Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (35 page)

I was thin when I came home from Lowe House, and I didn't notice myself getting thinner. At my weekly appointment at TAMS, I was surprised when another pound or two had fallen away. Kathi worried, but not too much, not yet. I was doing good work in therapy, my tears genuine, my laugh quicker to surface, my enthusiasm for life more real, more lasting. I was making plans for the future that weren't so terrifying, now that I was doing better. I applied, in late winter, to a number of colleges, none of them in Minnesota. We all believed I would be ready, the following fall, to leave again.

I was dating some, nothing serious, mostly nice guys I'd met in classes or in cafés off campus. I was beginning to get some feeling back in my body. My experience of myself was still primarily visual—what do I look like, am I attractive, what is the power of my body over others—but there was also a small, creeping element of the experiential, a tiny thrum of pleasure here and there. I remember one night, standing at a bus stop with a man I was seeing, when he pulled me close. I remember the feeling of his wool sweater against my cheek, the sound of his heart beating layers below. I remember a warmth seeping through me, and the cold fingers of wind pulling through my hair.

Now, with all these things milling about in my memory, I do not understand, in retrospect, what happened. I should've known better, I should've called myself on all the lies I was telling myself—I'm eating enough, I'm

doing all right, I'm healthy. I was happy. I had learned, or thought that I'd learned, that I was a valuable person. I understood that I needed to eat to live, and I wanted to live. I said to myself: It takes time, it's not that easy, you can't expect yourself to be perfect this soon. There are altogether too many “empowering” things that the professionals tell you that can be twisted around and turned against yourself. I had heard a few too many times that if I threw up, it was just a “slip,” if I stopped eating for a little while it didn't
really
mean I was relapsing. How long is a little while? It stretches out, one week, two weeks, three, and you're back where you started. Professionals give anoretics and bulimics way too much credit for having their brains in order: You have to be patient with yourself, they said, you have to be nurturing to yourself, be nice to yourself. And so, as I went through another day without food, as I crunched over the snowy bridge crossing the Mississippi, mittened hands held to my frozen face, I said to myself: I have to be patient, I'm being nurturing to myself by not expecting too much of myself, I will not push myself too hard today, so I guess we'll just have some coffee for lunch. I sat at the long tables in the student union, smoking, bent over my coffee and books, watching the people around me laugh and eat, and I thought, It's okay because I'm giving myself a break right now.

We all do this. I've never met an eating-disordered person who could not come up with an astonishing battalion of solid-sounding, intellectualized reasons why they can't eat. I listen to my friend Connie say to me over the phone, indignant, “But I just CAN'T eat as much as they're telling me to eat. It's ridiculous, this business of
three
meals a day,” she huffs. I ask, “How much can you eat?” She says, with finality, “One meal.” In the hospital, women shriek and holler about how much they're eating: “But NO ONE eats this much!”

Unfortunately, that has some truth to it. There are precious few women who eat normally. You get out of the hospital, look around at what other people are eating, and realize the nice little meal plan you're on—though you need it to stay healthy—is not the norm. You start cutting back. And back. You forget that you have a habit of cutting back until there's nothing left to cut. I said to my family and therapist and friends: I really am eating, I really am doing better, of course I'm still a little weird about food, I'm working on it,
dammit
.

And I thought, sometimes, about the day in Lowe House when I'd sat at the window and realized I had to give all of it up. I knew very well that I was not giving it up. I was hanging on, as so many of us do, to some small part of it, to a part so small it seems a mere token, nothing dangerous, a talisman of sickness, kept in the pocket, rubbed between finger and thumb. I told myself it would be all right, just hanging on to this little bit. And I knew, in the back of my mind, that it would not.

The year rolled over on its back and died. Midwinter, I stopped sleeping. After dinner, I'd drive back over to the university district, sit in a grungy all-night café, the name of which changed often.

