THE WINTER I REFUSED

By

Claire Kinnane

Submitted to the

Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of American University

in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Fine Arts

In

Creative Writing

Chair:

Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

. ~\ (\ (()\\) Date

2010

American University

Washington, D.C. 20016

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by

Claire Kinnane

2010

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE WINTER I REFUSED

BY

Claire Kinnane

ABSTRACT

The Winter I Refused is a nonfiction memoir of my hospitalization for anorexia nervosa in 1998. The 14-year-old speaker intimately describes the physical and psychological experience of anorexia. The retrospective voice, interwoven throughout the text, discovers that while the cause ofher illness remains mysterious, the nature of it reveals a profound sense of alienation that has little to do with weight and food.

Compelled toward self-destruction not by trauma but overwhelming boredom, the speaker discovers the dangers of an idle sensitive mind. Her recovery involves reinventing her relationship with consciousness itself. Anorexia, in this memoir, becomes a metaphor for introversion gone haywire, for discovering passion for life only after toying dangerously with existence itself.

11 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

Chapter

1. COLLAPSE ...... 1

2. I PROMISED MYSELF ...... 14

3. INTENSIVE CARE ...... 23

4. LUCK ...... 45

5. NOTES ON REMEMBERING ...... 51

6. EMOTION LIST ...... 54

7. THEPSYCHWARDPARADE ...... 76

8. TALKING DOESN'T HELP ...... 82

9. JESSICA AND WILLIAM ...... 87

10. NOTES ON (POSSffiLE) MEANING ...... 97

11. ART THERAP¥ ...... 100

12. I'M FINE ...... 106

13. HOME ...... l13

iii CHAPTER 1

COLLAPSE

I'm fourteen years old, walking up Wisconsin Avenue towards National

Cathedral. I'm wearing a leather jacket and a pair of corduroys held around my hips by yellow rope. I'm too skinny for my old belt. My bare hands are curled up, limp in my pockets. It's the middle ofFebruary in Washington, DC. I have a ski jacket at home, but

I don't bother wearing it. I let most of my body heat go.

I have chosen the Cathedral as a stopping point not because I want to see it, but because it is the next major landmark after CVS and the Junior League baseball field.

The Cathedral is about three more blocks up Wisconsin, which is six more blocks (there and back) of calorie burning. When I reach the Cathedral, I sit down on a cold stone stoop on the periphery of the gardens. I stare absently at the ground, feeling my heart race under my jacket. My breasts are gone. I burned all the fat inside of them. My chest is a thin wall, so thin it feels like my heart is bumping directly against the silk lining of my jacket.

I sit for a few minutes, conscious only of my heart and the way the bone in my backside rubs against the cold rock. I know from science class that this bone is the lower part of the pelvis. rm the only one in my class, though, who actually knows how its curved shape feels, who knows how much it hurts to have no padding between pelvis and

1 2

chair. I shift my weight a lot and when I do it feels like I'm rolling around on top of two pool balls. There must be a lot of nerves down there; I'm sore all the time.

When I get up my legs are swimming in loose corduroy. I can feel every turn of my hips. Like a wooden doll, my body feels simple and mechanical. I enjoy counting my visible bones, as though keeping track of all my possessions. There is nothing more elegant or enthralling to me than the hint of my skeleton, that intimate architecture that is only mine, lying just below my skin. All the fat that rests between me and my bones I regard as pointless, peach-colored junk.

I return from my walk just as dinner is served.

"We were waiting for you," my mom says. She knows I won't eat. But she hopes

I will. I take a seat next to the radiator. I like to rest my right arm on this until it gets too warm, then take it away, wait, and put my arm back again. This surge of warm air is heavenly. My mom puts a bowl ofhot chili in front of me. I eat a little ofthe sauce. My mom, stepdad and stepsisters have a conversation which I pay no attention to. I take a sip ofjuice.

"Try to eat, Claire. It's good for you." My mom is looking at me. "It's not fattening, it's healthy." I know I'm not fat. In fact, I know I'm gruesomely thin. I'm not afraid of being fat so much as I despise fat itself. Sometimes I imagine the word food in big block letters or an actual slice of pizza with a black line slashing through it. "Don't you like it, Claire?"

"I'm going downstairs," I say after a few more spoonfuls of sauce. 3

"Why won't you eat it, honey?" She sounds exasperated and looks as if she's about to cry.

"You are getting too skinny," my stepfather says.

"I'm gonna go downstairs now."

My bedroom is in the basement, a little room without windows where I used to blast Nirvana, light candles, and talk with my best friend Dana for hours on the phone. I don't listen to music anymore. I prefer silence. Dana told me she was worried about me when she noticed I was getting thin, so I stopped talking to her. I lie on my bed, instead, counting my heartbeats per minute. I do this for amusement. My resting heart rate is somewhere in fifties. I want it to be in the forties, just high enough to keep me alive. I don't understand why but this activity calms me down after a tense dinner with my family.

After I've been counting heartbeats for about a half an hour, my mother comes downstairs and knocks on my door. I ignore her. She knocks again. I ignore her again.

She bangs loudly, screaming.

"Claire. Answer me!"

"What?"

"You're killing yourselfl Don't you understand that? You will die."

"No, I won't. Go away."

She bangs harder on the door. This goes on for forty five minutes or so. I picture her face on the other side of the door: red, contorted, ugly with pain. The sound of her voice seems close to the floor. I think she's sitting down, leaning against the wall. She 4

says my name again, but this time she says it like a question. She says it softly, then sobs

a little. Eventually she goes away and I continue counting heartbeats. As I lie in bed,

I'm relieved by the thought that I might not wake up in the morning. If I don't wake up, I

won't have to go to my weekly doctor's visit to "weigh in." I won't have to horde tap

water all day long in order to trick the scale. I won't have to tape house keys to the inside

of my underpants in order to weigh a little bit more. I won't have to go to therapy. My

life is a nuisance -- so much planning and lying.

More pleasurable than counting heartbeats is taking hot showers. The hot water

warms my organs in ways that I cannot. It warms me from the outside in. Standing nude

in the shower I admire my work. I take my right middle finger and my thumb and make a

ring around my left arm. The circumference of my arm is so small, I can move the ring

around a little. The bare space (where my ann should be) gets me high, the measurable

lack of flesh. I used to sing in the shower. Now I'm careful to keep my lips shut. I don't want any water sneaking in. I know water doesn't have any calories, but it's a matter of principle. I keep my lips closed tight.

I try not to touch my body too much. I let the force of the water do what my hands used to do -- wash my legs and chest. I like to look at my work, but touching it is different. I'm afraid if I grasp my hips, I'll feel a surge of panic. I'm afraid I'll mourn for myself, realize what I've done. I want to keep my addiction, not because I like it, but because I'm really good at it. It gives me something to do, or rather, something to be.

When I get out of the shower, I see my mother has placed a book on my pillow:

Reviving Ophelia. On its glossy cover is a picture of an ethereal, forlorn looking blonde 5

girl with blue eyes. I've seen it around the house with a bookmark stuck inside it. I know why my mother read it. I know why she wants me to read it. She wants to understand why I'm starving myself. She wants desperately, for me, to have a life-saving epiphany.

My mother told me once what the book was about, and though I don't remember her specific words, I remember the gist; it details the self-destructive things young girls do to themselves and tries to explain why. I pick up the book, towel still wrapped around me, and flip through the pages.

I read about a girl who got down, naked, on all fours and ate dog food out of a doggie bowl. When her mother caught her doing this the girl cried out, "I'm worthless!

I'm worthless!" That's sad, I think. This girl is so messed up. I read that the dog-food­ girl also cuts her forearms. I imagine her otherwise soft flesh sliced with semi-scarred lines, and stuck to those awful branches -- purple-black blood, bulbous, like dew. I feel sick to my stomach. It scares me that someone could do that, that this kind of harm is possible. I don't understand the irony-- me pitying her. Most of my insight, like my period, is gone.

I don't sleep very well. Anorexics typically don't. My alarm goes off at 5:45a.m.

I rummage through the top drawer of my bureau, looking for small heavy objects to tape inside my underwear. I have a doctor's appointment at 3 p.m. and I want to weigh as much as possible. House keys aren't enough anymore. I find a heavy circular pendant with a pentagram on it and brightly colored stones in the center. I don't know where this came from, but it's heavy. It will fit in my underwear perfectly. I put it in my backpack, 6

along with my masking tape. And, because every little bit counts, I grab a couple keys to

stick in my socks.

I fill a tall plastic cup with tap water and begin to chug. This is the first of sixteen

cups of tap water that I will drink and hold in my gut until around 3:30p.m. I might go

to the bathroom once if it becomes too painful. This system has worked for over a

month. With a bloated gut and various metals in my undergarments I have managed to

trick the scale a few pounds each time. If I really weigh eighty pounds I might weigh in

at eighty three pounds. After the doctor's visit I urinate every twenty minutes or so for

about twelve hours.

I learned this trick from Leslie Jameson. She told me before I began to starve myself that she used to be anorexic. We were in seventh grade when she told me this, in

French class, before the bell rang. I had never heard of anorexia before. I couldn't understand why anyone would stop eating. How strange, I remember thinking to myself, trying to picture how Leslie might have looked without any fat in her cheeks. Just imagining it gave me chills. Anorexia seemed not only dangerous but pointless. What is there to gain from disappearing like that?

A year later I would ask a friend for her phone number and call her in desperation.

I wanted tips. I pressed her for ways to fool my parents, to fool my doctor. Leslie had made a full recovery and didn't want to help.

"You don't have to live to eat, but you have to eat to live," she said. I knew she was repeating what someone else had said to her, some recovery platitude, but I could tell from her voice she believed it. I was about one hundred pounds when I called her. I still 7

had enough wherewithal to comprehend the meaning of"eat to live." But my addiction,

my desperation was raging. I kept pressing her until she caved. "Well, water does add

some weight," she said. "But please, take care of yourself, Claire."

I told her I would and hung up. I had gotten what I wanted. I didn't know then

that it's possible to die from water hinging, that I could dilute my brain cells. I thought,

like most people, that water is harmless. I bring a few apples with me to eat around two

o'clock. They feel pretty heavy, a little less heavy than the pentagram, but they might add

a pound or so.

I walk around all day with my plastic cup, hording during class when no one else

is in the bathroom. Before I hinged on water, I never noticed how nuanced its flavor is,

depending on the pipes it flows from. Middle school tap water is disgusting; flat,

chemical, like chlorine. If I were drinking to quench my thirst, I might've let the water

flow for a few seconds until it got cold. But I wasn't drinking. Drinking water is an act

of self- love, or at least, self-preservation. I was merely dumping calorie free liquid in my gut. My stomach was not an organ to me but a tank that stretched. I drank it at room temperature and suffered through the taste.

I don't speak to anyone in school, and generally, no one speaks to me. Every conversation I overhear sounds like distant chatter, in a language I recognize but no longer speak. This chatter feels so remote mainly because it sounds cheerful, like the music of people who are present, tuned in, energetic. Once in a while fll say something to a girl washing her hands at the bathroom sink as I stand in the comer with my cup.

Most often this girl is Evelyn. 8

Evelyn sings in the bathroom stall and has the best voice I've heard in real life.

Therein lies the only pleasant quality of the dimly lit, jaundiced colored bathroom-­ excellent acoustics. She sounds almost as good as Whitney Houston, who I used to listen to on cassette tape when I was little. I hear the toilet flush and the door unlatch. Out comes Evelyn.

"You have a beautiful voice." This is how I prove to myself that I can think of something other than calories, even if just for a couple seconds.

"Thank you," she says smiling. To my relief, she doesn't question what I'm doing as I stand a yard away from the sink holding a half-empty cup of water. She washes her hands and says goodbye. I imagine it's possible she's never heard of anorexia, just as I hadn't heard of it a year ago. lfl were her, I might think I was skipping class. I wouldn't know what to make of the cup, but never in a million years would I have guessed water hinging. Once in awhile, for a brief second, I remember what it's like to have never heard of anorexia, and I, weighing less than ninety pounds find it incomprehensible. But this epiphany is extremely brief and evaporate~ quickly.

Just as one with a severed arm may develop a phantom limb, feeling pain in a nonexistent hand, sometimes I experience a phantom soul. My mind gives me a hunch that I am not my disease, that there is something vibrant inside me and I feel briefly a pain in this soul, the pain of someone imprisoned. And then, after a second, the pain is gone. I'm anorexic again, numb to the loss of myself.

I put my cup back in my backpack and tighten the elastic straps on the bottom perimeter of my fleece sweater. My bladder pinches, my abdomen bums. I think how 9

wonderful it would be to let some ofthis water go. But if I did go to the bathroom now I would have to drink more water. I think my stomach might rip open if I drank another cup. I walk back to class. My legs are weak and wobbly under the weight of my gut.

My portly, pregnant English teacher doesn't look at me. She barely looked at me when I left the classroom, she doesn't look at me when I return. I assume she knows I'm sick, it's obvious by now, but she's never spoken to me about it. Maybe she thinks it's none of her business, maybe she never liked me to begin with. I wonder if I remind her of what can go wrong in a girl's head. Maybe she thinks my parents did something to screw me up and she can do better. But my parents are wonderful. I experienced no childhood trauma. She could easily have a girl or boy who, for reasons no one understands, turns into something like me.

Why does she want to have kids anyway? I decide that she is bored, bored of her husband, bored of eighth grade English. Her solution is to procreate, to busy herself with a look-alike who will do God knows what to herself, who will do God knows what out of boredom or anxiety. I'm suddenly seized by the urge to throw up and make a dash for the trash can. I puke up bits of apple and a horde of watery stuff. The entire class, and my portly teacher, is watching.

When I'm done throwing up, I walk out of the classroom and head straight for my locker. My pregnant teacher doesn't follow me. Jennifer Rast does. Jennifer is one of the popular girls. We've never spoken much. She stands next to me as I open my locker.

"My cousin had anorexia." She has tears in her eyes and her voice is trembling so much, it's hard for her to get the words out. "She died." 10

I look at her as she speaks, but don't respond. I take my backpack from my locker and walk away, leaving her crying in the hallway. As I head for the stairwell I overhear my pregnant teacher snap, in her awful voice, "Get back in your seats!" I suppose a group of kids was huddling by the door. I imagine they were concerned or curious. She, as far as I knew, was neither.

I have just puked up a whole morning's worth of water, undoing hours of work. I walk into the nurse's office, heart pounding, and step on to a metal scale that stands in the middle of the room. The nurse does not ask me what I'm doing or why I'm not in class.

What could she do for me anyway? The middle school nurse's office, this primitive little hub of Band-Aids and aspirin, is no match for what's inside me. Maybe she knows this, feels powerless, and therefore can't look at my face. Maybe she just doesn't see me. The scale reads seventy seven pounds.

Only one of my teachers has pulled me aside to ask how I am. My Social Studies teacher once came looking for me in the cafeteria where I was tossing bits of my lunch into the trashcan, ceremoniously. I think I might've been singing as I launched pieces of granola bar into a four foot tall trash can. She told some student to come get me and I met her in the hallway. She asked if I was all right and told me I didn't look good. She looked worried I could tell she cared very much.

She was famous for getting hurt when her students acted up. Sometimes she left the classroom in a teary huff, as though she had just fought with a boyfriend. I didn't want her to waste her tears on me, to get distraught over something she couldn't change.

Maybe her tears would remind me that self-denial was not a game, that tossing food into 11

the trashcan was a serious thing to do, a suicidal thing to do. I told her I was getting help.

I tried to sound as self-aware as possible, to feign a certain tone in my voice that would imply sympathy for my self. She nodded, but I could tell from her eyes that she was not reassured. I went back to the cafeteria and resumed tossing bits of sandwich in the trash.

I could have thrown the whole thing away. But it was fun, rejecting it in pieces. Ifl tossed it all at once, I would have sat there with nothing to do.

The scale reads eighty pounds. This means I'm probably seventy five pounds, without clothes. My mom and dad will know I've been lying, tricking the scale somehow. They're going to be mad. I step off the scale, lift my Converse sneakers from the floor and walk out of the nurse's office carrying one shoe in each hand. As I walk down the hallway in my socks I begin to feel dizzy. This dizziness is different from the lightheaded sensation I felt when I began skipping lunch, when I would eat a banana for breakfast and by noon the comers ofbuildings and outlines of people began to disintegrate like burning leaves. I am not seeing small colored lights that pierce my mind like pins and needles, the potted plant in the hallway is not becoming an intangible pool of black.

The thing rising in my throat is not my stomach, it is hatred: hatred for water hoarding, for lying, counting calories, for the feeling of being trapped. I'm dizzy with hatred. I hate anorexia more than I have ever hated or loved anything else. I stop taking steps and begin to slide slowly across the linoleum floor. I slide into the counseling center and burst into tears. 12

"I can't I can't I can't I'm such a liar!" The school therapist is behind a closed door. I know she'll come out if I keep screaming. It feels good to shout. I've barely heard my own voice in months. The secretary does nothing. I scream louder, my face hot with tears. "I was lying I can't do it I can't do it anymore!" One of my socks is sliding off of my foot. I don't bother to slide it back on again. The therapist opens her door, walks towards me and gives me a hug. I follow her into her office carrying my shoes. I tell her I'm a bad person because I've lied for so long.

"No, you're not. You're not a bad person at all." She calls my mother. Their conversation is short and the therapist tells me gently that my mom is on her way. I go to the bathroom wearing 1 112 socks and urinate for what feels like a whole minute. When I stand up, my bladder still pinches. But I'm relieved. I feel like something other than water has just left my body in a long heavy stream. I've let go of control, emptied myself of control.

The voice inside me that commands me to burn calories is, for now, quiet. But no other voice is taking its place. I walk groggily out of the bathroom. When my mom steps into the office I begin to scream my confession in a fresh burst of tears.

