Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (29 page)

She snaps her head toward me and hisses, “
Sit down before you drop
dead
.”

I sit. She stares at me. She says, “Jesus Christ.”

Methodist Hospital, Take II. I am freezing cold. I am wearing my coat. They dump out my purse, my bags. I slide down to sit on the floor while the nurses, who know me well, assign me a room and a primary nurse. Someone conies over, pulls my arm out of my sleeve, does the usual blood pressure pulse temperature thing, takes me into the main room, sits me down on the couch. You're hurting my arm, I say. My hands in the pockets of my coat, I rub the edge of the box of laxatives I've stashed. They don't search my pockets. I sleep in the main room that night, on emergency monitoring. The light from the nurses' station keeps me awake till near dawn.

As I lie awake I think about Dr. J. What he will say to me when he sees me the next day. I think about something he'd said to me the last time I was in. Sitting in his chair one morning, he'd said, with a patronizing smirk on his face: Well, it's not like you're a sixty-pound anoretic or anything.

Seven months later, I returned, grinning in triumph. Not sixty pounds but closer than I was, in the low eighties. I lay in bed, pressing the bones of my knees together. Tapping them together, a steady singsong rhythm: clickclickclickclickclick.

MARYA JUSTINE HORNBACHER. F. DOB 04-04-74.

I. AXIS I:

A. 1. Anorexia nervosa, 307.10

2. Malnutrition secondary to severe starvation.

B. 2. Bulimia nervosa, 307.51

C. 3. Major Depression, recurrent, 296.33

II. AXIS II:

A. 1. Mixed personality features.

NOTES: BRADYCARDIA, HYPOTENSION, ORTHOSTASIS, CYANOSIS, HEART

MURMUR. SEVERE DIGESTIVE ULCERATION.

Interlude

November 5, 1996

You know, sometimes I get sick of writing this. I wake up in the morning, I lie in bed awhile, mentally conducting my heart,
one
two three four,
one
two three four. I look at the light coming in through the blinds. The cat stands on my stomach, glaring at me.

Julian hogs the pillows. All things are in their place: The paintings are still on their hooks, no one has come in the night and taken my stuff, no one has left me, nothing is missing, nothing is wrong.

I try on three shirts, two pairs of pants. I smoke and put on my eyeliner. I stare at my face from all angles. It isn't right. It never is.

I stand and look at my butt, my hips, my thighs, the way my upper arms look when I press them as hard as I can against my side. Are they bigger? Is the left side of my rear end bigger than it was two weeks ago? Julian comes in with coffee. Do I look like I've gained weight? I ask. He says no. This is a tired routine. I always ask, he always says no. I say, You're lying. He says, No I'm not. I look at the right side of my butt in the mirror. He sits down in my chair. I say, You always say that. He says, Well, honey, I don't know what to tell you. I ask, So, seriously, I don't look like I've gained weight? He says, No, you don't. I say, But I don't look like I've lost weight? He says, No, you don't.

This seems impossible to me. It seems biologically impossible to stay the same size, although I must. It seems one must always be either bigger or smaller than they were at some arbitrary point in time to which all things are compared. The panties that are possibly tighter than they were. When? You can't say when. But you are
absolutely positive no question
that it's true. It ruins your day. You get into bed that night with your husband, your lover, your friend, your boss, whoever, and roll over, facing the door, curled fetally into yourself. The hand snakes over to your side of the bed. You say: I'm tired, don't touch me, I have a headache, I feel sick, stop it, go away, leave me alone. Because you, in the course of

the day, have ballooned to the size of a small hippo. You are sure of it, your skin is too tight, you wish to take it off, you're hot.

This is the very boring part of eating disorders, the aftermath.

When you eat and hate that you eat. And yet of course you must eat. You don't really entertain the notion of going back. You, with some startling new level of clarity, realize that going back would be far worse than simply being as you are. This is obvious to anyone without an eating disorder. This is not always obvious to you. But this stage, when it is effectively Over, is haunting in its own way.