Dimly lit and noisy, tables that rocked on their stands, chairs with ripped vinyl seats, the wood of the tables scarred deeply with carved words, poems, epithets, signs, the bathroom walls covered with graffiti from floor to ceiling, mirror obscured with paint. A strange crowd came and went: students and vagrants, dealers and runaways, regular joes and complete loonies. Coffee was seventy-five cents and refills were a quarter. I brought a stack of books and a notebook, packs of cigarettes, and sat coiled in a chair in the corner, rubbing my eyes, red in the almost tangible haze of smoke, swallowing coffee so thick it left sludge in the bottom of the cup. Reading Bertrand Russell and John Stuart Mill and Marx. Eyeing the cases of muffins and cookies. Getting hungrier as the night wore on. The music they played, grating, banging, throbbing, crashing music, fading into the back of my mind as I read, occasionally looking up from the pages of my book to watch people shouting at one another over the cacophony, or staring intently down at their chessboards and cards, lighting cigarettes behind cupped hands, bodies bumping into bodies in the crowd. I gave cigarettes to those who asked, pocketed their proffered quarters and used them for refills, spoke briefly to the various figures who stopped at my table, Whatcha reading? What s your name?

You've got nice eyes, turning my page and wrapping my foot in the strap of my purse under the table.

When I got too hungry to read anymore, thoughts turning repeatedly to food—Should I get a muffin? Just a muffin, no big deal.

Should I? Should I? Blueberry or raspberry? How much fat in a muffin? They're big muffins, how many calories?—I slammed my book shut and left. Out the door, onto the street corner where a small throng watched each midnight

passer pass, this in the early phases of grunge, ragged clothes hanging loose on the thin figures of middle-aged men and teenage girls, boys in their twenties and very young women with babies and toddlers who hung on the cold metal stalks of the street signs, NO

PARKING, SNOW EMERGENCY ROUTE. My breath appeared, white against the dark, and I walked in small steps over the icy sidewalk back to my car. I drove down Riverside, down Cedar, then hit the freeway back to the suburbs, 35 South to 62 West, taking the curves too quickly, light from the freeway lamps running in sheets over the windshield, over my hands. The freeway mostly empty, the houses clustered near off ramps asleep. I drove my father's red car, a stick shift, cup of coffee in my left hand, cigarette in my mouth. Tired. A little lightheaded, six, seven hours since I'd eaten my last minimeal.

The roads in Minnesota, in winter, are very slick. This was a winter of black ice. Black ice is what happens when it snows heavily, then warms up a little bit in the afternoon. At sundown, the temperature drops and the melted snow on the freeways freezes into thick sheets.

You can't see that it's ice because it's too smooth, it just looks like the road ahead of you. Black.

After midnight on a night with snow in the forecast. Cloud cover.

No moon, no stars, little light. Jittery on caffeine. What I remember is this: I was bent forward over the steering wheel, trying to see. I had thrown my cigarette out the window, had both hands tightly wrapped around the wheel. Shaking. My head wouldn't clear. I shook it, as if trying to get water out of my ears. I shifted to a lower gear. I was in the right lane. Coming up on an entrance ramp, I saw headlights coming toward me from behind. I swerved into the left lane. And blacked out.

There was an incredible grating sound, deafening, and then I was thrown into the steering wheel, over and over and over again, and something was hitting me hard and everything was spinning and the median kept coming at me. Then it stopped. I sat there. A few cars sped by. There were cop lights, an officer pulling me out of the car by the arm, asking me questions I didn't understand. I was sitting in the cop car, looking at the wreck. My father's car was completely totaled, each corner of the car shoved back into the body. I didn't have any idea what had happened. Looked like I'd hit the median with one corner, bounced back, spun, hit, spun, hit, spun, hit. I sat there thinking about the muffin. I should've

gotten a muffin, I thought. My neck hurt. Smoke rose from the folded hood of the car, very white in the dark. The cop shook his head.

You're a lucky kid, he said to me. I said, My father's gonna kill me.

A tow truck took me and the car home. The headlights must've woken my father, because he was standing on the front porch in his pajamas, looking very fierce. The conversation that ensued gave us fits of glee later, but it wasn't funny at the time.

I hopped out of the truck and stood there. He hollered: WHAT

THE HELL DID YOU DO TO MY CAR?

I hollered: I'm JUST FINE, thank you!

