Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (7 page)

Suddenly all inanimate objects were imbued with aforementioned

“primitive magical powers,” from stairs to chairs, books to forks, curtains to lamps. Everything had to have an extremely precise order: the bed made a particular way, the clock watched so that things happened on time. I remember lying on my parents' bed watching the old digital clock flip its numbers like cards: 5:21. 5:22. 5:23.1 made sure time didn't stop, that dinner happened when they said it would happen. “It's been forty-five minutes!” I'd yell down the stairs, bursting into tears when dinner wasn't ready yet. Time had failed me. Nothing was happening in the right order. I talked to myself all the time, in bed, in the bath, in the park, in the yard. I made lists, a primitive form of a day planner scrawled on my mouse stationery, each day carefully planned. The days that said “nothing” sent me into manic turmoil; what would I do? who would I play with? who would keep me company and help me pass the time? I saved our California license plates so they wouldn't be sad when we threw them away. I lay on my bed with a harlequin doll, a gift from California friends, winding it up to make it play “Send in the Clowns” time and again. The doll's terribly sad tinkling, the silver painted tear on its cheek, made me cry. I talked to it, neatly propped it up against the pillows, told it not to be so sad. Everything would be okay.

In a study of [anorectic] patients, most had suffered from childhood anxiety disorders approximately five years prior to onset.1

The first year in Edina, we lived in a horribly ugly, brown, flat-roofed rented duplex on a busy street. The carpet in my bedroom was puke green. I got new school clothes. I did not wear slim-sized jeans, I wore “regulars,” and my cousin, whom I trotted after like a puppy and whom I aspired to emulate in all ways, wore “slims,” a fact that was, as I recall, discussed at length between my mother and aunt. I developed a deep, abiding fear of jeans, which I still have. I hold my breath and shut my eyes when I pull on a pair in the dressing room, afraid they will now, as then, get stuck at my hips and there I will stand, absurd, staring at the excess of hips that should, if I were a good person, be “slim.” Slim is such a strange, grinning sort of word, sliding out of the mouth, ending in the labial hum of “immm.” It's the sound of the girl in 1980s Chic jeans commercials, slipping snakelike into her slim chic jeans. Slimmmmmm.

I wasn't. I was regular. I had a gray dress that my mother said was “darling.” I didn't want to be darling. I was sick of being darling.

I wanted to be Slim. Or Chic. The dress was a shapeless square of gray fleece with two yellow stripes around the hips. I put it on when she brought it home for me, stood on the toilet, and bellowed, “I LOOK LIKE AN ELEPHANT!” I bawled. She said, No, honey, you look darling. I wept profusely as she braided my hair. I undid it because it wasn't perfect. There were lumps, I said. She lifted her hands in bewilderment and left the room, shaking her head. I stood back up on the toilet, lifted my dress, staring at myself from all sides.

It might have occurred to someone that I was on the brink of
1International Journal of Eating Disorders (IJED), April 1995, v. 17, n. 3:291.

puberty. I'd reached it awfully early, so I suppose no one was really looking for it. I was caught by surprise more than anyone, having never even had
sex
explained to me in anything but the most abstract terms. Still, I would have appreciated some insight as to why, at the ripe old age of eight, I found three completely uncalled-for hairs at a most inappropriate spot on my theretofore smooth self while perched on the toilet. I got the tweezers, plucked them out, wondering if I was turning into some sort of ape. The more I plucked each day, the more hair would appear, weird, wiry little hairs, until I had what could only be described as a small beard between my legs.

Eventually, realizing it was a hopeless effort, I surrendered the plucking. A few years later, when at slumber parties the other girls, in shortie pajamas and ponytails, were confessing during red-cheeked games of truth or dare that they had counted their pubic hairs, I was thinking to myself: Count them? Where would one begin? At eight years old, I stood on the edge of the tub so I could see in the mirror and watched my hips suddenly widen, my wrists, my bones and lower belly growing heavier. My vague surprise at my arms and legs
being
there, my tendency to crash full force into things like a mini-Mack truck, became a virulent hatred for my body. I had bruises on the nubs of hips that jutted where they'd never jutted before. I had a spatial relations crisis, becoming increasingly disoriented in my skin and annoyed at my own height and width and elbows and knees. I turned into Alice on 'shrooms.

