Fulfild of donge and of corrupcioun!’
Chaucer, The Pardoner’s Tale
In the first flush of a new diagnosis, it’s tempting to get carried away, to take every single trait you’ve never liked about yourself and call it a symptom: you were never wrong-headed or self-absorbed or difficult in your life – it was the Condition all along. You go through your life history, vindicating yourself at every turn; you realize what an extraordinary person you must be, so brave, so long-suffering; you realize that you were a helpless victim twice over, first of the Condition, and then of the Ignorance and Intolerance of those around you, who failed to make allowances, when it should have been obvious to every one of them that whatever you did and said hurt you more than it hurt them.
I had fun like this for a little while, but in the end I had to acknowledge that, whether I was emotionally challenged or not, there was no avoiding at least some of the responsibility for my own behaviour, not least if I wanted to be the protagonist of my own life, rather than some pitiful apology for a character who never acted unless she was acted upon. Even so, that still left a satisfying number of odd thoughts or incidents or habits that suddenly, finally, had an explanation. There was the shoe thing, for a start.
Every year, somehow, Jewish girls made up a neat third of my new school’s intake, and on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, we were herded into the West Gym for Jewish Assembly. Before we could enter our place of worship we had first to take off our shoes – not for any religious reason, but in order to preserve a gym floor designed for bare feet and plimsolls rather than Clark’s lace-ups. You could leave your shoes just outside the gym, if there was room, but more often you had to leave them further away, in the glass-walled corridor that led from the main building to the block that housed the two gyms, a smaller room with a ping-pong table in it, a little office where the lower fourths had to go for their BCG injections and a couple of cupboards full of athletics equipment, gym mats, and nasty folk-dancing skirts that were always either painfully tight or so loose that you had to tuck them into your knickers to stop them falling to the floor. It was probably called the Sports Corridor – it was that sort of school.
After we had removed our shoes, we would go in, accompanied by a few teachers, and sit in our year groups with the juniors at the front. Once we were all inside and the doors shut, whichever teacher was in charge that day would tell us to stand up – or more usually, stand up and be quiet – and then we would recite the Jews’ daily prayer, the Shema; some girls did so proudly and accurately, while the less observant among us muttered something that sounded approximately right, shuffling our unshod feet. Then we would sit down for the main part of the assembly. Sometimes a group of girls would enact some religious story, or else someone would sing, or lead us all singing (we used to sing ‘Hine ma tov’ to the tune of the The Flintstones, which was great fun). Quite often a teacher would read from a suitable text, usually from some well-regarded novel for young persons: I Am David and One More River were particular favourites. On one occasion a sixth former read some passage from a novel about the Spanish Inquisition which described a young Jewish woman’s torture in all its bone-cracking detail. We didn’t hear anything from that book again.
Once or twice I took an active part in the assembly myself, maybe reading something out, or, more probably, writing something for other girls to perform, but most of the time I just sat quietly on my constipated, brown-clad tochas, thinking about my shoes. There was a lot of work to do: I had to visualize their exact location, then visualize it again to make sure that it stuck in my memory, then I had to imagine what I might do if I couldn’t find them, just in case the visualization didn’t work, then I had to go through every possible scenario: another girl with shoes just like mine takes my shoes and I have no shoes; I take that other girl’s shoes and get into trouble; we take each other’s shoes; I find my shoes but take so long putting them on that everyone leaves me behind and I am late back up to the main hall for Notices; I am late for Notices on account of my shoes and everyone sees me come in late through the double doors in the middle and turns round to stare and then the head-mistress tells me off in front of the whole school; to avoid being made an example of in front of the whole school I decide not to go in for Notices but then have to remain outside the hall alone and find some way to join the others as they come out of the hall, and go back to my classroom through the corridors past the prefects without anyone realizing what I’d done and exposing me as the bad, stupid girl who, shod or shoeless, was always one step behind.
