Hunger

by Roxane Gay

  One night, I crawled to the door of the resident faculty member on my floor, a woman who, during my freshman year, had imitated me in a game of charades by widening her arms and waddling around the room until someone guessed my name as the clue. When she finally woke and came to the door, I was cold and sweating and clammy. Campus security took me to the local hospital, where the doctors discovered I had gallstones. I called my parents, terrified, and my dad told me not to worry. He told me to close my eyes and that in the morning, he would be there. I did as he said and when I woke up, there he was. That is the kind of father he has always been. I had emergency surgery, and my gallbladder was removed. It turned out the high-protein diet I had been on for the summer had not done my gallbladder any favors. I spent about ten days in the infirmary, and ended up with a wicked new scar, tender to the touch.

  During my recovery, I was still in pain, and before long, doctors discovered that the surgeon had left some gallstones inside me—such tiny objects causing so much pain. I was rushed to Mass General in Boston, my first ambulance ride, and I was scared again, but also excited in the way of a child who does not quite understand mortality. This time, both my parents came and fretted over me until I was better. Before long, I went back to school. I had lost weight with all the sickness, so once again, I had work to do to make my body bigger and bigger and bigger and safer.

  19

  Though I mostly sat in the counselor’s office silently and sullenly, I continued to go to therapy throughout high school. I didn’t make a lot of progress, but it was a space where I could escape the pressure of needing to earn good grades at an aggressively demanding school. I could escape from being an unpopular and awkward teenager who was desperately lonely. I could escape from being a disappointing daughter.

  Eventually, I was assigned to a woman counselor and she gave me a copy of The Courage to Heal, by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. At first, I hated the book because it included a “workbook,” as well as cheesy exercises I couldn’t possibly take seriously. The language was too flowery and full of affirmations that also made me distrustful.

  Many of the theories that book espouses have now been discredited, but at that time, when I was so scared and shattered, The Courage to Heal gave me a vocabulary for what I had been through. I needed that book as much as I hated it for all the infantile exercises it encouraged. I learned about victims and survivors and trauma, and that getting past trauma was possible. I learned that I was not alone. I learned that being raped wasn’t my fault, and though I didn’t believe everything I learned, it was important to know such ideas, such truths, were out there. I didn’t feel like I was healing and I didn’t feel like I could ever reshape myself into what that book suggested healing looked like, but I did feel like at least there was something of a map I could follow to get to a place where healing felt possible. I needed that solidarity and hope, even if I couldn’t imagine a time when I would become whole again.

  20

  There was one place where I could forget myself and my hurt—the theater department. In high school, I became a passionate drama geek, and fell in love with technical theater—all the backstage work that makes any given show possible. When I was working behind the scenes, my newfound girth didn’t matter. My shyness didn’t matter. I could be part of something without anyone in a show’s audience knowing I was part of something.

  The first show I ever worked on was Little Shop of Horrors, my freshman year. I worked in the sound booth, managing sound cues, and befriended Michael, the handsome young postgraduate student (or fifth-year senior) who manned the giant plant that comes out at the end of the show. At the end of the year, Michael would take me to his prom on a cruise around the Boston Harbor. He was so kind to me and never wanted anything from me but friendship. That was something of a revelation to me, that a young man could be kind.

  As a theater geek, I learned how to build flats and paint the taut canvas to look like any backdrop or setting a show needed. I learned how to design sound effects and hang lights and endure the endless hours of a tech rehearsal. I wandered through the musty costume barn to find specific costume pieces and helped locate or create the props needed for a given show. When I was in the theater, all darkened and dusty, I was useful. I was competent. People told me to do things and I did those things. I could apply myself to the tasks at hand and forget about the boys in the woods and what they did to my body.

  I got to watch plays and musicals brought to life. No matter the show, I loved the spectacle and the quirks of the actors who successfully pretended they were so much more than high school students. Our faculty members, Mrs. Ogami-Sherwood and Mr. Bateman, had big personalities and a passion for the theater. They held all of us drama geeks in their thrall. Mr. Bateman was notorious for walking around with a tumbler filled with Diet Coke and vodka. He was balding, but what hair he did have was unruly, standing on edge. He favored black turtlenecks. Shortly after I graduated in 1992, he was convicted of possessing child pornography and sending that pornography across state lines. He was sentenced to five years in prison. Mrs. Ogami-Sherwood had a thick head of long, curly hair. She was small in stature but tall in every other way. She tolerated no nonsense, and most of us were scared of her while yearning for her attention.

  On show nights, I was often a stagehand. I would dress in all black and be part of the invisible machine that keeps a show running. I knew all the lines to any show I worked on, and with the other drama geeks who were as obsessed with theater as I was, we found a way to have a lot of fun and make a little magic. High school was terrible, but in the theater, we created, for one another, a place where we could fit in for a few hours at a time.

  21

  Camp Kingsmont is a weight-loss and fitness camp that, when I attended, the summer after my sophomore year, was nestled in the picturesque Berkshires of Massachusetts. The brochure made everything look bucolic and inviting, so I knew, instantly, not to trust such propaganda. My parents sent me to Kingsmont for several weeks—another attempt to solve the problem of my body. I did not have much say in the matter because they were determined to make me lose weight by any means necessary, and I had learned the lesson that saying no meant nothing, so it was off to camp I went.

