Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (3 page)

“healthy eating,” or fast-food eating, or impulsive decisions to dine out at 11 P.M. (as I slid under the table, asleep).

I have had moments of appearing normal: eating pizza at girlhood slumber parties, a cream puff on Valentine's Day when I was nine, a grilled cheese sandwich as I hung upside down off the big black chair in the living room when I was four. It is only now, in context, that these things seem strange—the fact that I remember, in detail, the pepperoni pizza, the way we all ostentatiously blotted the grease with our paper napkins, and how many slices I ate (two), and how many slices every other girl ate (two, except for Leah, who ate one, and Joy, who ate four), and the frantic fear that followed, that my rear end had somehow expanded and now was busting out of my shortie pajamas. I remember begging my mother to make cream puffs. I remember that before the cream puffs we had steak and peas.

I also recall my mother making grilled cheese sandwiches or scrambled eggs for me on Saturday afternoons when everything was quiet and calm. They were special because
she
made them, and so I have always associated grilled cheese sandwiches and scrambled eggs with quiet and my mother and calm. Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others get eating disorders.

I have never been normal about my body. It has always seemed to me a strange and foreign entity. I don't know that there was ever a time when I was not conscious of it. As far back as I can think, I was aware of my corporeality, my physical imposition on space.

My first memory is of running away from home for no particular reason when I was three. I remember walking along Walnut Boulevard, in Walnut Creek, California, picking roses from other peoples' front yards. My father, furious and worried, caught me. I remember being carted home by the arm and spanked, for the first and last time in my life. I hollered like hell that he was mean and rotten, and then hid in the clothes hamper in my mother's closet. I remember being delighted that I was precisely the right
size
to fit in the clothes hamper so I could stay there forever and ever. I sat there in the dark like a mole, giggling. I remember the whole thing as if I were
watching
myself: I see me being spanked from across the room, I see me hiding in the hamper from above. It's as if a part of my brain had split off and was keeping an eye on me, making sure I knew how I looked at all times.

I feel as if a small camera was planted on my body, recording for posterity a child bent over a scraped knee, a child pushing her food around her plate, a child with her foot on the floor while her half-brother tied her shoe, a child leaning over her mother's chair as her mother did magic things with cotton and lace. Dresses, like angels, appeared and fluttered from a hanger on the door. A child in the bathtub, looking down at her body submerged in the water as if it were a separate thing inexplicably attached to her head.

My memory of early life veers back and forth from the sensate to the disembodied, from specific recall of the smell of my grandmother's perfume to one of slapping my own face because I thought it was fat and ugly, seeing the red print of my hand but not feeling the pain. I do not remember very many things from the inside out.

I do not remember what it felt

like to touch things, or how bathwater traveled over my skin. I did not like to be touched, but it was a strange dislike. I did not like to be touched because I craved it too much. I wanted to be held very tight so I would not break. Even now, when people lean down to touch me, or hug me, or put a hand on my shoulder, I hold my breath. I turn my face. I want to cry.

I remember the body from the outside in. It makes me sad when I think about it, to hate that body so much. It was just a typical little girl body, round and healthy, given to climbing, nakedness, the hungers of the flesh. I remember wanting. And I remember being at once afraid and ashamed that I wanted. I felt like yearning was specific to me, and the guilt that it brought was mine alone.

Somehow, I learned before I could articulate it that the body—my body—was dangerous. The body was dark and possibly dank, and maybe dirty. And silent, the body was silent, not to be spoken of. I did not trust it. It seemed treacherous. I watched it with a wary eye.

I will learn, later, that this is called “objectification consciousness.”

There will be copious research on the habit of women with eating disorders perceiving themselves through other eyes, as if there were some Great Observer looking over their shoulder. Looking, in particular, at their bodies and finding, more and more often as they get older, countless flaws.