Your closest companion is now, as ever, the mirror. You could detail, if anyone asked, each inch of your skin, each flaw amplified, each mole, bulge, wrinkle, bone, hair, pock, except for your back, which has always bothered you, not being able to see yourself from behind, watch your back, so to speak. This is the pitiful stage where you do not qualify as an eating-disordered person. And you feel bad about this. You feel as if you really
ought
to count, you ought to still merit worry, still have the power to summon a flurry of nurses, their disdain ill hidden, your skeletal smirk.

But you are in the present tense. Your husband sips his coffee, saying, But dear, I don't really
care
if you've gained weight. And you, triumphant, logical as the Red Queen, shriek, You see? I
have
gained weight! I knew it! And he sighs. You ask again, Do I look fat? No. Plump? No. Round? Well, you're a woman. What do you mean? I mean—I mean—

I picture husbands all over the world, hovering in doorways, caught in a terrible tangle of language, feet and hands bound by these slippery words, glossy and meaningless as the pages of a magazine.

6 Lockup

Minneapolis, 1991

Oh there is no use in loving the dying. I have tried. I

have tried but you can't, you just can't guard the dead.

You are the watchman and you can't keep the gate shut
.

—Anne Sexton, “Letter to Dr. Y,” 1964

January 1991. As my parents sat with me in the hospital, holding my shoulders, I sobbed. I wanted out. I wanted to go back to California. The television in the main room sent out loud bang-pow sounds of a war in Iraq. I wanted Julian and his eyes and his funny laugh.

The piercing hospital lights hurt my head. I wanted my dream world back. In the night, dark bringing me the familiar dissolution of object and angle and boundary I craved, I wrote wild, manic poems in the dark, scrawls across the page, complete nonsense, a series of some andom sort, one hundred poems of delusional wandering. I wanted to die, right then. I had this idea in my head that dying would be lovely, a simple loosening of the ankle shackles that held me to the ground. I would lift off into the sky, float over the iced white streets, yes, that was death, and I was a princess trapped in a cage, dying of a broken heart. That was death.

I did not yet understand that the gasp and wheeze of my heart was death. The wild skittish flitting of my eyes and my hands working themselves together, trying to get warm, was death. The absence of any understanding that my body was falling away from me like a pair of old pants was death. I did not understand. It did not occur to me that I'd gone crazy. It did not occur to me that I would either be dead or locked

up for good in the near future. I know that while I was in the hospital, I requested a pair of scissors and cut my waist-length hair to my chin. Someone's boyfriend, visiting, said I looked like a model. I was of course thrilled and failed to register the obvious and extremely sicko ramifications of that comment. I was throwing up every meal in my suitcase, or out the window, during free (unsupervised) times.

I know that one day, sitting on my bed, I had my one-on-one time with a nurse. She told me, slowly, that I wasn't speaking clearly, wasn't making sense. She was wearing a red-and-white striped shirt.

I was wearing a blanket. I began to cry. I said, You just don't understand. But there was a terrible fear that took hold then, when she said that. It hit me that I might have destroyed my life completely.

They weren't going to let me out this time. And the one thing that remained—my mind, for better or for worse—was going. Or gone.

In the last week of February, my vital signs stabilized and my insurance pulled out. I was discharged on grounds of noncompliance and insufficient coverage. Eating disorders are regarded, by insurance companies, as temporary and cured once the heart speeds up a bit. I was returned to my parents' house, batty and sicker than when I'd gone in. The tiny bit of weight I'd gained in the hospital scared me, and once discharged, I just stopped eating altogether. I enrolled in the high school where my mother was assistant principal, fell the second day I was there, went into the nurse's office. I tried to eat lunch in my mother's office, couldn't, didn't eat. People stared at me in the halls. It took me several days to realize that they were staring at me because I was so thin. It made me feel better to realize that, because it meant that something, at least, was right, something in this total mess was good. In the evenings, I sat at dinner with my parents, staring at my plate. I remember the night when I literally, honest to God, could not figure out what the hell to do with the fork.

I picked it up. I held it. I started crying. I can't eat, I said. I felt terrible.

I actually wanted to eat, if only to erase the ghastly horror on my parents' faces, if only to get them to laugh once or twice, or yell, or speak at least a little less softly, as if I were not about to break. I was not used to this gentleness. It cast a funereal pall over the dining room table, hovered over the plates of food like fog. There was no fighting, nothing at all, only my parents staring at me (in agreement, for once: our child is a lunatic) sadly, and me staring in panic at my plate. Catching my reflection in the mirror to my right, seeing my face parsed into Picasso-esque pieces: cheeks and chin out of proportion, eyes pasted on at random. At long last, I was completely alone.

