals drugs, and ask, pouting sexily (you've been practicing “sexy” in the mirror), if you can have some? Why not whine, Fair's fair—? Brighten up happily when you get a Baggie full of pills or powder, pocket it, flounce out of the car, say, sweetly, “Thanks.” Walk the rest of the way home, running your hand over your rumpled hair, thinking, I need a shower.

I did not stop bingeing and purging. I kept right on doing it, usually

twice a day. I simply entertained myself with the delusion that bulimia was not as interesting as some other things. It came to seem tangential, a part of the day as basic and predictable as breathing. I had better things to do than waste my time with such petty distractions as food. The year is a blur to me. I can only recall, with utmost clarity, the bathrooms at school (downstairs, upstairs, locker room), the bathrooms at home, the bathrooms at church. The solitary drinking of whatever booze I could sneak, the drugs. The feeling of the back of my head bumping against the handle of a backseat door, the sound of the breath of the body above me. My report cards show a steady string of D's. I was kicked out of the Gifted and Talented program at school and called, with sad sighs and deep sympathy for my parents, an Underachiever. There were terribly concerned parent-teacher conferences. I stared upward, counting the little dots in the panels on the ceiling while everyone talked about how I was not living up to my Potential. Notes were sent home saying: Talks too much. Work lacks effort. Disruptive behavior. Work incomplete.

My favorite one, a midterm notice with a big obscene-looking F on it, says: “Marya…just seems to dissociate herself.…Her work quality has gone. down. She gives the impression of being ‘indifferent’ to the situation.”

I was indifferent. I remember zoning off during classes, staring out the window, writing stories in my head, fixing my gaze on the particular shape of a particular tree's branch outside. Sound stopped.

I stared. Class ended. I wandered out, down to lunch, ate a little minipizza and an ice cream bar, stopped in the bathroom to puke, went to the next class. Sometimes I wandered out of school, down the road, alone. Just floated off. Came back for musical rehearsals or newspaper after school. Finished that, stopped at the community center next door, got a candy bar, chips, Mr. Pibb. Ate in the bathroom stall of the empty building, then barfed.

While I danced and sang with a big happy smile in school musicals and wrote ridiculous smart-assed editorials for the school newspaper, while I told my parents, “I'm going to the mall with friends,” my shadow slipped away, shut the bedroom door, opened the bedside drawer, reached a hand behind it, untaped the small plastic bag of cocaine, stuck a long pinkie nail up the nose, and breathed in hard: infinitesimal slivers of glass flying into the gray matter of my brain.

At least 30% and perhaps as many as 50% of patients with bulimia nervosa also have a history of current or prior substance abuse.…Substance abuse often is not restricted to street drugs…Valium, Librium, Dalmane, Xanax, and Halcion can also be abused by these patients, because [of] their propensity toward insomnia.17

Shivering, I lay in the dark in a field of scratch grass and nettles, watching the stars spin like pinwheels, biting the left side of my lower lip so as not to scream. I have always disliked needles. My skirt hiked up, the dry dirt? and weeds were itching my thighs, the ragged strip of tire around my right arm pinched the skin. I leaned back, tense, into the awkward cradle of elbows and knees of some boy, who crooned to me. I remember thinking he would make a good nurse. I laughed a jerky laugh and he said Shhh. His thumb ran up and down the inside crook of my arm. In the blue light, the joint looked off somehow, looked broken, sadly removed from my body, and I began to cry for the loss of my arm. He, his thumb thudding softly over the bump of the vein, said, Shhh. The needle bit my arm. I felt the sharp sting of liquid in the vein, imagined I could feel it tracking its way to my brain, a maze like they have on kiddie paper place mats in midwestern restaurants. I got up, swayed off, sat down by a swamp. He came and sat beside me. I watched the murky reflection of our faces in the slag water, pale moonish faces. He said: Amazing, isn't it? I said: Amazing.

He was anyboy. Their hands are what I remember. Or not so much their hands, but my body under their hands. The way I slid my body under their hands, as one might slide a note under the door. Wanting their hands, the clutching hands of boys who do not know the weight of their bodies, or the weight of their words, so they drop these things carelessly, and bruise, wanting only to touch.

