Hungry

by Sheila Himmel

  Throughout my childhood I yearned to be listened to. Because I struggled to express myself academically, my points of view often went unheard. At home I would try to make up for this by spilling my problems to my parents and not feeling satisfied until I thought that they had truly listened to me. I realized that other people also needed someone to lend an ear to them, and that’s where I fit in. Too often people fall into a state of depression from feeling lost and without a mentor. Just knowing that there is a friend who cares can change someone’s gloomy mood.

  Now that I knew I wanted to be a psychologist I had to practice scenarios of my everyday work life. Friends became patients as I sat in a chair and analyzed their pretend dramas. My friend Feyi became my most frequent patient as she had the most “problems.” So she would lie down on my black leather sofa and I would help her overcome her fears:

  “Feyi, tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “I’m crazy. I’m just a crazy person.”

  “No, Feyi, come on. Be serious. Pretend you have a real problem. I need to practice. I’m going to be a famous psychologist, you know.”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay, well . . . I think I’m being abducted by aliens.”

  “Oh, Feyi, you are crazy. I’m sending you to a mental hospital.”

  I thought about food constantly. It was affecting my schoolwork; it was affecting my life. My friends would say, “Try to focus on something other than food. Just don’t think about it.”

  But there were no safe havens. If I went for a drive, I’d pass countless billboards plastered with food advertisements. Restaurants and coffee shops lined busy streets and the social avenues of every downtown. Everything I did and everywhere I went somehow involved food—or rather the daunting task of trying to avoid food—especially in my own house, which displays more cookbooks and culinary magazines than family pictures. I spent a lot of time in my room, but I wasn’t safe there, either.

  If I tried to read a book I’d get no further than five pages without getting fidgety in reaction to my stomach growling. I’d say to myself, “It wouldn’t be so bad if I had an apple. I kind of want an apple . . . no, you can’t have an apple yet, you need to read, just don’t think about food!” And I would go back to my reading for a few minutes until my mind wandered back to the apple.

  I felt weak for thinking about food and more so for wanting it, even a measly apple. And yet, the more I tried to avoid wanting the apple, the sharper the desire became. Sometimes I would make contracts with myself, like: “You can have this apple if you go for a walk.” When I was exercising every day, I’d say, “Because you had this Pria bar, you can’t have any more carbohydrates today and you have to add ten minutes to your cardio.”

  Exercise and food restriction had become more than an obsession. I focused all my time and energy on counting calories and burning off whatever I took in times two or even three. If I had allowed what I considered to be an extra serving of carbohydrates or an extra fruit, I burned it off. I purposefully flaked out on friends’ invitations, making excuses of illness or too much homework and instead spent hours at the gym. On a soccer trip in Phoenix, I grew frustrated because of my limited playing time and broke down in the car. I felt I was being treated unfairly and was just as good as any of my teammates and that I should be playing more. My friend’s mom tried to assure me that I was a vital member of the team and would probably play in the final. In truth, my frustration came from my fear that I wasn’t getting as much exercise as everyone else, and I didn’t have access to a gym. Even during regular soccer practices I never felt satisfied with two hours of training, because most of the time was spent listening rather than running. I made up for that lost exercise by either running three or four miles or going to the gym after practice.

  Each day I took in maybe seven hundred calories at most and burned off about nine hundred. I stopped eating with my parents or with anyone else at all.

  I knew I was hurting myself but I couldn’t get out of it. I could barely stand, and my stomach was constantly growling. But I got used to the emptiness, and when I didn’t hear a grumble I assumed I had gained weight. Finally, I was the thinnest among my friends. What I was doing was working.

  sheila: Soon came another unpleasant surprise about eating disorders: Purging can take the form of excessive exercise, not just throwing up or taking laxatives. Inspect the bathroom all you want, but the purge may be going on at the gym. Lisa was spending hours a day at the gym. A sweet trainer at the Y, Rodney Aley, kept track of the exercise addicts. He would tell them, “You’ve been here for four hours. Go home.”