"I've lied about everything. I'm horrible." My mom kneels on the floor in front of me, her face red and anguished the way I imagined it looked as she sat outside my bedroom door.

"No you're not, honey." 13

"I told her she wasn't a bad person," the therapist says. "I told her she was very brave for coming to the office today." My mom sniflles. She strokes my head a couple times.

"Yes she is. She's very brave."

Near the entrance to the Children's Unit at Arlington hospital is a billboard covered with sloppy paintings and crayon drawings. My head fills with visions of bald, cancer addled toddlers looming in the corridors ahead. I'm that not sick, I think, and I'm not a kid I follow a nurse down a cream colored corridor. My mom walks beside me.

"This place is for kids," I say.

"I know, honey." She puts her hand on my shoulder and I jerk away.

"I shouldn't be here," I snap. "I should be with adults." CHAPTER2

I PROMISED MYSELF

At the end of seventh grade I was invited to the bat mitzvah of Jackie O'Connell.

Jackie sat across from me in art class and we'd spoken a few times. I was a little surprised to get invited; she'd never invited me to anything. Jackie was one of the most popular girls in my grade but she talked to me even though I wore baggy Kurt Cobain T­ shirts and gray corduroy pants. I didn't want to be one of the popular girls because I thought they were superficial and their male counterparts were morons. I guess Jackie liked me for who I was. Or maybe she was inviting everyone she'd ever talked to.

Jackie's parents were millionaires; they could afford a lot of guests.

I'd gained some weight that spring, mostly from pigging out on Easter candy. I wasn't depressed, I just ate more than usual. Maybe I was going through a growth spurt and my hormones demanded more calories. Whatever the reason, I noticed I looked bigger than normal in an Easter picture. I looked chubby, especially standing next to my petite stepsisters. I'd never been chubby before and the picture disgusted me. I weighed myself in my dad and stepmother's bathroom. The scale read 130 pounds. The last time I checked, maybe a couple months earlier, I was 117 pounds. I'd never gained so much weight in such a short amount of time. I didn't want to be fat but I didn't know what to do about it. I'd always eaten whatever I wanted.

14 15

I wore a stretchy brown velvet dress to Jackie's bat mitzvah. The dark color made my belly less obvious. I wasn't friends with any of the 100 or so kids that talked and danced around me in the lavish reception hall. They were kids who were into sports and parties and pop music. I was interested exclusively in my Nirvana albums and the poetry

I scribbled in my journal. I probably wasn't as different as I thought I was, but I felt like an alien. The rock music at the time only helped fuel my sense of estrangement; "I'd rather be dead than cool," sang Kurt Cobain. "I'm an alien, you're an alien," sang Gavin

Rossdale. I knew exactly how they felt. Jackie sat me at a table in the comer with a few nerdy boys. I didn't know what to say to anyone. I felt lonely, bored, and fat as a hog.

At the entrance to the reception hall was a face painting artist. Several girls got their faces painted with balloons, rainbows, and cat whiskers. I wanted to get my face painted, too, but thought better of it. Face paint would've attracted attention to my face which was developing a double chin. Also, it would've made people notice me and if they noticed me they'd probably wonder why I was invited. What symbol would I have gotten anyway? I wasn't happy; a balloon, rainbow, or cat whiskers would've felt ridiculous on me.

I was jealous of the girls with pretty faces, pretty dresses, and as far as I could tell, nothing to be miserable about. Watching Holly and Rebecca, the most attractive girls in our grade, deliver a speech to Jackie, it hit me hard, really hard, that I would probably never have a group of girl friends as pretty or well-adjusted as Jackie's. I didn't like shopping. I spoke my mind in class, which earned me suspicious looks from the popular boys. I'd always been proud to be a nonconformist, but sitting at the comer table in my 16

new fat body made me wish so badly that I could be Holly Brooks. What did she have to worry about? If I could have her body I'd be deep and beautiful. I'm not exactly sure now what I thought "deep" meant at 14. But whatever it was, Holly wasn't. I knew this, somehow, even though I'd never talked to her.

A few days after the bat mitzvah, my father made ham steak, pesto pasta and broccoli for dinner. He made this exact meal many times before, but for the first time in my life I became mesmerized by the butter, how it melted and pooled around the broccoli. I noticed how the oily noodles gleamed under the light from the dining room chandelier. Normally talkative during dinner, I was quiet and tuned out the conversation between my dad and stepmom. My heart began to pound. I thought of how fattening the butter and oil were, how they would ruin my body, make it even bigger. My chest tightened. Each bite was excruciating. Not only did the fat disgust me, I also hated the weight of the broccoli on my fork. I didn't care if it was healthy; broccoli contained calories. I thought it would turn into fat as soon as I digested it. It would keep me ugly and piggish.

After I finished my plate I asked my dad to be excused. I lay on my side in bed with my hand on my protruding stomach. I didn't bother to turn the light on; I didn't want to see the cacophony of colors in my room. My heart was still pounding and for some reason the thought of seeing color only made me more anxious. The overwhelming simplicity of black and gray lulled my heart to a regular rhythm. In the dark, I couldn't see the beige of my skin, the purple of my bed sheet or the red of my sleeve. Without the 17

distraction of color, the details of my room snuffed out like a flame, I could focus exclusively on my feeling. I could devise a way to kill it.

I smelled butter on my lips. I tasted salt. I'd never been so repulsed in my whole life. I never wanted to eat fat or anything containing fat ever again. You'll skip meals, I instructed myself, you won't be like this for long. I decided, blinking in the dark, that I would eat breakfast and dinner but would skip lunch. This would give me hours upon hours to burn off all the fat that smothered my hourglass shape. I took my hand off my stomach. It'll be flat again before you know it. I lay on my back so that my thighs didn't touch each other. I wanted no reminder ofthe fat which I had just canceled, which would soon be a bad memory.

Soon after I promised myself to get thin, my dad, stepmom and I went on vacation to Maui, Hawaii. I ate a breakfast of skim milk and cereal every day at the hotel and spent the mornings wandering around the hotel grounds with my camera, in awe of every plant and flower. The control I had over my diet and the beauty of my surroundings filled me with elation. I would soon be beautiful, too, like the sunsets and misty spectrums which hung in the green hills. The natural world was more astounding than I ever knew it was, having grown up in East Coast cities, and I was happy enough to appreciate it. I didn't hate my body anymore. I was becoming slimmer; I was starting to look like my old self.

When it was time for lunch, I sat with my dad and stepmom, sipping a virgin strawberry daiquiri or virgin pifia colada. I told them I wasn't hungry. I'd never had an eating disorder, so my dad didn't worry. He told me, years later, that he thought I was 18

dieting like a lot of girls do but he never imagined I would take it so far. My stepmom, apparently, told him in private that she was worried but my dad reassured her I was fme.

I still ate breakfast and dinner and rewarded myself for skipping lunch with ice cream every night. I didn't know what anorexia was. I didn't know skipping lunch was the beginning.

After a few days in Hawaii I began to feel dizzy in the afternoons. My face felt cold and flushed at the same time. I didn't know my blood sugar was low. I'd never even heard the phrase "blood sugar" and didn't understand what blood pressure was. I didn't know mine was dropping. I just knew that I felt pretty again in a body that truly felt like my own. I liked how I looked with my Hawaiian shawl wrapped around me and a lei, which I made myself with dental floss and fallen plumeria flowers, hanging around my neck. I wrote my mother a passionate letter thanking her for her bringing me into the world. I described plants and trees I'd never seen in DC. I told her how lucky I felt to be alive on Earth.

I ignored my waves of dizziness. It was a small price to pay for feeling so good, in control, beautiful. When I got home I stepped on the scale and to my relief and utter joy I was 118 pounds. I liked how I looked but wondered what I'd look like if I got even thinner. I was so proud of myself for losing weight I decided I'd keep going, cut out even more food. I didn't know there was such a thing as too thin, that losing weight could be dangerous. I thought of it as a kind of a secret game; it was fun seeing how low I could get. 19

I started wearing a fleece pullover with elastic on the sleeves at dinner time; when my family wasn't looking, I'd slip a piece of chicken or small handful of mashed potatoes down my sleeve. The elastic would trap it there. I washed mashed potato and various food-stuff off my forearms in the bathroom after dinner. I dropped the food into a shoebox and kept it in my shelf so it wouldn't clog the toilet and my dad wouldn't notice it in my trashcan. I was becoming clever; I was becoming an addict. I stopped writing poetry and playing guitar. I put my creative energy into devising ways to not eat. The less I weighed, the more I wanted to lose. By the time I was 110 pounds I knew I was thin and wouldn't look better if I were thinner, but it was too late. I hated food. I hated it with a passion that I didn't understand or question.

My family noticed. My dad took the batteries out of the scale in order to thwart my addiction. When he was at work, I put the batteries back in again. When he threw the batteries away, I walked to a local gym and used the old-fashioned scale in their locker room. I was unstoppable. My dad rented me a video from the library about anorexia. He wanted me to recognize that I was sick, hoping I'd come to my senses after watching the tape. I watched it. It featured a recovered anorexic talking about how she never worries about calories anymore and she never looks at nutrition facts. Good for you, I thought. After the video, I went to my room and did sit-ups. I smiled as I tried on my old pants which fell to the floor as soon as I buttoned them.

When I stood naked in front of the long mirror in my room, I saw someone who was hauntingly thin, beyond thin. I wanted to lose more weight not because I thought I was fat but because I was addicted to self-denial. I have rarely talked with anyone who 20

thinks of anorexia as an addiction. But the memoirs I've read of heroin addicts and junkies of various kinds are much more familiar to me than stories I've heard about anorexics. Apparently, anorexics perceive themselves as fat even when they look like skeletons. But I saw what other people saw -- someone disturbingly small.

When I was about 90 pounds my dad took a picture of me outside Barnes &

Noble in Bethesda. He gave me the picture and I felt a pang of terror. The skin around my smiling mouth was rippled, like water just after a stone is dropped. The space between the ripples should have been filled with flesh. I had a nightmare that night in which I saw my own face.

I didn't think I looked beautiful as an anorexic but eating caused so many waves of anxiety to flush my body that food became my nemesis. Not eating made me feel calm. I was addicted to this calm and I was addicted to weighing myself. After I stepped onto the scale, two digital red zeros flashed three times before my new weight appeared.

I loved the suspense, the flashing zeros, waiting for the number. Every time it was lower

I felt genuinely happy and smiled at myself in the mirror. Nothing else made me happy.

Food and weight were the only things that sparked an emotional reaction in me.

Maybe I felt like such a loner in middle school that I didn't feel I existed in the first place, not in any realm outside my thoughts and feelings. I wasn't in any clubs and I wasn't athletic. What did it matter if my body withered away? It's not like I used my body for sports or for hooking up with boys. What are healthy legs to someone who doesn't run and barely walks anywhere? What are breasts to a girl who wants to be felt up by no one? I wanted to get rid of everything that I didn't see as part of myself; my fat 21

and muscle didn't have anything to do with me as a person. My body felt arbitrary and

disposable. It was my mind that contained my self. If I could have, I would've probably

burned off my bones too and floated around like a bodiless spirit, observing things,

feeling free.

My father took me to a Children's Hospital clinic, just down the road from our house. There was a doctor there, Dr. Molberg, who specialized in treating girls with eating disorders. I saw him once a week for about a month. His nurse weighed me, after which I sat in his office and listened to him talk about anorexia. He told me even the experts aren't exactly sure what causes it. I learned words from him like "serotonin" and

"cortisol." I must have scowled at him as he spoke because he talked to me in a gentle, patient voice as though trying not to agitate a snarling dog. He told me, gently, that nutrition boosts serotonin levels, which lifts your mood and also raises your cortisol level. Cortisol, he explained, is the stress hormone, so when you don't eat you lower your cortisol level and feel less anxious. For anorexics, who tend to be anxious people, not eating can be very calming.

Dr. Molberg also told me he found protein in my urine, that I had burned off almost all the fat in my body, including the fat surrounding my internal organs and was now breaking down muscle for fuel. He said what I was doing was very, very dangerous and if I didn't increase my nutrition, I would die.

All I could think of as he talked was how he used the word "nutrition" instead of food. I wondered if he did this because he knew that word had the same negative zing in my head as "Nazi" or "hell." I kept thinking, as he explained my condition, that he didn't 22

understand. "Nutrition" was a euphemism for the most disgusting stuff on earth. When I managed to trick the scale by water-hinging my weight up by a couple pounds, I bragged to my dad on the car ride home from the clinic. "I'm 92 pounds," I told him cheerfully.

He told me he was proud of me. He didn't understand anorexia anymore than I did. The nurses never checked my thick socks for keys or my underwear for heavy silver pendants.

They never inquired as to why my water filled abdomen protruded so much.

When my weight dropped below the 90s I lost interest in music. Hearing it made me anxious, made me feel like a thousand flying insects were swarming between my ears.

It was too much stimuli. I stopped listening to my Walkman and when my mom turned on the radio in the car I immediately shut it off. I wanted silence. I wanted calm. CHAPTER3

INTENSIVE CARE

I'm lying in a hospital bed. A female doctor slowly pushes a feeding tube up my right nostril. My mom is watching.

'1t's going to be all right. You're doing good," my mom says. She's squatting by the side ofthe bed, her face scrunched up with pain. The edges of my eyelids seem stuck together by tears, as though they were drops of glue. The tip of the feeding tube scrapes my sinuses. I scream.

"It fucking hurts." The doctor stops pushing the tube and looks at my mother. I think she wants my mom to reprimand me for cursing.

"You're all right. It's almost fmished," my mom says. The doctor resumes pushing. I scream again but louder this time.

"It hurts!" The doctor, annoyed, stops again.

"There are children on this ward who are younger than you. Please try to keep your voice down." She pushes the tube further up my sinuses. It feels like she's shooting water up my nose through a syringe. When I scream again I don't bother to use words.

Instead, I let out a choked, defeated wail and cry quietly to myself.

23 24

I look down at my right hand, aching slightly from the IV held in place by hospital tape. I move my fingers up, then down, in order to prove to myself I still have control over something, however small. The tube enters my throat.

The doctor tapes the tube to my cheek with hospital tape to hold it in place. As she does this, the tube turns a little, moving up and down by fractions of an inch in my sinuses and throat. This bums and causes my already watery eyes to water again. She presses her fmgers to the tape, against my cheek for a few seconds. For now, my skin accepts the sticky adhesive. The doctor turns on my feeding machine. It looks exactly like the machine dripping saline water into my veins, except the bag on the metal hook is filled with a flesh colored liquid.

"What's that?" I ask. The machine makes a grinding, snoring sound as it churns the mystery liquid.

"It's got a lot of good stuff in it," says the nurse. She doesn't answer my question.

"What is it?" I ask again impatiently. I want the precise truth.

"It's stuff we give our patients who need a lot of nutrition." She repeats the word

"stuff'' as though its actual name would be of no interest to me, as though plain truth is a grown-up thing. I could make my question more specific but I'm exhausted. I don't feel like pressing it further. I let my head fall back on the pillow. I stare at the plastic churning mechanism, releasing two or three drops at a time. I'm fascinated that something as simple as this can save my life. I wonder, feeling the tape loosen a little on my face, if I would be dead if I were anorexic in a different century, before the feeding tube was invented. 25

"It's called Ensure, honey," my mom says. The nurse leaves the room.

"What's in it?"

"Vitamins and minerals and protein-- a lot of good stuff." My mom doesn't mention the words "fat" and "calories." I look up at the bag full of liquid and deduce by the thick look of it that it does contain fat. I feel offended. Other people don't mind ingesting fat but I'm not like other people. I'm anorexic; forcing me to eat fat is disrespectful.

"I think I'm going to go home," my mom says softly, apologetically. It seems outrageous to me that she would leave my side when I'm like this. When I was at home counting heartbeats I wanted her to go away. I was happy when she rose from the floor outside my bedroom and walked up stairs, defeated. But I was only happy then because her leaving was my idea.

"Alex is expecting me for dinner." I imagine my mom and my stepdad sitting down to eat. I imagine they talk about me at first but inevitably change subjects. The both of them, after all, have lives that have nothing to do with me. Eventually my mom will ask Alex about work or they will discuss something having to do with my stepsisters.

I can't stand the idea of vanishing from her thoughts for a second. I have trouble keeping myself alive, but as long as I exist in her head I can never really disappear. I need her to think of me, to preserve me.

I imagine myself poised in her head like a small eternal flame, invulnerable and bright. The idea that something might snuff me out, that she might forget me, awakens a kind of rage in me that I've never felt before. Death was not real to me until I imagined 26

fading in her, being replaced by some other thought like what she should have for dessert, when she should get her car inspected, how her husband looked or didn't look at her.

"Can't he eat by himself?" My mom doesn't answer this.

"Claire," she says disapprovingly. She leans in and kisses me on the forehead.

"I'll see you in the morning. I love you."

After she has gone I stare at the wall, the clock. I could tum on the television, but

I don't have the attention span to follow a plot or comprehend a joke. I don't know what to do with myself. Now that I'm alone, the feeding machine seems suddenly very loud. I look over at the churning plastic and feel a flush of affection for this tall, noisy robot. It feels like company, standing by my side; it's about mom's height.

Again, I feel like water is shooting up my nose. My cheek is letting go of the hospital tape and the tube suddenly shifts in my sinuses. I press the tape to my cheek and hold it there for a few seconds, blinking fast in a fresh flood of tears. This minor drama, which will occur again and again so much I'll get used to it, prompts me to realize the obsoleteness of my mouth. I become acutely aware of my tongue and my teeth. Just as I am on the verge of epiphany, as I am beginning to realize that I am designed by millions of years of evolution to chew and swallow, I hear the door click open. I expect to see a doctor. Instead, I see Natasha, my childhood best friend. The last time she saw me I was roughly twenty pounds heavier.

"Hi" she says.

