Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (28 page)

Bedtime, and the house falls darker still. I sit at the window, waiting for the mutterings and shufflings to slow and stop. The clock counts its minutes, small change. I hold the back of the chair with one hand, do exercises

endlessly, waiting for one o'clock. Only four hours till morning, I think, after one. Until then, the exercises. Organizing sweaters, pants, clothes on their wire hangers, by color, by pattern, by size. Writing.

I write a series of poems about a woman dying. Voyeuristic poems about watching a woman dying. I write about her silence, her face turned away, her still and patient biding of time, a war bride waiting for her dead husband to return. About her pushing her rowboat away from shore, oarless, floating toward invisibility. I read:
Once
asleep—who knows if we'll wake again?/…Don't sleep! Be firm! Listen,
the alternative is—/everlasting sleep. Your—everlasting house
!1

At 1 A.M. I'd pull on my coat, my boots. Walk down the stairway, out the door, down the long driveway to the road. Sometimes, I'd go to the stoned boy's house. We'd sit and watch TV. We'd have sex, sometimes. I remember only that the bedroom had two windows through which blue light spilled, and it smelled sticky sweet. His guitar leaned against the wall. Sometimes, I'd just walk. Down roads and up roads, through hills, through the neighborhoods, cold.

Counting the small squares of lamplight in the houses where someone was still awake. I wondered who they were, and what kept them up. I went down to the little strip mall, the all-night 7-Eleven a single glow beside the dark bluegrass bar, the dark deli, the dark beauty salon, Acrylic's Only $19. I bought a thirty-two-ounce cup of coffee, black. I sat outside on the bench, smoking, holding the cup in both hands.

I remember what my hands were like: birdlike, papery, blue and numb. They did not grip so well anymore. When the cup got a little lighter I'd stand, keep walking. Wait outside the Safeway across the street until dawn light began to come over the hills to the east. I'd walk through the aisles awhile, pass by the cigarette stand, stuff three packs up the sleeve of my coat. Buy a pack of gum, a pack of cigarettes. Walk a while more, up the narrow road that hugged a steep outcropping of the hill. Sometimes in the narrow ditch between road and hill, sometimes on the other side of the road, along the barrier that held the cars in, the flying cars that whipped my hair up as they passed, headlights skimming by me, missing my figure there in the shadow. Sometimes I stood on the

1Marina Tsvetaeva, from “Insomnia,”1916.

railing above the little town with its scattered lights, above the steep drop, wondering if the wind would come up and lift my feet and throw me into the swimming fog that hung over the valley.

One night, standing by the side of the readjust past a little roadside market, I found food on the ground, crusts of an eaten sandwich, a few scattered chips. I bent down and began picking it up, putting it in my pockets. I remember only that I did this. I do not remember why, or what I thought, or felt, or if I was there. Crouched, a beam of headlights came around the bend. My face flew up, I'm sure startled. I was wearing thin clothes, winter had come. I had forgotten my coat, wore only a thin T-shirt, hanging loose on my frame. Did the headlights catch the shadowy cage of ribs? Did they catch the hollows under my cheeks, the sockets of my eyes? What did the driver see? The car screamed to a stop. A man stepped out. He held a hand out toward me, maybe ten paces away, Are you all right?

Don't be afraid, I just want to help. He took a step toward me. Ma'am, can I help? Ma'am, I just—

I bolted.

Some nights I tried to sleep, I truly did. I'd lie down, pull the covers around me. Look into the shadows and hills through my windows. Shut my eyes, think: Sleep, sleep. But as I neared sleep, I swear I would feel something in my chest, something far stronger than my body, pulling away from me—how do I explain this without sounding completely absurd?—something lifting out of my body, straining toward the window, toward the hills. I do not believe in God, but I do believe in some human center, and I believe that mine, having had enough of me, was trying to leave. I lay there, concentrating on pulling it back.
Don't go! I thought. Don't leave, not yet
!

But some nights I just concentrated on the feeling of it pulling away and thought nothing at all.

