Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (5 page)

or in my case “binge foods”: high in carbohydrates, high in salt and fat, low in their capacity
to satiate actual physical hunger and likely to cause eating well past the point of fullness.

While my own family ate dinner together every night, as I got older, I ate alone more often—and ate more carbohydrates, sugar, and fat.

hoped for, a child who would adore him and make him feel needed, one who also would remain a child, world without end, amen. My mother, by contrast, expected a miniature adult. Quit acting like a child, she'd say. That always confused me. I
was
a child, but I got the point. Quit
acting
like a child. Be whatever you want, but don't let anyone see. Perfect the surface. Learn your lines. Sit up straight.

Use the right fork, put your napkin on your lap, say excuse me, say please, smile for chrissakes, smile, stop crying, quit whining, quit asking why, because I said so, dammit, don't talk back to me, watch your mouth, missy, behave yourself, control yourself. I always had this mental image of me, spilling out of the shell of my skin, flooding the room with tears. I bit my lip until it bled and furrowed my brow in a scowl.

By the time I was five or so, I began to believe in some inarticulate way that if I could only contain my body, if I could keep it from spilling out so far into space, then I could, by extension, contain myself. If I could be a slip of a thing, a dainty, tidy, bony little happy thing, then the crashing tide of self within the skin would subside, refrain from excess, be still. I locked myself in the bathroom, stood on the sink, stared at the body before me, and cried. And then pinched myself hard, telling myself to quit being a baby. Crybaby, I thought. Fat little pig.

The patterns in eating-disordered families are, in some senses, as varied and unpredictable as an image in a kaleidoscope. In other ways, they are as predictable as the rising and setting of the sun. In earlier research, the shrinks seemed absolutely convinced that there would be these necessary ingredients: one overbearing, invasive, needy mother; one absent and emotionally inaccessible father; one materially spoiled but emotionally neglected, regressive, passive, immature child. This particular configuration is so far from my own family that I was not, theoretically, allowed to have an eating disorder. To adjust the above pattern for my own family picture: one absent and emotionally closed-off mother; one overbearing, invasive, needy father; one strange, anxiety-ridden, hyperactive, aggressive child trying very hard to be an adult.

I was too small to understand how significantly my parents'

marital problems caused each of them to respond not to me but to each other through me. My father felt my mother did not need him, and so he

turned to me because I did. My mother felt my father was too needy, and so she turned away from me. My father's all-encompassing needs scared her, she's claimed, and my needs seemed to her only an extension of his. She's commented since on her very strong need to protect herself. My father, in what seems to me a bid for a monop-oly on my attentions, told her early on that she was a bad mother.

She believed him. There is such a thing as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

My parents did not, to the best of my knowledge, like each other very much, though I do know that they loved each other. They're still married. They honk and bite and flap their wings at each other like cranky old geese, but they're married. They, like a lot of parents of eating-disordered people, were notably unsupportive of each other when I was kid. Jealous of each other's successes, bitterly sarcastic toward each other. The shrinks note that a couple who cannot nurture each other cannot consistently nurture a child either. Shrinks also note that, lacking a marital alliance, each parent will try to ally him/herself with the child. The child becomes a pawn, a bartering piece, as each parent competes to be the best, most nurturing parent, as determined by whom the child loves more. It was my job to act like I loved them both best—when the other one wasn't around.

And so, with one parent at a time, I ate. Each had special foods, foods that only he/she was allowed to give me, all comfort foods, each food a statement of nurturance, a statement about the other parents lack thereof. My father's dominion was school days and af-terschool snacks, good midwestern stick-to-your-ribs breakfasts, the basics, the day-today must-haves, my balanced-meal lunch in its brown bag. My mother was queen of Special Treats, our afternoon truffle teas, scrambled eggs for dinner when my father was gone, fudge we made in the dark when the electricity went out, croissants after shopping, secret trips to Burger King for fries, cottage cheese and cucumber sandwiches for breakfast in the summertime out on the deck.

