No response.
“Mom, I need a doctor. I’m afraid I’m going to bleed to death.”
She was becoming more alert now, rubbing her eyes and temples distractedly. “Josephine, I can’t possibly call Dr. Arnold”—our family physician. “What on earth would he think?”
I knew I had to stay calm. “I don’t care what he thinks, I’m bleeding to death.”
“But where did you . . . do it?”
“What difference does it make, Mom? I’m bleeding.”
“How could you? Oh, Josie, I wish your father was here.” Her voice was rising in plaintive, helpless panic.
“Mom, please call Dr. Arnold.”
I don’t know why it never occurred to me to call him myself: somehow, my sole object was to convince my mother to help me. Standing there hemorrhaging wasn’t enough, it seemed.
“He was kind of cute,” I tell her, “but nothing really special. Certainly nothing worth almost bleeding to death over.”
“What did he look like?” she wants to know.
“Tall, lean, wiry, the way I like ’em,” I say, trying to sound like a woman of the world, though it’s been so long since I felt the faintest flicker of sexual interest that I don’t know if this statement is still true. Is this how I like them? I don’t think so: any body at all seems repulsively alien —just matter, meat on legs.
“What color eyes?” she asks. I wonder why she’s so interested in this minor character, this gate-crasher long gone.
“Green, with dark hair. And rather thick, sensuous lips. I thought he was gorgeous. I think I even wrote a poem about his skin, if you can believe that.”
He was a college student who seemed to spend most of his time getting stoned with his friends and the rest taking me to the movies. In between, he worked hard to convince me to have sex with him. I never wondered why he wanted to date a high school kid instead of a woman his own age: at 105 pounds and losing, I felt powerfully desirable, my newly naked ribs and hipbones all the explanation I needed. When I met him, through a friend’s brother, I was impressed mainly by how wild he looked, how feral and uncombed. Older people, I noted, did a disapproving double take on seeing him; he took LSD, read Hermann Hesse (or carried the paperbacks around), and practiced transcendental meditation (when he had time). He showed me how to make an origami swan.
“Were you in love with him?”
“Whatever that means. I convinced myself that I was, I guess, because I wanted a boyfriend.”
Even at sixteen, I knew better than to believe him when he sighed passionately and breathed “God, I love you” into my ear. But it conformed to my sense of the way the dialogue was supposed to go.
I enjoyed prompting his passion and was proud to feel his hands urgently outlining my new bones. (But there was still too much softness there, in the belly and the thighs: I wanted to be perfectly hard, offering no purchase.) Sometimes, after prolonged kissing, I would feel myself growing weak and slippery; mostly, though, I just put in my time.
Sometimes, if he touched me the wrong way—pressure in the small of the back, hot breath on the nape—everything would be drowned out by the sound of rushing water, white noise rising to a pitch of panic. I’d have to stop, open my eyes, look wildly around—because how can you know for sure who is there?
“Did he force you to have sex with him?”
“No, not at all. After we’d been going together for about nine months, I just decided it was time. It hurt like hell.”
I can’t believe I’m telling her this.
Finally, when I showed her the ruined towel, she seemed convinced. Shaking her head tearfully, she called the doctor’s answering service and, hardly able to choke the words out, whispered that her teenage daughter had been “fooling around” with her boyfriend and was now bleeding from the, er, private parts. Fifteen minutes later, he called back and instructed me to lie with my legs crossed, feet elevated on a pillow. If the bleeding didn’t stop, I should go to the emergency room. I lay with my legs crossed, feet lifted. After a while, the bleeding stopped.
I spent the next day in bed.
She sent my father up for a little chat when he got in from the airport. I was lying with my feet on a pillow under the covers, working through a pile of magazines, stupefied and headachy from staying in bed too long. It felt odd to see him walk into my bedroom in daylight, in his suit.
He sat on the edge of the bed—a familiar creak and list —but then changed his mind and moved to the wicker chair. He laid his arms carefully on the arm rests.
