Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (14 page)

That night, at dinner, I said MomandDadlhavesomethingtotellyou.

Staring at my plate, I said, I've been making myself throw up.

There was a long pause and low light. The window to my left looked out on the night. The mirror to my right reflected the stone wall. Dinner sat on my plate, waiting. The fork in my hand shook and dinged against the glass.

My mother said, “I used to do that.”

My father said, “I knew it!”

I sat blankly. My father said, “See?” and tapped his temple. “Mr.

Pig knows,” he said. “Remember the other day, when I came into your room, and I asked if you were getting obsessive about your weight?”

I said yes. I said, um, you were right.

I cried. I said I had stopped. We all, for some reason, had a good laugh.

I had not stopped. My eating disorder had taken a sharp turn for the worse. I was bingeing, alone, whenever I could, with whatever money I had. Fast-food restaurants, diners, food from home, food from other people's houses. I was doing hours of calisthenics in my room, wondering if, at the age of fourteen, I could get a plastic surgeon to do liposuction on every inch of my body, suck each molecule of fat out, leaving me with nothing more than a gleeful clattering set of bones. I lay in bed each night and stared at my body with a hate that even now brings bile to my tongue. My hatred of the bulimia, as well, steadily grew. That hatred became, with a little time, an absolute commitment to becoming an anoretic. I ate less normally, began “dieting,” lying to friends who were asking me about why I wasn't eating, whether I was throwing up, what the hell was going on. I began passing out in school. Flu, I said.

Headache. Allergy to MSG, on the rag, not enough sleep, bad cold, bronchitis.

Bulimia is hard to see, because it doesn't necessarily change your body size. It is also more immediately dangerous. I ditched one boy for another boy, phone fucking until all hours of the night. Making out in movie theaters. I had begun to be objectively good-looking, older looking. I'd lost the baby fat and was steady at my natural weight, a nice hour-glassy sort of shape I draped with low-cut sweaters and short skirts.

My life had begun to revolve around men, as many women's lives do. We sat—a few girls whose reticence about sex was, by necessity, fast disappearing—discussing dicks. To an extent, I feigned ignor-ance, but to a greater extent, I simply was ignorant. I knew how to give passable head and make noises at the right time, but I probably could not have defined
testicle
if I'd been called to, nor could I have explained the biological basis for the bizarre phenomenon of a hard-on. The nature of dicks was a mystery to us—the mechanics of dicks, the tremble of a belly as your tentative, spidery hands crept down.

We discussed the direction of dicks: Peter, up to the right, David, straight to the left, Brian, a hard line down, an arrow. We were certain that they were supposed to point
up
. We laughed and laughed.

We discussed: Was it possible to get pregnant from giving head?

One girl said yes; one girl said no, not if you didn't swallow. I adamantly insisted that it would only be possible if you had an ulcer, and the cum somehow
got out
, and we pictured all those blind tad-poles wiggling their way through our innards, heads bonking against liver and spleen, taking the long way around. Leslie offered, on the matter of dick direction, that they pointed toward you. They did, she said, nodding. Her mother had said so. Their dicks would point straight at you. I wondered aloud: So what if you stood up, and walked back and forth in front of them, would they follow you? A little radar? I pictured my dog, following the teasing bone above her head.

The very idea that you could control a man's body was intoxicat-ing; that you could make his head turn, follow your passing steps, that you could lean just so, or speak just so, or simply glance and toss your head, and he would be caught. The wonder of the female body, in all of its

impossible secrecy, is understood in some innate sense but is not easily articulated. You cannot explain, with the limitations of language and inexperience, why your body can cause such a sudden, fumbling response in someone else, nor can you put into exact words what
you
feel about your body, explain the thrum it feels in proximity to another warm-skinned form. What you feel is a tangle of contradictions: power, pleasure, fear, shame, exultation, some strange wish to make noise. You cannot say how those things knit themselves together somewhere in the lower abdomen and pulse.

We knew what we could do and feel, but we could not say why.

