I hoped that the neighbors would call the police.
Try harder.
The secret word is body.
Is it normal for teens to think about death and suicide?
The secret word is body.
For that frantic hunger that sets in.
The secret word is body.
There’ll be long, lean days ahead.
6
AT PRECISELY SIX-THIRTY, she bounds in, as usual, swishes the curtains back (how the metallic screech scores my ears, how the light pokes my dry eyes, lidless after the long night’s lonely straining). I’m still pacing and I make no attempt to hide it: I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to, so it’s lucky I don’t. From the one corner of the cell around the foot of both beds to the other corner is twenty paces, I’ve discovered. Figuring each stride as a foot (conservatively), that means I have to make the same circuit, there and back again, one hundred and thirty-two times to complete a mile. I’m on my third mile and I’m not going to stop until I finish it.
“Morning, Josie,” she says, standing by the window, where I have to make a detour around her, pacing and counting.
“Morning,” I mutter, without stopping.
She stands there while I complete three more circuits, but she is making me self-conscious. I can’t stop, though, I won’t, I have to finish three miles, otherwise. . . . Otherwise what? Otherwise something terrible will happen, my muscles will turn to mush, I won’t know what to do next, I’ll spiral through space, yielding voluptuously to dissolution.
“Josie, could you just slow down a moment, please? I need to talk to you.”
“When I’m done,” I mutter—she’s making me lose count.
“No, now, please, Josie, if you don’t mind.”
I do mind, you freckled cow. “OK, OK, just one more.”
I do two more and then throw myself sulkily on the bed, one arm flung over my face so I don’t have to look at her. Also, the room is spinning.
“Josie, the doctor is coming to talk to you about insertion.”
Insertion? So it’s not even a secret; even the nurse knows he can stick it to me whenever he wants.
“Insertion?”
“For the tube feeding, Josie—I explained already.”
“I don’t want any fucking tube in me,” I say. “You can’t make me do this. I won’t.” Someone always trying to force something into you, make you swallow something, pump you full of it.
No response, just a slight petrification of the professional smiley face.
Then I notice something is missing. “Where’s my goddamn breakfast, anyway? You want me to eat, I’ll eat.”
She looks a little confused, begins to make an explanatory gesture (offering the absent tray on flat palms), aborts it, and says, “We need to talk to the doctor, Josie. Let me see if I can get him in here.”
“Just bring me my breakfast. All you ever do is try to make me eat, and then when I ask for food, you won’t bring it.”
Now she’s definitely annoyed. Her fair, freckled skin is helplessly legible: a wash of blood travels over it, like watercolor. “Josephine, I must ask you please not to speak to me like that. I’m not your servant.” And then, unable to contain herself: “And would you please look at me when I talk to you? It really gets on my nerves.”
Coldly, victoriously, I remain precisely as I am. She really should have more control.
Later, we end up in a conference room, myself and four strangers: Dr. Frog, the nurse (still miffed), a “social worker,” and the alleged dietician, a sporty-looking woman in her early thirties, I would guess, with a runner’s utilitarian body and sun-dried skin. These aliens are gathered in this glassed-in, stale-smelling room (there are ashtrays on the wood-grain Formica: in a hospital?) to discuss what will and will not go into my body.
My body is there, too, chilled by the hoarse air-conditioning, unable to dispose its bones comfortably on the metal-frame chair; the seat’s padding, like mine, is meager and connects nowhere with my spine. My body is there, but I am not; this is something that you learn, early on.
Across the table, in the dark glass, I catch sight of a face, haggard in the harsh fluorescence, its dull, wispy hair like that of a cheap doll (rows of little holes in the plastic skull where it comes out in chunks). With shadowy, sunken cheeks and deep grooves around the mouth, it’s the face of an old woman. After a while, I realize it’s me. Automatically, I adjust the tilt of my head, so the light catches the chin and cheekbones differently; now it’s a face of exquisite delicacy, ethereal, haunting.
My body is here, crucified on this cold metal chair—even the arms, all edges, cut into my bones—but I am not.