  One day he asked me if he could speak to Lisa about her weight. In the past year he had tried to keep her on a sensible workout regimen, but in January of her senior year, the doctor told her to stop exercising for a few months. She was too weak. Later, Rodney met me for herbal tea and told me that when Lisa came back to the Y, “I didn’t recognize your daughter.”

  She didn’t want to go to a therapist. Should we have forced her to go? If we forced her, would that tell her something was wrong with her? But something was wrong with her.

  In March, she was accepted by several very good colleges, but it made no difference.

  Spring is the season of thick college acceptance packets, thin rejection envelopes, and their online equivalents. When spring does its job, high school seniors and their parents are put out of their misery. In places like Palo Alto, everybody gets into college somewhere; we have excellent community colleges that take all high school graduates. And nobody dies if the first place is not the right place. This is a truth that teenagers rarely buy. Even the adults don’t believe that things work out, at least until their first child makes it happen. I clung to the vision of the perfect launch, like a NASA spacecraft against blue skies in Cape Canaveral. They’re off—phew! Over the years there was often more stop than go, but now our children are in new orbits and, hope against hope, they’ll learn something useful and splash down in a safe harbor, with a job and a family and . . . are we getting ahead of ourselves? Of course we are. But high school is when we get way ahead of ourselves, pedaling to the rest area just over the next hill. The next hill is college, and, okay, as soon as they figure out what to major in, then they’ll be set. Everyone can relax. Until they change majors or drop out for a while, and so on.

  We chose to live in Palo Alto, where houses cost more because the public schools have always been good and test scores are phenomenal. When Newsweek and US News & World Report publish their annual rankings of high schools, Palo Alto Realtors carry them around like Bibles.

  The year-end high school newspapers run maps showing where their graduates are headed. Seniors by then are pretty sick of the whole subject and might rather have one summer not to think about what college means: leaving home and growing up. This issue of the student newspaper is for the parents. We study their graduation maps for our own grades in child-rearing: How have I done raising my child to survive the competition? Our eyes go immediately to the little dots representing college-bound graduates who bunch up on the coasts: Stanford, UCLA, and UC Berkeley on the left, Ivies on the right.

  Lisa most likely would have done better by starting at a community college. Living at home would have been torture, but that wasn’t the deal-breaker. The deal-breaker was having to tell others and facing the polite condescension of her peers and their parents. (“Where are you going?” “Foothill.” “Oh.”) Her ego wasn’t up for that. Lisa looked wounded when we mentioned the idea. Her brother went to Berkeley, her friends were going to Stanford and Princeton, and we were sending her to Foothill? We might as well have suggested the army.

  From preschool through fifth grade, the headline had been: “Learn for the joy of discovery, not for competition. Attention, parents, this means you.” But the minute kids hit middle school the clock on college acceptance starts ticking. Were you in the most advanced math class? Spanish was so ordinary (yet so vital in California). Would taking German or Japanese improve your prospe
cts? And on it went, until that fat packet, or some packet, arrived in the mail and parents imagined wiping their hands in bittersweet victory and sighing, “My work here is through!”

  Ned and I had a middling case of the college vapors. Products of the University of California, we nurture a populist bent against private schools. However, did we like having our kids attend the University of California? Yes. Did we want to say Lisa was going to the community college? Not so much. It would require explanation. We didn’t know that later we would be explaining issues that really were hard to talk about.

  Years ago, there was a bright girl in Jacob’s kindergarten class. That summer after kindergarten, I ran into her mother, so naturally I asked which teacher her daughter had gotten for the fall. The mother named a kindergarten teacher. I said, “No, I mean next year,” and she said, “Right, next year.” And then I got it. She was repeating kindergarten. This poor woman must have faced off with lamebrains like me all summer long, and again when school started in the fall.

