Hungry (21 page)

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.

When I could sleep, my dreams were disaster movies, but waking hours at home were worse. Lisa was leaving a trail of garbage, gum wrappers, and water bottles all over the house. Asked to clean it up, she would explode. Who
was
this child?

Once she had loved company and watched old videotapes labeled “Family & Friends” until they fell apart. Now she stayed in her room when family and friends came over. It felt as if we’d lost Lisa to a cult or a coven of witches. We could see her, what was left of her, but not touch her. Ned asked, “What should we do now?” What I really wanted was an expert to move into our house and tell us all what to do.

Lisa’s behavior took me back to my own teen years, not a time anybody revisits willingly. The trouble starts when your body changes from the way you’ve always known it to be. One day you’re playing with Barbies, the next you’re wrestling with bras and tampons. You likely put on a little weight with the curves—for me, more weight than curves. And just when your body goes out of control, how you look becomes essential to your being. Some fat is a normal part of adolescent development. But these days, nobody wants that part of being normal.

I went to UC Berkeley in 1968, a tumultuous time when many parents were directing their daughters somewhere safer. But Berkeley came up with so much real life that I needed a lot less comfort from food. By graduation I had grown happier, slimmer, and two inches taller.

Despite my heartening story, as a high school senior Lisa was sure her life was never going to get better, that whatever worked for me meant nothing to her, that she and I had little in common temperamentally or physically. At the time it was true, we were running on different tracks, though food was central to both. Now we were about to collide.

Prom was Saturday, May 3, 2003, in coastal Santa Cruz, the same weekend as the James Beard Foundation Awards, the food world’s biggest honor, in New York. It didn’t look like a problem, because I had no expectations of getting an award. We were just trying to make it day to day. The whole concept of looking forward, that good things could happen in the future, didn’t fit in a house where one of the children was ill. We all had lost the ability to think ahead.

Except for the prom. For that, Lisa had plans.

 

lisa:
I kept studying the pro-anorexia websites. Girls post their pictures and their weights. Many of them are fine and normal, but they call themselves fat and ugly. I felt this way, too. I absorbed their rules, like the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not eat. Thou shalt remain thin. This is where I learned to use a toothbrush for purging instead of my fingers, and to eat lots of soft foods or to drink milk after a binge, to get more of the food out.

I can recall standing in front of my parents’ full-length mirror in a white spaghetti-strap tank top, oversize sweatpants folded over three times at the top, with my twig-like arms drooping at my sides, hip bones sticking out, and staring at myself, saying, “This is good, right? I’m skinny—so skinny, and this is good?!” My head appeared too big on my extremely shrunken frame. Part of me wanted to believe I had reached something amazing with my new emaciated body and the other part of me knew I had landed in dangerous waters.

 

sheila:
The family physician who diagnosed Lisa’s anorexia also referred us to the HMO’s nutrition department, which unlike psychopharmacology held a lot of interest for Lisa. She pored over food labels and diet plans, websites and magazines, and talked about becoming a nutritionist. Prom was four weeks away when Lisa and I went to her first appointment with Karen Astrachan, a clinical dietician who turned out to be a valuable resource even after Lisa stopped seeing her. Astrachan looks like Lisa wanted to look: trim figure, straight blond hair, attractive. Lisa didn’t dismiss her as yet another adult who would never understand. In the dietician’s office, Lisa said that her goal was to stay her current weight for the prom, to gain not one pound.

“After the prom, there will be something else,” Astrachan warned, explaining that another event or reason to stay thin would always come up. She spoke knowledgably and convincingly, but without lecturing or talking down to a very sick teenager.

Astrachan was very likable and Lisa seemed to absorb some of what she said about nutrition. She piled up plastic models of various foods to demonstrate how much it would take to gain even one pound. As she told Lisa how she worked and that she didn’t want Lisa to weigh herself, I thought, “Please, please let this be the person who breaks through.”

 

lisa:
I wanted to go to Karen. I thought she would tell me: “This is the way.” My first question was how I could maintain my weight, especially with prom around the corner. I wanted an exact eating plan. I thought if I ate even a little bit more than I was currently eating, I’d gain weight. Karen said it takes 3,500 calories to gain a pound. She had a basket of toy food to show me: a slice of pizza, a tortilla, a piece of cheese, a bowl of rice, a piece of tofu, a chicken breast, a bowl of cereal, a banana, a piece of bread, a brownie, a scoop of ice cream. She said that she does not do eating plans, that it was my job to figure out what it was my body needed. She recommended that only she weigh me so I would not obsess. She said we would start slow, with added fats, since obviously they were my biggest fear.

I thought it would be easy enough, just six servings of added fats each day. But I couldn’t do it. Adding a tablespoon of peanut butter or a slice of avocado seemed like so much to me.

