“Ma’am?” asked the voice.
I laughed again. “But why thirteen?” I managed to gasp. “Don’t you know that’s an unlucky number?” In the silence that followed, it occurred to me that anyone hearing those spasms would mistake them for sobs.
“It’s not ‘acting out,’” I tell her. “I’m just not going to do it, that’s all.”
“It’s part of the therapy, Josie.”
“Well, as far as I’m concerned, the therapy is over.”
She looks at me.
“I’m cured!” I say, and we both laugh. I’m back in my room, as punishment for “acting out,” and she’s sitting with me while I address my lunch.
“Look,” I say, biting into a large cheese sandwich, “yum yum yum.”
“Yummee,” I say, crunching a carrot stick and chewing loudly, “can’t get enough of that ol’ vitamin A.”
“Ooh la la,” I say, “what do we have here? Dessert!”
She’s watching my performance with disapproving lips but amused eyes; with a small grunt and slight shake of the head, she picks up the newspaper—“Epidemiologist Notes Rising Rates of Rare Cancer”—pretending to ignore me. But I’m having a good time, I’m on a roll, smacking my lips and bulging my eyeballs like a demented character in a TV commercial. After every mouthful, I go, “Mmmn-mmmn!”
Nevertheless, the lunch is disappearing.
When I finally hung up, realizing that the line had gone dead, I sat motionless for a moment and then, registering what my glassy eyes were fixed on, began to scavenge in the chip bags. I crammed my mouth with salty crumbs and washed them down with something thick and sweet—no, slightly rancid—from the ice cream carton. In one of the trodden-on boxes on the floor, I found two petrified pizza crusts and gnawed on them, the jaw effort bringing tears to my eyes.
As a satisfying sickness consolidated itself between my ribs (if I still had ribs; I hadn’t checked them lately, hadn’t counted them, hadn’t pressed painfully between the bones), I curled up again, paws tucked under my chin.
But I couldn’t black out.
The afternoon light painted the inside of my eyelids a thin bloody red. My muscles ached, especially in the lower back. I could feel the gummy sweat between my toes. I began to itch all over.
The telephone had bored a hole in my dream; it was split open now, torn, and I didn’t know how to seal it again.
I itched.
I stank.
The room smelled like a sewer, with putrid overtones.
I decided to take a shower.
Next, draw an image of your own body (life-size) on the blank paper provided for you. The therapist will then ask a bystander to draw his or her image of you, next to yours. Finally, the therapist will stand you against the wall, arms outspread, while he traces your actual outline with a crayon. These three depictions—the patient’s, the stranger’s, and the rapist’s—will provide material for analysis and for subsequent Body Image Awareness Exercises.
I thought it would be possible, if I tried hard enough, to shower without looking at my body. If I stayed away from the mirror, if I didn’t look down, if I slid the bulky bar of soap across me without my hand touching flesh, surely I could stay invisible, undefined in space, for just a little longer? No one had looked at me for (I think) weeks; a body that isn’t looked at doesn’t exist.
But something went wrong. Out of habit, perhaps—or perhaps, as at an accident scene, out of horrified lust to witness the worst—I glanced down and, through the steam, saw an immense mound, soft and swollen as risen dough.
Something gave way in me, and if I hadn’t been in the shower I think I would have crumpled to the floor.
All to do again, all to do again: the awful struggle would never end. Not even for a second could I relax my surveillance; my dark, larval feeding, my drugged defection, had been a luxury I could never afford. I would have to start over, drawing the bounds again, etching the skeletal self again from that blurred mass bleeding at the edges (bad color, cheap funnies—but no joke, no punch line, the last frame’s missing, printer’s mistake).
I got out of the shower, toweled myself (keeping my eyes fixed front), combed my hair, and put on a clean pair of sweatpants (but no underwear, because the elastic would bind), clean socks, and an oversized T-shirt (no bra, for the same reason). In the bathroom cabinet, I found a sheet of small red pills, only three of which had been popped out of their bubble pack. I swallowed the remaining nine with tap water; they went down easily, but the glass slipped out of my hand and shattered on the floor.
