Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (4 page)

Therapy charts ten years later, will note:

Marya wants to live in a private world…is not open to trusting people…tends to shut people out if they try to get too close.

The therapists will scribble down:

Hypervigilant. Massive fear of abandonment. Controls fear of loss through fear of food.

The world outside my room seemed a seductive, fascinating, but very dangerous place to me. That sense of danger may have come in part from my father's near-paranoid overprotectiveness. My own sense of inadequacy in the face of a threatening world may have come also in part from my mother's attempts to knock me down a notch or two. I misread her advice. She tells me now that she was worried I would dream too big and get hurt. What I saw, though, were her skeptical eyebrows lifted as I regaled her with babbled tales of flying just that afternoon, her narrow, ramrod back swishing about the house as I trotted after her, trying to cut through her selective deafness: Mom.
Mom
. MOM!
What
? she'd finally say, Don't
shout
. I remember her as she tried to read in the living room when I was four, hand to her ear as I randomly banged away on the piano, crowing, “Mom, listen! Mom, listen!” “What
is
it, Marya?” she asked.

“I'm playing Bach! Mom!” She lifted herself from the couch and left the room, voice and the scent of Chanel No. 5 trailing behind her:

“Oh, Marya,” she said. “That isn't Bach.”

I stopped banging. I thought, I know
that
.

In the therapy charts, my parents are quoted as saying that they felt a need to “scale down my expectations.” They apparently mentioned, not once but four times in a single session, plans I made when I was
three
for a birthday party that was, admittedly, a bit elaborate. Their “scaling down” of my expectations, which seemed to me more like an abiding doubt in my ability to do so much as blow my nose properly, would continue from early childhood until, oh, last year. It had an interesting effect: My behavior became ever more grandiose, while I myself became progressively less certain that I could accomplish even simple tasks, let alone achieve any significant success.2 My parents, I sense, thought I was a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Who knows? Maybe they were right. They say, in the charts:
fears, nightmares, too much fantasy
.

The scream in the night, the sobbing as I fumbled my dark run across

2Whatever success is. For further musings on the mutable meaning of success, see also
chapter 5. My own uncertainty about achievement and success, combined with my agitated
certainty of its importance, would lead to frenetic workaholism by the time I was sixteen,
and would also feed into my idea that an eating disorder—or “thinness”—was the only
success that I would ever fully achieve.

the endless house to the door of my parents' bedroom, the incoherent rambling about monsters that were stealing pennies from my penny jar, the desperate weeping: I won't know how many I
have
now, I howled. My father, stubbled and striped-pajamaed, sitting sleepily up in bed, carting me back to my room, sitting by my bed, singing me songs in the dark until I fell asleep. The tape recorder playing books-on-tape that I placed under my pillow. I would lay my head on it, listening to the story over and over as the night wore on, sure that if I kept listening long enough, morning would come, but if I did not, the horrible prayer would come true: If I should die before I wake—

The shrinks scrawl these words on their notepads:
Magical thinking
.

Their books call it “a disposition to regard the metaphoric as the concrete” and “to attribute primitive magical powers” to objects.3

One might, for example, attribute magical powers to food. For example, if I am three years old and standing on a chair making myself an apple sandwich, and if I eat this apple sandwich in precisely
twenty bites
, no more no less, then I will be happy. If I eat it in more than twenty bites, I will be sad. If I am nineteen years old, sixty pounds, and eating a carton of yogurt a day, and it takes me precisely two hours to eat this carton of yogurt, and I smoke a cigarette every fifteen minutes to prove that I can stop eating, then I will be safe, retaining my dictatorial grip on my body, my life, my world. By contrast, if I so much as taste a bit of unsafe food on my tongue, it will not travel through my body in the usual biological fashion but will magically make me grow, like Alice taking a bite of the wrong cake.

