Loud in the House of Myself (6 page)

Eating disorders don’t take over unless you already feel you deserve less than other people, but if you do feel that way, they give you a strange power. They move in and simultaneously torment and protect you. They are a wonderful tool for helping you reject others before they can reject you. Example: You’re at a party. The popular girls are there. You know you can never be as cool as they are, but when one of them pops a potato chip into her mouth or chooses real Coke over Diet,
for that moment
you are better. In denying yourself, you win. In deprivation of self, you are all-powerful. Ugly girls eat, pretty girls don’t (or so anorexia’s logic goes), and so for that one split second you are prettier. In the ten seconds or so it takes her to chew, you sit on the couch with your hands in your lap and your lip gloss perfect, and you know your closed-mouth smile is much nicer than hers, marred with chips.

I began to live for these moments of power, and to hammer at myself with the old familiar mantra first encountered in my mother’s magazines:
Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.
There were midnight moments of truth, my hand on the freezer door with the ice cream just beyond it, when some sane part of me screamed
THIS DOES,
but most of the time I was able to walk away. I grew to love the feeling of saliva rising in my mouth in anticipation of food, because swallowing and denying myself made me feel so powerful. Never mind that in actuality I was growing weaker by the day, starting to get headaches at lunchtime when all I consumed was a massive glass of iced tea sweetened with calorie-free carcinogens from little pink packets, or that I was tumbling into bed at night weak and wobbly and racked with hunger pangs. Never mind that my intellect and my passions were rapidly being overtaken by this calorie-counting dictator who had taken up residence inside my head. It would be twenty years before I figured out that wide and winding is a lot more gratifying than straight and narrow.

One night in early spring, when his parents were watching Pat Robertson on TV in the next room, Owen took off my pants.

“Stop,” I breathed, pushing hard against him, trying to find the strength to get away. Kissing was okay with God, hands on the breasts were iffy, but anything lower than that was definitely a sin.

“Shhh,” he said, brave punk-rock knight to my shrinking-virgin princess. I knew I was giving in, knew I was gone. All I wanted, as he pulled my shirt over my head, was for him to see my flat belly, to run his palm across it, to pronounce me worthy. The air touched my bare breasts and my nipples hardened into crimson stupas. I craved him so badly, or rather, I wanted to feel his weight on me. I wanted to compare.

“Am I thin enough yet?” I asked.

“Almost,” he said. “I can see your ribs. It’s nice.”

He rubbed against me for a bit, against my naked thigh, and I became warm between my legs, and slimy, the way he often left me. I secretly loved smelling my panties when I got home, because it was
his
scent, it was what he did to me. Nobody else made me smell that way. I could never tell him that, though; he’d think I was some kind of pervert. I felt how stiff he was inside his jeans and I sort of slid my hand between us and pressed my fingers against what I was pretty sure was the head of his dick. And then I remembered it was the last day of my period and I still hadn’t taken out my tampon, and I lay there beneath him desperately scanning my mental database for what I knew of vaginas and sex, trying to figure out whether that would matter.

He pulled a box of condoms from his dresser drawer. I had only a vague idea what they were, and no clue how they actually worked. These condoms, apparently, were fruit-flavored, and they came in all different colors. I wasn’t sure why anyone would need a flavored condom for birth control. Then I thought:
birth control
. I could get pregnant from this.

I sat upright. “I have to pee,” I said.

“Okay,” he panted. “I’ll be ready when you come back. Be quiet.”

I nodded and pulled on my shorts and slipped around the corner into the brown-wallpapered bathroom. I almost looked in the mirror, as had become my compulsion, lifting my shirt and pulling down my pants and examining everything from all angles at every conceivable opportunity. But I couldn’t look, because the next time I saw myself, I wanted to be different. The next time I looked back at myself, I would be a changed woman.
I will have been
fucked, I thought, and it turned me on so much my knees went weak and I had to hang on to the sink. I lowered myself to the toilet but something felt locked inside me, the painful sensation of needing to pee but not being able to. I tried to rub myself with toilet paper to make it happen, but all I got was egg-white slime. I felt very, very dirty. I pulled out the tampon.