I do not think we understood then that the female body is more than the sum of its mute parts. We misunderstood the power we sensed, the scent and shape of ourselves. What we were discovering, flopped across one another's warm laps, was physical, sensual, sexual, material, and it was power. Why must the power of the female body cancel the power of the female mind? Are we so afraid of having both? What would it mean for women to have both? It's fine for a woman to be smart, so long as she is mousy, bespectacled, shy, because she is then no longer the obvious object of desire. It's okay for a woman to be sexual, tits bouncing and ass-presenting, because she is no longer obvious competition for intellectual glory. What if she is both? We complained that the double standard just wasn't fair: if a girl has sex, she's a slut; if a guy has sex, he's a stud. But we probably believed that to some extent.

I was light-years away from reading the first word of feminist literature, let alone developing my own understanding of feminism, sexuality, intellect, and ultimately, health. I loudly called myself a feminist, but it was mostly by principle. I had no idea what feminism actually meant, beyond the fact that I thought it was bullshit that all the boys in Gifted and Talented were drooled over for their grubby little pages of Fabulous Scientific Inventions while my friends'

footnoted analyses of the American judicial systems, their artwork, their poetry, my stories, were smiled at, given Creativity awards, and then ignored. Where I come from, “feminist” is an insult. My friends—several of whom would go into feminist academia as adults—occasionally took me aside and told me that I was getting, like, a little militant about this whole “feminism”

thing. I'd already landed myself in detention more than once for calling the psycho art teacher a sexist, and also for punching Jeff Seick when he insisted upon calling me a women's libber. To tell you the truth,
libber
sounded like
blubber
to me, so I didn't care for the term.

My body, for no reason I could understand, was an object of considerable interest to the lewd and obnoxious boys of my school, to the skanky sons of bitches I picked up like crusty green pennies from the gutters of neighboring towns. I believed that my power—it was a general sort of idea—would be incrementally increased with each pound lost. There is plenty of research to suggest that I was not alone in that belief. Studies of girls show that they associate thinness with both academic and social success.19 I saw it more as a prerequisite to success of any sort. I saw it as the ticket out of my suffocating suburban life, out of the torrent of untoward thoughts in my head, out of the self that was simply not good enough.

The anorexic body seems to say: I do not need. It says: Power over the self. And our culture, in such a startlingly brief period of time, has come to take literally the idea that power over the body has a ripple effect: power over the body, over the life, over the people around you, power over a world gone berserk.

We are about to watch one person's systematic, total loss of any power at all.

Fourteen years old at the end of eighth grade. A surreal and hot-as-hell summer ensued. I listened to maudlin love songs by the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel as I lay on the couch in the basement, cooling off in the long, blindingly bright afternoons. I wandered into the kitchen, ate, barfed, lay back down. Lay in the sun in the yard reading a book. Days melted into one another, a progression of meals and bathrooms and naps. Ninth grade began, the last year of junior high, and I began plotting, in earnest, to get out. I hated Edina and had no interest whatsoever in going to the high school there. I begged my parents to let me go to boarding school, to move into my own apartment, to let me go somewhere, anywhere but there. I wanted to cut my ties to where I'd been and who I was, and make up someone new.

19Ibid., 119.

The girl gets up each day and creates herself out of cloth and paint.

She writes at night about men who looked, and boys who touched, and weight. She writes of the great weakness that drove her to the cupboard and made her eat. The writing is never enough. Confession is insufficient. Absolution never comes in the articulation, only in the penance. She thinks of the saints: their flagellums, their beds of nails, their centuries-late apologies for Eve who doomed all women to the pains of the flesh by giving in to the pleasures of that flesh.

They lacerate their own flesh in penance for Eve, for the sins of the world, which they shoulder as their own. They wear hair shirts, or razors next to their skin.

She reads books on the saints. The sainted anoretics, who, in their holy asceticism, insisted that God was telling them to starve. She considers God. She determines he, if they were on speaking terms, would tell her to starve for general sins. The hair shirt is her own skin, rasping on the rawness of what lies beneath. She wills herself to rise above the flesh: not food, not sex, not touch, not sleep. She snorts cocaine in her flowered room to keep from giving in to sleep, a weakness, and she, already too weak, refuses to give in. The bulimia and the drugs give rise to insomnia and chemical imbalance.

