Faerie (8 page)

“How long have you been in this place?” she asked.

“Too long.”

We sat there companionably for the rest of the evening, like factory workers shredding papers. I hadn't realized how lonely I was for a friend until I had her company. It gave me time off from my own maddening thoughts. It was strange to hear my own voice as I spoke to her—I rarely spoke to anyone except the nurse. That evening, I felt a meagre sense of sanity and humanity, but beyond that I felt like I knew Alyssa, like I had always known her.

At bedtime, I helped her stuff the torn papers into a garbage bag. We took it to the nursing station where it was inspected by her nurse. I asked Alyssa how they knew that she had ripped exactly fifty papers.

“I don't cheat,” she said.

I watched her walk back to her room. She stopped at the door. “You wanna hang out tomorrow after breakfast?” she asked.

“Sure.”

She raised her bandaged arm with a wave and a smile, and disappeared into her room. Over the following weeks, Alyssa
and I became almost inseparable. We shared secrets. She pointed to places within me that had meaning, and I did the same for her. The qualities of our light and dark made us who we were. She was my sad, true soul sister.

16
. Butterflying Woman

I was still in Phase One, bound to my feeding pole and obliged to wear hospital garb, but now that my weight had begun to climb, I was permitted the scariest new privilege, which didn't feel like one at all, and hit me hard.

“You're going to have to learn to get comfortable eating in the company of others,” Dr Messer said. I now had “cafeteria privileges.”

I was used to eating by myself. It allowed me greater control over how I could strategically starve myself and not be affected by the appalled and shaming reactions of others. But in a cafeteria with heavily medicated patients, I would have to find new and inventive opportunities to get rid of food. One of the better known side effects of some medications was an increase in appetite. I thought it wouldn't be that difficult to lure a patient or two into relieving me of a piece of apple pie or a date square. This new privilege would work to my advantage—so I thought.

On day one of enjoying my privileges in the Four East cafeteria, I joined the regular lunch line-up of fidgety patients with my tray in hand and felt their nerves reverberate throughout my body. The hall was steamy hot, and a humid sticky air of cooking clung to my flesh. I honestly believed that I was absorbing calories through my skin from the dense smell of food. It made me crazy. The sweaty server dropped a bowl of creamy mush
room soup onto my tray. Then she added a plate of turkey slices soaked in thick, mocha gravy with a mound of mashed potatoes and a dribble of mixed vegetables. I struggled to hold the tray up with one hand, as the other had to manoeuvre my feeding pole. The server then slapped two thick slices of white bread on top of the turkey. I froze, horrified, looking at my food. It felt like I had been assaulted, not served. An onslaught of objections went through my mind: I had never asked for gravy. And did it need to be so thick? I didn't ask for mashed potatoes, either. Why the white bread? Why not brown? Why any bread at all? I looked up, and the woman behind the counter stared at me.

“Is everything all right, dear?”

I stared with rage but held my tongue. I expected the ordeal to be over, but then a bowl of carrot and raisin salad landed on my tray.

“NO!” I screamed. The room went dead silent.

A nurse rushed over and took the tray from my hand before it fell or got smashed into someone or something. “What's wrong?” she asked.

My body went hard, arms stiff along my sides, fists clenched. “No carrot and raisin salad,” I growled.

She looked at my tray, then at another nurse who had joined us. Picking up the bowl, she said, “Salad. Gone,” and removed it from my sight.

With my tray in her hands, she led me to my designated spot, where I could be observed closely by staff. I dragged my feeding pole along with me and sat, still in shock. The nurse bent down and looked into my eyes to examine my pupils.

“You okay now?”

I didn't respond. I noticed her scribble something onto a clipboard. A few moments later, when she left the report on the table to tend to another patient, I read: “12:13 p.m. Patient became extremely agitated when carrot and raisin salad was served to her. She calmed when it was taken away. Perhaps a trigger of a traumatic childhood incident?” I snorted in derision.

Suddenly, Alyssa sat down next to me with her tray, oblivious to what had just happened. She smiled and nudged my ribs with her elbow. “You're here! We can eat together now.” Alyssa dug into her meal. “No one ever wanted to hang out with me at the school cafeteria.”

My body flooded with warmth; I was immediately comforted. Soon I began to experience the true benefits of public eating, thanks not to therapy, but to my new friend.

