Loud in the House of Myself (10 page)

This is what people with eating disorders do: we drink lots of liquids. After all, if you chug a half gallon of water before dinner, you’ll be fine with just carrots and an apple. If you fool yourself with 64 ounces of Diet Coke, you won’t need actual nutrients. If you take a sip before each bite during a binge, and slam a liter bottle of whatever just before purging, it comes up easier. I had asked for a chance to go away and use my mind and I had gotten it, and yet there I was sitting on the floor eating pills. Thinking:
I could kill myself. I could do it. Right here, this could be it, my mother wouldn’t be the one to find me.
I wasn’t scared.

I decided to take a shower, thinking that maybe the hot water would increase my circulation and get the diet pills into my system faster so I could sit at dinner being all impressive with my ability not to eat. I washed my left arm, then my right. As I scrubbed my face, I noticed there was suddenly a strobe light in the shower. I could see every individual drop coming from the showerhead. It occurred to me, with a sudden manic flash, that showers and busy signals were EXACTLY THE SAME THING! Why had I never realized this before? Everything began to go
reallyreallyfast,
my vision narrowed to a tiny white dot, and I opened my mouth to scream but the water poured in and my voice was drowned.

My head hit the wall in a broken line like the water droplets:
thump thump thump
. I covered the drain with my body and the shower turned into a little swimming pool. I lay there for a while thinking,
Something’s not right here,
and then it occurred to me that the thing to do would be to
stand up
.
STAND UP! STAND UUUUPPPPP!!!

I stood up. Or at least halfway. I crawled. Left the shower running, crawled to the bathroom door, somehow got the door open, crawled down the hall. Everyone else was at dinner. I could have been eating dinner. Instead, I was having
THE TIME OF MY LIFE!
I was thin and popular and in demand! The glamour was nonstop!

I left a trail of soap suds in the hallway of the dorm, immensely grateful that there was nobody around to see me squelching along, unable to dry myself or walk without hanging onto the wall. The towel I had used to wrap myself was soaking wet, so when I got back to my room, I pulled myself up on the doorknob, opened the door, thought,
OH, I REALLY NEED A DRY TOWEL,
and ripped the
Les Mis
beach towel down on top of myself.

By the time Julie returned to the room, I had managed to dress myself in shorts and an old sweatshirt and lay sprawled on the red beanbag chair. She yelped when she saw her towel across the foot of my bed and little Sticky Tack pellets all over the room. I said nothing, just let her eyes travel to the empty Dexatrim blister-packs on my desk and her half-full tumbler beside them.

“I’m glad you’re all right,” she said. “Incidentally, I’m never speaking to you again.”

And she didn’t. She sat at her desk reading a script all evening, and then she went to bed. I remained in the beanbag until she fell asleep, listening to my Walkman, afraid to move lest my head fall apart. I sat tapping my foot to the music all night, still too wired to sleep, silently chanting:
Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, I’m sorry
.
Sorry about your towel, towel, towel, towel, towel
. My teeth clanged against each other, the echoes bouncing off my guts. I stayed like that until it turned blue outside, then white. With Julie still asleep, I crept to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and took another shower, and then crawled out onto the fire escape to look for half-smoked cigarettes. Found some, smoked them. I had an overwhelming urge to call Phil, which I could do at nine o’clock, as soon as he got to his office. I managed to wait it out.

His secretary’s voice, then his—beautiful, soothing. I told him I needed help, that it had all been going well but yesterday it went to shit.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I fucked up. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Sometimes,” he said, “when you put yourself in harm’s way, you get harmed. In your case, you harmed yourself. Interesting development.”

I laughed, felt guilty for laughing. But he chuckled with me, and I was so grateful for his irreverence I wanted to leap through the phone and hug him.

“That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s okay. Do you need medical attention?”

“No,” I said, “I’m alive.”

“Good,” he said. “Stay that way. Absolutely no more diet pills, you have things to learn and I’d be very disappointed if you died before you learned them.”

“Me too.” For the first time, I really meant it. Knowing there was someone out there who actively wanted me to stay alive because he thought I had something to offer was such a novel concept, I couldn’t let him down.

“It’s like this,” he said. “Your job right now is to try, and fail, and try again. The trying is more important than the failing. Eventually you won’t be afraid of either.”