The insomnia gives rise to mania, a racing of thoughts and sadistically vivid images flashing in the brain—“the atrocious lucidity of insomnia,” Borges called it—the thoughts spiral upward, whistling shrill as a teakettle screaming inside the brain.

She goes too long without sleep and freaks.

She doesn't remember when it begins. She becomes violently afraid of the dark again. She is too old for this, her parents remind her.

Each night, she makes her father check every lock, every window and door, scour the basement for the man she is sure has come to get her, the man with the knife. She lies in her bed, stiff as a corpse, waiting for the footstep on the stair. She cannot sleep. Each twitch and sigh of the house, each wind tapping the walls and trees, bolt her upright, screaming for Dad. Dad comes running and tries very hard to understand. She cannot stay home alone. She has been staying home alone since she was nine years old. At fourteen, it becomes impossible. She sits on the front steps of the house when she gets home from school and waits for someone to come home. The shaking: She remembers mostly the shaking, her whole body, tense and trembling, waiting for the man who will corner her in her room, with his knife, and slice her apart.

She thinks, looking back, that this was a premonition. This is the last year she lives at home. She wants her mother and father to save her. She says this, and Dad asks in earnest: From what?

From myself
.

My night fears ended as suddenly as they began. I began applying to art high schools. I had won several writing awards during my three years in junior high, had played leading roles in plays. Everyone said I could sing, everyone said I was headed for Broadway blah blah blah. I just wanted to get the fuck out, and “talent” was as good an excuse as any. By that point, I was as firmly convinced as anyone that I was not particularly intelligent. As I recall, I thought I was a fuck-up with good tits, useful for sex and laughs.

In the winter of ninth grade, I carefully typed my poems and stories, put them into a blue three-ring binder, and prepared two monologues. My father blocked the scenes. It was the first time I'd solicited my father's advice since I was a little girl. In March, I sent my application to Interlochen Arts Academy, a small school in northern Michigan, and arrived to audition. I fell in love with the place: the loud, theatrical voices, the trees, the dorms, the students, the classrooms, the theaters. On my first night there, accompanied by my mother, I turned to her and said urgently: I love it. I have to get in. I have to.

I did.

3 The Actor's Part

Michigan, 1989-1990

Watch out for games, the actor's part, the speech

planned, known, given, for they will give you away and

you will stand like a naked little boy, pissing on your own

child-bed
.

—Anne Sexton, “Admonitions to a Special Person,” 1974

Summer, 1989. I was fifteen years old and feeling terribly mature. It was a sticky, sweaty Minnesota summer. I'd stumbled high and drunk through and out of ninth grade. I was finally, I said to friends in all-night diners, drinking coffee, tossing my hair back and blowing smoke in boys' faces, getting the hell out of Dodge. I was preparing to leave for boarding school, with no intention of ever, ever coming back. I spent lazy summer nights riding around in somebody's daddy's car with the windows down, shouting over the music, watching my reflection in the rearview mirror, trying out new faces, faces more suited to a girl-of-the-world, a girl-on-her-way, a girl-on-her-own: sleepy-eyed, casual glances, slow smiles. I imagined calling my parents from school, casually telling them of my grand accomplishments. I thought about returning to Edina in a swish of perfume, all cheekbones and eyes. Everyone would stare at this new creature with wonder—you've lost so much weight! I could already hear them say it—and I would wave my hand and speak in casual tones of this lecture and that writer and the absolute superfluity of food to the artist, who feeds only on her thoughts. I was fifteen, sad, in search of balance, and trying very hard to become someone other than me. Not uncommon in teenagers. Teenagers like me, desperately

hitting the gas to get from zero to sixty in seconds flat will plow down anything in their path on their way out of Norman Rockwell hell, including their past. Including themselves. Teenagers do not know that both past and self will rise up like flattened cartoons on the road, unflatten themselves, and follow them everywhere they go. A shadow, or ghost.