"Hi." I smile. She slowly walks towards me. With one hand, she grips the metal railing on the side of my bed. With the other, she reaches down. She takes my hand and 27

grips it gently. She stares into the blue fuzz of my hospital blanket; I think she's avoiding my face. We hold hands like this, me staring at her, her staring at the blanket. Her eyes fill with water. After what feels like minutes of silence, she looks at me.

"How are you?" She asks. A tear rolls down her cheek.

I don't think anyone has asked me this all day. I've never thought much of this question before, maybe because I never quite knew how to answer it. I thought it was something grown-ups said to each other while they mustered up the courage to say or ask something else, something they really wanted to know. But "How are you?" sounds different now. It seems suddenly profound, more like a statement than a question. "You are a person," Natasha is saying. There is a person inside of the monster.

"I'm okay. I'm sure I look pretty scary." I try to sound upbeat, like everything is all right. I want to sound like a normal happy girl, a girl whose thoughts are healthy and whose hospitalization is the fault of something external like a car accident. I want to sound like there is nothing twisted about my being here, like I didn't do this to myself.

Natasha grips my hand harder and fresh two tears roll down her cheeks. Her eyes return to the hospital blanket. I assume she needs a break from looking at me. I remember the last conversation I had with her revolved around a piece of chocolate. She offered me a

Belgian truffie.

"I don't eat chocolate," I said.

"You love chocolate."

"Not anymore." 28

"Whatever, Claire." With her mouth full of chocolate she added, "Whatever you're doing is bullshit."

It's hard to know what to say to her now. She stays only for a few minutes more, tells me she loves me, and says she has to go. Her mom ordered a pizza and is expecting her soon.

The door clicks shut. I don't know what to do now, so I close my eyes. I fall asleep but wake up every half an hour or so needing to use the bathroom. This involves pushing the feeding machine, which I think of as "the robot" into the stall with me, then wheeling it back to its place by my bed. The churning noise is hard to ignore and my sleep is shallow and broken. My mom opens the door to my room around 8 a.m. I've only been awake for a few minutes.

"Hey munchkin," my mom says.

"Hey," I say without taking my eyes from the window. I'm a little sore she didn't spend the night with me, sleep on the narrow sofa for guests just below the window. She sits on the edge of my bed and hands me a paper menu. I take it from her and scowl as I read: French toast, pancakes, eggs, bacon.

"There's nothing I can eat on this."

"They have cereal, honey."

"I can't eat it."

"Why not?"

"I don't like anything." I feel a surge of pain in my right hand as I turn the pages of the menu. The N needle is poking me on the inside. I drop the menu, lay my hand 29

flat on the bed. I grind my teeth in rage before speaking again. "They're already filling me with calories."

"The Ensure gives you some nutrition, honey, but you still need to eat. I'll order you some cereal."

"Rice Krispies," I say staring out the window, imagining how light, air-like they are.

"There's nothing in Rice Krispies. How about Kellogg's cornflakes?" I do like the taste of cornflakes. I used to eat it with sugar sprinkled on top, before I swore off food. Part of me does want to eat it, to rebel against the voice inside me that tells me calories are evil. My mouth waters a little, despite myself, imagining the taste of sugary cornflakes.

"Fine," I say, "just make sure you get skim milk."

When the hospital tray arrives I stare down at the box of cornflakes and carton of skim milk. I make no move to open the box of cereal. My mom takes the box and opens it for me. I realize, quickly, that ifl pour the box myselfl can probably leave some cereal at the bottom. If she pours, she'll be sure to empty the whole thing. I take the box from her and pour enough cereal that she won't catch on, but leave just enough in the box to calm my nerves. It's all right to eat a little, I decide, I just can't eat it all. I pour some milk into the bowl.

"That's not enough," she says and pours more milk on top of the cornflakes.

"Stop," I yell. "That's enough." I take a bite, my heart pounding. The cornflakes taste bland without any sugar, but I wouldn't dare ask for sugar. The non-anorexic in me 30

still has voice, but it's a whisper compared to the voice that screams while I chew --you have to stop eating, stop stop stop.

My mom uses my bathroom. While I'm alone I take a fistful of cornflakes from the bowl, open the drawer on the left side of my bed and release the cereal. It isn't much, but it's about four bites worth which I won't have to eat. I close the drawer and feel a surge of relief. I dip my spoon into the bowl and lean forward as I hear the toilet flush. I want my mom to think the cereal is in my belly. She's never been anorexic. She doesn't know to check the drawers.

"I'm done," I announce and rest my spoon on the tray.

"Honey, you didn't eat anything."

"It's soggy now. It's gross," I say raising my voice.

"So eat the non-soggy parts." She lifts up the box of cereal and shakes it. "Claire, there's cereal in here."

"I'm full."

"You can't be full. Just finish what's in the box. Please." She holds out the box waiting for me to take it. My dad enters the room.

"Morning, bear. Hi, Maria."

"Hi," I say. I don't want my dad to witness an argument. He's never put up with backtalk the way my mom does. I want him to think I'm nice all time, not a pain in the neck teenager. I admire him a lot and even in my present state, I want him to admire me a little. I take the box, reach inside it, and put a couple flakes in my mouth. My dad opens the drawer on my left, looking for something or other and turns bright red. 31

"Oh my God," he says. He picks up a few cornflakes. I blush. He can't admire me now. How could he? I've done such an insane thing. Before my mom can react I accidentally drop the box of cornflakes and cereal falls into the crevices of my hospital gown. I burst into tears. This accident, which would have seemed minor when I was healthy, is cataclysmic. The shock of it is unbearable. I lift up the cornflakes with my right hand, feeling my face return to the teary mess it was the evening before. My mom helps me gather the cornflakes. My dad joins in, collecting cornflakes from the folds of my gown. I don't remember being an infant, but it must've felt like this; I'm upset and I don't know why. I just want the cornflakes gone. I want my dad gone; I don't want him to see me crying over cereal. A nurse rolls a machine I've never seen before into the room.

"What's going on here?" She asks. My parents are still scooping cereal from my lap and dropping it on the tray in front of me.

"She hid cereal in a drawer."

"Ms. Claire, why would you do that?" The nurse sounds disappointed, puts her hands on her hips.

Because I'm anorexic.

"She has anorexia," my dad says, frustrated. "She's just not going to eat by herself. She's not going to."

"I thought mom was with you," says the nurse. I ignore her, push away the retractable table .4,lt~cqe~'t9 the side of my bed and let my head fall against the pillow.

. .. '~ "Her ~<.an't~h her every two seconds," my dad says. 32

"It's all right, Adrian."

"She's got an eating disorder," my dad says now looking at the nurse. His face is just as red as the moment he discovered the cornflakes. I've only heard my dad sound really frustrated a few times in my life. He doesn't have a temper but he must be unnerved. He probably thought I was safe from myself once I was in a hospital. The nurse looks at him briefly and then back at me. I don't think she wants to be blamed for the cornflakes incident.

"We've got to put some electrodes on your chest," Ms. Claire. She wheels the boxy machine closer to me. "We're going to have to open your gown." I roll my head towards the machine. "We need to see how your heart is doing." My dad walks around the hospital bed and is about to sit down when I request both he and my mom leave the room. I don't know what an electorate is but I don't want either one of them around if she's going to open my gown. I'm too old for them to see my chest, however breast-less it maybe.

"Can you guys leave, please." My dad looks at me and raises his eyebrows. I think he's waiting for an explanation.

"Are you sure, honey?" My mom asks. After behaving like a two-year-old I want to make up for it now by sounding especially grown-up.

"Maybe you can come back in a few minutes, when she's done," I say. I notice my dad has a book in his hand. There's a ripped white piece of computer paper stuck in it, a third of the way through, with notes scribbled in blue pen. My dad's in graduate school; I guess he brought some work with him. Looking at his handwriting, I remember 33

how I changed my signature a year ago so it would look like his: sloppy, quick, grown up. Sometimes he reprimanded me for having a sloppy signature, but I just wrote that way because he did.

What did I care if the "n' s" in my last name were legible or not? I just wanted my

"Kinnane" to look like his "Kinnan e." I've caused a rift between us, being anorexic. He can't relate to self-starvation and I can't explain why I won't eat. I don't have a good explanation, at least not one that would sound good to someone who feeds himself. It hurts to see him standing there with his book and his glasses tucked under his shirt. It reminds me how we used to talk about books and history. After I became anorexic I tried talking to him a few times about something having nothing to do with me, but he barely spoke. I guess the elephant in the room was too big -- anorexia.

"You can read in the cafeteria," I suggest, now looking at his face.

"I'll be fine, Bear." He half smiles and walks towards the door, turns around and winks at me. Thank God for that wink. It must mean he still sees the old Claire in me. I smile and feel my skin wrinkle around my mouth. If my own face has given me a nightmare, I wonder how many it's given him.

"We'll be back in a few minutes," my mom says, stands up from the bed and waves at me. The door shuts behind my parents. The nurse holds a small circular shaped disk in her hand, about three times the size of a quarter. It's attached to a long wire which is attached to a box. I notice there are several other discs piled on top of each other, on the cart that holds the machine. The whole thing looks like a cross between a really big 34

alarm clock and what I imagine a dead space Martian might look like -- its tentacles lying limp. The nurse peels back a thin piece of paper from the disk.

"Slip your arms through your sleeves for me," she says softly. I do what she asks.

She places four electrodes above and below where my breasts should be. The last one she sticks in the center of what I recently learned, in science class, is called the

"sternum." I think mine kind of looks like a xylophone with skin over it. My whole chest is covered with light, dark fur.

"What are they for?" I ask.

"They're for monitoring your heart." What does my heart have to do with anything? "We just want to make sure everything looks good. You can put your gown back on." I slip my arms through my sleeves. She crumples the paper backs of the electrodes and tosses them in the trashcan. "You want anything to drink?" She must not have much experience with anorexics.

"No thanks," I say. I hear the door open. My mom's friend, Steve Patterson, ambles into the room using a cane. Steve has multiple sclerosis; one of his eyes is focused on me and the other is lazy, focused on nothing. The nurse leaves the room, taking my breakfast tray with her.

"Good morning, Steve," she says on her way out.

"Morning, Deborah," Steve says. "How are you doing, Claire?" Not only is

Steve a family friend, he's also a psychiatrist who works in the hospital. No one told me he was coming to talk to me. I guess my parents assumed, correctly, I would have objected to his visit. I don't want someone to try to pry their way into my mind, ask me 35

personal questions. Sometimes I imagine the question mark itself and I think it kind of looks like the profile of a fishing hook. The idea of answering someone's questions about my anorexia is just as appealing to me as the thought of someone literally sticking a hook in my brain.

"I'm okay," I say. He walks towards the chair in the comer of the room and slowly sits down. He rests his palm on the top of his cane, and his other hand on top of that.

"I know you been kinda havin' a rough time," he says. If I didn't already know

Steve from my mom's Christmas parties, I would think he was trying to sound purposely casual and cool because I'm a teenager. I would think he was trying to manipulate his voice so I would like and trust him. I know, however, that this is just how Steve talks and he has his own relationship with cool that has nothing to do with me. My mom told me before he got MS he was quite the ladies man and drove a red convertible. He went dancing, had long hair, skied. I feel sorry for Steve because I know how much he would enjoy his legs, if he could use them. Also, he's friendly. I try to be nice, even though I don't want anyone sticking hooks in my brain.

"I'm okay," I repeat. I notice how strange the electrodes feel on my chest, especially when I breathe in, my chest expands, and the sticky circles stretch.

"Your folks tell me you're not eating the hospital meals." My dad walks in the room. "I think you might be better off in a psychiatric ward." My dad leans against the radiator, crosses his legs, folds his arms. We don't say hi to each other and he doesn't look at me. "There's a psych ward at Children's Hospital where they're used to treating .. 36

. your condition. There are other folks there who have anorexia. You might make some friends." My dad nods his head in agreement. Maybe he knows about this already.

"Where's mom?" I ask, looking at my dad.

"She's at work, Bear" he says without taking his eyes off the floor. I think of the words psychiatric ward; I don't like how they sound. I feel suddenly conspired against.

"Psychiatric wards are for crazy people," I say.

"No they're not," says Steve. "A lot of people your age go there to work out their problems." I imagine being away from my mom and dad for a long time. My heart begins to pound beneath the sticky electrodes.

"I'll eat Haagen-Dazs every day," I say, knowing as the words come out of my mouth that this is a bold faced lie. "Chocolate Haagen-Dazs."

"I think that would be hard for you," says Steve. "Your folks can't be here all the time to make sure you eat. And the staff here ... they're not a psychiatric ward. They're not set up to watch you all the time."

"I don't need to be watched all the time," I say and remember dropping the cornflakes in the drawer. I do need to be watched. "I want to go home."

"You can't go home, Bear."

I stop protesting. He already looks upset and I don't want to make him feel worse.

I also know, ifl were home, I would spend every moment alone exercising. I would do sit-ups in my bedroom. I would take long calorie-burning walks by myself. My life would be tedious. And my dad, who constantly looks as though he has just returned from my funeral, would mourn my life in front of me: at the dinner table where I'd glare at my 37

food, on an errand somewhere where I wouldn't talk -- his expression would announce

"my daughter is gone." I would feel guilty but not guilty enough to eat. I don't want to go home. I don't know where I want to go. Anorexia always goes with me, so what difference does it make?

"When am I going?" I ask, looking at the floor, defeated.

"Probably at the end of the week," says Steve. "I think they wanna keep you a little bit longer, make sure your heart's okay." Steve slowly stands up from the chair, helping himself with his cane. "Listen, I've got a patient now but anytime you wanna talk you just let your mom or your dad know and I'll zip right over as soon as I can." My dad shakes his hand and smiles for him. I like how he said "zip right over." Steve has always had a good sense of humor. I admire him for it. He walks slowly out of the room.

"Do you want me to get you anything?" My dad smiles at me.

"No thanks."

"I could probably find you some paper and something to draw with." I assume when he offered me something he was talking about food. I remember how much I used to enjoy coloring when I was little, even though I've never been much of an artist.

"Okay," I say. My dad disappears and reappears in a couple minutes with a few sheets of computer paper and a box of crayons. He swings the retractable table in front of me and tugs on the curtain string. The curtains are already open, but he opens them some more. There are streaks of blazing pink and orange in the sky. It occurs to me there is one good thing about being in this room; my window here is bigger than my windows at both my homes -- my mom's and dad's. My windows at home have panes and blinds, 38

which obstruct my view. I like how I can see nothing but sky here and some leafless

trees in the distance. Looking out the window, I feel a wave of relaxation. I forget about

the psych ward. My dad puts on his glasses and opens his book.

Inspired by Steve Paterson's "zip right over," I decide to try my hand at irony. I

decide to write "Claire's Awesome Paradise" in big cursive letters. As I bend my fmgers

to pull a purple crayon from the box (purple is me and my dad's favorite color) I feel a

piercing pain in my right hand, the IV hand. If I drew anything, the needle would

probably pierce me again; I'm forced to write with my left. I've never written with my

left hand before, but I concentrate hard, and when I'm done it almost looks as though I wrote it with my right. I pull out a green and brown crayon and draw a few trees. The outlines are a little drunken, but I saw plenty of trees in Maui that didn't shoot straight up to the sky. I decide my left-handed sloppiness makes my trees more realistic. As I draw, my dad reads his book. I enjoy hearing him flip the pages as I work. It makes me feel like we're not in a hospital, like I don't have electrodes on my chest and we're at home in our living room.

"I'm done," I say. He looks up from his book and raises his eyebrows. I hand him the paper. He grins. "I'd like you to put it on the door, please -- on the outside, like a sign."

"Urn." My dad looks at me, then back to the paper. "Okay. It's interesting. I can see if the nurses have some tape."

"It's supposed to be funny," I say. 39

"Okay," he repeats, still smiling. I can tell he thinks it's strange but he indulges

me. He leaves the room and about 30 seconds later I hear my door open. My dad

attaches my sign to the outside of my door with a couple pieces of tape. My mom pushes

the door open just as my dad reenters the room.

"Claire's awesome paradise!" She says. I don't know if she knows that it's a joke,

a bit of dark humor. I think she's just happy that I've done anything creative, anything

other than stare, cry, object or scowl. "Hi, Adrian."

"Hi, Maria." My dad leans over my bed and kisses me on the forehead. "I'll see you tomorrow, Bear. Love you."

"Love you, too." I watch him disappear out ofview. My mom hands me a teddy bear.

"I found him in the gift shop. He said he wanted to meet you." The bear is light brown and his eyes are two wide lowercase "u's," like he's sleeping. His front paws are sewn together and his knees are bent. It looks like he's praying and I wonder if he was made by some religious company that makes religious stuffed animals. We're an agnostic family and I'm an atheist. This is the first toy or stuffed animal I've had that appears to be praying to God. I put him on the end table to my left. He stands up straight, in prayer.

"Did you talk to Steve today?"

"I don't wanna go to a mental hospital," I say. My eyes fill with tears. My mother becomes blurry. I blink. 40

"It's not a mental hospital. It's just a place to get help for a while." She sits on my bed, closer to me than she sat this morning.

"I don't want to go."

"You have to, honey." She brushes the hair from my face and strokes my head. I don't push her hand away this time; I want my mom. When she hands me the hospital menu I refuse to take it from her.

"There's nothing I can eat."

"There must be something ... "

"No," I interrupt her.

"What about soup?" My mouth waters, despite myself, at the thought of chicken soup. "They have chicken noodle soup. You like that."

"Whatever," I say. I can't admit to her or myself that I actually want the soup. I don't know why; I just can't. When the soup arrives I eat about a third of the broth, avoiding the noodles, chicken and chunks of carrot. I decide to rebel against myself and eat a few pieces of celery. I miss what it feels like to chew and I figure celery is mostly water anyway.

"I'm done," I say and push away the retractable table. My mom examines the paper cup of soup.

"Claire, you didn't eat anything."

"I'm full."