He asked me how I was feeling. I said fine. He asked about the, ah, bleeding. I said it had stopped. He said, “Your mother has asked me to talk to you.”
I said, “Oh.”
He said, “I don’t quite know how to say this, Josephine.”
He said, “You’re very young.”
He said, “Your mother and I are a little worried about your relationship with Peter.”
He said, “We wouldn’t like to see things continue this way.”
I told him not to worry, that I never wanted to have sex again.
He said, “Oh, you’ll feel differently in a while.”
He said, “Your mother has asked me to talk to Peter, too.”
I snorted.
But a few days later Peter was summoned to my father’s study; it was hard to tell who looked more uncomfortable. For the fifteen long minutes they were in there, I hid upstairs, writhing on my bed, clutching the blanket into me as my gut contracted with humiliation, cackling into a pillow as I tried to imagine the dialogue.
Afterwards, Peter and I strolled around the garden, taking the long way, by unspoken accord, to avoid a certain spot. My father had suggested that I was perhaps a little too young for sexual intercourse on a regular basis and it would probably be best if Peter didn’t see me anymore. Although Peter had earnestly promised to keep his appendages out of my sixteen-year-old orifices, that didn’t satisfy my father. He required that we “take a break” from seeing each other. I didn’t really care, because I didn’t want anyone’s insistent purple organ near me again, but I was annoyed that Peter had so flaccidly assented.
That was the end of Peter.
I decided instead to concentrate on my schoolwork and on perfecting my body.
Amanda Jane married (intact) at eighteen, with a half-hearted half year of French Lit behind her. Bruce, her brother’s friend, cast long ago as romantic lead, stepped from the wings on cue, in morning attire. Months earlier, at my dorm, I had picked up the mail: a cream envelope adorned in her curly round hand (it wasn’t my birthday, with Christmas long gone . . .). Something jolted inside me, but I soon sobered up. Join the wedding party, Miss A, are you out of your mind? Some obscure rule of etiquette, I supposed, that she knew but I’d missed: Former intimates, even if no longer such, should attend the bride—unless, of course, they’re on their Grand Tour.
As I stared at the note, its implications unfolded. I’d have to wear some kind of dress (showing my arms, perhaps: how long did I have?). I’d have to be photographed, over and over, ruining each pose, a toad that had somehow crawled into the frame. And—fear rising now like a tidal wave—would I be expected to eat wedding cake?
I starved for two months to wear rose crêpe de chine, no sleeves, fitted waist. The other bridesmaids, slim cousins, had necks like swans. In ivory silk, she looked fragile, antique. I waltzed with her brothers, who winked over my head.
It was the last time I saw her.
She moved, so did I.
(Of Bruce, all I remember is a silly cleft chin.)
It all seemed so simple, at sixteen. If I could lose enough flesh, I could have any body I wanted, look like anything, anyone. I remember an ad for some kind of mineral water which showed an array of lithe, muscular types lounging around a locker room, and invited you, in effect, to pick the body you wanted. Perfection was easy: it equaled not being fat. The same way a plant will reach for the light source from wherever it is located in a room,
so your body will forever strive for perfection.
Studying those clean, articulated limbs, I decided that I had to eat even less and, more importantly, begin exercising—I, who had always been too lazy even to walk to the end of the driveway to check the mail, who had, mostly by lying, exempted myself from sports at school. But my body cried out for motion (Motion is a magic potion, the magazines told me): it was becoming increasingly difficult to sit still for more than fifteen minutes, and I woke up every morning at five, shocked into anxious wakefulness.
Since I was awake, I might as well get up and do something. So I put together an elaborate repertoire of calisthenics from magazines, brutally punishing to every muscle, especially the abdominals. This ritual I had to perform in complete silence, and, in the winter, in darkness, because I didn’t want anyone else to know. My mother would have taken it as evidence of my increasing lunacy —she who never walked when she could drive, who was in such sorry physical shape that she tore a ligament hopping over a puddle.
