by Diana Clarke
Dedication
For my ma and for my pa
Epigraph
God gave a Loaf to every Bird —
But just a Crumb — to Me —
I dare not eat it — tho’ I starve —
My poignant luxury —
—Emily Dickinson
Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
It is dark: I cannot see myself anymore. And what do the others see? Maybe something hideous.
—Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
Part Two 24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
Part Three 35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
I always thought anorexia was a dinosaur. Some relative, maybe a second cousin, of the Tyrannosaurus rex. There she is, pale beige and beautiful. Long neck, slim build. She looks like a horse if only a horse were taller and transparent and not a horse. It’s okay if you can’t see her, she might’ve already gone.
She’s an herbivore, of course. How she cranes her neck to nudge the leaves of a ginkgo with her snout, knocks fruit free, sends it tumbling down the trunk for fellow creatures to feast. How she blinks, slow as her lope. How she tiptoes despite the size of her feet.
She wants to make no mark on this world, anorexia, not even a footprint in long grass. If you want to be graceful, it’s best not to exist. She has always been more idea than animal.
The group leader gives me this journal and tells me, “Write it all down.”
The weight of a book—I flex my hands. I tell her, “I wish I had no hands.”
She says, “You do, so use them.” She used to find me charming. My quirky condemnation of corporeality. I never meant to be cute. I meant that I, too, wish to be more idea than animal.
The group leader says that anorexia is a memory. Find what planted the seed of the disease in your mind and only then can you start to recover.
“Write it down” is what she says. “From the beginning.”
1994 (5 years old—Lily: 55 lbs, Rose: 55 lbs)
I told Lily that, if she didn’t eat the broccoli off my plate, I’d hold my breath until I died. She laughed until my cheeks bruised blue. Then she ate.
Part One
1
The group leader is showing us how to pre-eat.
“Preheat?” I say.
“Pre-eat,” she says.
“Pre-eat?” I say.
“Yes. Pre-eat.”
“Oh. Pre-eat. Okay.”
She lifts her hands into parentheses, as if she were showing us the size of a fish. Not a very big fish. A minnow, maybe.
The other girls in the group follow suit, lifting hands, curving fingers, all trying to be one another. I follow along, too, making brackets with my palms. I’m just trying to be like everyone else. Isn’t everyone? Isn’t it the impetus behind laughing when happy, crying when sad, shaking hands and bless you, how are you, good thanks, fine thanks, behind driving single file, walking down the sidewalk single file, the impetus behind wearing capris and then ripped jeans, sideburns then bangs, behind liking Abba, no, Ariana Grande, and toe rings and adult coloring books and Facebook? The humanest of instincts is to follow. And the group of us, all of us, we’re just trying to be human again. So we do it. We follow.
I relax my fingers into wilted versions of themselves. I, too, can hold space. The air between my palms feels important. I stare at it, claim it. My air. My nothing.
“Now,” says the group leader, her voice meant to be calming, tender and slow as a tidal change. “Imagine what might be between my hands.”
“A chain of paper dolls,” says a thin girl, whose name I don’t know. I stopped bothering with names after a week or two. They die or they leave. These are the options for thin girls in the facility. Not me—I’ve been here an entire year!
It’s inappropriate to think of your endurance here as an achievement, the group leader likes to tell me.
I like to tell her, Would you tell the pyramids of Egypt that their endurance is an inappropriate achievement?
Then the group leader says something like, Perhaps we should unpack this strange comparison you have made between yourself and one of the great wonders of the world.
I hate to unpack! I haven’t unpacked since I got here. I like the ephemeral feeling that comes with a full suitcase. The in-betweenness of it. I’m not thin enough for my body to shut down, too thin to live in the real world. I’m not dying, not living, I’m surviving. Welcome to my purgatory. I’m Rose.
“No, it can’t be a chain of paper dolls,” says the group leader, and just like that, the paper dolls of our collective imagination vanish. Poof! “It has to be food,” says the group leader. “Pre-eating.”
“You didn’t say that when you said the rules,” says Sarah, my only friend. Her eyes bag like a basset hound’s, and she’s younger than most of us. Only eighteen, skin still acned all over, bubble wrap. I like her, Sarah. The way she pops her knuckles every hour, on the hour, clockwork. The way she peels tiny licks of skin from her lips. Plucks her eyelashes, one by one. She can’t leave herself alone. As if she needs the constant reminders: This is your body. Do with it what you will.
“Let’s just imagine it’s a sandwich,” says the group leader and we all agree that there could plausibly be a sandwich between her parenthesized hands.
“Can you see it?” says the group leader. “Can you see the sandwich?”
I can’t, of course, because there isn’t one, but I do want to impress her, and I do want to recover, and so I nod. I nod and say, along with the crowd, “Yes, I see it, I see the sandwich, yum!”
The group leader smiles, and I feel glad to have made that smile.
“Now,” says the group leader. “Now I want you to try not to think about calories,” she says. “Don’t think about the calories in this sandwich.”