It is not uncommon for young children to develop elaborate, self-protective systems to give themselves a sense of control over their surroundings: imaginary friends, particular arrangements of stuffed animals in their arms in bed. Eventually, they will loosen their grip on these systems as they develop an understanding of security in themselves and in the world. My systems—precise arrangements of the knickknacks on my dresser, of stuffed animals imbued with

“primitive magical powers,” exact ways of walking down the street, and weird ritualistic eating behaviors, even in my earliest years (num-3Noelle Casky, “Interpreting Anorexia,” in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed.

Susan Suleiman, 183.

ber of bites, size of bites, order of bites, number of chews)—were systems that acted as a buffer between me and the world. My focus on minutiae calmed me. It was a simple refusal to look up at the larger world, which always seemed to dilate my pupils, making me squint and shy from the glare. An eating disorder is just such a system. And it indicated, in me at least, an inability to believe I was secure in myself or in my world.

he trouble, looking

back, is that there were a bunch of contradictory things going on at once. I lived in a perfect little family of three, we three against the world, a team. And we really were very close, most of the time. It was the mutability of things that disturbed us all. Everything kept turning upside down and backward, the perfect little family blown apart by the slightest touch, the team splitting into multiple teams, players switching sides without warning. My father, a brilliant and severely depressed man, was by turns adoring and unstable. My mother, a brilliant and severely repressed woman, was by turns tender and icy. My childhood home may as well have been a bumper car rink. We each drove wildly around, crashing into one another and bouncing off again. I personally did not care for this. I usually retreated to my bedroom, or to the bath, where things were quiet and consistent from minute to minute. The white curtains were always the same. The bedspread with small purple flowers was always the same, as were the curios of my infinite collections—rocks and boxes and feathers and knickknacks and ceramic ducks, carefully arranged and rearranged on my dresser, over and over, obsessive-compulsively organized and dusted and arranged. The books and the corner into which I tucked myself were always the same.

My parents were never the same. Opening my bedroom door, I could not guess who I would find: my father, loving and cheerful and wanting to play? My father, red-faced and screaming at my mother? Kicking the dog? My mother, cheerful and wanting to chat?

My mother, stone-faced and hissing at my father? Swishing out the door in a rustle of silk? My parents, a unit, glamorous and reeking of perfume and Scotch, wanting to go out to dinner at 11 P.M.? My parents, a unit, rushing over to me with terribly worried parental looks on their faces, wanting to know why I was crumpling up in a pile of tears?

Or would I find an empty house? The baby-sitter sitting in front of the television, watching
Love Boat
, offering me untoasted English muffins with honey. No, thank you, I said. I waited in my room, under a blanket in my closet, with flashlight in one hand and book in the other, until I heard the car pull up, heard the muffled screaming discussions, the slammed doors. Then I could dash to my bed, yank the covers over my head, turn my face into the pillow, screw my eyes shut, pretend to sleep.

If you are bulimic, it is assumed that you come from a chaotic family. If you are an anoretic, it is assumed you come from a rigid and controlling family. As it happens, mine was both.

In childhood, all of us go through a process of discovering how to self-regulate—to calm down, to stop the flood of tears, to release fears. It's a necessary process. Usually, children look to their parents to set an example and emulate them. You run into a bit of trouble if your parents' means of self-regulation are a little weird.

My father ate like a horse, drank like a fish, smoked like a chimney, and screamed. My mother stopped eating, grew thinner, sharper, more silent. I looked at each and settled on both: eat, throw up, starve, scream, skip town, disappear, reappear screaming and skinny, smoke and smoke and smoke. Of course there were other, numerous, factors that helped create my eating disorder, but I took the prototype of my family dinner table and elaborated on it. While my relationship to my parents has always been very complex, there is also the simple fact that both of them used food—one to excess, one to absence—as a means of communication, or comfort, or quest. Food was a problem in my family. A big problem. The shrinks say that two common elements in an anoretic's family are a focus on food and diet, and a significant degree of personality disturbance in one or both parents.4

My father was a periodic heavy drinker, ate constantly, and was forever obsessing about his weight—he would diet, berate himself for falling off his diet, call himself a pig.5 My mother was a
4Casky, 186.

former—or was it closet?—bulimic with strange eating habits. She'd eat normally for a while, then go on a diet, pick at her food, push it away, stare at her butt in the mirror.

