Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (24 page)

“Because this is a little embarrassing.” And they will say, “Why?”

And you will drop it, sitting there, attempting to will your body into silence.

Taking a dump will become an obsession. Taking a dump will be a topic of conversation, often a topic of terrific bawdy glee among the patients, sitting curled up on the couches, or beached, after meals, laid out on the floor, hands on the belly, groaning, distended, in no small measure of pain. The nurses will eventually get embarrassed and silence you: Let's move on to another subject, they'll say, and silence will seep over the room again. The fact of the matter is that you cannot take a dump. None of you can take a dump. You will beg for laxatives, but they cannot give you laxatives because more than half of you are addicted to them already, and they could kill you. You personally are not addicted to laxatives at that point, and the whole idea of using them for weight loss will seem utterly stupid to you, because it's not
real
weight you lose by shitting all day long.

It's just

water
weight, which isn't as
good
. Of course you do not know then that in less than six months, you and your disdainful ass will move into the bathroom for days at a time because yes, you too! will be eating whole boxes of chocolate Ex-Lax three times a day. Your bodies are in shock. Your intestines, not used to having food in them, or keeping it, will grip the six meals a day like a vise, tighten on the food, refuse to digest. You will lie in bed at night, picturing each item you've eaten, stuck somewhere, arranged in order of consumption: In your large intestine, Tuesday's meals, compacted but still whole; in your small intestine, Wednesday's and Thursday's, part of Friday's; in your stomach, Saturday's and Sunday's; Monday's meals are stuck in your esophagus and lunging toward the back of your throat. If you go too long without taking a dump—say, six to ten days—they will take you away to another part of the hospital and give you a barium enema. This is a nightmare. Barium is an explosive.

Your day will go like this: You will wake up in the wee hours of the morning with dreams of a boa constrictor wrapping around your arm. It will be a blood pressure cuff. You will, in hazy tones, ask the nurse how your pressure and pulse read. She may or may not tell you, depending on whether she's a regular nurse on the unit (won't tell) or a sub (will). You will sink back into sleep. In the morning, if you are me, you will wake up very early. This will get you in trouble because they will think you are waking up early to have unmonitored time to yourself, to exercise. You are simply used to waking up early, but you take their suggestion nonetheless and spend these early hours listening to the sheets hiss as your legs move up and down.

When the light turns from dark blue to pale gray, a nurse will come to the door to wake you up. Good morning, she'll say. You'll mumble, Morning. You will stand up too fast because you never, never get it through your thick head that your body is fucked up.

You will sway and sometimes fall over, which will put you on watch for the rest of the damn day. You will put on your paper gown, shivering, and get back under the covers to wait until it's your turn.

When it's your turn, a nurse will come to the door and usually hold your elbow as you go down the hall. You will stand o the high-tech scale that was probably construced for eating-disorder units because the

numbers face away from you. When you peer over to look at them, you find your weight reads in kilos. You don't know metric. You are furious. You are in a state of total disarray, as is everyone else on the unit. Most of you have known your weight minute by minute for sometime. It has become the center of your life, and this not-knowing simply will not do. You beg to know your weight, because you're new. When you've been there a little longer, you will listen to other new women bet with the same desperation, and you will exchange little knowing glances with the others in the hall. They never tell you. Your life comes apart at the seams.

You live, all of you, in a state of constant, crazed anxiety. You know you're going to gain weight. There's really no way to get around it. You can play all sorts of little games, and you will still gain weight. There is no way to describe the tiny, constant implosions of your chest when this thought hits you, as it does, often, day in, day out.

You take a shower in a stall with no curtain. You have to sit down on the little stool in the shower. You argue with the nurse about this.

“Why?” you ask. Most of the nurses will turn away in the chair where they keep watch, but not all. You will learn quickly which nurses you hate, which ones you do not hate. The ones you hate will watch. Because you are a little bitch, you will ask the one you hate most, “What, are you jealous?” She will attempt to shake her head in scorn.