My father says of that time: You were very sweet. It was almost as if you were saying good-bye. I expect my sweetness, my apologetic smile, must have struck them as strange and as frightening as theirs struck me. It was almost as if they, too, were saying good-bye.

My father sat awake, all night, at the side of the bed in my childhood room, the air heavy with that smell that hangs in hospital halls.

No twitch of pulse at temple or wrist. The white sheet over my body did not rise or fall. And so he pulled a loose thread from the quilt and held it over my mouth. He sat there, waiting for the thread to sway, if only a little, all night, every night during that interminable month. Some nights, I'd feel myself being pulled up through the waters of sleep, hear the dim bubbling voice of a man, Marya, wake up. WAKE UP, PLEASE, honey, come on. My body would rattle, a marionette, someone shaking me, my head too heavy to hold up.

Marya, say something. (Groggily: What?) Nothing. Go back to sleep.

His voice dim and distant, my bedroom dark, I sank back, felt sleep wash over me, a wave heavier than God.

Dizzy, walking slowly out of class, back to the nurse's office every day in school. Weighing in at TAMS. Within a week of discharge I was readmitted on emergency notice, twelve pounds lighter than when I went in. They suspected laxatives. I tried to explain to them that I didn't even have the presence of mind to pick up a book, much less get myself to the drugstore to steal laxatives. I just wasn't eating, and my body had just quit. I remember sitting in Kathi's office with my father holding my shoulders so tightly they bruised while he called my mother at work to tell her I was being readmitted. I remember his voice, suddenly calm: Judy, don't cry. Come on, pull yourself together.

I remember thinking: It's her birthday. We were supposed to go out to dinner.

I remember thinking: I've never seen my mother cry.

Never in my life, before or since, have I felt such profound guilt.

Methodist Hospital, Take III. I went into dinner, sat down in front of my half-a-peanut-butter-sandwich, looked away from it, huddled into

my coat. All the other patients were staring at me, of course. I'd just left. A girl I'd gotten friendly with leaned over and said, Marya, eat.You were eating fine last week. I said,Yeah, well.

It's not very polite to say, at dinner, that you only ate to get out to stop eating all over again. No good giving away tricks. People on eating-disorder units are notoriously supportive of one another's recovery. Less competition.

The next thing I remember is at the end of the stay. The rest of it is gone. We were sitting—me, Dr. J., primary nurse, Kathi, my parents—in the conference room. They were discussing what would be done with me, as I was beyond their control at this point. I was staring out the window, tapping my foot as hard as I could, thinking: Butter, butter, butter, butter, trying to work off the butter I'd eaten at breakfast by wiggling and shifting and scooting around in my chair. Gray foggy day, dirty snow outside on the streets eight floors down. I remember they were talking about the unlikelihood that any eating-disorder unit would take me, given my history of total nonresponsiveness to treatment. Voices and voices. Dr. J. throwing his hands up, my parents shaking their heads, my mother with her head in her hands. Kathi's calm low voice, voice of reason. Butter, butter, butter, butter, butter, Marya? (MARYA.) I come to attention.

Hmm? (Do you want to get well?) I'm not sick. Buzzing in my head.

Habit of taking my own pulse, cold fingers pushed under the cuff of my coat, laid on the thin skin of my wrist. Still beating. Lose track while I'm counting, start over. Lose track. A small and private giggle.

I can't count. Ugly winter's end, gray snow and city soot on the streets, bare trees. (MARYA.) Hmmm? (You see what I mean?

someone says, not to me.)

Willmar.

The word shoots out into the room, cracks through the haze like a bullet. I sit up in my chair. Did someone say Willmar?

Silence. They all stare at me.

I start screaming.

Willmar. Minnesota State Institution. For the legally insane. Where you are left to die in the kind, soft-spoken care of nice men in white coats. Never promised you a rose garden! screams this little girl, all eyes and bags of clothes. Fuck you all! she screams. I won't go, I won't go, I won't go!