I walked through the living room on the way back to the bedroom, smiled at Owen’s parents, and they nodded and smiled back at me. Owen’s dad said “Amen!” in response to something on TV. When I tentatively pushed open the door, just a crack, I saw Owen kneeling on the bed with a big purple thing protruding from his pelvis. I almost screamed but then I realized it was the condom, the condom was purple. Grape. And he was touching it, and it looked like one of those Chinese water yo-yos filled with blood, something that should jump away from you if you tried to squeeze it in your hand. Which he was doing. Hard.

He grabbed me. He actually grabbed me, like in the movies, and he pulled me down on the bed and with his fingers separated the skin between my legs and I sucked in all my breath.

“Will I know when it’s in?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” he said, “you’ll know.”

And then something hard forced its way inside me, like being pounded with a rivet gun, and my stomach sucked all the way into my back. I curled like a roly-poly around this thing poking at my guts, my chitinous shell on the outside, all the raw pink-and-gray parts on the inside torn asunder.

I yelped, but his other hand was over my mouth before any sound could come out.

“Shhhh,” he said into my neck, “shhh, it gets better.”

I wrapped my lower lip around my bottom teeth and bit down hard. I made a vise grip that dug negative copies of my serrated incisors into the pink-flesh mold of my mouth. I squeezed my eyes shut until I saw my own lightning-bolt veins, red on black, and then he wrapped his arms around my back so my limbs flapped helplessly about his elbows, and one, two, three, he pushed into me, grabbing my shoulders and pulling me down hard around that swollen purple thing. There was a great tremble, a shuddering of boy, all hot breath and armpits and stubble, then everything went still and flat and quiet.

For a moment I thought he’d stopped breathing. All of him was on me, crushing me. Maybe he was dead. I didn’t know or particularly care; I felt very far away, concerned only with looking at myself in the mirror as soon as possible. My friend Zoe’s mom had a magnet on the fridge that said
Sex Burns Calories,
and I wanted to find out if it was true. I wanted to check the space between my thighs for the forty-seventh time that day to see if it had gotten any wider.

“Is it over?” I asked.

He heaved himself off of me and pulled off the condom, which hung limply, like a bruise, like an ink sack full of mimeograph fluid. He tossed it in the trash. He took off the album that was playing on the stereo: Oingo Boingo, his favorite band.
Dead Man’s Party
. He did not answer.

“Okay,” I said, because there was nothing else to say, “I guess I’ll go.”

He didn’t reply. I didn’t care. I pulled on my white cotton panties and white shorts, the size-5’s I could finally wear after months of living on mostly canned green beans, chicken broth, and reduced-fat Club crackers. All I could think about was going home and looking in the mirror, standing on the bathroom counter, looking at the space between my legs where he had been.

I rode my bike home. It was a boys’ ten-speed, the kind with the hard, skinny seat. By the time I’d pedaled the two miles back to my house, my white shorts were soaked with blood. Of course I was utterly horrified about how I was going to hide it. Luckily, thanks to anorexia, I was quickly becoming a master of hiding things.

My mother thought I’d been at Kendra’s, and she was waiting up for me. I dashed into the bathroom, shoved a big wad of toilet paper between my legs, and began frantically scrubbing at my shorts. I could shove my underwear in the bottom of the trash can in the garage, but I had to get the stains out of my shorts.

I scrubbed until my fingers were frozen (I remembered from the menstruation film in fifth grade that cold water was best for getting out blood) and the bar of Ivory soap had turned bright pink. I kept watching in terror and praying as the blood swirls ran and hid in the pipes, washing away whatever it was Owen had done to me.
Please,
I begged,
please let it all come out. I’ll be good. I’ll never do it again inJesus’nameamen, o gosh o gosh o gosho.

All the while, I snuck peeks at myself in the mirror—it becomes a compulsion you can’t stop, which is why I have no mirrors in my house today—and nothing had changed. Absolutely nothing. I had always thought sex would involve wine and roses and chocolate and lingerie. Or at the very least, the guy taking his pants off all the way.

