All We Knew But Couldn't Say

by Joanne Vannicola

  I was so hungry. I wanted to eat. No. Get up, move. Get up, said the voice inside. I sat on the ground to do sit-ups, but my spine hurt from pushing bone against the hard floor, so I did push-ups instead, but couldn’t hold myself up anymore and fell to the floor, panting, the air moving quickly in and out of my lungs, my chest heaving, fingers constantly moving over the bones of my body, and all I heard was the voice inside my head, like a direct link from God.

  Just keep moving. Don’t tell. Don’t talk.

  I wondered if maybe the voice inside was God, thought maybe God was in me.

  “If you stand sideways we can’t see you anymore, Joanne,” people said. I thought they were lying, believed others thought I was fat. Why would I have thought otherwise? It was the message given to me since the age of twelve, and it would take more than a few concerned stares to reverse that message.

  My internal organs shook and trembled, like an arm losing circulation, with the sensation of hundreds of needles sticking inside of me. Organs tingled beneath bone and under skin, vibrating. I was terrified, didn’t know what to do, didn’t know why I hadn’t had a period in over a year, or why everything hurt.

  I was in the washroom rinsing my hands in the sink, rubbing them dry against my jeans. I started to brush out my long hair when I noticed a clump of hair in the brush. I held my breath and leaned into the mirror, separated strands of hair with my fingers, exposing my scalp where a tiny bald patch became visible. I covered it up by brushing through my hair with my fingers and tying it back into a ponytail. I left the washroom to go to the fridge and pulled out some strawberries and sliced four of them up to eat. I hoped it would stop my hair from falling out. I was hungry and opened the cupboard and found Barry’s jar of peanut butter and shoved my fingers into the thick nutty tar, then licked them like a child licks the cake batter from a spoon.

  I needed the energy. I was about to do a play with the Montreal troupe. We were touring across the country, starting at the Adelaide Court in Toronto. It was an original musical about teenagers, racism, pregnancy, and abortion. I was playing the part of a girl having an abortion. I would imagine aborting my childhood with the scream on stage that filled the audience while a coffin was paraded behind me. Oh, the symbolism.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THERE WAS A REHEARSAL in Montreal. I took the overnight train and slept in a tiny cabin the size of a closet. A tiny Murphy bed fell over the toilet and took up the entire cabin space. With a window beside me, the chugging sound of the locomotive and the constant motion lulled me into the best sleep I’d had in months. The whistles woke me before my stop and I was picked up at the station by Martha. She was taking me to the apartment I had lived in not that long ago. I wasn’t sure how I felt about going back home, but was excited to see my old friends, to hold Steffin, and to run around my old stomping grounds, as if I could, as if my time away had not changed anything and I could slip into Montreal like slipping into old clothes. But when I saw the blood stain on the wall of our old apartment and my mother sitting at the table looking nervous in the kitchen, I knew it would never be the same.

  “Why is there blood on the wall?” I asked.

  Mother sat at the table with her can of Coke and Martha gestured for me to sit.

  “We have something to tell you.”

  I didn’t say anything, just waited.

  “Clint was in an accident.” Martha looked at me, then at my mother.

  “What? Is he okay? What does this have to do with … is that why there’s blood on the wall?” I waited for an answer but none came quickly enough. “Tell me! Is he okay?”

  “Yes,” my mother finally said. She didn’t have much to add, mostly let Martha do the talking.

  “Why is there blood on the wall?”

  Martha and my mother looked to each other before Martha continued. “He was at a party last night, he got drunk and came over. He was angry, screaming at your mother and wasn’t making a lot of sense.”

  “He cut himself on a beer bottle in the bathroom and he dragged his hand across the wall before he left,” my mother piped in. “He was gone before I knew what to do. He was driving his mother’s car.…”

  I tried to absorb the information. Didn’t know how to assimilate it, but then it dawned on me that he could be severely injured or dead. “Is he going to make it?” I looked to Martha for some reason, not my mother. I did not want to cry. I tried to hold myself in as tightly as I could.

  “He’s in a coma.”

