Loud in the House of Myself (12 page)

And then I found her: my muse. The girl whose polar opposite I could focus on becoming. Her name was Summer, and she was Tommy’s ex-girlfriend. She was a year younger, still in high school in his hometown, Baptist, and a prude—although he’d broken up with her because he couldn’t stand her mother, he held her up as the very picture of pious virginity. In fact, one evening in the cafeteria, he held up her picture for real: her mother, Jolene, had sent it to him.

“Her
mother
sent you her
senior picture
?” I asked with a vague dread that something very, very unpleasant was about to happen. What kind of mother sent pictures of her daughter to a boy who had dumped her for someone else (in this case, me?). Summer stared out at me from an Olan Mills portrait, chubby-cheeked, heavily made-up, bleached and permed to within an inch of her life. Her beady raisin eyes stared out of her doughy drop-biscuit face, framed by the ubiquitous fake-book backdrop of so many thousands of school photos. If there was one thing I hated, it was fake fucking books.

“Yeah,” he said. “Jolene wants to make sure I don’t forget her.”

“Give me that picture,” I said.

That night, I smeared glue stick all over the back of it and mounted it on a piece of orange construction paper. I emptied all the binge-and-purge food out of my fridge: the cookie dough, the Cap’n Crunch, the cellophane-wrapped slices of pasteurized processed American cheese food product. Into a garbage bag they went, along with the peanut butter Cap’n Crunch and the packets of ramen noodles purchased in bulk at Wal-Mart. Around Summer’s picture I wrote with a fat black Sharpie:
Stacy’s motivation to run five miles a day, every day, and stay under 2,000 calories a week!!
Then I stuck it to the empty fridge. Lindsay saw it and raised an eyebrow, but, having begun dating the campus drug dealer, she was too stoned to give me a lecture.

Tommy saw it, though. He said, “I don’t think this is healthy.”

“No duh,” I said, and headed for the track. I was so far removed from kindness, compassion, reality, or sense that I motioned for Tommy to follow me—I’d equipped him with a disposable camera and asked him to take pictures of me from all different angles while I ran. He did, and I immediately took them to the one-hour photo and spent the evening studying them instead of whatever it was I should have been studying. That night, I hid the pictures under my mattress, to be pulled out the next time I needed a thrill: I had made pornography of myself, for myself. In the photos, the bones of my ribs showed in my back, which turned me on way more than Tommy ever could.

But we both needed someone to love us, however tepidly, so we stayed together. My family was so glad I had a boyfriend other than Owen, so glad I was in school, so glad I was finally normal and happy (because I couldn’t tell them I was neither). I found a certain perverse comfort in being with someone whose self-loathing matched mine, even though his was driven by religion. Tommy’s misery was a barometer against which to gauge my own—as long as I was more troubled than he was, I was winning.

One evening, Lindsay introduced me to grain alcohol mixed with diet orange soda, with a side order of bong hits. I hadn’t had any alcohol since England, and once I started drinking and getting high, it felt so nice to be out of my head. Plus, it made Lindsay think I was cool. She couldn’t stand Tommy, and asked me frequently why I was with “that religious fanatic dork.” Their loathing for each other was mutual; Tommy saw her as a heinous sinner. Feeling that I needed to “loosen up and tie one on,” Lindsay invited me to go with her to a party that night. Recklessly, I said yes. I’d been skipping parties all year, partly because alcohol had calories and partly because I didn’t want to hear it from Tommy. But, to use Lindsay’s phraseology, I decided to “just say
fuck it,
dude.” When Tommy called to see if I wanted to go to Steak ’n’ Shake, I told him I already had plans.

“With Lindsay?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Lindsay is an alcoholic whore,” he said, and hung up. I stared at the receiver, feeling simultaneously exhilarated and guilty. After all, it wasn’t like anyone else loved me; I should take what I could get. I should be grateful. In an effort not to think about it, I ate some leftover pizza Lindsay had left in the fridge. I’d been trying to ignore it all day. There was half of it left. I devoured it in under ten minutes. I purged, put on a black dress, and met Lindsay in her boyfriend Neil’s dorm room, where he sat surrounded by a cloud of sandalwood incense, weighing out dime bags beneath a Led Zeppelin poster.

