Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (39 page)

The week before I leave for Washington, D.C., I stop by TAMS to check in with Kathi. They have no power to admit me to the hospital or prevent my departure. I have nothing to lose.

Extremely thin. Says, “I'm ok now.”

I leave Minneapolis at eighty-five pounds, touch down at Dulles, and lose what remains of my mind.

Interlude

A simple thing: I get my wisdom teeth out. I go to the doctor, I sit in the waiting room, filling out the medical history forms.
Have
you been hospitalized for a serious illness? Yes. Do you have a heart condition
? Yes. It doesn't ask specifics, so I don't elaborate. I take the form back to the blond woman at the counter. I am perpetually nervous in any establishment where needles and drugs lurk in small cabinets waiting to bite me. The smell of antiseptic makes me sick, the scrubbed pink hands of the nurses look like those wet tropical toads.

Three people are standing in line behind me. The nurse says, loudly: Major illness? I say, not knowing what she's asking: Yes. She, impatient, says: What? I say: Oh. Anorexia.

She looks up at me for the first time, sharply. The nurse standing next to her looks at me. The woman in line behind me leans around to look at me, just enough so that I can see her move from the corner of my eye. I am thinking: Why didn't you just put it on the damn form? The nurse says: Heart condition? I say: Murmur. I say: I don't think you should give me a general anesthetic. She doesn't respond.

She scribbles
Anorexic
on the form. I mentally beg the doctor not to say, when he looks at my charts, Well, you don't
look
anorexic.

He does. They always do. Unless you are so emaciated that you can barely walk, people don't think you “look” anorexic. You sit in your chair, gritting your teeth. He calls me Mayra. I don't correct him. I tell him: I don't think you should give me a general anesthetic.

I have a heart murmur. He says, Oh, no, I'm going to give you GA, it'll be fine. I say: I really don't think it's a good idea. He says, Oh, no, you don't want to be awake for this. I say, trusting as any old idiot: Are you sure? He says, Oh, yeah. It'll be fine.

I come back the next day, I sit down in the chair. I say: Use my right arm, there aren't any veins in the left. They say: No, no, gotta use the left. (Why? No one explains.) There are several of them in there, I am getting more and more panicky by the minute. Someone wraps a tourniquet around my left

arm. I say, louder: The veins in my left arm are all collapsed. They say: Make a fist. I make a fist. They poke around in my arm with the needle. I say:
The veins are collapsed
. A nurse says: No veins. (Whaddaya know, no veins!) The tourniquet comes off my upper arm, they wrap it around my forearm, pinching tight the four-inch-long, half-inch-wide purple scar that seams down the center. They say: Make a fist. I say: Don't use my hand.
Please do not use my hand
. They say: Make a fist. I make what fist I can, the muscles of my left arm long since torn by a razor blade and atrophied by time. Tighter, they say.

The needle slips into my hand and I listen to my protests fade.

By the middle of the week, my heart is pattering a strange sort of tune:
Tha-thum thumthumthum.…Tha. Tha. Tha-thum
thumthumthumthum
. I fall easily, I'm dizzy. They give me penicillin to fight the infection in my mouth. It makes me throw up. In two days, there is no food left in my stomach, and I begin to throw up blood, or rather, pieces of my esophagus. The penicillin shoots my immune system to hell. Two weeks later, my mouth has not healed.

I wake up in the night, lean over the bathroom sink, spitting fat clots of blood. I have a bladder infection, a yeast infection, a bad cold, routine scratches on my arms that refuse to scab and break open at a touch, bruises that paint my body a funny shade of mottled blue: a hip tapped lightly against a door frame, a shin that bumped a chair.

Two weeks later, I have lost fifteen pounds. I press my fingers to my sternum: an old habit, a private gesture, an attempted wordless reply to the nervous chattering of my heart.

In the mirror, my ribs thrust themselves forward through the skin, proud. In the mirror, my hands play them, a hollow instrument. My hands make their way to the sway of my back, snake down to press the twin knobs at the base. My hands, shy as hands meeting up with an old lover, touch lightly, in that breathless disbelief: Are you really here? Have you come back to me at last? My wedding ring loosens and spins on my hand.