It was unbearable. I couldn’t tell anyone about it but I did ask my mother to allow me to go to Main Assembly, arguing that I could get all the Jewishness I required at home, and shouldn’t school be the place where I got to discover the Protestant host culture? She said no. Fortunately, after I’d been in the school two or three years, a new octagonal theatre and lecture building – the Octagon – was completed and we had Jewish Assembly there instead, this time with our shoes on.
It was a trivial matter, the shoe thing, and I recognized it as such at the time, but all the thought and attention and worry I expended on it made it grow and grow until, privately at least, I came to see my Jewishness primarily in terms of the potential it provided for shoe loss. It was as if I had been compelled, for no discernible reason, to pick at a tiny cut until it became first an open, infected sore, and then the starting point for systemic septicaemia. Then after the Jewish assemblies were moved, the thought, the anxiety, the dread faded completely, and I could easily have forgotten the whole obsession, because there was no wider context in which I might have placed the memory. I was not in general prone to thinking about the location of my shoes; the school placed no great emphasis on them – or else they would probably have been lined up in the Shoe Corridor; I was not raised in a culture in which shoes symbolized a young woman’s honour and modesty and their loss was ruinous; I did not voluntarily subscribe to any ideology which regarded shoes as particularly significant; nor was I swept up in any general current of cultural anxiety about the misplacement of footwear. To put it in psychological terms, what made that particular obsession so straightforward to diagnose, even in retrospect, even by an amateur like me, was that it was so clearly ‘ego-dystonic’ – that is to say, there was nothing about the shoe anxiety that made any sense to me in terms of the person I understood myself to be. If I did not attempt to explain it to anyone else it was partly because I had no way of explaining it to myself.
When a preoccupation or worry is not ego-dystonic, then it becomes harder to diagnose as a symptom; indeed, if a preoccupation can be adequately accounted for by the culture in which the person lives, then, no matter how bizarre it may sound to those outside the culture, and no matter how painful it may be for the person who holds it, it may well not be a ‘symptom’ of anything at all. In a community where illnesses are explained in supernatural terms, a belief that one’s diarrhoea is caused by evil spirits residing in the intestines may not be delusional; in a culture which associates thinness with high status, a preoccupation with diet, weight and exercise is not necessarily a sign of pathology. On the other hand, when a skeletally thin woman insists that she is too fat, and for this reason refuses all food, even though her beliefs make sense to her – are ‘ego-syntonic’ – if we label her as ‘anorexic’ it is partly because her beliefs about her body make no sense to anyone around her. The other reason is that they are causing behaviour which is detrimental to her work and relationships, making her ill and, without intervention, may well lead her to kill herself.
I doubt you needed me to tell you that. I’m assuming that anyone reading this will already know a fair bit about anorexia, bulimia and so on, if only because eating disorders are not an easy subject to avoid in the early twenty-first century; neither are the broader issues of body image and low self-esteem. It’s quite possible that you have read articles or watched a documentary about another illness which, like anorexia and bulimia, is seen by some as a member of OCD’s
extended family, or the ‘obsessive-compulsive spectrum’ as many psychiatrists would call it. Body dysmorphic disorder is characterized by an excessive preoccupation with an imagined or real but minor defect in one’s physical appearance, and by behaviours intended to check, minimize, camouflage or eliminate the perceived defect. These behaviours include excessive mirror-gazing, the use of make-up or clothing to cover up the defect, and constant seeking of reassurance about one’s appearance; in extreme cases, the sufferer may resort to endless plastic surgery – which never cures – or avoid company altogether, believing herself too hideous to look upon. Compared with OCD patients, those with a primary diagnosis of BDD have significantly higher rates of co-morbid major depression, substance abuse and suicide. The belief that one is ugly, no matter how unjustified it may seem to others, can cause the most intense distress imaginable. It’s also very hard to treat: like the anorexic girl’s belief in her own fatness, the BDD patient’s belief in the unacceptability of her appearance is, all too often, ego-syntonic. Like the anorexic’s calorie-counting and two-hourly trips to the scales, her anxious mirror-gazing and constant foundation touch-ups could be seen as a kind of unintentional burlesque on what most of us think of as normal behaviour. Normal for girls, I mean.
