Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (9 page)

period for the first time and could she, um, get me some, um, things.

She got me pads and, naturally, did not pursue the issue further.

I find out, nearly twelve years later, that she thinks menstruation is, at best, a major nuisance, hardly a thing to celebrate. So in the fifth grade, bleeding like a stuck pig and with only one pad on my way to school, I casually asked her if she thought one pad was enough. Of course, she said, tsking at my sheer stupidity. That day, wearing a new pair of white Guess pants and a T-shirt that I'd bought with my own money, I stood in the front row of choir, in the school gym. Some idiot yelled out: Hey Marya, what'd ya sit on? I turned around and looked at my backside: blood from my waist to my knees. I walked what seemed a million miles from the choir to the door with my chin up and went to the nurse, who informed me that they had no pads, because (stupid child) this is an elementary school.

Oops! Excuse me, I thought I was in college. She picked up the phone to call my mother. I said my mother wasn't home. Where is she? At work.
Oh
. (
That
kind of mother.) Well, who's home? My father.
OH
, I see.
Well
. She called my father, who rushed into the school wild-eyed and offered to take me to the doctor, and then offered to take me for ice cream. He receded as I slammed into my room. I crawled into bed, drew the blinds, and didn't come out for a week. I could hear whispered voices through the wall: What's wrong with her?

whisper whisper. whisper crazy, whisper.

The following summer I was eleven and took a solo trip to the West Coast. I stayed with my grandfather and stepgrandmother, who both drank nonstop and literally never ate. I remember eating an appetizer (they told me I didn't need to order an entree, that was too much food) of mussels in white wine while they got bombed and hobnobbed with the owner. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, bought a tampon from the machine. It was a dime. I remember looking in the mirror, my pink striped dress bought specially for the trip, thinking how grown up I looked. I lost weight at their house, subsisting primarily on mints and Shirley Temples, as I held drinking competitions with my grandfather (martinis). A letter to my parents, in my downward-slanting scrawl, ends: “P.S. I'm not gaining any weight!!!!!”

Back home, my parents and I snapped at one another. I cried without

cause and stormed around. I got “sick” more and more often, stayed home eating, curled up on the couch watching soap operas and game shows. When the food I was eating was gone, I'd throw up, go upstairs and get more food. And throw up.
Etc.
My bulimia developed in tandem with my body. I was soon throwing up almost every day.

When I was home “sick,” I threw up several times a day. By the time I was eleven, I met the full diagnostic criteria for bulimia nervosa (severe and uncontrolled); and by the time I was eleven, my body was fully developed.

“Fully” was the key word here, much to the delight of the older boys at school who snapped my bra in the halls or came up to me during lunch, leering, saying, “Marya, do you wear a bra?” No, I said, staring at my lunch, the sticky ball of mashed potatoes, the gray peas, the beef stroganoff that lay in a vomitous pile on my tray.

“Yes, you do. Admit it,” they taunted, grinning. One would trace the line of my bra across my back, his finger gentle, almost seductive, then snap it hard. “What's that?” they'd say. “Huh? Huh? Is that a
bra
? Are you developing
breasts
? Say it!” they'd say, getting louder.

“Say, ‘I'm getting titties.’” They laughed. I was flushed with fury from my forehead down to my toes, “Oooo, she's blushing! Are your titties blushing, Marya? What size bra is that?” Looking up at the one across from me, blond sonofabitch in an Edina hockey jacket, or the brown-haired, rat-faced skinny kid whose little pecker poked through his jeans even though he kept a hand in his pocket to cover it up. It didn't matter. They were all the same horrible creature. I searched my brain for some witty response, but before I could stop myself I blurted out, “Fuck off.” Ooooo, they said, and told the lunch lady, who grabbed my arm hard and hauled me out of the lunchroom. I glanced back and watched them laugh at me. One of them put two fingers up to his mouth in a vee and wiggled his tongue between them. I had no idea what that meant. I took my bra off in the bathroom, stuffed it into my locker, and crossed my arms over my chest.

