Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (34 page)

taken. I told them: Take a blood test, for chrissakes! They did not.

They ransacked my room. And found, of course, my stash of laxatives.

It didn't look good.

I cried. Because laxatives could have killed me, I might as well have had a loaded gun sleeping between sweaters in my closet. Staff put me on the highest level of restriction, worse than building restriction or room restriction or anything. Back onto twenty-four-hour watch I went. I sat, crying, in a blue plastic chair in the hall outside the Staff office. They brought me food on a plate. I remember trying to eat it and crying so hard I couldn't swallow the food, my bite of mashed potatoes soaked with tears and falling off the fork with a salty sad splat. No one was allowed to talk to me. All the other kids just walked by, trying to wave imperceptibly, trying to catch my eye and mouth: Hi. Duane had several fits in a row. I was furious with myself. I knew perfectly well that I'd just extended my stay by several months.

By summer I was getting very antsy. It was a good summer. I was healthier, beginning to eat pretty normally, in part because I wanted to go on the summer trips the unit was planning. We went hiking in Taylor's Falls, southern Minnesota. I have pictures of me in my father's old fishing hat and a backpack, almost smiling at the camera.

David scowls, my roommate Joan looks scared, Duane is grinning madly, the Staff looks pleased, it's a bright day, we're standing on a big rock. We went to camp. I feigned superiority about the whole affair—camp, indeed—but nonetheless ate and ate and ate in the weeks before we went so I would be allowed to go. We went sailing and hiking and had campfires and ate pancakes at breakfast. I remembered then how much I liked pancakes, and put syrup on them with a little rush of abandon. I remember afternoons, between horseshoes and swimming, debating at length with a bemused Staff as to whether I ought to drink a regular soda. Will it make me gain weight? I worried. She said she doubted it very much. And besides, she said, popping open a Coke and grinning at me, Why does it matter? I took slow fizzy sips of Orange Slice, telling myself over and over that it was just sugar. Nothing wrong with that.

I have pictures of that trip, too; me sitting at the wheel of a boat, hair growing out a little, almost a crew cut, wearing a life jacket, a pair of

shorts, my legs looking, to my present-day gaze, painfully thin. I am definitely smiling in this one, a great big I'm-steering-a-boat grin.

We went to a Dairy Queen across the lake, where I had a very brief fit because there was no nonfat frozen yogurt. Then pulled myself together, smiled at the glowering Staff and Joan, who was pinching my arm, and ordered a Mr. Freeze in a loud voice. And slurped it up. I have a picture of me sticking my tongue out, cherry red, at the camera.

I was getting better. It scared me something terrible. But I felt safe.

I felt like I could maybe deal with life. I actually had made friends with people who had no reason to like me. I'd actually gotten attached to my counselors. There is a picture of me and Joan curled up on my bed, looking like the teenage girls we were, a blanket over my knees, Joan giving me rabbit ears, a teddy bear tucked between us.

I both wanted to leave—with that same sort of cranky agitation you feel when you've been sick in bed awhile—and stay. Because I was happy. And because I was scared to get out. I'd never felt good about myself before, not really, and I was beginning to. I was actually working in therapy, trying to get a grip on who I was and why that was enough. In late summer, I began to page through the course catalog for the University of Minnesota's fall classes.4

I remember, one day in early September, sitting on a window ledge looking out at the street. I was journaling. For some reason it just hit me like a baseball in my stomach: I was going to have to give this up. The eating disorder. I was just going to have to let it go. Not part of it, all of it. No leaving Lowe House and just “dieting” a little here and there, no counting of units or calories or fat. None of it. I was going to have to keep eating on the outside the same way I was eating on the inside: normally.

I was patently aware that I didn't think I could do it.

4I have never technically graduated from high school. I acquired enough credits at Interlochen to graduate but was waylaid from my lifelong plan to start college at fifteen by fleeing
the hospital for one year and spending the next locked up. I started college at seventeen and
was granted a number of credits for the compulsive reading mentioned above. I got into the
university by enrolling in a Post-Secondary Enrollment Option, a program for high school
students who have run out of high school classes to take, and somehow just proceeded with
college.