  Recently I saw the mother of a boy who had been in Jacob’s class since kindergarten. Her son had gone to the California Maritime Academy, a state college forty miles away but way off the status radar, and he’d become a ship captain. The long stretches away from home were hard, but he loved the work. “Can you imagine?” she said. “A Palo Alto kid is a ship captain!” He’s happy, she’s happy, except for all the explaining.

  lisa: The week before spring break of my senior year of high school, I got my wisdom teeth out, which proved to be a huge mistake. I had already been seriously restricting my caloric intake and exercising for more than two hours a day, but I had not yet reached a weight so low that people gasped in shock. With oral surgery’s heavy medications and giant chipmunk cheeks, I couldn’t exercise at all. I compensated by barely eating. I picked at bananas and measured out one single cup of low-calorie, low-fat vegetable soup. I asked for sugar-free, nonfat pudding and when Dad returned home with regular (even though it was organic), I wouldn’t touch it. I also requested organic one hundred percent juice and products like sugar-free angel-food-cake frozen yogurt, and left most of them untouched, too.

  For spring break, my three best girlfriends and I drove to San Diego, where I began my love affair with starvation. More precisely, my day’s menu was half a banana, one cup Special K cereal, and half a cup of nonfat milk, always leaving something in the bowl. Sometimes I’d pick at steamed tofu or nonfat yogurt in the evening.

  One day as we all lay on our beach towels, letting the sun beam down hoping for a deep tan (I usually just burned), I stared into the sky while desperately attempting to keep a conversation going with my friends and trying to ignore the painful hunger in my stomach. Instead of the sound of waves crashing before us, my stomach crashed with gurgles and swishing of its own fluids and bile, waiting to be joined by food that was highly unlikely to come. After about three hours of fighting off my hunger, my closed eyes began to see sparks dancing before me like fireworks on the Fourth of July. I had to give in and eat something. It had been six hours since any of us had eaten, so Olivia and I walked over to the nearest street with stores, where five or six restaurants and delis lined up next to one another. They offered gyros, pizza, tacos and burritos, deli sandwiches made with sourdough rolls, and more pizza—all forbidden foods. Olivia and I kept walking. We looked and debated, and I turned down everything. Olivia remained patient with me; she knew she couldn’t force me, but I’m sure she wanted to shout, “It’s just food, Lisa, make a fucking choice. I’m hungry, too!” Finally we stumbled on a small ice cream shop that had a sign for smoothies. I gave in because that was probably my best and only option. Olivia suggested with some hopeful excitement, “Look, Lisa, they have mango. You love mango!” I needed no time to decide on this one, I knew the mango with banana and orange juice was my pick. However, hoping to be a good anorexic girl, I made one odd and I’m sure horribly annoying request: I asked the gal working the counter to leave out the frappé mix in order to reduce the sugar content. She looked at me in slight shock but tried politely not to say anything other than that my smoothie would be more ice than anything. I didn’t care as long as I had less sugar and saved some calories. It was in fact quite icy and a little unenjoyable, but I pretended to be satisfied.

  This scene occurred over and over again during that week of spring break. At a Chinese restaurant, the others enjoyed sharing dishes, while I picked at steamed tofu and broccoli without sauce, and at McDonald’s, I just went to the bathroom. After a few days of this, I found it difficult to complete easy tasks. We stayed with my cousin and made him dinner on our last night. Or, the others did. I couldn’t even boil water.

  sheila: Three years earlier, Lisa had been the first one home to find Jacob’s acceptance package from UC Berkeley, and she had been so excited she called me at the newspaper. I had to work that night. The gaming reporter, Mike Antonucci, and I were doing a story about the new Dave & Buster’s, the Goliath of arcade restaurants. I was meeting Mike there, plus my panel of experts: a game-designer friend of ours and two of his sons. A long night of fried food, loud music, and shoot-’em-up games stood in my way of getting home to celebrate Jacob’s getting into the school he most wanted. Lisa took up the challenge. She may have been a dorky freshman, but she was proud of her brother. She made dinner for the two of them. Ned also had to work that night.

