Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (30 page)

She turns frantically to her mother, Are you out of your mind? You'd let them put me away? Fuck you! She runs out of the room, flings herself onto her bed, waits for the heave of sobs. Nothing but numb.

Realizes that she no longer knows how to cry. Fascinating. No one watching. Scoot over to the side of the bed, lift the lid of the rancid suitcase. Throw up the butter.

Scoot back. Now
that
would be interesting, she thinks. The state pen! Well, fuck it. Nothing I can do about it now.

Kicked out of the hospital, a few days riding, half-asleep or half-dead, in the back of the car while my parents bang on the doors of treatment centers, pleading with insurance companies. A few meetings with doctors. I remember only their faces in shadow. I remember the light coming in through a window. I do not remember what I was asked or what I replied, only that we left each time, turned down.

Kathi works some magic to keep me out of Willmar, and it is March 19, 1991. I am standing outside the door of Lowe House, the Children's Residential Treatment Center. It looks like a 1950s apartment building, square and brick with weird baby blue panels on some of the windows, on the south side of a high-crime square with a scraggly park in the middle.1 It's sleeting. I'm shivering. My mother is crying and wearing a green coat. I have, as usual, not the faintest idea what's going on. Just another hospital, I think. Figure a way out of it soon enough. A woman comes out the door. I hate her on sight. She introduces herself to me with a most ingratiating tone. I say nothing. I look at the leafless shrubs around the building, bundles of black sticks. I say bye mom dad. See you later. They cry and hold on to me for a long time, tell me they'll be here to visit soon. I stiffen against them, shut down my heart like a window. I cannot stand to see them like this. I cannot stand that I'm doing this to them. I cannot stand any of this and I shut down. Click. I follow this woman upstairs three floors to Unit B.

1I will, three years later, move into an apartment building (crack house) catercorner from
Lowe House. This is where I will find my first measure of sanity. I am convinced at some
level that the daily reminder, as I looked out of my kitchen window at the loony bin from
which no shred of sound ever escaped, the reminder of my own tenure in the diagnostic
netherworld of madness, acted as a constant reality check for me, turned me away from the
window and to the cupboard, to a bowl of cereal, an apple, or to the phone.

MARYA JUSTINE HORNBACHER. E DOB: 04-04-74
.

1. Life-threatening weight loss. Laxative abuse. Orthostasis, dangerously low BP. Irregular heartbeat. Severe and rapid deterioration of physical signs.

2. Enmeshed father-daughter relationship. Detached mother.

Stressed marital relationship. Daughter triangulated in marital system.

3. Fear if abandonment. Fear of intimacy. Distances self through hyper self-control and food issues. Uneasiness around males.

ADMIT FOR LONG-TERM RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT. CAUTION: HAS

BEEN HOSPITALIZED ON FOUR SEPARATE OCCASIONS FOR HER EATING

DISORDER. BUILDING RESTRICTION UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. TWENTY-FOUR HOUR WATCH.

Three triple-lock soundproof doors fired their rounds behind me, salute to my arrival in Wonderland. I stood there blankly looking down the hall. Nothing but a hall, brown carpet, rooms on either side, all doors open. At the end of the hall, another door with a red EXIT sign. I am relieved for no other reason than the comfort in knowing there's a way out.

Suddenly, crashing into the silence, from one of the rooms whirled a dervish, a tiny wind, a small boy hurtling down the hall at warp speed. I caught a glimpse of his face: Coke bottle glasses, mouth curled into an animal sneer, little arms and legs pumping like pistons.

He flung himself, fell, stood up, flung. From another door came men, big men with a gray mat. They tackled the little being, rolled him up in the mat, carted him past me and out the door. From inside the mat came a muffled shriek. The door clicked shut. Silence again.

I turned to the woman.

“Who was that?” I said.

“Duane.”

“Where are they taking him?”

She, hand on the small of my back, pressed me not-too-gently down the hall.

“The Quiet Room.”

The Quiet Room? Mary, mother of God. What in the HELL was I doing here? This was not an eating-disorders unit. This was not a hospital. “Treatment center,” they'd said. Lowe House was an asylum. Last stop before Wilmer. You fail here, the game is over. I paced in my room as she dug through my bags, two little piles.

