Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (20 page)

Christmas break came. I flew home. In the Traverse City airport we sat, nervous and sad, distracted, laughing too sharply. Few of us wanted to go back to where we came from. I got drunk in the Detroit airport, and even drunker on the plane. Calorie counting was pushed aside in favor of oblivion. My mother picked me up.

Her face was tight, her mouth pressed together in a thin line. I looked about thirty. My skin was ghastly pale, my red lipstick garish, black clothes too loose and too old. She gave me a stiff hug. We walked to the luggage carousel, barely speaking. Surely she was worried, that's all it was. But I was only fifteen, and my mother is a difficult woman to read. Her face clenched with—distaste? irritation? what had I done now? I said, sarcastically: Well,
you're
glad to see me.

She made that
tssk
noise and said, Oh Marya. I said, What? She
tssked
and turned her head, moved quickly, professionally, efficiently. We swooped through the airport like witches on twin brooms.

January was cold, February colder. During my vacation I had achieved the acclaim I'd wanted in the form of compliments for having lost weight, giving me an oddly flat, fleeting sense of accomplishment. I couldn't figure out how to say “no Christmas dinner for me, thanks” without causing a ruckus, and upon my return to school I decided to eat once a week, in penance for the minimal eating I'd done at home. I ate on Sundays. Rice.

I did this until I began bingeing and purging almost autonomously.

This sounds very odd to people who haven't been malnourished, maybe even to those who have, but scientifically speaking, your body will actually override your brain and
make
you eat. You suddenly find yourself hanging up the phone after having ordered a pizza, with no way to hide either pizza or the hunger it implies. You lock yourself in your bedroom and eat it and puke. Or, you find yourself alone in the cafeteria, filling plate after plate, and you're so bloody hungry that the smell of the food, the existence of all-you-can-eat buffets, the garish light and the laughter and hundreds of mouths opening wide and taking in food, take over and you eat and eat and eat and run to the bathroom and puke. Or, one day to find yourself walking along, and you impulsively stop in a restaurant, order an enormous dinner, and puke in the woods.

Maybe the issue is that your body remembers a time when you did eat normally. When you were hungry, you stopped at a restaurant and ate. There is a kind of buzzing that goes on in your brain, and you miraculously forget, at least long enough to eat, that you are studiously trying to be a good anoretic. Midway through the food you remember, but then it's too late and you're still fucking hungry and you're hungry even after the food's all gone, but then you feel so unbelievably guilty and hideous that you have to, you
have to throw up
, and so you do and everything feels better.

That's really the worst of it. That's what mortifies me now when I listen to women in the thick of it telling me how much better they feel when they barf, when they talk about the release, the comfort, the power, however illusory and short-lived, of being able to conquer nature. Of being able to spit in the face, or rather puke on the shoes, of this material realm. I remember that relief, that power. I miss it.

It hurts like a sonofabitch. It's disgusting, but it was my safeguard, my sure thing, my security, my life for all those years. It was something I knew for sure, no question, that I was good at. I knew it would be there for me when I needed it. That's the thing: It's still there. It wheedles at me, after dinner: Come on, you're stressed, wouldn't it feel better? You wouldn't be so full. Come on, just this once? It's always there, every day. The bathroom is right down the hall, precisely ten steps away from where I sit at my desk—and I have counted those steps, pacing back and forth some afternoons, ten steps, ten tiny little steps. If the need was great enough, I could make it in three long strides.

Right down the hall from me lies certainty, comfort, but it's a comfort that I cannot have anymore. Every goddamn day, I have to remind myself that right down the hall, right after the certain comfort, comes a grotesque death. I picture my husband finding me that way—on the floor in a pool of blood and vomit, dead of gastric rupture or a heart attack or both—and I plunk back down at my desk.

That is
control for me, sad as it sounds. But the fact of the matter is, a few years ago, I would not have been able to make this daily choice. I

would have believed that the throwing up, perhaps even the death itself, was control. I would have been very wrong.

