Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (16 page)

I did not turn back. I pressed on, and eventually passed over the border, beyond which lies a place that is wordless and cold, so cold that it, like mercury, burns a freezing blue flame.

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I've tasted of desire,

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

—ROBERT FROST, “FIRE AND ICE,” 1922

light of my parents' basement, June 1989,

the Beijing government massacred the students of its own country.

I leaned over the garbage can and was violently, involuntarily sick.

Two weeks later, I boarded a plane with my choir for a tour of the Far East. In Hawaii, our first stop, we went to the beach. In my head, I looked terribly fat, at least compared to the other girls. Pictures of us show toothy grins and skin gleaming with sweat, arms flung around one another's shoulders. I look tired, pale, and plenty thin.

I had the bright idea to lie on the beach in my bikini for twelve hours without sunscreen. I am extremely white. I slept, that night, under an enormous aloe leaf, my skin blistered with second-degree burns from face to foot.

We flew to Japan, my face mottled with blisters and peeling skin.

My memory of the ancient cities of the East is skewed by the way my bra bit my raw skin, the way the airplane seats peeled parts of my skin off. My memory is skewed, too, by the uneasy guilt in my belly. Not to eat

would be an insult to my host families, but if I ate, where would I throw up? I remember every single goddamn meal: what was served, what I ate, what I threw up. This frightens me. It was nearly eight years ago and I remember the Kentucky Fried Chicken I puked in a subway station, the fish cakes I hid in my napkin and dropped out the window at night while my roommate slept. I clearly recall the whole trout, cold, that was served on a platter for breakfast, the table of girls who sat looking at it, chopsticks poised, trying to figure out how to cut off its head.

I agonized over this lack of puking opportunity with my friend, also bulimic, as we sat on a guest room bed in our underwear in Hawaii, wincing as we rubbed aloe on each others backs. In Osaka, I unfortunately fell in love with her. I kept my mouth shut and turned my face away as she stood in a shared bathroom, naked in the tall tub, complaining about her thighs. I glanced at her thighs and then away. I was not in the mood to compare thighs when I was having trouble keeping my hands off hers in the first place. I begged her to stop throwing up, said she was gorgeous, turned her around naked to look at herself in the mirror while she cried about what she'd just eaten. I nearly passed out from the contact of my skin with hers. It may have been the first time in my life that I really
saw
a naked woman, saw the elemental female form, saw hers not in comparison to myself but in horrible potential
connection
to myself. In hopes of getting her to eat without throwing up, I announced one day that I wasn't going to throw up anymore and I wasn't going to let her do it either. I began throwing up in secret. I expect she may have done the same.

We were on an international exchange, spreading goodwill and brotherhood, singing “Home on the Range” in six-part harmony, singing the Japanese national anthem, which we did not understand, but we smiled anyway. It was somehow very sad. I have pictures of me with my roommate, smiling, wearing traditional costumes that our hosts wrapped about us. We look profoundly white. The Beijing crisis hovered, unspoken, among us. We were headed for Canton, then called Guanjao. I have pictures of the two of us with the woman we were staying with, a tiny woman with two children and a husband who looked away from us, each of us holding up two fingers. As the flash snapped, she said, Peace.

We went to a dance club that had an enormous pink plaster Buddha at the door, paint chipping from the plaster rolls of his flesh, a garish, pupil-less smile on his face. Inside, young men with permed hair smoked Capris and asked us to dance. I was painfully embarrassed to be an American. We danced, and the glittering disco ball hanging from the ceiling spun. We sang long concerts, warned daily to keep bending our knees so we wouldn't get dizzy and fall down the risers in a flurry of pink taffeta. I bent them and bent them, and still I wavered, clutching the big bow on the backside of the girl next to me. Huge concert halls, a blur of faces dim behind the footlights, hot as hell, not enough air. I was hardly eating anything at all. Rice, bits offish. I perfected the art of the silent puke: no hack, no gag, just bend over and mentally will the food back up.

