Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (43 page)

Sixty-seven.

That's when I began bingeing. It was all over then. From there on out, everything is a blur.

Nothing in the world scares me as much as bulimia. It was true then and it is true now. But at some point, the body will essentially eat of its own accord in order to save itself. Mine began to do that.

The passivity with which I speak here is intentional. It feels very much as if you are possessed, as if you have no will of your own but are in constant battle with your body, and you are losing. It wants to live. You want to die. You cannot both have your way. And so bulimia creeps into the rift between you and your body and you go out of your mind with fear. Starvation is incredibly frightening when it finally sets in with a vengeance. And when it does, you are surprised. You hadn't meant this. You say: Wait, not this. And then it sucks you under and you drown.

Sixty-five.

The blur, the spinning of the sky above my head as I wandered through Washington, D.C., getting lost and trying to walk off the need for food, sucking up the smells of restaurants as I passed as if the smell itself might be enough, talking to myself, gripping my wallet and trying to fight off the thoughts of food, food, food, trying to clench my teeth hard enough to satisfy the longing for something between my teeth, the longing to chew, to bite down, to swallow.

And then the binge, in and out of fast-food restaurants, half-running as I tried to hide my face while I stuffed my mouth with food, and more food, and more food, and then threw up in bathroom after bathroom. I began to carry Kleenex in my pockets so that when the coughing started, the blood-coughing, I could politely cough into my Kleenex and then stuff it up my sleeve, unseen. I began to have trouble walking, the sky always tilting at funny angles and pressing down on one side of my head, the edges of my vision shrinking and then widening without warning, and everything seemed very, very big, and the sky was incredibly wide and bright, and it scared me, the sky did. It seemed unpredictable.

My roommate was very worried, tried to get me to talk to her, and I did talk, a little bit. I told her when I'd made it through a day without bingeing. I told her how proud I was if I had made it. I would refuse her offers of food. Once I start bingeing, I can't deal with the idea of keeping food down, any food. The less I eat, the more I want to binge. It does make some biological sense. It did not make sense to me then, though. Nothing did. I stopped going to my classes, saving up my energy for work, where I sat staring at my computer screen, managing to work a little before I became frantic again and went out in a manic search for food.

You can subsist a long time, eating just a little. You can stay alive.

That's how we all stay alive as long as we do, because we eat, just a little. Just enough to feign life. You can't stay alive very long when you're not eating at all, or when everything you eat is thrown up.

Sixty-one.

And then the last shoe dropped. I bought laxatives. I bought laxatives and began eating a box of them every day. Trouble was, there wasn't any food in my system. I was shitting water and blood. This is an eating disorder; and this is how crazy it makes you; and this is how you kill yourself by accident. Accident? Yes, by accident, because we are running through the streets of the city in the middle of the night, trying to find an open store where we can find more food. We are buying ipecac. We are missing the presidential inaug-uration that we are supposed to be covering because the sky is too big and we have shoved our way through the crowd, camera cracking against our ribs as we will our legs to walk and then run with the unfed energy of madness into Union Station. We are buying food and more food and we eat on the subway all the way home and people are staring and we drag ourselves up the stairs of the dorm and sit down on the floor and stuff the rest of the food into our mouths, choking on each bite as we sob horrible tearing sobs and

then we stand up and drink the whole bottle of ipecac, smug in our mastery of ourselves and we think of how we will write an article when we've thrown up and then the floor comes flying at our heads.

I lay there, praying with all my might, curled fetally into myself, stomach tearing, praying that I might be allowed to either throw up or die, dear God just please let me throw up or die, throw up or die, and then I threw up horribly and blacked out again.

Soon I cannot get out of bed in the morning. I try. I valiantly try.

I put both hands on the desk by the bed. I pull. I pull harder, trying to lift myself upward to sitting. I lose my grip and fall backward. I pick up the phone and call into work sick.

I hang up and laugh at how funny it is to be calling into work, sick.

