* * *
Now I’m thirteen and I’m in the front seat of my dad’s truck. He’s looking at the road and explaining that he and my mom found more cups in my room. Each night I bring two cups to bed with me—one filled with food and one to fill with vomit. I leave the cups underneath my bed, and their stench is a constant reminder to all of us that I’m not better. My parents’ desperation is growing. They’ve sent me to therapy, medicated me, pleaded with me, but nothing is working. My passenger seat is pushed up farther than my dad’s seat, so all of me feels huge and thrust too far forward. I feel bigger than he is, which seems like a breach. My hair is frizzed and orange and my skin is broken out so badly it’s painful. I’ve tried to cover it with makeup, and now the brown liquid drips down my neck. I feel ashamed that my dad has to drive me around, claim me as his own. I want to be small again, small enough to be taken care of, small enough to disappear. But I am not small. I am big. I am unwieldy. I feel obnoxious and impolite for taking up so much space in this truck, this world.
My dad says, “We love you, Glennon.” This is embarrassing to me, because it simply cannot be true. So I look at him and say, “I know you’re lying. How can anyone love this face? Look at me!” As the words burst out, I hear them and see myself say them. I think, Glennon. This performance is embarrassing. You’re even uglier in your angst. I wonder which voice is me—the one feeling the feelings or the one scoffing at my own feelings? I have no idea what is real. I just know that I am not beautiful, so anyone who says he loves me is saying it because it’s in his contract. My dad looks shocked by my outburst and he pulls the truck over and begins talking to me. I do not remember what he says.
I survive middle school the way a whale might survive a marathon: slowly, painfully, with great effort and conspicuousness. But then, over the summer between middle school and high school, my skin clears up a bit and I find clothes that hide my barely existent heft. That summer I have an epiphany: Maybe I’ve studied schools of fish long enough to pretend to belong to one. Maybe the beautiful girls will have me if I just wear the right costume, smile more, laugh right, watch the leader’s cues, and show no mercy, no vulnerability. Maybe if I pretend to be confident and cool, they’ll believe me. So every morning before I walk into high school I tell myself, Just hold your breath ’til you get home. I throw back my shoulders, smile, and walk into the hallway like a superhero in a cape. To onlookers it appears that I’ve finally found myself. I haven’t, of course.
What I’ve found is a representative of me who’s just tough and trendy enough to survive high school. The magic of sending my representative is that the real me cannot be hurt. She is safe inside. So, as someone else, I have finally arrived. I hold my breath all day at school, and then when I get home I relax with pounds of food and the toilet. This rhythm works. I become popular with the girls, who sense that I know something they don’t. Eventually I begin to notice the boys noticing me. As I pass them in the hallway, I practice carrying myself in a way that announces: I am available to play the game now. And then I set myself down on the chessboard and wait to be played. As pawns inevitably do, I get picked up.
* * *
I have one vivid memory of the first time sex happens to me: Camel Lights. One day after school, I find my sophomore self lying in my senior boyfriend’s twin bed, trying to catch my breath underneath his heaviness and wondering how long sex will take. The Eagles play on his plastic boom box and the first few notes of “Hotel California” make me feel hollow and afraid. As my boyfriend squirms on top of me like a huge, frantic toddler, I scan his bedroom and see a pack of Camel Lights on the dresser. There is a green lighter lying diagonally across the pack, and for a moment the lighter and cigarettes remind me of the two of us, tossed haphazardly on top of each other, meant to be of quick and practical use to one another. I understand that I’m the lighter. Eventually he stops squirming but remains lying on top of me. “Hotel California” plays on. I wonder if the song’s length is part of its message: Life is not only eerie and hopeless but also entirely too long. After that afternoon, he takes me to the laundry room in his parents’ basement. He was just trying to make our first time special.
