“Okay,” I said, my heart fluttering, and me hating it for reacting that way.
I realized, even before the night of the social, that he was a threat to my safe life, but knowing it doesn’t seem to help. Yet, I can’t seem to help myself. More and more, I approach him, engage briefly, and then flit away quickly. He just sits there and waits with solid amusement, watching me with a predatory smile.
I also know he is letting me find my way to him, so I will be the one who is culpable. He won’t have done anything wrong. I wonder if the others have noticed my fascination. I am sure they have. We all watch each other so closely but we are also caught up in our own lives: Kenneth rushes in and out; Meg is bruised, swollen, and miserable; Brit is searching and desperate; and me, well, what about me? What do they see? I have no way of knowing. I want them to see a successful, happily married woman who has everything; a woman who has made all the right choices and who lives a precise, neatly organized life.
But what about the real me? The chaotic me? What about the perpetually hungry me, the me who is drawn to Max as inexorably as a small, curious cat wanting to get close to a bear?
Max doesn’t show up the day after the social, so he must have come in early, placed the cactus and the note on my desk, and then left.
“Nice plant.” Kenneth stops at my desk.
“Thank you,” I say. “His name is Gordon.”
“You mean like Flash Gordon,” Brit says, yawning.
I am startled. Not a lot, it seems, gets past Brit. “No,” I say nervously. “Like my first dog.”
“He looks very phallic,” Brit says. “Gordon, the yellow dildo head with big spikes. Oh, my stomach is so sore,” she groans. “Please give me back the Messages book, I promise I won’t cry when I read it. I need to look up ‘irritable bowel syndrome.’ I am in terrible pain. Look how swollen my stomach is. I couldn’t even wear Chris’s wardrobe choice this morning. God, he was so pissed off. But I told him there was no way I could get the zipper closed and then, if I did, it would be like having a wire cutting into my poor tender flesh. Oh, man, the pain is awful.” She rubs her hugely distended stomach.
I hand over the book. “Maybe you should see a doctor,” I say.
“Nah, it’s a nervous condition. I get it when I get stressed. It’s like I swell from my knees up to my breasts, not that I need to swell mind you. I am quite big enough as it is.”
She pages through the book. “Hmmm, ‘irritable bowel syndrome,’ see spastic colon. ‘Blow out,’” she reads.
They are frantically sorting and shuffling ideas. There was never any form of trustworthy support when they were growing up and they have learned to take care of themselves in a “self-made person” manner. They’ve also learned to try to take care of everyone and everything in a desperate, “disaster-deflecting” psychology. Their feeling is that “I’m all I’ve got” and if they fail, then all hell will break lose.
She stops. “I think you should look at your addiction to that book,” I say, unable to admit I too am a frequent sufferer of irritable bowel syndrome, which is another reason I wear a lot of floating fabric. I can distend to nine months pregnant in a matter of minutes. My body, the human balloon.
Brit laughs and pats her breasts. “I am thinking of having a breast reduction,” she says, cupping her generous chest. “Seriously. These fuckers are huge. I’d have to stop smoking though first and get myself all healthy. I hear it’s quite a painful thing. Hey, I want to tell you some figures I found, from Dove. I am going to use them in my screenplay. I am not sure how though. I’m actually thinking of making a movie – like a low-budget, reality-based, hand-held, gritty number, and maybe one girl is telling another about her body issues and stuff, kind of like the chat you and I just had about irritable bowel although I could see you weren’t listening.”
“Uh huh,” I say, noncommittal.
“Okay, so this is from a study the Dove Self-Esteem Fund did in 2004, but I bet it’s still relevant today. I found it online; there is loads of this data out there. I am telling you man, women need to hear this shit.”
“I hope you’re going to be a little more poetic in your screenplay,” I say and she grins at me.
“Now that I have your attention,” she says, “pull up a chair and listen. You will be informed and saddened. Only 2% of women describe themselves as beautiful, only 5% feel comfortable as describing themselves as pretty, and only 9% feel comfortable describing themselves as attractive.”