Always more of a tree-climber than a doll-dresser, I had become used to thinking of myself as a boy deep down, so it came as a shock when, somewhere around my tenth birthday, I became aware that my chest was already not quite as flat as it had been. My family became aware too, and sometimes pointed it out; when they did, I would fold my arms or leap behind a chair. The emergence of these tiny bosoms, as far as I could see, was just the first of a whole series of mortifications. Soon I would be strapping myself into elaborate pieces of underwear that looked more like punishments than clothing. I would be expected to begin my days sitting in front of a mirror ‘putting my face on’, as if the face that I had on the front of my head was not only unacceptable, but actually less than real. Then there would be some kind of extra unpleasantness to do with toilets, which I would have to mop up with special paper. There would be no more tree-climbing, or even much running, because I would be wearing shoes that made me walk in a stupid way with my bottom sticking out and my feet simpering ‘click click click’ just like the feet of the headmaster’s secretary whose bright red pout and wiggly walk made her a legitimate object of ridicule to every child in the middle school.
Even now, the sound of my own feet clicking never fails to make my gorge rise, so I tend to avoid high heels. And then there are other remnants of that ten-year-old’s disgust and resentment. Whenever I walk into a kitchen, I become unable to follow verbal instructions and lose the use of my arms. As a girl, I was no keener to ladle chicken soup into other bodies than I was to adorn my own. I didn’t want to be a nice Jewish girl, clothing myself in silk and purple, and giving meat to my household while my husband sat among the elders of the land. There are many women who are perfectly comfortable within traditional Judaism, and they would argue that the home is the spiritual centre of a good Jewish life, and that at the centre of every good Jewish home is a good Jewish woman; there is nothing demeaning, nothing secondary about keeping a kosher home and raising the Jewish children with which God has seen fit to bless you. On the other hand:
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
Genesis 3:16
My mother was not your stereotypical Jewish accountant’s wife: she had always worked outside the home and had always assumed that I would too. She also cooked all of our meals, kept the house we lived in clean, stayed home when my brother and I were ill, complained to the headmaster when she felt that the school was failing me, allowed me to bring dozens of Enid Blyton books into the house even though she hated them and, when the time was right, she did her best to prepare me for puberty in a level-headed, secular sort of way. When I was ten or eleven, she bought me a book from Smith’s in Temple Fortune called Have You Started Yet? Recently, it took me no time at all to find a copy of the 1980 edition on the Internet, and it cost next to nothing, so I bought it and had another look. It’s every bit as sensible as I remember: the text explains menstruation in the manner of a kindly biology mistress, and there are plenty of clear, sensible diagrams to show the young reader exactly how her body will change through puberty and across the menstrual cycle. One set of images shows how to insert a tampon for the first time, and it makes it look incredibly easy, which it would be if real vaginas were like the ones in the diagrams: perfect cylindrical spaces, waiting calmly for whatever anyone might push into them.
My dreams were changing along with my body. I would find myself alone in the house, always inadequately dressed, sometimes in lacy underwear. The house itself would be in an unstable, vulnerable state, with a leaking roof and bricks crumbling out of the walls. There was broken glass under my bare feet and loose floorboards to trip me up. The taps would be jammed, flooding the kitchen and bathroom, and worst of all, every time I turned round I would see another exposed wire, with orange sparks fizzing malevolently out of its tendrillous ends. The cat had run away. If I was lucky I had a stick or a snooker cue to defend myself, the house and my honour – there were going to be intruders. In some of the dreams I could see them quite clearly, because the front of the house was completely transparent. They could see me too, in my underwear, stuck to the floor – did I mention that I was unable to move? They were big men in little knitted burglars’ hats, they were laughing, and they were on their way in.
In my waking life, I wasn’t climbing trees any more. I could barely cope with stairs, because I’d realized how easy it would be for me to fall backwards and break my back or smash my skull in. To make sure that this never happened, I began to walk up stairs in a very particular, careful way, holding on tightly to the banisters, leaning forward into each tread. The stairs at school worried me especially, as they were stone, and rose around a stairwell down which one might – in theory – fall through the whole height of the school, from the Science Corridor on the third floor to the cloakrooms on ground level. A scenario of just such a fall played in my head over and over again.
