Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (26 page)

Nothing will escape the watchful eye. Or so the story goes.

At the end of August, I kiss everyone good-bye and board a plane bound for San Francisco. On your left, says the pilot over the speaker, are the Rockies. I am drunk on Bloody Marys. In the warm late-summer night air, I take a shuttle bus north, sit next to a man who tells me about his daughter, his money, his job. Hand on my knee, hand on my hand, my hand pulled to rest on his short, thick cock. Stuck in the back of a bus with nowhere to go and nothing to say that wouldn't be rude, I have silent sex with a married man in his wide, comfortable seat, my knee caught between the armrest and his hard clenched thigh. Afterward, he reads a magazine by the light of a full moon. I watch the shimmering hills, the wide swaths of tilled land where low fog clings and spins, blue and ethereal, the wild apple trees that hunch their backs and hover like vultures at the side of the road.

I breathe deep, press my head back into my seat as Highway 101

flies by. I smile. I've become the Artful Dodger. I have a new game.

5 “Persephone Herself Is but a Voice”

California
, 1990-1991

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! let me guide myself with
the blue, forked torch of this flower down the darker and darker
stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone
goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm
where darkness is awake upon the dark and Persephone herself
is but a voice or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense
gloom, among the splendour of torches of darkness, shedding
darkness on the lost bride and her groom.

—D. H. Lawrence, “Bavarian Gentians,” 1932

It's a very dark house. Set far back from the main road, up a steep dirt driveway overhung with trees webbed with Spanish moss, down the driveway, past the chicken coop with the mad old rooster who crows at 2, 3, 4 A.M., up the driveway again. Ahead of you, the huge dark house, slipping slowly down the foothills of Bennett Mountain. Behind you, a valley, swimming in purple moon. Sky wide and cool. All around you, hills and trees and wild sounds, hisses through dry grass and whispering leaves and the quick pummel of hooves.

A sagging deck runs along the front of the house. Two chairs, a small table, an ashtray full of butts smoked only two-thirds of the way down. Up the stone steps with the wrought iron rail, you open the brown door. Inside the doorway, a stairway in front of you, a door to your right, kitchen to your left. Dark. Past the kitchen, a dining room, then living room, bedrooms you never enter. Woodstove, tall black pipe. You will, when winter comes, sit on the woodstove in your jacket, freezing cold, trying to get warm. You will melt your coat to the seat of your pants without noticing.

Become familiar with this kitchen. Stand in the doorway. Left: counter, microwave—you will need this, pay attention—sink, window over the sink, looks through the tall wild rosebushes, down the hill, into the valley. The coop, the old toolshed where a seldom-seen man named Ray lives and makes paper masks. Dead cars, burrowing into fallow ground, weeds sprung up around: Volvo, ancient green camper, occasional others, you will never keep close track. From the sink, you can see the garage, the overgrown garden, the hills.

On the counter: toaster, jelly, honey, peanut butter, butter, sugar in a blue and white bowl, salt, spices, cutting board. Bowl of fruit: apples, oranges, bananas, one kiwi on its last legs. In the cupboards: pots, pans, potato chips, rice cakes, bread, small crumpled plastic bags holding stale heels. A fish tank in the corner, piranha in the tank. Piranha will later commit suicide during dinner, leap in a macho show of belly-muscle right out of its tank to die gasping on the floor. Birdcage with a muttering green bird. Ancient cat who sleeps on the washing machine in a room off the kitchen. Two huge dogs, Rhodesian Ridgebacks, Tiska and Moe.

Refrigerator. So full and mysterious you will not detail its contents now. Suffice to say there is butter, cheese, milk, all of these things you will need. There is tofu, which you will buy and not eat. There are many leftovers, which you will eat. The cupboards to the right of the oven are for the man who lives down the hall from you. He plays blues guitar in the night. Eats potatoes, oatmeal, straight from the pot. Why dirty a dish, he says. Directly to your right—this is the important part—are the cupboards for crackers and cereal. Cornflakes, granola, boxes and boxes of health food cereal that has a scratchy texture and grates the throat on its frenzied way back up.

There are cookies on the very top shelf, as if you were a little girl and could not climb up. Could not, if your need was enough, levitate.

As if.