And then I call Mark, who might understand. I hide under the covers with the phone and whisper, Mark, I'm scared. And Mark talks to me, but I can't hear what he's saying, I just listen to the music of a voice. And I say again, Mark, I'm scared.

My roommate was beginning to panic, and I didn't want her to be so worried, so I got a therapist. I sat in the therapist's office and tried to talk. I don't remember a word that was said. I remember the office: a beige leather couch into which I sank, feeling small, her desk and chair and windows and plants. And I remember her: platinum blond, heavily made-up face, cheekbones jutting, black leggings, and a long sweater with gold lamé whatsits sewn to the front. I looked at her with suspicion. She looked at me with pity, which annoyed me. Then I left, got lost in the building, got confused about whether going down the stairs would burn calories, guessed that it would, slipped on my way down, cracking my tailbone on a stair. I went bingeing, lost in unknown parts of the city, often looking up from my plate and realizing that I had no idea where I was or how I'd gotten there. I went to work when I could get out of bed.

Otherwise I lay there, tossing uncomfortably. The bed was hurting my bones. The bed was giving me bruises.

Fifty-nine.

One day I was sitting in a Burger King eating six orders of Tater Tots and then I was in the bathroom throwing up and then I decided I was definitely having a nervous breakdown. This had to be a nervous break

down. I called my mother from work. It was a Saturday morning and I was alone in the office and working maniacally and calling my mother and sobbing over the phone that I was having a nervous breakdown and what was I going to do? What was I going to do? I don't remember what she said. I only remember the sound of her voice, low and soothing, asking, Do you want to come home? No, I don't want to come home, I don't know what I want, I'm losing my mind, I just wanted to hear your voice. When we hung up I put my head down on the keyboard and cried for a while more and then I worked.

My therapist convinced me to see a doctor. So I went to the doctor, who examined me. I'd been drinking huge amounts of water all day, so the scale read sixty-nine, and I guess he wasn't too worried because that was a pretty normal weight, apparently, and I was in the prime of health.2 I left and ate bag after bag of candies and threw up and made my way back to the dorm, squinting under the sky, wishing I was dead, wishing and wishing I was dead and it was much too sunny and I wanted so badly to be dead.

Fifty-five.

One night, in the coffee shop above the Dupont Metro station, I sat drinking my coffee and couldn't read. I was reading
Newsweek
, or attempting to read it at any rate. I realized that I couldn't read the words. I stared at them harder. I stared at them very hard, trying to make them cohere. They wouldn't cohere. At first they marched along in an unreadable row, and then they scattered all over the page. I slapped the magazine shut and thought, I'm out of my mind.

The boy at the top of the escalator steps was waving the
Washington
Times
and it was night and nothing made sense, now that I'd lost my mind. I was feeling rather calm about it all, and the boy was waving the paper and everyone was moving very quickly and someone caught my

2A doctor who would fail to freak at a fully grown woman with the weight of a nine-year-old is extremely unusual. While the frequency with which nonspecialists fail to diagnose
eating disorders is alarming, most doctors can spot something this obvious. This doctor did
not freak in part because I told him point-blank that I had an eating disorder and was
Working on It; I guess he assumed someone else was keeping an eye on me, so he did not
even give me the usual battery of tests one would have at a normal physical.

arm at some point and said, Hup, steady now, and kept walking. I wondered why he caught my arm and the boy was swimming in front of my face and saying, Ma'am? Ma'am? Hey, can somebody help? and I was getting shorter, somehow, Alice shrinking without warning, and HEY, can somebody HELP? and I fell down the escalator steps at Dupont Circle and then I hit bottom and thought: I think I'm dead.

Finally.

Fifty-two.

Then everything goes white.

From here on out things are very

blurry. Sitting in my room with my roommate, who started to cry and said, Marya, I'm sorry, I called your parents. I was just so worried. It took me a minute to register. Then I picked up the phone, it was the middle of the night I think, and called my parents and said, I'm really sorry, but I've got to come home. I hope you don't mind.

They minded.