  When Lisa’s turn came, there was no little sister to be excited for her. She had gotten into a couple of good schools and had been rejected by a couple, but she didn’t much care. When the large envelope she was waiting for came on Saturday, March 1, 2003, Lisa was working out at the gym, as usual. I walked to the YMCA, carrying the packet from UC Santa Cruz and waited for Lisa outside. I waved as she walked out. She scrunched her eyes in the sun and flashed a look that said, “Why are you here? Who died?”

  ten

  Our Big Nights

  In a rational world, Lisa’s college acceptances and her decision to attend UC Santa Cruz might have relieved some of the anxiety she was feeling, but they didn’t seem to make a dent. She continued to overexercise and undereat. At the end of spring, she and I reached a chasm. On each side was an event each of us had been hoping for, envisioning, for years. And they were scheduled for the same weekend.

  lisa: I couldn’t sleep at night. I was scared to sleep on my back because my stomach would growl, so I rolled onto my side. Unlike other anorexics, I hated the emptiness. I liked having the willpower but I wanted to be able to go hungry without feeling or hearing it. My hips protruded so severely that lying on them for even a few minutes caused me to wake up sore and bruised. I was afraid to fall asleep, and helpless to find any way out.

  My heart rate and blood pressure were dropping significantly due to malnutrition. My doctor told me to stop playing soccer and exercising. She referred me to a nutritionist. She noticed how tired and depressed I was, and asked if I wanted to try an antidepressant. I didn’t.

  My body contour changed frequently. I was bloated, so that it appeared I was gaining weight. I cried to one of my friends that the weight was coming on too fast, that I had to stay below 110, and she tried to reassure me that it was water retention. I started having nightmares in which voices mocked me and forced me to drink salad dressing and eat donuts.

  sheila: “What should we do now?” Ned would ask. As a child Lisa had been so close to Ned. From his family, she inherited playfulness and warmth in addition to nearsightedness and body type. When she had something to work out in her mind, she often went to Ned. They shopped for food, planted vegetables, and cooked together. When he took a class in improvisation, she, as opposed to me and Jake, enthusiastically played games like Panel of Experts, in which you carry on as if you have special knowledge of some obscure topic. Now she had no interest in any subject but her weight.

  When Ned said, “What should we do now?” I thought I should know. I’m the mother. Lisa called me at work many times a day, with some worry or complaint, often crying. Her eyes
bothered her. Yes, her contact lenses had been rechecked two weeks ago, but now they didn’t fit right. She needed to go to the optometrist again. Her stomach hurt, she was cold, her hair was falling out. Somebody said something she took as hurtful. She didn’t stop ranting unless I interrupted, with a comment meant to be reassuring that often angered her, or said I had to call back later. In the office I tried to stay calm and productive, as around me people talked about the Iraq war, the mayor’s shady dealings with a garbage company, our list of restaurants serving Mother’s Day brunch. The newsroom looked like an insurance office, although a messy insurance office, just a sea of desks in cubicles. For any kind of privacy, I would bend over and duck under my desk, talking upside-down, very softly. That, too, would annoy Lisa.

  Nobody in our house was sleeping. Many nights, Lisa brought a futon mattress into our room and curled up like a fetus, while Ned wandered from bed to the living room couch to the family room couch. The Himmels became regulars at the Safeway pharmacy window. Before this, Prozac had helped lift me out of chronic depression, which made a case that it might be something to consider for Lisa. When Lisa went to the family physician, Deirdre Stegman, she had lost too much weight and hadn’t gotten her period in several months. Prozac was mentioned and refused, but Lisa liked Dr. Stegman, and agreed to see the psychologist she recommended. Several nudges later, Lisa went a few rounds with a psychiatrist. She rejected one medication after the other because it made her gain weight or feel “not herself.” I hadn’t wanted to take an antidepressant, either. Who would? But now that I was a poster child for better brain function through chemistry, I didn’t hesitate to seek medications for heart-pounding panic and sleeplessness. Meanwhile, Ned discovered Ambien.