Go up the stairs and notice the spiderwebs in the corners above your head. At the top of the stairs, to the left, is the door to your room. Bed immediately to your left, window on the opposite wall.

Long yellow couch below the window, desk to the right of the couch.

Lamp on the desk casts a pale warm light. You knock out the window screen, sit in the sill, and smoke. Sometimes you climb out onto the broad, flat roof and lean over the edge. On the deck below you, very late, you will see the

red end of a cigarette in the dark, moving by itself back and forth in bright streaks. You will hear a disembodied cough. Sometimes you climb the ladder to the next layer of roof, lie on your back with a boy you will meet, make grand and impossible plans, close together, edge of a blanket clutched in your hand. Counting stars and invisible deer rushing by.

Back in the hallway, at the top of the stairs and to your left, you find the bathroom. A long counter, three sinks, three mirrors over the sinks, three mirrored cupboards under the mirrors. You have the sink on the end, by the door. In your cupboard are diuretics, laxatives, various pills. In your mirror, you see only your face, chest, stomach, top of hips and butt. You have to stand on your tiptoes to properly see your butt. If you stand on the toilet you can see your thighs. A window by the toilet, a fan, a heater, the whir and tick of which are just enough to cover the noise. A shower. A scale. The scale is two pounds off. When you arrive, you weigh 102. You watch the needle falter toward that number, then fall back, as if in time elapse, fall back, back, when you step onto the scale each day, ten times a day. Give or take a few. When you wake up, when you get home from school, after you binge, after you purge, when you eat dinner, after you throw up dinner, before you pee, after you pee, before you gulp handfuls of laxatives, after they take their hideous effect.

There are two bedrooms at the far end of the hall. Your stepbrother, the son of your father's first wife, has a room full of masks and bongs. The other room is rented by the man who eats from a pot.

Glancing in: two windows, a bed, a guitar in its open case.

You have been here before. You love this house. It has a certain magic to it, a certain creak and sigh in the wind, a smell of wood smoke and salt fog. The ocean at Bodega Bay lies thirty miles west as the crow flies. On still nights, from the top of the roof, you can hear it. You can always smell it. You can smell the salt and the sharp, high scent of eucalyptus that burns through your brain. This is the smell of home.

The house is owned by your father's ex-wife, whom you call your stepmother, and her husband. They have raised the people who you call your brothers. They are not technically brothers. They are the boys your father and his first wife adopted some twenty-odd years ago, the boys your father calls his sons, the boys with too many families, too many demands on their

time and their love, the boys who taught you to roller-skate and ice skate and spit. These are the boys you ran after when you were very small, crying, Wait for me!, who trotted back and picked you up when you fell and tied your shoes and made you apple butter sandwiches (Paul) and ice cream sodas (Tim). The boys of few words, whom you adore but do not know. They are young men away at college who have always been an intermittent, shadowy part of your life. They weren't around long enough to see what had happened in the meantime, how the little girl became a hospital ex-con, curiously “cured” and yet thinner every time they came home from school, thinner and meaner and more and more withdrawn. You cannot look them in the face when they ask, as they do from time to time, “Are you all right?” Of course I am, you say, and smile.

The youngest boy, ten months younger than you, still lives at home, down the hall. You and he have a strange, bitter, tight thing that one might call friendship. You fight, you slap. Or you lie on a bed, stoned, beating out of time with music, talking of nothing in particular. Not talking, in specific, of what is happening to you. Arguing when you steal all his shirts, when he shows up for breakfast wearing your best red skirt. You share some friends.

You've known the woman who has welcomed you into her home and trusted you to tell the truth. She is the mother of three boys, and you are an almost-daughter. You have a tendency to firmly attach yourself to anything older and female, collecting mothers in a way.

She is one. You are close. She loves you, and you her. You grocery shop together. You go to the coast and walk.

Late August. You take trips to Bodega, light bonfires in the dunes.

Sand grass and ice plant, lost poppies, thorns. You wear Mexican ponchos, pocket in the front, Baggies of grass in the pocket, papers, lighters. You sit in circles, knees tucked up to your chests, arms around your knees. The ocean, black, below a deep-blue sky.The ocean, rushing up at the shore. The smell of wood smoke, sharp, and pot smoke, sticky sweet. The wind and roar.

