Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (22 page)

Marya, you're full of shit. We're leaving. She pulled me up by one arm and hauled me out while I yelled and tried to pull away. I had a very hard time not laughing. It all seemed like a great joke.

In the car, I passed out. Back to the infirmary. My parents were called. They were told that while this was obviously not a good thing, I was in no way too thin and had probably just been taking diet pills that hadn't agreed with me. It was May. The year was almost over, and I think it must have been decided that I could finish the year. In all likelihood, I probably convinced my parents that this was much ado about nothing. Nonetheless, I was sent to a psychologist off campus.

I do not think eating disorders were my therapist's specialty. I was
profoundly
pissy. I remember taking a cab there. She asked me, I think, if I had an eating disorder. I said no. Then what's going on?

I shrugged. I don't remember anything else about it.

The year sped up. Spring turned to early summer, preparations for graduation week began, people worked like mad getting ready for performances and readings and exhibits. We laughed easily. The sky was

bluer than blue, the air warm and very sweet. Now that the cat was out of the bag, I had to change my tune a bit. I convinced my friends that the “real” issue was my bulimia, and since I wasn't throwing up, everything was really fine. Besides, my stomach is all messed up and food makes me feel sick, so I can't eat very much, so I can't eat at all, today. I'm trying, I swear to god I'm really trying. With that, I'd take a bite of toast, start to cry, and set it back down on the plate. I just can't do it, I said, and they cried and I cried and they told me what a good job I was doing, not throwing up and all. I nodded and wiped away my crocodile tears and I still did not eat.

I fell again, while returning from smoking in the auditorium with a friend. It was early morning, still cool. We came up the hill, toward the cafeteria. I swayed and fell.

For the first time, I was scared. But only for a minute. I said: I'm just tired. Maybe I had a bad cigarette. She said, Come eat something, and I said, Oh no, that would make me throw up, I don't feel good, and she helped me walk into the cafeteria. I drank my coffee and held my head.

The last weeks are a blur. Friends were crying in administrators'

offices, trying to get them to do
something
! They would respond, quite understandably, What do you want me to do? I would sit slouched in my chair, arms crossed, telling them and almost believing that things weren't as bad as they looked. In truth, I didn't think they could possibly be that bad. I wasn't that thin. There were people far thinner than me, and that was all there was to it. I mean, we all know the dangers of starving, but bulimia? That can't be that bad.

It's only bad when you get really thin. Who worries about bulimics?

They're just gross.

We packed up our rooms, soared through finals, notched our belts with awards. Lora and I had little to say to each other, so we did not speak. Murmurs of destinations hummed through the dorms: Jul-liard, NYU, Oxford, Harvard, Oberlin, RISD, Yale, L.A. Chatters of who would be back, who could take it, who was going into treatment, who was touring Europe, who'd been signed, who'd made it, who hadn't. I was planning to come back, planning to sweep the writing awards the next year.

Part of me, the part that was still attached to the ground, walked into a teacher's office, knocked, closed the door behind me, and told him I

was going into treatment. The strange thing was, I didn't know that at the time. My fiction teacher, who had worked closely with me all year, pushing me so hard I at times thought I would die, who believed in my writing, sat back in his chair, baseball cap perched on his head, and rubbed his beard. He said: I'm sorry this is happening.

He said, leaning forward: I want you back here next year. Got that?

I nodded, looking away, trying not to cry. He said: Okay, punk.

Don't you stop writing. I shook my head and said: See ya.

It was not so much that I knew I wasn't coming back to Interlochen.

It was that I had a funny feeling I wasn't coming back anywhere.

My brain had split into two poles. At one pole was the basic survival instinct, the desire common to animals, beyond language and reason, to live. This side, the innate biological need to survive, is the one with which anoretics are at war. The survival instinct is what maddens anoretics and bulimics more than I can even articulate.

Whereas most people, when hungry, eat, and when sick, go to bed, I was cowed and infuriated by the blind binge, the sudden fall to the floor, each implying my body's needs, weakness, and ultimate mastery over
me
. Refusing to starve, my body ate; refusing to stand any longer, my body buckled and fell. The awful paradox is that, to me, it seemed that my emotional survival, my basic personal integrity, was dependent upon my mastery, if not total erasure, of my physical self.

