Hungry

by Sheila Himmel

  When Lisa started showing anorexic symptoms, Ned and I refused to believe it was more than another ripple of teenage turbulence. A storm we hadn’t anticipated, a disease we had barely known even existed; we were certain it would fade away, its place taken by some other problem, and then another, the way they usually do. In my head I was hoping to hear a doctor say, “This is in the range of normal. Lots of kids act and feel this way.”

  Lisa was overexercising, skipping meals, restricting foods, hating her body overall, and obsessing over how certain body parts (thighs, legs, stomach) looked. We were clueless about the sexual activity, that Lisa’s hunger for love and affection made her so vulnerable and exposed to harm. When I read the section she wrote above, I feel sick.

  Ned and I finally acknowledged that Lisa’s symptoms and behavior were problematic, and that she wasn’t going to grow out of them, like a pair of shoes. We went into full librarian and journalist mode. Frantic for a book to help explain Lisa’s eating problems, I kept coming back to Carolyn Costin’s Your Dieting Daughter: Is She Starving for Attention? It still sends one of the few clear signals in a cacophony of advice books. Costin spotlights what she calls “The Real Issues” that draw people to binge, purge, and restrict. They are what everyone wants:To be heard

  To fill up an emptiness

  To rebel or escape

  To control

  To distract from pain

  To gain attention

  To have fun and entertainment

  To have relationships

  All that made sense, but was new to us and we had to figure out how these hungers applied in our family. We continued our research. It turns out that people with a family history of eating disorders are twelve times likelier to develop an eating disorder than the general population, but we had no such history.

  I had plumped up in high school. Every afternoon I came home from school and arranged a sandwich, chips, and a milkshake on the kitchen table while I read the newspaper. Two and a half hours later, I’d eat dinner. During a fling with candy-making, my sister and I had learned that simply melting butter, brown sugar, and corn syrup in a pan makes chewy butterscotch, swirled around a spoon before it hardens. I’d have that or some ice cream and with my afternoon snack. And what do you know, I gained weight, adding to the usual miseries. An intuitive English teacher had told me not to worry so much, that for many girls high school is torture and real life begins in college. He was right. In college I found a place in the world, like Lisa had at camp. The love handles just went away.

  In matters of dress, the sixties were far less constricting than previous and later eras for self-conscious young women. Instead of worshipping one appearance goddess, we could aim for hippie or preppie, or make it up as we went along. Twiggy, the five-feet-seven-inch, ninety-two-pound British supermodel was a blip on the horizon, having only just begun to inspire anorexics like Karen Carpenter worldwide. Miniskirts certainly looked better on thin bodies, but at the same time the women’s movement was making inroads into attitudes about body acceptance and self-expression. Lots of women in Berkeley had stopped shaving their legs. Miniskirts were not hanging in their closets.

  I had chosen UC Berkeley over UC Santa Cruz because of my hair. All through high school I straightened my hair and shellacked it with hairspray. I knew it would be even frizzier in coastal Santa Cruz, and I’d be miserable. I hadn’t counted on the fog in Berkeley, which would have been a disaster had I stuck with the curl-free look. But liberation was at hand, bringing in Afros, ringlets, and every kind of natural and manufactured hairdo. Most different from what kids face now, in my era there was room to experiment with your appearance, and a middle ground.

  As when Lisa was born a good eater, I was happy that she wasn’t like me—an adolescent nerd. She had a much more active social life. She didn’t choose her college based on her hair.

  Those are the personal and social roots of Lisa’s anorexia. There are historical roots as well.

  Eating disorders, especially anorexia, are like what cancer was in my parents’ generation, and what tuberculosis was to the generation before that: the shameful, mysterious disease that scares everyone to death. Until somebody discovers the real physical causes, these diseases are invested with all kinds of treacherous powers to invade and destroy. In 1881, one year before bacillus was discovered as the primary cause of tuberculosis, a standard medical text listed these causes of TB: “hereditary disposition, unfavorable climate, sedentary indoor life, defective ventilation, deficiency of light, depressing emotions.” That is, getting tuberculosis was mostly your own fault. Patients absorbed the message that they must have done something to bring the disease on themselves. As do ED patients, and parents like me and Ned, today.