I did not speak of this to anyone. Or of anything else. After school, on cold bright days, I would run down to the parking lot and jump into Julian's car, and we'd drive. Anywhere. We'd sit in small cafes, drinking sour lemon tea, suddenly shy. Climb up onto the roof and watch the sky and talk about music and God. We'd walk through the hills at the edge of town some mornings, at dawn. He'd wait at the end of the driveway in the dark, and my footsteps, crunching through the frost and dirt,

would shoot out into the mist. We'd watch the sunrise over the hidden lake, sitting close together but not touching. We'd talk, very softly, of time. We said, how incredible, that two people could be such good friends, and we lay close as lovers without touching, even once.

I was very much in love with him and it hurt like hell. Because it was too honest and horribly innocent, because he was a boy from a small town who lived right and believed in the world and his power to change it, believed in love and forever, believed in people. Because I was not what he saw, and because I could not show him what I was. I wanted to tell him, but I couldn't.

Years later, after we're married, we will cry about that time. I should have seen it, he'll say, I was such an idiot, how could I not see? We will put our foreheads together, and I will tell him, again and again, that he could not have seen.

No one saw Not the people I was living with, not my teachers.

My parents, trying to keep an eye on me from afar, had no way of telling what was going on. My medical “team” was incompetent.

My life was day and night: the day, the light, I spent with Julian, laughing, suddenly human and flush with life, a sixteen-year-old girl in love. The night, I spent watching someone who looked like me having sex with someone else in a dark room that reeked of pot, or wandering, literally crazed with starvation and lack of sleep, through streets that were not safe for a girl.

But that kind of girl is not a girl, quite. Madness is not what it seems. Time stops. All my life I've been obsessed with time, its motion and velocity, the way it works you over, the way it rushes you onward, a pebble turning in a brook. I've always been obsessed with where I'd go, and what I'd do, and how I would live. I'd always harbored a desperate hope that I would make something of myself.

Not then. Time stopped seeming so much like the thing that would transform me into something worthwhile and began to be inseparable from death. I spent my time merely waiting. I knew this even then.

At Christmas, I took a train to Portland to meet my parents on neutral ground. I wrote during the ride, avoiding sleep or food. I stepped off the train. I was beginning to have a hard time walking, my motion had slowed somehow. I would watch my hands struggle to close, or open, or

move from pen to paper to coffee cup. My parents were standing at the station, side by side. They did not smile. Years later, when asked what she was thinking, my mother would say: You looked like an escapee from Auschwitz. We went to my aunt and uncle's house.

We had dinner, spaghetti and French bread. I remember buttering the bread. I ate, then threw up. In the evening, I sat on my mother's lap, leaned back against her chest, sleepy and finally warm.

I didn't know this, but my parents called TAMS in Minneapolis the next day in a panic. My mother told Kathi that I was skeletal.

My father was furious. What the hell is going on here? What the hell happened? She's lost at least twenty-five pounds! I went about, cheery. I began to refuse to eat with anyone, swore I ate better alone.

I leaned over the balcony of my grandmother's apartment and scraped my food off the plate, watched it fall twenty-four stories to the ground! I can't eat bread, I said, or meat, or cheese, I can't have milk. I'm doing really well, I said, I truly am, I've been working really hard in therapy.

How the hell did this happen
? I'd been rigging the scale at the therapist's office. Easy. Got there early, it was just a regular bathroom scale. Moved the little dial, hopped on. Good, she'd say. I'd hop off.

At the nutritionist's office, the medical scale made it a little harder.

After the last class at school, I'd start loading up my pockets while the other students in my class laughed at my bizarre routine. Every bit of jewelry I owned, cans of soda, into my pockets. I wore shirts with extra pockets, rocks in the panties and bra, sometimes a couple of books in the baggy part of a sweatshirt. Three or four layers of clothes, fisherman's sweaters over the sweatshirts, Tshirts, then a coat. Several layers of pants, long Johns, tights. Then water. As I lost weight, I had to drink more and more water, four, six, eight liters of water, and then hold it until after the appointment. She was a nice nutritionist. I used to be an anoretic, she offered, so I understand. I nodded sympathetically. We'd go over my food charts for the week, my tidy little notations, three well-rounded meals, snacks, multivitamins. She'd congratulate me on any special little “extras,” a cookie, a candy bar. I'd gotten very good at filling out the sheets, did it during lunchtime on the day of my appointment. Tried to remember what regular people ate. Wrote it down. Immediately after our session, I'd run to the bathroom and pee like a racehorse.

