Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (15 page)

That summer I had a job at McDonald's. I liked standing at the counter, having men from the Jiffy Lube shop next door flirt with me. I lived for the speed of it, the eight hours neatly bracketing my day. It felt tidy. I liked the break room, the bawdy talk through a fog of menthol smoke, and the early shift, old men in black coats and bowlers shuffling in on their canes, ordering coffee two creams and a water, dear, and they'd wink. They called me Polly Green Eyes. I liked being one of the guys, forcing a loud laugh when some ferret-looking kid said, real loud, “Snatches are ugly as sin.” All the women blushed except me. No more girly blushing for me. My eyes hardened that summer. I watched them in the mirror, watched my practiced sneer. Splashed water on my face, rinsed the residue of vomit from my mouth, felt my glands for swelling, redid my lipstick, smiled coolly at the mirror. Wrapped my fingers around my wrists as I walked down the hall, out the door, to feel the bones.

I was Grown Up. I was going away to school. I had a job. I was leaving everyone. There was a twinge of sadness. A pretty big twinge, more like a knife twisting between two ribs. I was bummed about leaving my friends, in the back of my head knowing the friendships would end when summer did, when I left. Forks in the road,
etc.
We promised to write. They'd been the only thing that had kept me marginally sane for all those years, and I loved them a whole hell of a lot. Of course I was sad about leaving my parents, though less so—they would still be my parents when the summer ended—and of course I was scared of what would happen when the safety net fell away. I had the usual fears people have when going into the world. Alongside the sadness and fear, there was a rush of necessity. A need to leave. A need so fierce that it has been matched, in my life, only by two other needs: to eat and to throw up.

It seemed to me that two things were of the essence in proving my worth and my control, and one without the other was not enough: “Success,” that meaningless term, and weight loss. A cutting loose from

that which seemed to weigh me down: my father's worries, my mother's doubt, my small town, and my body itself. I would prove them wrong, that Great They for whom I have always lived. I would prove there was no child here, no weepy and weak little creature, no bouncy smiley smart-but-lazy rah-rah teen, no crazy kid, none of the things that they saw. I would disappear, only to come home reinvented. I would be unrecognizable upon my fleeting returns.

This fantasy was realized, but not quite the way I had intended.

In deciding to remake myself, I managed to avoid the fact that I would also, by definition, have to erase what self there was to begin with. I began to wonder, many years later, if total erasure had been my intent all along.

I felt weightless at night, untethered from my white bed. I would jerk upright from a half-sleep dream of stepping off a curb, foot feeling for the ground and finding nothing but space beneath my shoe. I'd wake up just before I fell, feeling around on the nightstand for the glass of lukewarm water, drinking. Pressing myself into the bed, clutching the pillow, a solid thing, reminding myself, Just a dream. That's the nice thing about dreams, the way you wake up before you fall.

It was a period of waiting. Waiting in the limbo of childhood's end and the advent of Life. On a level I sensed but could not articulate, these were the last dangling hours of a time when I could still turn back. I planned to stop eating as soon as I crossed the Minnesota state line. I had had enough of bulimia. It seemed so crass, so gauche, so unlike the person I wanted to become: a woman, dark and mysterious, regal. Like my mother. I wanted to turn heads not with lecherous leers of bemusement but with awe. I wanted to become untouchable, cruel, glittery, sleek and haughty as a cat. I wanted to take a running leap, jump over adolescence, land cleanly in the world of adults, where, at last, I would be good enough.

There was a woman I worked with at McD's, much older than I, two kids and a missing husband, blue eye shadow, overweight. She and I sat eating together, talking about diet and weight. Now that I think of it, most of the women I worked with talked about diet and weight. But this particular woman, who was probably fifty or sixty pounds heavier than I and the same height, said to me one day,

“You're kind of chubby. But you're a
cute
chubby. It looks good on you. You look like me.”