He hollered: Well, I FIGURED that, you're standing there, aren't you? Now WHAT in the HELL did you do to my CAR?

He bought a new car. He told me later that he had a sinking feeling I'd crashed because I wasn't eating enough, probably because I was lightheaded or blacked out. We didn't discuss that. I turned away and said, Back off, leave me alone.

Very shortly after that, everything fell apart. Again. I'd been able to pretend, up to that point, that nothing was really wrong, not seriously wrong anyway. That ended.

It was January. A cold spell hit. One of my stepbrothers and his girlfriend came to visit. My parents went up north with them for a long weekend. I stayed home because I wanted to get some studying done for classes that were starting soon. It started as if it had never stopped: I unlocked and opened the front door one day after spending an afternoon at the library. I walked into the kitchen, set my bags down, went to the cupboard—the dangerous cupboard, the one by the door, wherein lurked the bad foods, cereals and crackers—opened it, took out the cereal, poured a bowl, and started eating.

And eating. I ate until there was no room left, went to the bathroom, puked my guts out, washed my face and hands, returned to the kitchen. Time must've passed because outside the window it was dusk, then dark. I turned on the kitchen light, blazing and bright in the yellow room, the rest of the house still dark, the dogs in the basement still whining to be let out, and I stood at the counter, shoveling cereal into my mouth on automatic pilot. I ran out of cereal and moved on to bread, ran out of bread and

moved on to eggs, leftovers, ice cream, crackers, stopping every so often to puke in the dark bathroom, staggering back to the kitchen, bumping into door frames and walls that suddenly stuck out in strange places, moving onto the soup that my father had made for me to eat over the weekend. I ate all the soup and threw it up, whole noodles and carrots and peas flooding the toilet bowl, spattering the walls, spinning away when I flushed.

By midnight or so, I'd eaten everything in the house except the lime marmalade that had been sitting at the back of the refrigerator for as long as I could remember. I didn't eat the dog food, either. But I thought about it. It occurred to me to let the dogs out, so I did, then fed them, picked up my keys, got in the car, and drove to the grocery story, intending to buy all the foods I'd eaten so no one would know.

No coat, no hat, no gloves. Freezing cold and short of breath, dizzy, I got out of the car and went into the store. The lights were blinding. I squinted and went from row to row with my basket, desperately trying to remember what I'd eaten. I had no memory of the event whatsoever except that I'd gone to the refrigerator for the millionth time, opened it, and realized with horror that it was empty.

I couldn't remember what my parents kept in their house. Blank. I couldn't even remember if I'd ever seen them eat. I wandered up and down the aisles. This, I will later read, is known as “cruising”

and is often the precursor to gastric rupture, which is fatal. Suddenly I am at the checkout counter with a basket full of food. I'm paying.

I'm loading the bags into the car. I'm driving out of the parking lot.

Less than a mile away from the house, I have no idea how to get home.

I panic. All I can think about is my need to eat. Now. This minute.

I need to eat, fast, I need to eat a lot of things very fast. My mouth needs to be full, I need to be chewing on something, something salty.

I pull over to the side of the road, crawl into the backseat, and start digging through the bags, pulling out things I don't remember buying, finally landing on a bag of potato chips, getting back into the front seat, ripping open the bag, stuffing a handful in my mouth, pulling back onto the road, driving aimlessly around until I recognize a road and follow it home.

In the house, I dump the bags on the kitchen table, the floor, the counter, and clear a space for myself. I keep eating. I mix up blueberry muffins and let them cook while I suck down everything in sight, run to

the bathroom, desperately wanting to rid myself of the feeling of fullness, throw up, run back, frantic to get the fullness back. I stand there eating until all the food is gone. All of it. Gone.

I look up from the empty bowl in front of me and catch sight of my bloated, hideous face reflected in the dark window over the sink.

I lean down and throw up.

Flip the garbage disposal switch, rinse out the sink. Turn off the kitchen light, feel in the dark for the staircase's handrail. I make it most of the way down before I feel that weightlessness creeping through my body, the dark getting darker, before I feel myself start to pitch forward and take flight, soaring into a black hole.