Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (11 page)

Dan had a big bushy beard, wore tiny spectacles and was short and scrawny. He looked a lot like a woodland gnome, or at least a woodland gnome with access to an optometrist, and at this particular moment he looked like a bespectacled woodland gnome in a put-upon, disgusted mood. He didn’t speak for a good thirty seconds.

“Everything’s always come easy to you, hasn’t it?” he asked. Dan was aware that I, like one of the other ten campers in my Outward Bound group, was taking the course because of the Morehead scholarship. So he knew that I was a top student and athlete.

But did he appreciate the all-nighters that had gone into my grade point average? The five thirty a.m. workouts that had gone into being fast in the pool?

As if reading my mind, he added: “I’m not saying you haven’t worked. But the things you’ve done well and been praised for, they were things you had the talent for, right? The natural potential? Now here’s something that you really might not be suited for. That you might actually be bad at. And right away, you want to quit.”

He was right. On all counts he was dead right. Whatever hard effort I’d put into most endeavors had been hard effort with an almost certain payoff, hard effort wed to considerable aptitude. That was an easier kind of effort than Outward Bound demanded. Outward Bound wanted me to struggle through something I really and truly found difficult, and hated.

Dan said, “There are some things you enjoy doing, and there are other things you enjoy having done. And that second kind of enjoyment lasts longer.”

Then he turned away.

My appeal had been heard—and rejected.

I bumbled across the snow, back to my tarp, and crawled into my sleeping bag. I zipped it tight. I replayed the conversation for hours before I dozed off, and when I woke up, it was with a determination to show Dan that I wasn’t spoiled, that I could get through this ordeal.

I just had to be resourceful. I just had to adapt.

While stream or river water was definitely too cold to be plunged into, I could bear pouring it over my head. So I began to sort of wash my hair every two days or so, using a water bottle and a bar of soap.

I swore off knots, making a deal with the two campers with whom I shared a tarp and daily chores. I told them that if they would take care of tying anything and everything that needed tying—from the ends of the slanting tarp, which had to be secured to stakes and nearby trees, to the harnesses we wore when rock climbing—I’d take care of all the cooking. I’d make any hot oatmeal breakfasts we had. At night I’d be the one to fire up our pathetic little kerosene stove and put the pot on it and wait for the water to boil and pour in the grits, the beans, the canned beef or whatever we were having. I’d even clean the pot afterward, so long as there weren’t any more knots for me in this wretched adventure, and so long as my two coconspirators helped conceal my knot avoidance from Dan, who surely wouldn’t approve.

“
All
the cooking?” one of my tarpmates asked. “
All
the cleaning?”

“Yes,” I said, “and yes.”

I’d never been, and wasn’t, much of a cook. I’d never mustered the requisite patience for it. My rice and pasta were always too hard, because I always yanked them off the stovetop too soon. Whatever ingredients I assembled for a dish had a way of disappearing before I could use them, because I had a way of preempting the slicing, grating, pulverizing or molding of them by the consuming of them. If I set out to make three dozen chocolate chip cookies, I’d end up with nine, on account of all the dough I pilfered along the way.

But by volunteering to cook for my tarpmates, I not only sidestepped my knot problem but also got to be the chief meal planner, deciding which of our provisions we’d have one day and which the next. I could determine when we treated ourselves to the peanut butter, which we spread on thick crackers called pilot biscuits. I could also determine how much canned beef got mixed into the egg noodles, and just how much of the brackish liquid in the can with the beef should be poured over the noodles. I thought long and hard about these things, and it helped me forget that the blisters on my heels weren’t healing and that there were still fourteen days and then thirteen days and then twelve left until I could have a proper shower.

With about eight days to go, each camper was situated alone on his or her own patch of forest to do a “solo.” This was an integral, dreaded component of the Outward Bound experience: three whole days with no human contact whatsoever. You got a whistle, so that if you fell ill or encountered some other serious problem, you could blow it and summon the camper nearest you, who was theoretically within earshot. You got a sleeping bag. You got a miniature, individual-size tarp. You got a water bottle and, so that you could keep refilling it, proximity to a stream. And for food, you got three pilot biscuits and about two handfuls of “gorp,” which was a mixture of nuts and dried fruits, including raisins. That was it.

