and shakes each book upside down.
When she’s done,
Jennifer stacks them gently on the dresser,
feeling sorry for her books,
treated so ingloriously, like they are criminals.
As Nurse Bosom inspects Jennifer’s stationery,
she says, “Oh, about that dresser.
The top drawer turns into a desk. See?
Pull it out all the way, and the sides fold down.
You can use it if you meet your tutors here on the unit
before you’re medically cleared.
But usually you’ll meet downstairs
in the main dining room.”
Nurse Bosom lifts her backpack again,
like she is determining whether it feels empty,
then unzips its small front pocket.
She withdraws the four rolls of quarters Mom packed
for pay phones and laundry machines.
Nurse Bosom presses each roll carefully,
perhaps checking that they contain quarters only,
then tosses them onto the dresser,
where they bump to a stop against her books.
Last in the backpack is a line of postage stamps,
folded on perforated edges like a tiny accordion.
“Suitcase next,” Nurse Bosom says.
Jennifer takes a breath, chews her lip.
Why do they have to do all this?
She’s not trying to sneak anything in.
And also, does Nurse Bosom have to be so…
what is the word? Crotchety? Peevish? Impersonal?
Would it kill her to be nice
while she rifles through Jennifer’s things?
Maybe now that she knows Jennifer wasn’t
smuggling anything in her backpack,
Nurse Bosom won’t have to press and feel and shake
every single thing in her suitcase?
This time Jennifer does the unzipping.
She takes her things out,
making small piles on the bed.
As she unpacks, Jennifer tries
not to look too closely at the mattress.
If it has stains, she doesn’t want to know.
Surely the sheets they gave her will be clean.
Or maybe she should have packed her own sheets
along with her pillow and quilt.
Nurse Bosom plucks a black leather belt off the bed.
“Do you have a belt on?” she asks.
“You need to give it to me.”
“Right now?” Jennifer asks.
“Right now,” Nurse Bosom says.
Jennifer unbuckles her belt and slides it out of her belt loops.
The waist of her pants is loose without it.
Nurse Bosom coils the two belts into the wicker basket.
Jennifer continues unpacking.
Nurse Bosom confiscates three framed pictures:
the Olan Mills family portrait that
Mom forced them to get for the church directory;
the picture of Jennifer as a kid, holding tiny puppy Spike;
and her favorite picture of her and Kelly
from the summer they turned nine,
when Kelly’s dad took them to Darien Lake.
Nurse Bosom says, “Take your pictures out of these.
We’ll keep the frames in your suitcase,
which goes into storage until your discharge date.”
With shaking fingers,
Jennifer unlatches the back of her picture frames,
pulls the photos out, sets them on the nightstand.
What else will they take from her?
Jennifer’s heart continues its hard thumping
as she watches Nurse Bosom grab
her can of Pazazz hair mousse,
her Daisy razor,
her tweezers,
her small case of dental floss,
her triangular bottle of Liz Claiborne perfume.
They all go into the basket with her belts.
Nurse Bosom writes on an index card.
“I’m listing your items,” she says.
“Double-check and initial here.
This basket stays in the nurses’ station.
You can sign it out when you need something.
Make sure everything’s accounted for
when you sign it back in.”
Don’t they trust her?
Jennifer wanted treatment.
Doesn’t that give her the benefit of the doubt?
Jennifer tells herself to breathe, be rational.
Maybe it makes sense for them to take her razor,
except how could anyone get the blade out of its plastic shell?
And why take her picture frames? Is it because of the glass?
Tweezers? Because they’re sharp?
Hair spray? Perfume? Because they could be poisonous?
Her belts? Is it because she uses them to measure her waist?
But dental floss?
What is the point of taking that?
Nurse Bosom has produced a sheet of stickers
and a black Sharpie marker.
She writes “Johnson, EDU” on three stickers,
peels them off their waxed backing,
and, again without asking, sticks them on Jennifer’s
small boom box, digital clock, and purple blow-dryer.
“Electronics get sent down to Facilities,” Nurse Bosom says.
“Safety inspection.
You’ll get them back in a week, maybe two.
When you get your hair dryer back,
it will be kept in your basket at the nurses’ station.
You can listen to music quietly
on your tape player here in your room, but
no headphones allowed, so these”
—she picks up Jennifer’s headphones and Walkman—
“will stay in storage.”
The sharp scent of Sharpie hangs in the air.
No headphones?