One hot morning in the summer after tenth grade, my best friend and I go to the local pet store to visit the animals. My friend is considering having sex with her boyfriend and she asks me to tell her what it’s like. I watch the kittens play in their cage and notice one pouncing on a nearby scratching post. I point to that kitten and say, “Sex is like that. I’m the scratching post and Joe pounces on me when he gets the urge. My body’s a toy he likes to play with, but he’s not all that interested in me. It’s like, he’s touching me—but he’s not really touching me. Sex isn’t really personal. It’s just that I happen to be his girlfriend so my body is his to play with. It feels, like, childish to me. Like cats pouncing on scratching posts or kids playing with each other’s toys but mostly ignoring each other. But I learned this trick: I just leave my body there to get it over with and I slip out and think about other things. I plan outfits and stuff.” I turn away from the kittens and look directly at my friend. “Sex isn’t something that I have, really, it just happens to my body while I’m up here, waiting for it to be over. But I don’t think Joe knows. Or cares.”
My friend stares at me silently. I can tell by her face that I’ve shared too much. This is not the me who is allowed to speak. This is not my representative. I wait. She says, “That’s so weird. It looks like fun on TV.”
“I know,” I say. “It’s not really like it is on TV. Not for me, at least. But, whatever, you know?” She goes back to her dogs and I go back to my kittens. I’m sixteen years old and I want my world to be small again—just kittens and dogs and my best friend.
A few weeks later, my friend has sex for the first time. She calls and says, “I don’t know what you were talking about. It’s the best thing in the world. It’s totally amazing.” I stop talking about sex after that. I just pretend, to my boyfriend and friends, that it’s all totally amazing. Sex, friendship, high school, being me. Yes, it’s all totally amazing.
* * *
One summer evening I watch Joe walk across a stage and accept his diploma from our high school principal. While he and his friends throw their caps in the air, I stand against the wall, thrilled to be a peripheral part of this celebration, to belong here, with them. After the ceremony, he drives me back to his house with Van Halen blasting from his car speakers. There, in the passenger seat, being driven by this graduate—looking up at the stars through his sunroof—I feel free and important and lucky and powerful. That night, at Joe’s graduation party, his parents give him a present: a box of condoms. He is leaving for beach week with his buddies the next day so he’ll need these, his mom says with a wink. He laughs and his family laughs, too. No one glances at me to check if I’m wondering why my boyfriend needs condoms for a trip he’s taking without me. I smile. So funny. Condoms! Boys, you know.
Joe kisses me good-bye and heads off to beach week with his buddies and his condoms. Two days later, Rob, a boy I’ve known since second grade, knocks on my door. I step onto my front porch and Rob stammers a bit and then announces with a nervous smile that he needs to tell me something. He visited beach week and learned that the night before, Joe slept in jail. He was arrested because another senior girl accused him of rape. Everyone at beach week is talking about it, so Rob wants me to hear it from him before the news gets back home. He tells me that Joe was released without any charges early that morning because of “inconsistencies” in the victim’s report. I thank Rob, send him home, and wait for Joe to return. I ask him about the rape and he laughs and tells me the accusation isn’t true. I do not break up with him. My friends and I handle this by agreeing publicly that the girl who accused Joe of rape was drunk, stupid, jealous, and lying. I don’t think that anyone actually believes she was lying, but we never admit that to each other. I don’t know if this is because we just don’t care or because we are adhering to the unde
rstood but never acknowledged rules that govern high school life. This one is: Disbelieve and betray other girls to remain in good standing with the popular boys. A few weeks later I run into the victim in the locker room of my mother’s gym. As we pass each other, I hold my head high. She lowers hers and looks away. I feel an electric sense of defiance and victory.
Joe and I continue listening to Van Halen and drinking and laundry-room sexing for another year. When I finally break up with him, he cries while I stare at him in disbelief. I think to myself, Why are you crying? What are you losing that’s worth having? But I say nothing. I find another boyfriend, a new basement, same parties, different brands of booze. I know how to stay underneath at night; in the light of day, hiding is harder.