"You need the protein, honey." She stirs the soup a couple times and her face scrunches up. She rests the soup in her lap and begins to sob, her shoulders bobbing up 41

and down. I roll over on to my right side and stare at the wall. I don't like hearing or seeing my mom cry but I can't do anything to stop it. I won't eat the chicken. I want my mom gone.

When she leaves for the night I'm not tired at all. I still don't feel like watching television and I can't think of anything to draw. I'm left alone in a mostly dark room, save for a light behind my head. It illuminates my bed and the tubes in my arms, but isn't powerful enough to light up the floor around me. It's like a stage light, positioned by a director-- not a doctor. It's like I'm "the anorexic" in a one-woman show in some sort of small improv theater. The audience, which sits in the shadows ofthe room, is made up of healthier versions of myself, at younger ages, none of whom can understand what happened to this one particular Claire. I imagine one of the younger Claires, frightened by my gauntness, starts to cry. An older Claire picks her up and slips out of the room. I don't want to be the anorexic, to scare my younger selves sitting in the shadows. But I can't help it. This is what I am, what all the other Claires will become.

Not knowing what to do with myself on the rectangular stage of my bed, I perk my ears up to the goings-on outside my room. I tum my head in the direction ofthe door, in the direction of the nurse's station which lies just beyond it. The noises I hear, though they are few and infrequent, are like miraculous ladders and bridges leading out of my head. The ringing telephone, the opening and closing of doors, and myriad other sounds which I can't put an image to remind me that other people exist, not other Claires but other souls entirely whose fates don't touch anorexia. 42

I hear crying. The Claires in the shadows of the room vanish and my head fills with the image of an infant. The crying becomes screaming: raspy and red. I feel as though my own voice is gone, my voice box is missing and this other person is screaming for me. I want to meet the source ofthis voice. I pull back the blue blanket, finagle my various tubes, and stand up. I unplug my robot and push it, on its wheels, towards the door.

The night nurses don't say anything to me as I walk directly past the nurse's station, pushing my robot, following my ear. It doesn't take me long to find the room.

The door is open and inside it one soft light is on. A brunette woman is sitting quietly next to a metal crib.

"Hi," I say. "I'm from across the hall."

"Hello." She smiles.

"Is it okay ifl meet your baby?"

"Sure." I walk to the edge ofthe crib and look down. She's small, brown haired and for now, not crying.

"This is Adrianna."

"Is she sick?" Her mother answers, but I don't remember what she says. I'm too transfixed by Adrianna's bare belly, which goes up and down with her breathing. Around her left wrist is a white plastic hospital band with her name and some numbers on it. I don't like how it looks on her wrist, like the kind of tag you might see on a cow's ear or a corpse. But Adrianna doesn't know what it means or where she is. When she wakes up, 43

maybe she'll play with it, chew on it. She won't recognize her name. It's hard to imagine

I was once like that -- free of anorexic thoughts.

I can't think of anything to say to her mother, so I thank her and leave the room. I wheel past the nurse's station, thinking of Adrianna. I remember how she looked just a moment ago: nude, soft, unconscious.· Once I'm alone in my room, though, Adriana leaves my mind. A more gripping thought than her occurs to me -- no one is watching me. I can exercise. I park my robot outside the bathroom door and begin to jog in place, facing the mirror. As I watch my head bob up and down I wonder if my accelerated heart rate will cause the heart monitor to beep. I decide it's worth risking getting caught; the burn in my legs feels so good. I decide to exercise my arms as well and raise and lower them as if I were lifting weights. The heart monitor stays quiet. The next morning nurse enters the room pushing a wheelchair.

"Okay, Ms. Paradise, it's time to go to the basement."

"I don't need a wheelchair," I say.

"It's hospital procedure. Can you slip out of your shirt for me?" I notice how the nurses often say "for me" as though what they're asking is a personal favor. This annoys me; I think it's phony.

"I'm not paralyzed. I can walk."

"You're not supposed to be exercising," she says. She's the first nurse to even insinuate that she understands anorexia. I can't argue with her; she's on to me. I slip my arms out of my shirt. She pushes a button on the heart monitor and leans over me. She peels off an electrode. It stings and pulls on my light hair. I try not to let on that it hurts. 44

I've been here long enough (about two days that feel like two weeks) that I'm beginning to feel to~ like a veteran of bad sensations. I feel my right eye squint I'm not going to cry or complain, I think, as she pulls one after the other from my chest.

"How come I have to go to the basement?"

"We're going to look at your heart. You get to see it on a screen, from different angles. They have the equipment down there."

"Oh." I still don't understand the electrodes were for. "What's wrong with my heart?"

"Maybe nothing. We just want to make sure that's all." She pulls back my blanket and tries to put her arm around my shoulders to help me up and out of bed. I squirm away from her.

"I can do it." CHAPTER4

LUCK

I watch a black-and-white image of my valves puffmg open and closed. The technician pushes a button and I see another angle. There are acronyms and brightly colored squares on the comer of the screen. It looks like some sort ofkey. I watch from my wheelchair, the nurse behind me.

I've never seen the inside of my body before. My heart valves look like sea anemone, soft and waving. My ventricles look smooth and cavernous like an underwater cave or the basement of a medieval church. Watching my heart pump in hazy black and white, I feel guilty that I could have damaged my heart. I still don't understand how I could have done this, but I'm relieved when the technician says, "Everything looks good."

I begin to feel anxious that maybe she missed something. Ifmy heart is damaged, I'm done, I think. I'll either die or have problems forever.

"Are you sure?" I ask. I become conscious of my heartbeat and suddenly feel as though the past few months have been a huge mistake. Anorexia is dangerous and pointless. Nothing, I think, is worth heart damage.

"You're fine," says the technician. "You're lucky, but you're fine."

"It's kind of neat, huh -- to see the inside of your heart?" The nurse says.

45 46

"I guess." It's only neat if your heart is fine. After the technician says, "All done," I put my hands on the top of the wheelchair wheels and push myself forward a couple feet, towards the door.

"No no no, Ms. Paradise," says the nurse, "put your hands in your lap." She catches my wheelchair by the handles and steers me out of the room. She probably thinks I was trying to exercise and if I had a surprise heart attack, my parents could sue her or the hospital. What would her colleagues think ofher if they saw her anorexic patient pushing herselfdown the hallway? I wasn't trying to exercise, though. I honestly thought it would be fun to wheel around for a while. Most of the time I have an anorexic agenda, but not always.

"I want to go for a walk today," I say to the same nurse after I get back in bed and she re-hooks up my nasal gastric tube to the robot. This time, I am trying to exercise.

My heart is fine, so why not?

"What do you think I'm going to say, Claire?"

"You can say you sympathize with me being stuck in bed all the time and you understand why I want to go for a walk."

"I sympathize with you but you're not going anywhere. Why don't you watch some television?"

"I don't like television." This is partly true and partly false. I do think most television is stupid, but there are some shows I like such as "The Simpsons" and

"Seinfeld." I'm compelled to keep the TV off because watching it won't help me burn calories. Sometimes it's hard to know exactly why I want to do what I want to do. I want 47

to bum calories by walking around but I also think it would be neat to walk to the maternity ward and look at the new babies. Looking at babies doesn't bum calories the way walking does, but I still want to do it. I don't understand myself. The nurse disappears for less than a minute and returns with a small paper cup.

"Drink this," she says.

"What is it?" I take the cup and tilt it from side to side. The liquid is thick and dark purple.

"Phosphorus. It's a chemical."

"Why do I have to drink it?"

"Because you don't have enough of it. I don't want to argue. Just drink it, please." I put the cup to my lips and tilt it. The purple goo touches my tongue. "Just get it over with and take big sips for me." It tastes both good and awful at the same time -­ like a grape popsicle, but more chemically. I drink about a third of it and stop. My heart is pounding and I feel short of breath. Drinking something thick feels like eating; I have a small panic attack. The nurse sits on the bed, where my mom usually sits.

"That's good. Just chug the rest. You're almost done." I'm not almost done, but, like her, I want this to be over with. I take one long swing, lick my lips, and hand her the cup. I feel proud of myself. I haven't felt this proud since I accidentally ended up on a

"black" (the most severe) slope on a family ski trip two years ago made it down by myself. I fell down a couple times but laughed instead of reprimanding myself. You can do it, I thought I wonder if I can ever be that brave about food. 48

I didn't know, until I researched it years later, that phosphorus comprises 80% of bones and teeth. It's involved in all chemical reactions in the body and is imperative for healthy nerve impulses, normal kidney functioning and the maintenance and repair of cells. Until I was in my 20s and fully recovered, I just thought of it as "the purple stuff."

In addition to not knowing what phosphorus was, I also had no idea then that drinking huge amounts of water could be dangerous. I was dehydrated most of the time, but by hoarding water I depleted my body of sodium and potassium. This lack of electrolytes could have given me fatal heart arrhythmia, brain swelling, or seizures. The extremity of my condition compared to my level of ignorance at age 14 is frightening and overwhelming. I flinch now, when I remember how I wanted to go for a walk after I learned my heart was "fine," how I jogged in place with electrodes on my chest.

Sometimes I wonder, had I known about the dangers of anorexia when I was 117 pounds, if I would've stopped dieting. My compulsion to not eat was so powerful, it's possible that knowing about the dangers of starvation wouldn't have stopped me.

Sometimes when I think about anorexia and addiction in general, I picture footage of hurricanes and tsunamis I've seen on television; I think how weak those forces seem compared to my will to lose weight. It's possible to survive a natural disaster -- when the disaster is your own brain it's almost impossible to survive without forced intervention.

Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of all mental illnesses. "If it weren't for that tube," my dad told me a few years ago, "I'm afraid you would have died. You would have kept going." 49

"I made you some soup," my mom says, standing before my bed. She's holding a small Tupperware bowl. I don't know why she tortures herself; I'm not going to eat it.

"Thanks," I say.

"I'll microwave it for you." She leaves the room and reappears with a steaming bowl of homemade soup. My mouth waters.

"Please eat some of the chicken. It's good protein," my mom says pushing the retractable table towards me. She places the bowl, a napkin and a plastic spoon in front of me. I eat the broth for a couple minutes. It's delicious.

"Eat some of the noodles, honey."

"I'm not going to. Thanks for making it though. The broth is good."

"Just one piece of chicken, for me." I wish my mom wouldn't say "for me." She's making this personal. My not eating chicken has nothing to do with her.

"So you're just never going to eat ever again?" She's raises her voice and her face scrunches up. She'll cry in a few seconds. "That's your plan?" I push away the retractable tray.

"Thanks for making it. I just can't eat it."

"Why not?" She starts to cry and covers her face. I feel bad but I don't know what to do. "I don't understand," she says through the window of her palms. Neither do

I.

"Sorry, Mom."

As my mom is crying with her hands over her face, I look over at the praying stuffed animal looking devout in a flood of lamp light. I don't believe in anything, but I 50

imagine that the bear believes in God and is praying for me. Whether or not God actually exists is of little interest to me; it doesn't seem to make a difference either way. What matters to me is that "Praying Bear," something I can see and touch, will think of me always and love me unconditionally.

I imagine he is in a continual, unbreakable state of prayer in which I am the sole focus. I'm not going to talk to him, like I talked to my teddy bear when I was little. I'm not that childish. I'm not going to squeeze him at night. I'm just going to keep him near me. I prefer him to human beings right now, especially to my parents. They're sad all the time because of me and I can't do anything about it. Praying Bear doesn't know whether or not I'm eating; his eyes are closed by design. CHAPTERS

NOTES ON REMEMBERING

After a week of barely eating anything by mouth at Arlington hospital, I only

weighed 80 pounds. My parents and doctors were able to convince my mom's insurance

company that the hospital wasn't prepared to treat an anorexic and should pay for my

treatment elsewhere. I had only gone to Arlington hospital because my mom was a social

worker there and my healthcare was free. As my dad has often said, "They didn't know

what they were doing at Arlington. And they knew it." I should have been supervised 24

hours a day.

According to my mom, she my dad and I took a taxi cab from Arlington hospital

in Virginia to Children's Hospital in Washington, DC. I sat in between them in the back

seat of the cab; each parent holding my hand.

"I'm not sure why we took a taxi," my mom said when I called her in 20 10 to ask how I got from hospital to hospital. This piece of the story is missing from my memory.

"It was 12 years ago so my memory of the exact details is a little hazy." After I hung up the phone, I called my dad. He said he wasn't there for the ride to Children's, that if my mom and I took a taxi he didn't know about it.

"Why would you take a taxi?" My dad asked. My mom invented a memory or my dad erased one. I was inclined to believe my dad, only because I couldn't imagine me

51 52

and my divorced parents holding hands in a taxicab. My mom and dad get along, but the

memory sounded more like a fantasy of my mom's rather than a reality.

"They didn't even give you tube feeding at Arlington," my dad said. This I knew

he was misremembering. I will never forget the evening at Arlington when the doctor

pushed the tube up my sinus. I thought talking with my parents would help me

remember; it only filled my head with invented images and contradictory information.

Just like they couldn't make me eat, they couldn't make or help me remember.

"You were wearing a hat," my mom says. I don't remember ever wearing a hat

when I was 14. I liked to dress how Kurt Cobain dressed; he didn't wear hats.

"What color was it?"

"Definitely not a bright color. I'm not exactly sure. I just know it wasn't a color

color."

"Color color?"

"You know, it wasn't red. It was black or gray or something."

"Huh."

"You know how you were then, honey. You were into dark stuff."

I will never forget the image of my dad and mom clasping my bony hands in the back seat of a cab. I imagine, for a moment, that this actually happened; I think how they would never have been in a taxicab together in 1998 had it not been for their one anorexic offspring. I imagine them gripping my hands harder than I grip theirs, my unfocused eyes falling somewhere below the car radio, my mind blank. My dad is staring out the 53

window on his left, wondering whether or not anorexia will eventually kill me. My mom is staring out the window on her right, thinking she'll be fine, she'll be fine, she'll be fine. CHAPTER6

EMOTION LIST

Dr. Molberg puts the cold metal disc of his stethoscope just under my left rib. I'm sitting up straight on a hospital bed on the first floor of Children's Hospital. I'm getting a

"check-up" before he takes me upstairs to the psych ward.

"Your stomach is very slow," says Dr. Molberg. He takes the stethoscope out of his ears. He makes a fist with his left hand, unfurls and retracts his fmgers quickly so that his hand looks like a kind of machine. "Your stomach is a muscle and when you are malnourished your stomach can't grind food efficiently. It becomes weak." He unfurls and retracts his fingers more slowly.

I normally don't speak voluntarily; I generally have nothing to say to self-feeding adults, to non-anorexics. I'm interested, however, how Dr. Mol berg could know this just by listening. I've never thought of my stomach as a muscle that could be strong or weak.

"So it sounds slow?" I ask.

"Yes."

"Can I listen?" I remember I ate broth, a couple noodles, and a few pieces of cooked carrot about an hour ago. I imagine the food bumping against the walls of my stomach like clothing in a dryer, food brushing against other food.

54 55

"Sure." He puts the stethoscope in my ears and puts the disc over my stomach again. I hear gurgling.

"It should sound much more ... robust," he says. I don't know what robust sounds like but I suddenly feel guilty. I picture my slow stomach, the noodles swirling around. I didn't know I could weaken my organs; I didn't mean to.

My mom and dad sit side-by-side in the waiting room, speaking in hushed voices.

My dad sees me walk out of the doctor's office first and immediately stops talking. He looks at me and forces a smile.

"Hey, Bear," he says.

"Hi, Munchkin," says my mom, now looking at me. I feel my eyebrows furrow; I scowl at them both. I know they're going to leave me here. Dr. Molberg follows me.

My parents stand up. He explains in a soft gentle voice that the psych ward is on the third floor and the staff there is very competent. I will be in good hands. My mom lifts up a black tote bag filled with clothing and Praying Bear. My parents shake Dr.

Molberg's hand. "Thank you." "Thank you." He smiles at me. I scowl.

The doors to the psych ward are windowless and heavy looking. There is a plaque on the wall near one of the doors that reads "Adolescent Psychiatric Ward. Must be 18 years old to enter." My mom pushes a buzzer. The doors click and my dad pulls the door open. In front of us is another set of doors, this one with small circular windows. Against the wall is an intercom. My mom pushes a green button and says in one breath, "This is Maria Kinnane and Adrian Kinnane we're here with Claire Kinnan e." 56

A blonde curly haired nurse opens the door. Her nurse-shirt as Looney Tunes characters on it. She speaks through a smile.

"Hello," she says, upbeat, looking at my mom, then at me and my dad. Her smile confuses me. It suggests the psych ward is not the worst place on earth. How can someone who works behind two sets oflocked doors be cheerful? I don't trust her. I want to go home. She leads us into a small room adjacent to a large nurse's station. On my way into the room, I look around a little. The psych ward is all blues and grays -- gray carpet, blue walls, gray nurse's station. The overhead lighting is white yellow and florescent. The colors make it feel like a prison. Against one wall is a large dry erase board with names written in red, green and blue. The names are on the far left and to their right is some sort of chart. Some names have stars to the right of them, others have minus signs, some stars and minus signs.

The nurse has a clipboard and begins to ask my parents questions. We're all sitting down at a small black table in a room without windows. My mom does most of the talking. My dad's arms are crossed and he's staring at the table. I imagine he's tuning out the talk and wondering to himself, Why did Claire do this? I answer him back in my mind, I don't know, dad. I'm sorry.

"Any history of mental illness?" The nurse asks.

"No," says my mom.

"Claire's uncle is schizophrenic," my dad says.

"He's not schizophrenic," argues my mom. "He has paranoia."

"He's mentally ill, Maria." The nurse writes something down. 57

"Are you two married?" The nurse asks. My dad shakes his head no.

