Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (6 page)

put my fists in my eyes, smearing my makeup. Finally he turned to me, picking me up by the shoulders, shaking me, and advised:

“Child, when you come here, check your problems at the door.”

It was a maxim I'd heard before, usually thrown at some cast member who was whining or weeping or wailing about something or other. My father's voice would shoot through the room. Cut the crap, he'd bark. When you come to rehearsal, check your problems at the door. Everything would go quiet for a minute, and I would hold very still, blushing and wanting to apologize for him and make everything better again. Some nights when he did this, I would hide in a cupboard. But he'd never turned those words on me before.

I stopped crying. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. He stood me on a chair, fixed my makeup, and said: “See? There. The show must go on.”

My family and I took the theater metaphor a little too far. I have had the working assumption, since I was very small, that nothing was as it appeared. Appearances were not to be trusted. In fact, nothing was to be trusted. Things existed in layers, and under the layer lay another layer, like my little Russian Petrushka dolls, which came apart at the waist to reveal another doll, and another, and another. Everything was about context. Everything was costume and makeup, and the role that one played. When one of us went on too long with our, someone would start to clap a slow, sarcastic clap, and would say, flatly, “Wonderful, wonderful.” Everyone's favorite insult was, “Oh, get off the stage.” But no one ever did.

Somewhere in the back of my brain there exists this certainty: The body is no more than a costume, and can be changed at will. That the changing of bodies, like costumes, would make me into a different character, a character who might, finally, be all right.

I learned very early to choose my lines carefully. I still have a terrible habit, when people pause too long between words, of feeding them their line. I know my lines in advance. I dress for occasions, for personae. There are women in my closet, hanging on my hangers, a different woman for each suit, each dress, each pair of shoes. I hoard clothes. My makeup spills from the bathroom drawers, and there are different women for different

lipsticks. I learned this very young. I was not as I appeared. I liked that. I was a magician. No one could see what I hid underneath, and I didn't want them to, because what I hid seemed raw. Excessively hot and red.

We took our places and played our roles. I was the crazy child, uncontrollable and ticking like a small bomb. My mother was the woman trapped in a family she didn't want, bitter and resentful. My father was the misunderstood sensitive guy, given to outbursts of uncontrollable rage. It was darling. We were all incredibly melodramatic. But of course, in all that, we were also simply three people who loved one another and didn't know how to negotiate living together.

When I was between the ages of five and seven, my parents'

marriage deteriorated faster, as did the vacillation between calm and chaos. My mother went back to school to complete her license in educational administration. This done, she began working days in the school district office, performing and rehearsing at night. She directed several shows and won awards for them. My father was becoming increasingly annoyed by her absence, more still by her success. He was also entrenched in a massive war with the people at his theater. There was talk of separation, of divorce. There were screaming fights in the kitchen about who would go to the grocery store, who was a bigger martyr. There were also cozy outings together, hands held, pictures of big smiles. And then there were dinners where we all chattered happily, making each other laugh as I fell asleep in my soup. There were impromptu trips taken by one or both of my parents, out of town for inscrutable reasons. Occasionally I would be shipped off to the grandparents. I had a small plaid suitcase.

I dimly recall a war in the riving room as I sat on the piano bench, swinging my legs. Apparently my mother and I were headed for Portland. My father screamed at my mother, begging her not to leave him. My mother loudly retorted that we were going and he couldn't stop us. I was humming Sunday school songs in my head, wishing they would kiss and make up. When the decibel level made it impossible to properly hum, I sprang up, shouted over them, told them I loved them, demanded that they be quiet, and announced that everything was going to be okay. My father cried and picked me up and hugged me, and then

my mother and I left. My mother remembers that fight, that trip.

My father does not. Over the phone, he sighs, and says, “There were lots of those.” We took a train. I remember laughing at the Murphy bed that came out of the wall of our room on the train, and the nap I took, the trees outside flying past the window. I remember my grandmother giving me toast and tea when we got there. My grandmother then told me I'd get fat and whisked the toast out of reach.