There is a plethora of recent data focusing on the relationship between puberty and eating problems. Researchers are finally turning away from the long-held assumption that eating disorders are the result solely of innate neurosis and are now looking at culture and family. The first of these, culture, is relatively self-evident: When a prepubescent shape is held

up as an ideal to (impressionable, pubescent) girls, they may balk at their own bodies' sudden mute refusal to adhere to cultural requirements. They might, if their personal chemistry is right, go head-to-head with nature and bust their asses in a campaign to defeat their own biology. A body that begins to look exactly opposite of what it's “supposed” to look like is an uncomfortable body indeed.

Rather than take a feminist delight in your Cycles and Curves, you're probably going to freak.

Puberty is a perverse rite of passage in contemporary culture. The nice school nurse comes to talk to your class, telling you how you're going to Become a Woman. You want to scream with horror as visions of cellulite dance in your head. Girls, Becoming Women, begin to emulate the older women in their lives: They diet. They borrow their mothers' vocabulary, expressions, mannerisms. Between poring over the mysteries of long division and playing kickball at recess, they also discuss, in weirdly adult voices, “keeping their weight down,” with that regretful, knowing smile. They pinch their bellies, announcing, “I'm not eating lunch today, oh, no, I really shouldn't.”

Becoming a Woman means becoming someone dissociated from, and spiteful toward, her body. Someone who finds herself always wanting.

Even the
timing
of puberty is important. Extensive data supports the assertion that early-onset puberty may significantly predispose some young women to eating problems, whereas girls who develop closer to or later than their same-age peers have a more positive body image and fewer eating problems. I was not the only one who felt painfully aware of my suddenly sexual body in the midst of a bunch of gangly girls, nor was I the only one who tried to beat my body back. My body was visible evidence of all that was wrong with me: I had hips, ass, boobs, the whole nine yards, and was therefore a person who clearly ate food. I was a human-type person as opposed to an ethereal pale mannequin type, or a tall, thin, blond, blue-eyed, Scandinavian, future Bikini-Team type, with whom my little school-hall-size world was primarily populated. Worse, I was sexually developed and therefore obviously a sexual being at a time when boys were still known to punch your shoulder and holler, “Cooties!”

Added to the slush pile of mental contradictions was the association

of female sexuality with sexual voracity, weakness, an inability to control one's physical
appetites
, one's
hungers
, one's
needs
. It has been argued that food and eating have replaced sex as our foremost cultural taboo.7 To some extent I agree with this but would point out that the taboo is not against food, or sex, or flesh, but against a loss of control. Our most hallowed virtue in modern society is self-control, personal “power” (also the most hallowed virtue in my own family).

If you thumb through the cannon of philosophy, you find Augustine and Co. speaking of women with the same fear and virulence that we now use to speak of food, as something “sinful,” something that

“tempts,” something that causes a loss of control. “The slimy desires of the flesh,” Augustine writes. Note: not the flesh itself, but its
desires
, arising from the flesh, dismantling our control.8

That is to say,
my
control, what little I had. Sexual maturation was terrifying to me, not for the reasons shrinks often cite, but because I was already utterly terrified of my needs, my passions, and, admittedly, my derriere. The last thing I wanted was
more
of any of the above. Believing that I was already perceived as uncontrollable, I was most alarmed to find my body going out of control, internally and externally—and also alarmed by the response it was causing.

It was as if people could
see
, just by the very presence of my breasts, that I was bad and sexual and needy. I shrank back from my body as if it were going to devour me.

The cacophony in my head was not only cultural. My family, always skittish about the topic of sex, grew increasingly bizarre during my pubertal years, from eight to twelve. They seemed as surprised, and annoyed, by its advent as I was. My father said, years later, that I became “something of a foreign animal” to him during that time.

My mother simply did not know what to do. This is not uncommon.

Fathers are often uncomfortable with their daughter's maturation, and my father was perhaps overly so. My physical development scared the hell out of my mother and sent her into a
7See Jeremy Iggers, The Garden of Eating: Food, Sex, and the Hunger for Meaning. A
food critic for the Minneapolis Star Tribune with a Ph.D. in philosophy, he provides an
excellent discussion of the translation of cultural taboos into issues of food and body.