  “I should go see him —”

  “That’s probably not a good idea,” Martha said, looking from my mother to me.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “He should be left alone with his family right now,” my mother said, sitting with her hands tucked under her breasts like she always did, crossed arms high on her belly. It was odd, the moments remembered — blood on the wall, how my mother sat, the looks between Martha and my mother as if something was missing.

  I nodded in acceptance that I would not see Clint. But I didn’t know if he would make it, only that I might not ever see him again.

  “Tell me what happened,” I asked.

  Martha filled in the rest of the story, that Clint had hopped into his mother’s car, had driven the steep roads of Mount Royal, and was speeding down the hill at a very dangerous corner and smashed into a lamppost head-on. His face hit the steering wheel and his nose was broken and his face cut open, and he was in a coma.

  That weekend was a blur. I rehearsed and met friends in a bar, but all I wanted to do was go back to Toronto, get away from my mother. If I couldn’t see Clint, I just wanted to go home. I travelled back on the Sunday night train, and tried to forget. I learned soon after that Clint had made it. He woke from the coma. I let it go, let it recede into the back of my mind, and closed the vault. I could move on to my empty fridge, empty stomach, and the end of my first year in the arts program.

  I sat with Kate in her office on the last day of school. She wanted to give me her new phone number in case I needed it.

  “Take care of yourself. I know you have it in you,” Kate said.

  “I’m sorry. Sorry if I was too difficult.…” I said.

  “Why are you sorry, silly? You keep strong. It’s not all bad, you know, living. There is so much to enjoy. It’s not all tears and drama. The world is big.”

  I smiled and thanked her for being so good to me, said I was grateful, that I would miss her. All the right words came out. I often fantasized at night that she was my mother and Lionel was my father. Sometimes it helped me fall asleep, kept me alive in a tiny way she just didn’t know. I memorized everything about her before the end of that day — the silver necklace she wore, her burgundy shirt. I memorized the warmth in her eyes and drank it up with my last sip of tea before goodbye.

  “My number.” Kate pulled out a piece of paper from her notepad. I folded it over and over, then shoved it deep into my jeans pocket, protected by the fist I kept clenched around it.

  The kick-off to our cross-Canada tour arrived a few short days after my goodbye to Kate. I would miss her, but I would see my old friends from Montreal again. They arrived in Toronto on a Greyhound bus. We were all insanely excited, rehearsing our play about growing up, love, the end of childhood — all reflections of our actual lives packaged inside our play. After a few days of intensive rehearsal, we had our Toronto debut, then left on the tour bus, driving west through Ontario and continuing on all the way to Yellowknife and Whitehorse, not far from the Alaskan border. Then we’d head back east into British Columbia, over to Edmonton, and all the way across to Halifax and Prince Edward Island. The youngest actor in the show was eight years old, and the oldest eighteen.

  I turned sixteen the day the bus left. The first thing Steffin had said after we embraced was “We gotta get you laid for your sixteenth, okay?” He looked the same, except he had dyed his long, stringy hair white since I’d last seen him.

  Steffin could not get me to eat, no one could, but I made
sure that the children ate. I volunteered to pack lunches for the kids, making sandwiches filled with proteins and vegetables, wrapping each one in foil and plastic, brown-bagging them with cookies and fruit — an obsessive need to make sure everyone else was nurtured.

  “They don’t make size zero, Jo. You’re gonna have to eat so you can buy clothes that fit,” Steff said. I needed a new outfit for the show. I wanted to wear only sweats and baggy shirts offstage, but I tried some jeans on. Size 2 was on the rack, but nothing smaller. I liked the baggy size 2 jeans, though, and cut a hole with a knife in a leather belt to keep them up.

  In Whitehorse, while all the other children slept, I walked along barren roads with the sun still up at midnight, surrounded by mountains. I hoped I might run into a herd of wild horses or ghosts — I figured I might see them better in a place like Whitehorse. The sun illuminated that small corner of the Earth in the middle of the night, but when I did sleep, all I heard in my slumber was the sound of that controlling, anorexic inner voice putting me down until all I felt was enormous pain in my abdomen. I rubbed my belly and tried to breathe and move my feet, as if I could will the pain away from my stomach.