And then I did something I have regretted ever since. One day, in the evening group, a girl was talking about a frightening experience she'd had that day: A man had approached her in the park, scared the hell out of her. This brought up everyone's issues with abuse and fear and inappropriate behavior, etc., so the unit was in a bit of chaos. I got up and walked out of the room, sat down in the hall, and started bawling. A Staff came after me. After a few minutes I told him, through tears and gasping, that I'd been sexually abused by men in my father's theater when I was a child.

It was a lie.

It was not premeditated. It leapt into my brain and I spit it out.

The subconscious is not always an ally with the better parts of the self, not always that kind “intuition” that magically leads us toward sunny rainbowed health. Sometimes it is pure id, pure unmitigated base need. In this case, a base need to hang on to my eating disorder at all costs. Just after I spit it out, I realized the effect it would have: The remainder of my time in Lowe House was spent dealing with this nonissue. It was a nightmare. My parents were completely torn apart—briefly, until they figured out that it couldn't have happened.

All of the therapists were proud of me for dealing with this difficult issue. Everyone was almost relieved that there was a nice, pin-pointable reason for my total disembodiment, my selective amnesia, my sleep disturbances, my promiscuity, my fear of men, my issues of intimacy, my issues with trust, the whole nine yards. It all came back to the abuse, which never took place. In essence, I lobbed a firebomb to the right, and while everyone was chasing the firebomb, I disappeared stage left. Absolved. I created a straw man and he took all of the blame.

In truth, I do show all the signs of having been sexually abused, a fairly classic case of “post-traumatic stress disorder.” In truth, I think therapists had suspected abuse and were waiting for me to

“disclose” it when I felt “safe” enough. They had plenty of reasons to believe me—I showed the clinical signs—and no reason not to.

My parents, for reasons known only to them, did not tell the therapists that they thought I was lying. But as was often the case with me in Lowe House and elsewhere, my oh-so-honest-and-open revelations were, at best, distractions-my

teary-eyed attempts to end the bulimia at Interlochen that were purely an excuse to starve, my “genuine” interest in health in Methodist intended to speed up release, my “heartfelt” exploration of embodiment in California that was meant to keep my therapists, family, and friends focused on my “journey to wellness” rather than on my progressive deterioration. This time, though, I took distraction to a new level, from the realm of irrelevant truths to the realm of mirage.

I have never forgiven myself for doing this, and I doubt I ever will. It was purely self-serving, unbelievably short-sighted, inarguably another in an endless series of manipulations that were designed to keep me, and my eating disorder, away from prying eyes. And it worked.

I didn't have to deal with any of my real problems for the rest of my stay. I did this to get out. In late September I started school at the University of Minnesota, which seemed like the most fantastic thing that had ever happened to me. I left Lowe House every morning, took a bus to the U, took my classes, bused back. It was five hours of freedom. I remembered how much I loved to think, how much I loved work. I remembered that I was actually good at something other than starving and puking. I began to believe that I'd make it on the outside, that things would be all right. I was soaring through my classes, high on adrenaline, proud of my progress, hopeful about life.

I began to believe I was “well.” At least well enough to leave. At least not crazy anymore. I plowed over my own fears about leaving and started pushing hard for release. It was granted.

Leaving was hard. I said good-bye to people I'd come to care about and trust, such as I trust. On November 5, 1991, after dinner, my father arrived at the door, helped me carry my things. It was dark out, the snow was deep, the air was sharp. We got into the car. I lit a cigarette, he pulled out a cigar, and we sat puffing away, grinning, smoke swirling blue around our heads.

We drove home.

On my release chart, the last notation is this:

“Recovered?”

7 Waiting for Godot

Minneapolis, 1991-1992

Vladimir: We're waiting for Godot. Estragon: (despair-

ingly) Ah! (Pause) You're sure it was here?…And what if

he doesn't come? Vladimir: We'll come back tomorrow.

Estragon: And then the day after tomorrow. Vladimir:

Possibly. Estragon: And so on. Vladimir: The point

is—Estragon: Until he comes. Vladimir: You're merciless
.

