It took me two hours to get ready in the mornings, which was one of the reasons I was grateful not to have a roommate. Blow-drying my hair so that it looked negligently windswept took forty-five minutes; forty minutes more to confront the sallow, oily gargoyle in the mirror and mask it with a perfect layer of paint; a further thirty minutes to decide on an outfit and examine myself in the mirror, with rising panic, as I dressed. Whichever way I looked, all I could see was fat—fat face, fat gut, fat quivering thighs, fat disgusting tits. How could I go outside and show myself to other people, when they’d all know, just by looking at me, how weak I was, how self-indulgent?
How could I justify the space I occupied in the world?
Only by resolving to be stronger; by thinking of the next thing I would not eat, and the next, and of nothing else.
It fills up the brain, thinking all the time of what you will not think, what you will not do. It fills up all your time, maintaining emptiness.
I don’t know what else to think about.
I don’t know what else to do.
I don’t know how to get from one moment to the next.
Today they’re keeping me busy with a full schedule, a series of special events presented by the “treatment team.” (My whining must finally have gotten to them, my panicky weeping last night when I looked at my legs, the damage I did to my hands and nails. Now I’m required to wear these ridiculous mitts: I don’t know why—there wasn’t that much blood. I’ve done worse before, with more desperate teeth).
Quite an outfit, for this outing: a new hospital-issue robe, which, like my skin, is the wan blue of skimmed milk; these terry cloth slippers two sizes too big; these jumbo white mitts. I haven’t washed my hair for days because I can’t stand to watch it wad up in the drain, so it hangs over my face in limp strands. I imagine—still no mirrors—that what I most resemble is an exhumed corpse, with these sores around my mouth (“They’d heal if you didn’t pick them all the time”) and these “pockets of edema” below my eyes. That’s why I keep pulling my hair down over my face—to hide it. The other reason is to make sure more hasn’t fallen out.
“Try, Josie, please, to look at people when they’re talking to you. It really makes a difference.”
But I can’t—what would they see?—so I stare at the floor, bumping the numb mitts together behind my back in a thwarted effort to rip at my cuticles. She touches my shoulder (she must have tapped bone—no fat there yet, at least), and we proceed slowly into the hallway, walking this time. It’s too late, though, for me to take any pleasure in this meager privilege. I’ve given up any notion of exercise. Why even try? Everything’s beyond repair, beyond redress.
The sight of a scale still sends a fizz of panic through me—it always did, even when I stepped on that miniature stage twenty times a day. But now—helpless, bulbous, and sluggish—I’m grateful to be accounted for behind my back. I have no urge to turn around and know: let her record it, let her keep the score. Suffering this deformity is terrible enough. If I had to name it, put numbers to it, the very words would send me free-falling into the dark with a vanishing cry.
“Am I there yet?”
“We’ll tell you when you’re in the middle of the target weight range. You have to trust us, Josie.” Trust them, when they’ve turned me into a moving target, stumbling blindfold across the range? Trust them, with all their sights trained on me?
Speedy with fright, I try to stuff my fingers into my mouth, but get a mouthful of padding instead. She encircles my wrist handcuff-style and pulls my hand gently away from my mouth. I refuse to meet her eye, but she doesn’t let go and, warm fingers still locked around my bones, leads me to my next stop: the alleged dietician, with whom I’m supposed to have an informative chat about nutrition. I recognize her vaguely, having once seen her, I think, through some kind of haze (fog? smog? smoke? conference room!). She beckons me brightly into her office, where the prefab partitions are covered with charts featuring the Four Food Groups. (Good name for a rock band.) The illustrations, which I examine with interest, are fifties-style, flat and primitive—a crimson haunch; a wedge of something brown on a tilted plate speeding UFO-like through the air; a broad-shouldered bottle of milk. Would you make your way through the droppings and go right up to a cow and . . . ? I can’t say I’m impressed: my dorm room, by the end of the year, exhibited a much richer array of images, culled from Gourmet and Bon Appétit, to which I subscribed.
(My career aspiration, then, was to be a food stylist: the one who, before the photo shoot, blowtorches the turkey and injects the berries with dye—thereby, of course, rendering them inedible.)