My mother knocked. I turned off the sink, threw the shorts in the hamper, and sat on the toilet.

She came in. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m fine.” I stared between my legs at the lump of toilet paper and the red drips that fell into the toilet like Easter egg dye.
Hippity hop,
I thought.
Here comes Peter Cottontail
. My brain was turning cartwheels. “I just got my period.”

Silence like drumbeats: five, six, seven, eight. Then she said it.

“I thought you just had your period.” “Did you start again?”

“Why would you ask that?” I tried to think of a legitimate answer, I really tried, but what did I know about bodies that I could pull over on my mom? Instead, I just started crying, hoping for pity and/or mercy, whatever I could get.

I have never seen her look at me like that. Everything she had hoped for me was shattered right then, as I sat on the toilet weeping. All the words mothers and daughters usually offer one another were not available to us, because we were terrified of each other, and because sex was not a hot topic in the Pershall household. I couldn’t look at her. Eventually she shut the door and never asked again.

He broke up with me the next day.

Here, though, the story diverges from that told by a million girls jilted by a million lame guys. Here is where the eating disorder ascends the throne and tells me what to do, and the Dog and I obey with bowed head and tucked tail. Here is where I feel so dirty, so wrong, that I give up membership in the human race, where the sound in my brain becomes a constant screech of metal on metal, as if I am a self-punishment machine and someone has pulled my string, wound my key, set me on the track, and I chug straight on down the path full speed ahead.

I couldn’t allow myself to eat like normal people anymore, ever, because they were humans and I was a dog. I had to take my food into my bedroom and eat it on all fours. I was not allowed utensils, and for a while I think I actually forgot how to use them. I could eat French-cut green beans, out of a bowl, on my hands and knees. My water had to come from a bowl, too, because lapping was especially degrading. I had to be punished for every ounce of fat that remained on my body and every time I had let Owen touch me. The atonement had a very specific ritual. First, I had to write on the fat parts with markers, and the Bad Dog would chant in my head and tell me what to write. If someone said something mean to me that day, I had to record it on my flesh. So when I stood looking in the bathroom mirror one day at school and Kyra walked in with two of the other cheerleaders, I could just feel her looking me over, and I knew that night the punishment would be extreme.

“Gosh, Stacy,” she said, “you have so many blackheads your nose looks like a strawberry.”

This is the kind of idiotic bullshit high school girls say, but at the time it meant that I would huddle in my closet after everyone else had gone to bed, marker across my face, sucking chicken broth out of a saucer, breaking the surface of the soup with my tears. I did this late at night, after my parents had gone to bed. For a while, it was easy to fool them; we all liked to eat different things so we tended to be responsible for our own meals rather than sitting down at the table together. This meant that, at least in the beginning, I could get away with it. I could take the Sharpie off my face with nail polish remover before they woke up, park myself at the kitchen table with my homework, and tell them I’d already had breakfast.

I needed the sting of the polish remover on my skin to feel forgiven, cleansed: acetone atonement. I needed to hit myself in the head in my closet, needed to beat out of me the part that had failed everyone so completely. Most of all, I needed the scratch in my throat when I cheated, when I ate more than I was supposed to, when I broke down and binged in the dark and my fingers tripped over themselves to find that little piece of cartilage behind my tongue, the one that brings it all up when pressed. Oh yes; I found bulimia after Owen left me. As far as I’m concerned, once you start puking, you’re a goner. The eating disorder has taken over. All you are is one big alimentary canal, like an earthworm, existing only for the purpose of playing with your food.

So I hit and I wrote and I barfed and I lapped and somehow still it was never enough. Somehow I still kept waking up inside myself.

IN
1877,
THOMAS EDISON
decided to create a talking doll by implanting a phonograph in her chest. Ten years later, another inventor named William W. Jacques developed a prototype based on Edison’s design. The doll was almost two feet tall and sold for ten dollars at Schwarz’s Toy Bazaar, in New York City’s Union Square. Edison later said that “the voices of the little monsters were exceedingly unpleasant to hear.”