“Who are these women?” I want to know. “I mean how old are they, where do they live, what ethnic group are they, how much do they earn, what do they do for a living? I think ‘women’ is a bit of a generalization, wouldn’t you?”
“I think you are way too cynical. These guys wouldn’t get this stuff wrong, this is fact,” Brit asserts. “Here’s more. More than two-thirds of women strongly agree that ‘the media and advertising set an unrealistic standard of beauty, that most women can’t ever achieve.’ Seventy-five per cent say they wish the media did a better job of portraying women of diverse physical attractiveness, including age, shape, and size. Another study found that over 50% of women say their body disgusts them. And, the body fat of models and actresses is at least 10% lower than that of healthy women.”
“Only 10%?” I ask, thinking I could drop another 10% fairly easily. Brit throws a pencil at me.
“Six out of ten girls would be happier if they were thinner and while only 19% of teenage girls are overweight, 67% think they need to lose weight.”
“From what I’ve seen lately,” I say, “67% of teenage girls should lose weight but only 19% of them are trying.”
Brit shoots me a dark look. “You are hopeless,” she says. “Don’t you want us to be free from all this crap?”
Not if it means I have to get fat, I immediately think. I mumble something in Brit’s direction and she scowls at me and turns to her computer, signaling discussion ended. I can hardly blame her.
Eating disorders are exhausting
FRIDAY NIGHT I AM WATCHING TV with Freddo, thinking about the statistics Brit told me earlier that day. I am sad, thinking about all the unhappy women, struggling with their bodies and with food. I feel exhausted by it all.
You know what no one ever tells you about an eating disorder? It makes you so very tired. It is more exhausting than you can ever imagine; all the calculating, worrying, planning, obsessing, fixing, repenting, gearing up, watching, eating, not eating. There is no respite, not even in sleep; that is, if you can sleep.
I am sleeping less and less, and taking more sleeping pills. Sometimes, inexplicably, I look longingly at the floor next to my bed. I think I could sleep better there, on the cold hard wood. Sometimes I think I don’t deserve the softness of my bed. Sometimes it’s not even that; it’s that the hardness of the floor seems reassuring in a way I don’t understand at all.
I have just finished eating supper and I am still hungry. But really, who could be hungry after eating an entire head of cauliflower? No one, except me. But then again, no one, except me, would ever eat an entire head of cauliflower.
I am so tired, and even though I am only eating pure, clean things, I feel so befuddled most of the time.
I wonder what Brit is doing. She is quite manic these days, all fired up about her screenplay. I imagine her clacking away at her computer late into the night, finding more gems on the web. I wish I could find something to get that passionate about.
I think I’ll go to the mall tomorrow and buy some new bed linen. Maybe all I need in my life is a set of 400-thread count Egyptian cotton and it will be sayonara insomnia. Who was it who said shopping fills the void? Maybe I’ll get lucky and kill two birds with one stone; my hungry void will be filled and I’ll get a good night’s sleep.
Out of the mouth of babes
SATURDAY. MY BED LINEN SHOPPING expedition proves hopeless. I veer off into the mall washroom, lock myself in a cubicle, and hear a bunch of kids come in.
The cubicle next
to me soon fills with bustling little bodies.
The conversation between two of the kids stops me cold.
“I’ve got a fat bum,” one informs the other.
“Me too,” a second one replies. “And I’ve got a fat tummy too.”
“Me too,” the first agrees. “And I have to lie down on the floor to get my jeans up.”
“Yes, me too,” the second one says.
I lean down to peer under the gap that connects the toilets. I am hopeless at guessing children’s ages but I know one thing, these kids are really young. All I can see are tiny, jean-clad legs and miniature feet in pretty, strappy sandals. I could fit one entire foot in the palm of my hand. I open the door and join a woman at the washbasins, who, judging by her conversation with them, is the mother of some of the group but not all.