  “Just have a cracker. A slice of apple. A carrot?” we have pleaded with Lisa. We don’t say, but she hears, “How hard is that? Do you want to be sick? Just take a bite. You can start getting better right now!” We are like the people who don’t get migraines and don’t understand the sufferer lying in bed, wanting to die. We express sympathy but inwardly suspect malingering. Joan Didion describes this brilliantly: “Why not take a couple of aspirin,” the unafflicted say from the doorway, or “I’d have a headache, too, spending a beautiful day like this inside with all the shades drawn.”

  Cancer used to be that way. Even if the patient hadn’t done something to make her body turn against her, how could she have been so out of touch with her body not to know? But now, most cancers are not immediate death sentences and even smokers get sympathy when they become ill. The field opened for another disease to be the Next Big Fright. Enter eating disorders.

  History has shown us a fair share of starvation as a form of protest, from Mahatma Gandhi to Irish nationalists in the modern era to suffragists and saints before that.

  The medieval Saint Catherine pioneered what came to be known as “holy anorexia.” She was the champion of the common people, that they should have a more intimate union with God. Fasting was a way open to everyone. For many years, the Divine Sacrament was Catherine’s only food, for the eighty days from Lent to the Feast of the Ascension. Born in 1347, Catherine became a saint in 1970, but her story of sainthood is full of earthly parallels for teenage girls today. She chose anorexia as an adolescent, rebelling against the patriarchal medieval Catholic Church and against her family. Her domineering mother sought social status, while her father sat on the sidelines. They fit the anorexic family stereotype.

  From Saint Catherine on, anorexics basically hungered for hunger itself, deprivation as fulfillment. At eighteen, Mollie Fancher parlayed a streetcar accident into worldwide fame as the “Brooklyn Enigma.” From 1865 until her death fifty years later, she claimed to abstain from food. She did not leave her bedroom, but she did welcome visitors and sell her brand of wax flowers and embroidery, making a little profit on the ordeal. During the Victorian era, other “fasting girls” took to extremes the generally accepted notion that women should keep their appetites in severe lockdown. Living without food became a public spectacle, even inspiring circus side-show fasts of “hunger artists” who earned their living by starving.

  All of this is horrifying to someone who earns her living by eating.

  lisa: When Mom first got the food critic job, I thought, “Great! I could be helpful!” As her name became more well-known in the food world, appearing numerous times a week in the paper and often in the news, I never thought, “Oh, my mom is a celebrity.” Now, I brag about her work. People are still impressed and envious, and I get to gloat a little.

  But I have to wonder how I could not have an eating disorder with a food-critiquing mom. She and I grew up in totally different times with different idealized women. For me, a woman’s worth, as I learned too often in middle school, was equated to body type and image. Restricting food was a skill in itself, and many of my friends excelled. How could I be like them if food was so highly valued in my family? We were always eating out, trying one new restaurant after the other and
always having to order a different meal so that Mom could try everything.

  One afternoon during my senior year of high school I agreed to meet Mom for lunch, and it didn’t work out well. I had whittled my weight down to 105 pounds, and subsisted mainly on lean protein, veggies, and fruit, in between hours of cardio-aerobic activity. She picked Café Borone, an outdoor, contemporary California cuisine hotspot next to Kepler’s, a popular bookstore in Menlo Park. They had plenty of suitable menu items: fresh soups, large salads, and fancy sandwiches. But I freaked out. Nothing appealed to me—or rather nothing fit in the strictures of my rigid diet plan.

  I know she just wanted to have a pleasant lunch with her daughter. But I stared at the menu board overhead, while she carefully made suggestions, and I said, “No! That will make me fat, Mom!” She read out one option after the other, and I rejected everything. I wanted to give up, and let my hunger wallow in my tiny stomach, but I could tell I was acting like a child. I settled on a grilled vegetable sandwich on wheat bread, which I broke apart around the edges. The sandwich was fine, but I left most of it on the plate. My love affair with food was over.