A terrible little cry escaped me. This was more, much more, than I could take.
Leaving the shards where they had sprayed, I ran out of the bathroom, dived face downward on the couch and writhed, pulling the long, fine hair on the back of my head until the roots gave way. I whimpered and groaned until, tasting salt, I realized I had gnawed the skin off my lower lip. To stop the damage, I bit deep into the back of my hand; a familiar cold tingle wormed over me, and I heard someone laugh through the wall and then laugh again and then applaud.
I stood up and took a bow and the room was very large. There was lots of cold, curved space between objects, one of which was me. I understood that I could be both here and there at the same time and wondered why I had never noticed this before. I wanted to stare at myself in the bathroom mirror to reflect on this (and also to check for insects in my hair).
Oh, broken glass. Put on, what?—winter boots, for protection.
It crunched and grated under my feet, scraping against the tile with a sound that sent spasms of sensation through my solar plexus. I became distracted by this sensation and began a little dance, first stomping like a wine presser and then shuffling like Mr. Bojangles, to recreate the sound and its awful, exquisite twinge.
But soon the glass was too finely ground to make much noise, so I lost interest in the dance but couldn’t remember why I was there in the first place. Looking around, nothing occurred to me. The ants were really bad now, in my hair and on the floor—no, that was just broken glass and mud from my boots. Well—with a surge of purpose—I would clean it up.
A teaspoon, obviously, rather than a dustpan, seeing I didn’t have one. It looked so beautiful, like shaved ice or sugar crystals. Perhaps it would melt in my hot, wet mouth; perhaps it would score me going down, scarring my throat so I would never have to swallow anything again.
Open wide.
There’s a good girl.
18
I’M IN THE DAYROOM watching Julia Child (“Oh bother,” she says, dropping the fish on the floor, as if millions of people weren’t watching her do something intimate, obscene), when Suzanne puts her head in and says, “Tomorrow morning?”
“What?” I ask, still thinking about saumon en papillote: why would anyone eat a dead fish baked in a paper bag? (Then it comes back to me: a page from my loose-leaf binder. Just one. I had to put something in my mouth.)
“Tomorrow morning,” she says. “For the shopping.”
Ah yes. The shopping. Shopping therapy.
Art therapy. Physical therapy. Nutritional therapy. Body image therapy. Frog therapy. And now, before the inmate can re-enter the world, shopping therapy.
I thought she was kidding when she first brought it up (humor therapy?), but it turns out she isn’t. Predischarge routine, according to the doc. (Discharge: ugly word, gynecological word, cottage cheesy.) The nurse will take you shopping for an appropriately sized wardrobe.
“What about all my old clothes?”—my size ones, my “petites,” my precious collection from the children’s department?
“You can bring them in later, if you like, and we’ll go through them and bundle them up and send them to the needy.”
I am the needy. I need those labels to define an occupied zone: myself. I need those garments to contain me, to keep me within bounds (yes, doctor, I know I’m not supposed to think like this anymore. Fetishism? I thought that had something to do with feet).
Shopping
lessons: the idea is laughable, or would be if it didn’t frighten me so much. That’s right, teach me to consume. What else was I schooled in for sixteen long years? What else did my mother teach me: what else did she know? So easy, then, to believe you were entitled to anything you wanted; so difficult, now, to imagine buying even a comb. (Automatically, I touch my head and run my fingers through several times: only five hairs come out today. She’s told me to stop counting, but I can’t.)
Behavior mod, she calls it. (Behavior Mod and the Rockers. Behavior Mod and the Off-Their-Rockers.) But over the years I managed to modify my own behavior, instituting a system of punishment and reward. First there was a rule that I had to rearrange the closet or the bathroom cabinet before I bought anything, even a tube of toothpaste; then there was the rule that I had to throw something out before I could buy anything new; then the rule that I should have nothing in the house that I didn’t use every day; then, finally, the taboo on buying anything at all. Discipline for the spirit: to make things last, to do without. To use sparingly—as it says on the tube of skin medication the doctor has prescribed for me (it also says “apply to affected areas”: I don’t know where to start).
