Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (41 page)

I stopped going to most of my classes in favor of going to work.

I'd walk to the Metro, talking back to my stomach, telling it to be quiet, it wasn't really hungry, it was just fucking with my head. I'll eat at lunch, I promised it, placating. When twelve hours had passed since I'd eaten the night before, I'd go down to a little yogurt shop across from the office. They had the best yogurt. It wasn't that nasty icy kind, but the creamy kind, even the fat-free stuff, and they had fat-free peanut butter-flavored yogurt, which was the finest because it fooled the tongue into believing it was in contact with food. I even entertained the notion that it might have protein in it. Being a dairy product, and peanut-flavored to boot. I would order a small yogurt, after shrilly grilling the woman who worked there to be certain the flavor I was ordering was nonfat, and then I'd sit at a table facing the street so no one could watch my erotic encounter with a plastic spoon.

I would spread my paper out in front of me, set the yogurt aside, check my watch. I'd read the same sentence over and over, to prove that I could sit in front of food without snarfing it up, to prove it was no big deal. When five minutes had passed, I would start to skim my yogurt. Try this at home, kids, it's great fun. You take the edge of your spoon and run it over the top of the yogurt, being careful to get only the melted part. Then let the yogurt drip off until there's only a sheen of it on the spoon. Lick it—wait, be careful, you have to only lick a teeny bit at a time, the sheen should last at least four or five licks, and you have to lick the back of the spoon first, then turn the spoon over and lick the front, with the tip of your tongue. Then set the yogurt aside again. Read a full page, but don't look at the yogurt to check the melt progression. Repeat. Repeat.

Repeat. Do not take a mouthful, do not eat any of the yogurt unless it's melted. Do not fantasize about toppings, crumbled Oreos, or chocolate sauce. Do not fantasize about a sandwich. A sandwich would be so
complicated
.

Imagine a woman in a suit, reading the
Post
on her lunch hour.

Pushing her glasses up on her nose. Then imagine her pulling the yogurt toward her, bending over it as if she is examining its atomic makeup, watch her dip a spoon into the yogurt, then shake the yogurt off and lick a naked spoon. If I saw a woman like this, I'd be very tempted to walk over and shove the whole cup of yogurt in her face. But I was her, and having eliminated breakfast, all I ate for several months was that small yogurt, in the afternoon, and a fat-free muffin late at night. It's astonishing to see just how desperate you are to make those two things last, before they get taken away.

Picture a starving dog, gnawing and licking at a dry bone.

The classes I did attend I worked at with an absurd level of dedic-ation, getting into heated arguments and discussions about journalism and philosophy, staying up alternate nights to work on articles for reporting classes and papers in philosophy. It was the philosophy that got me. I became obsessed with philosophy, with Hume in particular, and with materialist ontology. I clung to the doctrine of disembodiment so furiously that it's odd I didn't notice the connection. Instead, I wrote letters to Julian, arguing madly that Hume was right, that life was but a dream and any sort of order in life was purely a product of the imagination and our minds were only a stage upon which perceptions played. My caffeine-and-mania-induced papers were returned to me with As. I reread them and furrowed my brow at arguments I didn't remember making. Then my mother came to visit Washington for a conference.

I didn't even bother to eat. I stayed with her in her hotel room while she was there. She brought me food, yogurt and muffins from her morning meeting. I left it all sitting on the table, sat in a big soft chair with my laptop on my lap, and tapped out a virulent argument against Kierkegaard. When I was finished, I sat in the windowsill with my knees pulled up against my chest, smoking and willing my mother to come back to the room. I wanted my mother. I wanted her to stay in Washington forever. I wanted my mother to hold me very tight and make everything stop spinning. She was visibly worried by the state I was in, tried to talk about it—We thought you were doing so well, she'd say, her voice fading. She tried very hard to simply be there, to find some piece of me underneath my layers of false cheer, exuberant ambition, palpable fear.

When I wrote her to ask how she remembers the trip, she replied that she would not say she thought I was relapsing. She and my father knew I was sick when I left but thought it was better to give me a chance to try and make it without imposing external controls, a decision that I am ultimately grateful for. She talked of how isolated I was, making no effort at all to connect with people at school or work, disinterested in doing things (anoretics, especially when their condition has become severe, tend to completely isolate themselves).