“Please sit down, Mara.”

“Marya.”

“Please sit down.”

“Why?”

“Do you want a time-out?”

“A WHAT?”

“I'm going to have to ask you not to be abusive.”

“EXCUSE ME?”

She glanced up at me. She had bad hair. Bad, bad hair. “Mara, you are making a choice.”

“To do WHAT?”

“All right, that's five minutes after lunch.”

Lunch? No one had said anything about lunch. I turned to the window, tried to open it.

“The windows are locked to keep clients safe,” said Miss Manners.

I rattled the window. Unbreakable Plexiglas, sealed at the edges.

Definitively locked. I looked down at the street below, the park across the street where dogs ran randomly about, uncollared: I watched them bark. I realized that Lowe House was soundproof. I leaned my head on the window.

In one pile on my bed—hospital sheets, flat hospital pillow—were clothes, books, shoes. She took the high-heeled shoes. They were placed in the other pile, with earrings, pictures with glass frames, several bottles of pills, matches, lighters, cigarettes, switchblade, Swiss army knife, mace on a key chain, all keys, things with hard plastic, anything sharp, anything with a rough edge. She took the pencils and pens. I debated each item, I said: But I don't cut myself, I'm not suicidal, I swear to God, I need the pencils and pens, take the keys, I don't care, but for Pete's sake, leave me my earrings, my eyeliner, GIVE ME THAT PICTURE OF JULIAN,

please
don't take Julian. I started crying, JESUS CHRIST, what IS this place?

She said nothing, bad hair falling over her flat face. She turned to me, searched my pockets, asked me to take off my coat. I refused.

Mara, we just want to keep you safe. (FUCK you.) You do not have the right to abuse me. (The HELL I DON't.) That's ten minutes.

(Doing WHAT?) Sitting on your bed, after lunch. (AS IF YOU WERE

GOING TO LET ME DO ANYTHING ELSE, you BITCH.) She frisked me, rifled through my pockets as I stood there, about to explode.

She did not check my shoes.

I stood there, grinning in my head. I had laxatives in my shoes.

Little pink ones, they'd been there all day. I'd been rolling them under my heel through the intake session, the meeting with so and so. I'd been gripping them with my toes while my parents gripped me saying good-bye. I'd walked up the stairs with them, sworn at the nurse with them, sworn at the unit manager with them, stood there, shivering in my shoes, holding the laxatives close with my toes, my Christ, my companion, my suicide attempt, just in case.

She stood too close and suddenly something snapped. I bolted, out the door of my room to the left, a manic rattling of the door. It didn't open. I ran the other way, down to the blessed red EXIT sign, flew through the air at the door, weightless and bare as a plucked bird, threw myself against it, it held fast, I jiggled the handle. I screamed, threw all my weight into my shoulder and slammed it against the door, which stood steady and solid as a tree. I sank to the floor, curled into myself, sat staring at the wall. Miss Manners came and took me back to my room. She said: I understand. I said: Like hell. She said: That's fifteen.

Now about lunch, she said. Are you going to eat lunch? I shook my head. She said: You understand that if you don't, you'll be making a choice.

I turned facedown on the bed and waited for lunch.

I thought: No Exit. I thought: This is what hell is like. Bad furniture and no mirror anywhere, stupid smiling women who perpetually say I Understand. Locked in a room with other people for eternity.

Damned to an inferno of asinine conversation, I Feel This and I Feel That, and no

one knows how to say your name, and your days pass on a timer, ticking o' put five-ten-fifteen minutes of penance for your sins.

Lowe House were primarily a series of

days through which I floated, stunned. On Unit B you woke up in the morning, you made your bed, you waited in line for a shower.

The bathroom door of course was locked, but for a different reason than in the hospital. At Lowe House, the Clients were at much higher risk for self-injury than your average eating-disordered person (no, I did not connect the fact that I was your average eating-disordered person and a Client) and Staff wanted to keep an eye on you at all times, lest you try to drown yourself in the shower. I was not allowed to go into the bathroom by myself, but at least they let me shut the stall door. And listened.