Which is easy because the sandwich is air.
“Think about something else, girls,” she says.
1999 (10 years old—Lily: 88 lbs, Rose: 88 lbs)
We’d just finished a stint at summer camp, Lily and I, and we had furious sunburns, our noses shedding old skin, our shoulders alive with that hot itch. We had new freckles sprinkled across our cheeks, and even the sun knew to kiss us with symmetry.
Our parents liked to send us to camp whenever possible. They told us, when we whined, not wanting to go, that it would teach us independence. “And new skills!” they said. “Like tying knots!”
On parents’ day, when each kid was meant to lead their mother by the hand, show their father how they could build a raf
t from only branches and twine, they didn’t come, our parents. On mail day, which happened once a week, the other kids opened letters sealed with the lipstick kiss of their mothers, signed roughly by their fathers’ gruff hands, the camp counselors sometimes offered Lily and me a letter printed on Camp Coromandel stationery, from the camp staff, who felt sorry for us.
After four weeks in the New Zealand woods, our young faces were striped with nature’s grime. A lick of mud across the brow, twigs braided into matted curls. We were identical, even in our disguises.
Our parents picked us up and we were on our way back to the city, Dad in the driver’s seat, Mum sitting shotgun, and Lily and I tangled in the back, holding hands, my head on her lap, our legs coiled around one another like climbing ivy. We smiled, luxuriating in the alone time we had been waiting for.
When we stopped at a gas station, Mum turned to us, entwined in the back seat, and said, “Want a drink, girls? Bottle of water? Diet soda?”
“Sausage smoothie!” said Lily.
“Anchovy juice!” I countered, and we fell into our laughter.
“You two are impossible.” Mum sighed. But we barely heard her.
Back then, my favorite color was pink because Lily’s was. I liked cucumber sandwiches because she did. I went on playdates because Lily was invited to them, and I had friends because she hung out with other kids, and I hung out with her. We were inseparable, and we lived for moments like these, in which we existed on our own frequency, a station between channels that sounded like nothing more than raw static to others.
Dad filled the car. Mum ran inside for gum and cigarettes, because even back then she was dieting. Lily and I opened our doors to let the summer air circulate, let our bitten skin breathe. It was the kind of summer day that wraps itself around you, bandages you with its wet heat. The kind that feels like forever. Like we would never go back to school, like the season would forget to change.
To keep ourselves occupied, we played one of our favorite games: Sister Says.
“Sister says, put my hands on your head!”
She did.
“Sister says, put your elbow on my knee!”
I did.
“Sister says, put your arms in the air!”
She did, and then Dad slammed Lily’s door, jamming her fingers in the metal seam. She screamed. The heat on my tongue was immediate, like chewing on a handful of jalapeños. I gasped.
Her fingers, stuck in the door, looked bisected—they disappeared at the knuckle, every digit beheaded at once. Her arm went limp and she turned to me, eyes damp and begging. Things happened in slow motion—the significance of a memory tends to weigh it down, slow its pace. Before asking Lily whether she was okay, instead of reaching over her to open the door and free her, I raised my own hand—Sister says, put your arms in the air—I slammed my door shut, making sure my fingers would fall victim to the attack.
“Jesus Christ, Rose!” Mum shouted.
As soon as my tears started, Lily’s stopped. She reached for my injury, so careful. My hand throbbed, heartbeat in my fingernails. Dad shook the gas nozzle and returned it to its bed. “What’d I miss?” he said, settling into the driver’s seat, fastening his seat belt.
“The girls,” said Mum, as if it were an answer. She turned over her shoulder to look at me. “If Lily jumped off a bridge, would you do that, too?”
“Yes.”
Lily sat for the rest of the journey home, nursing my slow-swelling hand in hers, our identical constellations of freckles aligned. We watched our matching bruises fade from red to purple, this gorgeous skin sunset.
Even hurting, I was happiest when we were in sync. We bled together, my sister and I.
Back then, the only difference between Lily’s body and mine was a mole. Hers. She kept it on the left side of her lower back. I hated to see that mole, perfectly round, slightly raised, the size of a chocolate chip plucked from a cookie. Every birthday, blowing out the candles, I’d wish that blemish away.
There’s a knock on the door to the group session room, and we all turn, invisible sandwiches suspended, mouths wide and about to bite.
She’s standing in the doorway, tall and thin. She looks like a streetlight. She’s wearing a top hat and a bow tie, to hide her balding, her bones, respectively. She can’t fool us thin girls with that gaudy getup; we’ve tried every trick in the book to keep our starvation to ourselves.
Her eyes are rimmed with black pencil, and it makes them look cartoonish, like those animated eyes that can boing out of a skull in surprise. She’s so elegantly ugly, this new thin girl. And familiar! I look around at the other sandwich holders, and they, too, are squinting with recognition.
She lifts a hand and her sleeve falls and her wrist is crisscrossed with raised white scars. Her wave is a flicker of fingers. “Kat,” she says. Then she licks her palm and uses it to bat at a feline ear that isn’t there. “Like cat,” she says.