* * *
Early in my senior year, I stand at the end of the lunch line, hold my tray steady, and look out at the sea of cafeteria tables. I try to decide how to appear aloof as I search for an empty chair. How will I make it across the slippery floor while wearing these heels? How will I keep my skintight dress from riding up, while carrying this tray? How will I cover my acne in this fluorescent light? How will I look cool while I’m sweating profusely? This is the impossible moment I arrive inside of every day. Hundreds of us have been sent to this cafeteria with two contradictory duties: Be invulnerable while doing the most vulnerable possible things—fitting in and eating. This room is like Lord of the Flies, and the only way to survive is to keep weakness hidden. My weaknesses are my needs: acceptance and food. These needs are entirely too human for high school. So I stand there in fear that this will be the day the real, hungry, sweaty, needy me rises too close to the surface and the sharks circle. Before I take a step forward I wish vehemently that we had assigned seats. I look out at the sea of faces and understand that we are all drowning in freedom. Where are the adults? We need them here.
I’ve taken too long and someone’s behind me now. I pretend to spot a friend waving me over, and I send my representative toward no one. Eventually I find an available seat at a table of B-list high school celebrities. This table is not too far above or below me—a good, safe fit. I sit and try to make small talk, but it’s so hard. I feel ridiculously exposed. I don’t want to be beached here in public. I want to be alone and underneath. My anxiety convinces me to eat far too much for the tight dress I’m wearing. I throw away my tray and teeter out of the cafeteria and toward my relief: the bathroom stall. When I get there, I see a long line of girls. No privacy, won’t work. I continue down the hall toward another bathroom. It’s packed with girls fixing their makeup, laughing, gossiping, hiding. The third bathroom I find is out of order. The food I ate is settling in and it will be too late soon. I’m sweating and my heart’s pounding and I watch myself take off my heels and start running through the hall. People are turning from their lockers and staring. I am making a scene. I look at them watching me and something breaks inside. Instead of looking for a fourth bathroom, I turn into the school office. The secretary asks if I have an appointment. I look at her and think, Who has an appointment when she’s this desperate? Desperation is not planned. If you only help kids with appointments, you will never help anybody who needs help. I walk past her, open the door to the guidance counselor’s office, and sit down in front of her. She looks up from her paperwork, alarmed. I say, “I’m so tired. I’m so uncomfortable. I think I’m going to die. Call my parents. I need to be hospitalized. I can’t handle anything. Someone needs to help me.”
I don’t know what I mean. I don’t know if this is a suicide threat or just a passive observation. I think I’m requesting a hospital for my body, because my suspicion is that my body is broken. But I can tell by the way the counselor looks at me that she suspects my mind is broken. She calls my parents, and that afternoon I am driven to a place for people with broken minds.
* * *
In the mental hospital’s intake room, my family and I silently watch the nurse search my bag for anything I might use to hurt myself. She takes my razor and my granola bar, holding each one up, smiling apologetically, then placing each inside a Ziploc bag with my name on it. My parents hold their faces steady, but I can tell their tears are right beneath the surface. My tears are there, too, but mine are tears of relief. Yes, please, I think, take everything scary. Yes, yes. Keep me from hurting myself. Let me hide here. Tell me what to do, how to live. Yes. Take it, take it, take it all.
My sister is watching, too. Her eyes are wide and she is so confused, so afraid. I can tell she is trying to be brave, but no one knows what brave looks like inside this particular moment. Does brave let me go with this woman or does brave take my hand and bust me out of here? No one knows. The nurse tells me to hug my family good-bye and I do, first my dad, then my mom, then my sister. She is trembling and I have to steel my heart so I don’t crumble from the horror and shame of what I’m putting her through. I do what I have to do. I let go of her and follow the nurse down a small hallway. My family stands in the doorway, watching me go. I stop and look back at them and I feel frightened by how small they seem huddled together in the cold, white, fluorescent hallway. They stay there together and I go alone. This is how it has to be. There is them and there is me and I can’t fit into their world and they cannot, should not, go with me into mine. They don’t need what I need. I turn a corner and they disappear completely and now it’s just me, in my world. I enter my new room and unpack again. Underneath my clothes I find a piece of paper scrawled with my baby sister’s handwriting. It’s the lyrics to a song.
