Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (13 page)

Then one night at dinner while I was building small cities out of mashed potatoes and peas, I felt something somehow
snap
. It was a funny sort of snap, not like cracking your knuckles. It was more like the smallish snap of a thread, more of a
snip
. Suddenly I felt very pale and sick to my stomach. I said excuse me. I went to the bathroom, running my hand along the wall. I locked the door, sat down on the toilet, and doubled over. I turned on the bathwater tap with difficulty. I could not get my hands to stop shaking. I saw my face, an ugly gray, in the mirror. I felt a dullish, carving, strange sort of feeling inside. Then it turned sharp and stabbed. I remember thinking, very clearly, Well. That was easy. I remember standing up on the toilet when it was over, lifting my skirt up, and looking at the blood coating the inside of my thighs. And then I remember getting distracted. I turned to one side and scrutinized at my butt.

Fat ass, I thought. Pig.

Things move in fast-forward from here on out. To get drugs I was sleeping with some boyfriend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend when I could.

I woke up in the morning, took uppers that I washed down with lukewarm water on my bedside table, took downers at lunch in the bathroom stalls after throwing up. I opened the refrigerator door after school, the most dreaded part of the day. Drank a little wine, nips from the rarely used bottles in the liquor cabinet, went to sleep or read, ate

dinner, threw up, took downers, slept. In the whirl of things, somewhere along the line, there are these flashes: a boy in the back of a car, hand laid on my belly, saying, Such a pretty belly, such a pretty little body. And the thought through my mind: get rid of the belly.

The damp feel of the concrete wall in the locker room bathroom stalls, the sweaty palm groping upward for something to hang on to, head spinning, lunch and blood spinning away. These flashes, which somehow, even now, knowing they took place, do not line up with who I was, or who I thought I was, or who I seemed to be, or the mundane sunny halls of Southview Junior High, where I was just another teenage girl gone wrong.

My parents thought I was going out of my mind. Off to the psychiatrist I went.

The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and
addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice
.

“
Who are you?” said the Caterpillar
.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice
replied, rather shyly, “I-I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least
I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have
been changed several times since then
.”

“
What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar, sternly
.

“
Explain yourself
.”

“
I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, Sir,” said Alice, “because I'm
not myself, you see
.”

“
I don't see,” said the Caterpillar
.

“
I'm afraid I can't put it any more clearly,” Alice replied, very
politely, “for I can't understand it myself, to begin with; and being
so many different sizes in a day is very confusing
.”

“
It isn't,” said the Caterpillar
.…

“
Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,” said Alice: “all I
know is, it would feel very queer to me
.”

“
You!” said the Caterpillar contemptuously. “Who are you
?”…

As the Caterpillar seemed to be in a very unpleasant state of mind,
she turned away
.

“
Come back!” the Caterpillar called after her. “I've something important to say
!”

This sounded promising, certainly. Alice turned and came back
again
.

“
Keep your temper,” said the Caterpillar
.

“
Is that all?” said Alice
.

The psychiatrist, who hated me because I called him Dokter Freud, or possibly for other reasons, was a very small, gray sort of man who wore fine suits and black shoes spit-polished to a leering gleam.

I was not entirely sure why I was seeing him. He was my mother's psychiatrist, so I guess it was just easier to take me to him than to anyone else. My headaches were still a mystery, as were my occasional trips to the school nurse for blackouts. The problem, I thought, wasn't medical. I wondered if I was being sent to a shrink because of my grades, but I couldn't figure out how he would help with that.

I went, amiably enough, because I got to miss school to go.

On the first visit, he opened the door, swung his arm toward the room, and told me to come in. I stood stiffly, going nowhere. He pointed to a chair. It was very quiet and the circulated air made my nose burn. I sat down in the chair. It was black leather, and I think it had wheels. It faced his desk. There was one plant, I think, by the windows to my right, which looked out on the parking lot of the business complex we were in, the manicured park, the freeway overpass, and America's first shopping mall, Southdale, built in 1958, an important fact we learned repeatedly in grade school.