The party was at Neil’s friend’s place in an apartment complex just off campus, and it was already going full tilt when we got there. Most of the guests were either comatose on the couch or making out with one another. I chased the lingering taste of vomit with a shot glass of vodka, then another, then another. By the time Tommy came to find me, I was wasted in the apartment complex parking lot, yelling at Lindsay through the chain-link fence over which she had leapt after taking too much acid. She and Neil had dropped before I arrived, and were now under the impression they were being chased by wild dogs. On the other side of the fence, they screamed, giggled, slapped each other, and used the word “dude” to express a range of emotions.

I knew I was in trouble. I stood up, teetered, looked around for help. Two guys in a yellow station wagon blared “Ice, Ice Baby” on the stereo so their friend could break-dance on the hood.

“Hey,” I said, trying to act sober.

Tommy looked at me with such intense disgust I felt my stomach churn in shame. Or maybe it was the fact that I’d barfed up all my food and drunk several different kinds of alcohol in rapid succession, that could have been it too. All I knew was that this wasn’t me. I should be home writing, studying, making the most of my education, excelling. But now I was just like every other stupid drunk college student on the planet.

I don’t remember what we said, I just remember that I shoved him, and he shoved me back, and I fell into the fence. I was so ashamed of myself, so appalled by my behavior. That night, I did strenuous drunken calisthenics in my room, as if enough leg lifts and crunches could absolve me. I did not eat. Instead, I knelt before the fridge as if it were an altar, stared at Summer’s picture, and resolved to be better. Her fat cheeks and slight double chin did nothing to convince me that I was thinner, and the more I dwelt on her fatness, the more I felt my own body grow in response. I couldn’t possibly be thinner than anybody. If Summer was fat, I was fatter. Even as I cupped my hands around my hip bones, lay on my back and felt my ribs, saw my abdomen sinking toward my spine, I knew Summer was skinnier. You could have stood her right beside me on a scale and wrapped measuring tapes around us both, and I would have told you there was something wrong with the scales and the measuring tapes. Later I would find out that this sort of dissociation is common to borderlines, and that in fact there is a name for it: “splitting.” For some reason, we have a uniquely difficult time seeing the world as anything other than black or white, “all good” or “all bad.” Incorporating both positive and negative beliefs about a person, including oneself, is largely impossible. We see ourselves and others in an all-or-nothing way: I was not just fat, but
the fattest
. Nobody else on the planet could possibly be fatter, and if units of measure said otherwise, the units of measure were wrong. Of all the things that go on in my head, this has always been the hardest to explain to so-called normal people, and by far the most painful aspect of the illness. Nobody wants to hate herself all the time, it’s just that some of us, unfortunately, feel compelled to. When you operate from an assumption that everyone is better than you, you tend to punish yourself for not measuring up. Because Summer was a Baptist virgin cheerleader and I was a godless heathen sex-haver who had been rebuked by a curling iron the one time I dared to hold a pom-pom, she was better, which meant she was thinner.

Flawless logic, right?

The following Monday morning, when Tommy knocked on my door to walk me to class, I saw that he had with him a copy of the Alcoholics Anonymous handbook. “It’s from Jolene,” he said. “She overnighted it.”

Jolene wanted Tommy to marry Summer as soon as she got out of high school. It still happened regularly in Arkansas that a girl was married by eighteen and a mother by twenty, and if arranged marriages were legal, Jolene would have hunted him down, locked him in the back of a windowless van with a rented tuxedo, and hauled him straight to the Baptist church.

“To you?”

“To
you
. In care of me.”

“Your ex-girlfriend’s mother sent you a copy of the Alcoholics Anonymous handbook to give to
me
?”

He nodded. Flabbergasted, I took the book. My indignation was overtaken by mortification. Tommy had told Jolene I was a sinner, and she had seen fit to issue forth in short order an attempt to save my soul.