In the boxes of old papers, I find strange things from this era: letters, drawings, report cards, newspaper clippings, and a sign that I must have hung on my bedroom door that read: IF YOU ARE THINKING

ABOUT COMING IN HERE, TURN YOUR MIND AROUND FAST! I DON'T

WANT TO SEE YOU. Among these papers, two things made me curious.

One, a card from me to my mother, written when I was in preschool, judging by spelling and punctuation: On the cover, a stick-figure sad girl in purple pen, with the words: “to mom.” Inside, the lines slant sharply downward: “DeAr mom./I do Not Liek [scribble]./It wen You Are/awae. I want You Back!/I can not sleep wen/Out you! love, marya.” At the bottom of the card, there is a purple heart.

I hated drawing hearts. My hearts always seemed lopsided and skinny, never the round, symmetrical hearts that the other girls drew. This particular disfigured heart is crying purple tears.

I asked my mother—via E-mail, as is our way—if she remembered this card. She did not. She wrote back, saying: “It could've been that trip to London. It could also have been nights I was in plays.…argggghhhh…Did I ever get the card? If not, why not? If so, where was my head? Obviously up my ass.” My father doesn't remember it, either. They also can't explain the odd letter my father sent to me when I was six. It was written during the summer when he was directing at a theater in Scottsdale, Arizona. It repeatedly mentions his sudden realization that he couldn't stand to be away from us, that he missed us horribly and needed us around. After finding this, I called him to ask if he had been planning to stay in Arizona without us. “I don't think so,” he said. He paused. “Maybe I was. In the back of my mind.”

He later explained that the following year, when I was seven, the shit hit the fan. This may explain why I do not have any recollection of that

year, save for vague memories of late-night screaming matches and crashings about in the dining room, when my parents returned from the theater. I was usually reading under the covers, and one night a strange stench of alcohol came from the kitchen, which I followed to find my mother pouring a number of bottles of booze down the sink. That year is a blank, aside from my seventh birthday party (I got a splinter in my nose). The next thing I remember comes a year later, when I was abruptly informed that we were moving, without apparent reason, to Minnesota.

Here is what I don't remember: My parents went, as my father put it, “completely out of control.” My mother had a midlife crisis.

My father had a professional and an identity crisis at once. My mother was turning forty. My father's whistle-blowing on some corrupt professional politics at his theater wound up getting him smeared and blackballed. He says that he came to a painful realization that he would never be what he had dreamed of being (“great”).

He says he suddenly saw himself as just “some guy schlepping his way through the best he can, but I couldn't respect that for what it is. All I could see was that I was a failure. And I went crazy.” He was drinking way too much, “mostly to dull the pain,” he says. I remember his rages. My mother became further obsessed with her appearance, worried about losing her looks. She began dyeing her hair, wearing inch-long porcelain nails (those I also remember), spending more money on clothes, losing weight, and in my father's eyes, flirting a lot (I remember some very low-cut blouses). My father was, as he put it, “mad with jealousy, on her case all the time.”

Though she was not involved with anyone else, my mother was drifting away from him. He believed she was thinking about leaving.

“Of course, I was driving her away,” he says. “But I felt like she was seeing me going through mental crisis and saying, ‘I have nothing to do with this.’ Everything I did that year was hyperemotional. I was a raw nerve. I had no skin.”

I ask him if he was suicidal. He laughs. “Probably, all the time, you know? Without really thinking about acting on it. I had to take care of you.

“You and your needs,” he says, “held me together that year. You were the only stable thing in my life.” He pauses. “It was like I said,

‘Okay, now you're going to be my stability. I realize you're only seven years old, but—’”

I cut in, “But do the best you can.”

“Yes.” He sighs. “It was too much to ask.”

Me and my needs kept my father stable. Me and my needs were driving my mother away. Me and my needs retreated to my closet, disappeared into fairy tales. I started making up a world where my needs would not exist at all.