It is not uncommon for people who are overweight to tell thinner people that they're overweight, too. I didn't know that then. I have since associated
cute
with
chubby
. When people tell me I'm “cute,”

I hear “chubby,” no matter how far from either I may be. I hear them telling me that I'm still a snub-nosed little girl with big tits and a round ass who's too loud and too intense and entirely too much.

That summer, I had decided that “cute” was the last thing I wanted to be.

At my lunch break, I would eat a quarter-pounder with cheese, large fries, and a cherry pie. Then I would throw up in the antiseptic-scented bathroom, wash my face, and go back on the floor, glassy-eyed and hyper. After work, I would buy a quarter-pounder with cheese, large fries, and a cherry pie, eat it on the way home from work, throw up at home with the bathtub running, eat dinner, throw up, go out with friends, eat, throw up, go home, pass out.

My parents watched me transform that summer, the constant purging thinning me quickly. Bulimics often vacillate between eating

“normally” with other people and bingeing and purging in solitude, which keeps them at an average weight. I'd already stopped the

“normal” part. I was doing drugs that put a weird sheen on my eyes and having backseat sex with young men dumb as sticks, flushing my cheeks and making me perpetually nauseated. I ignored my parents, full of a delusional certainty that one day soon I would walk back into the house, tall as a magazine model, cool and collected, a new woman, you've come a long way, baby, and
then
they would see.
Then
they'd know they'd had me all wrong, I would sweep into their perfect white living room and sit down on the couch, crossing my (magically long) legs and give them a bored stare.
Then
they'd be impressed.

Fat chance.

I fell for the great American dream, female version, hook, line, and sinker. I, as many young women do, honest-to-god believed that once I Just Lost a Few Pounds, somehow I would suddenly be a New You, I would have Ken-doll men chasing my thin legs down with bouquets of flowers on the street, I would become rich and famous and glamorous and lose my freckles and become blond and five foot ten. I would wear cool quasi-intellectual glasses and a man's oxford shirt in a sunny New

York flat and sip coffee and say Mmmm and fold my paper neatly and He would come up behind me and look at me with an adoring gaze. I would swing sexily into my red coupe, and the wind would blow through my hair as I drove into some great big city, stepping off the elevator and striding (with a feminine but authoritative step) into my office where everyone would be impressed with my every feminine but authoritative word. In the evenings I would go home and make magical gourmet meals and eat three bites, and He would look at me in the candlelight and I would be a superwoman 1980s goddess, yes indeed. As soon as I left my hometown and lost a few pounds.

Somehow I managed to believe this schlock (lying on my side on the green fuzzy carpet of my suburban bedroom reading
Seventeen
magazine diet articles and doing incessant, endless leg lifts), even though I was well aware of two facts: (1) All I really wanted to do was write poems, and (2) I'd met this clean-cut He of my just-before-sleep fantasies, and he bored the hell out of me. Not to mention the fact that I was at that time five feet tall in shoes, and had no immediate future as a calm, cool, and collected woman, given my basic personality. But no matter. In America, you can have anything if you just work for it, dammit, and I was bloody well ready to work.

Children, or so the literature goes, separate from their parents gradually. Not painlessly, but the small rips in the heart reknit themselves in time. I stood up abruptly and tore myself out at the roots. This has left me rootless, of course. But for my parents, I think, it must have been worse. The what-has-gone-wrong, what-is-happening, the gut knowledge that
there is something wrong with my
daughter
is something I can only vaguely imagine. I do not have a child, I do not know what it would mean to watch that part of yourself begin to fester, shrivel, and die.

I was somewhat aware that my parents were worried. I try to imagine the conversations in my parents' room, in their minds, during the year that preceded my departure. Perhaps they went like this: She sits in the dark all day like a vampire. I come in, saying, Open the blinds, open the windows, you need light. She says: I hate light. Leave me alone. The room reeks of sickness and sweat. She lies on the bed, lank, her face to the wall. She shuffles in the night.

There are pills in her purse. What is

she on? What is she taking? What's wrong? Why? Why? Why? There is something wrong with her eyes, what is it? She screams and cries at the slightest thing. She's lying. I see that she's lying.
But what is
she lying about
?