"We're both remarried," says my mom. My dad got remarried when I was seven but my mom isn't remarried. Her boyfriend was scarred by a first marriage and never wants to get married again, even though we live with him. I don't like how my mom lies and says she's married just because she wants to be married. I also don't like how this woman is asking questions that are none of her business. I think I know what she's up to; she's probing around for reasons why a girl would starve herself. I get the image of the fishing hook question mark again and I want to tell her to leave my parents alone. I dieted because I was fat and I couldn't stop because I couldn't stop. Uncle George and divorce have nothing to do with it.

"So tell me some of your interests," the nurse says to me.

"She's a very good writer," my mom says.

"Don't answer for me. I'm not a kid."

"You write stories?" She asks.

"Poetry," I say. I haven't written poetry in months but I now remember the purple velvet journal I used to write in. The last poem I wrote was about how beautiful my bones were and how disgusting fat is. Most of the other poems are letters addressed to

Kurt Cobain, telling him how sincere his music is and how no one has any right to judge him.

"Who's your favorite poet?"

"Kurt Cobain." I flash her a sinister smile. Jot that down. Patient's idol is a heroin addict who blew his brains out with a shotgun. Bring up in therapy. 58

"She likes other poets, too," my mom says. I guess she doesn't want me to seem too maladjusted.

"Like who?" I say frowning.

"Shel Silverstein."

"I haven't read him since I was seven."

"Anyway," my dad interrupts, "Claire likes to write."

After asking a few more basic questions, like what grade I'm in and how long I was in intensive care, the nurse tucks her pen into her clipboard. "I'll show you your room." My dad lifts the tote bag this time.

"Watch the attitude, Bear," my dad whispers in my ear.

We follow the nurse down a short hallway and into a room on the right. The room has two beds, two desks, two chairs and two sets of drawers. The large floor to ceiling window behind one of the beds makes it feel more like a room and less like a prison cell.

"That's the bathroom," she says pointing to a closed door. It stays locked at all times. If you want to use the bathroom just let one of the nurses know and he or she will unlock it for you." She unlocks the bathroom door and I peer inside. The tiles are an ugly shade of yellow. There's a shower, but no bath. I guess they don't want anyone drowning themselves. The shower head is attached to the wall -- if you could hold it yourself you could choke yourself with it. I wonder if any of the kids here, none of whom I've seen yet, would try to kill themselves in the bathroom. Self-destructive people are clever but whoever designed the psych ward bathroom is clever, too. "When you're in 59

the bathroom you must keep the door ajar at all times so a nurse can see you. There are a

lot of rules here and you'lllearn them as you go." I can feel her eyes on me and I wish

she'd roll them somewhere else; I stare out the window. "Since your parents are here and you haven't unpacked yet you should know there aren't any sharp objects allowed on the ward which includes scissors, anything made of glass such as vases or picture frames."

She looks at my mom, then my dad. "If you're going to send Claire flowers make sure they arrive in a plastic vase."

"She'll be receiving tube feeding at night?" My mom asks. I know she knows this already; the tube is still in my nose and taped to my face. I guess she wants reassurance before she leaves me with strangers.

"Yes. She'll be eating substantial meals during the day and will be fed two cans of Ensure every night." I think about the phrase eating substantial meals. She may as well tell my mother that I'm going to learn to fly here or levitate in mid air. "Visiting hours are just about over now so I'll let you guys say goodbye." A tear rolls down my mom's cheek. She hugs me. The pressure of her arms deflates the air in my sweater. I worry she can feel my ribs through the fleece. I don't want to upset her so I pull away.

My dad hugs me after her and when his arms are wrapped around me I imagine him thinking why did this happen, Bear? While my ear is pressed to his chest I answer him in my mind; I don't know, Dad. I'm sorry.

My parents walk out of the room. My mom turns around and waves. The nurse tells me to have a seat on the bed, she'll be back in a few seconds. I wonder if she tells me to sit down because she thinks I would do jumping jacks if she left me standing alone. 60

Maybe I would. Sometimes I don't know what I'm going to do or not do when I'm by

myself. She returns with a blue hospital gown and hands it to me.

"You can put this on now." She takes a seat on my desk chair, hangs her elbow

over the back of the chair. I don't feel comfortable changing in front of her.

"Should I go in the bathroom?" I ask.

"No. You can change right here." I undress, put on the hospital gown, and fasten the ties behind my back and waist. I leave my clothes on the bed.

"You can fold those and put them in your drawer. 11 I hesitate. I don't like taking

orders. I don't know her well enough, though, to argue with her. I slowly fold my pants.

"Can I wear my sweater?"

"No. If you're cold I can get you another gown to wear on top ofthat one, but no outside clothing allowed -- not for our anorexics. 11 I wonder if she knows about trapping food in sweater sleeves. I'd like to think I patented that move, that I came up with something unique.

"Why?" I slip my clothing in a drawer.

"Protocol." This isn't a real answer. I suspect, given her tone, if I ask her why it is protocol she'll give me another answer that isn't an answer. I decide it will be easier to just go along with things.

"I guess I would like another gown, then."

"Alright. Take a seat on the bed and I'll be back in a second." After she leaves the room I get up from the bed, unzip my tote bag and pull out Praying Bear. I don't 61

think I have time to do sit ups or jumping jacks without getting caught, but I don't feel like exercising anyway. I feel like seeing my one friend in the world.

"Here you go," she says. "You should be a little warmer now." I put Praying

Bear on my desk and put on the second gown.

"Time for dinner," she says. "Follow me."

She leads me down a short hallway and into a large room in which there's a long dining table and two blue sofas in the shape of an "L". A television-on-wheels stands in front of one of the sofas. On the floor sit three or four kids, all of whom look a couple years older than me and are wearing their own clothes. A Latina girl in a bright red shirt laughs and makes fun of the video. A handsome black boy at her side laughs along with her. As far as I can tell, I'm the only anorexic in the room.

The nurse, speaking over the video, introduces me. The small crowd turns to me.

Each teenager smiles and says, "Hi," "Hey," "Hey." I want my clothes back. I feel embarrassed in front of them, wearing a floppy gown.

The nurse tells me to sit down at the dining table. She explains that dinnertime has already passed, but because I arrived at 6:45 p.m., I'm having a late dinner by myself.

Another nurse, whom I don't bother to look at closely, places a tray in front of me. On the tray is a carton of whole milk, a hamburger, French fries, cookies, macaroni and / / cheese and green Jell-0. I stare down the hamburger. Impossible. My heart begi/sto / pound. I eat a couple spoonfuls of the Jell-0, which I assume is the least caloric thing on the tray. 62

I sink back in my chair. My peripheral vision alerts me of a colorful sunset, just

outside the large dining room windows. I keep the sunset peripheral, though, not looking

up more than once. My attention is stuck on the food. I'm hypnotized, paralyzed by I

can't. The Latina girl in the bright red shirt opens a bag of potato chips and begins to

chomp. I'm fascinated by this noise, by the ease with which she chews. The fact that she

eats voluntarily and laughs while she eats, makes her nothing less than surreal. Sitting

only yards away from her at the long dining table, I have never felt more astronomically

far from anything happy, normal, and good.

A nurse, who's been sitting to my left and watching me, tells me whatever I don't eat by mouth I'll have to drink in the form of Ensure. I hear threat in the tone ofher voice. "That right there," she points to the cold food, "is the caloric equivalent of about eight cups ofEnsure. You'll have to drink all that." I don't respond to threats. Besides, it's gotten cold now. Not even a self-feeder would touch it. The nurse says, "It's up to you," and leaves the room carrying my tray.

She returns with eight small paper cups on a hospital tray. Each one is full of thick liquid which I have never actually tasted. In intensive care, it dripped all day and night into my stomach through my NG tube. Normally, the site of any caloric liquid would make me anxious. But after facing off with hamburger, cookies, and mac and cheese for half an hour, I am relieved that this, at the very least, doesn't resemble food. I muster up some courage and take a sip. It doesn't taste good, but it's not bad either. The nurse tells me whatever I can't drink by mouth she'll have to pour through my tube. 63

I have my own robot here, like the one I had in intensive care. I saw it parked by my bed. I assume it will feed me as I sleep, in the privacy of my own room. "I'll pull the machine in here if you can't drink it. We have to get it in you, somehow."

She sounds tired, exasperated. I don't think I've been here long enough to exasperate her. In her voice I think I can hear exasperation that stretches back for months or even years. I don't think this is her dream job. I wonder why she wanted to work with messed up kids. Maybe she was a messed up kid and thought she could help other people, only to discover her teenage problems grew into adult problems and now she's surrounded everywhere she goes by a continuous flow of problems. Of course, I could be reading too much into her voice. Maybe she's got a headache.

I drink three cups of Ensure and feel proud of myself. My heart, surprisingly, isn't pounding. I look outside and see there's a man-made lake, maybe a water treatment center, next to the hospital. To my right is the National Cathedral, so far away it's the size of one digit on my pointer finger. It looks like a castle. The blues in the sky darken around its silhouette. Whatever reasons I have for not eating, whatever reasons the other kids have for trying to kill themselves can't be found in this view. It's like a picture of the whole world without the ugly stuff: a lake, a changing sky, and a thank you card (to

God) made of stone and glass propped up on the horizon.

I like the thickness of my drink. I contemplate its flavor as I stare at the

Cathedral. I would never drink it voluntarily, but now that I'm stuck with it, I enjoy it a little. It tastes both salty and sweet, like a medicinal milkshake. After the third cup I decide to call it quits. My stomach is full. I've pushed myself far enough for one day. 64

"I'm done," I say out loud, looking at the paper rim of the paper cup. My heart begins to pound, not out of anxiety but out of pride in my accomplishment. I drank three full cups.

"Have it your way," says the nurse.

She takes away the tray and returns with my robot. She wheels it passed the other kids, still watching the corny video, right up to my seat at the dining table. Now everyone is watching. The Latina girl looks at me sympathetically. The nurse hooks up my NG tube to the robot, presses a button, and the churning begins. This is supposed to happen in private. I stare at the floor, at the dark blue carpet, my noisy robot churning and churning. I look like a freak, I think to myself. They think I'm a freak

A plump male nurse walks into the room and says with a feminine lilt to his voice

"Hi guys!" He turns off the television and the self-feeding teens take a seat on the blue couches. They seem to know what comes next. "It's time for group," the nurse says in a slight singsongy voice. He pushes the television out of the room and returns a few seconds later with another male nurse.

"Hey guys." The second nurse also sounds friendly and speaks with a feminine lilt. I guess he notices me at the table by myself. He walks over and puts his hand on my bone shoulder. "Hello," he says gently. "My name is Miguel." I look at his eyes only for a second. Kindness makes me shy. I don't know how to return it.

"Give me your hand," Miguel tells me. He helps me up and pushes my robot on its wheels. I grab on to the metal pole, too. We push it together. I realize I haven't said a word to him. I like him so I push myself to say, "I'm Claire." 65

"It's nice to meet you, Claire." I sit down at the far end of one of the blue couches. My robot towers above me. The Latina girl in the bright red shirt sits in a chair to my right. A boy sits next to me, but I try not to look at him. My brown hair is falling out, hanging in limp cascades down the front of my hospital gown and around my shoulders. I feel like I was dug up from a grave.

"Hi everyone, welcome to group," says a female voice. I'm looking at the floor.

"We have a new person with us. Her name is Claire." My cheeks flush. I lift my eyes from the floor. The woman, whom I surmise to be the group therapy leader, is beautiful.

She looks to be in her early thirties, with dark brown skin. She's wearing a business woman suit and looks nothing like a nurse. She explains, for my benefit, how group therapy works. "We all go around in a circle and say how we feel and why. Here is a list of emotions."

She holds up a laminated piece of paper covered in cartoon faces with printed emotions underneath. "You can choose an emotion from this list, or you can say an emotion that's not on the list, but you can't say that you're tired. Being tired is not a real feeling unless you are emotionally exhausted, in which case you can say, "I feel emotionally exhausted."

She hands the list to me. I read over the words and stare at the cartoon faces:

Happy, Sad, Angry. The happy face is yellow with a big wide grin, two black dots for eyes and no eyebrows. The angry face is the same face, with a shorter down-turned mouth, down-turned eyebrows and red cheeks. The sad face has upturned eyebrows, no red cheeks, and a mouth that looks like a wide lowercase "n". I don't know what to do 66

with this. I'm beginning to feel emotions again, but I fail to find the appropriate cartoon faces to match.

"I don't know," I say, still staring at the laminated sheet.

"I don't know is not an acceptable answer. That's not an emotion."

"It's okay to not know on your first day," Miguel says and winks at me. Thank

God, I think. I have a friend. The truth is, I feel lonely and I do see a cartoon face with

Lonely printed underneath. But it's not as simple as "lonely." I also feel half alive, for which there is no cartoon. I'm the weird magic corpse, the one whose hair still grows, whose eyes still move. I don't see "almost human" printed on the list. I also don't see

"confused."

I have no desire to actually die. But if it weren't for the tube in my nose, I would've been dead a week ago. Ifyou ask me, "I don't know" is an emotion. It's a perfectly good emotion. The girl to my right doesn't need the laminated sheet. She places it on her lap without looking down.

"I feel really good," she says. She's wearing hot pink leggings and aT-shirt with a kitten printed on it. Her arms are unscarred so I know she isn't a cutter. Her legs are full and healthy so I know she isn't like me. I learn her name is Georgina, that she is a bulimic but she hasn't thrown up in two months.

She looks straight at me and says, "I think Claire is really brave." I'm sure she expects a smile from me. She doesn't get one. I had figured out by age fourteen that people say the most wonderful things when they are in the best of moods, but another person's mood rarely has anything to do with me. I knew Georgina felt good for her own 67

reasons, was shooting one of her sunbeams in my direction only because she had so many to spare.

My eyelids are half open. I'm staring at Georgina, whose legs are swinging below the collapsible metal chair. I'm thinking, you have no reason to think I'm brave. I don't like bulimics. I don't like bulimics for the same reason I imagine Orthodox Jews may frown upon their secular brethren. Anorexics are pious. Eating food and then puking it up is cheating. It's weak. I fast diligently and don't give in to temptation. I don't gorge on fried chicken and then change my mind. I wouldn't even touch a napkin that touched fried chicken.

Georgina doesn't talk for long. She doesn't seem to have much to share with the group other than her feelings of accomplishment and glee on the eve of her leaving the ward. As the emotion list gets passed around the room, I notice that no one says

"depressed." I would think most people would be in a psychiatric ward. Maybe some kids are depressed but for some reason don't want to say so. Maybe being asked how you feel causes you to perk up, ever so slightly, from depressed to sad in the moment you are asked.

William says he is sad because he wants to go home. When the group leader asks him why he's here, a question she obviously knows the answer to, he says he swallowed a bottle of pills. When she asks him why he says, "I just wanted to die I guess." He sits slumped on his seat and fidgets with the string of his boody. He looks down as he talks and speaks in a low soft voice. "I was really sad at that point." I picture what he might 68

have looked like in intensive care with a mask on his face and tubes coming out ofhim. I wonder what could make anyone that sad.

"My heart goes out to Claire today," he says in a louder voice than he used to talk about himself. He doesn't seem, like Georgina, to have many sunbeams to spare. I guess he has just enough though, or just one which he was willing to divide.

After group therapy ends, a few kids begin to play cards at the end of the long dining table. Not knowing what to do with myself, I stay put on the blue sofa. The

Latina girl, whose name I learned is Linda, opens another bag of chips. She sits on her shins on a metal foldout chair. She makes a wisecrack and three other kids, including

William, begin to chuckle. The sun sets behind them, leaving an orange pink oval stretched across the table, over their hands, making them glow. They look like kids at summer camp trying to kill time, and in doing so, forget where they are. Georgina sits next to me on the blue loveseat. Her knees are angled towards me, but I make no effort to face her.

"I see myself in you," Georgina says. "I used to be anorexic." I look at her, now searching for myself, for anything recognizable. "I used to be eighty pounds," she almost whispers. This is hard for me to imagine, to reduce her face to its skeleton. Looking at her eyes, which are watery but not sad, I realize she's giving me sympathy. Contrary to the sunbeams which just minutes before seemed to shoot arbitrarily from her, this new light seems entirely focused on me. Her warmth feels specific and I feel specific inside it, like a not quite dead flower under a heat lamp angled just so. 69

She pulls my left hand from my lap, forcing apart the loose bony hinge I'd made of my two hands. Feeling her strong pulse, and the foreign heat of her palm, I notice how clammy my hand is, my pulse slow and sleepy.

"I'll be right back," Georgina tells me. She lets go of my hand and rises from the loveseat. She walks out of the room, quickly, purposefully. She returns in less than a minute holding a folded piece of paper. "Open it," she says, "I'm giving this to you." I open it. It's a crayon drawing of a butterfly. I assume she drew it herself. "This helped me." The antennas are curled in fanciful spirals. The wings are long and wide.

"Thanks," I say. I take her butterfly to my room and slide it facedown into the darkness of my desk drawer. I slide it over a get well card I received in intensive care, a card from my middle school English class. I wasn't friends with anyone who signed that card -- none of the boys who wrote in black and blue nor the girl who wrote in purple ink

"Get well, Claire," dotting the "i" in my name with a heart.

My roommate is Marianna, the girl who said she felt "okay" in group and was chastised, like I was, for not saying an actual emotion. She smiled shyly and didn't speak when the group leader pressed her for a real feeling. After one of the male nurses said something to her in Spanish, she said she felt "sad" because she missed her friends. She seemed kind and I liked her, but wouldn't give her a second thought if she weren't my roommate. I don't really think about people. I just react to them when they're in front of me.

I think they didn't room me with Georgina on purpose. I imagine they suspect, despite Georgina's health, that we might swap starvation secrets. This is probably true. I 70

could sit in a room full of broken glass and not cut myself, but if I could talk in private with Georgina I might ask her how to hide food here without getting caught.

