I didn’t recognize myself. It was strange, the hollows and points that revealed themselves as the weight came off. I was fascinated by my hip bones, my clavicle, the knobs in my wrists and knees. Suddenly there were all these body parts I hadn’t noticed before. It was exciting. I went to bed wondering what feature would surface next. Perhaps cheekbones or some useful new appendage, like a tiny third arm I could use as a coat hook.
Other changes were more troubling. I was disappointed to discover I had an itty-bitty head. My birthday picture that year shows me with my skin stretched tight across my face, my head no larger than the scoop of light ice cream (90 calories) on my fat-free angel food cake (100 calories).
Still, it was better than a fat ass. After all, I was about to start junior high, about to be dumped into a cruel and lawless society. Worse, the television was suddenly inundated with ads for a new diet center whose owner had a name remarkably similar to mine.
I have never been called anything but Jenny, and my life had been just great until 1982. Suddenly this near-namesake was everywhere, urging America to shed its excess flab. I could picture the next six years of my life, and they looked like this:
“Jenny Traig, you need to call Jenny Craig.”
There was no way I’d survive. I was going to school with one girl named Christy Buttsick and another named Karen Vaginos, but I knew I’d have a harder time than either of them. My choices were to lose weight or to start studying for my GED.
So this sudden weight loss was a blessing. By the time Jenny Craig had saturated the junior high consciousness, I was already painfully thin. Classmates tried to make Jenny Craig jokes once or twice, but it didn’t really work. I’d done away with the punch line. The gag would peter out: “Uhh…Jenny Craig…looks like you’ve already been there…uh, yeah.” Besides, there were plenty of other things to tease me about. My tiny head, for one.
I’d been hoping for a swelled one. A few of my mother’s friends had lost a lot of weight and afterward they’d beamed with pride. “I just feel fantastic,” they said. “It’s like I’ve stepped out of a cocoon. A cocoon of fat. Now I’m a beautiful butterfly. And I know I’ll never be fat again, because nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.”
I didn’t think it felt so hot. It was frightening, being this small. Before, I’d been big enough to take on anyone. Now that I was going to school with hulking ninth-graders, with kids whose beards were so heavy they had to shave between classes, I was too small to protect myself.
I was also freezing. Without the extra layer of fat I was cold all the time. My parents kept the thermostat set to a balmy 60 degrees. Years later, when my parents dropped several sizes on a stint in Weight Watchers, they would issue a formal apology for keeping it so cold. “We had no idea,” they swore. “It’s a wonder you didn’t use your bedroom furniture for kindling.”
It was turning into a miserable year. I was cold and unhappy and obsessed with food. At this point I didn’t particularly want to lose any more weight, but I couldn’t stop. I had learned to take satisfaction in lack, in the spaces between my ribs, in the things I denied myself. Why would I stop? I was so good at it. We could have charged admission.
Or maybe we couldn’t; everyone had seen this show before. I was the first anorexic in my grade, but the disease itself was nothing new. I knew eighth-graders who subsisted on celery and ice water, ninth-graders who exercised three hours a day. We read books about it, gave oral reports on it, saw after-school movies about it. I loved nothing more than made-for-TV dramas, but I was a little embarrassed to be starring in my own. It was all there, all the tired touchstones and topoi. Cue the scene of me examining my vertebrae in the mirror, of me crying at the dinner table, of my parents pleading with me to eat, of my sister tearfully apologizing for calling me fat, asking if this was all her fault.
Cue the anthropological analysis. I was trying to be perfect, like the girls in the magazines. I was ashamed of all I had and I felt too guilty to eat. I was trying to take up less space in the world. Or: I was trying to delay puberty, to make myself sexless, scared that if I opened my mouth for a grape, Mickey Rourke would follow with a shovel full of cherry pie filling. And if I wasn’t scared 9½ Weeks, I was scared of nine months, for what was pregnancy except an exercise in getting appallingly fat? Or: I wasn’t sick, society was. How ironic that my mother’s family had come to America to escape famine. They didn’t know that famine would become our national industry, that we would learn to market it, to repackage it, new and improved.