I wonder what she thinks she knows about nutrition, this dietician who prescribes chocolate chip cookies. It’s vital that you learn where those killing carbohydrates lurk. I wonder what she thinks she can tell me, after my years of systematic study. I used to believe all the best-selling claims—Some have lost 30, 40, 100 or more pounds while consuming 2,000 to 3,000 calories or more a day. They’ve lost weight on bacon and eggs for breakfast, on heavy cream in their coffee, on mayonnaise in their salads, butter sauce on their lobster, on spareribs, roast duck, pastrami, on my special cheesecake for dessert. And on this diet, cholesterol levels usually go down—but now I know the truth.
Just don’t eat.
It’s as simple as that.
But she, of course, has other ideas. “Sit down, please!” she says, gesturing, and continues to chirp away as I lean back in the chair, which hurts my spine, so I sit forward, but the seat slices my thighs, so I put my hands underneath me and cushion myself with the Minnie Mouse mitts. This all takes time, and meanwhile she’s still chirping, unnaturally animated, like a character in a TV commercial. But the sound must be turned down because not much is reaching me where I sit, a vast distance away, raised toweringly on my padded hands.
I fix my eyes on the UFO to the right of her head. Myths, she says. Absolutism. Set-point theory. (I perk up for a moment: sounds mathematical.) Taboo.
I’m not listening. I look downward, at my naked shins, still like sticks. I look under the desk at her tight but solid calves, sausagey in their nylon skin. If you know so much, I think, why aren’t you perfect?
I had boyfriends that year—why wouldn’t I have? I was skillfully painted, I wore striking clothes, I made witty remarks, and I put in my time—but I felt desire only once. That was in the library, the place I liked best (NO FOOD OR BEVERAGES ALLOWED). One of the reference librarians was a large man with extremely thick glasses; whenever he had to read something, he would hold it right up to his face, caressing it with the end of his nose. Or he would bend all the way down to the book, as if grazing.
“He’s legally blind,” someone once whispered to me. (As opposed to—illegally?) “Isn’t it amazing? He has a Ph.D. and all.”
Later in the semester, when I was checking out a pile of books—the Chandrasekhar limit was causing me problems—I overheard one of the other librarians congratulating him. His wife, it seemed, had had a baby.
Wife?
And a terrible pang, so unfamiliar I at first thought it sorrow, swept over me. That’s what I would have wanted, could I have chosen any kind of human comfort: to be loved by a blind man.
14
THE EFFECTS of starvation on behavior: a classic study, by Herr Professor Keys, University of Minnesota, 1950. He took thirty-six “young, healthy, psychologically normal male volunteers”—as if there weren’t already enough unwilling subjects, an entire planet of the slowly wasting. But, adding thirty-six to their number, he tormented them with want for six months. At the end of that time, they were no longer so healthy and psychologically normal, nor quite so young.
Robust corn-fed types at first, they soon found themselves compelled to root in garbage cans. To read cookbooks and collect recipes. To shoplift. To hoard—anything: knickknacks, secondhand clothes, kitchen utensils. “The men,” wrote Keys, “would be puzzled as to why they had bought such more or less useless articles.”
A new lipstick, a pair of earrings, pantyhose in mulberry, peach, almond.
One man was in such distress that he chopped off three fingers.
Another was interested in a woman but reported: “It’s almost too much trouble to see her. It requires effort to hold her hand. Entertainment must be tame. If we see a show, the most interesting part of it is contained in scenes where people are eating.” He had, he said, “no more sexual feeling than a sick oyster.” (Note, Herr Professor, how even this image invokes the edible.)
When confronted again with food, the men lost control. One required hospitalization—for “aspiration,” whatever that is. (Perhaps that’s why I’m here, too: for aspiration.)
Such is the story that the dietician has told me.
“Well, that was decades ago,” I say.
She looks at me blankly, as if what I’ve said makes no sense.
Dinner: a bowl of lentil soup (300 calories). I manage about a quarter—food is medicine—until an image flashes into my mind: diarrhea. Lumpy. Then I can’t eat any more.