I do not remember a time when I was ever certain what the word
hungry
signified, or a time when I recall eating because I was
physically
hungry. “Hungry” did not necessarily connote a growling belly.

Rather, “hungry” was begging my mother to bake bread, thus securing a proximity to the scent of her perfume, standing on a chair with her hands on my hands as we kneaded the dough. “Hungry” was wheedling my father into taking me for rainbow sherbet, thus securing his jokes and funny voices and solid shoulder to lean my head on and watch pigeons in the park. “Hungry” was the same as lonely, and not-hungry was the same as scared.

My memories of childhood are almost all related to food. Food is, quoth the shrinks, “a reasonably consistent and available source of nurturance.”9This is not to say my parents were not nurturing—they were, my mother primarily through special books and foods, my father in his ever-present profferings of food and hugs and games.

I was my father's darling, and the way he showed love was through food. I would give away my lunch at school, then hop in my father's car, and we'd drive to a fast-food place and, essentially, binge. He'd take me out of school on “date days,” where we'd go to McDonald's, get cheeseburgers, fries, and shakes, sit in a park to eat and chat.

We'd go to A's games and stuff ourselves on popcorn and licorice.

When he quit smoking, we ate peanut M&M's all the time.

My mother was another story altogether. She ate, some. She would pick at cottage cheese, nibble at cucumbers, scarf down See's Candies.

But she, like my father, and like me, associated food with love, and love with need. Whereas my father was painfully aware of his needs, my mother did her damndest to prove that she had none. Hence the distance she forced between herself and my father and me, her exaggerated distaste for food, the tidy bits left over on the plate, precisely the same size every time. Hence her lumping me with my father, as if we were another breed of people, those who were excessive, needy, hungry, in stark opposition to herself.

Food has two salient qualities for all humans. First, it stirs a sense of nurturance. The physical food transubstantiates in our minds into something more ethereal, of human and emotional nurturance, a sense that our hungers are being sated. Even if you are just stuffing handfuls of fries into your mouth on a binge, you still feel that some emptiness, if briefly,

9Zerbe, 131-32.

is being filled. Second, food has a simple, chemical effect of calming the brain. Food gave me a sense that things were going to be all right. That if I just ate things in a precise fashion, if I just ate special foods—mushroom soup, toast, tortillas with cheese, scrambled eggs—my brain would stay still, the world would stop spinning, and I would have a focal point for my eyes: the book beside the plate, the food, the project at hand. Things would remain calm.

I went to school some days. The rest of the days, I stayed in bed, claiming grave illness. I doubt that either of my parents believed me. They let me stay because, I believe, they were trying to de-escalate my borderline hysterical anxiety level about school. My mother had spent most of her own childhood at home in bed with her books.

I stayed at home to read and eat, or more accurately, to be fed—passive tense—and to disappear into the world in my head, the world I read of in books.

Mostly I read fairy tales, plays, Ramona Quimby books,
Anne of
Green Gables
. Italo Calvino's nine-hundred-page tome
Italian Folk
Tales
. I would read it through and then start over. It was my favorite.

It seemed such a thing of might, such a
weighty
book (and indeed it was—I began reading it when I was five), such an
endless
sort of diversion, the kind of book that might stave off the world at large a bit longer than the others. I was perpetually grief-stricken when I finished a book, and would slide down from my sitting position on the bed, put my cheek on the pillow and sigh for a long time. It seemed there would never be another book. It was all over, the book was dead. It lay in its bent cover by my hand. What was the use?

Why bother dragging the weight of my small body down to dinner?

Why move? Why breathe? The book had left me, and there was no reason to go on.

You can, perhaps, foresee a series of terrifically dramatic relationships in my future, all ending with me in an Ophelian heap in my quilt. I had a love affair with books, with the characters and their worlds. Books kept me company. When the voices of the book faded, as with the last long chord of a record, the back cover crinkling closed, I could swear I heard a door click shut.

