Skin Game: A Memoir (9 page)

I was terrified of this new school, and yet eager to go. In the academic paradigm by which my life was regulated, the world began over again every September. There was a new schedule for your days, and people you hadn’t seen in months came back taller or tanned, in new clothes, and people you’d never known before became a new part of your life. You had new books and pencils, new paper and notebooks, new shoes. Every September was a chance to remake yourself.

At this new school, no one knew me. For all they knew, I could be the aloof, cool, even mysterious me that I planned to be. I imagined myself wearing a wistful, knowing smile when people spoke to me, a smile that hinted at desperate tragedies painfully mastered. I even practiced the smile in the mirror. I wouldn’t be unfriendly, just subtly detached, removed, as though I had seen far, far too much of the world for eighth grade to be more than a mere precious amusement. My fellow eighth-graders would cast sidelong glances at me, intrigued by this quiet figure moving with subdued dignity through each day.

She was nothing more than another invented, third-person Caroline, conjured up with the idea that she could somehow resolve the inconsistency between my emotional state and my pedestrian, middle-schooler’s life. As if it couldn’t be possible to be a tortured soul with your rubber bands forever snapping off your braces. As if, in order to validate your unhappiness, you had to be a dedicated postulant to misery alone, with no extracurricular distractions.

*   *   *

After the feverish intensity of the preceding months, summer fell across my lap like a corpse. I’d always loved summers in the past, the endless indolent hours stretching before me in languid promise. The ratcheting whir of cicadas filled the air, and the cement of the porch was cool under my feet as I pushed myself in lazy arcs on the hammock, absorbed in an Agatha Christie.

Now my misery robbed me of even this pleasure, and summer offered the prospect of nothing but endless empty hours made worse because instead of spending the season, as we always had, in Virginia, we were heading for Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, where my father’s relatives lived. I’m sure there must have been discussions leading up to this event; my parents had bought a small house there, divided into rental apartments. One of these was to be made available to students during the school year and reserved for us in the summer. In my memory, however, the whole proposal drops on me like a leaden fait accompli.

I suspect that if we had stayed home I would still have spent the summer in a dismal state. Nevertheless, I saw Saratoga as the latest outrage against me. I found its town-ness unnerving, with all those cars and all those strangers and the world gridded into streets and sidewalks and little green squares of front lawns. It felt at once both too restrictive and too full of unknowns—anything might happen to you, and the worst thing was that you couldn’t even know what the dangers were and so couldn’t know what to do to avoid them.

But no matter. I wasn’t planning on going anywhere or doing anything. I was going to spend the whole summer drooped like a wilted stalk of celery across the frameless mattress that was my bed, staring hatefully at the blank white wall and playing Bread’s “Baby I’m-a Want You” endlessly on my prized secondhand stereo that I’d bought from my cousin. That was my plan, and to leaven my days I’d brought along my trusted, stamped-steel companion. To disinfect the blade, I dabbed it with a cotton ball dipped in Love’s Lemon Scent, so that the faint sting of alcohol and a cool lemony essence served as markers to each cutting interlude. I was cutting the way kids will hang around smoking—to pass the time, to fill the empty hours.

My plan was to wallow in boredom, to wear my boredom like a hair shirt, to explore every flat plane and dull shade of boredom. In spite of my dedicated plans, however, I found myself in short order palling around with some of the kids on the block. I was intrigued by the small-town novelty of it all: ambling down to the Rexall for sodas, to the state fair across town, to the movies and the mall.
Here I am,
said my Narrator,
hanging out with the Gang.

I went to my first concert, that teenage rite of passage—America, opened by Captain & Tennille—with my new friend Lewis, and afterward as we were sitting in my backyard talking about not much in particular he leaned over suddenly and tried to kiss me.

I spun away as though bitten, my reaction as startling to me as to him. Why did I feel a flash of panic? He stammered some kind of apology. I stammered some kind of excuse.

Was that kiss the catalyst, the very last straw?

One July day thereafter, hot and airless in our first-floor apartment, I sat on the living room sofa with a plate propped on my lap, eating a ham sandwich. Thick slab of smoky-sweet pink ham, crisp iceberg lettuce, smeared with a gelatinous glob of mayonnaise and poised in the embrace of two thick hunks of homemade bread. I can assure you there was never a sandwich more multifaceted in its charms, more seductive in its flavors, than this, the last sandwich of my lost gustatory innocence.