It felt like all food was bad. I often found myself crying after finishing a sandwich or a small wrap. I was tired all the time and anxious. I was prescribed, with much resistance, Remeron, an antidepressant that would aid in sleep. However, it also increased my appetite. I had to check in with Dr. Stegman again to see if I would have to go on hormones since my estrogen level was getting low.

I knew I needed to gain weight and eat more, and yet I really didn’t want to nor did I want it done artificially, with all these pills. In a way I felt cheated out of my chance to be thin, with doctors telling me I did not have the body type to support a low weight. I had spent the majority of my important preteen and high school years overweight and self-conscious and now I had finally seized control, able to be labeled in the “skinny” category. Why did it have to be taken away? I wanted to stay this weight and still be normal. But I didn’t feel normal. All my focus on restricting calories and exercising in turn caused my attention span to be swarmed by thoughts of food. The less I ate, the more I thought about it. My mind was in a constant state of negotiation. I would try to study but the rumbling in my stomach grew louder and my mental debate worsened: “Should I have an apple? No. Be strong. Just finish this homework and then you can have an apple.” But in the end I didn’t do the homework or eat the apple.

I started having anxiety attacks, especially at the end of the day when my blood sugar was at its lowest. I constantly tried on certain clothes to make sure they were either still too big or fit a certain way. I checked my face in the mirror when it seemed bigger. I would complain to my parents that I was ballooning up. They would tell me I was crazy, and that I wasn’t seeing things clearly. They would say, “What I see is a very skinny girl.”

 

sheila:
Did we really tell Lisa she was crazy? It’s possible. We were not in the running for Parents of the Year.

With a year like ours, I hadn’t even thought to look when the Beard nominations email went out. But my colleagues did, and there was my name, attached to the long-winded award category: Newspaper Feature Writing About Restaurants and/or Chefs with or without Recipes.

The James Beard awards are the Oscars of the food world. For chefs, cookbook authors, restaurant owners as well as food writers and TV show hosts, the Beards are the big leagues.

I was nominated for my story “Serve You Right: Caring for Diners Is a Learnable Art.” I was proud of this story, which had grown out of an experience with good service one night with friends. The server had picked up on Diane’s disappointment with her entrée, asked her about it, and taken care of it with absolute efficiency. What struck me was how rarely this happens, unless you’re in a very expensive restaurant, and even there, you can feel uncomfortably full of attention overkill. In good economies and bad, service is always the number one complaint among diners. I had heard so many horrors that I had to wonder how a restaurant ever got it right, so I went about asking owners, servers, and customers why they thought service, though so important, was mostly flubbed and what were the steps to correct that, for diners as well as restaurants. Bad service spoils the best food. The point was that diners want to feel that some hunger—for nourishment, hospitality, community, or entertainment—has been satisfied by the time they’ve paid for dinner.

The journalism awards were to be given at a banquet in New York City on Friday, May 2—the night before the prom.

 

lisa:
The day Mike asked me to the prom, I happened to have one of my worst breakdowns so far. I hadn’t expect to be asked. I had never been asked to any dance ever in my high school career. I had been to many dances, but I had either gone stag or with a group of friends.

Mike was in a band with my friend’s boyfriend. I thought he was cute.

My last class of the day was physics, and for months I’d been having extreme difficulty holding it together for that hour. Whether because of six hours of various other draining classes, or low blood sugar, or just because it was physics, it had become my hour of doom. This day, I spent most of the class with my head buried in my arms, folded across the desk. My friend Gaelin did her best to talk me through, and when the class got let out, I felt like running to safety but could barely lift my head. All I could do was shuffle out, like a very old woman. I just wanted to go home, hoping to find some solace in front of the TV.

But Mike was waiting for me. Standing with his hands nervously tucked at his side, he called to me quietly, “Hey, Lisa . . . um, I wanted to ask you to the prom.” He extended his hand, which held a single rose.

My eyes fixed on the rose for a second. It seemed so lonely and almost hopeless, like me. And yet, somehow endearing.

My mind was in so many places, it took some time to process his proposition. Finally I lifted my head enough to meet his eyes and slipped out a yes. Then, I don’t know why, I fell into an awkward hug with him and whispered, “Thank you.”

I drove home to tell Mom the good news.

 

sheila:
How could I go to New York? Fly across the country for an award I had only a one-third chance of getting, dine like a celebrity, and gad about at cocktail parties? A month earlier I’d canceled a trip to Washington, DC, where Ned had a conference, because both of us couldn’t be that far from Lisa at the same time. We hadn’t even gone to visit nearby friends for a weekend. Canceling had been the right thing to do then, and maybe was the right thing now.