In the bed, my husband pulls the sheets back in the moonlight, moves his hands wordlessly down my body. He bumps into the sharp rise of pelvic bones; he holds them, thumbs resting in the hollow of my belly. I wait for him to say: You've lost weight. I wait for the rush of stubborn pride it will bring, the release of being caught red-handed in bed with someone else.

He says nothing. He lies down at my side, turns his back. His stillness fills the room.

8 “Dying Is an Art, Like Everything Else”

Washington, D.C., 1992-1993

Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally

well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I

guess you could say I've a call
.

—Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus,” 1966

Washington was very exciting. I remember it vaguely, for the most part, because I was dying. Dying is also very exciting. It's a pity I didn't notice it sooner. I imagine it would've been good food for thought, as it were, to consider the process of one's own dying at the age of eighteen. But I did not notice. I was very busy. Very busy indeed, very important, no time at all, my days measured neatly by the clock on my wall, the ticking of the watch I wore on my wrist, translucent skin-cloaked bone. I kept having to punch new holes in the band of my watch as it slid up and down on my arm, tapping and tapping at the small pale jut of wrist bone as my arm swung when I sped down the swarming street, jaw set.

I knew that I was thin when I got there. I took this knowledge as progress. I had never before been able to see, consistently, that I was thin, and now, as I looked at myself in the full-length mirror inside my closet door, fifth floor of Hughes Hall of American University, I could finally see, as I pulled on the panties that hung on my hipbones as if my hipbones had grown more prominent for the sole purpose of having hooks on which to hang my panties. Now I could see that I was thin. Pretty thin, I thought, smiling a proud smile at myself in the mirror, good girl! It did not occur to me that I was too thin. After all, what is
too
thin. After all, you can never be too rich or too thin. But I stood in front of the mirror, saying, Maybe. Maybe thin
enough
.

This was a miracle. The absolute truism of eating disorders is that you never believe you are thin enough. Whereas most people set out to lose a few pounds—say five, ten, fifteen—and stop when they get there, the anoretic sets out to lose ten pounds and then says, well, maybe fifteen. She loses fifteen and says twenty, loses the twenty, says thirty, loses thirty, says forty, loses the forty and dies. Oops.

She hadn't really meant to die. She just wanted to see what would happen. Wanted to see how far she could go. And then couldn't quite bring herself to break the fall.

It didn't matter at all, whether or not I was thin enough, and no, I was not sure, I couldn't be sure, who can be sure? Who's to say what's truth and what's perception? Where is the absolute standard?

It didn't matter anyway, because I did not eat.

The near-total cessation of food happened very quickly. I had not necessarily intended to cut back on eating; when I left for Washington, I was already at such a low intake level that it did not occur to me that I could, or should, lower it further still. But I did, eliminating what seemed a few superfluous bits of food. On the surface, I did it as catharsis; food suddenly seemed to be a burden, a strain on my limited time, and I pruned my diet just a bit, a few nips and tucks here and there. In reality, I did it as a test of my own endurance. I wanted to see how long I could go, running on fumes. I wanted to find the bare minimum required to subsist.

Remember, anoretics do eat. We have systems of eating that develop almost unconsciously. By the time we realize we've been running our lives with an iron system of numbers and rules, the system has begun to rule us. They are systems of Safe Foods, foods not imbued, or less imbued, with monsters and devils and dangers.

These are usually “pure” foods, less likely to taint the soul with such sins as fat, or sugar, or an excess of calories. Consider the advertise-ments for food, the religious lexicon of eating: “sinfully rich,” intones the silky voiced announcer, “indulge yourself,” she says, “guilt-free.”

Not complex foods that would send the mind spinning in a tornado of possible pitfalls contained in a given food—a possible miscalcula-tion of calories, a loss of certainty

about your control over chaos, your control over self. The horrible possibility that you are taking more than you deserve.

But systems, like corsets, keep shrinking, tightening around the body, pressing the breath out of you. They tighten further still until you cannot move at all. Even then they do not stop.

This is how my system of eating had worked when I was in Minneapolis: Food was divided into units. A unit consisted of eighty calories, the equivalent of your average slice of bread. Of course I made this system up in my head, and do not, to this day, understand why this particular system held such significance for me. This is how we work, we all have our systems. A friend of mine used to divide food arbitrarily into liquids and solids—solids including soup, bread, pasta, rice; liquids including chocolate, vegetables, and chicken—and would've argued with any rational being who tried to explain to her the alternative nature of “liquid” or “solid.”