  I was starving. Don’t, the voice inside my head rattled. Don’t, just like my mother used to say with that wagging index finger. I didn’t need anyone to do that anymore; the voice of anorexia was the perfect master, had learned all the lessons of all those who tried to manipulate and shape my body. But the voice in my head was ruthless. I was in a duel with myself, waiting to fall on my own sword.

  By the time we arrived in Edmonton, my size 2 jeans were baggier and all of my humour had disappeared along with what was left of my body mass. I was mostly a shell, a ghost of my former self.

  I walked along a road in Edmonton as Steffin shouted my name. He caught up to me, a can of Tab in his hand — he drank it like water thinking it would make him slim. We walked while the other kids were at the West Edmonton Mall sitting inside the Burt Reynolds train café or whirling on rides. Steffin and I didn’t care much for kid stuff. We were too jaded from drugs, child prostitution, and starvation. We were quite the pair.

  “You don’t have to scream, I’m right here,” I said, even though I was ten paces ahead of him.

  “Why do you do that?”

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “Act like you’re the queen of the Earth, like you’re the only one with problems.”

  I turned and stared at him, waited for him to catch up, then smacked the Tab right out of his hand, hitting him in the face with all my might. I was strong for a bag of bones.

  Steffin slapped me back and we fought until we stopped and held on to each other, giggling.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hit you so hard,” I said, hitting him again.

  “Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you?” We sat on the pavement in the blazing sun and shielded our eyes from the light like two little vampires.

  “I can’t talk about it, Steffiny.” I held my hands up over my brow to look at him.

  “I don’t want to watch you die,” he said.

  He tried to connect with me but my brain was starved, damaged, and I couldn’t be reached.

  “I can’t watch you do this —”

  “Well, who said you had to watch anything?” I asked.

  “Fuck, you’re just such a fucking pain in the ass.”

  “Well, I had to watch while disgusting old men sat there and you sucked their dicks. How is what I’m doing less fucked than that?”

  “You’re a bitch, you know. Starving has turned you into an A-class bitch.”

  “Well, fuck off then, Steff.” I didn’t really want him to, but anorexia was in charge, not me.

  “I don’t … I don’t want to fuck off. I want you to be Joanne again!”

  “I’m not her anymore,” I said, standing. “Now why don’t you go play on the fucking Tilt-A-Whirl and eat shitty cotton candy with everyone else and just leave me alone.”

  He stood and faced me, saying he would leave me alone if that was what I wanted. We stared at each other and then walked in opposite directions until I yelled that it was indeed what I wanted. “Fuck off,” I heard him say before his voice disappeared as we walked farther away from each other.

  I wanted to run after him. He was swaying, wearing flip-flops that flicked against his heels and squeaked, his jeans rolled up and his furry legs exposed, his long hair blowing around in the wind. How could you not love him?

  I hadn’t felt much of anything, but the idea of losing Steffin made me ache. He was part of me somehow, part of my essence in a way. He was closer to me than anyone. We understood each other’s lives deeply, like parts of an atom or a cell.

  I saw him walking in the distance and wanted to tell him, wanted to tell him the truth, and spoke out loud hoping he might hear, told him that being hungry didn’t feel good, that I had a hard time breathing, that it felt like a bone might break, or that I would die before I was ready. But he couldn’t hear me.

  I kicked the dirt and rocks and walked along the road that seemed utterly isolated, without people or animals or cars, and wiped my eyes dry.

  My bones threatened to poke through flesh as my muscles weakened and my body slowly attacked itself, breaking down. I wouldn’t drink water anymore because water fed my cells, which meant it was feeding my body, cells multiplying, feeding, growing, making me fat. Surely water would make me fat. Water: two hundred calories.

  I tried to understand why water was bad and believed that water had cells that travelled into the body, feeding blood and organs. I was confused, talked to myself about water out loud, words evaporating from my brain like the water I was afraid to drink. I picked at my skin and decided to allow myself to drink coffee. Coffee would give me enough energy to do my play.

