All We Knew But Couldn't Say

by Joanne Vannicola

  Then I heard her speak, the nurse. “Come back. Open your eyes, Joanne,” she said. “Come back.”

  The colours faded and the bright blues turned into flat grey, then the white of the hospital room came into focus and I saw the IV, drip, drip, drip, stuck to my wrist. I wanted to rip it out but people were watching as the liquid calories were forced into me. A sound deep in my belly rose to my throat, but stuck there. No sound. Just wide-open mouth. Internally I cursed them for bringing me back, for the trap. Drip, drip, drip.

  Post-traumatic stress, anorexia nervosa, suicidal, the voice in my head said. These were the names of illnesses that could get me locked up. I was warned that I would be institutionalized. Be careful what you say, Joanne, said the voice inside. And I was careful.

  “Yes, I know what I’ve done is foolish. I’ll never do it again.” I was stuck in a small room with a psychiatrist who wore a white coat. He had a moustache, pad, and pen. He stared right into my eyes when he spoke to me, without expression. I crossed my legs and tried to act like a grown-up.

  “You’re very sophisticated for a sixteen-year-old,” he said.

  “Yes, I guess I am. I’ve been living on my own for a while now, you see.” I thought I was doing a great job at imitating an adult and continued to tell him I wouldn’t repeat my actions.

  “Will you stop starving yourself? If you don’t stop, you could end up in the hospital for a long while,” he said, clicking his pen on the desk.

  I stared at his thick grey and brown moustache. I was smoking — strange as it seems now, you could smoke in hospitals then. I inhaled deeply, then delicately flicked the ashes into the ashtray with as much sophistication as I could muster, again crossing my legs, my bony left knee jabbing into the underside of my right leg. “Why doesn’t someone help the children who want to eat?” I asked. “There are children dying in Africa that have no food. Why don’t you help them?”

  “Well, there isn’t anything I can do about the children halfway around the world, but I can do something to help you,” he said.

  No, I thought. My father killed kittens with a shovel, killed them right in front of me and my sister Lou. Can you make that memory go away? And what about my mother? Should I tell you about her? Can you fix me?

  I couldn’t say anything I was thinking. I could not say what was at the brim, my jaw clenched. I didn’t know how to speak. I didn’t know what he would believe. How … do … I … speak … words? How can you say what you know? I have no home. I am not loved.

  “I promise to eat, honest I will.”

  Those were the words I chose. I had to lie.

  “You are going to be monitored. If you don’t eat we may have to keep you. We’ve spoken to your mother —”

  Bitch. I stabbed my cigarette out in the glass ashtray on his thick wood desk. I couldn’t get away from her, not even in Edmonton. I had done it, after all that time of being less than perfect, five, ten, fifteen pounds too big, I had lost it and ended up alone in a room, begging for my freedom from a stranger while my mother feigned concern for me, the daughter she once called fat. It was her, and Martha, and Sylvia’s measuring tape, and the men who eyeballed my body, instructing me to lose five pounds. Losing all that weight felt like losing them, too, along with their judgments and insults. Gaining weight meant putting it all back onto my bones, each horrible word and roaming eye, and my memories of childhood, lodged inside each pound. That girl was gone and they wanted me to bring her back to life after working so hard to kill her.

  My mother could go fuck herself, that’s what I thought.

  “I’ll eat. I want to finish my play, so I have to get out of here. I’ll eat, really I will,” I said as I bounced my crossed leg up and down.

  “Your mother is the main decision-maker here. I’m here to assess —”

  “She doesn’t get to make the decisions.”

  “By law she does, as your mother.”

  “I’m my mother. Me! I take care of me, see?”

  I was eventually released.

  The mother who made me go to hospital sat with me in the cafeteria. It had round plastic-covered tables and circular orange benches, with bright fluorescent lights above. The place was filled with hungry people who ate and spoke with frenetic energy, but it was not as oppressive as the rotting smell of unrecognizable processed meats in the air, or the dull green beans and mashed potatoes smothered in fat that sat in large steel food warmers under the spotlights of the hospital buffet. Starving was far more appealing.