February was claustrophobic, and things got stranger still. There was a sudden rage that swept over campus of desperate sex and cocaine and booze, a sudden spate of people kicked out of school when caught. A single cellist playing a sonata in the snow. People shuffling into class in their pajamas, a wild matted look to eyes and hair. There was my own mania one night—all I can say is that I wanted to make everything in my head stop moving around and jabbering at me, and that I may have done just a touch too much speed—that led me to the bathroom cabinet and had me swallowing all the pills we had, Fiberall, vitamin C, codeine, Motrin, aspirin. I remember the curious way the floor flew up at me. There was my early morning walk-crawl in the dark to the infirmary, asking to be excused from class, I just wasn't feeling well. They said no. The following week was a haze of classes that swerved in and out of focus, close-up and distant shots alternating madly through my eyes.

I began stashing uneaten food in my room. I had a little pencil box where I kept crackers, hard candies, stale pretzels, the occasional rubbery carrot stick. Lora brought me food from meals, which I rarely went to anymore. She'd toss packets of crackers on the book over which I was bent. I stashed them in my box. I kept them, in case.

This is a common habit of anoretics. There seems to be a biological basis for it. When a study was done on a group of young, healthy
men
whose daily caloric intake was cut to just under a thousand calories, they began to: stash food surreptitiously, talk about food constantly, chew gum and mints perpetually, read recipes for dishes they couldn't make. As the study went on, they were frequently caught digging through garbage cans, sneaking into the hospital kitchen to binge. They began to purge, and—interestingly enough—they became incredibly worried about their weight, the shape of their bodies, and began to
diet
. They worried about getting dirty, got disgusted with their own biological functions, and didn't want to touch food anymore.

Hmm.

I don't know where the body begins and the mind ends. Perhaps one of the fallacies endemic to both eating-disorders specialists and our cul

ture in general is that there is
either
a biological cause
or
an emotional cause for eating disorders. But the two become entangled. You yourself get terribly tangled up in both, and you don't know how to get out.

Whether the cause was malnutrition, neurosis, or an ineffable combination of the two, what changed very suddenly in that year was the way my mind worked. For as long as I had been bulimic—seven years, by that point—I had never before reached the state of complete and constant obsession that began that year at school and would characterize the years to come. A friend of mine who I'd meet later in life, one who never had an eating disorder, told me that she'd bent over the toilet once and began to throw up. But then she was suddenly gripped, she said, by a sudden sense that what she was doing was
wrong
. Not wrong in the sense of sinful, but wrong in a human sense—a crime against nature, the body, the soul, the self. She stopped. I think that prior to my sixteenth year, I had always understood in the back of my brain that this was true. I had a clear, haunting knowledge that my eating disorder was cruelty.

We forget this. We think of bulimia and anorexia as either a bizarre psychosis, or as a quirky little habit, a phase, or as a thing that women just
do
. We forget that it is a violent act, that it bespeaks a profound level of anger toward and fear of the self. That year, the questioning, whispering voice in my head fell silent.

With that voice gone, my eyes changed, and subsequently my world changed as well. Through the looking glass I went, and things turned upside down, inside out. Words turned themselves around, and I heard things in reverse. Inside the looking glass, you become the center of the universe. All things are reduced to their relationship to you. You bang on the glass—people turn and see you, smile, and wave. Your mouth moves in soundless shapes. You lose a dimension, turn into a paper doll figure with painted eyes.

You become fearless in a very twisted way. Reckless, careless, a cartoon character spinning its legs in glee as it falls from a cliff, splats flat, bounces back up. You sneeze, and your nose, cocaine torn, spatters blood. This pleases you, just as the small knives of pain please you when you run, the stabbing pain of each step, just as the worried, muted words of friends please you, just as your own voice pleases you when you say to

them, I just can't stop. You've made a decision: You
will not
stop.

