I don’t need “support.” I need . . .
I need . . .
It occurs to me that I have no idea how that sentence might end.
“And Suzanne?” I ask. “Where does she fit into this?”
“Well, the nurse isn’t generally part of the follow-up team, but,” he adds, noticing something, “in this case we plan to involve her fully in the outpatient phase.”
I shrug, surprising in myself a flash of longing to find her and cling to her body, so solid and substantial, to hold on so that I never have to leave, never have to feel the chill of empty space around me.
“Oh, well,” I say, “whatever you experts decide.”
I watch the Frugal Gourmet, who doesn’t seem very frugal, ladling on butter and cream, talking about how much he loves to eat this and that. I watch a documentary on colon cancer, then part of a slasher movie, then an aerobics program, lots of Lycra. If I weren’t afraid someone would come into the dayroom, I would stand up and start flinging myself around, grinning fixedly like the women on the screen. But watching them bores me—what exactly do they suppose they’re doing?—so I channel-hop, black lace and leather, must be MTV, lipstick, pizza, talk show on impotence (there’s an inflatable implant now, a handy rubber bulb you keep in your pocket), more pizza, a new wasting disease: bodies that have no choice, men cachectic and bruised like rotting bananas—like me, when I used to bruise so easily—except these aren’t bruises. I stare at the screen, at their dark bewildered eyes.
Some kind of sadness comes over me, so I turn off the TV and go back to my room. I lie down on the bed, where I’ve spent so much time—where so much time has been eaten away—and I close my eyes, covering my face with my arm. The usual images start to arrive (white noise, mouthful of blood), but—behavior mod—I try to think about something else. I think about something lost, something sun-kissed, then, I can’t help it, I think of the wasting; I think of the waste.
Wasted bodies. Wasted lives.
For reassurance, I grasp my thighs and run my hands upward, probing for hipbones, but all I feel is flesh. Sitting up anxiously, I look down at my thighs, huge now, spread out to double their dimensions, with a Y-shaped fold where my belly meets them—or, more accurately, rests on them. Folding my arms across squishy breasts, I pinch a thick wad under each triceps, formerly tight fiber. I bend my neck forward, tucking in my chin till I feel the pad of fat that lives there now.
This is the body I must learn to inhabit. (To cohabit, rather: it feels like an alien fastened to me, reprogramming my DNA to produce itself instead of me.) I don’t know if I can: that spare, vacant frame gave me so much space to hide.
Can I learn to be so present?
Can I learn to be so full?
“Suzanne,” I say, interrupting her (she’s going on about “follow-up” and “monitoring” and did she say “relapse”?).
“Yup?”
I can’t think what it is I want to say. We’re getting ready for the shopping trip, and she’s coaxing me into my shoes, which I haven’t worn since I got here.
“I . . . oh, I don’t know.”
I gesture vaguely and then for some reason use that hand, while it’s in the air, to touch my knuckles to her cheek, just to know what it feels like, that downy, slightly dry, dappled skin of hers. It feels surprisingly firm and resilient, someone else’s face.
“Suzanne?” I say, this time more urgently.
“Yes?” she says.
“Suzanne, what am I going to do when I get out of here?”
“But, Josie,” she says, “we’ve been through all that lots of times. You’ll see me, you’ll see the nutritionist, you’ll see the doctor three times a—”
“No, I mean, what am I going to do?”
“You mean, what’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get to the dorm?”
No: that’s simple. Only two options: eat or not eat.
Then it strikes me that perhaps the larger question is equally simple. After a while, I try out this idea. “Well, maybe I only have two options.”
“Oh yeah? What are those?”
“Well, the same as anyone else. Live or die.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake—”
“And even if it’s, you know, I still have a choice: quickly or slowly.”
She stops what she’s doing (putting clothes, mine I suppose, into a garbage bag) and looks at me gravely, uncertain, trying to read my face. I watch the lines around her eyes relax as she decides I’m not serious.
She may even be right, for once.
“Oh well,” she says, shrugging, “if I were you, I’d go for slowly, same as everyone else.”
“But what’s the difference? The result is the same.”
“Yes,” she says, “but you get to live in the meanwhile.”
“Live?” I say. “Let’s not get carried away here.”
She snorts softly and returns her attention to the trash bag, but I keep going, something swelling inside me, some wave of hilarity beginning to surge.
“Live?” I repeat.
“Live?” I say. “What a novel idea!”
And we both laugh, shaking our heads, she because she thinks I’m joking, I because I think I’m not.
I thought I had it all figured out.
The less I swallowed, the more I declined, the more I hoped to pare things down to essentials. Why shouldn’t all problems have a single, bare-bones solution? I needed to discover what was left when excess was stripped away, when nothing survived but the self in its minimal form.
I thought the body could be redesigned as a perfect, self-sufficient machine. But the more I denied it, the louder it cried. The more I reduced it, the less I found. The more I wasted it, the more space it claimed, until my whole mind was under occupation.
Don’t say “I have a body,” Suzanne tells me: say “I am a body.” I can’t do that yet.
But if it were true, if I were a body, what would I be?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to acknowledge my great debt to other writers and theorists who have explored the phenomenon of anorexia nervosa, especially Hilde Bruch, Kim Chernin, David Garner, Susie Orbach, and L. M. Vincent. I am also deeply indebted to the following first-person accounts, insights from which are woven throughout Josie’s story: Portrait of an Anorexic by Maureen Ardell and Corry-Ann Ardell, Am I Still Visible? by Sandra Heater, Solitaire by Aimee Liu; The Art of Starvation by Sheila MacLeod, and Starving for Attention by Cherry Boone O’Neill. Finally, I would like to thank Pamela Painter, Kim Witherspoon, and Betsy Lerner for their blind faith and expert assistance, without which Life-Size might never have grown to just that.
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