“I’m tired of starving,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Cut it out.”

And it seemed almost, almost that easy.

I thought about how, in just a few weeks, I would be a senior in high school. After that I could leave. I had less than three hundred and sixty-five days left in Prairie Grove, and then I never had to see it again if I didn’t want to. But first, I had to pass Algebra II. I had to fill out college applications. I had to go back to the snack bar at the Skate Place and make the cotton candy. But most of all, I had to be an exchange student. I had to leave the country and prove to myself I could.

I would.

As soon as I returned to Prairie Grove, I marched myself into the school counselor’s office and requested an application for a study-abroad program. She found one called the American Institute for Foreign Study, and I applied to Richmond College, an international university in London. While waiting for the acceptance letter, which came several weeks later, I found a higher-paying job at a clothing store in the mall in order to save up the $2,500 tuition. When I told Phil, he hooted with joy and applauded.

More than any other person in my life, I have him to thank for setting me on the path to becoming the person I am today. For the first time, I chose a savior and actually found him worthy of the title.

Unfortunately, I would experience my first manic episode in London.

WORDS I’VE SEEN
written on people’s bodies:

Words written on my body:

I am wordy.

Summer 1989. There was a plane and I was on it.

It was the day after my high school graduation, where I sat in the gym, sweltering; it was raining and muggy outside, and the bleachers were packed with people. I felt stupid in my hat. The pregnant valedictorian sang a song about how friends are friends forever if the Lord’s the Lord of them, reminding me how glad I was that the Lord was not the Lord of me, and that I therefore was under no further obligation to pretend these people were my friends. I threw my hat in the air and was out the door before it landed. Others scuffled to retrieve their tassels to hang from their rearview mirrors. I tugged my gown off on the way to the car and chucked it in the trash. Marcus Hawley got in his car and hung his tassel from his mirror. I peeled off my parking permit.

And then there was this plane and it was going to London and I was inside and looking out the window, watching home get smaller. It was my first plane ride, and despite my mother’s protests, despite all the reasons she had given me why this was a bad idea, I was going to England by myself to study literature for the summer.

My dad drove me to the Dallas airport and slipped me five hundred bucks at the gate. “Don’t tell your mother,” he said. I put the money in my pocket and clutched my ticket in my hand and got on the plane and went up in the air and then there I was, finally, flying.

The first time I heard music split apart, I was on the plane. I was listening to Prince on my headphones when all of a sudden I could hear all the instruments solo, but at the same time. Like when you say,
I’m just going to listen to the guitar,
so you shut your ears to everything else and just hear the guitar. Well, I did that with all the instruments at once, and when it happened, it gives me goose bumps. And not in a good way.

There was red on the wing of the plane, and when the music split, the red amplified itself times a million and burned my eyes. Everything around me liquefied—the air, my seat, my hands, the little girl beside me eating taffy, she was water, everything was wet.

And then just as quickly, it stopped. I tried to put it out of my mind, even though I knew my mind was where it lived, and I was terrified. By the end of the summer, I would find that occasionally everybody sounded like they were talking into fans, and I had to wait a few seconds for their words to settle. The voices were chopped apart, then they put themselves back together. I would look around me as the sound shifted back into place and wonder if anyone else had noticed. It made me sweat. I hated how it made me sweat.

It also made me feel instantaneously exhausted, which I now assume was due to sleep deprivation. The splitting of sound was my body’s signal that it would indeed eventually pass out, whether I wanted to or not. No matter how enervated one feels, no matter how much one’s environment, biochemistry, and fucked-up circadian rhythms have led one to believe that one has superpowers, one will eventually give way to sleep. When I fell asleep on the plane that day, dreams of Prairie Grove intertwined themselves with a London I’d seen only in pictures.

Upon waking, I decided to take advantage of the fact that I could drink on the plane, because it was British Air and in England the legal drinking age was eighteen. I didn’t particularly like alcohol, but then, I’d only had wine coolers. So I ordered cognac. I didn’t know what cognac was, exactly, but it was the most sophisticated drink I could think of. By the time we landed, I’d had four of them, mixed with Sprite. I had never been drunk before. I hadn’t even made it to England yet and already I’d had a new life experience. My decision to repeat that experience with some regularity over the next few months no doubt exacerbated the craziness, but it would be a long time before I would figure out there was a connection between alcohol, drugs, and mood swings. In some ways, I am a slow learner.