"How come you're here?'' I ask Marianna. We're both sitting on our hospital beds, Indian style.

"I want to be with my father," she says. Maybe she doesn't have the words in

English to explain why she's in a psych ward.

"I like your hair," she says.

"Thank you." Mariana opens one of her desk drawers and pulls out a brush.

"It's okay? I brush your hair?"

I love having my hair brushed. My stepmom used to brush my hair after dinner, when it was thick and red. I love the feeling of the comb against my scalp, exciting all the nerves on my head.

"Alright," I say. She pulls my wooden desk chair into the middle of our room.

She taps the back of the chair twice. I sit down. Mariana gently drags her brush across my scalp.

"Very nice hair."

"It's falling out," I say, embarrassed. I see new long strands hanging down the front of my gown. A doctor told me it falls out because there's not enough protein, vitamins or minerals in my system to sustain hair growth but I shouldn't worry; my new hair will be even thicker. Mariana holds the brush out to her side and pulls a clump of hair from the bristles.

"It's okay," she says. 71

"Thank you." The sky is now dark. Our view of trees, cars and buildings has been swallowed by black. The sky hangs like a flat curtain just outside the glass.

There's nowhere to look but around my new room. It seems like the only room in the world, a night light plugged into black space with me and Mariana inside it.

She gathers my hair and twirls it into a loose bun.

"You're welcome." Still holding on to the bun, she steps in front of me to see how it looks. "It look nice. It fall out, but you still have a lot."

A female nurse opens our door, sticks in her head and says, "lights off in 30 minutes." The door closes again with a click. I'm reminded that I'm in a psych ward, that this isn't a sleepover. Marianna drops a clump of hair in our trash can and I push my chair back, underneath my desk. A different nurse enters the room and sits at my desk while I brush my teeth. Although the bathroom door is ajar, she isn't looking at me. If I stand in the comer of the bathroom I can jog for a few seconds without her seeing me. I decide against it, though; I couldn't bum many calories in a few seconds. It strikes me as strange that they would have a strict rule about leaving the bathroom door open if a nurse isn't even going to watch me.

I tell her I'm cold. She lets me wear my red fleece sweater to bed. I zip up the front zipper and climb under the thin sheet and the thin blanket. Marianna's bed is behind mine, closer to the window. We don't say anything to each other after she puts her hair brush away. That brush was like a needle that sewed us together for ten minutes, then we came apart. She's faces the sky; I face the psych ward hallway. When I'm not looking at her she disappears. 72

After I've been lying in bed for about five minutes, watching nurses walk back

and forth in the hallway, one of those nurses opens our door. She's older than the others,

in her sixties maybe, and resembles my Filipino aunt. She's carrying two cans ofliquid

Ensure and a syringe.

"Hello," she says, her voice friendly, "I'm here to flush your tube." She takes the

end of my feeding tube, sticks the nose ofher syringe inside it and pushes. I feel a surge of cold in my sinuses. A couple seconds later, I feel a fist-sized chill in my stomach as though I've swallowed an ice cube.

"How come you're doing that?" This has been done to me before when I was at

Arlington but I never asked.

"Before I attach your tube to the machine, I need to make sure the tube is clean."

She has a Filipino accent, her voice soft and crackling. She sounds the way her hands look -- gentle and old.

"Oh," I say. My eyes follow her hands as she opens the first can of Ensure and pours it into the plastic bag hanging from a hook on the robot. I notice her name tag.

"Esmeralda." I say her name out loud. She smiles, tosses the empty can in the trash, atop my nest of dead hair.

"What is your name?" She asks.

"Claire."

"It is nice to meet you, Claire." She opens the second can. Pours. I notice she's wearing a wedding ring.

"You're married," I say. 73

"Yes. Thirty years." I know people stay married when they're not in love

anymore, but I fantasize that Esmeralda and her husband are deeply in love. My parents

are divorced, so the idea of being married for three decades is incredible. The ice cube

sensation in my belly is gone. I'm suddenly in a very good mood. I ask Esmeralda ifl

can see her stethoscope.

"You want to see it?" She asks, surprised. I nod my head. She pulls it from around her neck and hands it to me. I've had my pulse checked every day for over a week, watched nurses write numbers on charts I never see. It's my body, I think. It's only natural that I should have a listen. I stick the earpieces in my ears and place the cool flat disc over my heart.

"That not where your heart is," Esmeralda says softly. "I show you." She lifts my hand from the left side of my chest a couple inches to the right.

"Your heart is in the center. People think it's on the left, but it's more in the middle. Most of it is in the middle." It sounds low, deep, and thunderous. It pounds hard, then softer, like a woman's fist and a child's fist punching in tandem.

"Cool," I say. I move the circle down, over my stomach. I know approximately where it is because ofthis morning's checkup.

"That your intestines. You're close though." Esmeralda places two ofher fingers directly below my bottom most left rib. Her touch is light. I feel a zing up my spine from being touched unexpectedly. "Your stomach is here. You listen here."

I place the stethoscope below my rib and barely have to press down before I hear gurgling. It sounds like chomping and grinding, like a small garbage disposal. It sounds 74

busier than it was this morning. There hasn't been this much food inside it for months.

After Esmeralda takes back her stethoscope and shuts off the lights, I whisper, "I'm sorry" out loud to my heart and stomach. I feel a sudden burst of affection for them both because they don't have feelings; I can weaken them but I can't hurt them the way I can hurt my parents. As soon as I start eating more, they'll get stronger again and won't even remember what I did to them. They won't hold a grudge and they won't worry.

I don't sleep for more than two hours. Once in a while through the curtain of my window I see a couple seconds of night-nurse moving through the white florescent light in the hallway. I don't see Esmeralda. It would've been nice to catch a glimpse of her.

She wasn't my mother, but she was mother enough.

Because of the dripping liquid I need to use the bathroom every couple hours, a chore which goes something like this: Get out of bed. Wheel feeding machine to the door. Open the door and stick out my head. Tell the night nurse, who's flipping pages of a magazine, that I have to go to the bathroom. Wait as the night nurse unplugs the feeding machine from the wall. Wait as the night nurse unlocks the bathroom door.

Wheel unplugged feeding machine into the bathroom with me. Wait as the night nurse plugs feeding machine back into the wall. Get back in bed. Wonder if I'm annoying the night nurse, if she was reading something really interesting when I interrupted her.

"So you sleep during the day?" I ask the nurse, from my doorway, as she sits at her desk down the hall.

"Yeah, I go to sleep in the morning, then come back in the evening." I wonder why anyone would want a schedule like that. 75

"You don't get tired?"

"No, I'm all right."

"What do you do all night?"

"Do you have to go to the bathroom?"

"Not right now."

"I think you should go back to bed. You need sleep."

Fine. Just because I need sleep doesn't mean I can sleep. I push my robot, wheels squeaking slightly, back into the darkness of my room. CHAPTER 7

THE PSYCH WARD PARADE

After Georgina left, I was the only eating disorder patient on the psych ward for a few days. I ate about a quarter of my enormous meals and drank the caloric equivalent of what I didn't eat. I didn't choose my meals and regardless of how much I ate, the nurses made sure they "got it in me" by making me drink Ensure or pouring Ensure into my feeding machine. Because I had absolutely no control over my intake, I stopped thinking about calories. With calories out of my mind I found myself in a better mood, like my brain had been a large tight fist which was beginning to relax.

I had a compulsion to count calories but also hated math and hated my compulsion to constantly add and subtract. I thought not eating made me calm, but having no control made me even calmer. Numbers, just like fishing hook questions, bothered my brain. When I thought of numbers (the calories in a box of Apple juice plus the calories in half a granola bar) I saw the numbers 60 and 120 poised, in different colors in my mind. The 60 may have been blue and yellow, for example, and the 120 may have been red and purple. Around the numbers was black space: a vacuum of nothing. I wanted to picture other things, like people and places but I couldn't. The numbers sucked up all the color in the world and all I could see was math.

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The numbers floated on top of each other and something in me demanded count, count. When I closed my eyes, after a few days of eating enormous meals full of protein and vitamins, the numbers went away. I began to visualize the Crescent Trail bike path where I used to go biking with my dad. I didn't think about exercising, only about how the light looked in the afternoon streaming through the trees. I amused myself, lying in bed at night, by imagining how the woods looked in summer, winter, spring, and fall. As long as I'd been anorexic I hadn't paid attention to detail if it didn't have to do with food.

I wanted to recall the basic details the world, details I took for granted when I was healthy, just to make sure anorexia hadn't weakened my memory the way it weakened my stomach.

My attention improved rapidly. As opposed to feeling dull and withdrawn, I began to feel engaged by the problems of the other kids. When Jeremy announced in group that he beat up his little brother and pushed him down a staircase, I pictured

Jeremy and the staircase and his brother beaten to a pulp. I couldn't fathom how anyone could get that angry. Jeremy, who loved to eat, couldn't understand my fear of food. "I love food so much, yo. I could never be anorexic," he told me once before dinner.

I couldn't understand why Cindy cut her arms open with anything she could find.

At the end of group one day she pulled out a paper clip from her pocket and bragged to the nurses she'd been cutting herself behind their backs. A nurse must have accidentally dropped the paperclip. Cindy, in her mind, was winning. Listening to Jeremy and Cindy,

I felt comparatively normal. It was refreshing to recognize ways in which I was self­ preserving, to realize my self-harm had its limits. I may not eat voluntarily but I wouldn't 78

carve my wrists. That to me was still sacred -- the un-brokenness of skin. I wonder if

Cindy looked at her arms and thought I may have my problems, but at least I eat. Maybe we were all anti-mirrors mercifully surrounding each other, anti-mirrors which we could peer into to see images of what we were not, ways in which we were normal.

At the end of my first week, I went outdoors for the first and last time in my six­ week stay at Children's Hospital. Jamie, one of the male nurses, took all seven of us on a field trip to St. Peters Cathedral. We walked, a small band of psych ward patients, on a narrow sidewalk past the water treatment center, past a couple blocks of brownstone houses. I didn't speak to anyone and only half listened to the conversations around me. It was strange to be outside, not thinking of calories or exercising. It was also strange to be wearing my own clothes again. I could feel the ghost of my old healthy self floating around in the legs of my pants. My baggy clothes wanted me to fill them, I thought, and I didn't have the flesh. I imagined my hospital gown had been worn by other anorexics, maybe even some cancer patients if the hospital circulated its gowns. Wherever my gown had been before me, I felt like it didn't judge or know me. It was used to frail bodies.

I wouldn't have minded walking around in brought daylight in hospital clothing but there were no psych ward pants or sweatshirts. Walking in my old clothes I decided I should get new ones when I got out. There was too much history with my corduroys and fleece. Every time I looked at the elastic on my wrist I remembered how I slipped mashed potatoes down my sleeve. If they let me wear my own clothes on the ward, I'd probably do that again when a nurse wasn't looking. 79

My mind free of counting, I didn't know what to think, or rather what to think about as I walked. I took long deliberate breaths of fresh cold air. I ran my fingers along the side of a chain-link fence and realized how sensitive my fingertips were. I knew this sensitivity had nothing to do with being anorexic, that if any of the other kids ran their fingers along the fence it might aggravate their nerves, too. I wasn't completely different from them. I had a tube in my nose and my legs felt skinny as stilts, but I wasn't obsessed with food. I was in limbo -- between feeling like an anorexic and whoever/whatever I would become next.

When we arrived at the Cathedral, Jamie took us through a side door to the basement where the bathrooms and gift shop were. He sat us down on a bench to take a head count. Mariana was missing. Cindy checked the bathroom, but no Mariana. Jamie told us to sit where we were, to not move, and he would be back in a minute. He went upstairs, into the Cathedral, and came back again looking distressed. "She ran away." I wondered if Jamie was going to get fired and hoped he wouldn't. It was nice of him to take us outside, to trust us enough to not watch us every second on our walk from

Children's to St. Peter's.

We spent the entire walk back telling Jamie it wasn't his fault and that we would stand up for him if he got in trouble. I chimed in, "It was really cool of you to take us out." I wondered where Mariana went, if she had any money, and who she was going to see. I wondered why she was in the psych ward to begin with. I never found out. 80

Jamie takes the laminated sheet during group that evening. It's the first time a nurse has ever shared an emotion during group. Jamie is slumped over in his chair, leaning forward, looking distressed.

"I feel ashamed and upset. I was responsible for all of you and I let Mariana get away."

"It's not your fault, Jamie. You can't blame yourself." Everyone in group says they feel "happy" that Jamie let us get some fresh air or "bad" that Jamie blames himself.

No one says they're sad because they miss someone or want to go home.

"The thing is," I say when the list is handed to me, "if someone wants to do something, they're going to do it. You can't control people." I love how the other kids and I are counseling a grown-up, that our roles have temporarily shifted. "You're a really nice guy and you shouldn't beat yourselfup." I think how the roles can always shift; a grown-up can think he's made a mistake and not forgive himself. A teenager who's inexplicably terrified of fat can have something insightful to say, can help the grown-up.

"Thanks, guys," he says. "You're great kids." Jamie doesn't get fired, although

I'm sure he's reprimanded heavily when we aren't around. I assume one of his superiors is going to blame him and I hope we've created a barrier inside him -- a confidence barrier that will prevent the other grown-ups from making him feel worse. Jamie could have asked me to stay behind because the walk would be too much exercise and would remind me of burning calories. But instead of treating me like an anorexic, he treated me like a person. He gave me a chance to feel normal and I almost did. 81

I have the bedroom to myself. I look out my window, with five minutes left before "lights out" wondering where Mariana is among the houses, trees and traffic. I decide I like being here among people who hurt themselves and may or may not understand why. I like being around people who realized they don't want to die but have mixed feelings about life. I wouldn't run away like Mariana, especially since my alternative to the psych ward is middle school.

Looking down at the traffic lights and streets I imagine how many people are in their houses by themselves, right now, feeling depressed but don't actually swallow pills or cut themselves. Some people might put pills in their mouths, then change their mind and spit them out. Some people might scrape their skin without actually breaking it and drawing blood. I know all over the city there are girls looking in the mirror thinking they're fat and ugly, but don't starve themselves. I don't think anyone on the outside is much less crazy than us on the inside. Who knows what the nurses, doctors and therapists do to themselves when they're not here. CHAPTERS

TALKING DOESN'T HELP

It's my second week in the psych ward and I have no epiphanies about why I became anorexic. The staff wants very much for me to have an epiphany and because I'm not having one on my own, they try to induce one. I see a private therapist every day, after group, who asks me questions about my childhood. She probes for the magic button, the button that will make me think "Ah-ha! I know now. It's because my parents got divorced. It's because I have skinny stepsisters." She writes down my answers sometimes which I assume she thinks have magic button potential. I'm annoyed by all this probing. I point out to her that no one asks people with OCD or schizophrenia or autism why they have their mental conditions. Why all the probing with anorexics?

The therapist tells me that many anorexics feel they have to be perfect and that's something that can change by thinking differently. Therapy can help people change their thoughts. I tell her I'm aware of the stereotypes about anorexics but I'm not a perfectionist. I don't obsess over grades or being organized. I don't tell the therapist that when I was 11 I obsessed over Kurt Cobain as much as I obsessed over food. I planned on killing myself so I could be with him in the afterlife. I stole my stepmother's Benadryl and swallowed three pills. My heart began to pound when I realized I could actually die if I swallowed the whole box, so I stopped at three pills. My obsession waned after that.

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I like him as an artist now and I love his music but I'm not going to join him in the afterlife. I scared myself. No more suicide attempts.

If I tell this to any therapist or nurse on the ward I'm sure they would think the magic button, the secret of my anorexia, lies somewhere in my relationship with Kurt

Cobain. They wouldn't let it go. It was three years ago and I haven't attempted suicide since. Anorexia can kill you but it's not conscious suicide. I don't want to die and I wasn't trying to kill myself by not eating. Maybe it's subconscious suicide. Maybe I'm trying to erase myself even when I don't know it -- but why would I do that? I don't like psychobabble theories. I'm sure they'd come up with a few if I told them. They'd have a field day with it.

Dr. Molberg, who's not a therapist, comes to talk to me at the end of my second week about the female body. He takes me into a small windowless gray room, smiles broadly, and asks me to take a seat. I sit on a gray straight-backed chair and drop a small pink bouncy ball I found in the main room. (Spherical, edgeless objects are allowed.)

The ball bounces and I catch it with one hand. Dr. Molberg pretends not to notice or not to mind.

"Let's talk about the female body," he says. His folded hands rest atop his large protruding belly. "What's a woman supposed to look like?" I bounce the ball again and catch it. "A woman is supposed to have curves," he says and makes an hourglass motion with his two hands. "A woman is supposed to have fat in her hips and in her breasts."

He may as well tell me that birds are supposed to have wings. I know what a woman is supposed to look like. That doesn't mean I want to look like one. Ever since I 84

dropped below 100 pounds and lost the fat in my breasts, hips and thighs, I stopped thinking of myself as female. But I don't think of myself as male either. I certainly don't identify with the girls in school who gossip and shop and backstab each other nor do I identify with the boys who watch sports, talk about sports, cuss at each other and get into fights. I guess I think of myself as me, as not belonging to any category. I wouldn't dare talk about this with Dr. Mol berg out of fear he would tell one of the therapists that I have gender confusion or hang-ups about sexuality and all the magic buttons would light up.

The theories would begin. I change the subject.

"Why are the meals here so strange?"

"What do you mean strange?"

"They don't make sense. This morning I had green Jell-0, cookies and pancakes for breakfast."

"Ah," says Dr. Molberg. "Your meals aren't chosen by a person, that's why.

They're chosen by a computer that calibrates how many calories you need. We can't have a person hand-select your every meal."

Why not? I think. How would Dr. Molberg like to eat pizza, waj]les, raisins and string beans for dinner?

"But it doesn't make any sense," I repeat. "If you want to get someone to like eating again why would you give them food that doesn't even go together?"