I come from a family of divine liars. There is always the smell of a lie, a smell of things unspoken. I have never understood what it was, but that summer, I was the lie, the walking lie, the elephant in the living room that no one mentioned because it would have been gauche. I was throwing up three to four times a day. I was on some stomach-twisting combination of drugs, and I was drinking. I began to be rather ostentatious about my “diet.” My parents were not entirely unsupportive of this diet, given my running commentary about how I felt so Healthy now, given the fact that my father had been on one diet or another for most of my life (slapping his belly, saying Gotta get rid of this thing), and given that my mother had always, if only in an implied way, been worried about my weight, and hers, and everyone else's. Lunch in a café with my mother one summer day went like this: I order the dieter's plate, cottage cheese on a

“nest” of wilted lettuce, two slices of canned peaches. I remember saying, Mom, it's so cool, I can eat a little healthy meal like this and be, like, totally full! She nodded, Yes, you can, she said. Bulimia, now that I was too good for it, was being phased out. This was my last hurrah on the roller coaster of intake and output.

What I am about to say is tricky, and it is a statement about my own relationship with bulimia and anorexia. Bulimia is linked, in my life, to periods of intense passion, passion of all kinds, but most specifically emotional passion. Bulimia acknowledges the body explicitly, violently. It attacks the body, but it does not
deny
. It is an act of disgust and of need. This disgust and this need are about both the body and the emotions. The bulimic finds herself in excess, too emotional, too passionate. This sense of excess is pinned to the body.

The body bears the blame but
is not
the primary problem. There is a sense of hopelessness in the bulimic, a well-fuck-it-all-then, I might as well binge. This is a dangerous statement, but the bulimic impulse is more realistic than the anorexic because, for all its horrible nihilism, it understands that the body
is inescapable
.

The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions. The summer before I

left for boarding school was the last time I would ever fully understand that I was a human being, and occasionally care about myself as such. I was about to become an anoretic. That is to say, I, the girl I knew as myself, was about to disappear. She was about to become no more than the blank spaces in the mirror where my body had once been. She was about to become no more than a very small voice.

However people know things about themselves, through premonitions or suspicions or specific plans, I knew this. And I was afraid.

Yet I wanted it more than anything.

At some point, the intensity of my passion for life, the erotics of childhood, the natural hungers, and the instinctive childhood response to sate those hungers, became my greatest fear. My mind, my body, began to terrify me. I was an uncontrollable child. I could not, no matter how I tried, control my mind, its forays into distant realms, its dark curiosity. The depth and breadth of my imagination became a threat unto itself. Passion is strange. Mine is fierce, all-encompassing, a fiery desire for life. When I was a child, I knew it was there, and I lived it, a tendency toward explosion, flames, noise. This side of passion was my first perversion. The tendency toward excess veered out of control into bulimia, that state of fear and desire, that violent crashing back and forth between hunger and the abortion of hunger, between taking in and throwing back what is most needed and instinctively desired: food. The bread of life.

There is also the other side of passion. The side of me that feared fire and longed for ice, that cringed at noise and hungered for silence, that shied from touch and desired to numb itself into nothing. To implode. That side was the second to go wrong in me, perhaps in reaction to the first side. Fearing the velocity and force of life and self, I turned toward death. Fearing the constant thunder in the mind that bulimia brings, I turned toward the silence of anorexia. Afraid of the explicit passions of bulimia, I sought out what I mistook for the passionless state of starvation.

I did not know that passion will assert itself under any guise. I did not know that hunger for food, and the life-giving powers it has, could become its own opposite when thwarted, and become a different kind of hunger: a hunger for the hunger itself, a hunger for the life-taking powers that hunger has.

For a long time, I believed the opposite of passion was death. I was wrong. Passion and death are implicit, one in the other. Past the border of a fiery life lies the netherworld. I can trace this road, which took me through places so hot the very air burned the lungs.