  No matter what the mode of transportation we took from one city to the next, I would stay standing, with the earphones from my Walkman in my ears, grooving from Toronto to Yellowknife, upright for hours on end while everyone else sat like normal travellers, eating their sandwiches. I crashed around like lightning in the aisles of trains, buses, and airplanes, even when I had not an ounce of energy and it took everything in me to stay standing. And while other young people were touring shops and museums on our days off, I was looking for local cemeteries, visiting graves everywhere we went to talk to the dead. I would starve myself to death. I had finally figured out how to die. I would do this great play, tour the country, and die by the end of the journey.

  Only it didn’t work out that way.

  I was so hungry, I broke down. I purchased a package of Oreo cookies in Edmonton and found an alley. I didn’t want to eat in front of anyone; the act of eating was shameful. People stared if I didn’t eat, and I believed they would stare if I did. One set of eyes felt like thousands judging me for something they did so easily, without worry or care. Food was intimate.

  I pulled a cookie out of the package, smelled and inspected it, then licked it slowly until the wafers started to soften. I bit into it as the sugar melted in my mouth. I finished one cookie, then ate a second one, then a third, and fourth, then stopped and inspected the area to make sure no one was around. I left the bag of cookies on the ground like a bomb in a knapsack.

  It wasn’t long before the anorexic voice inside my head was yelling at me. The cookies felt like lead in my belly, weighing me down. I panicked and found a local drug store, browsed the stomach section where laxatives, pills, and liquids lined the shelves. I looked at the labels and found a small bottle of ipecac. It was for accidental ingestion of poison. Food was poison. Perfect.

  I bought the ipecac and swallowed the thick liquid that tasted like cough syrup. Retching, holding my stomach, I couldn’t get up. I ingested the ipecac two hours before the curtain was supposed to rise; it was an antidote to carcinogens, a self-punishment, penance, purging. Giving in to hunger was a sign of weakness, of failure.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “I’M NOT GOING to the hospital.” I la
y on a couch in a room in the belly of the theatre, in the basement beneath the stage, a plastic bowl on the floor beside me. “I’ll be fine,” I said to a few people standing over me. I heard the kids warming up above me, their voices hollow echoes.

  “You have to go to the hospital,” a woman said. She was one of the mothers touring with us. There was an understudy ready to take my place.

  I couldn’t let that happen; it would destroy my plan. I had to go on stage and I had to starve, those were the two daily rules. Without them I crumbled.

  “The cab is here and you have to go to hospital. We will have to carry you out if you don’t get up and walk,” the mother said.

  Normally I liked her. She had her big hair in a bun and wore a floral dress. She was a soft-spoken woman, so generous with all the kids, but at that moment I hated her.

  I refused to stand; then the struggle began. One person tried to lift me and I kicked and pushed, then two people grabbed me, then three, then four. In a flash I saw Steffin out of the corner of my eye, standing in the background, mouth open, while I kicked and screamed. A stick figure kicking and fighting so hard I had to be restrained by four people, even though I was half the size of any one of them. They finally got me into the cab.

  At the hospital, I was hallucinating. Dehydrated. Colours turned bright inside my head — violet, blue, turquoise, red, yellow — swirling under my lids and bleeding out into the room. Colours everywhere. Sound crashed around me and I drifted back in my mind. I flinched. Someone was in the room. They grabbed my arm and I felt like I was back in my house, like I was eight, and I felt my father’s fists and kicks and I was filled with the terror. The nurse stuck me with a needle while the colours in my head mixed with the memory of my mother, naked, rubbing. She was too close. And my father was screaming, calling me a bitch, a whore, and he was so big, and I couldn’t run. I couldn’t stop him.

  Red, purple, blue, all started to bleed into each other, turning turquoise and orange; electrified white shone like a glistening aura. I floated up and out into the colour itself, mystical and beautiful. I was released from the body that kept me trapped. I was evaporating like particles that fly unseen in the air, like water drops and the full spectrum of the rainbow, a mist no longer bound by form.