We sat in the main room, a petri dish, and were watched from the office while we waited for breakfast. The TV was on, cartoons. I read the paper, sitting with my feet tucked under me on the couch. There were several couches, a table, cupboards full of Legos, crayons, paper, toys. There was a routine: One was expected to get up on time, shower, dress, and make one's bed. It alarmed me to find that each of these ostensibly simple activities posed problems for some of my compadres; when John and Peter woke up, they were wont to punch Staff in hypoglycemic rage, and so waking up was a problem. A good half of the patients flat-out refused to get out of bed and began their days arguing with Staff about the Point of It All. Then there was a problem with showering, because there were those among us who did not, for their own reasons, care to shower. Dressing, too, seemed most useless to many, given that there was nothing to do all day but contemplate the crappiness of one's own life, and pajamas would do just as well for that. Making one's bed turned, many mornings, into a battleground for control, and shrieks of fury were heard down the hall as infinite philosophical reasons for not making one's bed were thrown out and shot down by Staff, with a patience and kindness I had thought was reserved for saints.

Meanwhile, I was already getting into trouble for keeping my room too clean, my bed too tightly made, my makeup perfect, even in

sleep
—“Wears lipstick to bed. Often sleeps fully dressed, including shoes”—and I sat on the couch trying to ignore David, who stood in his doorway in his Jockeys and a fishing hat, casting an imaginary fishing line at imaginary fish, laughing horribly and hollering, from time to time, “Bitch!”

When the chaos had been moderately organized, we lined up at the door, went down two flights of stairs, walked through an echoing basement hall, into the cafeteria, sat down at a table. Staff sat down with us, talking cheerfully. There were two tables. At the other table, across the room from ours, sat Unit A, which lived one floor down from us and was, as far as I could tell, a little less fucked up than Unit B. In one corner of the room, there were institutional refrigerators, a small work area for the cook? The cook, a small woman with a raspy voice and a not-insubstantial belly, piled serving dishes with food.

My first morning there I sat in my chair, looking around the table.

There were twelve empty plates. One of them was apparently mine. The cook came over, put a bowl of scrambled eggs, a plate of English muffins, and a plate of bacon on the table. All around me, the other kids were talking, pouring themselves orange juice as if they had nary a care in the world, as if orange juice was not liquefied
calories
. Chris, a small and temperamental boy with a sharp tongue, was scowling, and hurled a sarcastic comment at David. The Staff said, not harshly, “Chris, why don't you push back for a minute until you're ready to have breakfast with us.” Chris shoved his chair back overvigorously, tipped over backward, and everyone started laughing. Chris started hollering, was sent to the hall, stormed into the hall in a cloud of obscenities. A Staff hopped up and dashed after him, the other kids whispering that he'll have like a
major
time-out.

The food
stunk
. It smelled terrible. I passed the bowl of eggs to my right when it came to me, sat rubbing my hands under the table.

They were cold. I stared at the bacon. Ben got in trouble for hogging the bacon. I tried to imagine how anyone could possibly be capable of taking bacon voluntarily, let alone too much of it. My plate remained empty. It was explained to me, the day before, that “we eat family style here,” and I had no idea what that meant. Staff suggested that I take

some food. I shook my head. I was still in limbo, I had not been given my treatment plan yet, and I was baffled by the fact that I had to serve myself. I was absorbed in trying to figure out how much fat is in eggs—bacon being utterly out of the question—how much butter is on the English muffins. I asked the cook, “Is this skim milk?”

She shook her head, no. Therefore milk was out of the question. I had eliminated all items. I would sit there and eat nothing. I wanted some tea. I asked Staff if I could go upstairs and get tea? He said, cheerfully, no. I liked him. He was a ruddy-faced, tall fellow with long red hair pulled back in a ponytail and a good sense of humor.

He made the other Clients laugh. It occurred to me that he was the sort of guy I would've had coffee with, talked books and music with, had I been on the outside. I wondered how he could sit there and be cheerful with all those lunatics around.

I was painfully, suddenly aware that I was one of those lunatics.

I watched the boys scarf down their food, I listened to Staff tease them for talking with their mouths full. I watched the girls eat, talk to one another. My roommate, a tall girl named Joan, tried to make conversation with me, told me what the day would be like. I tried to smile, tried to speak. I watched the other anoretic across the table from me serve herself, eat slowly, but eat. She watched me not-eat with a palpable, ambiguous look of jealousy and anger on her face.