At the opposite pole of my brain there was a desire to throw in the towel at an early age. Turn over the survival instinct and you will find its wet white belly, the instinct that tends toward death. I felt no anger toward this instinct and, curiously, had little fear of it—not yet—and I turned to it as an ally in my little war.

Eating-disordered people are aware, to a limited extent, that their behavior is dangerous. We may be deluded in a number of ways, but we are not so far gone that we cannot see the way our crusade—emotional survival, physical death—cancels itself out altogether. The body, many of us find to our great dismay, will always win.

Either it will survive despite our best efforts, dealing a blow to our egotistical notion that we can control it, or it will die, making emotional survival utterly moot. People who have eating disorders are all very different. I am certain that there

are people who just get eating disorders and are not necessarily trying to starve themselves to death. I was not one of those people.

I was trying to die, in a curious, casual sort of way. Some women I've talked to say they were just testing the limits of the human body—eating-disordered athletes in particular seem to have this idea—but they speak in a bizarre, almost proactive tone, as if they had always intended to stop. The eating disorder just got out of hand.

I did not intend to stop. I was not testing the limits of the human body—which implies a certain respect for those limits—so much as I was wondering what it would take to break through them. I wanted to see what was on the other side.

In retrospect, I can see that my manic run toward success may have been based on the belief? knowledge? that I had only a small window of opportunity in which to succeed. One night, earlier in the school year, Lora had asked me how long I thought I would live.

I lay there in bed and considered the question for a minute. I said,

“Maybe twenty.”

I figured it would take me about that long to starve to death. I came very close. Three years later, two months shy of my nineteenth birthday, the doctors gave me a week to live.

I didn't particularly want to live much longer than that. Life seemed rather daunting. It seems so to me even now. Life seemed like too long a time to have to stick around, a huge span of years through which one would be required to tap-dance and smile and be Great! and be Happy! and be Amazing! and be Precocious! I was tired of life by the time I was sixteen. I was tired of being too much, too intense, too manic. I was tired of people, and I was incredibly tired of myself. I wanted to do whatever Amazing Thing I was expected to do—it might be pointed out that these were my expectations, mine alone—and be done with it. Go to sleep. Go to a heaven where there was nothing but bathtubs and books.

The usual line on eating disorders is that they are an attempt to become a child again, a regression. Rather than looking at eating disorders as an infantile desire to return to an
ex utero
symbiosis with the mother, I think it's important to note that they might be a cultural and generational phenomenon of plain old-fashioned burnout. My generation was weaned on subliminal advertising, stupid television, slasher

movies, insipid grocery-store literature, MTV, VCRs, fast food, in-fomercials, glossy ads, diet aids, plastic surgery, a pop culture wherein the hyper-cool, blank-eyed supermodel was a hero. This is the intellectual and emotional equivalent of eating nothing but candy bars—you get malnourished and tired. We grew up in a world in which the surface of the thing is infinitely more important than its substance—and where the surface of the thing had to be “perfect,”

urbane, sophisticated, blasé,
adult
. I would suggest that if you grow up trying constantly to be an adult, a
successful
adult, you will be sick of being grown up by the time you're old enough to drink.

I got tired of trying to be that kind of adult. I don't think I was the only one. I couldn't imagine what the hell I was going to do with myself once I attained “success,” but I couldn't give up the panicky need to achieve it either. My idea of success was about to take a rather perverted twist.

Bear in mind, people with eating disorders tend to be both competitive and intelligent. We are incredibly perfectionistic. We often excel in school, athletics, artistic pursuits. We also tend to quit without warning. Refuse to go to school, drop out, quit jobs, leave lovers, move, lose all our money. We get sick of being impressive.

Rather, we tire of having to
seem
impressive. As a rule, most of us never really believed we were any good in the first place. I got tired of the feeling that I was constantly onstage, wearing someone else's clothes, saying someone else's lines. I quit the charade of excellence and sought out something that seemed like an easy route to the respect I wanted, a
real
respect: an eating disorder.

