Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (40 page)

Fall in Washington was cool and breezy, bright, a sort of promised land of blue skies and teeming streets, the sprawling diplomatic mansions that lined the street where the American campus sat, smug and landscaped. I woke in the mornings, in the bed by the window of the dorm room I shared with another young woman. I went to breakfast with a few people I knew from the floor, ate a bowl of cereal, drank my coffee, went to my classes, ran from the campus to the Tenleytown Metro station, ducked into the subway, ducked out, raced up the long escalator, excuseme excuseme, elbowing and shouldering my way past a bunch of suits. I was just another woman in a suit and running shoes, and I popped up like a gopher in Dupont Circle. We all went zipping down the streets, our separate and anonymous ways, squinting in the sudden light, past the flower vendors, the fruit vendors, the hot dog and pretzel stands, past the cafés and the shops and the small circular park where men slept on benches with newspapers over their faces, past the men asleep on the grates in the sidewalk where steam rose like a belch from the belly of the city, past the women with signs and tin cups, crouched up against buildings, below eye level. Everyone was gauging the distance between here and there, avoiding eye contact, swinging briefcases in sharp arcs, clutching purses to hips, walking that walk.

I perfected that walk in short order. You walk as fast as possible, even if you're only going to the store for a cup of coffee, even if you're going nowhere in particular, even if you're early for work.

You walk as if you're going to be late. You are
definitely
going to be late, for a very important date, and because you are all trying to look important, you walk as if it is important that you not be late, because there are things waiting for your important consideration when you get there, because Washington will come to a standstill if you are even a split second late. You keep your face blank. You do not smile and you do not frown. You look straight ahead, you notice neither the bums you step over without breaking your stride, nor women in multiple coats wandering in your midst, muttering about the terrible state of the world. You do not notice the fruit vendor who wears a different hat every day and lives on the same sidewalk where her fruit stand sits and laughs and laughs the most lovely little laugh and waves to you every day as you pass, Hello, dearie! How are you feeling today? Because you are essentially just a small town girl lost in a big city, it always makes you want to cry. You smile a shy smile and say, Hi, and then straighten your face again and keep your thoughts to yourself and keep going and you race up the stairs to your office, say hello to the staff, pick up the phone and start making calls as you dig through the pile of papers on your desk, scribble notes on your legal pad, hang up, and work until the rest of the staff has long since gone home. Alone in the office, you go out to the coffeemaker and brew another pot, lean back against the wall and rub your eyes with your fists. You turn on the radio. You pour yourself more coffee. You go back to your desk.

Night. The streets still crowded with those who have worked late and are now on their way home. I loved the nights, the night subway, the night walk back to the dorm. Things were good, at first. I made a few acquaintances that one might have called friends, if one was in a generous mood. I don't actually remember any names, but we went down to dinner together, and I ate my carrot sticks with mustard and, on nights when I was feeling particularly brave, frozen yogurt in a coffee cup. It

seemed more manageable, somehow, to eat it from a coffee cup than from a bowl—a bowl was simply too much. When I had hunted down the cafeteria manager to make sure, absolutely
sure
, that the frozen yogurt was nonfat, and not low-fat, when I was sure there hadn't been a mistake, and no one had put out the wrong sign just to fuck with my head, I sat at the table and we all argued loudly about politics and philosophy, laughing and shouting. They were nice people. A little wacky. Very ambitious. We were all intensely driven, all of us spent more time working off campus than in school, mostly in politics. After we'd gone our separate ways to study and work, we reconvened late at night in the fifth-floor smoking lounge, turned on the television to the news, sat around a small table and played poker, shouting at one another until dawn.