8Susan Bordo, “Psychopathology as the Crystalization of Culture,” The Philosophical
Forum, Winter 1985-86, v. 17, n. 2: 79.

frenzy of reading up on the Gifted Child and the Child Who Grows Up Too Fast. The closeness I had shared with my family, as strange and tentative as it was, disappeared altogether—and I saw my im-pending sexual maturity as the culprit. That is to say, I blamed my body itself.9

My physical and intellectual development were careening far ahead of my emotional development. My mother was concerned, and rightly so, for I did not have the emotional tools to negotiate the new confusion of both sexual and intellectual possibilities. Chock-full of hormones, I babbled maniacally at the dinner table about my test scores and how, after I finished high school at fifteen, I was going to Columbia Medical School to be a neurological surgeon and was going to figure out how to cure all the ills of the world by the time I was twenty. My parents stared at me and suggested I be a little more realistic. I threw a rather age-appropriate temper tantrum.

Recent research suggests that an extremely strong desire for academic achievement may be as significant as sexual maturation, if not more so, in the development of eating disorders in young women.10 There is a combination of issues at work here: a family that has high expectations of achievement (as distinguished from genuine encouragement and prompting of a child to develop her intellectual skills); a child who is prone to excessive self-imposed pressure; and a child who exhibits unusual levels of academic ability and intelli-gence. The combination often results in mental paralysis. The child may defect from expectations—her own above all else—and take refuge in an entirely antirational set of behaviors that have, in fact, a highly organized structure.

This is my own experience: I was suddenly, deeply, passionately interested in everything. I couldn't stop thinking. I woke up in the night, heart pounding and head spinning with thoughts. I turned on my light and began to plot things out on notepads. Plotting was—and in fact still

9In a family with an absence of “healthy dependency,” a situation in which needs are
stated, accepted, and met when appropriate, a daughter may interpret relationships in a
very unhealthy manner: “dependency will equal slavery; intimacy will mean surrendering
integrity; and sexuality will mean a loss of control over her own appetites.” (Zerbe, 132;
italics added).

10Casky, 182; Zerbe, 338.

is—the only way to get the thoughts to slow down, planning my life out step-by-step, how I would get everything done in time, how it would all be okay. I plotted, mostly, careers—doctor, actor, politician, writer, geologist, singer, violinist, soccer player, Olympic swimmer, professor. Everything seemed possible. Everything also seemed deeply
necessary
, and, of course, I had to start preparing for every possible career
right now
or it would be too late. Essentially I worked myself into a tizzy. I was going to too many rehearsals, sports practices, music lessons, reading under the covers late into the night, reading in class, reading in the bathtub, asking my parents over and over, Do you think I could do this? This? This? Sure, they said. Why not? When I was about twelve, I developed an obsession with time, always sure that I would run out of time, time was awastin' and I wasn't Great yet. I started reading college catalogs and began badgering my parents to let me go away to boarding school, in hopes that it would get me Somewhere faster.

Faced with what seemed a staggering number of possibilities, I quit. The ever-expanding sea of thoughts that wash over one at a particular point of mental development is, in fact, a bit overwhelming to a person who is still trying to figure out tampons and the etiquette of writing love notes in grade school. I wanted to be a surgeon and I wanted Chad to give me a Valentine. I wanted my mother to let me sit on her lap and I wanted her to send me to college,
immediately
.

The dissonance in the brain is extreme at this point. Some children have the capacity to bore through it. I didn't. The idea of my future simultaneously thrilled and terrified me, like standing at the lip of a very sheer cliff—I could fly, or fall. I didn't know how to fly, and I didn't want to fall. So I backed away from the cliff and went in search of something that had a clear, solid trajectory for me to follow, like hopscotch. Like a diet.

In [Young women] can experience [professional liberation] as a demand and feel that they
have
to do something outstanding.

Many of my patients have expressed the feeling that there were too many choices and they had been afraid of not choosing correctly.11