I remember my entire life as a progression of mirrors. My world, as a child, was defined by mirrors, storefront windows, hoods of cars. My face always peered back at me, anxious, checking for a hair out of place, searching for anything that was different, shorts hiked up or shirt untucked, butt too round or thighs too soft, belly sucked in hard. I started holding my breath to keep my stomach concave when I was five, and at times, even now, I catch myself doing it. My mother, as I scuttled along sideways beside her like a crab, staring into every reflective surface, would sniff and say, Oh, Marya. You're so vain.

That, I think, was inaccurate. I was not seeking my image in the mirror out of vain pride. On the contrary, my vigilance was something else—both a need to see that I appeared, on the surface at least, acceptable, and a need for reassurance that I was still
there
.

I was about four when I first fell into the mirror. I sat in front of my mother's bathroom mirror singing and playing dress up by myself, digging through my mother's huge magical box of stage makeup that sighed a musty perfumed breath when you opened its brass latch.

I painted my face with elaborate greens and blues on the eyes, bright streaks of red on the cheeks, garish orange lipstick, and then I stared at myself in the mirror for a long time. I suddenly felt a split in my brain: I didn't recognize her. I divided into two: the self in my head and the girl in the mirror. It was a strange, not unpleasant feeling of disorientation, dissociation. I began to return to the mirror often, to see if I could get that feeling back. If I sat very still and thought: Not me-not me-not me over and over, I could retrieve the feeling of being two girls, staring at each other through the glass of the mirror.

I didn't know then that I would eventually have that feeling all the time. Ego and image. Body and brain. The “mirror phase” of child development took on new meaning for me. “Mirror phase”

essentially describes my life.

Mirrors began to appear everywhere. I was four, maybe five years old, in dance class. The studio, up above Main Street, was lined with mirrors that reflected Saturday morning sun, a hoard of dainty little girls in baby blue leotards, and me. I had on a brand-new blue leotard, not baby blue, but bright blue. I stuck out like an electric blue thumb, my ballet bun always coming undone. I was standing at the barre, looking at my body repeated and repeated and repeated, me in my blue leotard standing there, suddenly horrified, trapped in the many-mirrored room.

I am not a waif. Not now, not then. I'm solid. Athletic. A meso-morph: little fat, lot of muscle. I can kick a ball pretty casually from one end of a soccer field to the other, or bloody a guy's nose without really trying, and if you hit me real hard in the stomach you'd probably break your hand. In other words I am built for boxing, not ballet.1 I came that way—even baby pictures show my solid diapered self tromping through the roses, tilted forward, headed for the gate.

But at four I stood, a tiny Eve, choked with mortification at my body, the curve and plane of belly and thigh. At four I realized that I simply would not do. My body, being

1There are few classes for four-year-old female would-be boxers, and I think my parents
were trying to get me to be slightly more graceful (bull-in-china-shop syndrome).

solid was too much. I went home from dance class that day, put on one of my father's sweaters, curled up on my bed, and cried. I crept into the kitchen that evening as my parents were making dinner, the corner of the counter just above my head. I remember telling them, barely able to get the sour confession past my lips: I'm fat.

Since I was nothing of the sort, my parents had no good reason to think that I honest-to-god
believed
that. They both made the face, a face I would learn to despise, that
oh please Marya don't be ridiculous
face, and made the sound, a terrible sound, that dismissive sound,
ttch
. They kept making dinner. I slapped my little-kid belly hard, burst into tears. My mother's face, pinched in distaste, shot me a glance that I would later come to think of as the bug zapper face, as if by looking at me, she could zap me into disappearance.
Tzzzt
. I kicked the cupboards near my feet, and she warned: Watch it. I slunk to my room.

And I remember the women's gym that my mother carted me along to. In front of the gym, I seem to remember a plastic statue of Venus de Milo, missing half a breast and both arms. The inside foreshadowed the 1980s “fitness” craze: women bopping around, butt busting and doggie leg lifting, sweating, wearing that pinched, panicky expression that conveyed the sentiment best captured by Galway Kinnell: “as if there is a hell and they will find it.” The club also had something called the Kiddie Koral. The Kiddie Koral was a cage. It had bars all the way up to the ceiling, and the sticky-fingered little varmints clung to the bars sobbing for Mommy.