Washing my face over the bathroom sink, with the white noise of the water drowning out all thought, if I were to feel a sudden presence behind me—just a change in the pressure, the density of the air—it would be safer to believe I was imagining it. Because how can you really tell if someone is there or not?
“Are you listening, Josephine?” someone is asking. “This is your health we’re talking about here, you know.”
Slowly, reluctantly, I lift my head, blink rapidly to refocus. There’s no one there, just Dr. Frog, animated across the table, an annoying insistence in his hunched shoulders. I notice that he is (unconsciously, as he would say) stabbing at an empty Styrofoam cup with a pencil. When the pencil point goes through the cup, it makes a disproportionately loud ripping sound. I snort, an involuntary echo. He’s not amused; he looks embarrassed, guilty, and squishes the cup in his hand, looking for somewhere to dispose of it. But the more hunted the expression in his hooded little eyes, the tighter the line of his lips, the more I feel compelled to snort, to chortle into my hand. The chortling begins to take on a life of its own, arriving in escalating spasms.
“That’s enough, Josie,” the nurse says sharply, glancing at the doctor to see if she’s exceeded her authority.
“Yes, that’s quite enough,” he says. “Calm down now.”
Hilarity drains out of me, as if a plug had been pulled, and I slump back in my chair, spent. My head is lolling; I really don’t have the strength to hold it up. My bones are weary, deeply weary, weary to the core.
The social worker (what is she really, I wonder?) is taking notes on a yellow pad. I can just imagine: “Patient laughs inappropriately when doctor impales a cup. Patient picks her cuticles compulsively, refusing to meet anyone’s eye. Patient seems inexplicably resentful of flabby, decaying strangers gathered to prescribe her diet.” The dietician has forgotten to change the tensely bright expression on her face for quite some time and seems to think that inclining her head, birdlike, makes her look alert, engaged.
“Josephine, please pay attention for a moment,” the doctor says.
“I am.”
“I want to show you something, a picture.”
He takes what looks like a black-and-white photograph out of a folder and passes it across the table to me. What is it going to be this time, I wonder: a mouth and a dick, a woman and a Great Dane?
It’s entitled “Fig. 8” and shows a naked woman (I knew it), front and side views. She’s very thin: in fact, I feel a stab of envy. I didn’t know it was possible to be that thin and still live.
This woman is a skeleton, not I. Her arms, splayed at her sides, seem abnormally long, with the elbow joints at least twice as wide as the upper arms. Her knees, likewise, are much wider than her thighs, which, to my admiration, she has reduced to pure bone (but even they must flare, to fit the unseemly pelvic socket). The ribs score the skin so deeply they seem ready to burst through, a violent eruption beneath two minuscule, shrunken breasts (interesting that they never disappear altogether). Every cord in her neck is visible, even the corrugated tube of her trachea. A discreet black slash blanks out her eyes, reducing her face to the caved-in cheeks and lipsticked scar of a crone.
From the side, she is even more frightening, a hunched gargoyle on a stick. Her knee is about the same size as what’s left of her but
tock; as in an X ray, her long, straight tibia is visible all the way into the socket. Her chest is hopelessly collapsed.
Yes, I did know it was possible to be this thin and still live. I have seen photographs of them, too, the survivors. No black band slashed out their hopeless, uncomprehending, already otherworldly eyes.
“What do you think the woman in the picture looks like, Josie?” Dr. Frog is asking, invading my inner vision.
“A little on the thin side.”
“Do you think you are as thin as she is?” he asks.
“Of course not,” I respond. And it’s true: I know I don’t look that devastated. If I did, I couldn’t go out in public. Everyone would know immediately what the problem was.
Their eyes meet across the table, Dr. Frog’s and the nurse’s, and an immense weariness re-enters me. I’m sure I just failed some crucial diagnostic test, but I don’t care; I just want them to leave me alone, let me be.