I have an overwhelming urge to grab the little girls and smother them with kisses and reassure them that everything they have said is wrong, that they are beautiful, will always be beautiful, and what they clearly have been taught, is rubbish, and they should never listen to things like that.
I look curiously at the woman in charge of the girls and it is no surprise that she is rail-thin and expensively and exquisitely dressed. As I near her, to dry my hands, I think that her perfume probably costs more than I earn in a month. I want to tell her she is teaching her children all the wrong things and that they will suffer for years because of her ignorance, her stupidity, and her shallow superficiality.
But I don’t because, of course, I can’t, so I leave and go about my day.
How do we go about reconditioning our minds from all the things we have learned at such a young age? I still feel guilty when I eat in front of my parents and I am sorry every day that I fail them by not being thin.
But I can’t blame them for my issues. They are good, loving parents who just wanted the best for me. Not like the mother of a girl I went to school with, who told her fourteen-year-old daughter, Joanne, to look at her plate of food and imagine it writhing with worms. Joanne ended up severely anorexic and took her friend Nichola with her; they both lost all their hair and most of their adolescence. Nichola’s parents were great, although, somewhat pedestrian in their views. They were flummoxed by her eating disorder, had no idea how to cope at all. They separated her from Joanne and tried to make her eat. As if an eating disorder is about food. Food is just the artist’s tool for tormented expression of all the pain that lies beneath.
So anyway, Nichola latched onto me and eventually I too was only drinking two small bottles of pineapple juice a day and I got really skinny and could fit into tiny purple jeans, with my hipbones sharp and lovely. Nichola moved, we lost touch, and I still can’t look at pineapple juice without puckering.
Sometimes I think the onslaught just comes at us from all sides and for some of us it sticks, while others could care less. Odds are those little girls will grow up just fine, full of bouncing self-esteem and a carefree love for life. Or not.
On Monday I tell Brit about the little girls. “Do you think there’s any hope for them?” I ask. “Should I have said something to the mother?”
Brit snorts. “Like what? She would have probably called security or given you the phone number of her shrink.”
Brit goes very quiet, the kind of quiet that tells me something is up.
“Spill the beans,” I say. “Come on, I know they’re there, Brit. What’s up? Tell me about your weekend. How’s the screenplay?”
“Well, since you ask,” Brit whips out her notebook. “I have done some fascinating research. Wait till you hear this.”
“Bring it on, “ I tell her. Perhaps I am hoping I’ll somehow find a cure if I follow in the wake of Brit’s findings, like maybe all this is a vicarious form of therapy.
“Well,” she says, “I went to a talk on the weekend, about eating disorders. I thought it might give me some background info, some facts, I suppose.”
“And was it helpful?” I hope I sound casual. I keep my head down and my voice even. “What was it on? How did you even hear about it?”
“National Eating Disorder Information Centre,” Brit says. I immediately want to make a note of the name, but of course I can’t, that would be a dead giveaway. So I try to commit the name to memory. “In conjunction with this eating disorder place that was founded because of a girl who died – Sheila or something.”
Brit gets up and comes around to my desk, her notebook in hand. I am not at all happy about her proximity because I figure she’ll be able to read my face, which is the last thing I want. But I lean back in my chair, all very relaxed, and pretend I am a normal person, having a discussion about some other suffering demographic of the population; a demographic of which I most certainly am not a part.
Brit is animated. “It was called ‘Is Nature or Nurture to Blame?’” She reads off her notebook, “‘Genes versus Environment: A Researcher’s Look at Why Eating Disorders Develop.’ And how is that for synchronicity? It answers all your questions, about those kids.” She beams at me. “Were either of them a twin?”
I am startled by her question. “Uh, I don’t think so. I think they were just friends, although maybe they were non-identical twins….”
“Fraternal twins,” Brit the new expert informs me. “Okay, so here is the lowdown on the prognosis of genetics versus environment. This woman studied twins….”
“What woman?”
