Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (21 page)

—SAINT MARGARET OF CORTONA, IN A LETTER TO HER CONFESS-OR ORDERING HER TO EAT. D. FEBRUARY 22, 1297, OF STARVATION.

March. Two friends and I lay on the bed in a dorm room. We talked about sex, one-upping each other with what we'd done.

Flopped on our backs, we brag of the careless use of our bodies, our common disdain for the boys or men. I didn't feel a thing, we'd say with pride. We talked about food and weight, we talked about diet and loss.

The air warmed and the trees began to bloom small green buds.

It was breezy, sunny spring. I walked roads in late afternoons, out to an empty school yard, through the woods to a creek, with two other girls or alone, took off my shoes and rolled up my pants, dipped my feet into the brook, the ice water of melted snow. Sun played on the ripples and wet rocks, shone through the clear water to the pebbled brook floor. On brave days, we took off our clothes and swam, breathless and laughing with the shock of cold, the shock of water's motion after months of the ice's stillness.

My friend Jeremy remembers this time, the rush of spring and pollen, the way people move more quickly, bodies thawing, blood coursing through the veins like cold streams. He remembers knocking on my window one night. Lora told him that I was at the top of Kresge Auditorium, an enormous coliseum of an auditorium with stone floors and steel supports, a web of metal and wire that held up the arched roof. The top? he said. She said, Yeah. She climbs up into the rafters to smoke.

I picture myself up there—I was certainly not the first to go—a small girl, a pile of sweatshirts, perched on a metal beam by the ceiling, smoke coiling about my head. I remember looking down, the dizzy, heady feeling of the heads weight pulling forward, pulling toward the stone floor some hundred feet down.

A rustle of wind off the lake swept through the campus, tousled hair, and the craziness shifted again. Talk of contests and auditions and graduations was constant. There were late nights and endless workshops. Lora and I both won national writing awards that spring.

We grew increasingly distant, as I spent more and more time in the company of other dieting girls who didn't ask, or alone. Lora saw too much and was too angry, and I was too bent on not-eating. It was impossible for her to ignore it, and it pissed her off. Fights grew more frequent. She knew what was going on. She occasionally hauled me bodily to the cafeteria and then sat there glaring at me while I ate Jell-O. She told the resident advisor, who spoke to me briefly about it. At breakfast, a girl said to me, admiringly: Oh my god, you've lost so much weight! You look great! I'm so jealous. Lora furiously said, Jesus Christ, don't encourage her. She pushed her chair back and started slamming her things together. The girl put her hand around my arm, forefinger touching thumb. Wow, she sighed. Lora shoved her chair in and said, Don't expect me to be at your funeral, and walked off. Someone said, What's up her butt? I shook my head. Nothing, I said.

There was some part of me that could not understand, at that time, why she was so angry with me. There was a part of me that believed it was none of her business, not her problem. It was strange, because other people's concern, their hugs and advice, just fed into it. I just wanted to get more sick. Lora's anger scared me. I think it reminded me that I had no right. And as I would do for years to come, I got angry at the people who loved me the most and therefore pulled no punches. I wanted to be coddled. I wanted someone to say, Oh, poor baby, everything will be okay, we'll make it better. I did not want someone to say, This is bullshit. No one wants to hear the truth about themselves. Lora was telling the truth, and I moved out.

spring break.

It happened in late morning, a few weeks after we got back. I went to breakfast, my zest for starvation renewed by weeks of bulimia. I was

wearing pink sweatpants and a white sweatshirt. I remember it was cool but bright, incredibly bright. The light hurt my eyes, the scattered sudden white light between leaves that moved in the breeze was sharp. I must have been looking up because I remember the trees, and the light, and the pain in my forehead, my squint. I remember the three glasses of water I drank at breakfast, the pain in my chest, the nauseating fullness I always felt after the water. To this day I hate water. The taste of water feels empty, hungry, sick. I drank coffee, two cups. I had stopped using cream. I drank it black. When we finished breakfast, I stopped at the buffet line and picked up twelve chocolate chip cookies, putting them in the inside pocket of my bag. I remember the chocolate chip cookies: bendy, chewy. I hadn't eaten them in months, but I liked to have them around. I went out the front door of the cafeteria, turned right, crossed the main square of the campus. I went in the door of the classrooms building, walked down the hall, went into the English department, turned left, walked into fiction workshop, said hello, and passed out.