In the letters from TAMS:

Weigh Marya in a gown, NOT street clothes, always AFTER

voiding. Check the specific gravity of Marya's urine frequently.

If it falls below 1.006, she is water-loading.

Christmas was a lovely vacation, I'm sure. I remember it only in terms of what I ate, when and where I threw up. I remember, also, the most macabre Christmas gift ever given: my collection of recent work, given in such astoundingly blind faith to my parents. Entitled

“Health.” Suicide poems. The series called “Alex,” the dying woman.

In the last poem, she kicks off. They aren't about me, I insisted. Are you sure? my father asked. Oh, no, I said. I made them up.

Train ride back to California. Car ride back to Santa Rosa. The day after I leave Portland, my relatives' pipes break, spilling my undigested dinners, in their spaghetti entirety, all over the floor for any and all to see. My parents are still there. Their pipes had broken before.

They call TAMS, Kathi says get her back here,
now
. My parents call the people I am living with. Bear in mind here, I am completely un-aware of any of this. I am doing nothing in particular but contemplating death. I wait, pacing through downtown in the night, shaking off the hands of the vagrant acid-fried men with gray beards. The people I am living with argue that I am doing better—for all they knew, I was—and that it would only disrupt me again to ship me back to Minnesota when I'd only just begun to put down roots. My parents say fuck roots, she's dying. She's not. She is. She's not. My parents call my stepbrothers. I sit on the living room floor of my friend's house, stoned out of my mind, climbing out on ten-foot ledges because I think I am a cat. Getting the munchies, spending three hours trying to cut a bagel, turning it in circles and circles until it is a shredded mess and I give up. Drinking instead.

My brothers come back from school without warning. I am informed that I am in deep shit. I am, within two days of departure, spotted by a highway patrolman, running down Highway 101.

Where are you headed, Miss? Mexico. Oh? Excuse me, I have to go—fall asleep in the backseat of a cop car, comfortable ride. They drop me at the end of the driveway, I say

I don't want them to wake my husband, they give me emergency numbers to call should I need help. Sure thing, I say. Somehow it registers that I am going back to Minneapolis. I say good-bye. Night before I leave, I binge wildly in the kitchen of my boyfriend's house, ice cream sundaes, cheese sandwiches, deluding myself that I can gain enough weight to keep myself out of the hospital. My boyfriend says gently, Don't eat
too
much. I laugh. Sex a nauseated lurching, belly distended, head pounding. Next morning I wake up, throw up the night before. Realize I cannot digest food anymore. After my last day of school, Julian, Rebecca, and I drive to a croissant shop. I drink coffee. I swear I'll be back. Soon, I say, very soon. I just need to get my weight up a little, nothing big, I'll be back next month. In the car, Julian and I cry. I want to tell him. I tell him only that I love him. He, the only sane past of my life anymore. I hold on to him so hard I think I'll break him in half. He doesn't know what's going on.

Watches me walk up the driveway, slowly. Stopping to rest on my way. He realizes, for the first time, just how thin I am. I didn't bother to hide it that day. No use.

Brothers on the front porch, unsmiling. I say hi. They say hi. The last thing I remember is one of them saying, very simply, that he can't stand to watch me do this to myself. He stares out over the valley and shakes his head.

Next thing I know, I'm on a plane. Takeoff, my blood pressure hits the floor and I—it amazes me even now to realize how utterly oblivious I was—am surprised. I lean my head back, trying to will my heart to beat, wondering what they'll do with me if I have a heart attack on the plane. A steady scream rolls through my head, some voice:
I'm only sixteen! But I'm only sixteen
! I sleep or pass out. I am getting off the plane; mother, father, aunt, uncle, two cousins await my arrival, stand in a tight little knot, tense. I say hello. My cousins say, Hey, Mar. My aunt says, angrily, So we hear you've been puking again. I am too tired to flare. I just nod.

Next day, I walk up the stairs in TAMS, up to Kathi's office, gripping the rail. In her doorway, I ask brightly, “So how do I look?” I hold out my arms, as if showing off a new dress. She looks at the medical evaluation I've just had, sitting on her desk, and says, “Sit down.” I stand there, blankly, stupid. “So how do I look?” I repeat.