Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (32 page)

Certainly not, not like the rest of them! No no! I was able, quite able, to maneuver my mandatory conversations with Staff away from any discussion of my problems, onto the neutral ground of the problems of the theater, the problems of politics. I worked the conversation back to the war in Bosnia, the attempted coup in Moscow, the dreadfully repetitive musical format of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musicals. I danced happily through my days, writing long esoteric letters to Julian filled with quotes and contemplations, never once telling him that I was writing from a locked ward. As far as he knew I was writing from Mars. I was reading and reading, sitting patiently in the alternative world in my head throughout group therapy, picking my nail polish, refusing to sleep, sitting down at dinner, standing up and screaming at the top of my lungs to the cook, You bitch! I screamed,
You gave me too much MILK, what the hell is the
matter with you, are you trying to make me FAT? This is like, AT LEAST

an INCH too much milk, I'm only supposed to drink EIGHT OUNCES,
this is AT LEAST TEN
, tipping over the table, kicking and screaming all the way back to my room. Later that night, when I was supposed to be Processing the Incident, getting sidetracked on a concept in
Walden
, jabbering on and on. My parents came to visit. We sat having stilted conversations in the

main room while Staff unobtrusively sat in a chair across from us, observing. We talked about books. They brought me books. I sat at the table, behind my battalion of books, peering over the top, half-reading, half-talking to them, telling them about my books.

Then Staff took away my books.

I went to my closet one day, pulled on the handle. It didn't open.

I ran to the main room, looking for the pile of books on the table, the pile I'd left on the windowsill, the pile on the floor. My books were gone. They'd taken my books. I ran into the office—one desk, a long counter, cupboards, a refrigerator, a bunch of chairs, Plexiglas windows for walls, eyes on our little world—and said, trying to be calm, “Why is my closet locked? Where are my books?” My primary counselor, Janet, began: “Your treatment plan—”

“WHERE ARE MY BOOKS?”

“Marya, can you lower your voice?”

“WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY BOOKS? DID

YOU THROW AWAY MY BOOKS?” I had suspected, even accused them, of trying to make me stupid before. It seemed entirely plausible to me that they, not comprehending at all the
absolute necessity of
books
, might have thrown them away.

“No, we didn't throw your books away. We feel that it will be a positive experience for you to deal with your emotions for a while, instead of distancing us through books.”

“When do I get them back?” I asked, twisting the cuff of my shirt in my hand.

“As soon as you choose to deal with your issues.”

“WHEN?” Clenching my fists.

“That will be your choice.”

I lost it altogether. I started tipping chairs, screaming at the top of my lungs, hollering that I wanted my books, how was I supposed to GET ANYTHING DONE without my books, throwing coffee mugs. I hollered that I couldn't deal with all these STUPID CRAZY

FUCKED-UP PEOPLE if I didn't have SOMETHING TO DO, I was going CRAZY in here, it was BAD ENOUGH without them TAKING

MY BOOKS, and I was led down the hall, shrieking and kicking the walls, kicking my closet, kicking the heater and punching anything solid, then flopping down on my bed, screaming once more into the pillow, taking a deep breath, and then I started to bawl.

I cried for three weeks, more or less without stopping.

They were very impressed. I was dealing with my Issues, from a psychological standpoint. From where I lay, it looked like I was going to cry for the rest of my life. Of course I didn't. Eventually the tears dammed. And I started feeling a little better.

In Lowe House, something happened. I've been trying to figure out exactly what it was. A loony bin is a fairly low-action place to be, not a lot going on, a whole bloody lot of time to sit and think.

What I know is this: I went in with no emotions, no will to live, no particular interest in anything other than starving to death. I came out eating. Almost normally.

From the beginning, I tried very hard to keep the whole thing at bay. Being institutionalized is a major blow to the ego, no matter how you cut it. My entire identity-being was wrapped up in (1) my ability to starve, and (2) my intellect, I had a complete identity crisis when I realized neither of these was impressing anyone. I had a lot invested in not being one of Them, those other kids in there—I was patronizing, bitchy, mouthy, aloof as a goddamn queen on her royal throne. I was restless, anxious, didn't want to Connect with any of the other patients because that would mean I was no better than them. And God, how I needed to believe I was better than them. I needed to believe they were fucked up beyond all hope, and I was simply an erroneous guest in their midst. They were children, I was an adult; they were needy and I needed nothing.