—Samuel Beckett

Winter 1991. I loved life. It was a very strange time, and I loved my life. Mornings, living in my parents' house, I'd wake up, put on my robe, step out onto the deck to smoke. Still dark, just beginning to get purple, breath coming in thick cold clouds. The silence of northern dawn broken only by the patter of a cardinal's wings, the crunch of my feet on the snow, the scratch of a fox's paws as it scooted in shadow over the frozen pond. I would get dressed, go upstairs, eat breakfast, make my lunch, walk up the hill to Valley View Road, catch the number six bus to Minneapolis, watch the suburban ramblers give way to the skyline of the city. I'd read the paper, review for classes. I loved college intensely. I was taking political science classes, getting into heated debates with teachers and classmates, writing papers, spending hours on end in the library.

I got a job at the university's daily newspaper, on the environmental beat, which by sheer luck happened to be incredibly busy that year.

At the end of the day, I'd take the bus home in the early dusk, eat dinner with my parents, go downstairs to study and work.

And study and work. And study and work some more. There was no sudden transition this time. It went slowly, so much so that I didn't see it coming. Gradually, the night just got longer. Gradually, it seemed, there

were just more things I had to do. Gradually, breakfast shrank. And lunch. And dinner. There would not be a dramatic moment, this time, not for a while. In a way, I was starting over. Easing my way down.

Nights, at about eleven o'clock, I'd go upstairs to get my evening snack: a bowl of nonfat granola, covered with nonfat yogurt, honey, raisins. A big bowl of mush I'd mix up well. I'd flip off the kitchen light, carry the bowl downstairs again, sit down at the desk with my book, holding it open with my left hand. With my right, I performed my elaborate nightly food ritual: I picked out all of the raisins first, eating them one by one. Then I ate the yogurt—avoiding a single granola oat—licking it from the spoon, not taking whole spoonfuls, just enough to coat the spoon with a thin sheen of as-partame pink, and licking it off. This took some time. When I had gleaned all the yogurt that I could from the bowl, I ate the granola, completely soggy by this time, in tiny bites. This took about two and a half, three hours. When I was finished, I smoked my last cigarette and went to sleep. I would wake up a few hours later to get ready for school.

I didn't actually stop eating. I just started eating strange things.

There aren't very many anoretics, actually, who flat-out do not eat.

That's not a sustainable system, and even we know that. You have to eat enough to subsist. This time, I really believed that I was eating enough. I believed I was eating so much, in fact, that I had room to cut back. I cut back. Breakfast dwindled from cereal, fruit, and juice, to cereal, period. Then I stopped eating the cereal, grabbing an apple on my way out the door, hollering to my dad that I was late, no time for breakfast, I'll get something at school. Tossing the apple in the garbage can at the bus stop with a hollow
thunk
. Lunch went from being a normal sandwich and fruit, to low-cal bread—it tastes exactly like air and is about that filling—with nonfat mayo and mustard, a tomato slice, and a piece of nonfat cheese. I did keep eating dinner, since I was eating with my parents and couldn't get out of it. I began, of course, to lose weight. Not fast. Just enough to stop getting my period again, just enough to feel a little cold. And a little more obsessed with my weight.

Saturdays, I stayed at home, sat at the kitchen table, staring at huge bowls of microwaved frozen corn and peas, drowned in salt and butter-flavored powder that looked like pollen. I ate the peas first, then the

corn. One at a time. With a fork. Sometimes I ate a piece of melted nonfat cheese on a piece of low-cal bread. But I was eating. My parents were worried and tried not to say so. I told them, Hey, but I'm eating! And they nodded and tried to smile. I stared into my bowl of corn and peas, chasing the peas, stabbing them with the tines of my fork, one by one.

I ate, certainly, even was “committed” to eating. I was halfway under the impression that I was, in fact, trying to stay well. I just wanted to see if I could cut back a little bit. On eating, on health.

The meal plan they'd given me at Lowe House underwent a few alterations, the most notable being the complete elimination of fat. I was willing, perfectly willing, to eat. Just no fat. Ever. Not even a trace. This often happens in eating disorders: caught, you change tactics, you change tempo or type of obsession. I slowed down, stopped focusing on calories, and became obsessed with fat.