Oh, whatever. Eating disorders are unfortunate but inevitable, a rite of passage, expected among girls of a certain class. Of course I developed anorexia. Given my background, it would have been surprising only if I hadn’t. There’s a great tradition of the holy fasting girl, and an even greater tradition of the upper-middle-class overly self-conscious dieting girl. Anorexia is the suburban equivalent of getting jumped into a gang. It’s like a bat mitzvah, only with fewer ice sculptures and more laxative abuse. It’s a trope. It’s a cliché.
Even at twelve, I knew this. It had already been done to death, and this bothered me. At least some of my previous compulsions had been inventive. But this, this. This was embarrassing. So it was a relief, sort of, when the disease mutated into something a little more interesting. By February I was starting to do things the girls in the after-school movies didn’t. They didn’t wash their celery three times in salt water, then carefully dry it on clean paper towels before deciding it wasn’t clean enough to eat and throwing it out. They didn’t hide Ziploc bags full of meatballs in their sweater drawer while they combed the Torah to see if it was okay to eat them. They didn’t throw out blood oranges because they were convinced that they were, in fact, infused with blood.
I did. Something had changed. I was still obsessed with food, but suddenly dietetics weren’t the concern. I had discovered kashrut, or rather, I had invented a new and super-sterile form. This was the master class, an advanced mathematics. Now I wasn’t counting just calories, but things you couldn’t see, atoms and associations and invisible demerits.
Now I was limiting my intake in an entirely different way. This was an extraordinary exercise in subterfuge, a tremendous feat of logic and dissection. Every meal was a puzzle to be pieced apart and rationalized. Behold, the dinner of meat loaf with tomato sauce, baked beans, and broccoli. This was my theater of war, with meat and dairy troops to divide and conquer, pork products to vanquish and defeat.
It was an excruciating and painstaking process. First, I would drink my milk just to get that out of the way. The broccoli was buttered, dairy, so that came next, but that was trickier. It had been buttered from the tub, which was just tainted beyond belief, loaded with not-kosher toast crumbs, contaminated by knives that had cut steak and then come back to reload the baked potato. There were probably whole discs of pepperoni floating in there too, but who could find them under the big chunks of shrimp?
It was a mess. I had to blot off all the butter, and once the broccoli was bare, I could eat only enough to evade detection, since it was so unkosher that I probably shouldn’t be eating it in the first place. Then I would push food around my plate for twenty minutes or so, a pause between the meat and the milk.
“It’s too hot,” I explained, blowing on the lukewarm, congealing mass. “I’m just waiting for it to cool off.”
Finally it was time for the meat loaf, trickiest of all, deadly but compulsory. It was crowned by a tomato sauce topping that my mother made, inexplicably, with a powdered dairy creamer, which had to be scraped off and moved aside. The fork was now irretrievably tainted, so I would have to drop it and go get a new one. The next problem was that the meat had been baked in a loaf pan that had been greased with generic-brand shortening, containing lard, actual lard. The entire perimeter was tainted. Only the center could be eaten, and of this, as little as possible, because it wasn’t kosher beef to begin with. The beans were too porky to eat at all and had to be hidden under the meat loaf rinds.
>
“Very nice,” my sister observed, clearing the table. “Once again Jenny has turned her dinner into a work of art.” She cocked her head and peered at the meat loaf columns. “I shall title this one ‘The Barfenon.’”
But as long as I ate at least something substantive, I got away with it. At this point I’d been so weird about food for so long that the new weirdness went largely unnoticed. And my parents had given up on table manners long ago. We came to dinner in our bathing suits, sat on our feet, chewed with our mouths open, and belched at will. Only once did they actually banish one of us from the table. My sister was five and newly enamored of a rather colorful phrase. She was sent to finish her dinner down the hall. “If you’re going to use bathroom words at the dinner table, then you can eat your dinner in the bathroom,” my mother shouted after her. For Vicky this wasn’t a punishment but a novel pleasure. The neighbors happened to drop by in the middle of this and were baffled to find my sister sitting on the bath mat with her plate on the toilet seat, happily shoveling down her supper.