Duane, not much more than four feet tall, ruined everything.

Hair sticking up in tufts, glasses so thick his eyes were two inches big, tiny little pants perpetually falling down, Duane was eleven.

He was a car thief, a truant, an abandoned child, and a ward of the state. He'd been there a year by the time I arrived. He was the one who came hauling ass down the hall on my first day.

He climbed up onto a chair at the table where I sat reading, before they took my books. He pushed his glasses up on his nose.

“Hi,” he said, staring hugely at me. I glanced up at him. “Hello,”

I said, coolly.

We sat awhile.

“You wanna play Legos?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said. He nodded.

“What do you want to do, then?”

“Read,” I said.

We sat.

“So,” he said. “What are you in for?”

“Nothing,” I said. He nodded sagely.

“You're skinny,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

“Is that why you're in here?”

“Kind of.”

“You warma play rummy?”

I wavered. I was a card addict.

“Come ON,” he bellowed, grinning. Wheedling: “We can play with four decks.”

We sprawled out in the hallway and played rummy for the whole afternoon, stretched the rows of cards out down the hall. When Staff called us for dinner, we started clearing them up. His tiny body crouched over the cards, he said, “Hey.” I looked up. He pushed his glasses up on his nose, said, “How do you say your name?”

“Mar-ya.”

He nodded. “Okay.” We sat separating decks, my twig legs splayed, his miniature tennis-shoed foot tapping my socked one absently. Without looking up, he said: “Marya.”

I said, “Yeah.”

He asked, “Will you be my sister while you're here?”

I smiled. “Yeah.” He looked up at me and gave me the goofiest, most wonderful grin. I felt like I'd been offered the Nobel Prize for Normalcy.

Nights, before bed, Staff read to us. We brought our pillows into the main room. They turned down the lights, the kids sprawled out on the floor, jousting for couches. I sat, bolt upright, in a stiff-backed chair, still dressed. They were kid's books. I didn't complain. I tried not to let my eyes flutter shut. I tried not to let myself be lulled. But the voice, the

quiet, the kids who spent their days screaming in some inarticulate pain that was all too real, all too recognizable to me, all of them laid out, dozing, giggling. The fact of Staff giving a damn about any of us was painful. I looked out the window at the treetops with the beginnings of buds, the city just north of us, and tried not to cry. I had no idea why it hurt, why the hand of a Staff on my shoulder made me flinch, why the nightly, sudden peace of the reading set off tiny explosions of longing in my chest. I didn't know what I was longing for.

Worse yet, after the reading, there were Hugs. People requested, very politely, hugs, from each other and from Staff. There was a milling about of huggings, and for those who did not do hugs, or were in a fight with the proffering hugger, there were handshakes.

I thought it was penultimately bizarre. At the end of the reading, each night, I shot from my chair, as if from a slingshot, bolted down the hall, dove into bed fully dressed before anyone had the chance to touch me. It didn't take long for Staff to start teasing me about it, hollering after me, THERE SHE GOES! GOOD NIGHT, MARYA!

DON't LET THE BEDBUGS HUG YOU! I'd holler back, NIGHT!

And bury my head under the pillow.

But the night after Duane and I played cards, he caught me. He ran me down in the hall, blocked my door with his wee body, and said, staring at the floor, “I know you don't usually give hugs but I was wondering maybe if I could give
you
a hug, you don't have to hug
back
or anything, but I thought maybe since you've been here a while and you haven't had any hugs at
all
in like
weeks
maybe you need a hug.”

I leaned down and stiffly hugged him. He held on to my neck so tightly, the contact was so startling, and his small self so warm, that I took a sharp breath inward and started to cry, and he said, patting my back, “Hugs are very good for you. I'll give you another one tomorrow, if you want.”

And I just held on for dear life.