It's just a pattern we have, and we need it fiercely. I would have a hard time putting into words the passion we have for our systems.

They are as near and dear to us as any saving God. We know them better than we know the alphabet, we know them in the deepest part of the brain, the way the hand knows how to write, even in the dark. They are the only things that stand between us and total disintegration into chaotic, needy softness, the only things that keep the uncertainty of things at bay. We take a certain sick pride in the fact that we know the caloric and fat content of every possible food on the planet, and have an understandable disdain for nutritionists who attempt to tell us the caloric content of anything, when we are the gods of caloric content and have delusions of nutritional omni-science, when said nutritionist will attempt to explain that the average woman needs a daily diet of 2,000 or more calories when we ourselves have been doing JUST FUCKING FINE on 500.

When I got out of Lowe House, I was (1) quite thin at 101 pounds, and (2) eating a consistent diet of 31.25 units, according to my calculations. By winter of that year in Minneapolis, I decided that 16 units would suffice. I cut my caloric intake in half and deleted my intake of fat altogether. By the summer before leaving for Washington, I was down to 10. When I got to Washington, I decided immediately to cut two

units—just two, what difference does a measly two Units make?—

putting me at eight. By October, I went to six units, and by December, I was down to four.

Four units. Line up four apples and think about how you'd feel after a few days of eating that and nothing else. Or four slices of bread. Or one carton of yogurt and an orange. Or two bagels. Or a pile of carrot sticks and a bowl of cereal. I was eating 320 calories a day.

The term “starvation diet” refers to 900 calories a day. I was on one-third of a starvation diet. What do you call that? One word that comes to mind: “suicide.”

Factor in, here, that most people have a funny habit of sleeping.

I did not have this habit. Certainly not in Washington. I was afraid I'd miss something. I was manic, and starving, and starving explodes mania into a sort of psychedelic passion for wakefulness, a deluded disdain for such base needs as sleep. Most people sleep seven hours a night. That's seven hours where their bodies are essentially at rest and don't require as much energy in the form of food. Most healthy people can go seventeen hours on, say, 2,000+ calories, putting them at about 117.64706 calories per waking hour.

Put me, and a lot of people like me, at, say, twenty-one hours awake, three hours tossing in half-sleep, at 15.238095 calories per waking hour.1

By the way, I also became a little obsessed with numbers in Washington.

So guess what happens next.

It was 1992 in the Capitol city, an election year with candidates who had the nation up in arms. I hit the ground running because when in Rome, you do as the Romans do. It was a hell of a year to be in Washington, with Clinton promising to save the economy and spread youth and vigor over the land, Bush looking old and taking the heat for all national ills, the city sent into turmoil with the promise or threat, depending on which side of the aisle one sat, of a Democrat back in the White House. It was a hell of a year for an ambitious would-be reporter, with no sign of a personal life to hold her back, to break in. I was work-1The medical research will tell you that people who simply eat a low-fat diet, with a relatively normal number of calories, have a higher rate of: depression, anxiety, mood swings,
difficulty concentrating, difficulty communicating, and freak auto accidents.

ing for a small wire service as managing editor, which meant I started at forty hours a week and in short order decided that that was simply not enough, so I worked more, and then more still. I was writing a weekly arts column for the American U student newspaper. I was sidelining as a freelance research hack for a couple of papers. I was going to school full-time, pulling a 4.0 grade average, and galloping full-tilt toward the finish line in some odd little private race.

As a rule, I am and always have been a hyperkinetic person. I am always busy, no matter whether I'm working one job or five. I like being busy. It keeps the brain agile. Also, I can't help it. Diagnostically speaking, I'm manic. Very. To this day, I fidget and run around most of the time. If I'm not busy, I start wondering what's wrong with me. I start feeling lazy, and I search for something to do. I do not have an off switch. But while I was in Washington, this became extreme. The activity was desperate. And I still can't tell, in retrospect, whether it was a desperate attempt to stay busy enough to keep myself alive, or an attempt to work myself to death. I became very afraid of sleep, and of stillness. As if I was afraid I might not wake up.