You weren’t, in fact, supposed to touch it. It was there for emergencies. Say the mercury dropped sharply, and your body temperature dropped with it, and you found yourself on the verge of hypothermia. In that case, our instructors told us, you should eat. You should most definitely eat.

But the solo was meant to be a purifying experience, and the idea was that while you were forgoing plumbing, heat, electricity, TV, music, reading material, interaction with fellow members of your species and just about anything else that makes life endurable, you should pass on food as well. If you were going to embrace this kind of asceticism, why not bear-hug it for all it was worth?

I concurred: I’d leave the gorp and the biscuits alone.

Eight hours later, I reconsidered.

Night was falling, and I was losing my mind, because I’d already sung my five favorite albums from beginning to end and made a mental list of everything I should pack for freshman year of college. I’d even spent an hour or two drawing crude pictures with a stick in the dirt. I was deeply in touch with my inner Neanderthal.

I was lonely. I was even a little scared.

And the effect of having been told I shouldn’t touch the food in my possession was the endless repetition of a single syllable in my head. As I sat all alone in the gathering blackness, I didn’t think,
wolves, wolves, wolves
or
bats, bats, bats
or
help, help, help
. I thought,
eat, eat, eat
.

I told myself I’d just have one pilot biscuit, and maybe the equivalent of a thimble’s worth of gorp.

Five minutes later, my rations were gone, and I had sixty or so hours of my solo to go.

 

 

 

 

On the last day of Outward Bound, when we had descended to the base-camp area where we’d begun, our instructors had us trade our hiking boots for sneakers and sent us out on a thirteen-mile run: a half marathon. The point was to show us that after all the fasting, hiking and climbing, we were in fantastic shape.

I finished the run without pause.

The next day I saw a mirror for the first time in more than three weeks. I only half-recognized the person staring back at me. He was bearded, something I’d never been. And he was lean: yes, lean. His face seemed longer than mine. I liked the looks of him.

Back in Connecticut, I called Beth, telling her how horrible Outward Bound had been—and how it was the best thing I’d ever done. I prattled on about a genuine sense of accomplishment and about how true Dan’s words had turned out to be.

She hurried me to the punch. “How much weight did you lose?” she asked.

I hadn’t stepped on a scale, so I couldn’t give her a number. But I told her: “I think I’m as close to skinny as I’ll ever be.”

There was a moment’s silence. “I’m thinking of going out for women’s crew,” she said, talking about freshman year. “Imagine how many calories that must burn!”

A lot, I guessed. But
crew
? That seemed drastic.

To keep my newly lean Outward Bound form, I’d have to come up with something else.

Yo-Yo Me

To be a successful bulimic, you need to have a firm handle on the bathrooms in your life: their proximity to where you’re eating; the amount of privacy they offer; whether—if they’re public bathrooms with more than one stall—you can hear the door swing open and the footfall of a visitor with enough advance notice to stop what you’re doing and keep from being found out.

You need to be conscious of time. There’s no such thing as bulimia on the fly; a span of at least ten minutes in the bathroom is optimal, because you may need five of them to linger at the sink, splash cold water on your face and let the redness in it die down. You should always carry a toothbrush and toothpaste, integral to eliminating telltale signs of your transgression and to rejoining polite society without any offense to it. Bulimia is a logistical and tactical challenge as much as anything else. It demands planning.

My preferred bathroom was in a back corner of the student union at Carolina, right above the office of the campus newspaper, where I was first a movie and music critic, then the assistant arts editor, and then—toward the end of freshman year—an editorial writer. It was a public bathroom with multiple stalls, but the stalls were a decent distance from the door, and the door opened noisily. Few people used this bathroom, anyway. I could walk to it in about three minutes from the university cafeteria, so neither lunch nor dinner had to sit in my stomach for long. I could get there even faster from the newspaper offices, where I spent many hours a day, and where I’d sometimes eat a slice of pizza or a half tuna salad sandwich too many. With a quick jaunt up the stairs, these excesses could be erased.