On the wall facing me there were bookshelves: mostly Freud, or about Freud, or taking a Freudian approach to something. Some Jung, the DSM criteria manuals, abnormal psychology books. One book I recognized with horror,
The Gifted Child
, which my mother was reading and I had stolen, read, and dismissed as completely ridiculous, mostly because I was sure she was reading it because something was wrong with me. A lot of books with titles that were hard to see, so I craned my neck in an effort to read them.

“What are you doing?” he said.

I jumped. He'd been sitting in his chair, watching me. “I'm looking at

the books,” I said. He had big square black 1950s glasses that made him look a bit mean and excessively paternal.

“Why?” he asked.

I was at a loss. “Why not?” I said.

He made a note. He wrote on lined yellow legal-size paper and used a black pen with a wide tip. I craned my neck to see what he was writing. He moved the pad away. There were perhaps eight feet between us, and I needed glasses but hadn't told anyone. His writing was very small, very square, block printing, all caps. I could tell the shape from where I sat but not what he was writing. He wrote, I would later note, on only one side of the paper, flipping each used page upward with a slightly over-dramatic flourish and beginning again at a mad pace. I would remark that he was wasting paper. He would peer at me and make a note.

To my left was a black leather couch. I said, half-joking, “Will I have to lie on the couch?”

He looked at me, furry gray eyebrows arched. “Do you want to?”

he asked.

I was mortified. “No,” I said. “Why would I want to lie on the couch?”

He peered. “I don't know,” he said. “Why
would
you want to lie on the couch?”

“I DON't,” I said, glaring at him. We sat in silence for a few minutes. I looked at the parking lot.

“Do you want to leave?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Do you want to leave?”

“I don't really care,” I said, which was true. We sat. He made notes.

“What are .you writing?” I asked.

“Notes.”

“Thank you,” I said, like a mouthy little rat. “That's very helpful.

Notes on what?”

“Observations.”

“Observations of me?”

He stopped writing and looked at me. “Is it important to you, how people observe you?”

“Not particularly,” I said, which was a bald-faced lie, “but I'm just wondering, since I haven't said anything yet.”

He didn't answer. I picked up a magazine and started thumbing through it.
National Geographic
. Giraffes.

He leaned back in his chair. It creaked. “Mayra,” he said, contemplatively.

“
Marya
.”

“Pardon?”

“Marya. My name is Marya. Not Mayra.
M-A-R-Y-A
.”

“Ah,” he said. “Maria—”

“MARYA. MAR-YA. Two syllables. Not Maria. Not Myra, not Mayra, not Mara. Marya.”

“Does it bother you when people mispronounce your name?”

“YES.”

He made a note. I started sliding downward in my chair.

Things proceeded in this fashion for the first few visits: I came in.

He looked at me. I glowered at him. I looked out the window. He asked what I would later learn in journalism school were very leading questions. (“So, you're afraid of snakes, aren't you?”) I'd counterquestion. Then I began to get bored and, having nothing better to do for an hour, began to tell him, rather abruptly, the truth.

“What do you want to talk about today?” he said.

“Well, I think I have an eating disorder.” I pulled my knees up into the black leather chair and picked at the fraying gray canvas of my Keds.

“Oh?”

“Yes. I think so. I read some books.”

He took notes.

“And also I drink a lot. At least, like, a lot, for like, I guess, my, age, or something.”

Pause.

“And also I'm sleeping with people and also I'm sometimes doing drugs.”

Long pause.

“Like, heroin.”

He peered at me over his glasses.

“And?” he said, bemused.

“Um. Well, I don't know.” I pulled at the place where the soles were coming loose from my shoes. I tossed my hair arrogantly. “I guess it's like, fine. I mean, whatever. I mean, who cares? It's like, not a big deal.”

