Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (42 page)

thought of my cousin Brian as my hands, pure white, indiscernible in the white snow, scrabbled about trying to collect the contents of my bags which had spilled. I thought of my brilliant and wonderful cousin, dear friend and lifelong confidant, who'd been in a wheelchair since he was small. I thought of how he must feel every day, legs refusing to work, through no fault of his own, through some miserable joke of God, and I thought:
This is your own fucking fault.

Get up. GET UP
. I hated myself with a pure and fierce energy and wished myself dead.

Back in my room, I put down my bags, undressed, wrapped myself in blankets, put on Christmas music, and watched the snow fall outside my window, a picture-perfect postcard winter scene, wide lawns of white, thin black arms of trees holding up the white sky. I thought of writing. But what would I have said? I'd long since stopped writing, real writing, my own writing. No words ever came anymore. I'd lost the sense of first person, the sense of being in the world that writing requires. I guess I had nothing to say for myself.

I turned my face into the pillow and slept.

Finals week hit. I studied night and day, chatted briefly with the few acquaintances whom I still spoke to in halls or in class. I ate only bagels and yogurt, from the little campus store. One bagel, one yogurt a day. I took them up to my room, set them down on the floor on top of a book, got a pillow from the bed to sit on, and peeled the bagel. I pulled off the bottom part first, dunked it piece by half-inch piece into my coffee, chewing it slowly while studying, stopping my meal often, as proof that I could stop eating, that I didn't need to eat quickly, that I wasn't really hungry. I underlined passages, made rapid notes in my notebook, and then I peeled a bit more of the skin of the bagel and nibbled on it like a rabbit. When the entire skin was gone and I had only the naked bagel before me, I ate it bit by bit, pressing it into a pile of salt before I put it in my mouth: I'd lick the bit of bagel, then coat it with salt, then pop it in my mouth and chew. This process took so long that I usually didn't want to bother with the yogurt. Then the yogurt would get warm, and I wouldn't want it, and I'd throw it away. Some days I ate a can of green beans, drowned in salt. I'd wander into the lounge, microwave the green beans while I made more coffee, and ignore the silence that fell over the room when I came in.

One night, as I was leaving with my bowl of green beans, I heard someone I'd known earlier in the year say: Jesus, I wish she would just fucking eat. It infuriated me, and my fury surprised me. It used to make me swell with pride when people noticed that I didn't eat, that I was thin. All along, part of the point of disappearing was to disappear visibly, to wear my thinness like a badge of courage, an emblem of difference from the rest of the world. But then, it pissed me off. Something had changed. I didn't want to be seen anymore.

I wanted to be left entirely alone.

But I was not. Well-intentioned people began to approach me. My former roommate stopped by and said she was worried. I said, quite baffled, that I hadn't lost any weight, I was exactly the same as I'd been before, and she shook her head and said, No, Marya, you're not. Another young woman—who I'd always wished I could be friends with—knocked on my door one day, came in and sat down on my bed. I remember she was eating a carton of yogurt. I remember watching the way that she ate it, in normal bites, not licking it from the spoon like some people. I remember thinking how incredibly pretty she was. I remember her talking to me, warmly, about this and that, before she declared, You're an anoretic. And she looked me straight in the face.

I was sitting in my chair at my desk, knees pulled up against my chest. No, I said. No, I'm really not.

She looked at me for a minute and then said, You're severely anorexic and I think you should get some help.

It was snowing outside and I was holding my breath so as not to cry. I wanted to cry. I wanted to talk to her, and sit in the room all day with her, to tell her things, to have someone near me, to go to a movie, to talk about life, to be a human being again. I stared at my knees.

She put her hand out, as if to touch my arm, but left it in midair.

She said, I want to help if I can.

I said, flatly: Why.

She said: I don't know.

I said: You can't help.

I said: I'm going to die.

I said: Please go away.

And she looked up at the ceiling. I remember the way her red hair fell over her back and I thought of Lora and my mother and she touched my shoulder as she stood to go and as the door clicked shut I bit my knee and thought:

I'm sorry.