It was not the first time I'd fallen. It wasn't even the first time I'd faded, slipped, and fallen, not the first time I felt my vision blur and dim. But before there had always been a few things to warn me: the knees buckle, the center of gravity dissolves and the arms feel like they've begun to float, the ears ring, the eyelids flutter. It's just like the movies. I could always see myself falling, I'd always known.

This time it just went black.

I don't know what happened next. My next memory is of someone helping me up the stairs to the dorm. A friend of mine happened to be standing at the desk and saw me held up by the shoulders, unable to focus. She caught me and yelled for someone to help. Someone came running, and got me from there to the infirmary. I remember trying to walk and being unable to. I remember the feeling of gravity pushing us backward. I apologized for being so heavy. I was laid down on a bed. Someone took my temperature, another pulled me upright to a sitting position and veered dangerously close to my face with orange juice in one of those little paper Dixie cups they keep in infirmary bathrooms. Someone had one hand on the back of my head and one on the cup, was forcing my mouth open, tipping my head back, pouring the juice

down my throat. This I remember: As they stood there, still holding my head, I threw the juice up, on purpose, back into the cup. I fell back onto the bed and said: I have the flu.

Eating disorders have the centripetal force of black holes. I remember, that day, pulling into myself and not caring about who I was sucking in after me—the friends at the bedside, the nurses. I remember curling up under the thin white blanket, fading in and out of sleep, panicked by the faint taste of orange juice on my tongue, lulled by the memory that I had thrown it up, it was okay, it hadn't gotten in. That, I remember: the sorry little mantra I sang in my head, the lying lullaby, It's-okay, it's-okay, it's-okay. I remember the sunny, day outside the window, the tops of the trees that tapped on the panes.

And I remember being utterly, utterly pleased with myself.

Why?

Because I was disappearing. A disappearing act, the act of becoming invisible, is, in fact, a visible act, and rarely goes unnoticed. There is a strange sort of logic to this: We expect, in this world, that human beings will bear a human weight and force—there is a fascination with all human rebellions against material limits, with that small step into the supernatural, or what we imagine to be supernatural.

I am not saying that the act of erasing the body
is
magic, but it
feels
magical. Houdini, barefoot, walks across the coals, and the gathered crowd sucks in its breath. Houdini disappears into thin air; the gathered crowd murmurs and looks around wildly.

There is an even more urgent appeal to the anorexic body. We know, we've learned through the indoctrination of cultural babble, that we too can strip away the flesh, we too can “magically” drop pounds, “melt away” pounds, watch the pounds “disappear.” The skeletal body can be ours for a nominal fee. As the average American steadily grows heavier, the passionate fascination with and fetishiz-ation of the anorexic body also grows. Women fling themselves headlong down the rabbit hole, everyone else is going, it can't be so dangerous. There are people reading this who may think to themselves: What if I just tried it? What if I just lost a few more pounds?

After all,
she's
still alive.

Not quite.

the infirmary. My friends and the boy I was

seeing came to visit me. We found an ancient box of Girl Scout Tre-foils (shortbread) in a drawer. I ate them all and threw them up. It baffled me, even then, that the nurses didn't go into a frenzy. They periodically took my blood pressure and my temperature, and congratulated me on my (dangerously low, I will soon find out) blood pressure—I didn't know, at the time, that my blood pressure bore a relation to my health—and put me back to bed. I didn't know, then, that the only medical professionals acquainted with the signs of an eating disorder were specialists.

Friends would visit me in my little infirmary nest in the late evenings, when the yellow light from a cheap lamp would spill over the bed where we all curled up. I was full of good cheer, the picture of contrition, avowing my commitment to health. I did a funny thing.