In 2004, Denise’s friend Emma Porcupine tattooed a pink-haired version of this doll on my left arm, from wrist to elbow. Emma referred to her as “the brain eater,” and she does indeed look like she might very possibly eat brains. She has tiny pearl teeth, curly pink hair, and Mary Janes with bows. She is naked, and her torso is opened up to reveal her mechanical innards. Emma gleefully imitates her, clicking her teeth and saying, “Brains! Braaaaaiiins.” And once again I am thrilled to have found another strange girl, another beacon, another one who gets it.

Throughout my childhood, Zoe Maxwell was the closest thing I had to a best friend. She lived in my neighborhood, was in my class at school, and actually liked me most of the time, for which I was profoundly grateful. In high school, her brother became a big football star, which meant that being friends with Zoe was as close to popular as I would ever get.

Her family’s house smelled like perm solution, Giorgio perfume, and unwashed FryDaddy. Her mother worked at the JCPenney hair salon, but to earn extra money she gave cuts and perms at home to the ladies who didn’t want to drive all the way to Fayetteville. One afternoon while a perm sizzled on a local woman’s head in the utility room, Zoe and I attempted to sway the house’s olfactory balance in the direction of the FryDaddy, into which Zoe tossed several Schwan’s frozen hamburger patties.

“Do you think it’ll work like this?” I asked, taking a giant whiff of grease. It smelled so delicious I wanted to dive in, but I was already calculating the calories and figuring out how I would get rid of them.

“Hell yes,” she said. “It’s just like putting them on a grill, except in oil.”

Like much of Zoe’s logic, I wasn’t sure exactly what this meant. As the beef pucks sizzled away, I stood in the doorway of the den with the remote control of the VCR, rewinding Janet Jackson’s “Pleasure Principle” video over and over again to watch the part where she steps on the chair and tips it over. “We have to practice this part,” I said, tugging at my kneepads. We’d been working on it in the garage for weeks, because Zoe wanted to make the drill team and I wanted to still be her friend once she did.

“I need some kneepads like yours,” she said, because she’d been using her brother’s old football ones, and mine were sleek new neoprene.

“Wal-Mart,” I said absently, as if everything in her house and mine didn’t come from Wal-Mart, just like every possession of everyone else we knew. Of course, many of my clothes came from garage sales, to which my mother went every Saturday at 6 a.m., and I lived in fear someone might ask me why my new polo shirts had already been washed so many times.

“Motherfucker!” said Zoe, whose family had the biggest collective dirty mouth in Prairie Grove. “The burgers are falling apart.”

We fished them out of the FryDaddy and Zoe had the brilliant idea of smooshing them into meat loaf. She wasn’t exactly sure of the recipe, but knew it involved crumbled-up bread or chips or something, so she mashed in some Nacho Cheese Doritos and drowned the whole thing in ketchup. I couldn’t believe I was really going to eat it, but god it smelled so good, meat fried in oil with ketchup and orange powdered cheese, and if it was all I ate for the next two days and I exercised for two hours a day, I figured I should be able to get rid of it. I could get through up to two days without food as long as I had enough iced tea, coffee, and sugar-free gum. I made up my mind that the next time I would eat would be Saturday, when I worked my part-time job at the Skate Place in the snack bar, where my usual binge was three rectangular frozen sausage pizzas cooked in the toaster oven, all the cotton candy I wanted, two 32-ounce drinks made of every kind of soda mixed together, and popcorn soaked in extra butter-flavored grease to make it easier to purge. For some reason I had decided I need to bring saltine crackers with me from home to eat in the midst of all this, because eating disorders are nothing if not bizarre combinations of ritual and specific foods. I would eat the pizza, then slam down half of one of the sodas, then eat a cracker, then purge. Then cotton candy and half a soda and two handfuls of popcorn and a cracker and then purge. Yes, that was what I would eat on Saturday afternoon.