  I had to break free and find my own image and value. As I got older I began to stray from family dinners and my formerly adventurous appetite. My weight dropped and I seemed to become more noticeable to those who before had never or rarely acknowledged my presence. Words like “fit” and “thin” joined in their compliments of my body. I knew my assistance with Mom’s job was done. No longer could I go along for the ride, because each restaurant visit would be a surefire sabotage. Of course I can’t deny that avoiding eating out presented me with much less exciting and overall fun meals, but receiving praise about my body was better than a fancy restaurant meal. Even when praise turned into worry as I lost more weight, I only heard “skinny” or “thin” or “she exercises a lot,” and I had to keep going.

  For her first few years as a food critic, Mom celebrated in the company of an enthusiastic daughter, taking a relieved breath to not have one of those picky kids. But I gave her something far worse. I think that because of her job, shoving unnecessarily large meals in front of my curious young self, I never learned moderation. “Eat more. Try this,” is what I heard. Never, “Stop.”

  nine

  High School

  While Lisa was restricting, refusing, and turning inward, I was enjoying my spin in the spotlight. Going from copy editor to restaurant critic was like joining a prominent restaurant as a dishwasher and working your way up to chef. At first you do essential work that nobody else wants to do, and then, poof, you’re the star. You even have fans.

  What great timing, this restaurant gig seemed at first. The kids were old enough that I could ease off Mommy Brain, school committees, and the family GPS, constantly tracking where everyone was or needed to be. Jake and Lisa were moving forward, on their way to college. Our bookcases reflected the transition. We had the usual Get Out of My Life, But First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall?: A Parent’s Guide to the New Teenager and Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. But these were sources read once and maybe picked up again, not studied and memorized, like Your Baby’s First Year. I finally got rid of Penelope Leach, T. Berry Brazelton, and Dr. Spock. Relying on their popular child-rearing books required swallowing a whiff of disdain, or pity, for mothers who worked outside the home. As if it were a lifestyle choice. Now our shelves were getting populated by life-affirming food writers like Elizabeth David, M.F.K. Fisher, and John Thorne, who planted the idea that you don’t have to be a great chef, or even a good one, to enjoy cooking (your own food or someone else’s).

  We never went nuts about nutrition. White sugar, chocolate chips, Pepperidge Farm fish crackers, and the beloved Kraft Macaroni & Cheese all lived happily in our house. Jake and Lisa usually made better food choices than most of their peers, without being prohibited from enjoying the pizza and burger staples of the teen diet. Often, though, days went by when we didn’t eat together as a family. Jake had lots of schoolwork. He and Lisa had been making their own lunches and doing their own laundry since fourth grade. We made sure they had something nourishing for breakfast, but our power over dinner was starting to disintegrate in the face of their activities, my job, and Ned’s promotion to library management, upping his travel time and nighttime meetings. Only our two dogs could be sure of eating at the same hour every night.

  During Lisa’s first year in high school, she started to get interested in nutritional science, possibly as a career. Despite what was seething underneath, she understood what a body needed to grow and stay healthy. She took copious notes in Biology 1A:Homeostasis and Systems Control

  Which four tasks must be performed structurally and physiologically in order for an animal body to survive?

  a. Maintain conditions in the internal environment

  b. Acquire nutrients and raw materials, distribute throughout body

  c. Protect against injury, virus, agents of disease

  d. Reproduce & help nourish & protect new individuals

  Why must homeostasis be maintained in an organism?

  Homeostasis is the state of being balanced—stable operating condition. For an organism to survive, cells must be bathed in fluids.