It’s that, the kitsch gesture, the voice so low it crawls, that makes our eyes widen. We know this thin girl. Kat Mitchells. Child star. Her song, the only one she ever released, maybe, appears like an unwanted guest. The chorus, something about falling in love with a girl.
There was outcry about the sexualization of the singer, Kat Mitchells, who was thirteen and wearing golden hot pants onstage. There was more outcry about the sexual orientation of the singer, Kat Mitchells, who called herself a lesbian on live television.
“She’s a kid!” the people said. “How can she possibly know she’s gay!”
“How can your kids possibly know they’re straight?” said Kat Mitchells, in a talk-show interview that took over the world for a moment. Then she stuck out her tongue. It was pretty, pink, studded silver, and it drew to a point at the tip.
Kat Mitchells was so cool. You know Madonna? Mariah? Miley? Kat Mitchells was cooler. She was the first face of hair mascara and stick-on earrings and temporary tattoos. She had her own line of tube tops that said things like cool chick and bite me. She was the celebrity face of Kit Kats and released her own customized raspberry bar called the Kit Kat Mitchells. The Kat Mitchells Barbie wore fishnets and a leather miniskirt and came with a headset microphone and if you tugged her ponytail, she’d belt out a few robotic notes. Kat Mitchells wore men’s jackets wide open with nothing underneath. She dyed her hair neon and shone like a nightclub. She looked like a fucking Friday night. She chewed gum like it was part of her biology and blew big pink bubbles that never splattered over her face when they popped. Parents hated her. We were in love.
Lily and I watched the show from our bundle on the threadbare couch, eyes and mouths wide.
I once read about the Ain Sakhri, sculpted in the year 9000 BC. It is the first known artistic depiction of sexual intercourse, and the sex of each figure is indeterminate. It is often believed to be the first portrayal of queer lovemaking, but the statue, body tucked into body, could also be a pair of twins in the womb, fetal and joined.
And now here she is. Kat Mitchells. The Kat Mitchells! At the facility, my facility, standing in the doorway, older, thinner, uglier.
“Welcome, Kat,” says the group leader, gesturing to a spare chair. “Welcome to Intellectual Eating. Please, take a seat.”
“I’d rather not, darling. Actually, I’d rather perform fellatio on an aroused gorilla.” All the moisture has been wrung out of her voice. I want to lotion her throat.
The group leader raises her eyebrows. “Sit.” She doesn’t care that Kat Mitchells is a celebrity. This facility has a way of equalizing everyone, not communism but cloning. We all become one another in here—sick is all that we are.
Kat sighs into the seat next to me. I shuffle my chair away.
“What’s wrong, baby?” Kat leans over and whispers in my ear as she folds her long body into the too-small chair. “Do I scare you? You think I’m gonna bite?” She snaps her teeth closed, and, if she’d been holding a sandwich like the rest of us, she’d have just taken a large mouthful.
“No,�
� I whisper. My cheeks hot, palms spiked with sweat. Kat smells of peppermint and vomit. Fresh and stale. I inhale. “I’m Rose,” I say. “I’d shake your hand, but . . .” I nod at the way we are all still holding our imaginary sandwiches.
Kat smiles, her teeth sepia as an old photograph. A purger. I check her knuckles, and sure enough, they are the color of concrete, calloused and dry.
“Are you thinking about calories, Rose?” the group leader asks, inspecting my expression with a suspicious brow.
I want to tell her that I’m only thinking about calories, when she says the word calories, but I also want to please this whisper-haired woman. It’s her hair, so sparse it looks accidental, that makes me think she’s recovered from the battle we’re all fighting.
Anorectics experience extreme weight loss. But you lose more than that. Hair, fingernails, teeth. You lose your friends, family, yourself. You lose your sense of the world. Of what is important beyond the not-eating. And, eventually, you lose it all. Your life. She’s greedy, anorexia is.
Now, the recovered group leader wears scrubs around us, as if she believes our thinness to be contagious. Her new body shape is that of someone unafraid of carbohydrates—a little swollen, like a human allergic reaction, but not in a bad way.
“No,” I tell her. “I’m not thinking of calories even a bit.”
Kat laughs, the sound, the rattle of the last mint in the tin. Even though she’s barely famous anymore, barely recognizable, she still has the jaw of a famous person. The way celebrity chins are all sharp angles compared to the rest of us, soft. I reach for my neck, and the flesh there feels like fat.
The group session room looks like a classroom. We sit in a circle, on little chairs, behind little tables. The walls are elaborately dressed in motivational posters featuring photographs of landscapes, mountains, forests, lakes, the sorts of scenery people might describe as tranquil. Superimposed over the images are a series of words in bold fonts. INSPIRE: AWAKEN YOURSELF, GRATITUDE: THANK THE WORLD, PEACE: NOT HARM. We are being monitored by abstract nouns.