  A tray of food sat in front of me holding toast, juice, and an egg. I wanted to gag. The mother stared at me and waited. After taking a bite of the hardboiled egg, I chewed and chewed, feeling like a trapped feral cat, and tried not to panic. I did not want to swallow the egg and shoved the mushy mess into the pockets of my cheeks and under my tongue.

  “Can I go to the washroom? I have to pee,” I said.

  “You didn’t swallow. Please finish. If you don’t eat you can’t do the show, and you’ll have to go back to the hospital. You can do it.”

  She wasn’t mean, she was nice really, but she didn’t understand what she was asking me to do. They were taking away the only thing I had: control over what I put into my body. But I had no choice. If I didn’t want to sleep in a mental institution, then I had to eat.

  So I swallowed the egg.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “YOUR MOTHER CALLED and said she hasn’t been able to reach you and wondered if you were okay,” Kate said. I was back at school, uncomfortable in my skin and the size of my body after being forced to eat. My death-wish summer had ended without my death.

  Looking down at my hands was a habit I adopted while starving, trying to see the bones in my wrists and the veins popping out from the top of my hands. I didn’t realize I had completely gone silent. “What?” I asked.

  “You must check in with your mother. You can use the pay phone in the hallway.”

  Kate could get me to do anything — homework, help other students, clean up. Sometimes she ate with me, watched my intake, but she never forced anything. And she always made me think when she spoke. She knew some of my views, which included not eating as an act of solidarity with starving children in other countries, kids who could be fed if wealthy countries cared enough to provide food. “Dieting is a luxury,” she said. “Girls starve themselves into stupidity while others have no choice but to starve. If you really want to help kids in other countries, well, they don’t need your martyrdom. Get well, get healthy, and then go do some good, yeah?”

  It was impossible to argue or match Kate’s reasoning with an equal comeback. She flipped that do-gooder thought right on its head. I wasn’t certain that most people would call anorexia a do-gooder deed, but while starving I was able to convince myself of anything. And why would others care if I starved myself in protest? They didn’t even know; no one did. Not even Kate understood my childlike reasoning, the personal hunger strike of an anorexic girl. It was private, solitary, with no picket sign, no media scrum, nothing that said Starving in protest of child abuse around the world.

  Shuffling down the carpeted hall, chewing the skin around my fingernails, I wondered what to say to my mother. I thought of the rivers Ms. Kate taught me about, how they moved from the largest of them all, the Nile, across continents and countries, Africa to Egypt, to the Rio Grande on the Gulf of Mexico, to the St. Lawrence River, place of my birth in Quebec, to the fast-moving waters in me, of blood and salt, liquid, my legs, building strength with each step.

  “Will you accept the charges?” the operator asked.

  “Joanne? Joanne, are you there? I’m worried. I haven’t been able to get a hold of you,” Mother said in a higher pitch than her regular tone. It felt fake and made my throat constrict. There was a catch; there had to be a reason for the so-called worry. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  I gathered my courage. “I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want you to call me or look for me. I just want you to leave me alon
e. Oh … and you’re fired. You are no longer my manager.” My lips quivered as heat catapulted from my belly to my face with each word that flew out of my mouth.

  “Joanne, you can’t just fire me, I’m your mother.” She spoke in that patronizing tone. “That eating problem has changed you, and you’re not thinking —”

  “Stop it. I’m firing you as my manager. You don’t get to make money off me anymore.” She’d kept the money I’d earned from Sesame Street, my first movie, and the television shows I had done while living at home.

  “Who do you think you are, speaking to me in that tone? Don’t you think I’ve paid enough for you to go to that school —”

  “Fuck off!” I slammed the receiver down.