But she is jealous. Most of them are not. Most of them think you're pitiful. But a very few have, shall we say, eating issues of their own.1

You have a trump card.

Your forbidden things will be kept in a little plastic cubby in the nurses' station: Razors, matches, cigarettes. You will be allowed, upon request, to shave your legs. Most of you will shave your legs every day. You will also agonize daily about what you will wear, and you'll apply your makeup perfectly, and curl and tease your hair, as if you had somewhere to go, as if you will not spend your day and the next and the next

1Judging by the number of women I've talked to who have gone through hospital-setting
treatment, it is fairly common to have nurses who have eating issues of their own. They are
certainly a source of serious irritation to their patients, who often find it difficult to listen
to advice from women talking out of both sides of their mouths. It seems reasonable that
hospitals should carefully screen nurses slated for rounds on an eating-disorder unit.

on the eighth floor of a hospital, with no one to see you but the nurses and the other fuck-ups in the cage. Almost all of you have been spending at least an hour daily refining your appearance since puberty. It is part of your routine, and your routine must be maintained, if only in name.

You will sit in the main room playing solitaire on the floor. You like mornings, because you feel peaceful then. You look forward to your day. Every day, the routine is as such: Breakfast, morning checkin, physical therapy, snack, morning class, lunch, occupational therapy, snack, free time, dinner, visiting hours, snack, evening checkin, bed.

It's like being at camp.

You will not realize until you get to treatment just how deep and abiding your obsessive love of food really is. It's not the way most people like food—the feeling of fullness, of communion with friends and family. Food
qua
lover. I remember the day I met Jane as she sat on a couch, doing something to an apple with her mouth that was positively erotic. She was still pretty sick. I asked: What are you doing to that apple? She looked up at me, startled, her tongue on the wet, white flesh. She laughed and said, “I'm making love to it.”

It was funny, but true. With both anorexia and bulimia, food becomes the object of your desire. You either prefer the desperate hunger of unfed passion, or the battering cycle of food moving in and out and in and out of your body in a rhythm that you never want to end.

Treatment, that first time, turned out to be divine. I had it easy. I was classified as bulimic, so I did not have to gain too much weight.

I got to avoid the weird agony some of the other women were going through, though I would later experience the frenzied panic at weight gain upon my frequent returns. Treatment, that time, turned out to be a grand buffet. They feed you normal food, and lots of it. In earlier years, eating-disorder facilities were big on force-feeding and providing massive quantities of high-calorie food, but they soon figured out that this treatment gave way to almost immediate relapse.

Now they give you a nutritionist who attempts to convince you that food is simply a necessary thing, neither Christ nor Antichrist. After the first week, when I flat-out refused to eat anything—it was more a statement than an actual fear of food—I went through the motions that we all went through, bitching

and moaning about how awful it was to have to eat, balking at the slightest drop of grease on our poached fish, taking as long as we possibly could to finish our food. The fact was, I was in seventh heaven. My life revolved around meals. Never believe an eating-disordered person who says she hates food. It's a lie. Denied food, your body and brain will begin to obsess about it. It's the survival instinct, a constant reminder to eat, one that you try harder and harder to ignore, though you never can. Instead of eating, you simply
think
about food all the time. You dream about it, you stare at it, but you do not eat it. When you get to the hospital, you have to eat, and as truly terrifying as it is, it is also welcome. Food is the sun and the moon and the stars, the center of gravity, the love of your life. Being forced to eat is the most welcome punishment there is.

In the little eating room, a nauseating late-1980s aesthetic will prevail. Heavy on the mauve. There will be a schoolroom clock on the wall, round glass face glinting with the ugly light of those long, humming fluorescent bulbs. You will stand in the doorway for a minute, looking for your tray. It will have your menu beside it. You will spot it, like spotting the face of a lover in a crowd, move toward it, feign disgust, pull your chair back, sit down. At first, you will honest-to-god be mortified, and really not hungry. Your stomach is shrunken, you are very simply afraid of food, and you will cry in despair. But as the body begins to come alive again, you begin to feel hunger, a racking sort of hunger, and you will damn near cry for joy.

