Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (17 page)

There may be some validity in the common assumption that leaving home prompts waves of fear and insecurity, that eating disorders are concurrent with separation from the mother. Personally, I think it more accurate to say that, hidden from the periscope of the childhood home, people—myself included—go for broke and don't bother to hide it anymore. Leaving home is not so traumatic as to incite an eating disorder in people whose homes were perfectly Edenic. On the contrary, leaving home comes as a great relief, a sense of freedom. It is read, by an awful lot of us, as a ticket to undisturbed, self-destructive freedom.

I had not counted on rooming with Lora. I think I expected to find myself in a room with a snobby, pretentious girl in ostentatious tinkling gauzy skirts, who might, for that matter, be prone to spending time on her knees before the porcelain god.

Lora's mother was a renowned eating disorders therapist. I didn't find

this out for a while, nor did Lora find out that it was relevant for a while, not until my eating disorder got so out of control that she was going nuts. For the time being, we set to the matter of the two narrow single beds. I said I wanted to sleep by the door. She said she wanted to sleep by the window. We pushed the beds this way and that. No matter how you put them, the beds (in conjunction with the steamer trunk) took up the entire room. In the end, we shoved all three together to maximize space. This meant that I had to either crawl over her to get out of bed, which she would not allow, or crawl to the foot of the bed, because I wound up stuffing all my dirty clothes between my side of the bed and the wall, leaving them there until Lora threatened to move out. She, by contrast, did laundry constantly, folding her clothes in neat piles: jeans, sweatshirts, Tshirts, socks. She smelled like vanilla and Tide.

It was fall. I was utterly in love with fall, and Michigan, and Interlochen. Leaves hurtled down from the trees that lined the walks and pillowed on the grass. Acorns crunched beneath one's boots. The lake did a slow burn at night, with sun sinking into it, sending out red heat in waves, steam rising into the chilly air.

Anorexia started slowly. It took time to work myself into the frenzy that the disease demands. There were an incredible number of painfully thin girls at Interlochen, dancers mostly. The obsession with weight seemed nearly universal. Whispers and longing stares followed the ones who were visibly anorexic. We sat at our cafeteria tables, passionately discussing the calories of lettuce, celery, a dinner roll, rice. We moved between two worlds. When we pushed back our chairs and scattered to our departments, we transformed. I would watch girls who'd just been near tears in the dorm-room mirrors suddenly become rapt with life, fingers flying over a harp, a violin, bodies elastic with motion, voices strolling through Shakespeare's forest of words.

In the writing department, I would sit sucking on sugar-free mints, the fingers of my left hand gripping the edge of a desk, face inches away from the paper, right hand curled around my pen as tight as a baby's fist. At the end of a workshop, my entire body would feel stiff, my hand arthritic, my head whirring maniacally. I have never been able to explain what happened to me that year, in those workshops, in literature classes. They

made us read, and read, and read more, and then write until I thought I would never be able to write again. Entire pages were blackened with furious erasures, notations, triumphant discoveries of the
exact word, precisely that word
, notebook after notebook, ragged with torn half-pages, stapled photocopies of whatnots, paper-clipped random passing thoughts.

In biology, geometry, and German, I sat tensed, as if about to pounce, my brow a furrow of wrinkles. I did not understand. I could not keep my mind on it. I tried to concentrate, but my pen strayed to the margins, tracing and retracing small designs, scribbling bits of poems. I had maintained a running string of subpassing grades in math, science, and languages in my Edina years. It was during those classes that I wrote the bulk of the work that had gotten me into Interlochen in the first place. I swore to my parents that I would not fail my academic classes at Interlochen. I tried in earnest not to bomb out of all classes unrelated to my major. The school had nightly tutorials in academic subjects, which I religiously attended and which barely made a dent. Lora sat on the bed with my books while I paced wildly around the room, trying to listen to her explanations of proofs and cells and the subjunctive case. (Mar, do you want help with this or what? YES. Then SIT DOWN. I CAN'T.) Fall hung back at the doorway of winter. Mornings were darker, days shorter, nights long and sleepless and black. The first snow fell and melted. We walked the two miles of backcountry road into town, bought cigarettes, loitered in the Laundromat, smoking and talking.