A small tossed salad (100 calories). Too much salad can slow you down. It’s soaked in dressing, but, shaking each leaf hard before I put it in my mouth—she looks up; is this “inappropriate behavior”?—I force some down. Medicine.
A huge plate of wormlike pasta, with red stuff on top. Huddled together, seeping.
“What is this supposed to be?” I ask, playing for time. She looks up again from her paperwork.
“I don’t know: some kind of noodles with tomato-basil sauce?”
“Well, la-di-da” I say, prodding one with my fork.
“Don’t play with it, Josie, just eat it.”
I prod harder, impale one of the pallid grubs, shake some sauce off, look closely, and ask, “But what’s this white stuff on top?”
“Parmesan cheese, for Chrissake, what does it look like?”
Mold.
She’s watching me now. The nurse will sit with the patient during meals, encouraging her to eat. I put it in my mouth. It’s OK. She looks down again. I eat a few more, in slow motion, rolling each one first to the edge of the plate, so it’s not touching anything. Soon they’re tepid, so I stop.
A slice of carrot cake.
Three doughnuts, a glass of milk, a slice of pizza, most of a package of chocolate chip cookies, a bag of Doritos, a glass of orange juice, an English muffin with butter and jam, another, a large dish of coffee ice cream with chocolate chunks, more cookies, pretzels, a bowl of Raisin Bran.
Two hours’ work. Total calories: several million.
I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t.
I wanted to weep and gnash my teeth, but I couldn’t.
This was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.
It was his fault: if he hadn’t insisted we spend the night at his place, rather than mine, which I always preferred so I could kick them out before breakfast; if he hadn’t had to leave so early the next morning for grand rounds (he was a med student, skinny and bright, with his head permanently cocked as if expecting to be amused by the next thing he heard); if I hadn’t been hollowed-out from his enthusiastic, nightlong assault on me; if he hadn’t left me alone in his bed.
If he’d only had some Special K in the house.
But he didn’t, and, padding around his place alone, in one of his extra-large T-shirts (which made me feel gratifyingly tiny and frail), I was agitated, driven. Being in someone else’s house when he’s not there gives you a sense of license, a reckless desire to open the drawers, read all the mail.
Something lukewarm was running down my legs, but I didn’t want to take a shower in a strange bathroom. So I went to the kitchen and started opening the cabinets, not planning to eat anything, just with voyeuristic intent. Canned chili, instant coffee, peanut butter (jumbo-sized, smooth), potato chips, Oreos, and—in the malodorous fridge—leftover moo shu, stale pizza, beer, milk, mustard, and a limp and exhausted lettuce. On the counter, there was a box of Raisin Bran, one of Cheerios, and an almost empty Cap’n Crunch.
I should have just dressed and gone home. But instead I picked up the box of Raisin Bran, opened it, and took a small pinch (I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again, so what did it matter if I stuck my hand, still rank with sex smells, into his food?). I pushed it into my mouth, realizing, with a frighteningly ecstatic rush, that it was the sweetest thing that had gone in there for months, maybe years. Sawdusty at first, it soon turned on the tongue to a soothing paste.
Before I knew what I was doing, I had my hand in the box for another fistful.
An alarm flashed through my brain, an image of myself cramming the box’s entire contents into my mouth, handful by handful. Do something, the alarm said.
What I should do, I thought, is eat something—something permissible. This is happening only because my schedule has been disrupted. Maybe if I eat half a cup of cereal, with a quarter of a cup of milk diluted to make a third, then my body, fooled into thinking it’s getting the usual, will calm down, quiet itself. (But the cereal has sugar in it, the milk is whole! Never mind: I can compensate later.)
So, after searching in the cabinets for a measuring cup, I mixed the milk and bran and climbed back into bed with yesterday’s newspaper. Practicing my policy of delayed gratification, I put the bowl aside until I had read the entire “City” section. By the time I started spooning it in, delicately at first, it had turned to mush—sweet, milky mush that went down so easily, so tenderly, that I found myself in the kitchen measuring, then, abandoning measure, giddily pouring out another bowlful, not even bothering to dilute the milk this time.