But some picking and stalling, that was fine. For months, my parents didn’t ask and I didn’t offer. To come right out and say it was unthinkable. Keeping kosher was so embarrassing and strange. My father had already put the kibosh on my earlier attempts to become a fruitarian, to go macrobiotic, to subsist on nothing but Alba shakes and fun-size candy bars. There was no way he was going to endorse kashrut.
Even if he had, even if we’d approached the whole process sanely, keeping kosher properly would have been impossible. In the early ‘80s, in rural California, there just wasn’t much kosher food available. You could get pickles and raisins and little else. People hadn’t gotten uptight about animal fats yet, and there was still lard and beef tallow in just about everything. In a civilized society you expect cereal and juice to be meat-free, but in 1983 that just wasn’t the case. There was meat in ice cream and frosting, in potato chips and pancake mix. Oh, not a lot, sure, but it was the little amounts that bothered me.
Was it because I had shrunk? I had lost all this weight. I was moving in the wrong direction, getting smaller, and my focus had shrunk, too. Now I had eyes only for details, specks, fine print. I lost interest in paperbacks and began reading packaging instead, studying ingredient lists with myopic fascination.
Soon I was spending all my free time looking up food additives in the encyclopedia. Most teens liked Tiger Beat. I was more interested in propylene glycol, sodium stearoyl lactylate, carrageenan, and xanthan gum. The things that could be in your food! The carmine that colored fruit punch, it turned out, was derived from lice. There were calf enzymes in cheese, snouts and sawdust in luncheon meat. I began writing exposes for the school newspaper on subjects like ‘Jerky: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You’ and ‘The Truth About Corn Dogs.’
It was around this time that I took to calling restaurants. At home, I could see my mother preparing dishes so I knew exactly what had been contaminated by tallow or broth, what had been baked in the pan where we once found a dead spider and hence was inedible. But in a restaurant they could be basting the lettuce with clam juice for all I knew. It was possible. I’d heard stories. It was widely rumored that the disgruntled busboys at one local establishment peed in the minestrone.
What concerned me most, however, were not the bodily fluids that went into the food but the ones that went onto the pans. Were they greasing them, and if so, were they using a nice, hygienic, vegetable-based spray like Pam, or did they reach right for the treyf and hepatitis-contaminated suet? I was especially worried about pizza pans and began calling pizzerias to ask for details. The employee who answered had invariably just fielded ten prank calls asking how thick her crust was and had no patience left for me.
“You want to know what?”
“What you use to grease your pans.”
“Oh, we use K-Y, just like Julia Child. When we run low on that we borrow a little motor oil from the delivery van. Okay? And if you call here again, I’m phoning the cops.”
The anorexia had been plenty annoying for everyone, but my new condition was even more irritating. I regretted that, but everything else about it captivated and absorbed me. Scrupulosity was anorexia amplified, anorexia applied to every area of life. Anorexics only worried about food. I worried about shampoo, shoe polish, water, air. Dust. What if some dust got in my mouth? Dust was composed of skin flakes, I knew, and human skin wasn’t kosher. It probably didn’t have any calories, sure, but what good is that when you’re going to hell?
Anorexia and scrupulosity are, in fact, fairly closely related. They are both obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders, treatable with the same medications, one an almost logical extension of the other. My severe bouts of scrupulosity were always immediately preceded by bouts of anorexia, and it’s not at all uncommon to suffer from both at one time or another. Simone Weil did, and the combination proved fatal when she managed to die of starvation at thirty-four. Saint Veronica died of the same thing at the same age, despite the fact that she allowed herself to gorge on five orange seeds every Friday. Saint Catherine, also dually afflicted, preferred to snack on pus.
It’s a strange thing, the eating habits of saints, told in tales that are not so much hagiography as gagiography. Oh, the stories: Saint Angela of Foligno liked to wash lepers and drink the runoff, growing ecstatic when the bathwater was chunky with scabs. Saint Marguerite-Marie Alacoque had similar tastes, relishing the phlegm and diarrhea of the infirm. At some point it seems it was fairly standard practice among the extremely devout to consume the bodily detritus of the lepers in their charge. This was especially common in Italy and France, which seems strange given the tastiness of the native cuisine. If an English nun chose, say, runny sore over spotted dick, no one could blame her.