  Ms. Kate stood at the opposite end of the hallway. We smiled at each other before she instructed me to get back to class. I was fairly certain she’d overheard my conversation, but couldn’t be sure; I only know that there was a silent nod on both our parts before I ran to class.

  My mother left messages on my answering machine. “You want to be on your own and not talk to me, then you can pay your own way and see how far you make it without my help.”

  I would make it, no matter what I had to do. There would be no turning back. If parenting was about finances, then I would parent myself. She’d already abandoned the other parenting duties.

  She needed to be needed. Every time my mother got rid of another child, it seemed she wanted us to crawl back: “See how far you get without my help.” As if she knew we would not survive without her, or could not, that she had bred dependent daughters who would not make it in the world without her directives or control. It was hard to build ourselves up with a mother who undermined her children’s development, when she tried to knock us down. And while she berated and belittled us, she built herself up, became more powerful, false or not. There was one place in the world where she would always be needed and have power. But I wouldn’t allow myself to need her and I would never call her. That was my resolve, to be motherless.

  Then the phone messages changed to “I miss you” and “I love you.”

  Hearing those words made me cringe, when she said she loved me. I didn’t believe it. It felt like she was screaming “Love me, care for me, I need you.” I love you was loaded.

  I needed a good agent at a reputable agency. I found the actor’s union and a list of agents. I had learned a few things from my mother about being a shark.

  There was no money in the bank — not even my father’s child support made its way into my account — but I refused to contact my mother. I had no desire for school, no time for education. Education was for kids who had parents who packed lunches in backpacks; education was a child’s luxury I could not afford. So I auditioned for television shows and movies. Sometimes there just wasn’t any money and I took whatever jobs I could find — at a corner store, at a bar in the entertainment district as a busgirl. I was still too young to serve liquor and couldn’t waitress. Then there were television gigs, the jobs that mattered: being cast as the guest star on TV shows like Street Legal, Night Heat, and even one starring Mr. T, in which I played a teenage mother with a baby on my hip and a bruised face. I was paying the rent.

  There was a Mac’s Milk on Yonge Street where I worked the midnight to 8:00 a.m. shift with two drag queens. The St. Charles Tavern was up the block and numerous customers came in at all hours of the night, scanning the store for soda, chips, smokes, or groceries. Some were high, some threatening. Some were young, gay male prostitutes. The St. Charles was also a hotspot for drugs.

  “You keep your pretty little ass out of that place, you hear me, girl? You’ll end up with a pimp and a case of crabs before too long,” one of my co-workers said. He wore a long wig, lipstick, tight jeans, and heels. My other co-worker would arrive dressed in drag on occasion after singing at the club in the gay village and would change into street clothes in the backroom. The owners of the Mac’s Milk were two elderly women with soft hearts for young people like the three of us who worked the overnight shift together. I made muffins and pastries at 4:00 a.m., lining muffin tins with premade batter and baking all the sugary foods for the morning crowd, who would come in for coffee and baked goods before work.

  One morning, just after I got a batch into the ovens, three young men came in and started taking things from the shelves. My two co-workers dropped to the floor behind the front counter, terrified. I, on the other hand, still had the stupid bark of a belligerent teen. “You put that shit back where you got it,” I screamed, jagged as a porcupine.

  The three men laughed at me while my co-workers looked up at me with their fingers over their mouths to shush me. I ignored them. When I looked up, one of the men was staring at me from the other side of the counter. He had a baseball cap on and a thick scar on his chin. I tried not to look at it. “I’ll take what I want, bitch. What are you gonna do about it?”