I somehow managed to navigate Gatwick Airport, took a ride over cobblestone streets in a little black taxi, and puked when I get out. I overpaid the taxi driver exorbitantly because I was too drunk and nervous to figure out the money. Anything that could indicate to anyone that I was a hillbilly foreigner was verboten. According to the Institute for Foreign Study pamphlets sent shortly before my arrival, it was best to travel with only a backpack. I had done so, but stuffed three pairs of shoes into said backpack, because I was afraid Prairie Grove shoes might get laughed at over there.

My dorm was in Kensington, a very fancy neighborhood—or, as my cabdriver called it, “posh.” I went inside, talked to a curly-haired girl behind a desk whose name tag said
Nicki Sawicki,
got a key, found the room, opened the door, and saw a large black man and a large black woman having sex. He jumped off of her. They laughed, like it happened every day. He apologized in a British accent.

Nauseous and blurred, I told her I thought I was her roommate. She threw on a robe and introduced herself, said she was from Gambia, which was in Africa, and told me her very long African name but said, “Call me Lali.”

“Okay, Lali,” I said. “I’m Stacy. I need a nap.”

I passed out on the bed on which they were not fucking and dreamt I was being abducted by aliens. They came through the window and carried me off on a beam of light. I floated over London and looked down, disoriented because there were no Baptist churches. When I woke, I had a vague sensation that the aliens had been feeding me blueberry pie.

Pie: I was hungry. It was dark. I went outside, walked a block, found a café, and bought myself a scandalously over-priced ham sandwich—by which I mean bread and ham and that’s it. I thought,
None of that fancy condiment shit for the British,
and I giggled out loud, too loud, all by myself. Was I really there? As I sat in the window gnawing on the hard bread, the first baguette I’d ever had, I saw two women walk by with big black antique strollers I knew they called prams, and we did not have prams in Arkansas, and I was indeed somewhere else and I was elated. I’d done it. I’d gotten out. Furthermore, I could eat all the ham sandwiches I wanted and pay six pounds each for them, because really this was just play money anyway. It had colors. One was red, bright red. Or at least that’s how I remember it.

When I finished the sandwich, I wandered through the streets until I found a jazz club. It was called the Harlem Hotcha, and they had a drink called the Harlem Blues, which comprised, by my estimation, every kind of liquor ever made, plus blue food coloring. Because I could, I ordered one. I also ordered chocolate ice cream, which came with chocolate syrup and a crunchy waffle fin. I learned that if you drank the entire blue thing, you get to keep the glass, and the glass was cool, so I drank the entire blue thing. In twenty-four hours, I’d had more liquor than I’d ever had in all my life combined. I ate all the ice cream and dug on the upright bass, which I had never actually seen anybody play in real life (insert Journey:
Just a small-town girl
…). I do not remember going home, but in the morning, the glass was on my desk, complete with a soggy paper umbrella.

Lali was dressing herself in a white T-shirt with no bra, her massive ebony breasts pendulous, to her waist. The previous day I’d awakened in my room in Arkansas, and the walls were painted peach and there was a Bible on the bookshelf, and today I was looking at the first dark brown breasts I’d ever seen. Also, for the second time, I was hungover.

“Good morning,” Lali sang. “Sorry about yesterday.” She hurried out the door on her way to class. When she left, I snooped through her desk and found a Ziploc bag of used condoms, tied off at the ends, full of what I assumed was the semen of the young gentleman atop her the day before. I didn’t want to know. I was a stranger in a strange land, and, there alone, I was rapidly deconstructing. The
world
was deconstructing. Nothing was as it should be. I was terrified.

I showered down the hall in a stall with no curtain and the smell of my Vidal Sassoon shampoo made me gag. Puking voluntarily is one thing, but puking involuntarily sucks. If I’m going to vomit, I want to have control over it. I decided I would never drink again, a promise I would break in short order.