“Why,” a fellow grad student once asked—as if it were any of her business, the plump, overpainted parakeet— “do you wear the same clothes every day?”
“I don’t,” I pointed out, icily. “I have three pairs of jeans and the sweatshirts are different colors.” (Black and gray.)
“Nor do I see any reason,” I added, looking her up and down, hoping she would never talk to me again, “to become a slave to consumerism.” As if it were a moral position. As if it were a choice.
“I can’t,” I bleat, “I just can’t.”
“I’ll be there to help you,” she says, folding towels and flattening the edges efficiently with her freckly hand.
“But you don’t understand—”
“Jo, I do.”
How can she?
She’s so sensible, she probably just thinks, Oh, I need some socks, and goes right out that same day and picks a few and pays for them and takes them home and puts them on. How could she understand my weeks of anxious procrastination, my shame when I bring the sordid little purchase home, chewing through the tags and hiding it away, sometimes for months, before I can wear it? Does she, in the department store’s desert air, look down at her body and not know whether to head for the size twos or the size twelves? Does she stand paralyzed before a rack of skirts, unable to answer the question, Am I the kind of person who would wear that?
How do you dress someone who’s not there? What would a missing person wear?
I never planned to disappear.
My goal was a modest one: to be perfect.
But something went wrong, and I did without so much that I almost undid myself (so I’m told, by the doctor, who I don’t believe, and the nurse, who I do).
I even remember the moment I became conscious of this —this mission, you could call it, this vocation. Spring semester, sophomore year (eighty-eight pounds): walking home from classes one dazzling blue day, I was overwhelmed by the brightness, which, inhaled, expanded like helium in the head. My brain became a radiant blur, my limbs very long and light, and as I tried with slow-motion steps to negotiate the oddly slanting sidewalk, I knew I would never make it. (This happens, when you eat only every eighteen hours. I fainted in the drugstore once, hitting my chin on the counter’s metal edge. I slid down the wall to the floor at the registrar’s office, waiting to pay a bill. I learned, over time, how to stand up: very carefully.)
But that day I found a way to keep myself going. Concentrate, I said. Focus on this sensation, because the worse you feel, the better you are. The worse you feel, the better you are—the emptier, the freer, the purer. Know how it feels to be human, when all insulation (money, for instance, and fat) has been stripped away. Think of all the bodies on this planet which have no choice.
“The worse you feel, the better you are,” I repeated, chanting it inside my head, timing my steps to its insistent tetrameter.
That kept me going for quite a few years.
And by the end I didn’t need it anymore. I had reached such a pitch of discipline that my own abstention was beyond my control. Hunger had become abstract, food a foreign body, inert as stone (unless it had a strong smell—bread, meat, dark chocolate—in which case a valve in my throat would revolt). Most of the time, I couldn’t imagine forcing masticated matter down my esophagus; it fascinated and disgusted me to catch someone in the act. In the campus cafeteria one day, sipping a Tab and trying to concentrate on a crossword puzzle, I found myself staring, appalled, at a fat woman cramming hamburger into her mouth. And then chewing, con brio. It was the lewdest sight I could imagine (except, perhaps, a pregnant woman, every kind of appetite inscribed on her flesh). How could anyone do something so indecent in public, especially someone who had no right to eat at all? I stared and stared, deafened by a loud, loose rattling in my ears.
A while later, I realized that I was still staring, forgetting to blink, though she had long since left. That happened, too: missing a reel of the movie, or seeing, for a spell, only the black space between frames.
“Frankly,” the nurse says, “I don’t understand how you were even functioning in that condition.”
“I was functioning perfectly well, thank you very much. I didn’t waste time eating and sleeping and chasing after sex like everyone else. I just studied all the time, I was a kind of a, kind of a ‘star’ in the Econ Department.”