  Words about balance and nutrients went into her freshman notebook and, then, out of her life.

  lisa: As my sophomore year wound down, I knew I needed to change my lifestyle. I had become all too comfortable gorging on super burritos and making late-night stops at the donut shop. I felt bombarded by diet ads and pictures of thin women, a mold I didn’t fit. I was still playing “the chubby girl,” overweight and undervalued. I wanted my peers to want to look like me, for once, to compliment my figure, and to be told by guys that I was pretty. I grew tired of feeling so average in every way (looks, academics, athletics, talent) and wanted to be better, if not “the best” at something.

  As we lived no more than a three-minute walk from the YMCA, I decided to go to that gym after school. I’d never been attracted to the Y before, and at first I dragged myself there and vowed to come back every day. That’s when the weight really started to fall off. All I had to do was thirty minutes of cardio daily and alter my diet a bit, and I started to develop a curvaceous yet lean figure. My friends praised my motivation and dedication. And, finally, I was being told I was skinny!

  That summer, my friend Feyi introduced me to the Yogurt Stop, and it became my next obsession. There were plenty of frozen yogurt places in Palo Alto, but only the Yogurt Stop would do for me. It was way out of the way in Menlo Park, but had eight flavors to choose from daily, and the option of having two nonfat flavors swirled in harmony. I felt pleased with myself for getting this great deal: half the calories of ice cream for the same price. The Yogurt Stop took the dessert position on the shortlist of places where I would eat out, as the majority of frozen yogurt flavors came as fat free, some even sugar free and therefore low calorie. Even with the Atkins Diet taking off and fat-free/sugar-free labels appearing everywhere, there weren’t many restaurants that worked for me. I couldn’t eat Mexican anymore as everything seemed to shout out “starch” and “lard” and “massive caloric intake!” Italian was well-known to be an indulgent cuisine. American offered mainly burgers and fries and milkshakes. If I went out at all, it had to be a Japanese restaurant, where still I feared the unknown ingredients and additives and mainly had salad without dressing and a little teriyaki chicken, delicately pulling off any ounce of fat.

  sheila: At first, Lisa’s restrictions seemed weird but not red-alert worrisome. She was eating more healthily, happier with how her body was taking shape, and still active in soccer and choir. She was not pleased when I volunteered to chaperone the high school choir trip to New York City, which seemed like a great opportunity to hang around her and watch, without being in her face. As outstanding high school choirs bounced “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” off the walls of historic Riverside Church, choir director Bill Liberatore coached, “Alt
os and sopranos, I don’t hear your entrance clearly. Please be aggressive on the attack.” Amid the evening dews and damps, the sound was gorgeous. Liberatore also talked about the social responsibility of being in a large choir, and I wondered if Lisa was listening. More often, she seemed to be just mouthing the words. Liberatore had heard the buzz about a Broadway show in previews, so we got to see The Producers with Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane, before the show broke records in box office receipts and Tony Awards. The Producers later became a touchstone for me and Lisa, a special moment we shared.

  One afternoon while the students were practicing, I had the fun of introducing some fellow chaperones to Original Ray’s Pizza and then to Zabar’s temple of gastronomy. On a free afternoon, Lisa and I met a Mercury News friend in Brooklyn for coal-fired pizza at Grimaldi’s. She’d agreed to do what I wanted—eat and visit—and then we’d do a little shopping along Fifth Avenue. Bribery. I bought time with her, and she got a few blouses.

  Lisa had way more than enough clothes. She would weed her collection, selecting blouses she may never have worn, when we took boxes to Goodwill, but her room never lost its just-slept-in look. Wasn’t this normal? Even the occasional whiff of rotting food wasn’t out of the range of reason for teenagers.

  I tried chaperoning one more time, when Lisa’s soccer team went to a tournament in Las Vegas. Again the more adventurous parents deputized me to pick a restaurant. For something we really didn’t have at home, we went to Red Square. The duded-up Russian food was less the attraction than the décor, a post-Communist May Day parade of hammers and sickles, and the vault of two hundred frozen vodkas for drinks with names like the Cuban Missile Crisis. Dinner was fun, but I had the feeling that, more so than the other kids didn’t want their parents along, Lisa really didn’t want me there.