Yet as my weight climbed, so did my anxiety levels. Dr Messer's therapeutic visits had become surprisingly rare since my steady weight gain; besides, he was busy treating a new crop of patients who had been admitted. I was invited to begin therapy with Dr Bélanger, who had been assigned to take on my case for an interim period. The last thing I wanted was to be trapped inside the office of another grumpy expert and fed his psychoanalytical mumbo-jumbo. I politely declined the doctor's invitation. But that did not stop the doctor from inviting himself over.

I heard a knock on my door, then a woman's voice. “Can I come in?”

The doctor was not at all what I had expected. She strode in and stood next to my bed and gave me a warm smile.

“Hi, Lila. I'm Dr Bélanger. You can call me Eileen.”

I stared at her, speechless.

“How are you feeling today?”

I sat up. “Not great,” I grumbled, still taking her in. She looked to be in her early thirties and had wheat-gold hair that tumbled onto her shoulders.

“Why didn't you want to come see me?” she asked.

“Because.” I lowered my eyes and mumbled, “I don't trust shrinks.”

She nodded, chuckling.

“What's so funny?”

“That's hardly surprising. Maybe I can do something to change your opinion of them. That's partly why I became one.”

She sat down beside me and said, “It's a long boring story, but when I was about your age,” her eyes darted around the room, “I was exactly where you are now. And when I got better, I decided to become a ‘shrink,' to help young people. Like you.”

I was shocked by her candour. I wanted to know more about her, but she turned the focus of the conversation back to me.

“I heard you have a creative streak,” she said.

“I do?”

She handed me the canvas bag she'd brought with her. “I asked Dr Messer to let you have art supplies to draw and paint with.”

I poked my head in the bag and took out a sketchpad with pearly smooth pages, a batch of pencils, and a watercolour paint set.

“I asked for your camera,” she added. “But that will have to wait till Phase Three.”

“You asked for my camera?”

She nodded. “Lila, I want you to know that my door is open. You can come and talk to me anytime you want. I'm only here on Tuesdays, though. You miss me then, you'll have to wait a week.”

And she turned and left.

It took no time for me to “eat up” my new privilege of painting and drawing. I sat on the bed and sketched a massive portrait of my new camera as I remembered it, now locked away in my closet. I filled it in with paint, dabbed on a generous dose of glitter, ripped it out of the sketchpad, and stuck it on the wall at the foot of my bed. It was magic. I felt high.

I thought about Dr Bélanger for the rest of the day. I discovered from Nurse Jean that she was well-respected and apparently had even received some research grants. But what fascinated me most was that she was a grown woman who had emerged from the rabbit hole in one piece. Maybe she'd once been a faerie who'd metamorphosed and transformed into a butterflying woman, with a bigger, stronger set of wings. I pondered that and let it sink into the back of my fairy tale brain.

Alyssa, meanwhile, had graduated to Phase Two. On the main floor, that meant she could wear her own clothes, as all patients could at that phase, except for me. That was when I was in for a shock.

One afternoon, someone stepped into my room. At first glance I thought, “Who is this boy? He must be lost,” but it was
none other than my freckle-faced faerie sister. She wore straight-legged Levis and a plain sweatshirt and her hair was tucked into a beat-up baseball cap. She emanated no sex appeal, no style. And yet her expressions and gestures had the refinement of a dancer, a lightness and frailty that was incongruent with her rustic, androgynous appearance. Like me, she had an almost neutralized sexuality.

She sat on my bed during the mid-morning lull, her body slumped into a c-curve, examining her cuticles, picking away at loose skin, then biting it off as though she were squeezing slivers of thoughts out of her mind.

“Breakfast was shit,” she said. Her leg shook and rattled the bed.

“Shit from calorie hell,” I replied, pacing the room with my feeding pole.

“So, how come you're still on Phase One?”

“They like to keep me in their fat farm, that's why.”

“Phase Two is nothing much, so who cares.”

She was right. The freedom that a phase allowed didn't make up for the torment that weight gain brought on. We were growing comfortable there, citizens of the insane asylum; we would be foreigners in the world outside.

I picked up my sketchpad, sat down, and started to draw a picture of her. “What are you going to do once you get out?”

“What do you mean?”

