Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (36 page)

I woke up in the morning, rancid at the foot of the stairs, rumpled in my clothes. Sitting up, my head pounded, I held my fists to my temples. I went upstairs and looked at the wreckage. Empty boxes everywhere, wrappers and cartons and dishes and brown paper bags. The morning-after effect was not lost on me. I felt like I had the worst hangover in the world and really couldn't remember the night before.

Absolved by amnesia, I did it again. For the next three days.

There are two ways to answer why, after a year without bulimia, I fell right back into it when my parents left. Maybe it was because I needed them there, I wasn't ready to be on my own, I felt abandoned. I doubt it. I think it was something else, something so long established that it didn't occur to me
not
to reboot the bulimia. To this day, I cannot stand in my parents' kitchen without thinking about all of the possible foods I might eat. This doesn't happen in my house, or in anyone else's. It is only at my parents' home. I think my eating disorder by that point in my life was pure habit, a habit more deeply ingrained than I or anyone else had thought. I think that merely being alone in my parents' kitchen flipped a switch in my head, and a glaring neon sign started to flash: BINGE.

It didn't scare me until Monday, the first day of classes. I went into the bathroom during a break to take a dump. When I stood up, there was nothing in the toilet but blood. It wasn't my period. I hadn't had my period in years, save for a few short months in Lowe House.

I tried to ignore it. It kept happening all day. At the end of the day, scared, I went into a phone booth and called a medical information line. I didn't manage

to mention the probable cause. I was told to get to a doctor immediately.

I did not. I decided the safer course was to stop eating. Eating was too dangerous. Obviously I couldn't handle eating. Clearly I was too weak and spineless to be eating. I sat in the bathroom stall with my head in my hands, willing my insides to stop bleeding. I came out of the stall, splashed water on my face without looking at it, checked the size of my ass in the mirror. Fat. I was sure I'd put on weight over the weekend. Lots of it, tons of weight. I stopped at the pay phone again, called my dad to say I'd be home late, I had a lot of studying to do.

He told me the sewer had backed up. Again. All over the basement, it backed up, Marya, do you care to explain this?

I said: I had the flu. All weekend. Terrible flu. Gotta go. Bye.

I have never been so mortified in my life. If my stepbrother and his girlfriend hadn't been there, it wouldn't have been so bad. Their opinion of me mattered a lot. And here I was, clogging the sewer, flooding the bathroom and basement with my vomit, disgusting my sister-in-law-to-be so completely that she asked my mother, very nicely, for some new towels in case theirs had been inadvertently splashed with puke.

But we didn't talk about it until they left. My parents put me through the inquisition, Come on, honey, just tell us the truth. (I AM, I swear to GOD I had the flu!) But honey, I don't mean to be gross, but that's an awful lot of vomit for someone who just had the flu. Honey, there were noodles and peas from the soup that I made.

(Well, of COURSE there were! I thought maybe the soup would stay DOWN, but it DIDN't, I'm SORRY, why doesn't anyone fucking TRUST me?) Well, if you're sure…

In my charts for therapy that week:

1/16. Reports she had the flu over the weekend. Sewer backed up. Appears thinner.

To appear thinner in a week's time, you have to lose a fair amount of weight. In my eyes, I looked like the pig I thought myself to be.

Bulimia scared the hell out of me. Anorexia is so disembodied, so imperceptible for such a long time, so socially sanctioned, that you can go a long time

clinging to your belief that there's nothing wrong with it. The minute you stick your fingers down your throat, you know damn well something's wrong. You know you're out of control. The first time you ever eat without stopping, the first time you ever feel that sudden wave of need crash over you, feel your face tighten in desperation for food, any food,
now
, you know something's wrong. And let me tell you, the first thing that comes to mind is
not
“Gee, I must be really upset about something. Let's sit down and think about that.”

The first thing that comes to mind is: more food. And then, the horrible, nauseating realization that you are, in fact, as uncontrollable, as needy, as greedy, as you've always secretly suspected.

Once you realize that, there's no reason to stop. You say: Fuck it, then. I'm a fat cow ugly bitch weak slug lardass and I might as well keep eating.