Watching the two of them eat played out like this: My father, voracious, tried to gobble up my mother. My mother, haughty and stiff-backed, left my father untouched on her plate. They might as well have screamed aloud: I need you/I do not need you.

And there I sat in my chair—two, three, four years old—refusing to eat, which created a fine little distraction from the palpable tension that hummed between them. I became their common ground: Piglet, they said, please eat.

This, the shrinks tell us later, is called being the “symptom bearer.”

You get to do a little pantomime of the family's problems, playing all the parts, and everyone claps and you bow. What really happens is everyone gets into a big fuss over you and stops fighting for a while. This only works for one or two hospitalizations. After that they think you're crazy, so you have to come up with a new reason to starve yourself to death, which you always do.

“The parents of the anorexic person are often preoccupied with themselves but overtly appear worried or concerned about other family members.”6 I was my parents' only child, which is unfortunate, because you are their pride and joy and the bane of their existence all at once. You get way too much hyper-invested attention and become very manipulative. My father had adoptive twin sons from a previous marriage who spent some time with us, and whom I adored. When they were not there, there was no mitigating factor, no other focus of attention. My parents' fury with each other was somehow always related to, or channeled through, or deflected onto, me.

You do a little tap dance all the time to try to make what is very obviously not working, work. You, imagining yourself a small Hercules, hoist your bickering parents onto your shoulders and carry them around. You also begin to tire of it, so it is not so surprising that one day you will up and quit. Weaken yourself. Drop them, oops. Take

5Friendly nicknames probably being fairly benign, it is still worth noting that my father
calls himself Mr. Pig, calls my mother Dr. Pig, and (before my eating disorder came out of
the closet) called me Piglet. None of us is, or ever has been, fat, and I have no idea where
this came from.

6Zerbe, 131-32.

up residence in a hospital bed, where everyone is taking care of you.

Where you, vindictive and infantile, can turn your sunken eyes on them and say,
J'accuse
.

Whereupon they promptly begin blaming each other for the mess that you've become.

Let it be noted here that it is decidedly not their “fault.” If someone tells you to jump off a bridge, you don't have to jump. But if you jump, you can always blame them for pushing you. It would be very easy to blame this all on my parents, if I weren't so painfully aware that I was also very curious about how it would feel to fall.

The shrinks call it “enmeshment,” they call it “triangulation.”

They talk about a “confusion of pronouns” in families like mine, a situation where each person seems to pay more attention to the ideas, the perceptions, the needs, of the other people than to his/her own. They say that “anorexics [sic] have from an early age learned to be more responsive to others' perceptions of their needs than to the needs themselves.”7 It becomes ventriloquism on a grand scale: Dad thinks Mom is being cruel to him, so Dad takes Marya for ice cream. Marya is grateful and lovey-dovey, so Dad is happy and Mom is jealous. Mom thinks Dad is shoving her out of the family, so Mom buys Marya new books, which Dad thinks are too old for Marya, and they argue in the kitchen while Dad is making dinner.8

Grandma Donna, Mom's mom, comes to visit, tells Marya she wouldn't be so fat if her father didn't feed her so much (Grandma Donna is stone blind, and Marya is not fat). Grandma Ellen, Dad's mom, comes to visit, feeds Marya nonstop for days, and comments spitefully on how skinny Mom is.

I was not what my parents expected. My father expected, or at least

7Hilde Bruch, cit. Casky, 178.

8Studies indicate that conflict at mealtime can exacerbate eating-disordered behavior.

On the cultural front, there is some evidence that the specifically modern trend of solitary
eating in general leads to weird eating, food choices that would not be made in a family or
social eating situation: people eating alone tend to eat what one might call “comfort foods,”