Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (8 page)

But the delight did not last long. The daily bingeing was making me heavier, and though I did not make the connection, it was also making me increasingly volatile. Though the purging was initially rare—maybe

2Zerbe, 155-56.

3The TV movie based on this book, which details the brief stint in anorexia of a girl in
her early teens (and which therefore is not overly representative of the eating-disordered
population), is often shown on eating-disorder units and never fails to bring a great many
patients into a tizzy over how skinny the actress (who starved herself to play the part) is,
and how they need now to be as thin as her.

once or twice a week—it was right about this time that I began to get in trouble at school. With frequency. I got into fights. My grades fluctuated, notes were sent home about my disruptive behavior: talking back, being sarcastic, causing a stir. I began to spend more time alone in my room when my parents were home, drawing pictures of skeleton-thin women. My parents and I began to fight. An uncalled-for level of anger on my part began to surface, only to escalate over the next few years until I seemed, to my father, “a ticking bomb.”

At nine, ten, eleven years old, I paged through the teen magazines at Clancy's Drug Store. While my friends were standing in front of the 99-cent Wet 'n Wild lipstick displays, I was poring over Diet Tips for Teens, staring at the paper doll figures of clean, hairless, grinning girls (“Mandi is wearing Shell Pink Lipgloss” and her smooth toothpick legs are doing chorus line kicks. My legs in their regulars are too big, too hairy). I slapped the magazine shut, caught sight of my face in the makeup mirror: round cheeks, round freckled cheeks, cow eyes. At night, I would lie on my bedroom floor practicing their Tight Thighs! leg lifts. I would lick my finger and turn the pages, looking at their faces. There were Mandi and Sandi and Kari and Shelli with their Shell Pink skin and Toned Tushes, glancing sexily at the camera, flouncing boyish bodies about. I practiced the looks in the mirror, casting bedroom eyes at my reflection, thrusting my hips to the side and tossing my hair. My body was wrong—breasts poking through my shirt, butt jutting, all curvaceous and terribly wrong. Everything was wrong.

school years, I'd wake with a jolt at 6:30

A.M., when the alarm started blaring awful 1980s pop music. Into the shower, out of the shower, climb up on the toilet with a hand mirror: look, peer, examine, critique. Frontal view first. Legs too short, too round, thighs touch.
Seventeen
magazine advises that thighs should not touch. Mine touch. I suck. It's all over. How can I hide it? How can I stand so I'm not so swaybacked? How can I curve myself inward, as if preparing to implode? Left side: butt too round, juts out, major gross, ohmigod, the butt, the horrible butt, the butt that is so undeniably a butt. Rear view: hips curve out from the waist.

Are those saddlebags already? Butt, the butt! Two hand spans wide.

Oh, fuck it all! Right side: the fucking butt! Who said I wanted a butt? Why can't I have a
flat
butt, the kind that seems to sink right into the pocket of Guess jeans when the leg goes back? I don't
want
this thing, not this round, imperious, proud little
butt
.

I get up in the morning. I'm maybe nine or ten. I sit down on the couch and pick up the newspaper. There is a story on the front page of the metro section: a girl from my town, Edina, has committed suicide.

Let's take this a little deeper. Here's what I know: There is a girl, sixteen years old, from the town where I live, who has imploded.

She has gotten into her mother's car, driven to a peak (there are no peaks in Minnesota, I only picture it this way, a James Dean-esque peak). She has parked the car. She is wearing jeans (did the story say that? Why would it say that? Did I picture her in jeans? With long brown hair). She has poured a circle of gasoline around her.

(The gasoline was in the trunk? Lighter or matches?) She has lit the gasoline on fire. She has burned herself to death.

I know that she was an anoretic. I know that she left a note saying she couldn't go on because she couldn't stand to live inside her body anymore. Too heavy a weight to bear.

My first thought: I can understand that.

I read the story, then the comics, the horoscope, the weather, the national news, the arts section. I rose when my father called me for breakfast, ate breakfast, bye Daddy, took a left turn out of Nancy Lane, took a right turn down the embankment of the pond at the end of the road, walked into a grove of trees, held my ponytail back, stuck my fingers down my throat, kicked leaves over the mess, spat, put two pieces of gum in my mouth. Walked out of the grove, down St. John's Avenue toward Concord Elementary School, thinking of weight, unbearable weight, and understood. I felt sad for the girl. I felt sad that she would never marry or have babies. I also understood, sadly, and apologized to God for not having thought: Oh no! How awful! How could she do that? How could it happen? Such a waste!