I didn't realize that I would apply the same unrealistic expectations to my illness. I didn't know in advance that I would never feel like I was good enough, like I was a “successful” eating disordered person until I was at death's door. Actually, not even then.

My mother arrived in the last week of school, her mother in tow.

I was wearing some sort of gauzy white thing. She hugged me. As we walked, smiling, passing through the throng of students and parents, she said, You look like hell. What? I said, waving to friends.

She said, Your face is covered with fur. My hand flew up to my face, felt the fine silky down on my cheeks. I said, Look how much weight I've lost. She said, sarcastically, Yes, dear. I can see how much weight you've lost. I asked proudly,

Don't I look good? She replied, You look like a ghost. You're gray.

We went to see Beckett's
Waiting for Godot
, a concert, a reading. I introduced her to everyone. She was looking at me funny. She was being unusually sweet—not that my mother isn't a nice person, just that
sweet
is not the first word that comes to mind to describe her.

She didn't know what was going on, but she was clearly going nuts with worry, though I think she was trying not to upset me. At graduation ceremonies, I sang with the choir,
I took the road less
traveled by, and that has made all the difference, all the difference
.

That afternoon, everyone hugging and waving and bawling, I climbed into the car and we drove to Chicago. I don't remember the first day except for the memory of badgering my mother to let me drive. High on speed and starvation, I'd done my driver's training that winter, learning to drive on icy, snowy Michigan roads. Maybe drug and blood-sugar testing ought to be mandatory for fifteen-year-olds in driver's ed. We pulled into Chicago late in the evening, my grandmother bitching, my mother white-lipped and terse, me dizzy and cranky. There was an enormous convention or festival going on, and the streets were gridlocked, the hotels full. We wound up at the Hilton or the Hyatt in a ridiculous suite with a separate room for the bathtub, which I promptly sank into, watching myself from all angles in the mirror-covered walls.

I decided, quite randomly, that I was hungry and proceeded downstairs to the five-star restaurant. I ate
quail
. To this day I have no idea what possessed me, but I remember that meal as if it was my last request before execution, the elaborately arranged corn thingamajig appetizer, the cold soup, the quail, the thick black coffee at the end, the mint. As I ate, I read. I signed the bill, went upstairs to the room, bent over the toilet, and began to throw up, when I decided the meal was too expensive to just flush. I stopped puking.

The whole affair was completely out of character. I lay down in bed and read for a while, pulled the little dangling cord of the bedside lamp and fell asleep, full at last.

The next morning, feeling guilty and rotund, I did not eat. We sat in a cafe on Oak Street, my grandmother picking at her food as she always did, admonishing me to drink my smoothie, my mother glaring at me. A bizarre dust storm upturned semis on I-94W and rain began to pour. I

remember the windshield, a sheet of running water, the murky green sky that comes before midwestern tornadoes. I bitched and whined the entire time, insisting that my mother ought to let me
drive
. It didn't seem to me that it would be so hard to drive in a tornado. I picked a fight with my mother, who was damn close to smacking me. I took that opportunity to tell her how she never let me do anything, that she thought I was just a little kid and never took me seriously. She sat silently, bent forward over the wheel. I jabbered on and on, reminding her of the last time we'd been stuck in the car together during a storm in the summer of 1987. I said: You HIT me!

She said: I didn't hit you. I said: YOU DID! We were driving along and you were pissed because you didn't get that job you wanted and you were just in a bad mood and you SMACKED me! You did!

(Can you blame her?) Finally she hissed:
Marya shut up! I cannot deal
with you right now
!

By the time we got to Edina, I had probably convinced her that I'd lost my mind. I, however, was planning my summer job, my summer books. We pulled up to the house, and my father ran out to give me a hug. In the refrigerator sat a big bowl of grapes with a sign that read: WELCOME HOME GRAPE HOG! When I'd lived at home I'd always eaten all the grapes before anyone else got to them. Grapes have-hmm-a laxative effect. I had the good grace to force a laugh and thank my father. He moved around the kitchen, hyperkinetic, worried, hugging me often, patting my back. I would later realize that their constant, unprecedented touching was a test. I would learn the difference between a hug and a bone count, hands roving down the spine with a bump-bump-bump, palm tripping on a shoulder blade.