I thought that I was clever—that I was doing something lots of other people would if they just had the nerve, the poise, the industry. I knew it was supposed to be dangerous: I’d read stories in newspapers and magazines about this behavior, always characterized as a disorder, an affliction. It was these stories that had given me the idea. From them I concluded that people who threw up their meals tended to get carried away with what was an otherwise solid, tenable plan, especially if they fell prey to anorexia as well, and I was an unlikely candidate for that. Even a fast of merely three days had foiled me. But if a person just threw up the occasional meal, the meal that had gotten out of hand, well, what was the harm in that?

And consider the
benefits
. My willpower could waver, I could gobble down more than I had meant to, and I wouldn’t have to go to bed haunted by the looming toll on my waistline, or wake up the next morning owing the gods of weight management even more of a sacrifice than I had owed them the day before. Throwing up was my safety valve. My mulligan.

It usually happened like this: I’d go to the cafeteria, begin to assemble my dinner. I’d get a salad, or something similarly virtuous. I’d pick at it slowly, hoisting the picayune cherry tomatoes and wan slices of cucumber into my mouth one at a time, in slow motion, and then chewing and chewing and chewing, as if there were some odometer rigged to my jaw and I could stave off hunger by pushing the numbers on it high enough.

There’d be a few jagged cubes of feta in the salad, each one an event I would pause and savor for half a minute. They and the croutons, all four of them, were islands of excitement in a dead sea.

Upon finishing the salad, I wouldn’t be anywhere close to satisfied. I wouldn’t be in the same
hemisphere
as satisfied. And the sound of that dissatisfaction, like a drumbeat in the center of my brain, would grow louder and louder.

Pum-pum.
I could have had a burger. I had seen the cafeteria workers cooking burgers on a griddle. There were burgers to be ordered. I could have had one.

Pum-PUM.
Macaroni and cheese. There’d been macaroni and cheese. It looked sort of congealed and stiff at the edges. I love it when it’s sort of congealed and stiff at the edges.

PUM-PUM.
Remember the smell of the hot oil that still clung to the fried chicken on the food line? And the way the chicken seemed to have a
palpable
crispness? And yet . . . and yet . . . the breading didn’t look all
that
thick. Could one piece, a breast, hurt so much? Hadn’t Mom always said that white meat was less caloric than dark?

I’d go back to the food line. I’d get a fried chicken breast. I’d eat it, and then I’d worry—no, I’d conclude—that I’d miscalculated. That I’d eaten too much, and would have to get rid of some of what I’d eaten. This decision made, I’d get an ice cream sandwich. And a cookie. Two cookies, actually. If I was going to empty my stomach—if I was going to go through all of that messy, beet-faced trouble—I might as well make the most of the buildup, might as well acknowledge and address all my cravings and satisfy them. That way, I’d be less tempted the next day. I’d be less likely to need to throw up.

Off to the second-floor bathroom in the back corner of the student union I’d go. I’d walk in, listen for the sounds of anyone else, bend down and glance under the stalls to check for feet, making sure the coast was clear. I’d stop briefly at the sink, turn on the water and moisten the index and middle fingers on my right hand, so that they’d slide more easily down my throat. Two fingers were better than one. They brought the gagging on faster.

I’d enter one of the stalls and kneel down. I knew just how far down my throat to push the two fingers, just where and how long to tickle it. Once the food started coming up, I could pretty much will my throat to stay open and the food not to stop. Heaves built on themselves, one setting off another.

Sometimes I’d have to probe and tickle my throat a second time, sometimes not. I could tell when I’d purged enough, because I could taste the flavors of what I’d eaten in reverse. I could gauge whether anything was still left in my stomach.