The years I spent at my Edina elementary school are a blur of mortification. In third grade I began fooling around with the neighborhood girls in the basement, under the stairs, fueling my furious, nightly self-flagellation for infinite sins. Sex was a taboo topic in my house. No one had ever even explained where babies came from, though of course I'd figured it out—and as kids are wont to do, I'd become very interested in the whole affair. This interest, however, seriously conflicted with my truly crazed anxiety, and suddenly the rather innocent rubbings and gigglings I was engaged in took on the sharp tang of bad-wrong-dirty-evil, leaving me lying silently on my bed, my hands pressed into my temples to beat back the headache, the racing thoughts. In my chest, a great hole sighed open, wide as the sad sunny sky at which I stared.

It is commonly assumed that women with eating disorders have a neurotic fear of sex, and that this fear manifests itself in a desperate attempt, at puberty, to stave off the increasingly visible sexual signs of their bodies. Some women do have this fear, but in some cases the reasons are perhaps less related to an individual's own fear of sex—I personally was not
afraid
of sex, merely ashamed that it so fascinated me—than to a fear that other people will see them, and
judge
them, as sexual. Eating-disordered people are often far more concerned with other people's perceptions than with their own feelings. Fear of sexuality may well have something to do with a culture that has a highly ambiguous, conflicted view of female sexuality, as well as a family that shares this perception. My parents'

response to my general craziness—the reports from school that I was talking dirty to other girls, their sense that my girlfriends and I were up to something nasty in the basement-was not to sit me down and tell me that sexual feelings were normal but something I might want to keep to myself. They stared at me, bewildered and angry, and told me to stop using “sewer words.”

Fourth grade, and I was terribly worried about the strange and painful swellings on my chest, nubs of prenipple. I pulled my mother into my room, yanked up my shirt and said: Look! Something's wrong! I have cancer! I said. She peered at them and took me to the doctor. The doctor, who was very nice about the whole affair, said, She's just starting to develop. Oh, my mother said. Oh, I concurred. We got into the car and drove home. After a while I asked, What does that mean? It means you're going to get breasts, she answered. Oh, I said. Oh, dear. I looked out the window of the car, watched the McDonald's go by, the Bridgemann's Ice Cream Parlor, the Poppin' Fresh Pies. It was a sunny day and the seat belt hurt my chest. I kept shifting around. Dear God I'm sorry for everything. Counting the driveways, the cars, my breaths, counting, counting, counting the even, steady throbs in my head.

I am aware that puberty is not an occurrence that's particularly
uncommon
, but I was (a) not prepared, and (b) not interested. My body, which I felt unruly to begin with, suddenly did what I had always feared it would do: It defected. Without my permission, and without warning, my body began to “bloom.” I woke up one morning with a body that seemed to fill the room. Long since having decided I was fat, it was a complete crisis when my body, like all girls' bodies, acquired a signify-cantly greater number of actual fat cells than it had ever possessed.

At puberty, what had been a nagging, underlying discomfort with my body became a full-blown, constant obsession.

With fourth grade, along with a steadily swelling, repulsive body, came a new house, a redoubled anxiety, insomnia, nightmares, compulsive eating, headaches, and a desperate fear of being alone.

Because I am a masochist, I begged my parents to let me stay home alone after school. They were both working a lot, and I usually had baby-sitters. I wasn't a baby (I howled) and didn't need to be sat upon. It was a matter of principle. I wanted them to think I was responsible, I wanted them to trust me. Eventually they agreed that I was old enough.

In truth, the last thing I wanted was to be alone. As I turned the corner down Nancy Lane, the house's blank eyes stared back at me.

I began picturing the inside: the mirror in my bedroom, in my bathroom, in the downstairs bathroom, in the laundry room. I began thinking of what to eat once I got inside. Was I hungry? Not terribly.

