But I don’t stop there. I skate past ballerina, into danger. When I go back to Tenafly for Thanksgiving, I don’t show the mark of the freshman fifteen like the other kids. I’ve lost thirty pounds since school started at the end of August. In the photograph my siblings and I pose for in front of the fireplace that will later become the Christmas card, I wear a smooth black mock turtleneck with short sleeves. My upper arms are the size of a wrist, my wrist the size of a child’s. My parents send me to my old pediatrician. In my memory he tells me I really must eat, but that I don’t have a serious problem. That seems curious now, even impossible. Who would tell an anorexic teenager that she didn’t have a serious problem? Looking back I imagine my parents standing at the side of a highway, their eyes wide and their mouths agape, watching a car wreck. My father still drinks too much. He is still depressed. My mother has found a voice in the courtroom, but she is still quieter at home. They still have two daughters to raise and a reputation in town to uphold and a law firm to run. And above all we are prisoners of the story we tell about ourselves, the story of the parents descended from poor immigrants who made it good and now have the Cadillacs and the beautiful, successful children and the most porch lights at Christmas. We are so determinedly fine it must be overwhelming for them to have a daughter who has suddenly shown up with the marks of all that is not fine so visibly on her. And a relief for all of us when I go back to school.
A month or so before spring break, my dorm adviser knocks on my door and hands me a typewritten piece of paper sheathed in a white envelope. I have lost still more weight, and the college is demanding that I see a nutritionist. I have already gone begrudgingly to a few sessions with a therapist, though I do not think a therapist will do me much good. I think a nutritionist will do me even less. The problem isn’t that I don’t understand that I need nutrients. The problem isn’t even, not anymore, that I think I look good. I have stopped taking off my clothes in front of Ben. Only alone in my dorm room do I strip naked in front of the mirror. I have always had prominent hip bones, but now they are bladed, so clearly only a thin layer of skin over bone that they nauseate me. My backside seems to have deflated. When I was in fifth grade I was asked to draw a portrait of myself in art class one day. The other kids crayoned golden loops for their hair, scribbled in the red of their shirts. I remember my amazement when I looked at their portraits. They all seemed to know what they looked like so easily. I had drawn the only thing I could: a black swirl that emanated from the center of the construction paper like one of the swirls that obscure the screen in the Hitchcock movie Vertigo. Caught in the swirl I’d drawn a gun, the electric chair, and hands that were reaching out for me, the stuff of my nightmares. That was the portrait of me I could imagine: what I thought and feared. What consumed me. My body was an unimaginable artifact swaddled in dark sweat clothes, something I tried hard to forget.
But in college, standing alone in front of the mirror, I find it strangely easy to look at myself. I repulse myself, with my bones and the knobs up my back and the bruises that, if I sit on a hard chair for too long, spread across the bag of skin that used to be my ass. That repulsion is comforting. I don’t feel attractive, but I do feel safe.
The room in the college health clinic where I meet with the nutritionist is small and windowless and determinedly beige. “People have noticed,” she says, that I seem to lose more weight after I go visit my family. She doesn’t specify who “people” are. She sits on a white vinyl chair with arms of washed blond wood, her manner as carefully uninflected as her surroundings. The week before, at the Chinese dry cleaner’s, the clerk had stopped me just as I’d reached to take my clothing off the rack. “Do you,” he’d said, and then smiled. I’d smiled back. We always exchanged wordless smiles whenever I came in, but now he looked nervous. “Do you,” he started again, “have the AIDS?” The next day in the cafeteria, I’d unfolded a note passed to me. I know you think you look good but … When I’d talked about signing up for a blood drive, a friend in the dorm had said, “You have to be a hundred pounds to give blood.” I’d bit back the automatic words that I was five feet nine, of course I weighed a hundred pounds. But that night, I’d stepped on a scale and found I didn’t. “Perhaps,” the nutritionist says, “there is somewhere else you could go for the upcoming break?”
That’s how I find myself seated in the cab of an old Ford pickup, Ben beside me and his older brother behind the wheel. The Kansas sunrise is like nothing I’ve ever seen, a dappled spew of lavender and pink that reaches to the heavens and seemingly beyond, exploding the earth into an almost obscene show of beauty. I am nearly dumbstruck by it and by the thought that the people in the buildings we are speeding past have this beauty before them every day. How many different kinds of lives there are. The buildings, too, surprise me. None is taller than two stories, three at the most, and though they look run-down with their neon-lettered signs turned off for daylight, there is nothing to compete with the gorgeously alive sky. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Ben’s brother asks. I nod mutely.
For a week, we stay with his family. Ben’s father is legendarily difficult, outspoken with strong opinions. But he is tall and thin and holds no opinion as strongly as he does his hatred of fat people—so he likes me. Ben’s mother seems always to be watching me, and she treats me with such delicacy I could be made of spun glass. His brother is friendly. His brother’s wife is just a few years older than Ben and me, and I learn that her first name is Roberta, but no one ever calls her that. They just call her his brother’s “bride,” even though the wedding was two years ago.
It’s Roberta who finally gets through to me. Not something she says, but who she is. She seems lovely, kind and always smiling, content to live in this tiny town and not work and be referred to by the name of the guy she married.
But though the thought makes me feel small and mean, I know I wouldn’t be happy with a similar life. I am sick, I realize, and if I do not find a way to make myself better, I am going to end up married younger than I want to be and living somewhere I do not want to because the truth is right now I do need someone to take care of me. How would Ben or anyone else know that this isn’t my real life, that I’m still waiting for that to begin? How would he or anyone else know that in my real life, I don’t need anyone to save me?
That summer, I break up with Ben, taking the cowardly phone call route. “But, but,” he says, and I can hear his bewilderment turn to indignation like a newborn calf finding its legs, “I’m the one who should have broken up with you.”
I flinch, but his words are true. In them I hear the conversations I’d never considered, the conversations he must have had with his friends.
I set about getting better with a single-minded devotion to the problem: If the problem is that I wasn’t eating, I will eat. My body gets bigger. It softens. Summer passes, and when I come back to school, everyone can’t stop telling me how good I look.
But I can’t stand it. I can’t stand how visible I feel. How unsafe.
I drop out.
*
I have wanted so badly to empathize with Ricky in Indianapolis, as he stands in the pouring rain in front of Ruth’s car door, his hoodie pulled over his head, one hand shoved deep into his pockets and the other holding his blue duffel, his head ducked forward to keep the rain out of his eyes. In that moment, his life had spun off the rails of what he imagined for himself. He was trying to find something to save him, to make him normal. I understand that wish. In Ricky’s files, there’s a therapy intake sheet from the years after the Calcasieu Center days. On it, Ricky says he is no longer a virgin. He had a girlfriend once, he says. I came across this mention and that the Georgia girl—whom he touched when he was twenty—was fourteen.