I went home for Christmas break, and it was hell. I was only just beginning to realize that beyond the visible change in me, I had become an entirely different creature in my few months in Washington.

Serious and quiet. Eyes that moved only rarely to meet other eyes.

Slow in my movements, oddly still.

I took a cab from my dorm to the airport, watching the mansions in their holiday-lit glory glow as the cab hurtled along in the midst of the rest of the nighttime traffic, and wrote a story in my head for the holiday party my parents were having that weekend, a storytelling party. I wrote a story about the sadness of cities and the small solitary happiness of one woman at Christmastime. As usual a story for the benefit of my parents. As usual a lie. At Dulles, I dragged my suitcase behind me because I couldn't lift it and slept all the way to Minneapolis. It was freezing bloody cold when I got there. My parents had brought me a coat, and we went to a café and I began eating. Out of nowhere. I ate what seemed to me a vast amount of food, two raspberry muffins. Nothing had ever tasted so good in my life. We talked. They listened to me and watched me strangely as I spoke about Washington, the work I was doing, the way I felt I was growing as a person. This must have seemed a terrible irony to them. I weighed, at most, seventy-five pounds and was eating like a starved cat, apologizing for eating so much, it was just that I was so hungry, I hadn't eaten, I said, since lunch. Lunch indeed. They let me be for a day or so. Then the fights about food began.

The worst of it was that it did seem to me that I was eating enough.

It seemed to me, in fact, that I was eating too much, and I had to at least go through the motions of appearing normal for my parents.

My father and I screamed at each other about food. He hollered that I wasn't eating. I hollered, indignantly, that I'd
just eaten
, I just had a muffin, and I turned to my mother for support, didn't I just eat a muffin? Mom? Just this afternoon? She said, yes, but honey, now it's dinnertime, you should

eat dinner, you can't just eat a muffin and call that dinner, come on, and my father said Goddammit, and slammed out of the kitchen.

My stepbrother Paul was there for Christmas. One night he invited me for a walk, after a fight about food with my father. As we walked outside, bundled to the eyes, I said to him, Paul, I'm not better. And we walked a while more. He said, I know. I said, I'm worse than ever. And I shook my head and looked at the sky and counted stars, wondering how far this could go. We walked a block. Then I was too tired to keep going, and we turned back.

There was the party and everyone politely ignored the fact that I was disgustingly thin. I had given myself permission to eat, for the party, so as not to embarrass anyone, and I did eat, many carrot sticks and celery sticks and fruit from the fruit tray with fat-free fruit sauce that I'd made. We all told stories and sang carols and it was very warm in the house and there was a fire in the fireplace. My friend Sibyl pulled me aside and said, You're sick. I said, No no. I'm fine. She said, Marya, you look like you're about to die. I said, No no. And went back to the party where there was noise and laughter and singing and everything was warm.

My parents, Paul, and I went for a walk one afternoon in the countryside with the dogs romping through the deep snow, and I think that was the day I finally lost my mind. I mean, above and beyond the previous incremental losing of my mind. We hadn't been walking for more than a half hour when suddenly I wanted to lie down in the snow and go to sleep, just bury myself in the snow. I'd read somewhere that if you made yourself a snow cave you could keep warm, the snow itself would keep out the cold of the snow, and I was so incredibly tired, willing my legs to keep walking. We were having a family outing and I didn't want to ruin it but I was so
fucking
cold. I wish I could find words to explain what this kind of cold is like—the cold that has somehow gotten in underneath your skin and is getting colder and colder
inside you
. It isn't an outside sort of cold; it's a cold that gets into your bones and into your blood and it feels like your heart itself is beating out the cold in hard bursts through your entire body, and you suddenly remember that you have a body because you can't ignore it anymore. You feel like an ice cube. You feel like you're naked and have fallen through thin ice on a lake and are

drowning in the ice water underneath. You can't breathe. At some point I turned and stumbled back to the car, yelling at God in my head for letting me get so fucking cold, Why aren't you saving me?