I agreed with a friend of mine that I needed to go into AA. In truth, I did have a problem with chemicals: I was using them as a substitute for food and had been for years. In truth, what I wanted was a group of people who wouldn't judge me, wouldn't lurch up in their seats with alarm when I said: I'm sick. There was a little AA clique of underage recovering alcoholics and addicts at school. They had special permission to take the bus into town on Sunday mornings and sit in the room where AA met, smoking to their hearts' content.

I called my parents that day and told them I was going into AA. My father said only this: Why?

Sunday mornings, we left campus, and the sky seemed suddenly wider. The laughter on the bus was, I would later note, a great deal like the laughter of the girls on the hospital unit when we got to take a three-block walk, when the miniloonies from the bin took a little field trip to the pool. It was a reckless sort of laughter, as if a sudden rush of oxygen had hit the brain. We sat in the room, smoke so thick you couldn't see. After a few meetings, I sat up and announced: Hi, my name is Marya. (Hi, Marya.) I'm cross-addicted. I paused. I said: And I think I'm bulimic.

As the words came out of my mouth, they felt like a lie. I felt, God help me, like I was
bragging
.

I loved the group. I loved feeling that things would be okay, that if I

just went to meetings, and Stuck to the Program, all would be fine.

I especially loved the step that said: I am powerless over this disease.

I think this assumption of powerlessness is the most dangerous thing an anoretic can hear. It grants license, exoneration. I liked sitting back in my chair, chain-smoking, sighing with relief and thinking: This is beyond my control. The mind lifts its hands from the wheel and says: I hand this over to a higher power. God, don't let me crash.

People who've Been to Hell and Back develop a certain sort of self-righteousness. There is a tendency to say: I have an addictive personality, I am terribly sensitive, I'm touched with fire, I have Scars. There is a self-perpetuating belief that one simply cannot help it, and this is very dangerous. It becomes an identity in and of itself.

It becomes its own religion, and you wait for salvation, and you wait, and wait, and wait, and do not save yourself. If you saved yourself and did not wait for salvation, you'd be self-sufficient. How dull.

At Interlochen, there is no prom, but rather Morp,
prom
spelled backward. I had convinced the several dorm parents that I was well enough to go. I had to promise that I was telling the truth and knew that if anything went wrong, I was in deep shit. I remember one woman, a small, tough woman, who looked me in the face and said: If you're lying, you're out of here. It was a threat that hung, with good reason, over the heads of most of the students. Expulsion lurked in the background waiting to catch you in the act of sex, smoking, drinking, drugs, and now, illness. I wheedled, I cried. I was getting rather good at both. I went.

The costumes were fantastic. A bunch of us got dressed in our room. There had been a debate over shaving our armpits, and we eventually did, and were subsequently bereft. We took a bus to a restaurant on the bay and had dinner. I ate a potato, excused myself, quietly threw up while my friends redid their lipstick. My date and I walked on the beach, high on the smell of salt and the sunset. I took off my shoes (teenage love is terribly dramatic). My head began to spin, just slightly. We took the bus to the club. The dance floor throbbed, skin flashing wet and red under colored lights, eyes glassy.

My friends and I moved through the club, from pool tables to dance floor and back again. I

leaned against a wall, trying to breathe. Smiling very bright. My black satin dress began to cling, cold and damp, to my skin.

While dancing, I stumbled. I made my way through the bodies to the bathroom, sat down in a stall, leaned my face against the cool metal of the wall. I steadied. I stood. Back on the floor, strobe lights were flashing, and I couldn't balance. There was too much spinning, too much flashing, faces suddenly garish, absent-eyed smiles flickering on and off, limbs moving too quickly, too close. I began to flinch, holding my hands up to my face, trying to focus, and stumbled off the floor to return to the bathroom, my friends at my heels. I bent over at the waist and began to cough, blood spattering on the white porcelain tile, rasping out the words: I'm fine, I'm fine while my friends screamed. With my back to the wall, I slid to the floor: A distinct drop in altitude, a feeling rather like slipping under water, temperature falling, gravity losing its hold.

A friend furiously slammed out of the bathroom and got one of the chaperons. She stood above me, listening to the chaotic noise of my friends telling her in shrill voices what had happened, me insisting that I was all right. She finally cut in with: All of you, shut up.