Dinner is as bad as I was afraid it would be. At precisely six o’clock, Squeaky squeaks in with a big tray, which she puts down next to the bed, where I am floating again, on my back, imagining myself somewhere else altogether, cool and perfectly hard in a silk-lined gown. Firmly, she says, “Josie, I hope you’re going to eat your salad tonight, otherwise the medical team will have to make a decision tomorrow about hyperalimentation.”
I look in horror at the huge bowl of salad on the tray. It’s possible to slow yourself down by eating too much salad. “This is hyperalimentation,” I say: a mound of lettuce with chunks of pale tomato, shards of green pepper, hunks of purplish raw onion and—they must be nuts if they think I’m going to eat any of this—gobs of cheese and hard-boiled egg, with a bruise-colored line where the white pulls away from the yolk. Even though I didn’t ask for it, there’s a big, stale-looking roll and butter, an apple, a dish of vanilla ice cream, a glass of milk, and a plastic container of some urine-colored oil labeled “Italian.”
“I can’t eat if you’re watching me,” I say, which is true.
“OK,” she says, “I’ll be back in half an hour to see how you’re doing.”
As soon as she leaves, I draw the curtain around my bed: no one must ever see me eat, no one must ever catch me in the act—especially now that my appearance excites so much attention, with people always staring at me, willing me to weaken. The Trobrianders eat alone, retiring to their own hearths with their portions, turning their backs on one another and eating rapidly for fear of being observed. With the curtains drawn, my heart slows down a little and I concentrate on controlling this food: if I don’t deal with it soon, it will exert a magnetic pull on me, commanding me to eat it, filling my consciousness until the only way I could escape would be to run shrieking into the street.
There is a big paper napkin on the tray, so I scrape exactly half the salad out of the bowl and into the napkin, along with half the roll. I bundle this mess up and start looking for a place to hide it: not easy in this cell. My clothes locker is locked and I don’t have the key—of course not: this is going to be one of my little “rewards.” (Even my shoes have been locked away, my socks.) Under my pillow would be too risky, because the napkin could leak or break, making a big lettucey mess that would be hard to explain. So the only place I can think of is the drawer of the nightstand next to the other bed, the unoccupied one, the one as flat and empty as I would like mine to be.
Once that little bundle is out of the way, I can relax a bit and start working on what’s left. I separate the mound of food into piles: lettuce on one side, tomato on the other, pepper pieces neatly stacked and segregated from the rank, juicy onion. The egg and cheese I pick right off and banish to the bread plate: evil. Cheese is the hardest food to digest and it contaminates everything you eat it with. Then I cut the lettuce, tomato, and pepper into tiny pieces, deciding I won’t even pretend to eat the onion because lots of people don’t like raw onion: it’s legitimate, it’s “normal.” I cut the half roll into four sections and decide I will eat only one. Of the ice cream, I will eat exactly two spoonfuls, and the apple I will save for another time. So I put it away in my nightstand drawer along with the piece of roll I picked off the lunch tray: just in case.
Now that these decisions have been made, now that the bad stuff has been removed, now that the food is separated, with white space showing on the plate, now I can start eating: one piece at a time, and at least three minutes (timed on a second hand) between mouthfuls, with the fork laid down precisely in the center of the plate after each bite.
Of course the nurse comes back before I’m done and, without even asking, swishes back the bed curtains, revealing me shamefully hunched over the tray, chewing. I freeze, unable to meet her eyes. She says, gently, “There’s really no need to close the curtains, dear, when you’re alone.”
Sullenly I push the tray away and lie back on the pillow, staring up at the mangy acoustic tile.
“Don’t stop,” she says. “I’ll come back in fifteen minutes or so.” She leaves, but it’s no good: I can’t eat any more; I feel sick and upset, with the undigested salad sitting scratchily, bulkily, inside me. My stomach is beginning to swell. I feel it anxiously, palming the dip between my hipbones, sensing a new curvature, a new tightness there. Panicky, before I know what I have done, I have wolfed down three teaspoons of the now almost entirely melted ice cream.