Leaning over the bathroom sink, it begins again. As the rush of water rises in intensity, so too does the panic—the certainty that, as I bend over, blinded by the water, deafened by it, somebody is coming up behind me. No, not coming up behind me; that’s not quite it. Someone is already there, close behind me, less than a foot away. I know, in a rational part of my brain, that no one can be there, because no one was in the bathroom a second ago when I looked, and the door is closed, but this knowledge means nothing in the face of the panic, the terror, the other kind of knowledge. Blood speeding and pounding, eyes stinging with soap, I reach blindly for a towel and swivel around to discover, as I already knew, that no one is there.
Yes, doctor, every time.
New regimen. New regime. Last chance. (Wasn’t there a best seller a while back called The Last Chance Diet?)
The dietician here, Miss Sparrow (she bobs her inclined head, grimacing reflexively at the mention of her name), will draw up a program of regular, balanced meals for you; we’re not going to let you choose your own menus, Josephine, but you may name a maximum of three foods you dislike for exclusion. (Meat, fish, eggs, and the opaque white or bluish white liquid secreted by the mammary glands of female mammals for the nourishment of their young.)
The nurse will sit with you during meals, encouraging you to eat. (“Eat, you bitch, or I’ll eat you.”)
Three-day trial. If you don’t cooperate, we’ll be compelled to begin hyperalimentation. It’s up to you, Josephine.
When has it ever been up to me?
Last week, for instance (I think it was last week, though months seem to have passed), there they were when I got home, large as life. Perched on the burnt orange Salvation Army couch, they were sipping tea from some misshapen pottery mugs made by a friend of Jane’s; evidently they’d debriefed her and were filling the time with awkward small talk. My shock at seeing them—I thought them three thousand miles away in the snowy east—was nothing compared to their shock at seeing me. My mother leapt off the sofa as if stung by a bee; my father slumped backwards, as if poleaxed.
“What are you doing here?” I said. “I mean, hi.”
Unable to speak, my mother burst into tears, which Jane—the Judas—took as her cue to slink out. I remained unmoved by the door, my bicycle helmet under one arm, feeling something in me begin its familiar decampment to a cool, untouchable place just under the sternum. My only thought was: I hope they don’t expect me to skip ballet class this evening just because they’re in town.
“Oh God, Michael, look at her,” my mother sobbed, smearing mascara on the pouches under her eyes. My father, as usual, said nothing, but permitted himself his unconscious gesture of worry, a catching of his lower lip between his teeth, which gave him the look of a pained bunny rabbit.
“Jo, you’re not looking at all well,” he suggested.
According to script.
“I’m looking perfectly fine, for God’s sake. So anyway, what are you guys doing here? Do you have a business trip, Dad? I wish you’d given me a bit of warning because things are pretty hectic at the moment. Even tonight, you know —I have plans.”
Their eyes met. Who was going to do the dirty work? She, of course, once she’d retrieved a powdery tissue from her capacious handbag, stuffed with salt and pepper packets scavenged from the airline (an ineradicable habit). After a few juicy blasts, she smudged her mascara once again, threw the balled-up tissue back into the bag, breathed deeply, and said, “Josie, sit down, we have to talk to you about something.”
I stayed where I was, merely setting the bicycle helmet down so I could fold my arms, feeling myself hard and capable, lean and spare under two oversized sweatshirts.
“Josie,” she began, tears welling up again, “you look like something from Belsen.”
“That’s what you always say, Ma.” Just because I’m not fat like you.
“No, this is by far the worst we’ve ever seen you, isn’t it, Michael?” He nodded, opening his palms in a placating gesture. “You’re just skin and bones, I don’t know how you can even be walking around.” More tears.
Surreptitiously, I glanced at my watch: ten past five. I had to leave in twenty minutes and hadn’t even changed yet, let alone stretched. I’d missed the first ten minutes of the news. And I needed my can of Tab if I was going to make it through class. It was time to get going.
“So did you fly all the way out here just to start this again? I’m really not into this, Mom. And I have to change for ballet. Maybe you guys can go out for dinner while I’m in class, and then we can go to a movie or something.”
She couldn’t speak, so he took over. “Josie, Jane called us.”
“Jane?” At this moment, I did feel a twinge of annoyance, a slight leap of disbelief. “Jane? What the hell for?”