But like I said, bulimia has always scared the hell out of me—precisely because of the inevitable horror that hits you midway through a binge. I have been known to go to great lengths to avoid pain of any sort. The pain of feeling like you are, truly and eternally, a filthy, bilious, greedy slob is intolerable. When I became seriously anoretic for the first time, it was the first time in my life when I was not afraid of myself. Fucked up, sure. But from then on out, I would always connect my ability to get control over my rampant needs and desires to my ability to starve.

The following weekend, my parents were gone again. I had been working all week, trying to talk myself down, trying to reassure myself that I'd be fine, I wouldn't binge, I just wouldn't eat at all if that was what it took. That seemed to be what it took. On Friday, after classes, I went home, let the dogs out, sat stiffly in a kitchen chair, reading the paper, trying not to think about food.

There are reasons people binge. One of them is malnutrition. That's what was going on, and I knew it. I knew perfectly well that I'd been eating way too little for a couple of months and was now paying the price for it. It did not cross my mind that a surefire way to stop obsessing about food was to eat properly. The only way I could do this, in my mind, was to keep myself away from food completely. I hung out with the dogs for a while, then got back into the car and drove to my little café with a mammoth pile of books, intending to stay all night.

Which I pretty much did. Until near dawn, anyway.

It was 1 A.M. when he swung around a post, long hair hanging down onto my table, dangling dangerously close to my coffee. I moved my cup. The noise was deafening. It was always packed in there on weekends. Minneapolis being the land often thousand treatment centers, the coffee shops and cafés are often jammed like San Francisco bars, standing room only after 10 P.M., bass pumping through the floor so hard your table throbbed and your books shivered. I was reading Bertrand Russell's
Unpopular Essays
. His hair was blond and I heard him holler over the din, “HI!”

I glanced up and said HI.

He asked: CAN I SIT?

I answered: NO.

He said: MY NAME IS DAVE.

I said: GOOD.

He sat. He leaned close to me across the small table, stuck out his hand, and said, What's your name?

For the next few hours he talked. And talked and talked. I decided that I would sleep with him. I did this, went about mentally seducing men just for kicks. The point was never the sex. I hadn't ever enjoyed sex much, and wouldn't for several years. The point was the game, and the game was not simply to get someone into bed. Men are embarrassingly easy to seduce. The game was to get them to fall in love with you first, or get them to think they were in love with you, think you were the most astonishing woman they'd ever met in their entire lives, and if things went according to plan, fuck them up forever.

By about 4 A.M. he had decided he was in love with me. Which, though a little strange, since I'd barely spoken, was fine with me.

It's always nice when someone's in love with you. Gives you lever-age. I took him home. We made a fire, lay on the floor making abstract plans, lying to each other because we could. We went to bed and stayed there for the weekend. I don't know what happened, precisely, but something did, and I found myself rolling around in the sheets with a man I knew only as Dave and having, arguably, the best sex of my life. Certainly the most startling sex. The most raucous, noisy sex, shocking me in the moments when I would see myself from the outside, unrecognizable, bare and laughing and crying out and who the
hell
was this woman, falling back into a deep, deep sleep, content and deliriously sore?

Sunday I dropped him off at the café, told him not to call me again.

It was fun, I said, but you know how it is. Take care, see you around.

I drove off on my way to work. I remember it now as a film clip, a voyeuristic sort of memory, watching from the door. I remember it as the blue curve of a woman's back lit by moonlight through the window, the box of condoms spilled by the side of the bed, the ring of a wordless voice shooting out through a silent house.

It was too much for me. It was too intense. It made me too hungry, afterward, too easy in my body, too careless as I sprawled on the floor eating apples and cheese. It made me want more, and that wouldn't do. Sex and women with eating disorders are strange bedfellows. We approach it in different ways. Some women avoid it like the plague, much more than I did. Some women seek it out as a source of marginal intimacy, an oasis of companionship in a desert of isolation. Others, like me, use it as power, but that's a little different: The power game is the mental foreplay, the sex itself is almost irrelevant, and when the sex takes over your body, makes you lose control, you've lost the game. Some women, as we laughed about it in the hospital, use it simply to burn calories, but then there's the bummer of having to be naked and seen in the flesh. Some use the limited pleasure it brings as a fleeting reminder that the body can, in fact, feel something, anything, other than hunger. But that, too, backfires, because the desire for sex is a hunger in and of itself.