But man. Pus. My eating habits were plenty weird, but the saints made me look healthy and normal. They made my sister look healthy and normal. But we had something in common, these saints and I, all of us weird in our own ways. I, Sister Infinity Fats, belonged to the same order. Instead of a habit, I had habits, but the principle was the same.
Scholars are careful to point out that the anorexia that plagued medieval saints was very different from the anorexia that plagues mall-going teens, and that’s true, but they bear some similarities. What binds us are the fundamental links between faith, fasting, and food, the holy trinity of the female religious neurotic from Saint Catherine to Cherry Boone O’Neill. Who knows why these things hold such appeal? Perhaps it’s because fasting humbles and purifies, or perhaps it’s just because it fosters a cheap and easy high.
Or maybe it’s just because, hell, we like getting our way. There is tremendous power in food refusal. Food, after all, is control. Anorexics are tiny, tanned Somali warlords, cutting off the supply of powdered milk and high-protein flour to the oppressed civilian fat cells. We are kitchen dictators, steadfast and zealous, righting everyone else’s wrongs. It’s a fantastic technique. We have nothing to do with our mouths but preach. Every time a girl refuses to eat, she one-ups Eve.
It may have been a brain-based organic condition that caused my weirdness with food, but it was the power dynamics that perpetuated it. What was the impetus to get better? For all the disadvantages – loose teeth, bad skin, downy fur – there were plenty of rewards. If you can keep the anorexia up long enough, you get presents for eating. Presents! And attention! My family revolved around me throughout my entire adolescence. My sister’s occasional teen partying was no competition for my skeletal fire and brimstone. Valley of the Dolls can’t trump Valley of the Dry Bones. I got all the attention. What was the reward for stopping? To get fat and be ignored, then go to hell when you die? No thanks.
My parents were tougher than most, always reluctant to indulge my craziness, but even they could only take so much, and I got my way as often as not. They caved. You want to subsist on breath mints today? Sure. Diet Coke popsicles for dinner? Okay, why not. And you need to spend half an hour inspecting the flatware? Fine. Sometimes it
just wasn’t worth the battle. It was never mentioned, but after my bat mitzvah pork quietly disappeared from the house. The transition was so serene and natural that it never occurred to me that this was for my benefit, and I was shocked the first weekend I came home from college when I opened the refrigerator and found an impenetrable wall of ham.
Without making a big deal of it, they accommodated me, riding out my flare-ups of anorexia and scrupulosity, accepting my grab bag of dietary idiosyncrasies. My mother quickly learned which margarines were parve, which brownie mixes were acceptable, which ingredients would make me fling myself down on the floor in a fit. When I became a vegetarian, she forged an acquaintance with tofu and seitan. And thus the dust would settle, for a time, until I relapsed and kicked it up the next time.
It was Atkins that put her over the edge. I still love my fad diets, and when the Atkins plan became popular a couple years ago I couldn’t resist. A few weeks into it, I went home for the weekend with my Ziploc bags of sugar-free chocolate and nuts. I was fixing myself a snack of cream cheese with ranch dressing when my mother asked if I’d prefer tortellini or rotelle for dinner. “Oh, neither,” I answered casually. “I’ve gone low-carb.” My mother didn’t say anything for a minute. I can’t be sure what she was thinking, but her expression registered something akin to murderous disbelief. Had her thoughts been captioned, I imagine they would have read like this: “I survived your anorexia. I acquiesced when you decided to keep kosher. I accepted the vegetarianism. I supported you even when you would eat nothing but dried fruit and untoasted English muffins. But this is a bridge too far. Pasta is all I have left. You will eat it, and you will like it’. ‘Tortellini or rotelle?” she repeated, glaring hard. “Tortellini,” I recovered. “And I’ll make the garlic bread.” It was a nice meal. The water glasses could have been a little cleaner, but we drank out of them anyway. No one got sick. No one got fat. No one got condemned to hell. For dessert, there was ice cream, and we all had a very nice time.
Devil in the Details Page 8