I licked a few, final mayonnaise-y crumbs from my fingers with great satisfaction, and then it occurred to me:

You’re fat.

As though a distorted fun-house mirror had just been thrown up in front of me, I saw with sudden and perfect clarity the image of my self: grotesque, bloated, the embodiment of ill-restraint. As if the whole last year had been winding up to this moment of confrontation, as if I’d been fleeing headlong from a horror, then turned the corner to find I had been running all this time from my own self.

Time and space blurred, suspended. I lay on the sofa in almost a fugue state, thinking,
I will stop eating. I will stop eating.
I wasn’t trying to convince myself; it was a statement of fact. I did not say to myself that I would go on a diet. I did not say that I would lose weight. Simply, I would not eat. This decision seemed so perfectly obvious that it was like suddenly coming up with the Grand Unified Theory. Of course! How could I not have understood this before?

I weighed ninety-eight pounds, which at five feet two inches would have been stretching the definition of fat. Nevertheless, it was fat to me, so I would stop eating until I weighed seventy-five. Seventy-five was the number I settled on from that first moment. It was the number I associated with that other, lost life, the one I had lived on the previous side of twelve.

Imagine if you could truly make yourself indifferent to want. It is desire, say the Buddhists, that makes us suffer. I want, I need, I hunger—I suffer. Imagine how ridding yourself of desire would ease the burden of living. So I chose to believe—I had to believe, it was the number I would place all my chips on—that I could eradicate hunger, that it was something utterly distinct from self, something I could jettison like so much unneeded ballast. I knew it was possible. I knew it was necessary. Thinness would be the visible mark of my self-perfection. All I had to do was strip myself down to the simple mathematics of line and angle, the essential, the prime number of self.

*   *   *

I stopped just like that. The next morning I woke up, and I didn’t eat. Every morning after that I woke up and didn’t eat. It was startlingly easy. It gave me something interesting to occupy the rest of the summer. I spent all of every day working on not eating.

I did allow for certain minor exceptions to the general rule of refusal: diet root beer, a smallish tangerine, one carefully measured cup of plain yogurt. All that other food, it was dangerous. When I fell to its temptation, when I succumbed to a scoop of curried eggs over rice or a creamy wedge of sharp New York cheddar, it was as though I had wallowed in some corrupt orgy of appetite.

By the logic of my obsession, however, food consumed without witnesses did not exist. At the dinner table I’d push three bites listlessly around my plate; then later, alone in the kitchen lit dimly by the open refrigerator door, I’d frantically stuff handfuls of that same food into my mouth, poised like a scavenger to flee at the sound of approaching footsteps. Technically, of course, I was witness to this eating, but somehow it seemed entirely possible to deceive even myself.

Emptiness was what I sought. Emptiness, like a pure note plucked from a perfectly strung instrument. I lay on my bed for hours at a time, experiencing emptiness. My days were occupied with delaying as long as possible the moment when I would finally rise in my emptiness to walk to the kitchen, my feet whispering like air along the wood floors, to withdraw that one, cold carton of yogurt from the refrigerator and spoon it up in excruciatingly slow bites, letting each one dissolve away on my tongue before finally I swallowed.

The narrowness of my obsession was a part of its appeal: I would be about nothing but refusal. To hold hunger in abeyance felt like a power of incomparable magnitude. I will, therefore I am.

In the endless idle hours of August I imagined over and over again how I would walk into that first day of my new school. I’d never even seen the place, so I sketched in vague details to stand for the buildings and the furniture and the teachers. All these details were irrelevant, anyway. The point of the portrait, its very center, drawn in every shadow and detail, was my slenderness. I liked those sibilant thin words.
Slender. Slim. Slight.

16

Public school turned out to be—well, school. It was louder and bigger and more institutionally characterless than my old school, and packs of tough girls cruised the hallways, lumpish in too-tight jeans, with lank Farrah Fawcett haircuts, long-handled combs stuck in their rear pockets. But when you get right down to it, English Grammar and Comp is pretty much English Grammar and Comp wherever you find it.

