LIFE-SIZE
JENEFER
SHUTE
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON
NEW YORK
LONDON
1992
Copyright © 1992 by Jenefer Shute
All rights reserved
ISBN 0-395-60479-6 (print)
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating by Peter Farb and George Armelagos. Copyright © 1980 by the Estate of Peter Farb. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
The description of an anorexic woman eating an apple and a cube of cheese originally appeared in “Food as Enemy,” by Caroline Knapp, the Boston Phoenix, February 1989.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Acknowledgments
Stars with masses above the Chandrasekhar limit, on the other hand, have a big problem when they come to the end of their fuel. In some cases they may explode or manage to throw off enough matter to reduce their mass and so avoid catastrophic gravitational collapse, but it was difficult to believe this always happened, no matter how big the star. How would it know that it had to lose weight? And even if every star managed to lose enough mass to avoid collapse, what would happen if you added more mass to a white dwarf or neutron star to take it over the limit? Would it collapse to infinite density?
—Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
LIFE-SIZE
1
I’M LYING HERE, just occupying space, drifting in and out of a dream, when I hear something clattering and rumbling down the hall. I know what it is; my jaw and stomach muscles tense, but otherwise I remain exactly as I am. Why should I move? The trolley stops outside the door with a faint tinkle of crockery; after a brief knock (giving me no time to respond), she comes in, smiling and pert, brisk and trim in her white tunic and pants. (Trim, but don’t think I don’t notice the almost-sagging buttocks, the incipient droop of the upper arm.)
As she walks towards me, her blockish, cushiony shoes squeak against the floor, jarring my ears, scraping my brain.
“Hello! Still lying there? It’s lunchtime.”
I make no response as she puts the tray down next to me and removes some kind of cover from the plate, releasing a sickening, mealy odor.
“Sit up now and enjoy your lunch,” she says brightly, pushing it closer to the bed. “I’ll be back in half an hour to see how you’re doing.” I say nothing and she leaves (shoes conversing in shrill, rubbery shrieks across the floor).
I’m not planning even to look at this tray, but the smell is so strong that I turn my head and encounter, at eye level, a brown, oily, pimply thing (chicken! as if I would ever eat that) oozing onto a mound of mashed potato and some big green branches of broccoli. I try, and fail, to imagine eating it, like munching on a tree. Everything is heaped, crowded on the plate, everything touching. There’s also a glass of milk, beaded with sweat; a puffy roll plus two pats of butter; a dish of flabby yellow stuff growing a skin (custard? are they kidding?); an apple; a little envelope of salt, one of pepper, one of ketchup. The smell is so overpowering that I know I’m going to have to do something.
Reluctantly, I roll over on to my side and tip myself so that my feet hang over the edge of the bed. Then, very slowly, I push upwards until I’m sitting, curled, with my head on my lap. I rest like this awhile, trying to breathe, and then, tightening my abdominals, raise myself carefully to my feet.
This prevents fainting.
I have to get this tray out of my sight. The smell is entering me as a hollow nausea, and seeing all that . . . food sends a chilly tingle across my skin. Got to get this thing away! I dump it on the other bed and am about to climb back on mine when I reconsider, go back, and pick off a small piece of the roll, which I put in the drawer of my nightstand: just in case.
Then I roll on the bed, flop my arms wide, wait for everything to stop spinning, and, fixing my eye on the ceiling light bulb, return its stern, milky stare.
So this is what my world has shrunk to: a ward with two gray metal beds, barred at head and foot, with thin spreads, waffled, which might once have been white. The walls, an institutional cream, are scuffed and scarred; lying here, I trace and retrace each blister, each blemish, each bruise. The cold floor is tiled in beige and khaki, which might once have been lemon and olive, or even vanilla and lime. Through the high, locked windows—is this perhaps the psycho ward, after all?—limp shades diffuse a sooty light. A metal nightstand with a screeching drawer, a locker in which my clothes are locked from me, and a plastic chair—for visitors I assume (though who would come here, I cannot think)—complete the decor.
