Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (19 page)

Wrong. They have rules about what they eat, and eat “safe foods,”

as we'll call them in the hospital in a few months. Sugar was an obvious choice: fat free and it makes you hyper to boot and just think how much work you can get done when you're wired to the gills on cocaine, caffeine, and sugar! A steady stream of strange short stories spilled from my typewriter, weirder and weirder, more and more breathless and abstract.

Reading over them, years later, I can almost picture myself lifting up from my chair, levitating midair, staring off into space, the words that spilled out completely cerebral, not grounded in physical reality, all magical realism, all hallucinatory image, a clear, bizarre progression of stories about women who grew increasingly silent, increasingly pale, thinner and thinner, building to my pitiful literary de-nouement of that year. I wrote of a woman who disappears into thin air. Then of one who, while walking, finds herself crumbling into a pile of porcelain dust.
Disturbing and vivid
, scribbled the teachers,
Eerie, ungrounded
. On the last one:
Marya, come back down. You've
gone too far with this one
.

Lora wrote madly with a purple pen and worked herself into incredible states, trying to get the lines of her poems EXACTLY RIGHT.

I was buzzing with weird energy. Mania is easy when you're not eating because, of course, you have to keep your mind off food as much as possible. Food is such a hindrance to your progress, and you must keep yourself awake because if you fall asleep you're not burning any calories and not getting anything done. Time is of the essence when you're manic, you MUST GET THINGS DONE, anything, everything, and you must DO IT IN TIME, the White Rabbit dashing about looking at his pocket watch, I'm late! I'm late! The world won't stop for me and I have to catch it before it goes flying by and I MISS MY CHANCE to be INCREDIBLE. There is a deadline on incredibility and the clock is ticking away. My days and nights were planned in fifteen-minute slots in my notebooks. I was always checking my notebooks to see what I had to do next.

fighting over nothing. Well, not really over

nothing.

I was taking my shirt off, my back to her.

“Max, let me see your back.” Her voice was sharp. I had stopped changing in front of her. I had slipped.

“What? No.” I pulled my pajama tops on and went into the bathroom, locking the door.

“Max!” She banged on the door. “What the fuck is up with your back?”

“What are you talking about?” My hands ran their panicked course over the bones of my back, my collarbones, my wrists, my knees.

“Max, you
aren't eating! Come out here
!”

I came out and stood in front of the mirror, brushing my hair. It fell to the floor in thin dark clouds.

She stood at her desk, banging things. “You know, Max, this is, like, bullshit.”

I didn't say anything. I looked at myself sideways in the mirror.

I was thinner, but not thin enough yet.

“I mean, like, you could talk to someone about this, or something.”

I got into bed and vigorously cracked open a book.

“MAX,” she screamed.

I looked up, waiting.

“
Fuck you
,” she said. “I mean, about this. Just
fuck
you.”

She slammed out of the room.

smoke. I stood on the back of toilets in the

dorms, tight up against another girl, our faces lifted, baby-bird-like, our illicit, punishable-by-expulsion cigarette held up to the vent. I signed out to leave campus, walked, sometimes alone and sometimes not, down the worn road, into the woods. This was the first time in my life when I began to like being alone. I had always had a sharp fear of solitude, but now, the walks were necessary. I wanted the exercise. The girls and I had discussed the length of the walk from campus to the strip of shops at the edge of Interlochen. We estimated about two miles, and we debated at length whether you estimated how many calories you burn by the length of the walk or the time that it took. I figured by length because it would mean more calories.

I wanted the solitude. I walked, my steps matching the rhythms of words in my head. Words, a sudden unfailing companion: Turn left at the gate of the school, breathe, walk a while, and then the words would come, swinging like a metronome in my head. I'd walk and with each line breathe in, and with each line breathe out, and step, and step.

On weekends, we were 350 children dressed up to attend evening performances, the like of which I've not seen since. Still as snow, we sat in the audience, holding our collective breath, hearing the music in the

dark. Our fingers clutched the programs in our laps, our muscles followed, involuntarily, longing, the figures in their dance. On Tuesday nights, we shook our heads in time with the barefoot and goateed jazz combo, their calloused hands seducing sax and string bass into some song that moved, belly deep, through the swaying, sweating room.