I put the tray on the other bed and draw the bed curtains around it so I don’t have to be reminded of my gluttony; climbing back on to my own bed, I draw those curtains too, wanting to be alone, to hide where no one can find me, tempt me, torment my will. I want to find a cave or burrow somewhere where the idea of food becomes an abstraction, and this body, ever clearer and purer, evaporates finally into the dark, leaving only consciousness behind.
When the nurse comes back, I ask her to take me to the bathroom (another of these laws under which I now live: I can’t leave the ward unaccompanied). This is partly a diversionary tactic but partly also because I’m desperate to wash my hands and face: my skin feels oily and slimy, as if the fat in the food is oozing through my pores. She helps me tie on the hospital-issue robe, with a faded blue design that makes my skin look even more cyanotic than it is. I’m cold but she won’t let me put on any more clothes. So we walk slowly to the bathroom and she stands near the door while I go into a cubicle, where I’m not allowed to close the door in case I make myself vomit (which I’ve never been able to do—though not for want of trying). I can’t pee under these conditions, so I give up and comb my hair instead (it’s still coming out, in dry hanks), tying it back tightly with an elastic band. Then I scrub my face and hands once, and again, then again, until the nurse says sharply, “That’s enough now,” and we trudge back to the cell.
She bustles about, making a big deal of flinging back the curtains on both beds, plumping up pillows, straightening the limp covers. Then, tilting her head to one side, she contemplates the tray and says, “Well, Josie, you did a good job on your dinner.”
Relieved, I climb back on the bed and pick up a Vogue that’s been lying around—I got away with it! again—when she says, “I’m going to have to take a look around, if you don’t mind. It’s one of the rules.”
If I don’t mind! What choice do I have, powerless as a child, forced to lie and scheme simply to exercise the elementary—the alimentary—right to determine what does and doesn’t go into my body?
She looks quickly under both beds and behind the curtains, checks the lock on the clothes locker, runs her hand between the end of the mattress and the metal railing at the foot of both beds, and then, of course, opens the night-stand drawer on the far side.
“What’s this?” she says, though she knows.
“I was saving it for later,” I say. “I couldn’t eat it all now, so I was going to have some more later, before bed.”
She says nothing but just stands there, shaking her head, holding the imperfectly closed bundle of salad and bread, already soggy in spots. Then she dumps it on the tray and says, “Anything you don’t eat, just leave on the tray.” She seems about to pick up the tray and go, but then, as an afterthought, comes over to the side of my bed, opens the screeching drawer—is there no place that’s mine?—and finds the apple and the piece of roll I took from lunch. “This is hoarding,” she says. “You can have anything you want to eat at any time—just ask, but don’t hoard.”
Angry and humiliated and bereft, I don’t answer. I put the Vogue over my face so I won’t have to see her, wondering how I must look, lying here flat in a faded robe, my fragile limbs sticking out like a grasshopper’s, my skin a dry grayish white, netted with veins, my fingertips and nails blueberry-hued, the crook of each arm a purplish mess dotted with bloody pinpricks, and on top of this all, superimposed over my face, the vivid face of the Vogue cover, each eyelash alert, each tooth a dazzling, chunky Chiclet, the skin a sealed and poreless stretch of pink, and the ripe, shiny lips curved into a radiant smirk
.
2
IT’S FIVE A.M. and I should be stretching for my run, but how am I going to run here, when they won’t even let me walk farther than the bathroom? I could run in place for forty-five minutes, which is how long it usually takes me to do four miles, but would that burn the same number of calories? Maybe I should run in place a little longer, just in case. By my calculation, I have an hour and a half before Nursey bursts in: she didn’t come until six-thirty yesterday.
Sure enough, at precisely six-thirty, there’s a knock on the door, which opens immediately, giving me just enough time to leap back on the bed. I try to look as if I’m just lying there contemplating the ceiling, but I feel flushed and a little out of breath from the running. At least I never sweat anymore.
“Good morning,” she chirps, eyeing me suspiciously. “How did you sleep?”
“Fine,” I lie.