I had never done this before. I watched myself with appalled disbelief. Stop now, before it’s too late, a stricken voice cried from deep in my brain, but a wild, deaf roar rising from the rib cage drowned it out.
I climbed back into bed—perhaps this had been my initial mistake, allowing myself to eat in bed, unwashed, undressed, amidst the encrusted sheets—and, this time making not even the slightest pretense of delay, wolfed it down. My belly felt tight but not full: I’d eaten so quickly that no chemical messages had yet reached the brain. Taking advantage of this lag, acting as if automatized, I jumped out of bed again and carried the empty bowl to the kitchen, looking around for something else to eat as I rinsed it out, sloppily. Something had opened in me like a funnel, and the only possible appeasement was to fill my mouth.
This has nothing to do with hunger. It has to do with filling the mouth so the howl can’t make its way out.
Reaching up for the package of Oreos, I noticed that it wasn’t properly closed, just kind of crumpled together at the top. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who carefully close packets of cookies and crackers so they won’t get stale and those who don’t. I have little patience with those who don’t. It was becoming increasingly obvious that I wouldn’t want to see this person again, so—sealing the decision, since I would never be able to face him afterward—I ate all his Oreos, standing at the counter, pushing each one into my mouth before I had finished chewing the last, thinking all the time only of what I would eat next.
No pleasure: only terrified self-witness, encroaching nausea, and the single, urgent drive to keep the mouth filled.
I put a small forkful in my mouth, but—it’s so sweet, so moist—terror surges up and forces it out again: pffft, a soggy, brownish lump.
“No!” she says. “What on earth are you doing?”
“I can’t. I just can’t. Not . . . cake.” The very word is difficult for me to say: obscene, taboo. Cookies, cake, chocolate, and other sweets—avoid them like Satan!
“It’s food, Josephine. There are no ‘good’ foods and ‘bad’ foods.”
I know this isn’t true. But how can I convince her? There are certain . . . things . . . that, once you put them in your mouth, force you to keep going, keep cramming, keep chewing, in a frenzy of horrified craziness. How is it possible that she doesn’t know this?
“And you k
now you’re not allowed to scrape the icing off like that,” she tells me, looking more closely at the despoiled plate (what once was a slice of carrot cake—400 calories—now reduced to a mess of crumbs and mashed butterfat).
“I can’t,” I say, my voice rising. “I just can’t. This is really going too fucking far.” How can I explain to her the siren that sounds through me, the choking spasm that stops my throat? (And the image, unbidden, of three thick, blubbery rolls: my gut.)
I am too frightened to put a forkful of . . . this . . . in my mouth. At this moment, I would rather die than eat. Something is wrong here, some exorbitant blockage of biology: I have seen babies at the breast, and I know, yes, how the organism is designed—to experience life through the mouth, to put everything there first and try other inlets later, as dismal substitutes. That’s how we first know the world, through the ecstatic workings of lips and tongue, but now some current has reversed in me, and I negotiate the world by keeping it out.
Because if you begin taking things in, how will you know when to stop?
What finally impelled me to leave that morning was that there was nothing left to eat. After the Oreos, I attacked the potato chips (they were stale, but what did I care?), cramming them in by the handful as I stood with eyes fixed on the wallpaper (sheaves of wheat, tied with blue bows), my mind void of any thought save what to eat next. Before I reached the bottom of the chip bag, licking the last greasy crumbs from its folds, I had the jar of peanut butter ready with a spoon, so my rhythm could continue uninterrupted.
Some blind drive had taken over my brain.
I had to leave, to find more to eat. Whereas roughly seventy percent of an ape’s time each day is devoted to finding food, hunters and gatherers need spend only a few hours a day.
But first I had to confront the damage. When I took off his T-shirt, my belly, usually concave, was swollen, as if last night’s frantic insemination had produced immediate fruit. Helpless, I looked away. I dressed as quickly as I could, not looking at myself—I, who usually spent so long posturing before the glass. The waistband of my skirt felt snug; my hair was oily and unwashed; I stank of sex. I spent a scant few minutes on my face, as if it were someone else’s, then, crumpling the empty packages and stuffing them into my handbag, I left the house—invisible.
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