Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (25 page)

When I got to treatment the first time, I was not one of the emaciated ones. I was definitely slim, far thinner than is normal or attractive, but because I was not
visibly
sick, the very
picture
of sick, because I did not warrant the coveted title of Anoretic, I was embarrassed.

Ignore the fact that my diastolic pressure had a habit of falling through the floor every time I stood up, putting me on watch for sudden cardiac arrest, or the fact that my heart puttered along, slow and uneven as an old man taking a solitary walk through the park.

Ignore the fact that I had a perforated esophagus and a nasty little habit of coughing blood all over my shirt. In treatment, as in the rest of the world, bulimia is seen as a step down from anorexia, both in terms of medical seriousness and in terms of admirability. Bulimia, of course, gives in to the temptations of the flesh, while anorexia is anointed, is a complete removal of the bearer from the material realm. Bulimia hearkens back to the hedonistic Roman days of pleasure and feast, anorexia to the medieval age of bodily mortification and voluntary famine. In truth, bulimics do not usually bear the hallowed stigmata of a skeletal body. Their self-torture is private, far more secret and guilty than is the visible statement of anoretics, whose whittled bodies are admired as the epitome of feminine beauty. There is nothing feminine, delicate, acclaimed, about sticking your fingers down your throat and spewing puke. Denial of the flesh, however, is not only the obvious culmination of centuries of bizarre ideas about the dainty nature of

women but also an active realization of religious and cultural ideals.

And yet this is a culture where we seesaw madly, hair flying and eyes alight, between crazed and constant consumption, where the insatiable hunger is near universal, as is the fanatical belief in the moral superiority of self-denial and self-control. Culturally, we would be diagnosed as bulimic, not anorexic, daily veering back and forth between two extreme points, bingeing and purging. The frenzied adoration of the anorexic body, and the violent hatred of fat, on ourselves and on others, reveals not that anorexia is beautiful, nor that fat is particularly despicable, but that we ourselves are intolerably torn, and we have to choose sides.

You, Doctor Martin, walk

from breakfast to madness. Late August,

I speed through the antiseptic tunnel

where the moving dead still talk

of pushing their bones against the thrust

of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel
or the laughing bee on a stalk

of death.

—ANNE SEXTON, “You, DOCTOR MARTIN,” 1960

he doctor, one Dr.J.,

had been an army physician prior to his

advent in EDI (Eating Disorders Institute) as resident paterfamilias to a family of shrunken pygmy girls. We wondered aloud at what had moved him to make this odd career change, to stride, white coated and unsmiling, into our midst with his clipboard of questions and bottles of pills.

My parents remember him differently than I do. It is worth noting that I lived on the unit, they did not. My parents were (briefly) under the impression, as most people are, that treatment would fix me. Dr.

J. was seen, however unconsciously, as my potential savior. Dr. J.

has since gone into the medical insurance business, and I am sure that he is very good at it. He, as might have been predicted, was not very good as Christ.

To the best of anyone's knowledge, we were the most annoying crea

tures Dr. J. had ever come across. He did not laugh or smile, did not noticeably give a damn. To his credit, he did tell my parents that the only person who was going to save me was me. They did not, at that time, believe him. Dr. J. did not care for me much. I was difficult, mouthy, disruptive, “not receptive to treatment,” unpleasant, rude.

I did not much care for him, either. We saw him on his rounds once a day. He asked how you were feeling and granted or denied you a pass to leave for an hour or a day. He asked if you wanted prunes and bran with breakfast, and if you wanted happy pills. He determined whether you would be allowed to take a stroll with the nurses at noon. He peered at you, bemused. After rounds, girls sat, sullen, or quietly weeping, or screaming in their rooms. Partly the weeping, the screaming, came from predictable sources: Dr. J. had refused a day pass, or revealed their weight, or informed them that their caloric intake was being bumped up. The screaming also came about because he was an unmitigated ass.

