Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (38 page)

restaurants. I have since wondered if there is something about the city itself that clicks with people like me, fosters the hunger for power and success to such a degree that the people themselves become hollow, sucked dry of simple humanity. But maybe I'm just imagining things.

It surprised but did not bother me, how naturally nastiness came to me. I waved down a cab outside the airport, face frozen, voice brisk. I watched the Capitol city rise up in front of me as the cabby careened toward my hotel. Spring of 1992, dark falling and the lights coming up, reflecting in leftover rain on the pavement and buildings.

I checked into the hotel, headed up to my room, bought stale Skittles and a Coke from the vending machine—a real Coke, not diet. I was impressed with myself, telling myself that I needed the blood sugar.

It was 11 P.M., and I hadn't eaten since my minimalist breakfast in Minneapolis.

I looked around the room: the usual TV, bed, chair and small table, ashtrays, wide mirror over the dresser. I flipped on CNN, undressed in front of the mirror, admiring myself from all angles, standing up on the bed to get a good look at my legs. Thin. Very thin. I put on my robe and sat back against the head of the bed, smoking and drinking my Coke. Arranging my Skittles by color, eating them one by one, red ones last. I stared at myself in the mirror, glee and a sugar rush bubbling up in me, thinking: Alone in a hotel room in Washington, D.C. Thus began my love affair with hotels, which has yet to end. The anonymity of it all, the just-another-woman-in-Washington, the solitude, the smoking in bed, the TV as late as I liked, the palpable proximity to speed and power, within spitting distance of the Real World. I could almost reach a hand out and touch it, this nameless thing I wanted so badly.

I stood at the window, looked at an imploded building across the street, and then at the Washington Monument rising up, white and ethereal in the distance. I decided to stay.

The next morning, invisible in my suit, I went down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. Crisis. It was a buffet. There are few things so attractive to a bulimic as a buffet. “All you can eat” takes on new meaning when you know you could eat the entire buffet a few times over. I sat down at a table, opened the Post in front of me, looked at my watch, and gave myself ten minutes to calm down. If I hadn't calmed down by

then, I would leave. Scrambled eggs danced in my head and I read about the primaries, glancing up at the television. Larry King's first interview with Ross Perot. I calmed down. I got up, grabbed a french roll, four packets of jelly, two strawberries, a sliver of melon. I stood over the platter of minimuffins for an embarrassingly long time, debating about the calories in a muffin the size of a nickel. Too complicated. I skipped them. Melon first, followed by the strawberries, the crust of the roll with jelly, the middle of the roll. This took me an hour. I timed it. And I went the rest of the day on 160 calories.

Subway to the American University campus. I loved the subway, the clickclick of my ticket in the ticket taker, the crush of the crowd hustling to the yawning doors. I loved the escalator out of the underground, light widening above me. I loved the walk to campus and the campus itself. Interviews and tours. That night in the hotel bar, I ate carrot and celery sticks and drank a screwdriver, watching CNN, writing maniacally in my notebook.

The strange thing is, the poems I wrote while I was there are all about the sadness of cities. The desperation I sensed. The incredible, terrible speed.

This seemed to be separate from me, somehow. I took a cab to a movie, went to a crowded cafe afterward, drank coffee, spying and eavesdropping, writing and writing. It was all very glamorous. The next day, I walked through the city, street by street, stopping once to buy a pair of tennis shoes when my good shoes wore out. I was high as a kite, trying to think of the city as a place I could live. I wandered through the vaulted halls of Union Station, basking in the deafening noise, the bodies rushing by me. I went to the basement food court, read every single menu, finally settling on a bag of orange sugar-free candies in a candy store. I sat on a bench, popping them into my mouth, glancing from newspaper—
Roll Call
—to people, thinking of internships and jobs. I decided I could live here just fine.

No one even noticed me. I was invisible. It was perfect.

I have since wondered if some part of my brain had decided it would be a good place to disappear completely. Take my exit, leaving nothing in my wake.