Maybe they want to know what music she’s listening to,
if it’s too sad or violent,
the reason her brother hates The Smiths.
Someone appears in the doorway.
Pale blue sweater, red hair, fat.
She looks sixteen or seventeen.
Scowling, the girl looks at Jennifer,
gaze traveling up and down, scrutinizing.
She leaves without speaking.
“That’s Heather, your roommate,” Nurse Bosom says.
“She’ll warm up to you.”
Her roommate?
Why is Heather fat?
Jennifer thought everyone would be pin thin,
had agonized over whether she was skinny enough
to belong here.
Nurse Bosom pats the length of Jennifer’s pillow.
Feeling the lump that is Bearibubs, she takes him out
and frisks her poor teddy bear, like he’s a felon.
She shakes out Jennifer’s quilt,
and then her clothes,
everything,
one at a time:
jeans, shirts, sweaters, socks, underwear, bras.
Then she hands them to Jennifer
to refold and put in the dresser drawers.
“Nope, no sweatpants,” Nurse Bosom says,
stuffing them back in the suitcase.
“But I wear them for pajamas,” Jennifer says.
Nurse Bosom puts her hands on her hips
and tilts her head, smiling, like she’s amused.
“Nice try, Jennifer. W
e know all your tricks.
You won’t be sweating out your weight here.
Not on my watch.”
But…that’s not one of Jennifer’s tricks.
Hot tears fill her eyes.
She doesn’t want to cry,
but she was telling the truth:
sweatpants mean snuggly comfort,
not a nighttime sauna.
The burn of being falsely accused
and prejudged,
along with everything else that is happening
makes her want to scream.
And crying is what she always does
instead of screaming.
Nurse Bosom twists the cap off Jennifer’s shampoo,
puts the rosy pink bottle to her nose,
inhales, screws the lid back on.
She pops the top off Jennifer’s deodorant,
sniffs, puts the top back.
Then the pot of Vaseline
for Jennifer’s persistently chapped lips,
and the blue jar of Noxzema,
wincing at the waft of potent menthol.
She twists open the plastic jar of Stridex pads,
the box of Tampax,
and Jennifer’s soap container,
checking under the fresh white bar of Ivory.
Next, each of Jennifer’s cassette tapes,
clicking each case open and shut,
checking between cassette and folded-paper album lining.
Jennifer is learning all sorts of places to stash things.
They are places she hadn’t thought of.
Hidden spaces,
inside, underneath, in-between.
The dark corners of the soul.
“Here are the rules.”
Nurse Bosom hands Jennifer a thick set of papers,
stapled in one corner.
“That copy’s yours. You need to read those.
Circle any questions you have,
and we’ll go over them later.”
Jennifer looks at the papers,
then sets them on the nightstand.
Nurse Bosom chuckles, “What are you waiting for?
A maid to do it for you?”
“Um,” Jennifer says. She has never had a maid.
Where does this nurse think Jennifer comes from?
“Do you want…,” Jennifer says, “I mean,
am I supposed to read them out loud?”
Nurse Bosom barks a laugh.
“Not out loud. I already know them.
You sit right there and read them to yourself,
and I’ll sit right here and do my notes.”
Jennifer looks at the first page.
Her brain is so muddled and distressed
that the words look like hieroglyphics for a while.
Eventually they morph into English.
Her tears splat onto the pages.
A different girl, not fat, but certainly not skinny,
knocks on the frame of Jennifer’s open door.
She, too, has pale skin,
with freckles big enough to see from across the room,
and permed, shoulder-length brown hair with frosted tips,
the kind you get from a home kit.
She is wearing the sort of practical, comfortable clothes—
oversized sweater, nondescript pants, sensible shoes—
that a second-grade teacher would wear,
except she looks young for a teacher.
Maybe she’s twenty or twenty-one.
She is cute, but not pretty. Not beautiful.
“Come in, come in,” says Nurse Bosom,
who is still writing notes.
“Monica, this is our new admission, Jennifer.
Why don’t you take her into the lounge
and introduce her to the rest of the girls?”
Jennifer follows the patient—
Monica, Monica, she must remember Monica—
to the lounge.
It’s a bigger space, double-wide,
as though someone knocked down a wall
between two of the bedrooms.
The air is hazy with cigarette smoke.
Heads turn.
The other patients.
Teenagers, women.
Different sizes, different ages.
Two are African-American.
Jennifer didn’t think African-American people
got eating disorders,
and wonders if it was racist of her to think they wouldn’t.
