Skin Game: A Memoir (10 page)

In the right-hand column I entered my weight, and each day as I sat with my pen poised, ready to inscribe the number, I struggled between scrupulous, merciless honesty and generous optimism. I weighed myself every morning, stark naked, e-e-easing onto the scale as though I might surprise it into dropping five pounds off me, just like that. If the needle hovered just a fraction of an inch above the black line that represented 91 pounds, could I go ahead and put myself down as 91? Or was that cheating? How could I wrap myself in the brief glory of 91, when clearly I still clung to the last bloated vestiges of 92? You cannot imagine how much time I gave to such debates.

I looked in the mirror every day, poking and prodding at my too-abundant flesh, searching for the emerging protrusion of bone. I looked in the mirror and the girl who looked back seemed familiar, yes, but not overly familiar. Certainly not intimately familiar. Not at all what I knew myself to be.

*   *   *

If you want to call it anorexia, you’d probably be safe enough. An eating disorder, let’s say, to be accurate without overstating the case.

I’d never heard of such a thing as an eating disorder then, and even if I had, I doubt I would have connected the term in any way to my own behavior. I’m sure I would have assumed I didn’t qualify. I lost nearly twenty pounds in five months, but what’s that? Four pounds a month, one pound a week, big deal. I never made it below eighty pounds. I never ended up in a hospital, jammed full of tubes, pitting my will against reward systems and group therapy.

I don’t care to claim that I had anorexia, because I worry that I’ll be challenged on the point and discounted on a technicality. After I first read about it, in
Seventeen
magazine a few years later, I would recite the diagnostic criteria to myself like so many Stations of the Cross, suspecting all along that true anorexia was not for the likes of me, that it was reserved for those more troubled than I, whose suffering was greater.

*   *   *

Did my parents see what I was doing? Did I eat more, or less, than I believed? Did I hide myself well, or make myself obvious? I remember my father sometimes harping on me to eat, but the more I was urged to eat, the more triumphant I felt in refusing. Having something to push off against made me stronger.

During that school year my family was dividing our life between an apartment in Charlottesville and our campus home. I’d wake up in the morning, and my mother would already be rushing out the door to make her classes twenty-five miles away, my father long since gone. It was easy to skip breakfast, or to dawdle in the apparent act of toasting an English muffin, and then stuff it, barely nibbled, wrapped in a paper towel to disguise it, into the bottom of the trash can. My sister, whose metabolism could have burned through a steel door, churned up thick breakfast shakes of whole milk and eggs and chocolate sauce and instant coffee, and sat at the table sipping her meal, elaborately ignoring me.

Lunch was an easy lie; I told my friends I’d eaten at home and I told my parents I’d eaten at school if it ever occurred to them to ask. Dinner was more problematic. I didn’t want to have to look at food, to find myself in too-dangerous proximity to it, and I was thankful for all the many days when dinner was a haphazard scrounging affair shoehorned in between my parents’ academic schedules and my sister’s extracurriculars.

I could lie about my eating with perfect equanimity, my gaze level as I improvised my prevarications. “I had a big snack when I got home from school. I’ll make myself something later.”

Once you take to the habit of deception, every new lie comes that much easier. Though to me it wasn’t so much lies as a matter of judicious editing. We all inevitably present a version of ourselves that is a collection of half-truths and exclusions. The way I saw it, the truth was too complicated, whereas the well-chosen lie would put everyone’s mind at ease. Why gum up the works with information nobody wants?

17

Anorexia isn’t about
being
fat, it’s about
having
fat. Any fat. Any bulge or fold or wrinkle that isn’t skin, muscle, or bone. Fat’s too dangerous. It’s too amorphous. It has no structure, it dimples and jiggles and droops. It is born of a disturbing, invisible alchemy, by which a cracker, a slice of cake, a pickle, a ham sandwich, all of it is rendered into the same tallow congealed beneath your skin. Fat gets away from you. You could almost imagine that it replicates itself, that once you lay down that first layer, your fat will take over from there. You could imagine yourself consumed by it, swallowed and suffocated by it, pulled down and drowned in it. Fat does not negotiate, it rampages.