“Have you been awake for long?” she asks. “If you wake up early, or you can’t sleep, you can always ring for the night nurse. She can bring you a cup of tea or something, or just stop by to talk.”
“No, I’m fine, thanks.”
“Well, here’s your breakfast,” she says, as if I haven’t already figured out what the huge tray is. “We’re going to weigh you afterwards and decide what needs to be done, so see how much of it you can eat, OK?”
What needs to be done is for everybody just to leave me alone, to let me eat my own food in my own way.
Although I told them exactly what I have to have for breakfast—two cups of tea, no milk, no sugar, exactly a quarter cup of Special K cereal with half a teaspoon of sugar substitute and skim milk, diluted—they refuse to give it to me. Special K has no nutritional value and sugar substitutes are bad for you and you must learn to eat “normal” food, blah blah blah.
“What’s ‘normal’?” I ask the doctor. “Should we all strive for an IQ of precisely one hundred?” Of course he has no answer. (How would he, the fat, balding frog?)
Every mealtime is going to be the same struggle, I can see, looking over the enormous load.
The more they give me, though, the less I’ll eat.
Here I’m confronted with a huge mound of dry flakes—corn or cardboard, who can tell?—heaping over the rim of the bowl; a pitcher of what looks suspiciously like whole milk; half a cantaloupe (cantaloupe: 40 calories per quarter); two pieces of whole wheat toast (180 calories), dry, I’m glad to see, after the tantrum I threw yesterday, though there are four pats of butter (110 calories) in case I change my mind; a vial of glutinous red stuff; a gigantic glass of orange juice (100 calories), a pot of tea, and a boiled egg (79 calories)! How many times do I have to tell them! The very sight of it, freckled and pert in its white china cup, makes me want to take a spoon and smash its shell and smash again and watch it crack and then stab it with the point of the spoon until the membrane that holds it together ruptures once and for all. Except I would be afraid of the terrible smell this would release, the metallic stench, the viscous yellow blood.
I take the egg off the tray, in its cup, and carry it to the windowsill, where it sits like Humpty Dumpty before the fall. Then I get back on the bed and draw the curtains around me. I decide I will drink two cups of tea and eat half the cantaloupe and one piece of toast. Eat the plain, crispy toast in small bites, savoring the crunchiness and nutty flavor. That ought to keep them happy. For a moment I think of throwing the cereal away, to make it look as if I’ve eaten that too, but after the salad fiasco, I can’t think of a place to hide it.
Slowly, delicately, precisely, I cut the piece of toast into halves, then quarters, then eighths, then sixteenths, and daintily convey each piece to my mouth, allowing three minutes between bites. Then, in the same way, I eat exactly half the slice of cantaloupe, panicking for a moment: how can anything so heartrendingly sweet and juicy, so intensely orange and alive, have so few calories? What if they’ve sprinkled sugar all over it, so I can’t see it? What if this is some special high-calorie cantaloupe, grown expressly for hospitals? Something is definitely wrong, because this vivid sweetness is titillating my taste buds, tempting me to yield and eat more.
But I don’t. When I’ve finished the cantaloupe, my heart is hammering in my chest: I put the tray on the other bed, as far away from me as possible, and slowly drink the weak, bitter tea. The tray still looks loaded, despite everything I’ve consumed. I hide the other piece of toast under the napkin; if I had a bedpan, I could pour some of the orange juice into it. That would give the lab something to think about.
I wonder if they have me on some kind of drug, because I seem able to spend so much time just lying here, suspended, with time becoming increasingly unreal—a question only of the day nurse versus the night nurse, a different tint behind barred glass. Usually, I can’t sit still: it hurts my bones, and a voracious fear funnels up from my gut, driving me out of the house, to the gym, to the jogging track, to the park to pace endlessly, to a store five miles away for a pack of gum.