He took notes. The rest of the sessions, I did talk. I told him everything that came into my head, jabbered cheerfully, swearing like a sailor for kicks. Pulled up my shirtsleeves to show him the bruises on my arms, opened up my mouth as far as I could to show him the raw patch on the back of my throat that burned like hell when I drank orange juice. Rubbed the even row of scabs, little dash marks, teeth marks made in haste, on the first and second knuckles of my right hand. Then fell silent, slouched back in my chair, chin up, daring him to call my bluff.

But it was not a bluff.

He never said a thing—that is, until the last day, when I was shouting, as I often did, that he never said anything. Why didn't he ever say anything? It made me fucking NERVOUS, like, what are you writing there, anyway? Aren't you like, going to fix it? This is like, NOT HELPING, you ASSHOLE, and like, WHY are you CHARGING my PARENTS all this fucking MONEY so you can SIT

there and like LAUGH AT ME?

“Do you think people laugh at you, Maria?”

“MARYA! MY NAME IS MARYA, you FUCK! Are you like, going to tell me what my PROBLEM IS, or WHAT? Tell me! Just TELL me what is WRONG with me!” I hollered, red-faced and shaking and furious at this bastard's interminable poise.

“I think,” he said calmly, leaning back in his chair with a smile on his face, “that you,” he said, clicking the pen cap back on his fancy pen, “are a very angry young lady.”

I, halfway out the door, swung back around and started laughing like a hyena, horrible rasping laughs. “That's it?” I said. “It took you all this time to figure THAT out? Brilliant! You're fucking brilliant!

Oh, my GOD!” and I slammed the door, hoping it would fall off the hinges. It didn't. But I never went back.

In fact, I didn't go back into therapy for another three years, not until I was put into the hospital for the first time.

Years are important here. The research shows that one of the major factors in “chronic” eating disorders is duration. By the time I got professional help, at the age of sixteen, I was well past the five-year mark, the mark where the doctors will look at your charts, raise their eyebrows, shake their heads, and say, “Since you were nine, huh?”

You will nod and look at the scale, cold and waiting to bruise the soles of your scaly feet. “Do you want to get well?” they'll ask. You'll shrug and look at the scale, wondering how off it is, whether it will lie and tell them you weigh three pounds more than you actually do. You will be obliged to correct it, on principle, to save your soul, and for your pains you will find yourself with a new address, Eating Disorders Unit, Eighth Floor, having confirmed their suspicions, because who, with a pulse of forty-three and a systolic pressure careening in vertical swoops, gives a flying fuck if the scale is three pounds off? An anoretic, that's who. Does she care that she's dying?

Hell, no.

eighth grade, a friend from church ratted

on me. I'd known her a long time. We weren't exactly close, but through confirmation class she'd come to know me better than most of my closest friends. She told the school counselor that I was throwing up. As mad as I said I was at the time, I had never been so grateful for anything in my life. I was called into the counselor's office. As I sat there, staring over her shoulder out the window, I was not ashamed. I was not even afraid. I was flattered. And, God help me, I was proud. Something had been confirmed: I was worth giving a shit about; I was getting to be a successful sick person.
Sick
is when they say something. Of course, I'd been sick for five years.

But now, now maybe I was really sick. Maybe I was getting good at this, good enough to scare people. Maybe I would almost die, and balance just there, at the edge of the cliff, wavering while they gasped and clutched one another's arms, and win acclaim for my death-defying stunts.

But who the hell were they? Just what was I trying to prove, and to whom? This is one of the terrible, banal truths of eating disorders: when a woman is thin in this culture, she proves her worth, in a way that no great accomplishment, no stellar career, nothing at all can match. We believe she has done what centuries of a collective unconscious insist

that no woman can do—control herself. A woman who can control herself is almost as good as a man. A thin woman can Have It All.

At the mirror, I pulled the skin of my face tight and grinned a garish, bone-protruding grin.

The counselor was very concerned in that way people who haven't the faintest idea what to do, or even what the problem is, always are. She said one of us would have to tell my parents that I'd been throwing up, me or her. I thought it over. I said that I would tell them, guessing they would take it less seriously if I told them. I guessed right.