This seems plausible enough. I’m not going to tell her that I remember almost nothing from those long, mute, vitreous days, the six months or so before I came here. I remember only how slowly they unspiraled and what an effort it was to breathe.
And I remember Jane’s face when she saw me in the shower. She walked in by accident once, soon after I moved in. She’d never seen me without layers of baggy clothes, and I made sure she never did again (unless, of course, she spied on me through the door, which, come to think of it, she probably did). This was precisely why I hadn’t wanted a roommate in the first place, but after my trip to the emergency room I decided, perhaps too hastily, that I shouldn’t live alone. Something had rattled me—claustrophobia, I think, or some other kind of craziness—so I gave up the studio (that smell of scouring powder) and moved my books, my suitcase, and my typewriter to Jane’s place, which was orderly and rent-controlled. She was a grad student in Biology (“Quiet, considerate person looking for similar to share”), a solid, dog-faced girl who lived on beer and peanut butter sandwiches. Our only real fight occurred when I asked her please to keep her jumbo economy-sized extra-crunchy peanut butter at the lab rather than at home. “Just who do you think you are?” she asked me—a good question.
Otherwise, she stayed out of my way, while I tried to be quiet and considerate and not too neat. (But those hairs in the drain, that unrinsed spoon in the sink . . .)
I think she believed me when I said I bought all my meals at school. I think she believed me when I said I was allergic to the glue on postage stamps (so would she please lick one for me). I think she believed that I had Crohn’s disease.
“Come off it, Josie,” says Suzanne. “You know she saw right through you all along.”
Did she? How would I know? How are you supposed to know what someone else sees, looking at you? I was approaching transparency, my blue hands blood-red against the light: perhaps she could see right through me. Perhaps everyone could.
“It’s time,” she says softly, “to start telling the truth.”
But I never have told the truth. How could I start now?
“I’m cured,” I tell the doctor, “large as life, ready to go back into the world as a mature, productive individual.” He doesn’t think this is funny and keeps repeating, in an earnest croak, that the hardest part is about to begin. “I’ve had it up to here with the hardest part,” I pun, gesturing, but he doesn’t seem to get it. Then, as if announcing that I’
ve won the lottery, he tells me we’ll be seeing each other three times a week for “outpatient therapy.”
“Can’t wait,” I reply.
I’ll be seeing the dietician, too, for “nutritional counseling.” I’ve agreed to live in the graduate dorm (but in a single room: no more roommates, no other bodies in the same space), and I’ve “contracted” with the “treatment team” to eat three meals a day in public. (I imagine the dining hall, the banging plastic trays, the clatter, the yelling, the masticating crowds, the stale, mealy smell of the steam, the fogged Plexiglas shield, and the food itself, buckets and buckets of it, heaps, piles, vats. A buzz of terror goes through me, as if from a cattle prod; that’s where the “biofeedback” and “relaxation training” are supposed to help. And the “menu selection” lessons from Miss Sausage-Calves.)
I don’t know if any of this is going to work. But what choice do I have? (A rhetorical question: I know what choice I have. And it’s comforting to know it’s always there.)
“I beg your pardon?”
Group therapy, he says. Assertiveness training.
“Not on your fucking life,” I respond, demonstrating, I hope, that I don’t need the latter.
Target weight, he insists.
“But I thought I was there. I weigh a hundred and seven, don’t I, don’t I”—staring down at my gross belly, panicking at the thought of ever reading those numbers on the scale.
“One-oh-seven?” he asks. “What on earth gave you that idea?”
“I thought—”
“Josephine,” he says, “it’s only been eight weeks. You’re still a long way from that. But we think you’re at a weight now where normal physiological functioning is possible.”
Normal physiological functioning. Growth and bleeding and hunger and decay. A long, slow rotting; meat going bad. Thanks a lot, doc.
“Doctor,” I say, in a sudden panic, “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“You’ll have a lot of support,” he says, reaching over to pat me, molding the air above my right deltoid in a manner meant to reassure.
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