In Hong Kong, we stayed in a hotel. The girls fanned out over the streets, murmuring to one another that we'd better buy things fast because Hong Kong would soon be the property of China. We bought like crazy, moving down the narrow streets thronged with people, the yellow arches of a McDonald's casting a strange yellow light in the late evening. In a marketplace, on a hot sunny day, I bought plate after plate of fried squid, ate it while walking through the narrow rows of lean-to stands covered with bright cloths. I ducked into a back alley, leaned over, and heaved. I straightened up. At the end of the alley stood a very old man, watching me, expressionless.

I felt I should say something. I did not. I hurried back into the heat of the day, head spinning with dehydration and beating sun and an inexplicable terror. I felt I should pray. But all I could think to say, to the ears of some deaf god, was: I'm sorry.

When the tour was over, I flew to Seattle to meet my mother. We were visiting my alcoholic grandfather and his alcoholic, anorexic wife. I hadn't seen either of them since I was ten years old. In the meantime, I had, of course, gotten older, and in so doing had lost my darling-girl factor. I was now considered a threat by my stepgrandmother. She'd bought me an outfit suitable for a ten-year-old that was too tight and made me look like a sausage. I cried and said I was fat, alone in the guest room with my mother. My mother sniffed and told me to stop it.

I saved the outfit. I wore it almost every day in the hospital a few years

later when I was seventeen, and it hung from the bones of my shoulders and hips, bagging at the ankles and ass.

The tension in my grandfather's house hummed like a violin string that vacation. My mother has spent her whole life trying to please her father, and I, in turn, have spent my whole life trying to please my mother. It became very obvious to me that trying to get approval was an exhausting, fruitless exercise. I was tap-dancing for her, she was tap-dancing for him, and he was staring into the sky, drunk as a deacon on holiday. Three women—my mother, my stepgrandmother, and me—competed for the Most Perfect Woman award. My mother insulted me, I insulted her, Jeanne, the stepgrandmother, insulted everything in a skirt, and my grandfather just kept right on drinking. We picked at our food, competing for who could eat the least.

When my mother was a kid, fat people were perceived by her family as slightly lesser beings. Fat people were lower class and were thus sneered at. In their opinion, fat people couldn't control themselves, not like the perfect little Williams family with their perfect skinny genes. My mother has told me that my great-grandmother, a hefty person, was mocked. Eating was seen as an annoyance. Meals were really just an excuse to have a few drinks. You were supposed to pick at your food. It's no wonder that my mother had screwy eating habits. No wonder everyone else did, too. And it is no wonder I always had the sneaking suspicion that my mother thought I was fat. Poor woman, giving birth to a normal-size child. Could I possibly have come from her body, this little round being who did totally untoward things like yell and get messy and cry? You're just like your father, she said.

Now, at the age of fifty-six, my mother tells me the problem was not that I was like my father but that I was like her. Intense. Temperamental. Driven. Bulimic. In pain.

My mother and I went for a walk. I told her about my trip to the Far East, how much it had changed me, how I felt I had learned a thing or two about the world and about myself, how I now felt more ready than ever to go away to school. She fell silent. I asked her what was wrong. She said, You talk about yourself an awful lot, Marya.

This was true. It's common in teenagers who (1) have not seen their

mother in a while, and (2) are about to leave home, and (3) have recently traveled to a politically explosive part of the world. Asked about this later, she tells me I was too hyper, too excitable, nervous, babbling, and she was worried. My mother works in mysterious ways.

We went to lunch, the four of us. After the first drink, my stepgrandmother began insulting me, doing so without interruption and without pausing to eat through the arrival of the salads, the second and third drink, the arrival of the entrées, the fourth and fifth drink.

She did so while I took a sudden intense interest in the napkin in my lap. An eloquent and imaginative woman, she detailed my arrogance, my uppity behavior now that I was going to some snotty arts school, how I would get a big head, how I would think I was
something
now, how my parents were spoiling me terribly and I would turn out to be a terrible person if they let me go on thinking I was talented and smart.

It truly fascinates me, the pains my family has taken to protect me from overblowing a self-image that has always resembled a pile of shit.

