Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (37 page)

Nor, I think, did they.

I shut down. My father needed me to need him, and I could not.

I had grown up (normal), and decided I would never need anything again (not). And the last thing I needed, I thought, was some bastard trying to hold me back. I hated my younger self with an intensity that frightens me even now. Of course I resented and deeply feared anything that threatened my chances of escaping who I'd once been.

My father became my nemesis, the symbolic focus of my fury at everything I'd ever been and never wanted to be. After the Condom Incident, I doubt there was a day we did not go head-to-head on the issue of my independence. We both became incredibly desperate people. He was desperate to keep me. I was desperate to get the hell away from him.

Conventional wisdom says that eating disorders are a means of stopping time. The line goes, halting physical development at a prepubescent stage gives the eating-disordered person a symbolic sense of safety: safe in childhood, safe in the bosom of the family, safely at a remove from the big bad monster of sexual maturity and its implication of adulthood and responsibility. I do not think this is always accurate. I have looked at this long and hard, trying to fit my life, my personality, my experience of eating disorders into this framework. My life and I just keep spilling out. We don't fit. Maybe, if we stretch it, we can say that in the year before I was to leave home (again), my eating disorder reappeared because I subconsciously wanted to stay at home with my father (who drove me bats) and mother (who barely spoke), in the warm and comfortable womb of childhood (which was shitty), avoiding sexual maturation (which I didn't much like but wasn't afraid of) and responsibility (which I craved). But that's really stretching it.

The only thing I can come up with is that maybe, in some small way, my anorexic body was an apology to my father for having become a woman. Even that is problematic. It's far more plausible to me that my anorexic body was a confused statement directed more at the world than at my father, both an apology for being a woman and a twisted attempt to prove that a woman can be as good as a man. There are many women who get eating disorders primarily because they're afraid of adulthood, so afraid that they will do anything to prevent it. But I was so afraid of being dragged back into childhood that I would have done anything to avoid it. The reading of eating disorders needs to be more complex than the rather Freudian analysis that sees the anorexic body as symbolic of regression.

It is equally possible that the anoretic is attempting to demonstrate—badly, ineffectively, narcissistically—a total independence from the helpless state of childhood, from the infinite needs that she recognizes in herself and will annihilate in any way she can.

I remember childhood, even now, as an embarrassing time, a time of weakness and need. Being put in Lowe House, however much it helped me recognize the acceptability of some basic human needs, was a setback in my grand plans, and having to live in my parents'

house was even worse. My father's need was palpable and painful and suffocating,

and I'm sure that my hell-bent race toward adulthood was equally painful to him. But he was not in a very good place just then, and had a very difficult time separating himself and his needs from his expectations of me. My mother had a tendency to float off waving her hands whenever my father and I got into conflict. I know that they fought about this. I know that my mother was trying to get my father to back off and just let me grow up, and I also know that my father felt that we were ganging up on him, as he always had and always does, despite the fact that my mother and I did not share a single conversation on the matter.

My mother once told a therapist that she felt like she was living with two crazy people. My father and I were both very hurt by this.

In retrospect, I don't blame her one bit for feeling that way. And even as I write, I know that my father will read this and feel like I'm siding with her. He always has. My mother always feels like I'm siding with him. I felt stuck in the middle, of course, but more than that, I felt sorry for both of them. They were both running around licking twenty-year-old wounds, grabbing me, pulling me between them, pointing at their emaciated, manic daughter, and saying,

“See?”

As if I proved anything. They both had the rather self-important assumption that the world revolved around them, and that my problems were their fault. I had pretty much tired of thinking about their Role in my Problems. I was tired of their endless petty bitching, tired of my father's neediness, tired of my mother's facile peacemak-ing, and wanted to get on with my life.

Here we find another turning point. I'd had my eating disorder for nine years. The causes were endless and cross-referenced and footnoted and referred to other causes. The major etiology was, by that time, my personality, and the very simple, inescapable eating disorder itself. It was habit by then. My parents could've been the sweetest, most understanding of parents, my culture could've been the most feminist and egalitarian of cultures, and I would still have gotten worse because my eating disorder had become a part of me, the way I dealt with my own brain, my emotions, the world I was living in, my daily life. Everything was filtered through the lens of anorexia and bulimia.