I was overwhelmed by time, all that blank space in front of me, a few hours stretching out into silent eons, the house as bare and full of sad light as my chest. As I walked the block toward the house, the panic mounted. I ran the rest of the block, opened the door, dropped my book bag on the floor, and sought solace in front of the refrigerator, heart pounding in my chest. I melted cheese on toast and ate. And more cheese, more toast. Cereal. Mushrooms fried in butter and brandy. Filling the mouth, the hole in my heart, the endless hours with the numb stupor of food.

Predictably, these afternoons spent watching
Three's Company
and reruns of
Gilligan's Island
, hand to mouth, put a few pounds on me.

My time in front of the mirror, at night, found me pinching my thighs hard, harder, until welts rose, slapping my ass to see if it jiggled, so I could say, Fat bitch. Turning around and around like a music box doll in front of the mirror, face pinched.

And so it came to pass that one day, stuffed full of Fritos, I took a little trip downstairs to the bathroom. No one gave me the idea. It just seemed obvious that if you put it in, you could take it out.

When I returned, everything was different. Everything was calm, and I felt very clean. Everything was in order. Everything was as it should be.

I had a secret. It was a guilty secret, certainly. But it was
my
secret.

I had something to hold on to. It was company. It kept me calm. It filled me up and emptied me out.

But, as is always the case with bulimia, it is at once tempting, seductive, and terrifying. It divides the brain in half: you take in, you reject; you need, you do not need. It is not a comfortable split, even early on. But early on, its pros seem to outweigh its cons. You have a specific focus, your thoughts do not race as much. They stay in an orderly row: go home, eat, throw up. The problem in your life is your body. It is defined and has a beginning and an end. The problem will be solved by shrinking the body. Contain yourself.

You no longer face the threat, upon opening the door, of falling headfirst into the white light of silent hours and wild worries, as you pace up and down the hall, sit on the couch while staring out the window at the light coming off the lake. Getting lost in the light and the lack of boundary, sitting there listening to words whistle through your ears, listening to your breath or the wind or the light banging around in the echoing hole in your chest. Forgetting who you are and where you are and if you're there. Getting lost in the thought that you might be imagining everything, you might be dreaming your life. You look at your hand in front of your face, surrounded by light, and your heart thrums as you think: I'm dreaming, I'm not even here, I don't exist. It is too fascinating, the thought that you
aren't
. The thought that if you watch the lake long enough you might disappear into the white flames of light on the blue, which seem to be just inches from your face. It sucks you in, and you stare, only a little afraid. And then you scream, startled, when your mother comes through the door. You crash back to earth.

It's dark. It's evening. You're here and your mother is looking at you and asking, What?

No more of that. Crazy girl. You're losing your marbles. Come in the door, eat. Fill up the space. Keep yourself on the ground.

May experience the world as strange and depersonalized.…For the bulimic person, what is outside or inside the body is often quite confusing…bingeing is an attempt to experience containing by exerting control over what goes in.…Purging defines the

body by keeping certain contents out.…The quest to feel alive and full by taking in…substances…is fueled by experiencing one's self—and one's body—as inherently empty or dead.2

Shortly after I became bulimic, I went to the library one day to check out a book on anorexia nervosa called
The Best Little Girl in
the World
.3 I wanted to be her: withdrawn, reserved, cold, wholly absorbed in her own obsession, perfectly pure. Shutting everything out. It is in fact a rather romanticized account, written by a doctor intent upon demonstrating not the experience of having an eating disorder but rather his own genius in curing them. The book said you could die of an eating disorder. That didn't bother me. What it did not say was that if it did
not
kill you right away, it would live with you the rest of your life, and
then
kill you. I wish I would've known that. I decided that if I did nothing else with my life, I would be an anoretic when I grew up. Bulimia seemed a good place to start.

As it turned out, I was very good at it.

My nighttime baby-sitter Kelly would watch me and laugh as I boasted, I bet you I can eat this entire loaf of bread. No you can't, she'd say. Determined, I'd start popping bread in the toaster, heart pumping. I remember the toast, the butter I spread on it, the crunch of toast against teeth and the caress of butter on tongue. I remember devouring piece after piece, my raging, insatiable hunger, the absolute absence of fullness. I remember cheerfully heading off for my bath. Night, I said. Locking the bathroom door, turning the water on, leaning over the toilet, throwing up in a heave of delight.