Wherever I was, safety was my first concern. I would make my rounds of the house at night, switching off whatever could be switched off, unplugging whatever could be unplugged. And I liked to be absolutely sure that the front and back doors were locked. But absolutely sure.
One miserable November evening when I was twelve and a half, my parents went out to a dinner party or the cinema or perhaps a supper quiz, leaving me, my little brother, and the teenage boy who was our babysitter for the night. I had been in an uncontrollably foul mood all day, but had put this down to the book I’d been reading – a dreary written-for-teens story about an outbreak of fascism in an American high school – and to the way the seams of my new corduroy catsuit had been digging in all over the place. According to my mother, this foul mood had been going on for months and when she’d raised the issue with my father he’d suggested that perhaps my menarche was on the way. She had pooh-poohed the idea, but as it turned out, he was right. At about eight o’clock that evening I went to the downstairs lavatory, and when I wiped afterwards the paper came up covered in blood. It was very unwelcome but hardly shocking; thanks to my mother and Have You Started Yet?, I was prepared, so I crept up to my parents’ wardrobe, probably without singing on this occasion, and fetched out the packet of press-on towels that had been waiting for me there, nestling among the collapsed handbags, the old hats and the boot stretchers. They were called Sylphs, as misleading a brand name as has ever been coined. I hated their bulkiness. For my next couple of periods I tried quilted Bodyform towels instead but they looked far too much like surgical dressings for my liking, and the way they chafed my thighs was nothing short of vicious.
There was no way of resisting periods, but I had put off my first bra-fitting for as l
ong as I possibly could, clinging to my white Aertex vests until it was just too uncomfortable to go about so inadequately supported. I had also begun to realize that wobbling about without a bra was even more embarrassing than wearing one to hold it all in place: the girls at school had started to say things. When the girls at school say things, you know the game is up.
We had sewing lessons in our first year. I did my best not to learn anything during them, but I still had to go. Once a week we would go into a dingy annexe next to the dining hall, where we would sit in front of old Singer sewing machines while the poor, put-upon home economics teacher did her best to make the class of budding lawyers and baby doctors take her and her subject seriously. Now, after years of begging or paying other people to take up my trousers and skirts for me, I wish I had. But at the time, the idea that it might actually be in my interests to learn to alter clothes or make them myself never occurred to me – I liked to boast that my mother had got an A for my wrap-over skirt. Those skirts were supposed to be our introduction to the art of dressmaking. There were three patterns available, but each came in a different size bracket, so each girl was first measured, to see which pattern she should follow. The categories were Girl, for the smallest and least curved, then Teen, and for the really advanced: Miss. Most of the class were still in Girl. Thanks to the small frame my breasts were growing on, and much to my relief, I scraped into Girl too. In the cloakroom at break-time, another girl in my class, who was not a bully, or even particularly bitchy, asked me which pattern I got – Teen or Miss?
‘Girl,’ I said with emphasis.
‘No way!’ she shrieked. Then she turned to her friend, and pointed at my chest:
‘Look at hers!’
That’s ‘embreasted experience’5 for you. This is a lovely term I came across while researching this chapter. It means, as you might expect, ‘the experience of having breasts’, and it encompasses, among other things: becoming aware of fleshy growths on one’s chest; feeling anxiety as a result of their development; wondering if one’s breasts are normal; feeling proud of one’s breasts; feeling embarrassed by one’s breasts; comparing one’s breasts to those of others; being aware that one’s breasts are being compared with the breasts of others; being aware that other girls are looking at one’s breasts for the purposes of comparison; being aware that men are looking at one’s breasts for other purposes; hearing men say things like ‘Look at the tits on that’ and being aware that one is the ‘that’ in question; suffering tenderness in the breasts during pregnancy and just before periods; wondering if, and when, one is going to get breast cancer –
Woman Who Thought too Much, The Page 4