Mommy was wearing some stupid bathing suit contraption, lurching around on the floor with a bunch of skinny ladies, getting all bony and no fun to sit on anymore. All the little kiddies in the kiddie cage wept and argued over the one ball provided for our endless entertainment. I managed to unhook the door of the cage, a door of wrought iron bars, and stand on it, swinging back and forth as I watched my mother and the rest of these women hop and lurch after some state of grace.

I remember watching my mother and the rest of these women's bodies reflected in the mirrors that lined the walls. Many many mad-looking ladies. Organizing them in my head, mentally lining them up in order of prettiness, hair color, bathing suit contraption color, and the most entertaining, in order of thinness.

I would do a very similar thing, some ten years later, while vacationing at a little resort called the Methodist Hospital Eating Disorders Institute. Only this time the row of figures I lined up in my head included my own, and, bony as we were, none of us were bopping around. We were doing cross-stitch, or splayed on the floor playing solitaire, scrutinizing one another's bodies from the corners of our eyes, in a manner similar to the way women at a gym are wont to do, as they glance from one pair of hips to their own. Finding themselves, always, excessive. Taking more than their fair share of space.

Creek, California, to a pair of exceptionally

intelligent, funny, wonderful people who were perhaps less than ideal candidates for parenthood. It must also be noted that I was not very well suited to childhood and should have probably been born fully formed, like Mork and Mindy's kid, who hatched from an egg an old man and grew progressively younger. I was accidental. My conception caused my mother to lock herself in her bedroom and cry for three weeks while my father chain-smoked in the backyard under the cherry tree. They seem to have gotten it together by the time I was born, because I was met with considerably more joy than one might have expected. I had a happy childhood. I was not, personally, a happy child, but at least things were exciting. Certainly dramatic.

I know there was a time when things were all right. I went climbing in the hills out back, slid down on paper bags over the gold-colored grass, played in the creek, climbed the cherry tree. I do not remember a childhood of chaos. Only in retrospect would I term it chaotic. I never knew where I stood with people, what they'd do next, whether they'd be there or gone, or mad or mean, or happy or warm. The colors in my mind of that time are green and gold—the trees and the hills—and the heat, the incredible heat. Tossing in bed those summer evenings, when the sun had not yet gone down.

Through the open window, I could hear the clink of glasses and the music of voices and laughter out on the deck. I could smell the suffocating summer air, the dust, the garden, the glorious flowers, the narcotic spice of eucalyptus pouring into the lungs. Late-summer droughts, the wavering air above the road, out back behind the creek, the dapple-gray horse in the yard down the road, the chokecherries, sour, and lemon trees, walnut trees, women in white. The pink stone steps of somebody's pink stucco house, the oranges we ate with some lady. Perfume and cigarette smoke, late nights at parties when I fell asleep in the coats on the bed, the fleeting dreams of those sleeps, mingled with shadows and words. The three-footer's perspective on the world at butt level, searching for your mother's butt in the crowd, sensing the smell and glint of wine in glasses and men with beards and low belly laughs, tuxedos, some sense of an intricate dance of costumes and masks. It was a world that I, through the keyhole of years, watched and reached a small hand out and tried to touch.

It was not an unhappy childhood. It was uneasy. I felt as if I were both living my life and watching my life simultaneously, longing for access and yet fearing the thing that I longed for. In fact, my whole life has been this, moving in and out of the day-to-day world, both fascinated by and afraid of its sheer voluptuousness. The parallels in my approach to food and my body are striking: bulimia, feasting on food and then throwing it back; anorexia, refusing food and feasting on hunger itself.

As a child, I was always vaguely nervous, as if something was looming, something dark and threatening, some deeper place in the water, a place that was silent and cold. I was afraid that the shah of Iran was under my bed waiting to snatch me up and take me away.

I was terribly, terribly afraid of the dark, and of my dreams of the horrible goat-man who kidnapped me at night as I slept. People made me nervous. I preferred to stay in my bedroom with the door shut tight, dresser shoved up against it (it was a very lightweight dresser), and curl into the corner of my bed with a book.