We sat in the coffee shop, sharing our menthols, drinking our coffee, waiting for winter to come. We walked back at sundown, the last parchment leaves on the long brittle branches of trees hanging on for dear life in the very sharp wind. Pickup truck after pickup truck trundled by. We went to the pub down the road and played pool.

Lora and I didn't spend much time together outside of the room.

She'd been at Interlochen the year before and had her own crowd of friends. I hung out with a scatter-shot crowd that shifted and changed with the seasons, some dancers, some musicians, several people from theater, a writer or two. As winter began, something intensified. The cold pressed us inward, closer together, kept us walking in circles, lost in work. I became utterly manic. I was not the only one.

It's not surprising that a place like this would run wild with startlingly intense children. Intensity about our respective fields was what had drawn us there in the first place. The workload was intense.

Many of us, including me, had so many classes, workshops, isolated practice times, and rehearsals that we were studying ten hours a day, six days a week. The fact that we had left home at the age we had, in favor of a world that intellectually and artistically far out-stripped our emotional development, was notable in and of itself.

Home and childhood was not enough. We wanted more. And more we found. Many of us were lost and turned to art for direction. What we craved, in many cases, was religion.

Had we a god, it might have been Dionysus. We, his followers, imagined ourselves maenads, half-believing in divine possession, half mocking it. Either way, it was a Dionysian sort of time. Dionysus/Bacchus, it is said, was driven mad by his education. There was more information about the world, about our opportunities, about the limits and their elasticity, than we probably knew how to process. A few too many of us fell for the old romantic story of the mad artist, the genius made idiot savant by the swells and falls of music, language, color on canvas, ceaselessly, manically, playing inside his head. We wanted to be that genius, that idiot mad with the world of his mind. A thrum of self-destruction, anger and joy all tangled up, ran through the halls, the roads, the dorms.

We were very hungry.

Early on in the year, I'd decided to lose twenty pounds. Most of us had, having heard those obnoxious warnings about the “freshman fifteen” that people say girls add when they get to college. We figured the same would apply to us. It seemed to be a rite of passage beyond our control, fifteen pounds magically landing on the butt, an event that one needed to vigilantly guard against. In my dorm hallway lived several dancers, a violinist, a voice major, a harp major, Lora and I. I'd become friends early on with the voice and harp majors, who were roommates. We were in agreement that we all wanted to lose weight and swore on the pain of death to help each other do that, while insisting that the other two didn't really need to lose weight. We talked about food and weight nonstop, about how much we wanted to lose, asked each other: Do I look like I've gained weight? Lost weight? Does my butt look big in this skirt, in these jeans, when I

stand like this? Does my stomach stick out, do my thighs jiggle? The two of them had a little refrigerator in their room containing Crystal Light, small tins of tuna (“It's a great lunch,” said one of them to me.

“There's only sixty calories in it and you're totally full.”), bags of trail mix, yogurt. We took the Saturday bus into town, to Meijer's, one of those superstores, and bought bags of food in bulk: banana chips, sugar-free candies, raisins (anything with a laxative effect).

We loaded up on diet sodas and ramen and popcorn and stood in the diet aids aisle, surveying the goods. Debating the merits of Dexatrim versus Fiberall. We'd wonder aloud how long a person could go just drinking Crystal Light.

You cannot trick your body. Your body, strange as it seems to we who are saturated with a doctrine of dualism, is actually attached to your brain. There is a very simple, inevitable thing that happens to a person who is dieting: When you are not eating enough, your thinking process changes. You begin to be obsessed with food.

They've done study after study on this, and still we believe that if we cut back fat, sugar, calorie intake, we'll drop weight just like that and everything will be the same, only thinner. Nothing is the same.

You want to talk about food all the time. You want to discuss tastes: What does that taste like? you ask each other as you devour your bizarre meals. Salty? Sweet? Are you full? You want to taste something all the time. You chew gum, you eat roll after roll of sugar-free Certs, you crunch Tic Tacs (just one and a half calories each!). You want things to taste
intense
. All normal approach to food is lost in your frantic search for an explosion of guilt-free flavor in your mouth, an attempt to make your mouth, if not your body, feel full, to fool your mind into satiety. You pour salt or pepper on things.

You eat bowls of sugar-coated cereal (no fat). You put honey and raisins on your
rice
.