Such a shame! Instead I thought: I could do that.

I could do that
. That is the shock. It stops me in my tracks. Narcissist. Attention grabber. Always thinking of myself. Pray for the girl!

But I can't. I'm thinking of unbearable weight. I'm thinking of where to get gasoline.

operated on money. Money—class,

really—and eating disorders share a direct relationship with each other. In our culture, thinness is associated with wealth, upward mobility, success. I may not even need to point out that these things are associated with self-control and discipline: the yuppification of the body and soul, perfect people with high-powered jobs and personal trainers, perfect-toothed smiles and happy-happy lives. Conversely, fat is associated with weakness, laziness, and poverty.

Thinness has become “an ideal symbolizing self-discipline, control, sexual liberation, assertiveness, competitiveness, and affiliation with a higher socio-economic class.”4 To put a finer point on it, the very recent trend of “working out,” the necessity of being “toned,” not merely thin, expresses sexuality—but “a controlled, managed sexuality that is not about to erupt in unwanted and embarrassing display.” 5 Taking part in the fitness craze requires time and money, a privilege available to those only with the means. The “perfect body”

becomes a public display of those means. The body as costly bauble.

My generation was raised on popular media, television, teen magazines, billboards that bellowed “If you could choose your body, which would you choose?” with pictures of hard bodies getting yet harder at a very chic gym. Well, what the hell do you think I'd choose? The perfect body, of course. Our magazines were stuffed with ways to achieve it. “Lose That Baby Fat!” “Nose Job for Your Sweet Sixteen!” We read the endlessly boring series of
Sweet Valley
High
pulp novels like Bibles, with their terribly chipper stories of twin sisters who were, of course, the most popular girls in their Southern California high school. They were smart and nice and always getting the guy. As every single book in the series reminded us, they were also blond, blue-eyed, tan, and a “perfect size six.” A pair of literary Barbie dolls. We read the books in class, hidden behind our math books. We stood in the school bathrooms dis-4Horesh, Stein,
et al.
“Abnormal Psychosocial Situations and Eating Disorders in Adolescents,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, July
1996, v. 35, n. 7: 921. See also Becky Thompson's A Hunger So Deep and So Wide.

5Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 195.

cussing the plots as we compared our thighs. Look at this, we'd say, slapping our bodies so hard we left white welts. Look how my fat jiggles. But you—we'd say, turning to another girl—you've got, like, the
perfect
body.

It is crucial to notice the language we use when we talk about bodies. We speak as if there was one collective perfect body, a singular entity that we're all after. The trouble is, I think we
are
after that one body. We grew up with the impression that underneath all this normal flesh, buried deep in the excessive recesses of our healthy bodies, there was a Perfect Body just waiting to break out. It would look exactly like everyone else's perfect body. A clone of the shapeless, androgynous models, the hairless, silicone-implanted porn stars. Somehow we, in defiance of nature, would have toothpick thighs and burgeoning bosoms, buns of steel and dainty firm delts.

As Andy Warhol wrote, “The more you look at the same exact thing…the better and emptier you feel.”

I grew up in a world of children who seemed unnaturally
clean
, dressed in matching outfits bought from the same line at the same store. They were playing grown-up—there were miniature trophy wives and their miniature lawyer husbands prancing around the playground with perfect teeth and hair and tans from Mazatlán vacations or wintertime tanning booth sessions. There were perfectly folded notes and psycho-soap-opera grade school dramas. I was an indeterminate quantity. I was liked but not particularly cool. I was too quirky to be cool, too loudmouthed and quick tempered, smart enough to verge on nerd, too wild.

There was a social caste system at my school. I was from the wrong side of town, where the houses were plainer, smaller, 1950s-style ramblers. I lived on the side of town by the public pool, where the mothers worked and the kids were latch-keyed. On the other side, by the country club, the houses were old Victorian para-mansions with housekeepers and gardeners, huge stone walks and grand oak trees and BMWs in the three-car garage. Mothers went shopping and decorated obsessively. Their lanky children were clad in Ralph Lauren and Laura Ashley. The fathers seemed to be hidden in the attic, appearing only to pat their daughters on the fanny at dinnertime. Girls got manicures in the fifth grade, did not swear, ate white bread at lunch in the horrible lunchroom, and laughed a very dainty sort of laugh that matched their dainty Keds decorated with ballpoint-pen scrawlings that said “I luv (name).”