She describes me as “depressed, disengaged, wrapped up in whatever mental quest you were on.…It was difficult to leave. I felt you very small and angry and determined to be alone.” I asked her if she felt she was letting go of me. She wrote, “I was not leaving you psychically but I was leaving you to make some decisions about yourself that I felt only you could make.”

Those decisions were, I think, primarily about whether to live or die, and I was making the choice by default. In the past few years, my mother's presence had changed for me. She no longer seemed distant and cold, but calming; and, if not always warm, always connected to me, always tethering me to the ground. That October, the sudden shock of

being connected to another human being left a knot in my throat that I could neither express nor undo. We had two days of, for me, a semblance of peace. Then she left. I went back to my dorm room, lay down on my bed, and sobbed.

It is only in retrospect that I understand why her presence was so painful: though she was there, I could feel myself slipping away from her, falling backward into space. It was a presence I reached for but could not grasp. When someone is dying, there is nothing left to say or give. All you can do is hold their ephemeral body, carefully, and then let them go.

I began to lose it.

Shortly after she left, I went to work one day and something was wrong. Not with work. Something was wrong in my head. This was the beginning of what I believed to be a nervous breakdown. I couldn't concentrate on the computer screen. I paced in the office.

This happens. Starvation does eventually hit the brain. First it eats all your fat. Then it eats your exoskeletal muscles. Then it eats your internal organs, one of which is the brain. I couldn't think straight, I kept getting distracted, kept telling myself that I was just a lazy brat who didn't have the wherewithal to work like an adult. Then I'd talk back to myself. Hey, I'd say, I'm tired, I'm stressed, I'm working a lot, this is natural when you're working too much. I finally went into my boss's office and said I needed a vacation. My boss was a very cool fellow and had expressed, privately, a genuine concern for my health. He had attempted, on a number of occasions, to take me to lunch, and had drawn me aside to say, Hey, you really don't need to work so hard. Delegate. You're the managing editor.

You can give some of this work to the staff. I shook my head no.

He'd pat me on the back and say, Well, you let me know if you need a break. So I walked into his office and said, very abruptly, “I'm freaking out and I'm leaving for a few days.” He said, Good, good, by all means. I left the office, went back to campus, packed a bag, went to Union Station, and took a train to Boston to visit Lora.

Though she and I had ended the year at Interlochen on a bad note, as soon as she heard I was in the hospital that summer, she called and wrote. Our letters, fat with drawings and clippings and poems and quotes, flew back and forth over the next few years, through all my hospitalizations and the loony bin and the year at home in Minneapolis.

In my head, no matter where I was, I saw a thin red line connecting me to the East Coast—Lora—and the West Coast—Julian—therefore keeping me suspended somewhere in this world. They were the only things in the world that made sense to me. I suddenly, fiercely, needed Lora's bouncing, shrieking, busting-with-life self.

We hadn't seen each other since her graduation the summer before.

A funny thing had happened in the meantime: She'd transformed from a twiggy wild-haired girl to an absolutely beautiful woman, curvy and graceful. And I had transformed from a thin girl to a skeletal ghost wearing a plum-colored hat that hid my eyes and the purple half-moons below them. She picked me up at the station and we hugged and danced around and she tried, all weekend, in her gentle way, to get me to eat. Hey Max, she'd say as I stared at the muffins in a case at a café, the way one might stare at the crown jewels on display behind glass. Max, she'd say, poking me in the back, Get something to dunk in your coffee. Max, come on. You're way too skinny. I'd shake my head. Not hungry.

It was a painful trip. We crashed about like electrons, racing toward each other and bouncing off, one minute curled in our pajamas in her dorm room, laughing and bawling and hooting and hollering, another storming off scowling and pissy, the way it had always been with us. But there was one difference. I was half-dead, and she knew it and I suspected it, and it had changed me, brought a certain shiftiness to my eyes and motion, an odd heavy breathing when I walked. Hey, I'd say, can we stop and sit a minute? We'd sit in Harvard Square, watching the pigeons and the people strutting about. I'd huddle into my coat, fists shoved in my pockets, fingers rasping against themselves. She'd look away, speak in tight sentences: Max, this isn't cool. (What isn't?) She'd shake her head, furious and silent. Then: Jesus, Max, could you just talk to me? Tell me what the hell is up? (What do you mean?) I looked at the grounds of Harvard, thought about graduate school. Let the thought float off into the white winter sky like a balloon.