Eating disorders are addictions. You become addicted to a number of their effects. The two most basic and important: the pure adrenaline that kicks in when you're starving—you're high as a kite, sleepless, full of a frenetic, unstable energy—and the heightened intensity of experience that eating disorders initially induce. At first, everything tastes and smells intense, tactile experience is intense, your own drive and energy themselves are intense and focused.

Your sense of power is very, very intense. You are not aware, however, that you are quickly becoming addicted.

And there's the rub. As with drugs, the longer you do it, the more you need to achieve that original high.

It is assumed that everyone wants to lose weight, so no one notices when the old topics of dinner conversation—classes, majors, guys—switches over to food, almost exclusively. It doesn't strike anyone as particularly odd, at first. Later in the year, there will be a few girls who defect: We're all just getting way too obsessed, she'll say, nibbling her apple, I'm just sick of it. But not at first. At first there is a religious fervor, a cultist sort of behavior,1 a pact.

I made a pact with a tall, thin girl who offered to help me lose weight. When I got to Interlochen, I was at something close to my

“set point,” the technical term for your natural weight—mine is about 120. But 120 seemed too high, and I decided to drop that ex-traneous 20, down to 100 with the dancers and starving artists, and I'd been going around blathering about how I was on a diet. This girl came into my room at night, talked to me about what to eat, encouraged me in a most patronizing tone, and told me how much better I was looking. And then, one night, I “slipped.” There were sundaes in the cafeteria that night. The girls had been talking about it all day—the future virtuosos of the world, cream of the crop, la di da, had been discussing in hushed voices whether we'd break down and eat a sundae, couldn't we be strong and just eat the toppings, no ice cream? that would have less fat, wouldn't it? what if we didn't eat all day, and all the next day, then would it be okay?

bless me father for i have sinned i ate an ice cream sundae. I went to the cafeteria, put together a sundae, and sat with the other girls.

We laughed—for once we had enough sugar in our systems, for once we were eating regular food like any other teenage kid—until Ms. Diet Police came up from behind me, leaned over, took my sundae, walked to the trash can, and dropped it in.

The furious little kid in me got good and pissed. I shoved my chair
1For a more complete discussion of the commonalities between cult behavior and the
Western obsession with dieting, as well as an excellent interpretation of new research on
eating disorders and the commercial influence on American attitudes toward weight and
body, see Sharlene Hesse-Biber, Am I Thin Enough Yet?: The Cult of Thinness and the
Commercialization of Identity.

back and ran after my disappearing sundae. This girl turned around and I
hit
her. Whatthehell? she yelled, wide-eyed. Marya, I'm just trying to help you, you said you wanted help losing weight and here you are pigging out on ice cream! Near tears, I left, feeling like a complete fool. What is my problem? I thought, heading back to my dorm. Am I such a cow that I can't live without a fucking sundae?

No self-control, none. Pig.

Sometimes you break down. The body and the soul protest deprivation. We broke down from time to time, ordered pizzas or subs, sat in the main room of the dorm in front of the television, eating. Sometimes I threw up, sometimes I didn't. There was this weird unspoken agreement: If we eat together, it's okay, we've all got permission to eat. Those were good moments, when the part of us that wanted to be normal and healthy and loved food like anyone else broke through, and we sat giggling on the floor, munching away.

Those moments became, for me, few and far between. Marya, do you want to order a pizza? No thanks, I already ate. I'd disappear into my room to work. Sometimes I'd come out, sit with my friends, eat the spare crusts.

Of course I didn't know then that I had all the obvious signs of having an eating disorder: strange combinations of food, eating other people's leftovers, skipping meals. Part of the reason I didn't notice was because what I was doing was hardly unique. One day, late fall, standing in the main room after classes, a girl was eating a bag of microwave popcorn and offered me some. I took a handful without thinking and popped it in my mouth. Midchew, I asked to see the bag. I read the nutritional information and spit the popcorn into a trash can. She said, Marya, that's like
really
weird. I said, it's not weird, that popcorn is fucking
full
of fat. Another girl, sitting on the couch, concurred. I'd spit it out too, she said. The popcorn girl said, that's bulimic. I said the hell it is! I ought to know, I used to
be
bulimic, and spitting food out is
not
it. She shrugged. Looks bulimic to me, she said.