The pain is necessary, especially the pain of hunger. It reassures you that you are strong, can withstand anything, that you are not a slave to your body, you don't have to give in to its whining.

In truth, you like the pain. You like it because you believe you deserve it, and the fact that you're putting yourself through pain means you are doing what you, by all rights, ought to do. You're doing something right. It's hard to describe how these two things can take place in the same mind: the arrogant, self-absorbed pride in yourself for your incredible feat, and the belief that you are so evil as to deserve starvation and any other form of self-mutilation.

They coexist because you've split yourself in two. One part is the part you're trying to kill—the weak self, the body. One part is the part you're trying to become—the powerful self, the mind. This is not psychosis, this splitting. It is the history of Western culture made manifest. Your ability to withstand pain is your claim to fame. It is ascetic, holy. It is self-control. It is masochism, and masochism is pleasurable to many, but we don't like to think about that. We don't like to think that a person could have a twisted autoerotic life going on, be both a top and a bottom, and experience both at once: the pleasure of beating the hell out of a body shackled at the wrists, and the pleasure of being the body and knowing we deserve each blow.

psychedelic. Winter began to break in

March, the sun changing from white to pale yellow, daylight creeping in earlier, the packed snow on the paths beginning to melt.

I was severely malnourished and moving faster and faster, with the bravery particular to fools, toward sickness, seeking out sickness with a passion. It was not that I
thought
that I wanted to be sick. It was simply that I was actively doing all I could do to be sick. On one level, I wanted very much to get caught. I did not want to get caught to be saved. I wanted to get caught to be seen as something, to have a claim to greatness, to have the sick admiration that comes to those of us who destroy ourselves particularly well. My god!

people say. You have so much
self-control
!

And later: My god. You are so, so sick. When people say this, when

they turn their heads, you've won your little game. You have proven your thesis that no-body-loves-me-every-body-hates-me, guess-I'll-just-eat-worms. You get to sink back into your hospital bed, shrieking with righteous indignation. See? you get to say. I knew you'd give up on me. I
knew
you'd leave.

But then what do you do? What are you worth if no one's looking?

How do you know you're even
there
? Back to the mirror you go, then, looking for something other than bones, other than the shadow of death at your back. It takes a long time to learn to see.

Death is a fascinating thing. The human mind continually returns and returns to death, to mortality, immortality, damnation, salvation.

Some fear death, some seek it, but it is in our nature to wonder at the limits of human life, at least. When you are sick like this you begin to wonder too much. Death is at your shoulder, death is your shadow, your scent, your waking and dreaming companion. You cannot help, when sleep begins to touch your eyes, but think: What if? What if? And in that question, there is a longing, too much like the longing of a young girl in love. The sickness occupies your every thought, breathes like a lover at your ear; the sickness stands at your shoulder in the mirror, absorbed with your body, each inch of skin and flesh, and you let it work you over, touch you with rough hands that thrill.

Nothing will ever be so close to you again. You will never find a lover so careful, so attentive, so unconditionally present and concerned only with you.

Some of us use the body to convey the things for which we cannot find words. Some of us decide to take a shortcut, decide the world is too much or too little, death is so easy, so smiling, so simple; and death is dramatic, a final fuck-you to the world.

Dear Father, I have no intention of making a peace pact
between my body and my soul, and neither do I intend to hold
back. Therefore, allow me to tame my body by not altering my
diet; I will not stop for the rest of my life, until there is no more
life left. You should not think that my body is so mortified and
weak as it seems; it acts this way so that I should not demand
the debt it contracted in the world, when it
liked pleasure.…Oh my body, why do you not help me to serve
my creator and redeemer? Why are you not as quick to obey as
you were to disobey His commands? Do not lament, do not cry;
do not pretend to be half dead. You will bear the weight that I
place on your shoulders, all of it.…I not only wish to abstain
from bodily food but I wish to die a thousand times a day, were
it possible, in this mortal life of mine
.