Since being admitted two days ago, I’ve spent most of my time lying on this bed, arms apart, hands splayed, eyes fixed on the blind bulb above me. They want me to get up, put on my robe, perhaps wander down to the dayroom to meet the other inmates. But I won’t, of course. I’m just going to lie here, drifting through time, dreams washing over me, retinal dots composing themselves pointillist-style into a private flow of images.
But then I notice that I’m holding my breath, almost choking: a chemical whiff in the air has stopped my throat. At first I think this is a new symptom—already I’m afraid of running water, of restaurants, of licking a postage stamp—but then it makes sense. The last time I was in a hospital was when I was nine, for a tonsillectomy: in my throat I feel again the dry, violent pain, like swallowing ground glass. Dark clotted stuff in the mouth, salting the ice cream, tingeing the vanilla with tinny strawberry.
Vanilla and strawberry and cream. Think about something else. Think about the tonsils, ripped out like tubers.
A brisk knock, and then the door opens immediately (why do they never wait for me to answer?). In comes Squeaky, interrupting my dream—the surgeon is caressing my hair, the anesthetic taking its ecstatic hold—but I don’t even move my head. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see her taking in the situation: the full tray dumped on the other bed, me flat on my back, arms outspread, my pelvic bones protruding pointedly under the gray-green hospital gown. She shakes her head and says in what she probably takes for a calm, reasonable tone: “Josie, you haven’t eaten anything, have you? That’s very disappointing: you know the rules. You remember what the doctor said.”
“I’m not hungry,” I say.
“It was too much,” I say.
“Anyway, I did eat something,” I say. “I ate some of that roll.”
“Josie,” she says, “you know the rules, you agreed to them yourself. Do you just want to lie here forever? What’s the point of that?”
Her measured yet whiny tone is getting to me and I just want her out. Out! Out of my room! Still staring at the ceiling, I say, “I don’t like chicken.” They say I’m sick, but what about them, all of them, who think nothing of chewing on a carcass, sinking their teeth into muscle and gristle and blood? They say I’m sick, but what about them, who feast on corpses?
“Well, you wouldn’t fill out a menu card, so the dietician picked out something for you.”
A corpse and a tree; a fluid secreted by bovine mammary glands; gobs of congealed grease.
“Later, if you fill out the card, you can get something you like. A nice fruit salad perhaps, with ice cream? Or a tuna sandwich, with a banana, perhaps, and some co
okies . . . ?”
Banana and tuna and cream: the very words, as if secret, obscene, are making me ill, my heart starting to hammer, the same hollow sickness poking at the base of my throat. To get her to stop, I say, “Leave the card here and I’ll think about it.”
“OK. And we have a busy afternoon planned for you. The endocrinologist is going to stop by to ask you some questions, and then we’ll need to take you for some blood samples.”
Blood again. They’re after my blood.
Sure enough, a chirpy little woman (thin, birdlike, but with a turkey’s tired wattle) shows up, armed with a rubber mallet. She asks me a few questions about my periods; that’s all anyone seems to care about around here.
“I forget. Maybe when I was about seventeen.”
“So you’ve had no periods for eight years now?”
“No, they come and go. Sometimes I won’t have any for a year or two, then they’ll come back for a while, then go away again.”
“And how long have they been gone this time?”
“I forget. Maybe a year or so.”
Why do they think I should care, anyway? Who, given the choice, would really opt to menstruate, invite the monthly hemorrhage—a reminder that the body is nothing but a bag of blood, liable to seep or spatter at any moment?
Then I discover what the mallet is for. She asks me to sit on the edge of the bed and starts tapping away at my knees, a sharp, clean crack on the bone. Nothing happens, so I give a little kick to help things along. Then she tickles the soles of my feet and tells me my reflexes are impaired because the electrolytes are out of balance and the neurons aren’t firing properly, or some such jargon.