I wrote to Lora, asking her to tell me how she remembered that trip, and this is her reply:

Here we go. You stepped off the train and you looked like a porcelain doll who thought she was bulletproof. And you were very much the fashion plate of a Lois Lane. I mean you would have looked awesome if you had had your health. I was surprised at how little you had gotten or how much I had grown.

I guess people who eat grow more. And your head looked really too heavy for you to be carrying it around on your bones like that. And your bags for that matter were about to make you collapse like a Slinky.…And then you needed a back rub and I swear I felt like I was giving a back rub to a bird. Absurd to give a back rub to a bird. And maybe your bones were that light and hollow and that was how you managed to carry them around with no muscles and fat like normal regular non-bird humans have.…And anyway. Wow. I remember my friend Ryan thinking you were like terminally ill and me saying I hope the hell not. You know?

I remember eating only once the entire time I was there. One night, Lora went out for a few hours to a party that I didn't want to go to.

I'd become very afraid of new people. I put on my pajamas. I lay down to read. There was a bag from a bakery on the floor. I couldn't stop thinking about it. I turned my pages, not registering the words.

Finally I dove at the bag, peered in. Stale muffins, half-eaten. I agonized. I pulled the muffins out, minimuffins. I said, Just a bite. I'll have a bite, one bite. I took the bite. I took another bite from a different muffin, what if Lora saw I'd been eating? Cranberry muffins, crumbling in my hands. I bit and bit. And then I cried. Having eaten less than the total of one normal-size muffin, I began crying, standing up to look in the mirror, checking my bones, feeling for signs of softness, my brain veering back and forth from pig-pig-pig-fat-pig to stop-it-you're-okay-it's-okay-okay-okay. When Lora came back to the room, I cried and confessed. The look on her face, confusion and horror, I remember clearly, her voice saying, Max, chill, it's fine, it's really fine, stop crying, Max. Max—

One night, Lora and I ran into a childhood friend of mine who stared at me for a minute, then spent the rest of the brief, awkward conversation looking away. In my head, I said good-bye to her. The morning I

left, Lora and I sat in a café, she eating, me wrapping the muffin I'd ordered in a paper napkin, putting it into my purse. For later, I said, There's nothing to eat on the train. We sat in the train station, talking only a little. The train was late, and we stared into our coffee cups, waiting to let go. The pain in my chest was sudden and so intense I could barely breathe. I wanted, more than anything to say, Lo, I'm really scared. But I didn't say that, I talked about the classes I was taking and the work I was doing and she didn't say anything at all.

When the train came, we hugged and I walked onto the train. I sat in my seat a minute, leaning my head on the window, clenching my jaw, saying to myself: Don't cry. Don't cry. People go away, it happens, it happens, don't cry. The train started moving. I sat up in my seat and wrote a very good paper on Dostoyevsky and got up at one point to throw away the muffin in my purse because it was distracting me with its presence. I sat down feeling much better, much more contained, stronger, the way one might feel if one had just eaten a good solid meal. Back in D.C., I got off the train and walked through the station, and took the subway home. I went to work the next morning feeling empty, and lost, and light, as if I'd untethered myself from something that had been holding me down.

Winter rushed in fiercely and seemed suddenly malevolent, as if winter was after me in particular, the winds scraping against my skin. In reality, Washington is not all that cold, certainly not as cold as Minnesota. I knew that, and it seemed funny that I would be so cold. It snowed one day—Washington is always very surprised when it snows, they're never prepared for it, so everything shuts down. I returned from a day of Christmas shopping and decided not to take the shuttle bus from the station to campus, I could use the exercise. I walked the few blocks, near tears with cold, my bags too heavy, the muscles of my arms burning from what can't really have been so very much weight. Halfway home I began to run, a faltering, stumbling run, eyelashes fluttering with snowflakes, face numb, hair falling into my face with the weight of wet snow. I slipped and fell and could not get up. I sat there in a heap in front of the vice president's mansion, I, up-and-coming young journalist, A student, maniac, starving artist, invisible basket case, me. I cried with an impotent fury at my legs for refusing to stand when I told them to and