Back in Minneapolis, I said I would go to American. I have a re-markable ability to delete all better judgment from my brain when I get my head set on something. Everything is done at all costs. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense, pretty much. People with eating disorders tend to be very diametrical thinkers-everything is the end of the world, everything rides on this
one thing
, and everyone tells you you're very dramatic, very intense, and they see it as an affectation, but it's actually just how you
think
.

It really seems to you that the sky will fall if you are not personally holding it up. On the one hand, this is sheer arrogance; on the other hand, this is a very real fear. And it isn't that you ignore the potential repercussions of your actions. You don't think there are any.

Because you are not even
there
.

When you reach legal age, your parents and your treatment team lose their power to make treatment decisions without your permission. In other words, you have to be a voluntary patient, or they have to obtain a court order for your therapeutic care. Three days before my eighteenth birthday, I walked—head up, confident, extremely thin—into TAMS and terminated treatment.

That done, I packed up my things and moved into an apartment in Minneapolis with a friend from work, Sibyl. Full of independent gusto, I went grocery shopping for supplies. Anoretics have strange shopping lists:

Fat-free muffins (1 doz.)

Sugar-free jelly (strawb.)

Low-cal bread (wht.)

Fat-free sugar-free yogurt (12 crtns.)

Fat-free granola

Carrots

Mustard

Celery

Lettuce

Fat-free dressing (French)

And that is what I ate for the next three months.

Except for the nights when I would come home late and find Sibyl reading on the couch, saying casually, “Hey Mar, we ordered pizza.

You can have the rest if you want.” I would eat the pizza. And barf.

And weigh myself on the creaky old bathroom scale. Sibyl, one of the healthier beings on the face of the earth, pulls no punches. Tells me I'm being ridiculous when I stand in front of the full-length mirror, as I do every day, worrying about the size of my butt. Suggests I get my shit together before I leave town.

May: Mark and work and road trips. Ninety-eight pounds. The LAPD is acquitted for the beating of Rodney King. The newspaper staff huddles in front of the television the day the acquittal is announced, the normally raucous newsroom stunned to an eerie silence.

Someone breathes, “Jesus Christ.” Then knocks his chair over backward and screams, “Jesus
fucking
Christ,” and slams out the door.

The newsroom explodes in chaos, people saying, over and over,

“How the hell can we cover this?” staring at their computer screens, turning around and screaming, “I CAN't COVER THIS,” and walking out. People writing in jerky spurts, hands shaking on the keyboard, stopping suddenly, putting their heads in their hands. Three people quit in fast succession. The editor yelling at people to pull themselves together. I walk out and sit down against a wall outside, staring at the sky, an unbelievable blue. I'm shaking and nauseated, thinking about God's perverse sense of humor, sending such a blue, blue sky on a day when moral reason has become a charade. Mark and I can't sleep that night. We get out of bed and go sit on the swings in a park, talking, a few words between long ellipses of shaking breath. I wonder aloud if I have the guts to be a journalist after all. Mark leaps off his swing and says, You have to. Whether you do or not. You fake it. I nod and look at the sky.

June: Mark and warm weather and road trips and ninety-two pounds. Mark and I in bed, talking about politics. I leave the paper to write my own stuff full-time. My days are this: Wake up, sit down, write. I decide that I am learning discipline. I eat nothing but yogurt.

We take a trip with my family to our lake house in northern Minnesota, go to a bar with my stepbrother Tim and cousins, play pool and get plowed. Freed

from the usual inhibitions, we get home and I snarf down pasta salad right out of the Tupperware container, knowing I'll regret it in the morning. Mark is drinking too much. I am drinking too much.

Back in Minneapolis, I see my parents occasionally, usually separately. My mother and I have coffee. She reads my poems and I almost explode with pride when she looks at me, smiling, and says, “It's good.” My father and I have breakfast weekly. I order one fat-free muffin and spend an hour dissecting it, compacting infinitesimal sections (bottom, sides, top, middle) with my fingers, dunking them into my coffee, smoking between bites. He says, You're getting too thin. I say, It's just because I'm biking everywhere. Really, I'm fine.

July: Mark hits a bad depression. Every morning I get out of bed, shower, dress, read the paper. Poke my head into the bedroom. Mark wrapped in blankets, facedown in the pillows. Mark, get up. MARK.