I went to my first class, the first college class I’d ever taken, and sat next to a blond girl who wore no shoes. Her bare feet were dirty, like she’d walked all over the city. Were these things real? I remember them as real, but now, twenty years later, they seem impossible and absurd. Still, this is what my brain tells me, what my senses led me to believe, and though my memories are those of the mad, they are mine.

After class, I followed my professor—whose name was, in a strange twist of fate, Dr. Southern—to the cafeteria. Because I wanted to look smart, I asked him if he liked Anthony Burgess, who wrote
A Clockwork Orange
. I was proud of myself for having subsequently plowed through a wordy doorstop called
Enderby,
and wanted to find a way to impress him with this fact. He said, “Oh, my dear, some writers write as if they’ve memorized dictionaries. Anthony Burgess
swallowed
one.” Conversation over, we ate potato soup, the first of many potato-based foodstuffs I would consume in England. Potatoes, I would find, could generally be counted on not to contain kidneys or other frightening meat. Plus, they made me sleepy. That night I fell asleep staring out my window, and in my dream I was still staring out the window, and then the aliens in their spaceship were there. Somehow this dream made me even more tired. I did not want these aliens.

I began, over the next week, to sleep less and less. Sleep seemed increasingly irrelevant in London. There was so much to do! There were so many places with bright lights where they were happy to take your money! In a whirlwind of impulsiveness for which the borderline and bipolar are known, I purchased a pair of expensive silk pants at Kensington Market, because they were purple paisley and purple and paisley both started with
p
, as did Prince, who wore purple paisley. Good things came in threes; it seemed prophetic that I should find these pants and wear them all summer. Big full pantaloons, another word that started with
p
(therefore interfering with the rule of threes and making me quite uncomfortable, as though I would bring misfortune upon myself for having calculated incorrectly), made my legs sweat, so I cut them off at the knees—or, at least, that was the intention. One side came out significantly higher than the other, like one leg ended at the knee and one mid-thigh. They started to unravel. I began to obsessively pluck all the shiny gold and silver threads and drop one every three blocks. Step, step, step, step, step, hold, drop. I walked to class and through Hyde Park that way. That bass from the jazz club had been stuck in my head for days, and I had to match the rhythm to the dropping of the threads. Five notes repeated themselves over and over for a week—something that still happens to me now, despite medication, and still drives me nuts—and I had to try to sing them in my throat while I walked (this, too, still happens, and is profoundly uncomfortable). I had to feel the notes in there but not actually let them out, because then I’d really be a crazy person. As long as I didn’t vocalize, I figured I was still holding on, still just barely sane, but there was one note I couldn’t hit. My throat kept opening and I could feel the note down in my chest, and the way my vocal cords were pushing down made it feel like the music was literally hurting my heart.

The bright spot in that first week in London was that I met a lifelong friend in the dorm. Her name was Yael, and she was from Los Angeles. Her father was a psychiatrist, and, as such, she had lots of money. Yael was only the second Jewish person I had ever met, after my Governor’s School roommate Julie. She was so Jewish she was actually born in Israel, and it made me feel very worldly to know her.

I also met a guy named Geoff and started making out with him every night. I wasn’t really attracted to him, and we never actually had sex, but we did things I had never done, like when he poured Evian water on my breasts and licked it off. Yael’s room was next door to Geoff’s, and she came over one night asking if he had her Jane’s Addiction tape. She looked at me, disheveled on the bed, accurately assessed my discomfort with Geoff (though, again with the impulsivity, I couldn’t stop making out with him) and said, “I’m out of tampons. Do you have any? Let’s go to your room.” As we climbed the stairs, she said, “You don’t need to fuck some idiot for excitement. I want to go to Spain this weekend. You’re coming with me.” Just like that, my instant advocate and friend. I was profoundly honored and grateful.

“How will we get there?”

“There’s a student travel agency that sells round-trip plane tickets to Barcelona for ninety-nine pounds,” she says, “We’re totally going.”

What I knew about Barcelona was that they pronounced it
Barthelona
. When I learned that in high school it got stuck in my head all day. Swept up in Yael’s confidence, authority, and desire to be my friend, I followed her to the travel agent’s that afternoon and we bought tickets. Two-fifths of my money was gone, and I still had over two months left in Europe. No matter, I’d just spend less now, really.