When I was sure she was finished, I excused myself to the bathroom and threw up. When I returned, my mother and grandfather made small talk while my stepgrandmother drank, her head trembling in its weird constant way, watching me out of the corner of her eye.

It was the last time I would see either one of them. She died a year later of a cancer no one knew she had. My grandfather died two years ago, three months after he married his third wife. He and I spoke briefly a few times over the years. The conversation always went like: “Well, is yer head screwed on right yet?” “Ha ha. I guess it is, Grandpa.” My mother and I returned to Minnesota, where I packed for school and said good-bye and got in the car with my parents and began what would become an endless series of departures and arrivals, comings and goings, the latest great search for something I would never find.

Wisconsin, into the apostrophe of

Michigan's Upper Peninsula, circle south and head west to Interlochen. In the hotel, I order a chef's salad. My father complains that I'm not eating enough, that I've hardly eaten since we left Edina. My parents have developed a sudden awareness of the fact that I pick at my food. I have developed a sudden disinterest in hiding it.

In the room that night, my father does his calisthenics, I do mine.

We have a strange competitive exchange about nightly exercises.

My father says, You don't do them every night. I say, Yes I do. How would you know? He says, Hmm, and stretches his back. The inconsistency with which my parents responded to my problem would continue. A year later, just after my release from Hospitalization No. 1, I will stand in front of the mirror while my mother sits in a chair. I will weigh about 103. Trying to get some visual perspective on myself and practicing my Affirmations, I will declare: I'm pretty thin. And my mother will respond: I wouldn't call you thin.

We arrive in the tiny town where I will stay for a year, one of the sweetest year? of my life. Interlochen, Michigan, is: a gas station, two pizza parlors, a Flap Jack Shack, a laundromat, and a bar. It is miles and miles of state forest. It is Green Lake, glassy and speckled with small motionless boats, held in by a dark, thick border of pines.

It is a boarding school overhung heavily with trees, miniature roads winding between dorms, chapel, concert hall, studios. Farther out in the woods, the dance building, the theater, the tech building, empty cabins in the woods where old-looking long-haired children would meet, in pairs, in secret, and make use of the empty silence on bare sagging mattresses stained with time.

We moved my boxes of clothes and books into Mozart-Beethoven, my dorm, which was next door to Brahms and across a little road from Hemingway and Picasso, the two boys' dorms. The room was miniature. Along the wall, under the window, was a long desk with bookcases at each wall and two metal folding chairs. There was a very small dresser with a mirror above it, a small bathroom, a small closet.

My roommate had already moved in, her imposing presence apparent in an enormous black steamer trunk that took up half the room. I do not remember my parents leaving. They must have, because the next thing I knew, a wiry girl with a plethora of reddish hair, whom I would later come to call Tigger, bounded into the room, terrifically edgy, and, looking wildly around the room, blurted out: I didn't pick my bed yet so you can pick, I don't care which I have.

She had these incredibly long legs. She wore an enormous sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. She strode, she loped, she bounced—I have too few words to accurately describe the way her legs worked then—to the closet, swung open the door, and started rustling madly through the clothes she'd hung up. She said, more to her clothes than to me, By the way, I'm Lora.

I replied, I'm Marya.

She turned abruptly from the closet, glanced at me and then away, saying, Yeah, I know.

It was bound to be difficult. Prior to my arrival, I had considered serious questions that anyone might have before moving into a small community, sharing an infinitesimal space with another person: How will I throw up without offending? How will I do my calisthenics at night while reading a book? I expect I was not the only girl there who had these concerns. I knew from a girl who had gone to Interlochen that bulimia was rampant in the dorms. She'd told me that she and her roommate used to order pizzas and then throw up in the empty boxes. I found out later that boarding schools, in general, are hotbeds for eating disorders. I heard tales of resident advisors (“dorm mothers”) posted at the bathroom doors to physically pull girls' heads out of the toilets. Later, I'd discover that the rumors were true: College dorm bathrooms rarely worked because the pipes were perpetually clogged with vomit.