Some, and this was me, too, use it as just another form of self-destruction, throwing the body around like an old coat, into bed and out of bed with whoever comes wandering by. When I slept with Dave, I had a hard time understanding what was happening. Wait a minute here, this isn't what sex is. Sex is staring at the ceiling and saying oh-baby oh-baby and thinking about the size of your thighs. What the hell is this? I was used to sleeping with people because I endlessly found myself in identical situations where it was easier to just fuck them than to say no. Obviously I was in those situations because it gave me a rush to get there. I never really cared for the follow-through. What happened that weekend was altogether different. I didn't know why I'd done it. It didn't occur to me to just grin and say, Why not? All the times I'd slept with people I didn't care about, didn't enjoy sleeping with, I never once felt guilty. This time, I felt like a slut. All that moaning and eating naked. Good lord.

My father found the condoms. There is, of course, the question of what the hell my father was doing, digging around in my drawers.

There is, furthermore, the question of what the hell my father was doing, getting pissed off that I was having sex rather than being at least marginally relieved that I had the brains to
use
condoms. We got in an incredible fight. I screamed at him for invading my privacy, he screamed at me for breaking the rules, betraying his trust, having sex in his house, having sex at all. I screamed at him for being such a blind fool that he'd missed my growing up. I screamed at him for being so fucking overprotective. He screamed that I was too young to be having sex.

At the time, I felt that he was being utterly unreasonable. In retrospect, I can't say what “too young” for having sex is. I was seventeen.

I'd been having sex for a good long time, so it didn't seem too out of the ordinary to me. Maybe he was right. He tried to ground me, but I think it seemed a little ridiculous at that point, even to him, given the fact that I was a full-time student with a full-time job. What was notable was the virulence with which he attacked my choices, and the measure to which it was painfully clear that the problem was not that I was too young to be having sex, but that he was afraid of my growing up, and that he would do anything in his power to prevent that. The problem was, I had already grown up.

As was his way, my father flipped out about it. This is a subject my father and I have never discussed in any depth—because it is such a delicate issue, because I don't know that he understands it any more than I do—so my thoughts on this are speculative and subjective. The easy part is understanding the fear he seemed to feel about my leaving him with no one to take care of. The hard part is trying to figure out why he was so incredibly angered by my involvement with men and with sex. Say it's because he didn't want me to grow up too fast. That's reasonable. He wouldn't be the first father who felt that no one would ever be good enough for his little girl.

Say it's because he wanted me to stay a little girl, say he had a few problems with women, say he was threatened by women, say he was angry with women, say he had a bit of a problem with their independence from him, their control over him. Say he didn't want me to

become one of them. Say he needed me to need him. Say he wanted to be the most important man in my life. He wouldn't be the first father to feel threatened by the entrance of other men into a daughter's world.

And he wouldn't be the first to feel more than a little threatened by the advent of a daughter's sexuality. The child is developing a side of herself to which he has no access, and over which he has no control. I have spoken before of the highly idealized relationship between some women with eating disorders and their fathers. That relationship balances precariously on the daughter playing a dual role: that of innocent child, and that of companion. When the innocent child part disappears, when she becomes a rebellious, foul-mouthed teenager fucking strangers in your basement, the relationship dissolves. The child you loved and were loved by has disappeared.

Ideally, a father can come to terms with his child becoming a woman, can come to accept the other men in her life. Eventually my father did this. It just took a while. During my short stay at home—my father's growing hysteria over the loss of his child, and his attempts to reverse the course of nature—I was completely confused. It sent me into a state of equally hysterical self-defense. This also put my mother in the horrendous position of mediating what looked too much like a bad breakup. As has always been the case in my family, my father and I loudly fought it out in the living room, the kitchen, the dining room. My mother and father fought it out behind closed doors, and I honestly had no idea what was going on.