All of us carry around countless bags of dusty old knickknacks dated from childhood: collected resentments, long lists of wounds of greater or lesser significance, glorified memories, absolute certainties that later turn out to be wrong. Humans are emotional pack rats.

These bags define us. My baggage made me someone I did not want to be: a cringing girl, a sensitive plant, a needy greedy sort of thing.

I began, at an early age, to try to rid myself of my bags. I began to construct a new role. I made a plan. When I was six, I wrote it down with my green calligraphy pen and buried it in the backyard. My plan: To get thin. To be great. To get out.

I believed, even then, that once I got thin, left home, became great at whatever, once I was more like my mother, I would finally have something of my own—something, though I could not have articulated this then, resembling an identity. Only when I look back can I say that I was trying to escape what seemed my fate: to be a replica of one of my parents, thus inciting the other's wrath. Each of them, by turns, spat out: Oh, you're just like your father/mother, and then exulted when I did something they liked, saying, Oh, you're just like me.

When I was eight years old, the war between my parents reached its apogee, unbeknownst to me. My father informed my mother that he was leaving her and taking me with him to Minnesota, where he had been raised. My mother said she was coming, too. He retorted nastily that he didn't recall having invited her. She was, I hear, afraid that he would keep me away from her, a worry not entirely without basis. He says, in retrospect, that he is “grateful for her wisdom.”

They told me that we were moving. On July 4, 1982, my family moved to Minnesota. One year and three months later, I was eating my Fritos, scratching the dog with my foot, and then suddenly heading downstairs.

2 Bulimia

Minnesota, 1982-1989

But, when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its

waistcoat pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on,

Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that

she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-

pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with

curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in

time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the

In another moment down went Alice after it, never once

considering how in the world she was to get out again
.

We got in a big moving truck—it was a sunny day, the pictures of us show us squinting, shading our eyes with our hands—and headed east for Edina, a smallish, very wealthy suburb on the out-skirts of Minneapolis.

My most salient memories of the trip cross-country—my father driving an eighteen-wheel Hertz truck for the first time in his life, my mother driving the old Ford—are as follows: my father choking on a chicken bone in Reno, almost dying (food, death). The view from the cab of the truck in the Rockies, looking over an unrailed cliff that descended into endlessness. I pulled my stuffed animals around me and put their ears over their eyes so they wouldn't see (death). I recall the baked Alaska my half-brothers ate in Yellowstone on their fifteenth birthday (food). There's a memory of standing in front of the mirror in a Wyoming hotel room, panicking about my hair, looking down at my body and “realizing” that I was fat, fat, fat. My thighs and belly and face were fat (body, food). I burst into tears. The picture in my parents' photo album of that day—me in a flowered jumpsuit, my hair wet from its eighth trip to the sink as I obsessively tried to get it right—shows me half-smiling, hunching into myself, face swollen from tears.

The year we moved to Minnesota, my family's tenuous grasp on stability slipped. My parents were together solely because each of them wanted to parent me. Period. In addition, neither had a job lined up.

They were a bit stressed.

Eventually, after the turmoil of moving settled down, the two of them pulled it together and began to like each other again. I, on the other hand, became completely neurotic. My neurosis surprised even me. All of a sudden, I was a mess. It's quite possible that I had some preexisting depression and/or anxiety disorder and/or mania, and the confusion simply gave it a chance to surface. And it did surface. Almost immediately upon our arrival, I developed an acute, bizarre fear of everything. I was a walking bundle of anxiety, crying easily and afraid of the dark, the kids at school, the teachers, the sun, the moon, the stars. I got it in my head that prayer would work. I began to pray constantly, frantically, as I peered around me to see if anyone was watching. I dropped to my knees, pressing my nails into the palms of my hands, praying wildly for God to forgive me, muttering manic prayers that would've made little sense to any god: Please God I'm sorry don't let me get fat I'm sorry forgive me Father for I have sinned bless my mother and my father and the dog and my friends and I'm sorry and thank you for books and forgive me and don't let me get fat I'm sorry I watered my plant with 7UP—.