My father brought me on the first day. The two of us sat in the front office waiting for my class schedule, while I watched tides of middle-schoolers sweeping past the office door in a cacophony of shouts and a whiff of grape bubble gum. It was all so very …
public.
The great, undifferentiated masses.

My heart froze at the prospect of being tossed into that tide. I wanted to beg my father to take me with him, not to abandon me here, but to return me to the hateful familiarity of my old school and my former tormentors. Instead, I waited politely, and then a student aide slouched up to show me to my homeroom, and my father gave me a kiss and a smile of encouragement and I was swallowed up in that sea.

Tears stung my eyes as I followed the aide through a labyrinth of hallways. How would I ever know where anything was? I felt so abjectly alone, as though I had been transported to a foreign land, lost forever to friends and family.

That lasted about three days, during which time I completely abandoned any pretense at cool, aloof, wistful knowingness in an effort simply to make it through the day without bursting into tears, and then I was taken under the wing of a cheerful girl named Mary who shared my homeroom, a girl with a bright and bustling manner and thickly curled hair and a mission to be my guide through the perils of public school. She told me whom to ignore and whom to avoid, which bathrooms were safest, which teachers were coolest, and most kindly of all, and to my eternal gratitude, insisted that I join her and her friends at their lunch table. There are few things more desolate, more forlorn, than sitting alone in a school lunchroom.

These girls became my friends, truly the nicest girls in the eighth grade, the most decent and generous and cheerful girls. I selectively edited all that I believed was sordid and bitter and caustic in me—the scarlet past, the suicidal dreams, the razor, the self-starvation—so that I could take shelter in their warmth and good spirits. In their company, I could script myself, could almost even imagine myself, as just another bookish eighth-grader, with no more momentous preoccupation than the next day’s algebra quiz.

My best friend among these girls was English by birth, and I loved the Briticisms that inflected her speech, the way she said “alu-min-i-um” with the extra “i” and “herbs” with the “h” pronounced. She was smart, and she had a wonderful bedroom tucked into the eaves of her family’s house, with window seats in the dormers that begged for curling up with a good book. There wasn’t anything mawkishly girlish about her, just that wonderful, sturdy British good sense and competence, like a pair of stout and reliable brogues, to guide her. I felt chronically grateful to be her friend. Everything about her from her mastery of mathematics to her neatly ordered brown-bag lunches spoke of a level head and a reasonable relationship with the world.

Never once in the years that we were friends would I have thought even for a moment to tell her of that other life of mine, the one that unfolded by the light of my lighthouse lamp and the measure of my scales. That life might almost not have existed, except for its secret reminders to me etched out in scab and scar tissue and the ever-present racket in my head.

*   *   *

Every now and then, one of these Very Nice Girls would remark on my shrinking body and my miserly lunches.

“You’re so skinny,” Mary would say, as I hunched over my cup of yogurt or my tiny jewel of tangerine, “you need to eat something. Here, take part of my sandwich.”

I wanted that sandwich, I wanted the slabs of hamburger-topped pizza and the thick cheeseburgers and the french fries limp with grease that came off the cafeteria line. But I’d wave them away, and I’d wave away the sandwich or the cookies or the chips Mary was always trying to offer.

“Oh, God, no thanks. I had such a
huge
breakfast, you wouldn’t believe. I’m still so full I can’t even finish this tangerine.” And I’d push away the last little crescent moon of fruit, with a secret surge of delighted triumph.

My project for Mr. Wayne’s general science class was my diet. We were assigned to measure and record the progress of something—anything—over the course of the school year. I would measure the progressive and eagerly anticipated disappearance of my body.

“MY DIET,” I printed in large, commanding block letters across the cover of an electric-blue spiral notebook. That’s what I called it, that’s what I believed it—a diet. Inside the notebook, under each day and date, I listed “Breakfast,” “Lunch,” “Dinner,” and then the shameful evidence of my still-unmastered appetites: one apple—100 calories; two olives—16 calories; one saltine—12 calories. I carried everywhere a little pocket calorie guide, which I consulted until I had it memorized, panicking when something I ate was not listed, thinking that if I wasn’t absolutely certain of the precise number of calories I consumed, then anything could happen. Anything.