Weekends, we drank. A lot. The campus was technically a “dry”

campus, but that meant diddly-squat. We hit the bars and drank ourselves silly and danced. I once wore a little black dress and we took the Metro to Quigley's downtown and I met a very nice idiot named Jeff. I was drunk enough by the time I got there to think that the name “Jeff” was perfectly hilarious, as was the fact that I was seducing an accounting major from Georgetown, of all things, as was the fact that Jeff was wearing a silk tie and a baseball cap
at the
same time
, as was the fact that he bought me drink after drink because, of course, I was underage and couldn't buy my own. We fucked, my body numb, in a dark corner of the bar, behind a curtain, standing up. He gave me his phone number on a napkin. In the cab on the way home, the girls I'd come with and I laughed so hard we could barely walk up the stairs of the dorm, and our friends were all in the smoking lounge and someone said Uh-oh and caught me before I fell over, laughing my ass off, and carried me down the hall to my room (Goddamn, girl, what do you weigh?) and put me into bed. I vaguely remember two guys arguing in the room about whether or not they should undress me, and in the end they just took off my shoes, put the garbage can next to my bed, and left me there. I leaned over and puked up a night's worth of booze with a tremendous slosh. There was not an ounce of food in the puke because I hadn't eaten in a day or so.

The next morning, I woke up, hopped out of bed, and sauntered back

to the lounge. There were people in there who hadn't gone to sleep at all, and they all stared at me. I was still in my dress and stockings, makeup still on, hair still neatly done. One of them asked, wryly, How do you feel? I said, Fine. Why? He said, You're not hung over?

I said, Nope. Are we going to breakfast or what? We went to breakfast. For breakfast, I usually poured a half-cup of bran cereal in a bowl and poured hot water in it, mashing it around with a spoon.

Then people began to ask me if I was anoretic. My roommate told the resident advisor that she was worried about me. He came into my room one night to talk about it, poor fellow, and I told him blithely that I'd once been anoretic but that was all over now. He said he was glad, and if I ever wanted to talk I could come to him.

Sure thing, sez I. Talk began to circulate about me and about the bulimic who lived next door who, it was rumored, was the cause of the constantly flooded bathroom. I stopped going to breakfast and dinner. I'm busy, I said, which was true. I began to spend my evenings alone in my room, at my desk, in front of my computer, listening to National Public Radio, ignoring my whirlwind of a roommate who was having a perpetual crisis.

I, by contrast, was certainly not having a crisis. Not I.

I was, however, intensely lonely. My frequent letters home to my parents say over and over that I'm lonely. This now strikes me as very strange. My relationship with my family had been, until I left, antagonistic at worst and stilted at best, and for years I had been doing my best to hold them as far at bay as I could, myself as hidden as possible. But these letters are soft-spoken and intimate, full of questions about the world I was living in, concerns about my place in it, about what I wanted to do with my life, about my fear of the pace at which I was going. That is maybe the strangest part, the fact that these letters, written almost always in the middle of the night, are so revealing, probably more than I had intended. I do not remember being as contemplative as my words would suggest. I do not, in fact, remember feeling anything at all. Except terrified. And the letters do not do justice to how very afraid I was.

One thing the letters do reflect is my attempt at constructing a picture of health for my parents. Every last one contains some mention of food: “I'm off for a snack,” “I'm off to dinner,” “Warm and cozy after a

bowl of soup,” “Just back from pizza with friends.” Pizza with friends, my ass. Ha ha. I had no ass. No legs or arms or cheeks or breasts. In fact, I had no friends. Early in the first quarter, my roommate moved out. The thin thread that had connected me to the world of humans was cut off completely. I stopped going to meals.

Classes, work, walking up five flights of stairs to my room in the dorm, holding the handrail to pull myself up some nights, into my room, door locked. I flipped on the light, the radio, made a pot of coffee, lit a cigarette, kicked off my shoes, and sat down at my desk to work.