There’s a hero
If you look inside your heart
You don’t have to be afraid
Of what you are
It will take me another twenty years to understand what my fourteen-year-old sister is trying to tell me. How is it that she was the only one who knew what was wrong with me and how to fix it?
When I wake up in the morning at the hospital, the only thing I have to do is brush my teeth. I don’t need to shower, get dressed, or do my makeup because costumes are not required here. So I brush and then stand around in the hallway, waiting for the first bell to ring so I can line up with the other patients to get our meds. We don’t make small talk in line. Everybody seems comfortable with quiet. There are no unspoken social rules we’re supposed to adhere to, and as the relief of this sets in I feel my muscles relaxing, my shoulders dropping, my inhalations deepening. After we take our meds, we meet for group therapy. We sit in assigned seats around a circle and look at each other. We tell our stories. If we don’t feel like smiling, we don’t. Most of us don’t feel like smiling. We’re here because we’re tired of smiling.
One day a girl with sliced-up arms says, “My mom sent me here because she says no one can believe a word I say.” I look at her and I want to say: Does she see that you tell the truth on your arms? Like I tell the truth in the toilet? By the time we landed in the hospital, most of our families considered us insensitive liars, but we didn’t start out that way. We started out as ultrasensitive truth tellers. We saw everyone around us smiling and repeating “I’m fine! I’m fine! I’m fine!” and we found ourselves unable to join them in all the pretending. We had to tell the truth, which was: “Actually, I’m not fine.” But no one knew how to handle hearing that truth, so we found other ways to tell it. We used whatever else we could find—drugs, booze, food, money, our arms, other bodies. We acted out our truth instead of speaking it and everything became a godforsaken mess. But we were just trying to be honest.
My roommate’s name is Mary Margaret. Mary Margaret is anorexic. Unable to speak with my little sister, I allow Mary Margaret to take her place for a while. We whisper long into the night, every night. One night, after lights out, I tell Mary Margaret about my great-grandfather. I explain that he was a coal miner in Pittston, Pennsylvania, and that every morning my great-grandmother packed a lunch pail for him and sent him down into the mines. It was dangerous work because there were deadly, invisible toxins in the mines, but the miners’ bodies weren’t sensitive eno
ugh to register the poison. So they carried a canary in a cage down into the mines with them sometimes. The canary’s body was built to be sensitive to toxins, so the canary became their lifeguard. When the toxin levels rose too high, the canary stopped singing, and this silence was the miners’ signal to flee the mine. If the miners didn’t leave fast enough, the canary would die and, not much later, so would the miners.
I tell Mary Margaret that I don’t think we’re crazy, I think we’re canaries. “Could it be,” I ask, “that we aren’t making any of this up—we’re just sensing the very real danger in the air?” I tell Mary Margaret that I think the world is more than a little poisonous and that she and I were built to notice that. I tell her that in lots of places, canaries are appreciated. They’re the shamans and the poets and the sages, but not here. I say, “We are the ones on the bow of the Titanic pointing and yelling ‘Iceberg!’ but everybody else just wants to keep dancing. They don’t want to stop. They don’t want to know how broken the world is, so they just decide we’re broken. When we stop singing, instead of searching the air, they put us away. This place is where they keep the canaries.”
I talk about canaries for a while and Mary Margaret is silent, so I assume she’s sharing my epiphany. But after I finish, I look over and realize she’s asleep. I climb out of my bed and walk over to her. I pull her sheets over her tiny body and kiss her forehead. She is seventy pounds and she looks like a bird who is too tired to sing. Right then I wonder if my friend is going to die soon. I wonder if dying is the only warning Mary Margaret has left for the world. I let myself hope that maybe in here we are out of the mines. Maybe in this little bare room together we are safe from the toxins.
One night, very late, Mary Margaret and I write vows promising to take care of each other forever. We both sign the vows in crayon because we aren’t allowed to have pencils. Mary Margaret makes me promise not to eat the crayons. I tell her maybe she should. We laugh. Here, we feel safe enough to laugh. But when it’s time to be released, we stop laughing.
Love Warrior Page 2