There are five…six…seven patients in the lounge,
sitting cross-legged on tatty couches,
fidgeting on upholstered rocking chairs,
seated around a small table, playing cards.
Monica introduces them, listing names
Jennifer knows she will not remember.
All of them look at her,
sizing up the new girl,
eyeing her neck and legs.
In front of the couches,
a thick coffee table is covered with familiar magazines,
the bibles of the thin and the aspiring-to-be-thin:
Vogue, Elle, Glamour, Seventeen, YM.
Aluminum foil ashtrays pepper the tables.
They are the kind you see
in the smoking section of McDonald’s.
Tiny, filthy pie tins.
A television is on, the volume low.
Downtown Julie Brown is reading the MTV news.
And then Adam Curry—Jennifer’s least favorite VJ—
with hair like a haystack helmet, comes on.
Somewhere, life continues,
because the Dial MTV votes have been counted,
and here are today’s top videos, starting with Bon Jovi.
In the far corner someone sits on a folding chair,
talking on a pay phone.
The figure is made of bones, teeth, hair.
It is as if someone put a wig on a skeleton.
Jennifer shudders.
This is the anorexia she expected to see here.
This is what she had strived to become.
But the figure on the phone
is not the shiny beauty and glamour
Jennifer had envisioned.
It is more relic than human.
The skeleton slides coins into the phone
in jerky, furtive movements.
Jennifer wants to run to the phone,
shove the skeleton aside
(it wouldn’t be hard),
and call Mom to come get her out of here.
Right now.
How many more hours until she can pick up that handset,
feed her coins into the slot,
punch the number pad,
talk to someone who knows her, loves her?
She looks at the clock on the wall.
It is almost 5:00.
Her admission was at 2:00.
She has been here three hours.
Forty-five more.
Forty-five hours until she can make her first phone call.
She can’t do it.
She won’t survive the wait.
“Jennifer, you’re bulimarexic, right?” Monica asks.
Eyes stinging with tears, willing them not to fall,
Jennifer nods.
Monica says, “The diagnosis they’ll give you
will be bulimia. Sorry, sweets.
If you binge, ever, you’re bulimic.
Bulimia, anorexia nervosa, or compulsive overeating
are the only official diagnoses listed in the DSM-III.
&nbs
p; But in here, we know
bulimarexia is a real thing.
Right, ladies?”
The patients who are listening nod,
and so does Jennifer, even though
her stomach is a maelstrom of disappointment.
She had prayed that Samuel Tuke
would be on the cutting edge, and use the term
from the newest book at the library: Bulimarexia.
Clearly all the patients know it. It means something.
But bulimia?
God.
A diagnosis of bulimia?
It dismisses years of Jennifer’s hard work.
It negates all her hunger,
her painstaking dieting, her weight loss.
None of them matter in a diagnosis of bulimia,
only the bingeing and purging.
No. She has bulimarexia. That is her real diagnosis.
The “rexia” is what you work hard for.
Still, Jennifer is stunned by how casually
her deepest, most secret self—
the name of her monster—
has been spoken.
Just after her name.
Jennifer. Bulimarexic.
A wheeled cart is pushed through the doorway,
and the patients stir.
It’s time for dinner.
Jennifer finds herself at a table, sitting next to Monica,
other patients seated nearby.
A sectioned plastic tray is placed in front of her.
Three slices of turkey, like thin, dehydrated sponges.
A tiny salad: wilted iceberg lettuce, a floppy cucumber slice,
a tomato wedge with leathery skin and pink crystalline flesh.
One carton of skim milk, the kind they have at school.
Plastic fork, spoon, and knife wrapped in a paper napkin.
Rustling, clattering,
the other patients organize their trays and plastic utensils,
smoothing paper napkins onto laps.
The skinnier girls’ trays are laden with food: chocolate milk,
gravy-swamped mounds of mashed potatoes and turkey,
a square of frosted yellow cake.
The greasy sheen of icing makes Jennifer’s mouth water.
As she chews her dry turkey—
her first meat in sixteen months—
sipping skim milk to help it go down,
she is aware of the others talking.
Voices whose names and faces swim in her brain,
the way the turkey and salad and milk swim in her stomach
and her eyes swim in sockets puddled with tears.
Jennifer tries to eat slowly,
one tiny bite at a time,
like an anorexic would.
She wants to make a good impression on the other patients.
But now that the burdens of choice and responsibility
Believarexic Page 4