"What matters is that you're eating and getting all the nutrition you need. When you are healthier and you've made more progress we will let you choose your own 85

meals." Ifprogress means epiphanies, I'm never going to make any progress. I'll be here forever.

I hate talking to therapists. I do, however, enjoy talking to grown-ups on the ward who don't try to pick my brain. I forgot how much I like talking. Anorexia made me withdrawn to the point I hardly ever spoke, but, when I'm not starved nearly to death, I'm outgoing and curious. In my second week on the ward, my old personality returns. I begin to strike up conversations with the French African nurse who draws my blood every few days before I go to sleep.

I'm sitting upright on white waxy paper, spread across a small hospital bed in a side room on the ward. The room is mostly dark, save for a small light above a silver sink. It's around 9: 30 p.m. and completely quiet. A nurse, whose plastic ID reads

"Tom," ties a yellow tube around my arm.

"You work pretty late," I say.

"Yeah," he says smiling, "I do."

"This going to hurt a little bit," he says in a French accent.

"I'm used to it. Doesn't bother me." My blood flows dark and thick into a small plastic tube. I notice other tubes of blood in a plastic carrying case near the sink.

"How come the blood is different colors?" I ask as he presses a swab of cotton into the soft side of my elbow.

"The bright orange blood just left the heart. It has fresh oxygen in it. The oxygen make it bright. The dark red ... on its way back to the heart."

"Oh." 86

"You hold that there," he says gently and I take over pressing the cotton into my arm. He unwraps a bandaid.

"When do you get off?"

"I work till ten." He puts the Band-Aid on my arm.

"You get to go home so ... that's cool." A female nurse walks in the room and hands me a clean blue hospital gown to sleep in.

"Time to put on my prom gown," I say when she leaves the room. Tom laughs.

"Okay, you're finished."

"Thanks." I scoot down offthe hospital bed. "See ya." As I walk back to my room, my heart is light with amazement at how easy it is to make someone laugh. I like

Tom because he's friendly and amicable, but so are the therapists and Dr. Molberg. Tom is different because he doesn't ask me personal questions. He's not going to ask about my parents and think "Ah-ha" when he learns they're divorced. When he draws my blood his only goal is blood. His job is honest. And he likes my jokes. CHAPTER9

JESSICA AND WILLIAM

Group therapy has just begun when an emaciated blonde girl walks into the Main

Room. She has a tube taped to her cheek and is wearing a hospital gown. One ofme, I think Her eyes sweep the floor, brush over the group, then back to the floor again. I raise my hand slightly and wave it, trying to get her attention.

The curly haired nurse from the front desk stands at her side and says, "Everyone, this is Jessica." I wave my hand a second time. She sees me now and I smile for her.

She forces a small smile for me in return and I motion for her to sit next to me. She sits by my side on the sofa as the group therapy leader explains the Emotion List.

"It's not that bad," I whisper to Jessica when the nicely dressed woman finishes talking.

Jessica's eyes fill with tears, as though she didn't hear me. When the list is passed to her she says, "I don't know."

"Everyone has to pick an emotion," the group leader says. "Everyone has to participate."

"Mad, then," Jessica snaps.

"And why are you mad?"

"I wanna go home."

87 88

"Why do you think you're here, Jessica?"

"I don't know."

"Well, you'll have plenty of time to figure that out." Jessica passes the list to me without taking her eyes off the floor.

"I'm good," I say.

"Why are you good?"

"I like the people here. It's better than middle school."

"How come?" she asks. I wonder if she's faking the curious tone in her voice.

Anyone who's been to middle school must understand why a psych ward would be a superior place.

"It's smaller, people are more mature here." I am the youngest kid on the ward.

Everyone else, I'm pretty sure, is in high school.

"Yeah but you seriously don't prefer being here to school?" Cindy says.

"I do actually. But everyone's different I guess. Maybe your school is different from mine."

"Middle school sucks," Jessica says. I'm impressed she volunteered to speak, given that it's her first day. She seems to have strong feelings on the subject so I think maybe she's my age.

After group therapy ends the self-feeding kids disperse to play cards or hang out in their rooms until dinner. Jessica doesn't move. Her mouth hangs open a little and I wonder if that's because the tube is bothering her throat.

"How low did you get?" I ask. 89

"Eighty."

"Seventy seven," I say. I'm glad my number is lower than hers. This means my anorexia was more severe; I was better than her at starving myself. If her lowest had been 100 pounds, though, I wouldn't be happy. I want to be able to relate to her, and yet still feel that in our tribe of two -- I am chief. Having the lowest weight is akin to being the tribe elder. I like this combination of budding friendship and social power. It doesn't occur to me that Jessica is no worse at starving herself but rather her parents took her to the hospital before she reached seventy seven. In my mind, she's good at anorexia but

I'm fantastic.

"I hate this tube," she says.

"Do you have to wear it at night?"

"Yeah." She presses the tape on her cheek.

"So do I," I say, "but you get used to it."

Jessica fidgets with her fingers as they lay in her lap. A drop of water rolls down her cheek.

"The nurses here are pretty cool," I tell her. I point to an overweight nurse talking to a self-feeder on the other couch. "That's David. He's really nice."

Jessica's eyes roll from the floor to David, who's now laughing and gesturing with his hands. I've only talked to him once and our conversation was almost entirely about a broach he had pinned to his work shirt. When I asked him about it he happily shared with me the history ofhis seasonal brooch collection. 90

"You can talk to him about whatever you want," I say. Jessica cranes her head towards me and speaks into my ear.

"What's with the tacky pin?" David is wearing a heart pin that has a blinking light inside it.

"That's his thing. He wears a different one every day."

"Weird."

"Yeah," I say, remembering from middle school how sharing the same opinion is important for starting a friendship. Jessica shifts her weight and angles her body towards me.

"So, like, what do they make you eat here?''

"Hamburgers and pizza."

"Gross," she says raising her voice. "There's no way I'm eating that."

"You have to. Otherwise they make you drink Ensure."

"I hate that stuff." I don't think Jessica understands that she doesn't have a choice here.

"So what's like, the worst thing they've given you?"

"I had pizza and french fries covered with cheese one night." I realize this is like telling Jessica I ate a fresh corpse, or something equally vile. "I had salad, too, though."

Jessica's eyebrows raise. Her mouth drops. I actually enjoyed that meal and finished it.

I didn't have to drink Ensure afterwards. If I tell Jessica I liked it, though, she won't be able to relate to me and I might lose her as a friend. Looking at Jessica's dropped mouth and tube coming out of her nose, I feel in limbo again. I know how she feels but I also 91

like cheese fries with ketchup. I'm anorexic and not anorexic; I'm opposite things at once.

When it's time for dinner, Jessica sits across from me. A nurse puts a tray in front ofher on which there is a plate of fried chicken, mashed potatoes and string beans covered with butter. On the tray there is also a bag of butter cookies, a bowl of chocolate pudding, a cup of apple juice and a carton of whole milk. I watch her eyes fill with water as she stares at her plate. She looks up at me. I half smile. I'm sorry, I say to her in my mind. I'm sure her heart is pounding out of her chest, that nothing has probably seemed more impossible to her than the prospect of eating anything on her tray.

I think of questions to ask Jessica like what school does she go to and what kind of music does she like. I'm pretty sure, however, that she's in no mood to answer questions like that. I remember how I felt my first day staring down at my hamburger. It was like being asked to eat a mansion made of dog shit. It was the biggest, most disgusting thing I'd ever seen. If she feels anything like I did my first day, she probably wouldn't even hear my questions. She probably can't think about anything other than what's in front of her. She leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. I take my last bite of grilled cheese sandwich, which looks to me no bigger or smaller than the size of a grilled cheese sandwich.

"You know," says the nurse, "whatever you don't eat, you're going to have to drink." Jessica stays silent and stares at the comer of the table. The self-feeding patients chitchat quietly while Jessica, the nurse and I keep a tense triangle of silence at the end of the table. I think Jessica is too anxious to talk, so I talk to the nurse. 92

"How come you wanted to work here?'' She doesn't take her eyes off the carpet and I assume she's spacing out. I don't know why she would ignore me on purpose. I forget her name, so I glance down at her name tag.

"Angela," I say. She turns her head and looks at me.

"Yeah?" She doesn't smile nor does she look like she smiles easily.

"I was just curious how you ended up working here."

"Well," she says. She rubs her hands together near her face. "When I was a teenager I had some problems so I thought maybe I could help other teenagers."

"Oh," I say. I'm curious what kind of problems she had but I don't want to be too nosy. Angela looks at her watch and tells the group dinner time is over. I finished almost all of my food, except for half a piece of cake. I tried to finish it, but I'm stuffed. After grilled cheese, a bag of pretzels, tomato soup, broccoli and orange Jell-0 I think I might be sick if I take another bite of chocolate cake. Angela stands up, lifts our trays and carries them out of the room. When she's out of sight, Jessica looks me in the eye and whispers, "that was disgusting."

"I had a hamburger my first day," I whisper back in solidarity. "I couldn't eat it."

The self-feeding kids get up from the table and slide their trays into a tall metal shelf on wheels in the corner of the room. Some go to their rooms after that and some play cards on the floor. The sky is almost completely dark when Angela returns with a tray holding two groups of paper cups. She places two in front of me and six in front of Jessica. She takes a seat between us at the head of the table and rests her head in her hand. I start to drink when she says, "you know it would be much easier if you guys ate your food." I'm 93

guessing whatever problem she had was not anorexia. I ignore her and begin drinking my first cup. Jessica smells the Ensure and makes a face.

"Whatever you don't drink, I'm going to have to pour through your tube so you may as well just drink it," Angela says looking at Jessica. It occurs to me Angela probably gets to go home after dinner and could be out ofthe parking lot by now if it weren't for me and Jessica. I decide, as I begin my second cup, that if I ever end up working on a psych ward I'm going to be especially patient. I never want to sound like

Angela. I want to be like Jamie who treats everyone with respect and David who's upbeat all the time.

"Angela," another nurse calls out from the nurse's station.

"I'll be right back you guys," she says. She gets up from the table and walks out of the room.

"I can't do anymore," Jessica whispers to me. I'm halfway finished with my second cup. She's halfway finished with her first and has 7 112 to go.

I look to my left, making sure Angela's out of sight. I make a quick decision to help Jessica. I reach over to her side of the table, grab a paper cup and chug. It's too risky to drink two cups, but I can spare her one. I put the empty cup back in front of her.

She stares at me wide-eyed. Anorexics never go out of their way to eat or drink anything.

I've broken code. Angela returns and stands at the end of the table with her hands on her hips, surveying our cups. 94

"Okay, three more minutes. This is taking you guys way too long." Angela pulls the chair out, sits down and rests her hand on her head again. After three minutes of silent sipping, I finish my cup.

"Okay Jessica, I'm going to tell the night nurse to put extra Ensure through your tube tonight. We need to get those calories in you." I guess if Angela waited for Jessica to finish all her cups at her own pace she'd be waiting for her for a month. Angela would never go home. "You guys can sit on the couches now," she says.

Jessica and I stand up quickly and at the same time, after what feels like hours of sitting down. I'm nervous that Jessica might tell on me or that I might have upset her.

Thankfully, she has a sense ofhumor.

"Dude, that was nuts," she whispers and smiles. "You could've gotten in so much trouble I bet." We stop short ofthe couch and stand with our arms crossed, almost facing each other. My legs are achy.

"You know," Angela says standing near us with her hands on her hips, "it's normal to sit, too." This is one of the strangest things I've ever heard anyone say. "It's normal for people to sit and talk," she says.

"Why can't we stand?" I ask.

"You know," she says, "you bum more calories standing up than sitting down." Of course; she thinks she's on to us. It didn't even occur to me to bum calories by standing up.

"We're just tired of sitting down, that's all," I say. 95

"Why don't you have a seat, ladies," she says firmly. Jessica rolls her eyes. We sit down on the couch.

Being wrongly accused of exercising makes me realize I'm thinking differently than I was two weeks ago and much differently than before Arlington. I'm 90 pounds now, but that kind of change is easy if you're forced to eat. No one can force my mind to change but it's changing on its own and without the help of epiphanies. A few weeks ago, if I learned that standing up bums calories I would try to stand up all time. I just want to stretch my legs, now. I'm beginning to feel normal.

"How are we doing, ladies?" Jamie asks upon entering the room. It's standard for nurses to approach patients after dinner to chitchat -- a form of informal therapy. I'm also guessing the powers that be don't want Jessica and I to talk to each other, lest we swap anorexia secrets.

"I'd like to talk to Jessica for a minute if that's okay," Jamie says to me.

"Okay."

"Let's talk over here," Jamie says to Jessica. She rises from the couch and waves her left hand.

"Offl go," she says with mock enthusiasm. She and Jamie walk over to the other blue couch. I assume another nurse, maybe Miguel and hopefully not Angela, will approach me soon to talk but instead William walks in the room and takes a seat near me.

He slouches the way he does in group therapy. He tells me in his soft voice, so no one will hear, that there's a girl on the ward whom he likes but he doesn't know whether or not he should tell her how he feels. I think he's talking about me. We've talked a few 96

times before and I've made him laugh. Maybe he sees past the tube or he likes me so much he doesn't see it at all. I tell him he should definitely tell the girl how he feels. He says, "I will," and "thanks."

That night I do something I don't remember having done in months. I take my hair brush into the bathroom with me and brush my hair. I don't remember the last time I used my brush or cared about what I look like. William inspires me to look at myself the way I think he might see me, not as an anorexic but as a girl, a prospect. As I run the brush through my hair I notice how dark it is. That's not my hair color. It's thin and scraggly, mostly from not being brushed. I comb it until it's shiny, pulling whatever natural oils my scalp has to offer into the dark dry strands. It's fun brushing my hair like my life matters, like my body isn't something to piss away but something to preserve and make shine like a trophy. My thin brown hair glistens in the fluorescent light of the bathroom. I feel almost pretty. CHAPTER 10

NOTES ON POSSIBLE MEANING

When I was 11 I didn't believe in God or heaven. I didn't believe that there was such thing as a soul. I did, however, believe that Kurt Cobain existed in the spiritual realm. To put it differently, my mind created a spiritual realm just for Kurt Cobain. I never talked to my deceased grandfather because I would have felt ridiculous and irrational doing so. I did talk to Kurt and believed he could hear me. I sat 5 inches from the television and wept while watching his emotional performance on MTV's Nirvana

Unplugged. I felt more connected to him than anyone I actually knew. I had 17 Nirvana and Kurt Cobain T-shirts and hung them from my window panes. My room was a Kurt

Cobain Cathedral. I listened exclusively to Nirvana.

The morning after I took three Benadryl I felt genuinely frightened of myself. I knew if I'd kept popping pills I'd be dead. I avoided looking Kurt Cobain in the eye, which was hard to do since his face was taped all over my walls. I decided to take a break from Nirvana. I listened to Pearl Jam and R.E.M. for a while and stopped talking to Kurt Cobain. He would be my favorite poet for years but I didn't want to die to be with him. I never told anyone. I only swallowed an appropriate number of pills from then on, only if I was sick.

97 98

I didn't think at age 14 that my anorexia had anything to do with playing at suicide at age 11. Only in retrospect do I notice a connection, a connection which sounds so simple it's almost unbelievable -- I didn't know what else to do with myself. Kurt

Cobain gave me a channel for my thoughts and emotions. As long as I had Kurt Cobain to obsess over I could never feel bored or lost. I was free of the burden of not knowing what to think about or what to do. I thought about Kurt Cobain. I listened to Nirvana.

Calories also gave me something to focus on. Because I thought only of calories I was invulnerable to every negative thought or emotion I could possibly have as a result of any human relationship.

Why I was so ardent about mentally and emotionally fleeing my own life, I'm not sure. I had good relationships with both of my parents and stepparents. I liked my stepsisters and although I felt different from most kids at school, I never got made fun of or bullied. I've gotten so far as understanding anorexia as a self-destructive form of escapism, but I'm still not exactly sure what I was escaping so desperately. I can't think of any event in my life that was so terrible I felt the need to destroy my thinking process as to never feel bad again.

Perhaps I was escaping consciousness itself, the burden of not knowing what to do with my mental energy. Maybe for some people consciousness feels like an opportunity, for others it's a stress inducing burden. Sometimes now, 12 years later and recovered, I wake up in the morning and lie awake in bed for up to two hours. I can think of different things to read, errands to run, people I could call, but I'm not passionate enough about any one particular thing that I'm able to choose. I don't know what to think 99

about and I don't know what to do. I close my eyes and try to go back to sleep, hoping my subconscious will take over and I won't have to decide anything. Maybe obsessing over Kurt Cobain and starving myself were just different ways I induced sleep. CHAPTER 11

ART THERAPY

"Did you tell her?" I ask William as we sit on the couch after group. I think this is a trick question; the "her" is me.

"Yeah," says William.

"Oh." I'm confused. I would know ifhe'd told me already.

"She said she feels the same way." It occurs to me for the first time since William told me about his crush that his crush isn't me. He tells me that he likes Linda and Linda likes him. I think how her regular clothes aren't any more formfitting than my smock. I'm pretty sure she's not more attractive than me -- I guess you never know what's going to make two people click. I feel disappointed but surprise myself by smiling. I suddenly find it funny that I assumed he had a crush on me; I have a tube in my nose and my hair is falling out.

I think how for the past 20 hours or so I haven't thought once of my anorexic body, food, or exercise. William gave me something to think about. Now I'll have to think of something other than being his girlfriend, but at least I now know I can think like a normal person for hours at a time. I can want something other than calm; I can want someone else.

100 101

A woman I haven't seen before walks into the Main Room carrying a large crate.

She sets it down on the dining table, puts her hands on her hips and flashes us a big smile.

"Hi guys. I'm Cynthia. Let's make some art." Jamie tells us to take a seat at the table, that it's time for art therapy. Jessica sits next to me.