Fine with me. I don’t want any involuntary responses; soon, in this body, everything will be willed.
So I just look at her blankly and flop back on the bed, because all this sitting up and being hammered is making me light-headed. The minute she leaves, I roll over onto my side and begin my leg lifts, hoping I can complete the full hundred on each side without being interrupted.
I am halfway through the second set when the nurse comes back again, pushing a wheelchair, into which she invites me to climb for some blood tests. (More blood.) I tell her I won’t get in the chair, I can walk, thank you—I’m desperate to move: my muscles are turning mushy from lying here. But she insists—says it’s “policy”—and wraps a blanket around me when I complain of the cold. So off we go, her shoes squeaking across the tiles.
The assistant who’s supposed to take the blood looks startled when she sees me and shakes her head at my arms —my white, well-defined arms, ropy with blue and softly furred (I hate this hair, this down, which keeps growing all over me, even on my stomach: I have tried bleaching it, but more just keeps growing in, dark, like a pelt). She comes at me with the needle, jabbing and wiggling; she tries both arms a few times, getting flustered. “Your veins keep collapsing,” she says. “I’m sorry, hon, but I have to keep trying.”
It hurts, and though I don’t look, distancing myself from this piece of meat that’s being probed, I start feeling sick, my head suddenly receding from my feet, which in turn have disconnected from my knees. Squeaky, ever vigilant, pushes my head gently down onto my lap, and, after a few minutes in this pose, I feel ready to continue.
“Come on, let’s get it over with,” I say.
More prodding, but eventually she finds a vein, and, while I fix my attention on the far wall, she takes eight tubes of blood: to test potassium, calcium, hemoglobin levels. Sugar, too: as if they would find sugar in my blood. Even though I don’t watch the blood being sucked out —once I made the mistake of observing the thick, grape-colored stuff rising in the tube, stood up, and passed out —I still feel light-headed, and the shaken bloodsucker makes me lie down and drink some apple juice (120 calories; I take only a sip) before we leave.
My keeper wheels me back and explains, in her professionally patient, reasonable tone (I’d love to hear how she bitches with the other nurses on her coffee break) that, though psychotherapy is part of the treatment plan, “they” have decided that I cannot begin yet because, she says, I am a starving organism and my brain is starving and therefore not working the way it should. I say nothing, but it’s hard not to sneer: my brain’s not working the way it should! On the contrary, it’s never been purer and less cluttered, concentrated on essentials instead of distracted by a body clamoring for attention, demanding that its endless appetites be appeased. Stripped down, the brain is closer to the surface, taking in colors, light, sounds, with a fine, vibrating intensity.
One day I will be pure consciousness, traveling unmuffled through the world; one day I will refine myself to the bare wiring, the irreducible circuitry that keeps mind alive.
She also explains to me, again in what she thinks is a neutral, measured tone, that they’re sure I’m going to cooperate, but if not, as a last resort, they might have to consider hyperalimentation. Hyperalimentation: interesting euphemism for force-feeding, for attaching a helpless human body to a tangle of tubes and pumping—what, I wonder?—into its unwilling ducts. Hyperalimentation: isn’t that the word, rather, for the way most people eat?
I never feel hungry and despise those who do, whose lives are governed by the peristaltic pulse. Never have they learned to ignore that gaping maw: its slightest twinge sends them running to the trough. From the day’s first mouthful to the last at night, their lives are one long foraging. In the morning, hunched over their desks, they munch on soft dough; at noon, they herd out en masse, meat-hungry, to feed; midafternoon, in a circadian slump, they crave sugar; arriving home, they root in the refrigerator’s roaring heart and eat upright before an open door. And all this before the serious eating begins, the ever-to-be-repeated hours of shopping and chopping and mixing and cooking and serving, only to wolf down the result in seconds and greet it the next morning transformed into shit.