Did my family set it off again? Did my father's neediness and my fear of it spark relapse? My mother's distance? An article I read? A woman I

saw? Not likely. What probably happened is that, faced with a number of things in my life that I didn't like, I turned to my eating disorder because I had never, ever figured out how to fucking
deal
.

Similarly, it was tough to say whether my teeth-bared, hissing demands to be left the hell alone—“Get OVER it,” I'd holler, “I'm FINE, back OFF, I JUST want to get ON with my LIFE”—were a normal stage for any ambitious seventeen-year-old. Perhaps it was just a normal desire for a little breathing space after the microscopic scrutiny of the hospital and loony bin. Maybe my desperation was more complex. My desire to leave Minneapolis, and my family, may actually have been a desire to leave me behind and become someone else.

I suspect it was the latter. A pattern was well established by that point: I'd spent the last several years plotting escape routes, using them more to escape a persona than a place. Even way back at my intake interview at TAMS, when asked what I would change about my life, I had replied, “I would move.” Not the usual reply—make new friends, take up a hobby, get along with parents better, improve my grades—just “move.” Not until I was nineteen would it occur to me that the old adage is true—everywhere you go, there you are—and even then I didn't stop moving.

At seventeen, I was under the strong impression that everywhere you go, you'll find a brand-new you, the way you happen to bump into a friend in a café. In each new place, I always turned out to be someone I liked better than the old me. Someone without a past following her around like toilet paper stuck to the heel of her shoe.

Someone who spoke less often and less rapidly, smiled without showing her teeth rather than grinning lopsidedly, wore sunglasses and had cool shoes. Who was known neither as that-silly-kid or as the-incurable-crazy-sick-person; a woman who was not known at all.

The year I moved home, some switch flipped in me, cutting off the lights in the rational part of my mind, shutting out the self-knowledge I'd gained in Lowe House, and leaving me with a blind, desperate desire, more virulent than ever, to get rid of the self that I hated and make me new. Success, I firmly believed, was the key to my salvation. It would absolve me of the sins of the flesh and the soul, lift me out of the life I hated. “Success” meant a perfect career, perfect relationships, perfect control over my life and myself—all of which depended on a perfect me, which depended in turn on me living inside a perfect body. I did not stop to think about the drawbacks of forfeiting youth and health for the sake of success. There was no contest. The fact that I did not examine the connection I made between success and self-annihilation would, in the year to come, nearly kill me.

I spent less and less time around my parents. I stopped bingeing almost as soon as I started and switched back to starving. By February, I was practically living at the newspaper office, pushing for more assignments, covering as many stories as I possibly could. My job technically demanded only thirty hours a week, but I began spending most of my time in the newsroom, on stories, tapping away, phone tucked on my shoulder, racing off to cover a story, grabbing frozen yogurt on my way back to my desk, letting it melt while I worked. I loved the job. I was covering several major statewide issues, getting friendly with the state legislators and U.S.

senators who were involved, making “connections,” doing lunch with so-and-so, filling notebook after notebook with my scrawled notes, scooping the major Twin Cities newspapers and roaring in delight with the rest of the staff early mornings, newspapers flying, when we beat out the big boys for a good story. I went to therapy, quite consciously constructing a picture of myself that would convince TAMS that I was getting better. We began to taper off my Prozac and my appointments in accordance with my verbal assurances that I was on the right track.

2/5/92: Near recovery. Marya indicates a desire to terminate weight monitoring.

A note is submitted to TAMS from me: “I have had no difficulty in continuing a healthy lifestyle and maintaining my weight.”