Winter inched into the small world where we lived, drifting through small fissures in our walls, wind leaning its shoulder into the buildings, making them groan and sigh, the ground high and white, roads crunching under our feet. The snow fell in soft convul-sions, quilts of white drifting over our heads. In wool and scarves we blew from class to class, breath coming in small white explosions from our mouths. Inside, short of breath, fat flakes clung to our hair, their perfect geometries melting into patterns' of crystalline drops.

In the cafeteria I'd pour myself coffee and dribble one-third of a teaspoon of cream on the top. A small plate: carrot sticks, celery, mustard. As the year went on, I began to fill a bowl with a ridiculous amount of mustard, eat mustard straight, using a carrot stick more as a spoon than as an edible. It didn't actually seem that strange to me at the time, no matter how often people told me it was weird or made jokes about it. I was first and foremost concerned with the loss of weight, and hell, if mustard and carrots had no fat, no calories, and filled me up, then what the hell did I care? No one else was eating normally either, so who were they to talk? Most of the time, a big group of girls, including me, would jabber on about our diets, how much we'd lost. Other times it would look like someone was pulling ahead of the pack: so-and-so is throwing up, one girl says, and we'd all freak out. Oh no! we'd cry, as if we weren't all doing it. That's awful! Or the famous anoretic on campus, a dancer who (we whispered) had been in the hospital once (gasp) and had (we leaned closer) only
four percent body fat
! We said, No WAY. Are you SERIOUS? (The healthy range of body fat for most women is between 18 and 25 percent. Did it occur to us that four percent was potentially fatal? No. We were jealous.) Of course, there was body fat testing day for the dancers, and they all came back crying. Or if there was someone who usually ate more food than the rest of us, but who ate only celery for dinner one night, we'd be all over her like a pack of dogs, yapping and

snarling that That's like REALLY dangerous, you won't have any energy, STOP THAT RIGHT NOW! She'd burst into tears and say that her boyfriend wanted her to lose weight. Fuck him! Who needs it? we cried, and gave her hugs.

If I was terrifically hungry, I'd eat a few pretzels, a bit of corn, or some rice with lots of salt. Like, a really disgusting amount of salt.

Dehydration, induced by both incessant vomiting and a lack of nutrients, makes you crave salt in the worst way. It makes mustard delicious. It makes you want a salt lick. People stare, then try not to as you shake and shake and shake on the salt. You glance up, say,

“What?” When you get to the hospital, you will scream at the nurse, the nutritionist, the doctor, the laundry boy, because you only get one of those little teeny packets of salt with your meal. You want handfuls and handfuls of salt.

Sundays, we'd binge. Several of us, unspoken. On Sundays there was a dress-up brunch in the cafeteria, buffets of sugary institution rolls, muffins, Danish, coffee cake, huge stainless steel trays of crusting mashed potatoes, eggs, sausage, hash browns. We'd eat and eat and eat. But we ate strange things: seven blueberry muffins, an entire plate of salty mashed potatoes, fourteen chocolate chip cookies. Sunday afternoons, you'd see us, faces pinched, hopping aerobically up and down, pedaling wildly on ancient stationary bikes. One Sunday, standing in the cafeteria with Lora, eating frozen yogurt, a friend of hers said to me: God, do you do anything other than run and eat?

I said, defensively: I don't eat that much.

The bragging was the worst. I hear this in schools all over the country, in cafés and restaurants, in bars, on the Internet, for Pete's sake, on buses, on sidewalks: Women yammering about how little they eat. Oh, I'm starving, I haven't eaten all day, I think I'll have a great big piece of lettuce, I'm not hungry, I don't like to eat in the morning (in the afternoon, in the evening, on Tuesdays, when my nails aren't painted, when my shin hurts, when it's raining, when it's sunny, on national holidays, after or before 2 A.M.). I heard it in the hospital, that terrible ironic whine from the chapped lips of women starving to death, But I'm not
hun
-greeee. To hear women tell it, we're never hungry. We live on little Ms. Pac-Man power pellets.