  I hate camping and the outdoors, and I especially hate the woods. The cabins where we campers stayed were rustic, at best, and located at the top of a rather steep hill we were forced to climb whenever we wanted to be in the cabin.

  We didn’t get to spend much time in our cabins, though, because the camp was aggressive about making us “enjoy” the outdoors. The counselors kept us all busy with various activities designed to make us exercise without expressly feeling like we were exercising. At least, that was the conceit. I always felt like I was exercising. It was a nightmare—nature walks, swimming, organized sports, and, of course, the terrible treks up the hill after dinner and whenever I forgot something in my cabin. There were weigh-ins, and for three meals and a snack a day, we ate shitty nutritional food (lots of baked chicken and steamed broccoli and bland versions of normally delicious foods like pizza and hamburgers) designed to further promote weight loss. I distinctly remember an unnatural quantity of Jell-O being offered.

  Again, I lost weight, but as one of the older campers, I also got to spend time with the counselors, most of whom were only three or four years older than us. At night, after the younger campers were put to bed, we would hang out around a fire pit behind one of the cabins. It was quietly thrilling to be included in a group in this small way, to feel like I was breaking the rules.

  When I returned to my real life, home with my parents, I immediately abandoned all the other lessons I had learned and regained, once more, the weight I had lost, and then some. The enduring lesson I learned at Camp Kingsmont was how to smoke because the counselors let us bum cigarettes from them. Smoking was a habit I would lovingly nurture for eighteen years.

  Smoking felt good and always gave me a light buzz. Smoking also made me feel cool when I knew I was very,
very uncool. I loved the ceremony of smoking. Back then, I was very much into the performance of it. I bought a Zippo lighter, and always kept it filled with lighter fluid. I liked to flip it open and shut it against my thigh as a nervous tic.

  I started with Virginia Slims, or Vagina Slimes as we called them, then moved on to Marlboro Reds, then Marlboro Lights, before finally settling on Camel Lights, hard pack, my cigarette of choice. Each time I got a new pack, I would tap the top of it against the palm of my hand several times to tamp the tobacco, then pull off the plastic wrap and the foil insert. I’d turn one cigarette upside down and then pull out another to smoke. I am sure I learned this little ritual from one of the camp counselors.

  I loved smoking after a meal, first thing in the morning, right before bed. In high school, I had to hide my smoking from faculty members, so I would walk downtown between classes and smoke behind the storefronts of Water Street, looking out onto the murky Exeter River. During those quiet moments down on the water, sitting on gravel and dirt, surrounded by abandoned cigarette butts and beer cans and who knows what else, I felt like a rebel. I loved that feeling, that I was interesting enough to break rules, to believe rules did not apply to me.

  Like most smokers, I developed elaborate practices for hiding evidence from people who might frown upon the habit—namely, my parents. I usually had an assortment of breath mints, gum, and the like on my person. If I was in a car, I would roll all the windows down as I drove, trying to convince myself that this would air me out.

  It didn’t take long for me to develop a pack-a-day habit, and sure, my lungs ached when I walked up stairs and sometimes I woke up coughing, and all my clothes reeked of stale smoke and the habit was becoming prohibitively expensive, but I was cool, and I was willing to make a few sacrifices to be cool in at least one small way.

  22

  In the after, I turned to food, but there were other complicating factors. I was never athletic, even when I was slender. I was a child of the suburbs, so my parents enrolled me and my brothers in all manner of sports. Though they were both athletic, I never really excelled at any of the sports I tried, despite dutifully going to practice.

  In soccer, I was a goalie. To this day, my family loves to recount the story of me sitting near the goalpost, picking dandelions in the middle of a game. I do not recall this, but it doesn’t surprise me that the game held little interest for me. Flowers are pretty and soccer games are long and boring, especially when children, barely cognizant of the rules or the strategy of the game, are playing.

  When I played softball, I was the catcher, but I was afraid of the ball, how it raced toward me with such force and velocity. I did everything in my power to avoid that ball, which was not at all conducive to my mastering that position. I also had no interest in running around the bases. My ideal version of the game would have had me hit the ball, have someone else run around the bases for me, and never have to play when the opposing team was at bat.

  At some point, I played basketball, but I wasn’t tall yet—the height would come much later, toward the end of my teens—so I had no natural advantage and was not at all adept at making baskets or defending opponents or doing anything required of someone on a basketball court. Again, I had no interest in running up and down the court. The uniforms were not flattering. My favorite position was scorekeeper. I was very good at flipping numbers over each time a new basket was scored.

  In school, we played dodgeball and tetherball. We did the presidential fitness challenge and I finished the running portion last nearly every year—a mile felt like it was a marathon. In high school, sports were a significant and mandatory part of the curriculum, which was not ideal for me. I rowed crew and hated the old creaky barge of a boat we used. I played field hockey and was more interested in the merits of my field hockey stick as a weapon. Lacrosse simply made no sense to me. Ice hockey was a nightmare—spending so much time in frigid temperatures, trying to balance on two narrow blades while also basically playing soccer on ice with a small puck and awkward hockey sticks. I quickly concluded that I was allergic to sports. I still hold fast to this conclusion.