“She thinks you’re killing yourself, Josie. She feels so helpless—she didn’t know what to do, so she called us.”
Where did she get their number? The bitch must have gone through my drawers, handled my things, thumbed through my address book.
A deep, familiar fatigue soaked into me, and all I wanted was to go into my room, close the door, turn on the radio, and begin stretching—slowly, deliberately, holding on to my bones, feeling each tendon resist, then relax. As if from a great distance, sending my words with effort through space, I told them: “All I really want is for everyone to leave me alone. I can’t believe you flew all the way out here because of some flaky roommate. And I don’t have time for this now because I have to go to class.” And if I injure myself by not warming up properly, it will be your fault, I added, mentally.
“But look at you, Josie,” my mother blurted, “have you looked at yourself?”
Have I looked at myself? What else do I spend most of my time doing, sometimes, trancelike, for an hour at a time? I see myself very clearly: somewhere between fat and thin, but not yet perfect.
I shrugged. Recognizing this conversation as the same one we’d been having, off and on, for eight years, my father intervened, a reflex developed through a lifetime of placating miserable women. “OK, OK, Gin, let her be. Jo, how about if we let you run off to ballet now, and your mum and I check into the hotel and have a bite to eat”—only then did I notice their suitcases next to the couch—“and then how about if we meet for breakfast tomorrow, when we’ve all had a good night’s sleep, and decide what needs to be done?”
“I don’t eat breakfast.”
Even he allowed himself a soft, exasperated explosion of air. “OK, then, we’ll meet for coffee. What time is your first class?”
“Not until ten. But I have to work out first.”
The next morning, when we met at nine—at the Elysée, typical transparent ploy, to meet in a pastry shop, hoping I’ll be tempted by the warm, fragrant air, by the mounds of airy dough, snow-dusted, dark-hearted (but I don’t even notice, note)—everyone seemed calm, myself to the point of apathy. Mother’s face was freshly painted on, her hair firmly glued; in a blue jersey suit with sensible pumps, like the Queen of England, she looked determined not to c
ry. Dad, redolent of shaving cream, with comb marks still in his hair, was ruining the effect with a haze of cigarette smoke. He didn’t appear to have had much sleep, and neither had I, studying, as usual, until three. (Studying and pacing, reading a few lines and then jumping up to prowl the silent flat, to consult the dark glass.)
I sipped my iced tea. They troweled butter and jam on to their croissants (300 calories apiece).
There’s this hospital, Josie—well, not really a hospital. More like a private rest home. Specialists. Rest up. Take care of you. Just a month. Gladly pay. Won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. Break from routine. What do you say, eh, love?
I say, fuck off and leave me alone.
I say, what the hell difference would it make? I can starve anywhere.
I say, it’s becoming too much work to decide what to do next. Just to move my hand through thick, resilient air to this glass of iced tea—the lemon slice has begun to molt, the rim is sweating, how can I put it in my mouth?—requires all the energy I have. To move my hand back again and decide where to put it, somewhere it will look natural—so bony and blotchy, so cracked and fissured in the cruel morning light—takes all my attention. I will rest it here, beside the blue napkin, parallel, and line up the knife so they’re all parallel, equidistant: hand, napkin, knife. Knife, napkin, hand.
Why is everybody looking at me like that?
Are they still waiting for me to say something?
She’s staring at me from the foot of the bed. I refuse to say anything, won’t even meet her eyes. Why should I give her the satisfaction of fathoming my fear?
This is the New Regime. She stays with me through the whole meal and I may not even close the bed curtains around me. I must eat at least some of everything selected for my dining pleasure. There is a huge glass of orange juice (150 calories), two pieces of wheat toast with four pats of butter (200 calories, plus 185 for the toast), a slice of cantaloupe (about 40 calories: it’s the only legal food on the tray), and an enormous bowl of oatmeal, clumped and congealed like mucus (at least 200 calories, without milk or . . . merely to think the word sugar makes me feel unclean). If I ate all that, it would amount to over 800 calories, more than I’ve eaten in an entire day for years.
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