Food makes us queasy, food makes us itchy,

food is too messy, all I really like to eat is celery. To hear women tell it, we're ethereal beings who eat with the greatest distaste, scraping scraps of food between our teeth with our upper lips curled.

For your edification, it's bullshit.

Starving is the feminine thing to do these days, the way swooning was in Victorian times. In the 1920s, women smoked with long cigarette holders and flashed their toothpick legs. In the 1950s, women blushed and said tee-hee. In the 1960s, women swayed, eyes closed, with a silly smile on their faces. My generation and the last one feign disinterest in food. We are “too busy” to eat, “too stressed” to eat.

Not eating, in some ways, signifies that you have a life so full, that your busy-ness is so important, that food would be an imposition on your precious time. We claim a loss of appetite, a most-sacred aphysicality, superwomen who have conquered the feminine realm of the material and finally gained access to the masculine realm of the mind. And yet, this maxim is hardly new. A lady will eat like a bird. A lady will look like a bird, fragile boned and powerful when in flight, lifting weightless into the air.

We feign disinterest and laugh, and creep into the kitchen some nights, a triangle of light spilled on the floor from the fridge, shoveling cold casseroles, ice cream, jelly, cheese, into our mouths, swallowing without chewing as we listen to the steady, echoing
tisk-tisk-tisk
of the clock. I have done this. Millions of people have done this.

There is an empty space in many of us that gnaws at our ribs and cannot be filled by any amount of food. There is a hunger for something, and we never know quite what it is, only that it is a hunger, so we eat. One cannot deny the bodily response to starvation, and that is part of the reason, some nights, I sat in the basement of the dorms, locked in a bathroom, watching myself in the mirror as I stuffed candy bars, chips, vending machine anything into my mouth, and then threw up. There is also a larger, more ominous hunger, and I was and am not alone in sensing it. It squirms under the sternum, clawing at the throat.

At school we were hungry and lost and scared and young and we needed religion, salvation, something to fill the anxious hollow in our chests. Many of us sought it in food and in thinness. We were very young at a time in our lives when the search for identity, present and

future, was growing intense, the hunger for knowledge and certainty extreme. Many of us came from less-than-grounded families. We were living inside a pressure cooker, competition tough, stakes very high, the certainty of our futures nonexistent, the knowledge that one is choosing a difficult life clear and the awareness that one's chances of “making it” were slim. This created, quite simply, a hunger for certainty.

We lived in a larger world where there is also a sense of hunger and a sense of lack. We can call it loss of religion, loss of the nuclear family, loss of community, but whatever it is, it has created a deep and insatiable hunger in our collective unconscious. Our perpetual search for something that will be big enough to fill us has led us to a strange idolatry of at once consumption and starvation. We execute

“complicated vacillations…between self-degradation,”3 the pendu-lum swinging back and forth, missing the point of balance every time. We know we need, and so we acquire and acquire and eat and eat, past the point of bodily fullness, trying to sate a greater need.

Ashamed of this, we turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how to not-need.

Not everyone at school was obsessed with food. There were the others. Oddly enough, my closest friends there were marginally healthy about diet (of course, several of them were male), and simply by virtue of being young, very few of my friends knew anything about eating disorders beyond their conceptual existence. This problem, rampant as it was, did not share the same very public sphere at Interlochen that drugs and drinking did. As the dead of winter set in, my friends began to worry. I ate strangely. At meals, they'd say, too casually, Mar, don't you want some? They'd push food at me. You need protein, Anna would say. Have some cottage cheese, have some beans, eat something, you must be hungry. By December, I had decided to ingest one hundred calories a day. It seemed a good number, a tidy number, a “diet” rather than a disorder, a Plan. Carrots, mustard, two pretzels, the milk in my coffee.

My friends would sit down at breakfast, loudly saying: Oh, yum, I love oatmeal. Mar, go get some oatmeal. It's really good today, Mar.

Oatmeal is

3Ibid., 270.

low fat, they'd say in a singsong voice, waving bowls of oatmeal under my face as I scowled, pulling back from it like a baby having a good pout. Mar, you'll be hungry, they'd say. I'd change the subject.