Your menu: you have been given a chart, which tells you how many calories you have to eat per day. It breaks that number down into categories: Proteins, breads, milks, vegetables, fruits, desserts,

“satieties” (fats). These numbers dance like sugarplums in your head. The obsessive-compulsivity2 that you used to channel into hyperactive management of time and work is rerouted to a place where it can do some
real
good, and it twitches in your face like a tic when you sit down, each day, with your

2The obsessive-compulsive behaviors that creep up concurrent with eating-disorder
symptoms are not necessarily the same as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The eating
disorder, and the biochemical malfunctions that it causes, also cause obsessive thoughts and
behavior, which often decrease or disappear when the eating disorder is under control. OCD

is a separate disorder, and while it is relatively common in eating-disorder patients, the two
do not necessarily go hand in hand. I myself do not have. OCD, but when anoretic I sure
as hell seem to.

chart and your menu. You spend hours poring over it, trying out every possible combination of items that might fulfill your quotas.

You love the neat X in the box, the tidy circle around optional items, butter and jam, French or ranch. You will look forward to every meal, every snack, with a completely ridiculous level of excitement.

All of you will pretend to dread them. All of you are full of shit.

This time around, it will be summer. At meals and snacks, someone will turn on the radio, which sits on the counter running along one wall, under the cupboards where they keep the Ensure.

You will remember the Ensure, a nutritional liquid that you will get when you do not finish your food within the allotted time: half an hour for meals, fifteen minutes for snacks. As soon as you walk into the room, a nurse will look up at the clock and write down a time on the white dry-erase board on the wall. A nurse will sit down at the head of the table to watch you. She will not eat. She will not read a magazine. She will simply watch you. If she is young, she will join in the conversation, if there is one. Usually there won't be because you are all peering suspiciously at your food. If she is old, she will not talk. When the conversation inevitably turns to food, weight, exercise, she will speak. That's a nonissue, she'll say. You will find this incredibly ironic.

She will scrutinize your eating habits. If you are scraping the tines of your fork against your teeth, even silently, if you curl your lip back from the food in an involuntary sneer, if you are pushing your food around on your plate, or eating things in a particular order, day after day, as I did—liquids first, followed by vegetables, starch, fruit, entrée, and dessert—if you do any of these things, the nurse will pipe up: Marya, that's a behavior. When you are new, you'll ask, A
behavior
? You will sit there, trying to keep your lip as far from the food as possible without being obvious, thinking of all the connotations of a
behavior
.

Or if you commit a cardinal sin—spitting food daintily into your napkin, folding it expertly under the table, casually slipping the pats of mandatory butter into your pocket, hiding the last bites of food under your tongue (hiding it in your cheek never works, your cheeks are sunken and stretched)—you will find yourself in serious shit. If you do not finish your meal on time, you will be kept after. You will sit, with one or two other girls, while the nurse calculates the number of calories

left on your plate. How are you figuring this? you cry. How do you know how much Ensure to give me? That's too much! That's bullshit!

Watch your language, Marya, she warns as she pours the white liquid into a little plastic cup with measuring marks along the side. You will be given ten minutes to finish the Ensure. I'd speed it up, she'll advise, watching you sip as slowly as you can. You're making a choice, she'll say. This is supposed to be empowering. If you do not finish, you will be tube-fed.

You will remember the silence, the ding of tin fork to plate. You will remember the radio, KDWB bouncing along. Everyone will come to know every song on the playlist backward and forward.

You will remember a table of women, intently staring at their food, glancing at one another's plates, unconsciously mouthing the words to the songs between slow bites.