Go away, he says. I go away. I worry. When he finally drags himself out of bed, we don't mention the fact that it's three o'clock in the afternoon. We don't talk about his depression, we don't talk about my jutting bones. Maybe we don't talk about them because we don't want to believe they're a problem. Maybe we don't talk about them because maybe Mark likes them. We don't talk about the fact that a silence has crept between us. Neither of us knows whether it is my silence or, his. We are both slipping away. He takes pictures of me, asleep in the grass, naked at the window, driving the car. I write constantly, trying to avoid the dull pain of gradual loss, trying not to think about the fact that I am leaving soon.

August: I go back to Washington for a two-week journalism seminar at American, pounding the pavement to the rustle of the East Coast rat race. The heat is oppressive and the flies swarm, the sun is blindingly white. I wear suits and sensible shoes and shake hands and interview and call my father from a senatorial building one afternoon and we giggle about the fact that I am on Capitol Hill.

In a workshop about representations of women in the media, I get into a virulent argument with a cocky little bastard about advertising, my face flushed, both of us standing up and leaning our hands on our desks, hollering excessively articulate epithets at each other. He spits out,
Feminist
. The room explodes in laughter. He turns beet red and storms out of the room. I sink into my seat and stare at my notes, trying to keep my hands from shaking, embarrassed at my own unchecked fury. That evening, back in the dorms where the participants are being put up, three young women come to my door to talk about the seminar. We discuss, in cerebral and theoretical terms, eating disorders. One of them asks me point-blank if I am anoretic. I say, Oh my goodness, no. We all laugh and talk about the presidential candidates. When they've left, I stand naked in front of the full-length mirror, certain that I've gotten fatter since I've been there, holding up a little compact to see myself from behind. Saddlebags, I can see them. I sit down on the floor and cry.

Then turn out all the lights, sit at my desk playing solitaire on my laptop, the sounds of people coming and going and shouting and laughing floating in through the open window, my hands blue in the computer screen's light.

Mark picks me up from the airport. In the car it occurs to me that he's slept with someone else while I was gone. I ask him, he denies it. I can see that he's lying. We are distant. In bed that night, we decide that it's over. I go to the bathroom, stand on the edge of the tub to see myself. I get down and stand on the scale. Eighty-seven. Hands counting my bones, I stare at my face and think: I don't need him.

I'm thin. I'm thin. What do I need him for anyway.

I leave.

At the end of the month, my parents and I go to Oregon with my mother's side of the family—my three younger cousins, aunt and uncle, grandmother who has Alzheimer's (no one knows it yet because she's too polite to tell anyone she doesn't know who they are or where we're going). On the plane I wear a long pink dress, a hand-me-down from my mother. I think that I look exactly like her in this dress. It hits me that I am thinner than my mother. I gloat. My father tells me, as we drive from the airport to the coast, that I am too thin.

He stares at the road. I ignore him and read my book. In the cottage at the shore, the girls and I play games and go for walks and have a grand old time. Sitting on the living room floor, my cousin Johanna reaches for a cracker, spreads cheese on it. My grandmother, who is sitting on the couch looking into space and humming to herself, grabs Johanna's wrist

and says, in her high flutey voice, “Oh,
no
, honey, you mustn't eat that! You eat too much, you're going to get fat!” She pinches Johanna's arm and says, “Honey, look at this! You're getting fat!”

Time stops. No one moves. Johanna, who is twelve and quite thin already, starts to cry. I stand up and walk out of the room. I go to my bedroom and sob, my mother comes in after me and tells me my grandmother doesn't know any better, and I say I don't give a damn if she knows better, this whole family is totally
fucked up
about food.

Later on, the girls and I go for a walk. I talk to them about anorexia, that they need to stay away from it, it ruins your life. They have the good grace not to mention the fact that I am grotesquely thin and a hypocrite to boot. They nod and promise me they'll stay healthy.

We eat saltwater taffy together. That's all I eat the entire trip. My oldest cousin eats nothing but salad with fat-free dressing. No one talks about it. A picture of me from that trip shows me lying facedown on the sand on a sunny day, emaciated limbs akimbo, pale as bones. I look like a corpse.