“Hey asshole,” said Zoe, “stop thinking about sex. Do you want some of this?” I nodded and blinked and she used a large wooden spoon to glop some coral-colored Dorito meat onto a plate, which she shoved at me. If you asked me what I learned during my high school career, I would struggle to come up with something about cotton gins or gerunds and the meaning of
synecdoche,
but I will be able to describe that meat loaf in grueling detail until the day I drop dead. Food, hunger, food, hunger, food: this was my life. What food tasted like going down, what it tasted like coming up. What I ate in what order, how many calories it had. I remember calculating how many times I would have to chew each Dorito bit so it wouldn’t stab my throat on the way back up, and I remember how they looked like shards of broken pottery sticking out of the oily, ketchupy meat.

“This tastes like shit,” Zoe proclaimed with the first forkful, and the brakes slammed on in my stomach, an automatic response to anyone eating less than or slower than me. So I pretended I didn’t like it either. I swallowed my saliva and hoped it was not obvious that what I really wanted was to eat it all, lick the FryDaddy clean, and suck the rest of the ketchup from the squeeze bottle.

“Let’s go practice,” I said, pushing the plate away.

In the summer of 1986, Zoe lived, ate, slept, and breathed Janet Jackson, which meant I tried over and over to put my right foot on the seat of a chair, my left foot on the back, tip the whole thing over, and slide across the floor in a kneeling position. Granted, pastel-fabric-covered
Golden Girls
-era kitchen chairs with bows and skirts were not the best vehicles for this move, but they were all we had, so we keep trying.

“If I don’t make the fucking drill team, I’m gonna be so pissed,” said Zoe, wiping the sweat from her brow.

“Yeah, totally,” I echoed, but the truth is that I didn’t really give a damn about the drill team per se. I cared about losing weight, being skinny, and not losing Zoe. She was a good dancer, and her brother was a popular football player, and she would undoubtedly make the team. This was the inevitability toward which we had been slouching for years, the moment I had dreaded. This is where Zoe and I would irrevocably split off into The Popular One and The Smart One. This was high school, where we were at last forced to stand definitively on opposite sides of the line.

When the day of tryouts arrived, Zoe and I joined thirty other girls in dancing around the gym to Janet and Haircut 100, and I forgot to smile. I lost my smile in increments my sophomore year—week by week, pill by pill, purge by purge, green bean by green bean, I felt it sliding down my face and disappearing. I learned that it’s very hard to smile and remain vigilant in your self-punishment at the same time. I could barely keep up with the calories in things. I didn’t have time for facial expressions. I had more and more energy but less and less personality every day, every time I threw up. Written in red on my critique sheet:
No smile
.

Zoe smiled a lot. As I knew she would, she made drill team. I did not.

It is as easy as that to put a fence between girls. Zoe, my best friend since we were five, jumped overnight into an echelon of popularity reserved for blond girls rich enough to keep their tans all year. All the cheerleaders came back from lunch smelling like tanning beds, drinking Diet Coke out of Big Gulp cups, and now Zoe would too.

I would go to her house still, sometimes, when she wasn’t at practice or performing at a ballgame, and I would touch her uniforms when she went to the bathroom. One night I even held her huge poofy pom-poms and stood in front of her mirror, wondering if I was skinny enough to deserve to be holding them, and then, tentatively, I sat at her dressing table and arranged the pom-poms around my face, striking the pose in which the spirit squad were photographed for the yearbook. I knocked her curling iron off the table and it landed, plugged in and scorching, in my lap. I jumped up screaming, because it stuck to me; Zoe had a habit of rolling her bangs around it and then spraying the whole thing with hairspray, and she did this so many times a day she saw no need to ever turn the thing off. The flesh on my thigh went up in a broiling haze of JCPenney-salon-brand product commingled with the aroma of steak. I threw down the pom-poms, the curling iron landed on top of them, and they started melting too. By the time Zoe came running, I was hopping around hooting in a room that reeked of burning plastic and seared flesh, and she shrieked and dove to save her pom-poms.

Note to self: You are not as important as plastic. This is how you will see it, and she will see it as you being jealous and sabotaging her stuff. And you will part, and you will miss her almost as much as you miss food, but thankfully, not quite. And this, this is how an anorectic survives hell: it will all be okay as long as nothing in the world is
quite
as important as food. You can coast for a long time on that one. Too long.