Save me, you bastard! I screamed in my head as I went, the snow very deep and heavy against my legs and I felt like I was running through water, that clumsy slow-motion slogging you do when you're playing water games at the shore as a child. This is different because you're thinking, Hypothermia, I'm gonna fucking get hypo-thermia, and my family, in a furious silence, drove home as I apologized over and over for ruining their day, but it was just that I was so
cold
.

Back home, I sat in a chair at the dining room table, still wearing my coat and my hat and my scarf, hands chapped and red, fingers wrapped around a cup of tea held close to my face so that the steam would warm my skin. I thought, spring will come. It's going to be all right. I switched on my laptop and worked.

Vacation ended and I was at school again. When I opened the door of my dorm room upon my return, I realized there was someone living with me. There were clothes in the other closet, pictures on the dresser, books on the desk. I panicked. How the hell was I supposed to get any work done? How was I going to do my morning and nightly exercises? How was I going to peel my bagel in peace?

How was I supposed to go back and forth, from mirror to desk to mirror to desk, all day, all night, as I'd been doing for months? Shit.

Shit shit shit.

Unfortunately, she was one of the nicest, most genuine, most wonderful people I've had the privilege of meeting in my entire life, and we actually came to care a great deal about each other, such as I was able to care about anything at that point, and that ruined everything.

Having a normal person around me made it poignantly clear to me that I was out of control. No, that had not in fact occurred to me before this point. She ate. She slept. I watched her do both, as if watching the fascinating habits of an exotic beast. In the long and quiet nights, when she slept in the shadow of the small circle of light cast by the lamp on my desk, I watched her yellow hair cast over her pillow, her mouth. slightly open and curved in a very small smile. I watched as she dropped butter in a pot, marveling at the existence of butter and all of its implica

tions, which seemed so separate from me: the idea of buying butter in a store, the idea of touching butter without fearing that the oils would seep through the skin of your fingers and make a little lipidy beeline for your butt, the idea of eating food that you knew, you
knew
had butter in it, of having butter in your possession that did not haunt your waking and sleeping hours, that did not wear a little invisible sign that only you saw: EAT ME. ALL OF ME. NOW.

In her presence, I was reminded again of why I was an anoretic: fear. Of my needs, for food, for sleep, for touch, for simple conversation, for human contact, for love. I was an anoretic because I was afraid of being human. Implicit in human contact is the exposure of the self, the interaction of selves. The self I'd had, once upon a time, was too much. Now there was no self at all. I was a blank.

But the thing that was most amazing to me was that she was perfectly beautiful. Her skin had the most curious softness, and a funny sort of gold-rosy color lit her cheeks. Her hair was thick and shiny.

And she had tits and an ass that were startlingly appealing. Not that it would have occurred to me that I might be attracted to her. I had long since stopped having the vaguest sexual feelings. It was simply the contrast that got me. Where my breasts had been, persistently bouncing even at my theretofore thinnest, there were now only small brown-button nipples stretched over a rib cage, skin sunken inward between each bone. Where my derriere had been, there was nothing at all, a straight line from the nape of my neck to my legs, ending in a tiny bone in the center of the bow of pelvic bones, which jutted out fore and aft in an odd flat sweep. My face was the strangest, cheeks sunken so far deep that you could see all of my teeth through the skin, throat taut and concave below my chin, eyes seeming to move farther and farther back into my head with each day.

I looked like a monster, most of my hair gone, my skin the gray color of rotten meat.

I double-folded my skirt across my front and pinned it shut. I put toilet paper in my shoes so the ground wouldn't slam back at the bones of my feet when I walked, jarring me and making me dizzy.

I waited.

While I waited, I applied for internships at newspapers across the country, wondering, as I put my applications together in my office when

everyone else had gone home, making my piles of recommendations, essays and clips that all seemed so separate from me, a pile of lies, why I even bothered. I stood at the window of the office, looking down on Dupont Circle and the circling figures, mocking myself for being too weak to jump.

I went in search of a scale.

Seventy.

I took off my belt and shoes.