We specimens slowly filed down the hall to physical therapy and lay on the floor stretching (watched very closely). We made moccasin after moccasin from kits with dull, wide-tipped needles. And we crocheted and latch-hooked little poodle rugs, cross-stitched and knitted, and made collages from magazine clippings that were supposed to express our very deepest selves. Occupational therapy is supposed to give you a sense of effectiveness by showing you that you can actually do something other than starve. We had assertiveness groups, where we practiced asking for what we needed, and nutrition classes where we sat, rapt, learning that a piece of pizza counted as an entrée (one protein, one bread). We played role-playing games where we said something we really, really wanted to say to some member of our family, using I-Feel Statements. And we did our morning checkin (my Goal for the Day is to write in my journal, ask Dr. J. for a pass, finish my milk) and sat on our pillows on the floor, legs splayed, tendons jutting grotesquely from the backs of knees, coloring in coloring books, making little construction-paper cutout signs to hang in our rooms: SYMPTOMS ARE NOT AN OPTION, I HAVE THE RIGHT TO TAKE CARE OF MYSELF, I AM

LOVED, TODAY I ALLOW MYSELF TO EAT.

I sat in the groups, not participating, partly because I was in a snit and partly because the topics seemed to have little to do with me.

Passivity

was not something that kept me up nights. My ability to state my feelings seemed perfectly well developed to me, considering how much time I spent on that unit, seething over yet another warning that my excessive temper, my language, my Attitude, were making Recovery difficult for everyone else.

My parents came to visit in the evenings. My father and I played gin rummy, double solitaire, crazy eights. We didn't talk much. We certainly didn't talk about what was going on. Periodically we'd fight, and they'd leave. Everyone on the unit talked about how nice my parents were, how well we got along. I nodded.

One night, my mother came alone. This was potentially dangerous.

My father acted as a buffer between us, I acted as a buffer between them, my mother between my father and I. Classic triangulation. A house of cards depends on the stasis of each; pull one out, and ashes, ashes, we all fall down. My mother sat in a chair by my bed while I played solitaire on my bed tray. In therapy it had come to my attention, despite my adamant insistence that my mother was immortal and lived on Mount Olympus, that my relationship with her was perhaps less than perfect. It had been suggested to me, in therapy, that I might have picked up some of my neuroses about food from my mother.

I casually broached the matter with her. I mentioned that she was perhaps a bit overconcerned with her own body, her weight, how much she ate. She sat in her metal hospital chair, arms crossed, fingers flickering, smiling a patronizing smile. I pressed her. The smile turned nasty, and she announced that I had no business blaming her for my problems. I said, I'm not blaming you, I'm just saying I might have picked up some habits—

She said,
Sweetheart
, you didn't pick anything up. You just came this way.

She stood up from her chair, picked up her purse, and walked out. I lay on my bed, looking at my reflection in the night-blackened window. I turned my face into my pillow, then pulled the pillow over my head.

I had just come like this, with a peculiar tendency to self-destruct.

I went to individual therapy on Tuesdays. My family and I sat through family therapy on Thursdays. My mother was cold, sat back in her chair, legs crossed, one arm holding her waist, one hand flickering, twitching,

touching the upturned collar of her shirt, the sharp lapel of her suit.

She didn't meet my eyes. Pressed by the therapist, she would snap, eyes flashing, a quick stiletto to the ribs. My father was warm, concerned, leaned forward, elbows on his knees. When pressed, he would snap, voice rising, jaw clenching, a blunt fist beating steadily on his thigh. I tied myself into a strangle knot in the corner of my chair. Went for the jugular, swore. Hissed at my mother, uncoiled, snakelike, to shout with my father, face to spitting face.

At first we went in smiling. I was their little girl and I was sick.

They were gung ho to get me all better. We talked a good game, their arms around my shoulders. My witty jokes. This ended quickly.

Sixteen years of a bad marriage, and sixteen years of a fucked-up child, were swollen and pulsing under the skin, waiting to burst.