  I didn’t say anything, just felt panic in my bones as he leaned in over the counter to intimidate me, while the two at my feet slunk down on the floor. I stared at the cameras that lined the store. They were on a timer. Every thirty seconds the camera would shift from the front of the store to the back of the store, then back to the front. I knew because I learned to count as I walked the aisles putting food inside my pants: peanut butter, jelly, crackers, bars. By the time the camera came back to the front, I had what I needed to take home. I felt guilt for stealing from the two women who employed me on the overnight shift, but there was never enough money in my pockets. I could steal, but these men could not. There were principles about theft. I looked at the cameras so that they would know they were being filmed. The guy in front of me followed my gaze to the swivelling camera and decided to leave, the others behind him.

  “Crazy girl. Next time, you get your ass on the ground beside us, you see a group of men walk through this place. You trying to get us killed?” one of the drag queens said after the guys had left. “I’m calling the manager.” He walked to the back of the store followed by our other co-worker.

  “Sorry,” I said. I knew why there were three of us on the overnight shift. It wasn’t safe for one or two. That job didn’t last long.

  I had gained a lot of weight back in the six months since being hospitalized in Edmonton. It didn’t take long for the pounds to return, for the muscles, bones, and organs to rebound. Insecurity settled in along with the weight. Calorie counting was still a habit, and with every mouthful of food I consumed, fewer of my bones were visible. The bones had become friends at my lowest weight. In the bath or lying on my side, feeling my ribs or hipbones had been a comfort, soothing, as if I were embracing someone each time, feeling a familiar bone. But I was losing them. With the returning weight, I buried my friends one by one until I could no longer feel them, and instead, memories took their place, night terrors and memories of the childhood I tried to forget.

  I became a pro. People acknowledged my budding career: casting agents, producers, directors. I was the next hopeful, the one to watch for. But I had zero self-esteem, and the inner voice was always there, waiting to tear me down. As an actor, I needed that part of myself to cope with the judgmental and unforgiving film industry, the ones invested in keeping me skinny, subservient, and silent, like an abusive father or husband.

  And there were adults who thought it was okay to stick their tongues down my throat, and men who wanted to play strip poker with me in hotel rooms. They thought I was naive, behaved as if they knew my inner world, as if they were the first to show me affection, attention, the first who dared to cross my physical boundaries. But these were the same people who had the power to hire or fire me, the ones I stepped away from, the ones who tried to touch my thighs and get me to take my top off, to show them my body — “for the part.”

  I was seventeen when an older male director with white hair asked me to take my top off. It was down to two of us for the part after a few auditions. It would be the last callback. The role was a young street girl, a prostitute a mi
ddle-aged man would help get off the streets. The room was warm with the camera lights on. The director sat through my audition, then came up to me, walked me to a corner of the room with his arm around my shoulder, and whispered, “Will you take your top off?”

  I stiffened, frozen in place. He didn’t seem to pick up the cues that I didn’t want him holding me, that it was uncomfortable. Or maybe he didn’t care to notice.

  “I want to see if you can play the part of a prostitute, be uninhibited … you know.”

  Oh, I knew, and I was instantly aware that if I said no, I would not get hired and would lose the leading role, not to mention the money. Money I needed to pay the rent. I was close to being that girl in real life, on the streets, uncertain how to make a living. Just like this old man in the audition room, another old man had approached me in the park a few weeks before. He pulled a wad of cash from his pocket and asked if I had seen a girl about my age with red hair. When I said no, he asked me if I wanted to make some money. All I would need to do would be to follow him into the wooded area beside the Riverdale Farm and beat him with his belt by a tree. I hadn’t eaten that day, and not out of choice, and only had a nickel in my pocket, which I used to purchase a piece of licorice. My belly rumbled as the old man with wrinkled skin, white hair, and a wad of cash stood above me. I knew he was a predator, but I followed him anyway because I was hungry. So I took his money, and I beat him with the belt, and I ate that day.

  But I would not be manipulated by this director. I had my boundaries in my career, or at least I was trying to. I needed someone to rescue me, like the character in the very film I was auditioning for, to swoop in and help me. Instead, I ended up with this guy, arms around me in a corner asking me to take my top off. Irony.