But books were better than school by far, and if one read very fast, and without pause to so much as patter down the hall to pee, if one kept

a
stack
of books right by the bed, and rested one's right hand on the top of the stack while reading another, it was even better. You finished one book, closed it, picked up the next, read the inside front cover, took a sip of water, opened to the first page. No break in the fantasy, no fissure into which reality might seep. So I stayed home and periodically yelled: Daddy! And sometimes again, more urgently: Daddy! And Daddy came and said: Whaddaya need, Piglet?

I'd answer: Soup. And ginger ale.
Please
. And lo! it arrived, in its bowl, with crackers that one mashed up with a spoon. I ate the mushroom soup in bed, the two of us sitting and chatting. And he would take the bowl away, close the blinds, while I slid down into my sheets and let the sound of the afternoon breeze wash me to sleep.

When I woke, there was always panic. What now? Where are things, what day is it, what time, do I have to go to school, where s Daddy, has everyone left? Are they gone? I'd strain my ears for the sound of a chair scraping back, or a sigh. No sound. Surely they're gone. But there were the books and the glass of water. All things in their place. No need to worry. Just read.

Climb down from the bed, creep to the bedroom door, peek out.

Look around, check for monsters. Call out, Daddy?

No answer. Run to the kitchen, open the fridge, look for something to eat. Fast. Before you have time to get sad.

grew up in the theater. My parents were

actors and directors, and I myself began performing when I was four.10 There is no place on earth that fosters narcissism like the theater, but by the same token, nowhere is it easier to believe that you are essentially empty, that you must constantly reinvent yourself in order to hold your audience in thrall. I became fascinated with transformations, with mirage and smoke and mirrors. I hung at my mother's elbow in front of the mirror as she took out her makeup case, pulled back her hair, painted herself into someone else. I held very still as

10I played Want in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. I was the little girl dressed in
rags and dusted with white baby powder, yowling with hands outstretched as I emerged
from the Ghost of Christmas Present's cloak. An impassioned performance.

she dabbed powder on my nose and curled my hair. I grew up standing in the wings of the theater, wrapping myself in the velveteen curtains as I watched my parents onstage, disappearing into blackouts and going up in smoke.

I loved the dressing room. Mirrors bordered by blinding lights, costumes, bustling, nets, wigs, masks, boxes, hats, women, the room buzzing with loud voices and laughter and snatches of song, a blur of fabric and skin. I put on my costume and someone zipped me up and tied my sash. I smelled the smells, listened to the chatter, sat down at the long wall of mirrors to apply my lipstick. I was five. A woman turned to me and offered: Oh, honey, here, let me do that.

My lipstick wasn't exactly painted inside the lines, and it was a bit too red. I remember the scent of her perfume and hair spray, that musty smell of velvet. She rustled. She leaned close and showed me how to pout my lips: soft, like this, she demonstrated. And she pulled my hair down, brushed it out and curled it: the heat of a curling iron at the nape of my neck, the soft feel of curls on my cheek. She pulled it back, clipping it with a taffeta bow, and turned me toward the mirror: See? You're all pretty now. I stared at the new, distant girl in the mirror, pleased with how grown-up I looked. Not the anxious, wide-eyed little
baby
I saw in the mirror at home. All pretty, now.

A New Me.

The women all blended into one nice-smelling creature back then.

They sat me on their laps, and I fell asleep when rehearsals ran late.

These women were particularly warm. I remember the flutter of my eyelids, their hands holding a soft brush close to the eye, painting on lines and shadows and mascara: Hold still, they would say. I'm almost done. I listened to everything. I made mental notes. People gave me candy bars and laughed when I stood on my head. I ate the candy bars like this: Eat the chocolate off, then eat the middle. Nibble first at the flat part on the bottom. Then eat each side, then the top, then, fingers sticky with chocolate, eat the carmelly middle part, making a big mess. If you eat it wrong, something bad will happen.

My father was a fierce director. He was also a fantastic director, as it happens. One night, I was upset. I scuttled around after him, hiding my face in the back of his knees. He kept saying, Dammit! I was crying and