I didn't answer but continued to draw. I was afraid of what she'd say. It had already been more than a month since she'd been admitted, and I realized how little I knew about her. What was
her family like? Did she miss them? Our conversations had orbited around our mental health, the medications, nurses, other patients, and, of course, the lousy fattening food. My connection to her was deep, but it had never crossed my mind to ask about her life outside this place. I knew that family was a sensitive topic.

I braced myself, and out it came: “How come your folks never come to visit?”

A flush of blood rose to her temples. “And how about yours? Haven't seen them either,” she shot back.

“I'm just asking.”

She sighed. “They're sick of coming here, I guess.” After five hospitalizations, Alyssa's parents had apparently grown weary of the routine.

Would my family tire of me? Would I exhaust their supply of sturdy love?

“C'mon. Let's get outta here.” She hopped off the bed and headed for the door.

For the rest of the morning, we paced the hall, watched nurses and interns shuttling back and forth, patients lumbering along at half speed. We poked fun at everyone, blew spit balls, and lifted the burden of all questions off our minds for as long as we possibly could.

17
. Gaining Pains

“Honey, don't let it get you down,” Nurse Jean said gently when she found me one morning on the floor, sobbing hysterically against the radiator. “Cheer up!” she said. “It's like breaking in new shoes.”

I began to resent her upbeat tone; it seemed to dismiss the pain and horror I felt about the changes taking place in my body. What was getting me down was that my weight was going up. Bulging new flesh appeared literally overnight, wobbling on my midriff and rear. I had to pinch my skin to confirm that indeed it was my own. I had spent the night twisting into my mattress as I felt my flesh enlarge and bloat like an unwelcome stranger, my detestable twin, was emerging inside me. I vowed that when I got out of this place, I would follow the most extreme diet so that I could lose weight as quickly as possible; it would be like pulling the plug on an inflatable doll.

One hundred pounds would be the magic number, the one-way ticket, the eject button to the alien world outside. On the feeding tube and high-calorie diet, my weight started to increase more quickly than ever. Ninety-one, two, three, four, five, six, closer and closer, when suddenly I stopped gaining at ninety-nine pounds. My weight remained there for two weeks. On weight day, I was filled with dread, especially after sluggish Sunday when even more calories were slipped into my meals
from larger and greasier portion sizes and were digested by my slowing metabolism. Surely I would tip the scale over the one-hundred mark.

On that silvery Monday morning, an oblique sunray beamed down the hall like a UFO headlight and onto the medical scale near the nursing station. Nurse Jean stood next to it, projecting a long lean shadow in her path. With a sharp flick of her wrist, she slid the weight with a sharp clank that made my heart stop. She turned to me and nodded. I held my breath and stepped onto the scale. One foot pressed onto cold metal, then the other. Shoeless. Breathless. Then darkness. I shut my eyes and saw uneven flickerings, golden speckles dancing behind my eyelids. I heard the sleek dragging of the metal slide back and forth. Then it stopped.

“Okay,” she huffed.

I stepped off the scale and opened my eyes.

Nurse Jean scratched something into her chart then walked away, shaking her head. “Where them calories goin,' only Lord Jesus know.”

The muscles in my face dissolved with joy. “Yes!” Fist in the air, I returned to my room walking lightly on my toes. I was still just 99.2 pounds. I had been complying with the program, eating exactly what I was told to. Dr Messer didn't lecture me or perform his therapy wizardry on me. Instead, I was wheeled off to get tests. But all results failed to indicate why I wasn't packing on the pounds. Dr Messer finally came to the conclusion that the cause was entirely psychological, and the culprit was my incredible inertia. He claimed that it was my mental
and not physical state that put me at risk. That was the only thing we agreed upon.

But when he would sit and talk to me, I couldn't seem to reply; all that came out were feeble wafts that left me light-headed and exhausted as though all the air had been suctioned out of my lungs from the force of a few syllables. I had neither the strength nor desire for words. I had, in the depths of my being, silently made a decision to come to a halt at enigmatic number ninety-nine. Another week passed and still no change. The nurses took me on brisk walks on the main floor to stimulate me out of my stalemate. But another week passed, and I still weighed ninety-nine pounds.

Dr Messer strode into my room one morning during rounds. “If you don't change your attitude, Lila, I'm going to have to send you to the Dunhill.” He let that sink in. The Dunhill Psychiatric Hospital was the mother of all mental asylums. “They practice the types of extreme … therapies there that I, in good conscience, could never bring myself to impose on my patients. Is that what you want?”