I wanted them to bruise. I wanted to know I was there. I wanted to

17Zerbe, 224, 265.

touch and be touched, if only for the intense explosion of nerve endings that said
I'm here he's here we're here
. And I wanted to feel used. Or at least feel useful. And, the eternal masochist, I wanted to go home afterward, look at my thighs, my ass, eyes narrowed at myself, mouthing names at myself in the mirror.

Sex, like bingeing, is an attempt to fill a void…bulimic patients tend to have more past and current sexual involvements [than anoretics]…tend to be more sexually active than individuals who do not have eating disorders…not looking so much for a compatible and complementary partner as she is attempting to experience herself as more whole and alive.…alleviates terrifying anxiety and brings the other person close…to such a degree that the patient loses sight of any boundaries between herself and her partner…terrifying experience…temporary loss of identity…body begins…ends…fragmentation.…18

I spent my nights up late: towel pressed against the crack below the door to block the thin knife of light, one light on the bedside table. I lay on my side on the green carpet of my bedroom floor, in front of the mirror, watching my legs move up and down, and up and down, in endless calisthenics, a precise number of each. Even if the muscles, weakened, began to tremble, I kept lifting, thinking
lazy bitch
. Left side first, then right side, then standing, then on my back, then on my belly. I watched each inch of my flesh as it flexed and relaxed, got lost in the repetition, got off on the image, pictured myself smaller, and smaller, and smaller, until I was no more than a slip of a thing. I pulled my thighs apart to see how they'd look when I got skinny, pinched hard at the excess, tried to smother the wellspring of terror that rose in my chest when I thought:
I'm fat
. If the terror would not go down, I'd promise myself: no food tomorrow.

None. That let me breathe a little easier. The punishment seemed just, seemed as if it might make things better, more organized, the calming twist of hunger in the chest might remind me
18Ibid., 183.

that things were all right. I'd lie down on the bed, open my bedside table drawer.

Inside the drawer, pills for night and powders for day, my little bag of tricks, my expansion of mind, my great experiment, my Mr.

Hyde. The glass-eyed grin that spread across my face each morning, isn't life exciting, what shall we play today, isn't everything just so traumatic, so dramatic, just so high and shrill, the sound of this blurred whir of the cogs and wheels inside my head.

My friends looked at me, perhaps wondered once or twice about the manic extremes of my voice, my mood, my laughter and screams, barely a breath apart. I was vivacious, rebellious, obnoxious, often sick, sometimes cruel, and sometimes falling apart on the locker room floor, usually seething at something, running away from my house in the night. Slipping out the back door, over the frozen white still of the lake behind my parents' house, over the white-lit-blue calm of snow-washed lawns, through the crunching lamplit streets, shivering. Standing sometimes on the icy walkway over the freeway, gloveless hands gripping the chain-link fence, watching the cars drive by.

My parents wondered, later, where I got the drugs. They wondered who, and how. They wanted to know when. They sat on the therapist's couch, staring at me, bewildered, disbelieving, wanting to know how the rose-cheeked, snub-nosed little girl they remembered could play this fantastic trick under their roof. My actor parents in my theater of a house sat looking out separate windows, wanting, absurdly, to know where I learned to lie so well. They decided they didn't believe me. Fair enough.

I learned about sex the way you learn about reporting: you just do it. No one ever explained it to me. Sex ed class was actually menstruation class. No one ever mentioned birth control in my presence. The shrinks say, by the way, that there is a strong connection between early interaction with the opposite sex and concerns about weight. In my experience, there was a strong connection between sex, a temporary adrenaline rush, and a flooding sense of being fat and needing to throw up. Despite my level of not only sexual behavior but also sexual fascination, I knew precious little about its technicalities. When I was nine, and indisputably a virgin, I stood in front of the mirror sticking my little belly out, wondering in panic if I might have gotten pregnant from playing doctor with a little boy when I was five, and if I was still pregnant, how would I explain it to my parents? What would they say?

Five years later, at fourteen, I stood in front of the mirror and realized I
was
pregnant.

How would I explain it to my parents? What would they say?

I asked my friends what they would do if I got pregnant. My friends were used to my weird, morbid, hypothetical questions. I asked them with some regularity what they would do if I died. No, seriously, I said. What would you do? I casually fished for opinions on abortion: a unanimous no, ringing with the righteous certainty of Catholic girls who've never had sex. Abortion is Wrong, we all agreed. I asked my mother what she would tell me to do if I was pregnant. She said, clearly uncomfortable with such a topic, that she would want me to get an abortion.