I sat in the stairwell of the news offices eating the tomato out of my sandwich, throwing the rest away, smoking and guzzling coffee while I flipped through pages and pages of morning notes. Scribbling questions in the margins, chatting with the other reporters, laughing a lot. I was high on life. I'd just gotten early admission to Reed, the only school I'd applied to for early admission, and the rest of the admissions were starting to roll

in. I'd see them in a pile on my desk when I stepped in late at night, and read them, grinning: It's working, I'm going to make it. Life was good.

I sat in a café early mornings, reading papers, drinking coffee.

One day I remember vividly: I was wearing a short skirt and a green blouse and spring was beginning. I tossed my jacket over my shoulder and sauntered down the sunny street. Buds on the trees. I walked into work and sat down at my desk. There was a kick-ass photographer on the staff who sometimes appeared at my desk, spreading out negatives for one of my stories, bending over them, our heads close together, gesturing wildly, and then he'd shoot off to the darkroom again. His name was Mark. He showed up at my desk that particular morning and hollered (he was always hollering), HI! I laughed and he stood there a minute, looking befuddled. I said,

“Yes?” And he said, “You look very nice today.” I stammered. We sat there looking at each other for a minute more, dazed.

The spell broke and he was in motion again. I had a major story running the next day, what did I want him to shoot? He crouched down next to my chair and we jabbered and waved our hands and he tapped my shoulder lightly as he left and I stared at my blank computer screen for a while and thought, Oh, no.

It was not a good time to fall in love.

Nights got later and later. I'd come in the back door quietly so as not to wake my parents, and I'd sit down at my desk, keep working.

My father and I had a final blowout and I left, moved into a friend's house until I found a place to live. I went to therapy less and less often. Mark and I began seeing more of each other, leaning against each others' desks and talking a mile a minute, maniacs both, skipping out for coffee, just the two of us or with other reporters, heading back to the office in a dark that got warmer daily. We went to dinner one night, alone. We drank a lot of wine. We lay on the living room floor of his house. I read him some of my work. It was very late.

When I was done, he took my hand, turned it palm upward, carefully traced the lines. Threaded his fingers with mine.

3/4. Marya refuses to be weighed. Blood pressure orthostatic, very low temperature. Body fat 14.5% (in Lowe House, BF="19%)." Feels bony! Suspect reemerging eating disorder.

Mark and I fell horribly, horribly in love. I was bouncing back and forth from friends' houses to my parents' house. My father screamed at me about Mark's motorcycle, about Mark in general, said he was too old for me (he was twenty-five). He was wild, my father said, I was growing up too fast. I spent my days in classes and the newsroom and all over the city. Mark and I drove anywhere and everywhere, talking of politics and the world and journalism and facts and thoughts and anything at all, crashing at the Motel 6 and laughing and rolling around until daylight and then heading back to work. I ate a carton of yogurt, sprawled belly down on the bed while we pored over magazines, saying, Listen, listen! and reading heatedly to each other all night until the magazines were kicked to the foot of the bed in our haste for motion and heat.

The plan had been that I would transfer to Reed. It was where I wanted to go, I'd been very clear about that, it was my first choice.

Julian and I had been planning, in our letters, to go there together.

They had an excellent political science program. But then I got a letter from American University offering me an obscenely large scholarship, larger than any I'd been offered. My parents said, Just think about it. Consider it. I considered it and said I wanted to go to Reed. They said they would pay for me to go out to Washington, D.C., just to look. Just to see if I liked it. I remember one evening, I was staying with them that night, painting my nails. I remember my red nails, my father asking, Have you thought about it? I had.

Washington, D.C. It was the top of the line, the Post there, infinite internships, connections. I knew a few politicians, it was tempting.

I said I'd go. Just to look.

The trip changed everything.

There is something wrong with Washington, D.C. For all the time I've spent there, I've never quite been able to put my finger on what it is—there are the obvious things, of course, the palpable greed, the thrum of excessive power, the unbelievable racism, the city itself a total political and social shambles. But beyond these, there is something wrong with Washington, D.C. There is a tight-faced look, a haggard and driven look that people wear as they race down the streets, shoving past one another on the subway, bashing one another in the back of the knees with leather briefcases as they push and jostle their way up escalators, into cabs, in