“You are impossibly anal about details,” Brit says. “Let me tell my story and all shall be revealed. She’s a doctor from the States, very lovely and very normal-looking. I have to tell you though, there were some really scary people at the talk. This one girl, I could have put one hand around her entire thigh. I exaggerate not. She gave me the shivers, and I thought she should have been in hospital, not at some talk thing. I didn’t even know they made jeans that skinny; they were like jeans for a six-foot ten-year-old. Just weird, man.”
I fill with envy at the thought of the girl and her stick legs. “Were a lot of them thin?”
Brit thinks about it. “Not really. Well, a few of them were. It’s like there were extremes. Just about the only normal-bodied women was the doctor and me and maybe a couple of others. Anyway, I tried not to stare, you know. I wanted to give the rest of them their privacy.”
“Likely, most of ‘them’, as you call them, were normal people who have friends or family who are afflicted,” I say. “Most of ‘them’ were like you, there to get educated.”
Brit shrugs. “What was totally bizarre, if you ask me, was all the food – the talk was in this theatre, right? So I got all signed in, which reminds me that there were some really old people there, too, like in their forties. You’d think that by then you would have gotten over an eating disorder. I mean, you are so over-the-hill, what’s the point? You may as well just eat.”
“Brit!” I interrupt. “That’s a terrible thing to say. What, you think there’s a specific birthday that comes along and people wake up and go, ‘hey, look, I’m cured?’”
I dream of that, but I know I have as much chance of that happening as winning the lottery, and since I don’t buy lottery tickets or stare my issues in the eye, my odds on either are slim.
Brit doesn’t seem to be listening to me. “Anyway, so I went inside and there was like this mini-convention thing happening, little booths with tables laden with all these pastries. I mean real pastries, the deluxe version, doughy, fried, iced, custard-filled, almond-covered, chocolate-topped pastries.”
My mouth starts watering. “Did anybody eat them?”
“I did! I had two almond and chocolate croissants. But I was about the only one who ate. Most of the people there drank coffee or hung onto their water bottles.”
“So what then?” I ask. “You were telling me about the talk, the twins, the research.”
“Right, right. Okay, so listen. So this doctor talked about how body image and eating disorders dominate cultural ideals in industrialized nations and she said that eating disorders hav
e been around even during times when thinness was not considered the ideal shape for a woman. Therefore, one can conclude culture is not to blame.”
“A big jump in logic, don’t you think?”
Brit waves at me to be quiet, studies her notebook and looks confused. “I thought I wrote more neatly than this. Well, anyway, the first documented case of anorexia was diagnosed by Richard Morton in 1689 and since thin was not ‘fashionable’ then, what accounted for its occurrence?”
I can think of a million reasons. I shrug.
“Genetics! So the doctor studied that and found that the heritability of anorexia is 48-67%, bulimia is 54-85%.”
Oh, God, I feel sick. “That high a percentage of women all inherited eating disorders?” I am horrified.
Brit chews her pen and examines her notes. “No, wait, hang on a sec,” she says. “It doesn’t mean that. I wrote this part down very carefully. The doc said heritability doesn’t indicate the percentage of people who inherit the illness. But it is an estimate of the how much potential there is within a person for an illness to develop due to genetic factors.”
“I truly do not understand that,” I tell her. “Do you have a version from Eating Disorder Statistics for Dummies?”
“Uh, it tells us that 54-85% of the reason that women in the U.S. differ as to whether they have bulimia nervosa or not, is due to the fact that they have different genes.” She says this with a triumphant flourish as though all is explained.
“Okey-dokey,” I say.
“Well the cause for schizophrenia is 70% inherited, so why not? Eating disorders appear to be as biologically inheritable. But while we might assume the figures to be higher, only .5% of women have anorexia, and 1-3% have bulimia, so it’s much more rare than schizophrenia. It just feels like more to us because we have a high percentage here in our office.”
I go white while Brit continues, oblivious to the stress her comment has caused me. “Although Meg is an alcoholic too, so she is a cross-addicted person,” she adds and I am filled with relief. She’s referring to Meg. Not me.
The Hungry Mirror Page 21