  I was, however, a decent swimmer. I loved the water, the freedom of moving through it, feeling weightless. I loved being able to do things with my body in water that would never be possible on land. I even enjoyed the smell of chlorine. I once set a school record for the fifty-yard freestyle. To be clear, this was in the sixth grade, but I still feel a small rush of accomplishment at the memory because in water, using my muscles and my lungs, I was capable and strong and free.

  My brothers, far more athletic, both took to soccer, my middle brother going so far as to play professionally for several years. I envied their palpable enjoyment of the sport, of athleticism, but I did not really covet that enjoyment. I’ve always been a woman of contradiction. My true loves were and still are books and writing stories and daydreaming. Sports were merely a distraction keeping me from what I really wanted to do.

  23

  Throughout high school, I went through the motions, pretending to be the good student at school and the good daughter when I was talking to my parents, as my mind continued to splinter. With each passing year, I became more and more disgusted with myself. I was convinced that having been raped was my fault, that I deserved it, that what happened in the woods was all a pathetic girl like me could expect. I slept less and less because when I closed my eyes, I could feel boy bodies crushing my girl body, hurting my girl body. I smelled their sweat and beer breath and relived every terrible thing they did to me. I would wake up gasping and terrified and would spend the rest of the night staring at the ceiling or reading myself out of my body and out of my life and into something better. There was no rhyme or reason to what I read: lots of Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler for the pure escape they provided, Harlequin romances because they were so bountiful, whatever I could find in the campus library.

  During the day, I went to class, which was, in its way, another kind of escape. Academically, Exeter was intense, way more rigorous than my college classes would ever be. I loved my classes. In architecture, we had to build a vessel that would keep an egg safe if we dropped it from the roof of the building, but we could only use, like, Styrofoam and rubber bands. In an English class every Upper (or junior, to the rest of the world) had to write a Reporter at Large essay—an in-depth project for which we had to do research and interview sources and immerse ourselves in a topic that interested us. Back then I wanted to be a doctor, one of the Haitian-parent-approved professions, so I wrote about a surgeon who was my family’s next-door neighbor. He was patient with my questions and allowed me to observe a surgery over spring break. While I worked on my Reporter at Large, I felt like I was so much more than a lame high school student.

  I did well academically. That’s how I had been raised, to be excellent, to never be satisfied with anything less. A B was a bad grade, and if I received an A-minus, I could still do better, so I did better. I did my best. I was always very high-strung about school for many reasons, not the least of which was a pressure to perform and the comfort of knowing that schoolwork, at least, was something in my control. I knew how to study and memorize and make sense of complicated things, as long as they had nothing to do with me. I also knew how much money my parents were spending on my education and so I could not fail. I could not let them down in one more way. I needed, in some small way, to feel worthy of their expectations of me.

  I became more and more detached from my body, continuing to eat too much and gain weight. I only tried to lose weight when my parents made me or nagged me enough to give dieting a half-hearted try. I didn’t care about getting fat. I wanted to be fat, to be big, to be ignored by men, to be safe. During the four years of high school, I probably gained 120 pounds. I racked up incredible bills using my Lion Card, the school currency system, buying so much food at The Grill, buying random crap at the school bookstore because there was a rush of solace when I ate or spent money.

  As I spent all t
hat money, I was also probably trying to keep up with the wealthy kids around me, who had their own American Express cards that they used extravagantly on weekends in Boston and exotic trips over break to Europe and to Aspen. My parents would confront me about the bills, furious at the waste of money, wanting answers for every expenditure but really wanting answers for who I had become, so different from the daughter they thought they knew. I had no answers for them. I was all self-loathing, for what had happened to me, for what I was doing to my body by gaining so much weight, for my inability to function like a normal person, for the ways I was plainly disappointing my parents.

  I still nourished my commitment to being the geekiest drama geek ever to drama geek. My senior year, some friends and I wrote and produced a play on sexual violence. We all had experiences with assault that we had shared in one way or another over the years. On opening night, my parents were in the audience, and after, when I found them in the lobby, their bewilderment was palpable. They asked me how I could have come up with such a thing. It was an opportunity for me to tell them the truth of me, but I shrugged off their questions. I continued holding tight to my secret.

  By the time I had to decide where to attend college, I knew I had to do whatever I could to make my parents happy, to make up for being who I was, for being a disappointment. I dutifully applied to colleges, mostly Ivy League schools and New York University. I got in everywhere except Brown University, a slight I have (clearly) never forgotten. I got my acceptance from Yale in the post office at school, surrounded by other seniors who were equally eager to find out what their futures might hold. I opened the envelope and allowed myself a flush of pride. A young white man standing near me, the kind of guy who played lacrosse, had not been accepted to the school of his choice. He looked at me with plain disgust. “Affirmative action,” he sneered, unable to swallow the bitter truth that I, a black girl, had achieved something he could not.