My parents were scared, but they were also new at this. They believed, then, that it was simply a matter of getting me fed. Things would return to normal. This is the Little-Bit-Overboard-on-Her-Diet Theory. This holds the real issue—the fact that you're dabbling in a fatal disease, on purpose—at bay and stalls any meaningful progress. You don't yet know that monsters larger than diet and weight will have to be worked through. Your family will have to look at you in a new light: not simply as their little girl—even the parents and spouses of older eating-disordered women often display this attitude—but a human with a history, a range of emotions, a person perhaps more complex than they perceive. And you will have to look at them as humans, fallible, who love you, rather than as either enemy or savior. You will all have to grow up a great deal.

Neither my family nor I was ready to do that yet. It was easy for us not to. They saw my eating disorder as just one more weird outcropping of my contentious, possibly crazy nature, and I saw them and their attempts to be supportive as one more example of their general awfulness. Both of us were very wrong. Neither had, at this point, any other way of looking at it.

Family therapy was spent fighting. Predictably, my mother said it was my father's fault, he said it was her fault. Then they changed directions, created an unprecedented Marital Alliance, and agreed that it was my fault. Oddly, I agreed with the therapist that it wasn't anyone's fault, and

that we were wasting time with our endless fire breathing of blame.

I did enjoy, however, having permission to tell my parents, without censor, what idiots they were. They, too, enjoyed the padded oasis, the hour a week that allowed them to rip each other apart, limb by limb. The sessions were beyond virulent. All the years of making it work for my sake, all the years fearing a dam break if only a word too many was said, fell apart. On a kamikaze mission, we flew at terminal velocity toward each other.

Things would never be the same. You cannot watch your child kick death's door and expect that you will forget. You cannot tear open family wounds and hope that they will heal without a scar.

Everything changes. For better or for worse, the family fell apart.

A few friends from Edina visited me in the hospital. I sat on the bed, blanket over my knees, trying to laugh. It was my best friend's birthday, they had balloons. They were going out after visiting me.

They brought flowers, filled me in on local gossip. We didn't talk about where I was. We hung in blank space and fell silent when the nurse came in to take my blood pressure, temperature, pulse. She returned with a cup of Ensure. I bit my lip. I could not ask why I was being given extra calories. I had to be normal. I could not scream or cry. I smiled weakly and, hands shaking, drank it as my friends tried not to watch. They hugged me, stiffly, one by one, and left.

I knew the night they came that they wouldn't be back. I didn't want them back. I was embarrassed, humiliated, and I didn't want to deal with anyone who would remind me of what a mess I was.

My year-long absence had created an unbridgeable distance. My illness exacerbated it. What held me to a past I didn't want snapped very fast. I was free to go.

August:Vital signs stabilized, head cleared a little, I felt strong and restless. I ate when I was told, taking normal bites. I confessed, in therapy, a wide-eyed desire for health. Life, I said, beckoned. I feel so good about myself, I said. My charts noted that I made a complete and sudden turnaround. Treatment effective.

In the hospital, I did not get well. I got worse. I would've gotten worse anyway, I was so far gone. But the hospital became a haven for me, as it does for many of us. It became the Eden I longed for when I was out. It was as close to death—that still, silent, very safe place—as I

thought I could come. Life stops. Time stops. You become a case, a study, a curiosity, a problem, a sickness, a child. You do the cross-word puzzle all day long. You read countless books, undisturbed.

And when they let you out at last, you are far more scared than when you went in.

Out of the hospital, I slept around. Some guy from AA thought I was pretty, so we'd have sex in the back of a car. Cool night, fall coming early, mist on the glass, I thought how funny, the print of my toes on the window. I sat in an all-night diner, picking apart a fat-free muffin, smoking Camel straights.

I would later reflect, with morbid pride, on the incredible work it must have taken to craft so careful a lie. I would reflect on the seamless, smooth surface I must have shown: the magician pulls the endless scarf from his sleeve, the slippery silk snaking on, and on, and on. I managed, somehow, to convince my parents that I was in perfect condition to move to California. The salt air will do me good, I said. Plans were made. I would rent a room in the house of my father's ex-wife. I would attend the high school where she taught, where her son was enrolled as a sophomore. I would have weekly individual therapy, twice-a-month visits with a psychiatrist, a nutritionist, an M.D. I have a weight to maintain. I will be weighed.