I was drinking between three and six pots of coffee a day. My hands shook terribly. It was almost embarrassing; in classes I'd keep them under the table, where they could tremble in private. My hands, when fall began to fade into winter, turned a funny shade of mottled purple, the tendons jutting out through skin, a small web of blue veins crisscrossing the bones. When I held my hands up to the light, only the knuckles touched, the light shone through the gaps between fingers no matter how hard I pressed them together. I became very concerned with gaps, spaces between bones, absent places where I was certain there had once been flesh but I couldn't quite remember when. When the small voice in my head would not stop hissing, I'd throw down my pen, stand up, go to the mirror, drop my pants, and look at the gaps. Pressing my legs together as hard as I could, I'd look at the gaps between my calves and thighs. I began to measure things in absence instead of presence. Where once I'd stared at my rear end, to see if it had grown or shrunk, now I looked at the space around it, to see if the space had grown or shrunk. I looked at the way the side of my ass sank in toward the hipbone. I'd scrutinize the hipbone, cup the bone in my hand, knock on it, listen to the hollow sound. I'd look at the space between my thighs, my lower body like a wishbone, my pubic hair obscene on a prepubescent frame, legs bowed apart from each other, the bones of my knees touching and then pure space, blank space. I could see the heater behind me through my legs, a little oval of space from knee to crotch.

I stared at the place where my torso had been, the space between bones. I took my rib cage in my hands, curved my whole hands around the twin curves of bone, fingers inside the cage, palms on the outside, two fists. When I was satis-fied that space had not shrunk, that my body had stayed within its spatial confines and had not encroached, I pulled up my pants, sat down at my desk, swallowed my coffee, and worked. All night.

Early in the year, my parents asked me to go to the doctor, just for a checkup, just as a favor to them. I went to a doctor on campus, correctly assuming that he wouldn't know an eating disorder if it bit him on the ass. I ate a bagel before I went in to boost my weight.

As my parents had requested, I did tell him that, at one time, I'd had an eating disorder. A very nice doctor, white-haired and personable.

He put me on the scale in my underwear and socks: 82 pounds. I was surprised and hid my grin. He told me I might want to put on a little weight and recommended milkshakes. I left, humming all day long, remembering that once upon a time my ideal weight had been 84, and now I'd even beaten that. I decided 80 was a better number, a nice even number to be. I told my parents, when they asked, that the doctor said I was healthy as could be, and that I weighed 104. See? I crowed. I'm maintaining my weight!

I went down to Virginia to cover the presidential debates. A frantic day and night in the press tent, reporters running around madly, bowls of caramels on the tables. I ate an incredible number of caramels and felt very ill. Packs of cigarettes were provided, as was dinner, but the line for dinner was long, and all that seemed safe to eat were the white rolls, so I decided to skip it. I ran around with the rest, interviewing and scribbling notes, sitting in the pressroom during the debates, the noise deafening. An old man with an Under-wood typewriter and a loosened tie who sat next to me, chewing on his cigar, reading over my shoulder, turned to me at one point and said, “Kid, you're gonna be a good reporter,” and returned to his typing. Then the debates were over and Mary Matalin and James Carville came into the room, the press jostled for position, and I, being five feet tall and as wide as a twig, ducked under everyone's arms and stood with my tape recorder next to their faces and shouted questions over the din and then back to the hotel, tapping out the story while I gnawed on ancient Dots in order of color, and drank a Coke. I caught a train back to Washington at five-thirty in the morning, sat in my seat watching the fall leaves go by. I got out a notebook, intending to write a poem as I always did on trains, but my brain buzzed a flat ambi-ent empty din. I pressed my fist into my stomach to try to squash the incredible hunger that seemed to be chewing on my ribs. I sipped my coffee. And made small talk with the man next to me, a lonely man in Armani who was looking for a date. I remember thinking, in a rare moment of clarity, that I couldn't imagine who would be attracted to me, as ugly as I'd become.

I had become very ugly. Where was the romance of wasting away?

Where was the eerie beauty of pallor and delicate bones? Not on my face. Death by starvation is nasty. I was a strange sallow color, my cheeks sunken back into my face. Mornings, I'd wake up and look in the mirror for a while, thinking how different I looked. More and more often, I'd have the same feeling I'd had as a little girl, when I looked in the mirror and suddenly didn't quite know who that person was, couldn't quite make a connection between her and me. And then I'd lie down on the floor, spread out the paper, and do my exercises, shifting often because the floor pressed into my bones and it hurt. I had bruises on each hipbone, on the bones at the base of my back, on the coccyx bone, the end of the spine that really isn't supposed to stick out because there's supposed to be a butt there. I clearly remember the day I saw that bone sticking out. It looked like I'd grown a tail.