When I was a small kid, there were plenty of hugs. My parents are big on hugs. My father gives bear hugs, tight and quick. My mother usually puts her arms around your shoulders and bangs on your back, as if she's trying to burp you. My friends and I had always hugged. It wasn't as if I'd never been hugged, as many of the Clients had not. But at the same

time, physical contact has not come naturally to me. It seemed, and seems, laden with significance, so laden that one might like to avoid it altogether. One might, in fact, over a few years, begin to avoid it like the plague, begin to claim such absolute ownership over one's own body that contact itself—the brush of a hand, even, let alone the startling number of emotional and physical nerve endings jangled by an embrace—begins to seem a threat.

Sex was different. At first, sex had been a sudden shock, a jolt that brought me, if briefly, back into my body, and I had initially wanted that. But as bulimia gave way to anorexia, sex became a study in dissociation, a physical shutdown, the brain splitting off and watching bodies from above. As I've mentioned before, bulimia is a more physical form of eating disorder, anorexia more cerebral. For the bulimic, sex is an attempt to fill the void with something like passion, even though the aftermath brings the disorienting sense that you are spilling out of your skin. But for the anoretic—for me, at least—the usual pleasurable blitzkriegs of the bedroom become a losing battle, a terrifying onslaught of synapses shrieking at a terrible pitch, a feeling that your heart is about to burst, your body itself shatter like glass. And so your brain defects. Sex is not experienced so much as it is seen, and this translation of physical experience into intellectual exercise had made sex tolerable.

Hugs are difficult, however. Kissing is perhaps more intimate than sex itself. Similarly, hugs imply emotional, rather than sexual, intimacy. They are a gesture from one person to another of nonsexual caring, and the idea of being cared for in a nonsexual way was not something I could understand. Contact with another person reminds you that you are
also
a person, and implies that someone cares about you as such. This felt to me profoundly false, and I felt I did not, in any way, warrant such care, such contact. Contact with another body reminds you that you have a body, a fact you are trying very hard to forget.

Duane was the first to pick his way into my brain. Beyond the simple fact that he hugged me, and made me laugh, he did something that I believe was ultimately more important: He made me care about someone other than myself. The exaggerated attempts I had been making to protect myself were, in great part, diverted into a desire to protect him.

The extreme pain I felt was put into perspective by the fact that his pain was far, far worse than mine—and that, at eleven, he was dealing with it a hell of a lot better than I was. Until he left Lowe House the following summer, we were an odd little pair. I sat with him when he fell into one of his long silences, mentally trying to shed some light on what dark lurked in the back of that small brain.

He sat next to me on the couch and tried to make me laugh when I was crying, after a screaming phone call with my parents, or after a bad day trip home. I knew, and told him, that he was going to make it, that they would find a foster family for him. He believed no one would ever take him. “I'm too mad,” he'd say, “I'm never going to find a family 'cuz I get so MAD,” he'd bellow and wind himself up to throw a fit—and I would say, “Don't be mad, you'll find someone and they'll love you because you're wonderful.”

And he'd say, “I'm glad you're my sister.” I'd say, “Me too.” He'd say, “I think you better eat today.” I'd look away.

They charted my Issues, intimacy being the big one. I wanted none of it; no attachments, no physical contact, no displays of emotion.

They noted that I knew of only two emotions in myself: pissed and fine. “But fine isn't an emotion,” they'd say. I'd sit there, blank, completely lacking any affect, trying to come up with a parallel word to describe how I felt.

I felt flat. I felt two-dimensional, front and back. This wasn't right, either. They gave me a list of emotions with corresponding faces. I studied it with some devotion. In community meetings (CM, twice a day) I would crow, very pleased with myself: I feel indifferent!

They gave me an elaborate program to take up the time left over from the loss of my books. I had mandatory playtime every day. I had to play. I found this very confusing. Staff pointed out to me that I, like most of the kids on the unit (I bristled at the comparison), had never really been a child and needed to make up for lost time. I disagreed, staring at the crayons set before me, as confused about what I would do with them as I'd been about an empty plate. But what does
play
mean? I pleaded at the disappearing back of Staff.