But here, a prisoner, I pace, yes, but I also lie back and float, the images coming in such a flow that they frighten me, I who have been perfecting emptiness for so long. I thought I had lost the past, starved it away, until nothing remained but a vague dream populated by phantoms: a lifetime of words reaching me through thick languor; other people never really seen but remembered only in terms of how I must have looked to them. (Sullen, lumpish, weighed down with ugliness? Small, delicate, waifish, perfect? A monster of gluttony and sloth, this body gravid with its own greed?) Days, weeks, months, completely lost, lying on the bed too faint and dizzy to consider standing up, counting the hours (eighteen, always, exactly) until the next and only meal: a half cup of cottage cheese.
Time for the big weigh-in and I’m afraid: afraid that I will have gained weight under this regime of force-feeding; afraid that I won’t have, and will have to stay here forever, having huge trays of food pushed at me, even perhaps having tubes rammed in. The nurse is chattering away mindlessly as she wheels me to the examining room: it’s a beautiful day outside, she says, too bad I’m not “level three” yet, so I could go out: I’m scheduled to see Dr. Frog later in the day, she says; how about a nice long, hot bath after the weigh-in; take off your slippers—no, take them off—and step up.
The beam doesn’t move at first, and then she slides the weight along and it lifts, quivering gently. With a shock of alarm I see that the metal tooth has snagged just above sixty-nine. Sixty-nine and a half pounds! I’ve gained a pound and a half in three days (not counting the five glasses of water I drank before being wheeled here: half a pound, perhaps?). My belly feels tight to bursting and suddenly looks obscenely round; reflexively, I press it with my palm, resolving not to eat again today.
I have a rule when I weigh myself: if I’ve gained weight, I starve for the rest of the day. But if I’ve lost weight, I starve too.
As panic surges in me, I try to remind myself why I’m here. I’m here to become “healthy” again. (But I am healthy: a perfectly functioning, energy-efficient machine, driven by pure will.) I’m here, basically, because my roommate couldn’t take it anymore and called in the cops: come and get your daughter, I can’t cope with her, I’m afraid she’s going to die. Nothing too good for the daughter, no expense spared (now), leave her in the institute and get the hell out of town again, as fast as possible.
Hospital, graduate school, prison: it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference. And here at least the rent is paid.
I’m here but—ha!—I’m still nowhere near the seventy-five pounds they’ve set as a minimum for me to start the rest of the “treatment plan.” Intensive inpatient care for “nutritional rehabilitation.” Long-term outpatient psychotherapy and “support.” Starving organism, blah blah. Neurological deficit, blah blah blah.
Hyperalimentation.
“It’s not something we like to do, Josie, and it’s certainly not something we like to bandy about as a threat. But sometimes it’s the only way we can get people out of dang
er, or up to a certain level of cognitive functioning.”
From a long way away—the parents are on a plane, hushed and bowed, unable to look each other in the eye; my father holds a big key (ornate, theatrical, something a chatelaine would wear on her belt), pops open the plane’s porthole, hesitates a moment, and releases it, sending it downward in a dream-slow spiral—I come back, feel the scale’s cold metal on my feet, look down at my purple toenails, tune in to the nurse. Why doesn’t she ever talk like a normal person? Why doesn’t she just say, “Eat, you little shit, or I’ll shove tubes into every orifice and blow you up like a blimp”? Then I could say “Fuck you, I’ll never eat; you’ll have to watch me vanish.”
“I’m trying,” I say. “I really am.”
I keep standing there, staring at the numbers on the scale as if the reading might change if I will it hard enough. It’s terribly cold in the thin robe, but I can’t think what else to do. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to do; time opens up vertiginously beneath my feet.
Usually, around this hour, I would be getting out of my Macro lecture and riding home on my bike to prepare my first meal of the day: diluted skim milk and instant coffee and sugar substitute and ice cubes whirred in the blender for ninety seconds. And drunk with a straw from a special tall glass, at the kitchen table in the sun, reading over my notes—half an hour minimum, no slurping. And then it would be time to start changing for noon aerobics. But here?
I’m shivering; she suggests a shower. But I don’t want to undress, to confront my bloated, blotchy body, to feel the shock of hot water on my bones. I want to go back to my room again, close the door, lie down, drift through this thick expanse of time.
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