When we first arrived in Minnesota, I went on a desperate crusade to get my parents to buy all the stuff that “everyone else” had: microwaves, VCRs, reproductions of bad art in gilded frames, plush couches, sports cars, expensive clothes that I would surely outgrow within weeks. They, refused. I gave up my cause and settled, for good, on the goal of getting thin.

The year is 1984. It is fall and I am in Mrs. Novakowski's fifth-grade class. I am living in the land of the Pretty Blond Girl in White.

I am not a pretty blond girl. I am short, solid, brown haired, freckled, snub-nosed, and loud. I can't help it. I try to be dainty and pleasant and sweet. It works for about five minutes at a time, when suddenly I laugh too loud, or shout out in class, or get in a fight. Every time this happens, in the embarrassed aftermath, I am suddenly, horribly fat. I pull my sweater down over my butt because it is too big. My thighs are also too big, and my boobs poke out through my shirt. I cross my arms over my chest and put my hand over my mouth to shut myself up. I am too much. There's too much of me. My parents are weird, and I wear Lee jeans, not Guess. Plus, I puke in the bathroom during recess, and that is definitely not dainty. Definitely gross.

Eeew
, say the blond girls during sex ed class as we watch the screen showing the weird cross-sectioned female lower body. The body is outlined in pink, and it suddenly starts to bleed as the motherly voice-over tells the blond girls that they, too, will bleed, and that they should watch what they eat as they go on their Journey to Womanhood, or else they'll break out in zits. Meanwhile, under the desk, I am surreptitiously bleeding. I picture myself cross-sectioned.

I fold my arms over my chest and say, overvigorously,
Eeew
.

That year, I began posting letters to my mother: a note in the sewing room, an eleven-page missive on my best stationery folded neatly in her jewelry box. It was at about this point that my poor dad told me that I needed to get a bra because, in a white T-shirt (he stood, staring at his shoes) I was a little (he rubbed the stubble on his chin), I looked a bit (he twitched and pulled at his ear), well,
busty
. There was no reply to my mother-bound letters, which form-ally requested some data on the female body and what,
theoretically
, might be happening to mine. The

only response was from my father. He freaked out. He was jealous that letters, marked PRIVATE, were circulating. He began to avoid me. My mother averted her eyes when I asked; Did you read my letter? Yes. Well? I'll talk to you later.

Something had to be done. I finally accosted her in the living room and demanded that she take me to buy a bra. I HAVE TO HAVE A BRA, I declared. Why? she asked. I burst into tears because she couldn't see that I was wiggling and jiggling everywhichway and what I really wanted was a good butcher knife to chop 'em right off, which I actually threatened to do once, as I sat sullenly in the car with my father. He believed me. But my mother, sighing heavily, said, well all right. Everything was silent: our drive to the mall, our walk through the shops, our perusal through the children's department of Dayton's, where, of course, none of the damn things fit. But we bought them anyway, ugly white training bra contraptions that itched and pinched. They were too tight. My mother was inexplicably furious, so I thought I'd best shut the hell up.

When I was ten, I also got my first period. I took a five-dollar bill from my stash of runaway savings and tromped up to Valley View Drug Store. I plunked a box of tampons on the counter, stared at the ceiling, and paid. Back home, I locked myself in the bathroom and read the directions very carefully. I hated the diagrams; more cross-sectioned half-bodies. But, truth be told, I was glad. For some reason, I had an innate sense that menstruation was a good thing. All the literature on eating disorders claims that anoretics hate menstruation.

I loved it. I thought it meant I was that much closer to being grown-up and getting out of the house. I missed it a great deal when it stopped two years later.6 At this point in my life, nothing had validity until my mother confirmed it with praise. This was really the wrong place to look for praise. I kept my perverse enjoyment of bleeding to myself. In fact, I kept my bleeding to myself and didn't tell my mother about it for more than a year, when I ran out of cash and had to confess. I muttered that I'd just gotten my
6“Amenorrhea,” which is the loss of menstruation due to a lack of nutrition and/or body
fat. It causes deterioration of bone mass because of insufficient calcium retention. A broken
hip is a common primary cause of death in anoretics.