Therefore the only way to be sure you are safe from it is to allow none of it, not one ounce or curve of it. You must strip yourself to skin stretched like a canvas on a frame of bone, and even then you have fought merely to a stalemate, a permanent demilitarized zone along which you must stand vigilant at all times. You have to stake out your border.

My eating disorder was driven by a blind, animal need like the one that fueled my cutting—something far below the level of conscious thought that hounded me day and night with a desperate urgency, an alarm going out. It was vital not to eat; I understood that one fact with pristine clarity. It wasn’t a point that required further clarification; it was, as I saw it, my life’s one Truth.

Anorexia is not about being pretty. It’s not about being desirable. It’s not even about being thin, really, because “thin” doesn’t begin to describe what you’re aiming for. Thin is too transient, too untrustworthy, too liable to slip away from you in a bite here, a nibble there. What you want is bone: absolute, impermeable, the Maginot line. Anorexia is not for the weak.

I learned, just a few years ago, that among self-mutilators, as many as sixty percent report a parallel history of eating disorders: a statistic that didn’t surprise me. From the outside, their shared theme might appear to be self-destruction, but from where I’ve stood, what they have in common is something altogether different. I subdued hunger, overcame the animal self’s blind instinct for self-preservation, in search of a perfect silence.

18

Our apartment in Charlottesville took up half of a nondescript, ranch-style brick duplex in a small, characterless neighborhood hemmed in by commercial strips, professional offices, and an apartment complex. The kind of neighborhood occupied by recently divorced single mothers, and struggling young couples, and low-level-management bachelors edging into their forties and eating half-frozen TV dinners over the sink. And us, of course.

Our apartment had two dark bedrooms, a cramped bathroom, and a living-dining room opening into a kitchen. Electric-blue industrial-grade carpeting glued to the living room floor suggested the transience of so many tenant feet coming and going, short-timers too briefly in residence to care for comfort. The walls were covered in a paint textured with vicious little nubbins.

The worst thing about our apartment, however, was the suffocating feeling of confinement, of being reduced to a cramped space and a scrubby backyard imprisoned by chain-link fencing. It made me restless and claustrophobic. It was depressing. It wasn’t home.

It was, on the other hand, an adventure. I lived in an
apartment
—so sophisticatedly urban. I didn’t know anyone who lived in an apartment. I imagined we might have wacky neighbors and comic sitcom adventures in the manner of Mary Tyler Moore and her spun-off former neighbor, Rhoda. I could ride a bus to school, a proposition so Middle American that it sounded positively exotic. My sister and I could walk—walk!—to the Safeway just up the road. In the midst of my self-imposed starvation a grocery store was like pornography: so desirable, so forbidden.

We left virtually all our furniture out at our other house, which we continued to think of for a while yet as our
real
house, and my parents hammered together the trappings of domesticity in square-edged lumber: a sofa, and platform beds of particleboard resting on square two-by-four frames, topped with foam pads. I liked the novelty of sleeping only inches off the floor. I thought it was hip and chic and unconventional, very hippie vans and Haight-Ashbury. We even slept under sleeping bags.

That our parents had moved us to Charlottesville with the primary intention of wresting my sister and me from the oppressive attention of too many bored teenage boys was never discussed. That was the subject that dared not breathe its uncomfortable name—a La Brea Tar Pit of awkwardness all of us preferred not to blunder into.

“But
why
are we moving to Charlottesville?” I’d demanded, attempting to exploit this avoidance of the obvious answer to my advantage. As though if my parents couldn’t come up with a good enough explanation, the whole plan might be scrapped. Why do children ever bother to mount such negotiations?

“You’ll be close to school,” said my mother. “You can be in plays, and your sister can play on the soccer team.”

It was irritatingly difficult to argue against that logic. The long drive to Charlottesville had always been the bane of our extracurricular lives, the reason why we couldn’t join Brownie troops or even attend birthday parties without planning as if for a military campaign.

Nevertheless, I burned with ill-concealed resentment at this move, which I considered to have been dreamed up if not quite for the sole purpose of making me unhappy, then at least in complete disregard of my feelings. I’d waited the whole summer in maddened impatience to get back to Virginia—back, plain and simple, to the boys. Life had gotten stupefyingly boring the minute they left school in the spring. I wrote some of them ten- and fifteen-page letters, the romantic inaccuracies of my memory of them growing exponentially with each further day of our separation. I crafted endless reunion fantasies for their return in the fall.