Amanda Jane had once shown me a waist-trimming exercise that she did every day, swiveling purposefully left and right. I began doing it, too, but for a long time my waist stayed at twenty-five inches. In the historical romances I borrowed from my mother, eighteen was the norm. I hadn’t heard, then, of corsets worn since childhood, of deformed inner organs, of crushed, useless lungs.
But if I’d had such a corset, I’d have worn it without complaint.
Instead, before I began, I wrapped those parts of me I hated the most (my waist, my belly, my breasts, my thighs) in plastic sandwich wrap. This was supposed to melt the fat away. The plastic didn’t adhere well, so I had to tie yarn around it, in large bows, to keep it on.
There was something comforting about the silence, the cold, the dark, the stubborn, will-driven repetition, the mind empty of everything except the next count.
Get down on hands and knees.
Donkey Kick. Pussy Cat. Inchworm. Doggie at the Hydrant.
Lie on back as shown.
Decline Dumbbell Fly. Chicken. Compromise Curl-Downs.
Stand with knees unlocked.
Dumbbell Shrug. Bent-Arm Fly. Slow-Motion Jumping.
Almost Kneeling.
Hanging from a Bar.
12
DIAGNOSTIC PROFILE
MEDICAL HISTORY
Have you ever had any serious medical problems? No
Have you ever suffered a serious injury? No
Do you engage in regular physical exercise? Irregularly
If so, describe your habitual mode of exercise: Going too far
Are you currently on any medication? Yes
Do any members of your immediate family suffer from the following ailments?
Heart disease Hypertension Diabetes
Epilepsy Breast cancer Obesity
Scotoma Scleroderma Gargoylism
Is there any history of mental illness in your family? History?
List all family members who are still alive: Define alive
Childhood diseases: --
Age of menarche: 11
Have you ever ceased menstruating for more than two months? Whenever possible
Average length of cycle: No cycling allowed in the hospital
Current height: Five feet two inches
Current weight: Don’t know
Ideal weight: Zero G
Highest weight since age 18 (excluding pregnancies): 122 pounds
Lowest weight since age 18: 67 pounds
How long did you maintain your lowest adult weight? 3 days
Are you engaged in an occupation (e.g., dance, modeling, wrestling) that requires you to maintain a specific weight? Yes, the occupation of maintaining a specific weight.
How does a 3-pound weight gain affect your sense of well-being? Excess fat creates attitudes that can actually work to keep you unhealthy. If you believe that you are fat and unhealthy, you will stay fat and unhealthy.
How does a 3-pound weight loss affect your sense of well-being? In reality, you are a different entity every time you lose a single pound.
Have you ever sought psychiatric help? Sought? No
Please indicate how often you experience the following symptoms:
Anxiety
Depression
Loss of appetite
Fatigue
Irritability
Insomnia
Fear of heights
Fear of enclosed spaces
Fear of open spaces
Fear of running water
Difficulty getting up in the morning
Difficulty making it through the day
Difficulty making it through the next day
Sense of floating through dark interstellar space
Have you ever made a suicide attempt?
All information will be kept strictly confidential, available only to doctors, nurses, endocrinologists, dieticians, social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, art therapists, physical therapists, fellow patients, parents, significant others, readers of professional journals, insurance companies, and/ or whoever pays the bill.
Have a Nice Day.
“That’s not funny,” she says, looking over the form, though I can’t tell whether she means the places I answered or the places I didn’t. “And you’re not on any medication, though we might consider some lorazepam for the anxiety.”
“What anxiety?” I say.
They tried to have me fill out this form during the intake interview—that’s how they put it, “fill out this form”—but I just stared at it, so they took it back, muttering something about “inanition.” Now here it is again, for the record. But whose? And why?
“None of this is anybody’s business,” I tell her. This is where all my previous experiences with “psychotherapy” have foundered: whenever the therapist (the high school counselor, the family therapist, the cut-rate psychoanalyst, Herr Doktor Frog) asks a question, something in me shrinks up, shuts down. Primly, as if the issue were one of etiquette, I tell them, “It’s none of your business.”