My father explains this minding, years later: “I had said to you for so long, ‘You're not eating enough, you're looking deadly ill again.’ We said it and said it and said it, you said, ‘I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine,’ you lied, you lied, you lied. When you wanted to come home, something in me said, ‘She damn well better be sick.’”

If I put myself in my parents shoes, I can understand. After four years of watching your child play an infantile game of chicken, watching her stand at the edge of a cliff, teetering and laughing, almost falling and almost falling but never quite flinging herself over the edge, I can see how a worried audience might eventually get a little sick of this particular game. I can see how people might need to, for their own sanity and for simple reason's sake, let go.

And I can see, too, how a person's brain might refuse to accept that this time, she's actually gone over the edge.

My father flat-out did not want to believe that this was it. Neither did

I. My own behavior at this point was entirely contradictory: I knew that I needed to get home, but I didn't want to admit that I was really sick. Like, really fucking sick. I lied about my weight and said I was just so stressed that I thought a short break from school would do me some good. My father suggested I work fewer hours. I was con-tinuously hysterical, terrified that my one chance to get saved was out of my reach. The girl who cried wolf. I talked to my mother occasionally, incoherent, trying to get her to convince my father to let me come home, just for a break, I said. There was a lag time-a few days? a few weeks? time unravels in my head here-while my father and I argued in a series of phone calls about whether or not I should come back, my therapist pleaded with them, my roommate did.

Then I just up and dropped out of school. I walked into my counselors office and said I was an anoretic and needed a leave of absence.

She was incredibly understanding and very supportive. She, too, called my parents and told them I—haha—visibly needed a bit of a rest. I packed my things and sent them home, quit my job, and hopped on a plane to Minneapolis.

Let us say that my reception was not exactly warm.

I can understand that. I think it would be unpleasant to look at your child and realize she is going to be dead very shortly. My father was furious and my mother was terrified into a chilling silence.

The night I got home, my mother sat at the kitchen table with me while I ate several bowls of cereal in a row and then cried because I'd eaten too much, and she just said, Honey, oh, honey, don't say that. Lifting my head from the place mat, I looked at her, searching her eyes for an answer, and I asked: Mom, do you think I'm crazy?

There was an excruciating silence. The clock ticked. I was still wearing my coat.

She said, looking out the window, “I think you're very sick.”

It took me a minute to realize that she'd just said: Yes.

I've never been so terrified in my life. I had registered, to some extent, that this was the end, that I was honest-to-God about to push my leaky little rowboat away from shore and really truly
die
. The idea began to sink in, more than it ever had, that I might be crazy, in the traditional sense of the word. That I might be, forever and ever amen, a Crazy

Person. That what we'd suspected all along, what I'd been working so hard to disprove, might be true. I preferred, by far, being dead.

I spent the next few days sitting on the couch in a quilt, looking out the window, thinking about madness while my parents pleaded with me to go to the doctor, just to get a checkup.

I agreed to go. The night before I went, I drove—yes, drove—over to the university district to read in a café. I couldn't read, of course.

I kept thinking about the fact that I'd just eaten dinner, a bit of dinner, and it was making noise and jumping around in my stomach and I thought about throwing up but decided that as long as I was going to throw up I might as well throw up something besides the three bites of skinless chicken I'd eaten. I bought a few muffins and walked around eating them, the old familiar adrenaline rush pumping through me, propelling my legs into a Burger King, writing a check from an account that was empty, chewing calmly. Then I was off, running through the town, stopping here and there and eating and throwing up in alleyways and eating and blacking out and standing up and running and eating as I walked, impervious to the cold, hand to mouth and hand to mouth. I bounced checks worth $200 in a few hours eating and running and purging and finally getting into the car and stopping on my way home at a Perkins, my last supper, I thought. I ordered pancakes with whipped cream and bacon and eggs and hash browns. I threw up in the bathroom, bought a slice of pie, ate it in the car and threw up when I got home. I got into bed, too tired to do my exercises.