Because I couldn’t force myself to believe in God, I sublimated my guilt by jogging as many miles a day as I could—at least five—as penance, until my muscles quivered so hard I couldn’t continue. By the end of my run, I would be scooting along on my toes, going something like a quarter of a mile an hour. It was all about endurance. The one thing I knew for sure was that if I was running, I wasn’t doing anything wrong; I wasn’t, in that moment, failing myself or anyone else. As much as my muscles and my heart ached, exercise was a welcome respite. My drive to succeed, and my conviction that I never would, led to more and more nights sitting awake slugging coffee and chain-smoking. In utter despair, I wrote stories I subsequently thought were shit and tore up, trying to prove myself to myself and knowing I never could. The more I jacked myself up on caffeine and nicotine, the more I exercised, the more weight I lost, the more irrelevant sleep became. I simply didn’t need it anymore, just like I didn’t need food. All those people who said you needed both to survive were wrong—I could live on sheer determination, pure force of will, adrenaline, and air. My wheels spun faster and faster, and the mania, of course, came back. It was subtle at first—the wind in the trees became a little louder, the rustling leaves scratched insistently at my eardrums, and the carrots on the salad bar turned a little more orange. My professors began to sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher, their voices garbled; what they wanted from me was indecipherable. When it came time to register for spring classes, I decided on a whim to take two senior-level English courses and French. I had never taken French in my life, but I felt confident I could go right into French II, because I was pretty sure I had the magical power to divine foreign languages.

My mother called me one day to tell me that the high school yearbooks from my senior year had come in, that she had received mine and would mail it soon. They were always published in the fall semester, a document of the previous rather than current school year, and I was excited to see it, as I had been the editor. When Tommy came over that night, I told him my yearbook was on the way. “I hope it looks okay,” I said.

He was quiet for a minute, and then he said, “It does. You did a good job.”

I paused for a moment to make sure I’d heard him right. “How do you know?”

“I have one,” he said.

“You ordered my yearbook?”

“No,” he said, and hung his head. “Jolene did.”

With that, he pulled it out of his backpack, as I tried to comprehend what had happened: Jolene had looked up the number for my school. She had called and asked to speak to the journalism teacher. She had paid money to get my high school yearbook and study my photos. I snatched the book from him and opened it. Inside the front cover, Jolene had written:

Tucked inside was Summer’s most recent cheerleading picture, in which she had clearly lost weight.

The world broke apart again, another shattering. All the instruments in the song on the radio separated, and I dropped the book and shook and sweated. Then I bolted, leaving him standing there, and I ran out through the lobby of the dorm and kept going until I reached the track. I was barefoot.

There’s nothing quite like being manic and sliding into obsession and then realizing the people you’re obsessed with are obsessed with you too. It’s a strange inverse psychosis, like seeing your reflection thrown back at you in a thousand mirrors, going on forever, and it wreaks havoc on successful splitting, which may be a really fucked-up defense mechanism, but is nevertheless your one method of making sense of the world. I ran around the track that night until my bare feet burned and I fell, exhausted, heart pounding so hard it threatened to explode, into the cool wet grass. Lay there for a while, pulled myself up, walked gingerly back to the dorm, went to the bathroom to pee out all the gallons of water I was in the habit of drinking. Coming out of the stall, I saw my reflection in the mirror, and pressed my nose up against my own face. I stood like that for a long time, knowing that if I just remained in contact with the girl in the mirror, if we just kept our noses pressed together, I wouldn’t lose her. Maybe that girl staring back at me, the one with the bright green irises glowing in the bloodshot eyes, the one with coffee-stained teeth and cigarette-stained fingers, whose hair hung in her face, whose collarbones protruded, maybe she was disappointed in me too. I knew we were supposed to have something to do with each other, but as I stood there staring at her, I couldn’t remember what it was. I was completely dissociated; I felt nothing. My fingers couldn’t feel my cheeks, my cheeks couldn’t feel my fingers. Someone had cut the wires. I was nothing but an apparition.

I dug my fingernails into my face. The girl in the mirror did too, and she left red marks. I kept clawing. Our skin, our faces, our bodies were all make-believe—we had no shell. We were permeable membranes. We had been scraped raw by our own hands. Anything could get in and infect us.