(“I don’t pay eighty bucks an hour for you to tell this man, this expert, this Ph.D., that it’s none of his business,” my mother ranted, when the family therapist finally admitted defeat.)
The therapist and the rapist—a matter of spacing, but the approach is the same. The psychology student with her jellied probes. The endocrinologist with her vampire prick. The doctor with his insistent tube.
“It’s none of your fucking business,” I repeat.
“It is if we’re trying to help you,” she replies smugly, “to understand you better so we can help you.”
I permit myself a dry laugh.
“Your mother and I,” he said, avoiding my eye, obviously obeying orders but with no stomach for this discussion, “are a little concerned about you.”
“Why, for God’s sake? I’m getting straight A’s, all I ever do is study, I never go out anymore, I haven’t had a goddamn boyfriend in six months . . .” I let that idea hang in the air between us, shaping space with the unspeakable, using it as a shield. It had been six months, more or less, since the public blooding; after Peter made his exit, none of us ever mentioned it again.
“Yes, but,” he said, addressing the floor, “we’re a little worried about your, uh, eating habits and the hours you spend exercising. Mom thinks it’s all got a little out of hand. And she thinks she hears you moving around upstairs at odd hours of the night—I don’t know, you know how she is . . . ?”—almost pleading now, but trailing off into silence, as a similar image visited us both.
None of this was anyone’s business, none of this was even up for discussion. This particular block of time (5:30 to 6:45 P.M.) was scheduled for studying, and I couldn’t afford to lose the ten minutes this “conversation” had already cost me. Other people wasted so much time, volumes of it, letting it expire unspent, unredeemed. But since I had put myself under production, I practiced economies of scale. I made each second count: I jogged from 6 to 7:30 in the mornin
g, swam laps from 4 to 5, and worked out with hand weights for an hour before bed; around these fixed points (and, of course, school), I had to schedule homework and my nightly command performance at the dinner table, which left only an hour for leg waxings, brow tweezings, facials, manicures, and a weekly extravaganza involving egg yolks (for the hair), cucumber (for the eyelids), and lemon halves, like small, avid mouths, sucking on each elbow.
I fidgeted and felt my left triceps. It was 5:43. “Yeah, well,” I said, “I need to do my homework.”
The desk in my room was a slender white secretary, which opened to reveal an array of dainty niches designed for a lady’s correspondence. Nothing I needed ever fit into those elegant red-lined innards, so I left them empty, piling books and papers on the floor. If, while writing, I pressed too hard on the hinged lid, it shuddered, reminding me to go lightly.
The way I did my homework was to write everything out three times and memorize it. Later I could summon up anything I needed—Latin, Chemistry, Poetry, Math—by reading it off my mindscreen, never betraying (I hoped) that it meant nothing to me: black traces over a void, a code to which, staring at the page from a distant star, I had somehow lost the key.
Studying like this, I made straight A’s. Studying like this, I won scholarships to three major universities and chose the one farthest away from home. I had reached an important goal—cracking one hundred pounds—and immediately set myself a new one: cracking ninety-five by the time I left for college. There, a thousand miles from jealous surveillance, I could begin to perfect myself.
“I won’t eat it,” I say. “It’s a garnish.”
“Josephine,” she says, “you know the rules. You have to eat some of everything on your plate. Now eat that orange slice and quit stalling.”
“But, Suzanne,” I say, mocking her tone, “to eat that would constitute a gross breach of etiquette. Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to eat the garnish? It’s very gauche, very déclassé, very je ne sais quoi. Look it up in Emily Post if you don’t believe me.”
“I don’t need to look it up in Emily Post, miss,” she says, with the emphasis, the edge, that tells me I’m winning. (Next she’ll flush, showing that I’ve insinuated myself under her skin, riding the blood tide like a surfer.) “I don’t need to look it up in Emily Post because I know what our rules are: lemon slices don’t have to be eaten but orange slices do. So just eat up and let me take your tray. I’ve got work to do.”
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