In the end, when I saw them again for the first time, we just stood around awkwardly, hands jammed in our pockets, trading labored barbs as though our repartee had grown rusty with disuse. Before long, however, we’d slipped comfortably back into familiar grooves. What surprises me is that none of them, after a summer’s reflection and no doubt a fair crop of girls their own age, had grown too self-conscious to continue chatting up an eighth-grader with newly installed braces on her teeth. I had worried that those braces, along with the glasses I could no longer shirk wearing because I couldn’t see the blackboard anymore even when I squinted, would spell my social death, but no, it was my parents who were ruining my life, with their relocation agenda.

*   *   *

In spite of our new apartment, we maintained technical occupancy of our house, and at first I seized any opportunity, any excuse to finagle a night or a weekend there.

“I need to go out to the house tonight to look for a book,” I’d say, or “Wouldn’t it be fun to go for a hike this weekend?” I’m not saying these pretexts weren’t patently transparent, but at the time I believed they would appear credible.

Once on campus, I’d wait, my heart pounding with anticipation, for dinner, for walking into the dining room and imagining a little ripple, an awareness among my putative pals that I’d reappeared, as if they were dogs suddenly getting wind of something intriguing, and sniffing at the air. But of course you never look. Never acknowledge. Just feel like you are moving through an electrically charged field, its faint crackle and surge playing across your skin. Eat nothing, just sip slowly at your milk, because eating is so degrading, so empty of dignity.

After dinner, I’d meander to the lobby, maintaining the same requisite pretense of nonchalance. We’d warm up with a few moments of fidgety mock hostilities.

“Gee! We thought you were dead,” they’d say, or “Oho! So you condescended to come back and see us!”

“Yeah, well, I’m stuck here for the weekend. Figured I had to kill time somehow,” I’d say in reply.

The preliminaries dispensed with, we’d settle back into the same old routines, the thrusts and parries of our game.

*   *   *

But I’d reached fickle thirteen; my allegiances began to drift. Every time we stayed in our old home for the night or the weekend, the house seemed that much colder, emptier, more depressing. It took on a ghostly quality, like a house abandoned suddenly in the face of some oncoming cataclysm or lethal plague. One glass stood on the drainboard in the kitchen, rinsed and reused, rinsed and reused. The soap dried and cracked in the dish in the bathroom my sister and I had shared. My father, who stayed there the most, did his living in his bedroom and study, and the rest of the house went unheated. My room—still with its familiar array of animal posters on the wall, my childhood bed and desk, a few outgrown dresses hanging in the closet, the Trixie Belden novels stacked thick along the bookshelf, the Fisher-Price toys piled in the closet—seemed like an artifact preserved, a museum reconstruction of a life that was almost but not quite familiar, a life I could see but never revisit. An almost palpable pall of disuse settled like dust over everything. I think we even draped some of the furniture in sheets, though that may be my imagination.

When we first moved into the apartment, we brought with us the bare minimum of possessions, thinking in a vague way that, at some undetermined point in the future, when some unspecified criteria had been met, we would go home and resume our interrupted lives, like returning relieved from a disastrous vacation. Degree by degree, however, that life receded unrecoverable into our past. Each new possession we moved into our apartment signaled the shifting of worlds, until the balance had tipped unalterably.

Charlottesville was seductive in its charms. We could run up to the store for a quart of milk. I could walk to my best friend’s house after school. Going to a movie? It’s as easy as pie—just get your mother to drop you off into your little cluster of girlfriends all waiting there in line with ticket money and giggling gossip.

Then there were my sister’s friends, a pack of flamboyant, brainy students from Charlottesville High School, who milled about one another in a constant ebb and flow of emotional drama. They fascinated me, with their complex theoretical ontologies and conversations that rambled broad and deep. The narrowly focused talk of the boarding-school boys started looking vapid and dull by comparison; it was only ever about sex and how much beer they would drink at their next vacation, and sex and the cars they would buy in college, and sex and the apartments they would inhabit then, and sex and the girls they would sleep with. And sex.