To that, I hardly batted an eyelash and looked at him with a mental yawn. Now that I was eighteen, and therefore legally an adult, and more or less within the so-called “normal” range of body weight, I could no longer be deemed a risk to my health. Dr Messer could, without consequence, discharge me from his care with the stroke of a pen. But I think his pride prevented him from doing so. Letting me go meant letting me win, and Dr Messer was a miserable loser—like me.

It was perfectly clear to me why my weight was locked at ninety-nine.
One hundred was a triple-digit emblem that stood for completion, termination, a submission to nature and to wholeness. It didn't match the fragmented, splintered state I was in. One hundred was dull and inert, while ninety-nine was dynamic and defiant. The number meant that I would never yield, never settle. The faerie was in control.

More daunting than weight gain was discharge. My curious condition was the result of rejecting a life that I had never laid claim to. I didn't feel that I deserved to be alive in the ways that other people were alive, outside the hospital. I cared not a whit for the privilege that I had been born into, with an able body, a middle-class household, a family who provided for me and loved me.

In the fourth week of my clinging to ninety-nine, Mother, Dad, and Mina came to visit me. Mother and Dad spoke about how much they missed me and wanted me home, healthy and happy. Mother tried to cheer me up, flipping through a Sears catalogue and pointing to clothes in “healthy sizes” that she'd buy for me. But her tone and gestures were fatigued from months of hope, now throttled by my refusal to gain.

“Lila, when are you coming home?” Mother put the catalogue down, sighing.

“She's not. She's getting too comfortable here,” Mina grumbled.

“How can she be comfortable?” Mother glared at Mina.

I just sat there, numb and overwhelmed. I couldn't say the words she wanted to hear: “Don't worry, Mother. I'm better now. I'm going to come home.”

All I could feel was the torment of the new flabby flesh on my inner thighs, which rubbed against each other revoltingly.
If only
I had a butcher's cleaver
, I thought,
I'd slice the blubber from those thighs and toss it into the trash
. How could I explain the fierce power of these thoughts and desires? I believed then that Mina—and maybe Mother and Dad, too—wished I'd already killed myself so they could have buried me and gotten on with their lives. And who could blame them?

“I'm almost there,” I told her. “Just a pound to a hundred …”

“And then? What will happen when you come home?” Mother said wearily.

I looked up and caught Mina's eye. In the contours of her arched brow and firm lip (and short of flashing me the finger), I read the simple truth: she had grown up and I had not. What stood between us was time, and within it I was absent. I had missed her basketball games, her prom, and her birthday. Her big sister had not been there during the many times in the last year when she needed to lean on the experience and comfort of an older sibling. Not only that, I had stolen the spotlight away from her. “Fuck you, sister,” is what I heard in the contemptuous silence of her look.

Mother sat staring out the window. Dad stood, hands deep in his pockets, his foot scratching away at some stain on the floor.

This was it. I had worn out their sturdy love.

“What's going on?” Dr Bélanger asked. Her office felt more like a living room than a clinical office. Plants cascaded from pots, and on the walls were canvases of calm, dreamy seaside scenes—blue skies and cottony clouds that I wanted to soar into and take
flight. An Oriental area rug partly covered the scuffed hospital linoleum, and a collection of delicate crystal figurines of animals decorated her bookshelf.

“Lila?”

I looked at her kind, compassionate face, covered my own with both hands, and sobbed. I cried for what seemed like an eternity while she just sat there quietly. I was shocked at how I had just fallen apart. After a moment, I blew my nose into a tissue.

“How did that feel?”

I looked up at her smiling face and chuckled. “Well, better than Xanax.”

She sat patiently as I told her about the family visit and how miserably it had gone. “I'm scared, I guess,” I said.

“Of what?”

“Of the future. Of life.”

“What scares you?”

“Everything, pretty much.”

“Do you think you've given life a chance?”

“Yeah. Eighteen years of it,” I said.

“Do you want to die?”

“I'm too
fat
to die.”

“That shouldn't prevent you,” she said unflinchingly.

I shook my head, about to write her off as just another Dr Messer, when she said, “If I had given up on life, I wouldn't be sitting here with you. It
does
get better.”

I don't know why, but I believed her. For the next nine hours, at any rate, I believed her.