Late August. You are pregnant. Again. You knew this when you left. You think, This is God's little joke. God will continue to play this joke for several more years, a cruel reminder that life happens, that the laws of nature will knock you on your arrogant ass no matter how hard you fight. You wait. When waiting is too much, you fall down the stairs when

no one is home, an easy dive, belly down. Body still weak enough to fall for such an old trick. Flush the red matter away. No tears. The uneasy guilt and cringe in your chest are not for the baby, but for the breasts that are tender, a trace of blue veins, fat. They will shrink, you assure yourself over and over. Shrink.

These will be a strange few months. This is the only time in your life when it is safe to say you are crazy. Mad as a hatter. You remember things in random flashes. The days seemed a blur even then, not because of the smearing hand that runs over memory's chalk drawings, but because days ran, sleepless and liquid, into one another, swirling in a fascinating vertical descent, a helix of blood in water, dancing down.

Things will be skipped in this chapter because there is so much I don't remember. It burned off, I think, like dawn fog with the first hot burst of sun. This is what's left.

Late summer, drought. Hills dry, gold, like combed hay. Glinting.

Trees still. I fed the chickens in the mornings, crunched down the gravel path, ducked into the cool, rank air of the coop, dumped a bucket of feed on the ground. I know for a fact that my first month there I was actually trying to Follow my Fucking Program, munching my afternoon snack each day precisely at three, drinking my milk.

I know for a fact that I was dating young boys again because, of course, they never ask. Breathless and hot, tremble-bellied boys. I remember lying in bed with them, listening to the dark. I remember thinking as I walked down winding foothills roads, whistling through the tall weeds in the hills behind the house:
I'm home, I'm
home, I'm home
. It was the smell. The eucalyptus leaves of
before, back
then
, that time that seemed so purely mine, when my small legs seemed sturdy enough to travel just about anywhere, down Walnut Boulevard, down the mossy creek bank, over millions of acres of fields.

But my legs were weakened and something was wrong, though I didn't know what. The only particularly revelatory moment was this: I woke up before my stepmother and brother on the first day of school. I went downstairs, into the kitchen, still a pale gray with thin light. I reached for a banana, set it on the counter, took the cornflakes from the cupboard, went to the fridge for milk. Stood with the door open, staring blankly at the milk. I thought, quite clearly: I don't have to have any milk. I don't have to eat any breakfast at all. I shut the door. Put back the cornflakes. Took out a small knife, cut the banana in half. Ate the half in 120 bites: sliced into quarters, each quarter sliced into 30 small bits. Ate it with a fork.

It was so easy. It was so organized, so very much the same as I remembered it. All concentration reduced to the lowest common denominator, the brain switching over to the simple patterns of nu-merical logic, the tidy arrangement of bits of banana on the white plate.

Suddenly full of energy, I made my lunch: two rice cakes with a pat of peanut butter, an apple, a graham cracker, a diet Coke. Heart pattering with the sudden realization, amazed that it hadn't occurred to me before. How stupid! I thought. I've been eating all this time, and no one's even here to give a damn!

There was a sudden shift in my attitude toward starvation. Before, the not-eating had always smacked a bit of deprivation. The human body and mind rebel against deprivation. The fact that I was not allowed to eat—I was well beyond thinking that I just wanted to diet, I had developed the idea that I
personally
was not
allowed
to eat—had frightened me, made me twist my fist against my belly, writhing with hunger pains. But all of a sudden, it seemed perfectly delightful that I didn't have to eat if I didn't feel like it. And I didn't feel like it.

In retrospect, of course, that was part of the game. A test, to see if the lie detector really works, see if Big Brother is really always watching, or if he occasionally falls asleep in his chair. The hospital had sparked in me an infantile desire to dodge the rules, to gleefully watch the Very Caring faces tighten and whiten with irritation at their own impotence, at your uncanny ability to trip them, force their hand, fuck them up. You do not notice that this is, pure and simple, a bunch of crap, and you are still, as ever, fucking yourself up, not them. You let yourself believe that you are really at battle with Them, because it's easier. You have escaped Them, a fugitive running, and you are rather pleased with the discovery that you are a very good liar.