But I’ve freed myself from this compulsion. When I wake, I’m empty, light, light-headed; I like to stay this way, free and pure, light on my feet, traveling light. For me, food’s only interest lies in how little I need, how strong I am, how well I can resist—each time achieving another small victory of the will: one carrot instead of two, half a cracker, no more peas. Each gain makes me stronger, purer, larger in my exercise of power, until eventually I see no reason to eat at all. Like a plant, surely, the body can be trained to subsist on nothing, to take its nourishment from the air.
Miss Pert—I think her name is Suzanne—finally leaves me, with a cheery reminder to fill out the menu card for dinner. The minute she’s gone, I take it out and study it carefully, reading and rereading it, savoring not the names of the foods so much as the knowledge I will never eat them. Some disgust me, the very words filling my mouth with a viscid sickness: pork chops, hamburger, cheese omelet, clam chowder. But others I linger over, imagining their colors and textures, feeding on images, secure in the knowledge that images alone can fill me.
I prepare myself an imaginary feast, taking about forty minutes to decide on the menu—banana with peanut butter, fried rice, pecan pie—and to imagine consuming it lasciviously with a spoon. When it’s over, I look at the menu card again, knowing that Squeaky-Pert will harass me if I don’t mark something. Some of the dishes frighten me, their names alone quickening my pulse: spaghetti and meatballs! Imagine eating that, a whole, giant plate of it, everything heaped together, oozing oil. My heart is racing now, so I put a check mark next to “mixed salad” on the card and push it away from me, to the far side of the nightstand.
I lie back again, trying to relax, wondering how big the salad will be and whether they’ll try to make me eat the whole thing. Then panic seizes me: I sit up violently, grab the menu card again, and write in emphatic block letters next to my check mark, “NO DRESSING!!” I underline this three times and then lie back, trying to calm my hammering heart.
To collect myself, I start doing leg lifts again, picking up where I was interrupted earlier and deciding I will do an extra fifty
on each side in case the nurse, my jailer, makes me eat the whole salad. The bed isn’t really firm enough for calisthenics, but I’m afraid to get down on the floor in case someone comes in. I’m going to have to get down there eventually, to do my push-ups: maybe I can say I’m looking for something on the floor. (A contact lens? A cockroach?) They think they can wear me down by this constant intrusion—I’m supposed to be on an hourly watch—but I know I can outlast them all.
One day I will be thin enough. Just the bones, no disfiguring flesh, just the pure, clear shape of me. Bones. That is what we are, after all, what we’re made of, and everything else is storage, deposit, waste. Strip it away, use it up, no deposit, no return.
Every morning the same ritual, the same inventory, the same naming of parts before rising, for fear of what I may have become overnight. Jolting out of sleep—what was that dream, that voice offering me strawberries and cream?—the first thing I do is feel my hipbones, piercingly concave, two naked arcs of bone around an emptiness. Next I feel the wrists, encircling each with the opposite hand, checking that they’re still frail and pitiful, like the legs of little birds. There’s a deep hollow on the inside of each wrist, suspending delicately striated hands, stringy with tendon and bone. On the outside of the wrist, I follow the bone all the way up to the elbow, where it joins another, winglike, in a sharp point.
Moving down to the thighs, first I feel the hollow behind the knee to check that the tendon is still clean and tight, a naked cord. Then I follow the outside of each thigh up towards the hips: no hint of a bulge, no softening anywhere. Next I grab the inner thigh and pinch hard, feeling almost all the way around the muscle there; finally, turning on one side and then the other, I press each buttock, checking that the bones are still sticking through.
Sitting up in bed, a little more anxiously now, I grasp the collarbone, so prominent that it protrudes beyond the edges of the shoulders, like a wire coat hanger suspending this body, these bones. Beneath it, the rows of ribs, deeply corrugated (and the breasts, which I don’t inspect). Then I press the back of my neck and as far down my spine as I can, to make sure the vertebrae are all still there, a row of perfect little buttons: as if they held this body together, as if I could unbutton it and step out any time I wanted to.
Life-Size Page 1