Eventually Zoe started acting like she didn’t want to be seen with me. Granted, I had, not long after drill-team tryouts, chopped off all my hair and taken to wearing my eyeliner like Alex in
A Clockwork Orange,
so there was that. Tenth grade was the year my mother asked me more days than not if I was a lesbian, a drug addict, or a Satan worshiper, and she meant it. I just figured that if I was going to look scary, I might as well look
really
scary. It was like playing Celia, I needed the accoutrements. I needed the big black sweaters and the fucked-up black hair and the clunky black shoes and the matching black attitude. I needed the weird T-shirts, the weird books, the weird music, and the otherwordly thinness. I wasn’t just playing Disease anymore, I was playing Anorexia, and I was by god going to be good at it. I was doing it so it felt real, to paraphrase my newfound idol Sylvia Plath.

For a while I really believed it was just that: playing. I was toying with the idea of sickness, flirting with it, but because I was not yet what I would consider emaciated, I felt I could give it up at will and move on to something else. The old I-can-quit-anytime-I-want. But soon I was sort of playing but it was sort of real, and then it was entirely real and I realized it had never been a game at all. Playing with anorexia is like playing with heroin, fire, plutonium, or Scientology—it’s just a bad idea all around. Playing with anorexia is like cracking open mercury thermometers and drinking them just to see what happens. Anorexia, to use the vernacular, ain’t playin’.

THIS IS WHERE
Lula Vandeventer enters the story, or, perhaps I should say, reenters. When Lula first moved to Prairie Grove from Tulsa, Oklahoma, she had impressed me with the fact that she was being raised by her gay uncle (though nobody ever used the word “gay”), had an exotic, lovingly cultivated Valley Girl accent, and was missing the pinkie toe on her left foot, having lost it in a terrible accident with her uncle involving something called a Vespa. I didn’t completely trust her; she was one of those girls who always had to one-up everybody, especially when talking about her family. She talked about all the vacations she’d taken, all the exotic alcoholic beverages she’d tried, and how her four-year-old brother was a certified genius. One night, all those years ago when we were all just twelve, she had invited me and Zoe to spend the night at her house.

My first inkling that all was not right came when I met her little brother. In truth, Tymythy, who had been named by and startlingly resembled the uncle in a tangle of parentage I could never quite unravel, was not so much a genius as a shrill, beady-eyed fruit bat of a child, constantly swooping from place to place and never shutting up. His favorite thing to talk about was himself; specifically, his abilities in comparison to those of popular film and television characters. “I can run faster than Nanny Gann can,” he said, referring to the heroine of a popular Disney movie whose name was actually
Natty
Gann, and he said it over and over again and his uncle said it too.

“Oh, yes, Tymythy,” cooed Alec Zander Vandeventer, a towering, oversized man with an oppressive hairdo—a sort of cotton-candy copper-orange concoction, a going-for-blond-but-can’t-quite-get-there look—who stomped through the house like an impending thunderstorm or indignant wildebeest. “You
can
run faster than Nanny Gann can!”

This right here is a great way to drive an anorexic spelling and grammar fiend crazy: Say something wrong, and say it with authority. Revel in your own damn ignorance. My id was running circles around itself wanting to scream out to them
Goddammit it’s not fucking Nanny, it’s NATTY,
and in my head a relentless chant began:
nattynotnanny, nattynotnanny, nattynotnanny
. But I knew that correcting other people’s uncles was not something you did, so I sat at the kitchen table grinding my teeth and tapping my foot instead. I had twelve long hours before I could go home.

Later that night, Lula incorrectly used the word “fetish,” and Alec Zander Vandeventer practically shot out of his chair to issue a correction. “Fetish,” he said, “f-e-i-t-i-s-c-h. Fetish. It means something weird that gives you sexual pleasure.” As the word “sexual” crossed his lips, he let out a loud bellowing snort-laugh, like a wounded hyena.

“Wait,” I said, with a red blood swell behind my eyes, unable to take it any longer, trying to keep from kicking him or vomiting all over him or something. “How did you just spell it?”