"I suck at art," she whispers to me.

"So do I," I whisper back.

Cynthia opens the lid ofthe large crate and puts a stack oflarge white paper, three different boxes of magic markers and a large box of crayons in the center of the table. She tells us to draw whatever we feel like. When I reach for a piece of paper she puts her hand on my shoulder. "I have something else for you guys," she says. She just referred to me personally as "you guys." I smile at Jessica. I think she means to say "you anorexics." She hands us two 8 Y2 by 11 light green pieces of paper with "I Love My

Body" printed in bold in the top center. "I want you guys to draw your favorite body part."

I think of my eyes which are green like my mom's, my fmgers which are long like my grandmother's and my feet, elegant and bony with a high arch, just like my dad's. I decide my foot is my favorite body part not only because it has a nice shape and reminds me of my dad, but it's also the furthest body part from my head which is the seat of my anorexia. My feet are part of me and far away from me at the same time. I take a purple magic marker, pull off my purple sock, and trace my right foot onto the piece of paper.

My tracing job is less than perfect and Cynthia only half smiles when I hand her my paper. 102

"Interesting," she says. "You know, most people don't like their feet." I think

maybe she's talking about herself and I am amused by the fact I might have higher self­

esteem in the area of feet, than she, the mental health professional. Maybe she doesn't

like to wear flip-flops in summertime because of her ugly feet. I would never have an

issue like that. It's nice to be reminded there are some issues I'd never have.

I watch Jessica draw muscular legs with yellow crayon. She gives the legs black

sneakers. On top of one of the sneakers, she draws a soccer ball.

"You like soccer?" I ask, staring at her paper.

"Yeah. I'm on a team."

"I've never been on a team," I say.

"So, like, what do you like to do?"

It takes me a second to remember.

"I like music and writing." I peer into the plastic bin, searching for something to do next and find a few spools of string.

"You like Madonna?"

"Yeah. I love Madonna." It's been a long time since I've listened to anything poppy and upbeat.

"Cool, me too." Jessica pushes her green paper to the side and takes a white piece of paper from the middle ofthe table. "My mom and I listen to Madonna in the car all the time. I'm gonna make her a card." 103

"You gonna make Madonna a card?" Jamie asks. I turn around and see him getting something or other from a drawer. I didn't know he was behind us. Both Jessica and I laugh.

"No," says Jessica pulling a cap off a magic marker, "my mom." I get the idea, out of nowhere, to wrap pieces of string around the end of my NG tube to make it look like a sort of dread-lock. I find a pair of scissors in the crate and cut a long piece of red thread. I tie a knot and begin wrapping.

"What are you doing?" Jessica asks.

"Decoration," I say. We work quietly for a couple minutes. "Life is a mystery.

Everyone must stand alone," I sing quietly.

"I hear you call my name. And it feels like home," Jessica joins me. At first we sing quietly, but by the middle of the song we're almost shouting the lyrics to "Like a

Prayer." Neither Cynthia nor Jamie tells us to be quiet. William snaps his fingers.

If Jessica and I went to the same school, we may not have talked to each other. I wasn't close to anyone who played sports because people who played sports were "jocks" and jocks weren't deep. I saw an interview with Kurt Cobain once in which he said he wasn't like the jocks in his school. This meant, in my mind, that the sensitive interesting people were artsy and unathletic. Jessica changed my mind. Being in the psych ward with her has helped me realize that a lot of my thoughts for the past few years have been, in some way or another, total nonsense. She reminds me of the kids in my grade who I'm not friends with for no good reason. 104

Cynthia pins my purple foot and Jessica's soccer legs to a bulletin board at the far end of the room near one of the windows. It begins to rain -- the shadows of raindrops pour down on our pictures, so if you use your imagination, Jessica's legs could be in a soccer field in summertime and my footprint could be Bigfoot in the jungle somewhere. I grin inwardly at the thought of me being Bigfoot, ofbeing enormous and free.

That evening Jessica receives news that she won't be allowed to rejoin her soccer team when she gets out of the hospital. She says it isn't fair because she should be allowed to exercise as long as she's eating again. Watching her cry in group therapy I'm sure it's not the exercise she'll miss but the extra time with her friends outside of school, the feeling of belonging to something other than anorexia. I could never be on a sports team because I don't understand the point of running around in order to achieve such a meaningless goal -- getting a ball and in a net. That goal has nothing to do with each player personally, so it's uninteresting to me. It must be nice, though, to share the same goal with someone else, to go out for pizza afterwards and have an excuse to hang out all the time.

It would probably be good for me to be on a team or join some sort of group.

Maybe I will. Maybe I'll start a poetry writing group. I can't be the only poet in my grade. There's about 300 of us; statistically (although I know nothing about statistics), there must be other writers.

Patients aren't allowed to write each other notes but I have no respect for that rule. I think receiving a note from me would make Jessica feel much better. Ten minutes before "lights out" I write this to Jessica on a tom-out sheet of my spiral notebook: 105

Dear Jessica,

I'm sorry you had a bad night. Try not to worry about it too much,

though. You will play on a soccer team again, just not right away. You're

talented at it and no one can take that away from you and you have all your life to

play. I think you're brave and beautiful and you're my best friend here. I'm

leaving you Praying Bear for the night. He's been with me the whole time I've

been in the hospital and he looks out for me. He 'I/ look out for you, too.

Love,

Claire

I leave the note on the toilet seat in our bathroom, Praying Bear resting on top of it. Jessica will find him there when she brushes her teeth. I smile as I brush my hair on my bed, thinking how I turned our bathroom into a secret communication hub. I'm more excited imagining Jessica's surprise then I've ever been stepping on a scale. This is better than a low number. Anyone can starve themselves. Breaking a no-fraternizing rule in a creative way, using my pencil to write a secret note, I feel like a renegade. Not eating is bold, but letting Praying Bear pray for someone other than me is even bolder. I need to find more ways to be bold that don't involve near-death. CHAPTER12

I'M FINE

"You need extra blanket?" Esmeralda asks. The last time I saw her, I was several pounds lighter, my chest and arms covered in soft brown fur. I needed two extra blankets for insulation. I'm heavier now by about ten pounds. I've grown a blanket on the inside.

"I'm okay," I say.

"You sure you not be cold?" I have a reputation on the ward for asking for extra blankets.

"This one's fine," I say, and because I like her, "thank you though. I appreciate

it. II

"Okay, Ms. Claire. I see you soon. You and teddy bear have good sleep," she says and leaves the room. With Praying Bear tucked under my arm, I think about my heart in its cloak of fat. If I think about fat by itself, it seems disgusting. I saw it in science class when we dissected a fetal pig. I saw its heart as well and it was ugly. All hearts are ugly. So why then, do I feel moved by the image of my heart in its cloak?

I decide my heart is beautiful not because of what it is, but because of what it allows. It allows me to live, which I decide is a positive thing. Maybe some people take this for granted but for me it's an epiphany; I am a surviving machine, and my machine, my body needs food. I know if I eat regularly and don't diet I'll never be anorexic again.

106 107

One of the therapists told me that ifl don't know why I starved myself I'll always be vulnerable to relapsing. I don't understand this theory -- I didn't know before I was anorexic how it would feel to have an anorexic body and mind. I didn't know I could kill myself. Now that I know, why would I go back? I don't like being cold all the time, hate counting calories and don't want to die.

When therapists ask me what I think about the female body I tell them I think it's beautiful. This isn't exactly true, but I'm afraid if I tell the truth they'll never let me go home. I'm not as disgusted by the female form as I was before I entered the ward, but I still don't identify with it. When I think of the female body I think of a Venus statue that sits on my health teacher's desk. The statue has enormous sagging breasts, a flabby belly and enormous thighs. I still see the average female body, like the bodies of the nurses in the ward, as similar to this statue: excessive, cartoonish, and gross.

I want to have a healthy strong body not because I want to look normal, but because I want to feel normal. I want to have enough energy to ride my bike and ski and go for long walks with my dad. I want to do all these things without risking a heart attack. I want to feel not calm, but joy. If this means I have to eat and eating causes me to resemble Venus in my own small way, on my own small frame, so be it. I might, someday, think it looks beautiful -- my body, with curves on it.

I decide, as my eyelids become heavy and I feel myself sink into sleep, that no matter what it looks like, it will be beautiful because of what it will allow. I think about the word allow, or rather I picture it on the inside of my eyelids. I imagine how the word sounds, the openness of the "ow" sound. In my mind, I swim through the "o" and into 108

aqua blue water. I know where I am. I'm in Maui, where I went snorkeling with my dad two years ago. My arms are stretched behind my head and my back is arched; I'm floating. Breathing is easy and painless so there can't be a tube in my throat. I reach down with one hand to feel my hip and fmd it's covered in flesh. I hear a bird make a squawking sound every few seconds. It hurts to look at the sky with the sun directly above me, but I squint and see a blackbird with its wings spread wide. I have to show my dad. I stand up in the water and see him standing on the shore.

"Hey dad!" He's about to jump in the water. He has a huge smile on his face.

"Daaaad! " I wave my arms back and forth over my head. He looks up and sees me.

"Blackbird!" I point. He looks and I look but it isn't there. I still hear the squawking. I look back to the shore and my dad is gone. The water has cooled. The squawking gets louder. I have a sudden urge to go to the bathroom. Should I just go in the ocean? I open my eyes. I still hear the squawking, then realize it's coming from the left-- the robot. I get out of bed, push the robot to the door, thinking how happy my dad looked standing on the edge of the water, how comfortable I felt standing in a body that weighed at least 120 pounds. I beamed in all that mass and weight which felt neither burdensome nor gross.

In my dream, my heart seemed to be beating a singular message throughout my body with each robust, confident bump, a message that struck each part of my body: blood, bone, fat, muscle, like a magic wand. Blood turned to joy. Muscle turned to joy. It didn't make sense, as anorexia doesn't make sense, but I recognize this singular feeling of joy to be the very essence of myself. The fat in my breasts and hips and thighs didn't 109

bother me in my dream, they merely trapped this joy, absorbed it, stopped it from escaping.

I look with disappointment at my left hip jutting out like a bullhorn. Although I am fully awake, the robot snoring in my left ear, my heart is still stuck in the dream. Its beats are confident and robust, just like they were minutes before when I was up to my shins in warm light blue seawater.

In my fourth week on the psych ward I discovered in a dream the comfort of flesh, feelings of levity that are only possible in a body that's weighted. The next week, however, I make a very different discovery. I find a vagrant, forgotten syringe near the sink in my bedroom. I get an idea.

Staring at the nose of the syringe, it occurs to me that if they can push food inside me using the tube, I can pull food out. I wonder what would happen if. .. I push the tip of the syringe into the opening of my free swinging tube. My heart begins to pound, not with joy, but with something better than joy -- the rush of sating addiction, the feeling of total control in a place where I have none. I pull the syringe and feel something swell in my right sinus. Within seconds a blueberry milkshake colored liquid fills the tube, flowing thickly towards the syringe. I had a blueberry muffin earlier; the color of my liquid loot makes sense, as do the small chunks of blue. The blueberry swill fills the syringe. I push on its end and it squirts and puffs into the sink.

The pleasure I take in doing this has nothing to do with my body, but being my own master. I'm delighted I can remove muffin from my gut without tasting it at all.

This process looks disgusting, but in a way it doesn't touch me. I don't taste the bile, only 110

feel the sensation of something thick leaving my body, of being lighter and emptier afterwards. The empty feeling is a quick relie£ I only pull on the syringe twice though; I don't want to remove pure bile from my stomach, only blueberry. To take yellowy acid from my stomach would be to take something that doesn't belong to me. It belongs to my belly itself and I am no thief.

I fill a syringe with water, push out the water, fill it again, encourage the blueberry balls down the drain with the light touch of my fingertips. I just pulled out a little bit of food, just enough to get me high. I don't want to hurt myself, that wasn't my intention.

The wonderful feeling I had in my dream occurred in a body that was bigger than mine, far from the ward, eons away from the sink where I stand. I hate anorexia but I know it well. Alone in my room, with Jessica out of my life until breakfast, I want to be close to something. Mariana isn't here to brush my hair. I have no pictures of my parents to keep an imaginary eye on me. Starved for intimacy, I reached for the syringe. I got close to the thing I hate.

Afterwards I feel empty, both physically and in spirit. Sitting on my bed, I have only one thought; I have to tell Jessica. I want her to be appalled. I want her to tell me to never do it again. I don't think I'm strong enough to quit without her disapproval.

I tell her before group. I don't dare tell any nurse; I'm one hundred and five pounds and scheduled to go home next week. Extracting a muffm from my stomach could really set me back and I just spotted a daffodil from my bedroom window. The season is changing and I want to be in the world. 111

"I sort of figured out I could do something," I whisper to Jessica. I feel a mixture of pride and horror; I don't know if I'm bragging or confessing.

"What?"

"There was a syringe in my room. I pulled stuff out of my stomach." Jessica's face falls flat. I'm suddenly embarrassed. "I put the syringe on this," I hold the tube between my fore-finger and thumb. "I pulled on it and blueberry stuff came out." Jessica doesn't say anything, just stares at the tip of my tube.

"That's really gross," she says. I wonder if I've disturbed her too much, if I've hurt our friendship.

"I won't do it again."

"You could mess up your stomach," she says meeting my eyes briefly. She doesn't seem to know where to look. I've caused a rift between us. I've gone too far.

"I'm not going to do it again. Ijust saw it and got an idea," I say. I wish I hadn't done it. It doesn't make sense. I don't want to be thinner. I don't even hate food anymore.

"Are you going to tell?" I whisper.

"No," she says and gives me a hug. "Never do it again," she whispers in my ear.

In group I tell everyone I'm feeling "calm." I don't know whether I'm feeling calm because I extracted food from my stomach or because Jessica gave me the strength to not touch the syringe again.

"Why do you feel calm?" the therapist asks.

"I'm just happy I'm going home soon." 112

"And you think you're ready?"

"Definitely," I say, avoiding Jessica's face. CHAPTER 13

HOME

In my sixth and final week on the ward I receive a letter from Henry Patterson, a boy I share a table with in science class. The letter is written in pencil on a piece of loose-leaf paper:

Dear Claire,

I hope you're doing well. Science class isn't the same without you.

Everyone misses you and I miss you, too. I hope you get out ofthe hospital soon.

My sister had anorexia. Please don't tell anyone that, though. Anyway, I know

how hard it is. Everyone is talking about you and when I say that I mean in a

good way. I hope you have a good week.

Sincerely,

Henry Patterson

P.S. My sister is fine now.

I don't remember ever having a conversation with Henry Patterson. I guess I'm not as invisible as I felt when I was in school. All I know about Henry is that he has a twin named Jacob in my English class. I see them both sometimes carrying lacrosse sticks and walking side-by-side in the hallways. I've thought before, watching them, how they must understand each other better than anyone else and have felt jealous that they

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have each other. I wonder ifl had a twin if she would've become anorexic and we would've skipped meals and done push-ups together. Maybe hanging around people who are different from me, people like Henry and Jacob, would be the best thing for me. I fold Henry's letter and slip it inside a small compartment in my tote bag. I think how I'll never lose it. It's one of the most thoughtful things anyone has given me.

Dr. Molberg holds up a laminated piece of paper with a chart on it and explains to me, my mom and dad in a gentle voice where my weight falls. He points to the paper with his pen. "For Claire's height she should be 130 pounds. Right now she is 107, which is not ideal." He puts down the laminated sheet and folds his hands. He looks back and forth between my parents, but doesn't look at me. "Unfortunately, because of her insurance, we can't keep her here. The nasal gastric tubing will have to continue at home."

Jessica gave me a letter after we hugged goodbye in which she told me I was her one of her best friends. She told me she thought that maybe she'd always be anorexic but

I was strong and could beat it. I didn't want to live on a psych ward forever but I didn't want to leave my friend. I cried after we said goodbye, as my dad held the door open for me and my mom as we walked out of the ward.

After I was discharged I never starved myself again. It took me a few years to be able to eat McDonald's and doughnuts, to get over the remaining pangs of anxiety about fatty food. But now, twelve years later, I'll eat anything. Sometimes when I stretch this way or that, I see hints of sternum and rib. The darker hair (probably an illusion created by shadows) reminds me of the dark fur that used to cover my torso. These reminders, 115

these anorexia phantoms are the reason I drink whole milk and never drink diet soda. I don't want to do anything that might coax my anorexia back from wherever it disappeared to.

Sometimes I think of bites of food as participation points; every time I take a bite,

I'm participating in life, allowing myself to have energy. Participate, I think, biting into a sandwich or bringing a spoonful of soup to my lips. I liken being anorexic to being the one person at a symphony concert surrounded by clapping who keeps her hands limp in her lap, knowing what she heard was beautiful but seized by a feeling of immense detachment, is unable to bring her hands together. Participate. Without energy, I'll have no attention, without attention I'll miss everything.

Sometimes when I don't know what to do with myself or what to think I remember what it was like being anorexic and I realize how much better it is to have a mind that can think of anything than a mind with one obsession. It's daunting feeling as though my attention can go in any direction, but it's exhausting, boring and lonely thinking of calories all day long. Starving myself made me feel calm but never joy.

When I was 80 pounds I was apathetic to thunderstorms -- now they make my heart lighter. Even if I'm not in a good mood something in my soul sings when I smell wet concrete, feel the wind lift my hair and hear the sky grumble like my stomach under the stethoscope. There are moments now when I feel so completely alive that I think feeling sad now and again is worth the ability to feel good.

The feeding tube stayed in my nose for the first week I was home. The robot hovered over my bed at night, just as it did in the hospital. I ate lunch at a table 116

surrounded by classmates, finished my lunch without anxiety and answered questions about my feeding tube. I loved being surrounded by people and enjoyed my food: ham sandwich, orange slices, two brownies, a box of Boku juice. I trusted myself to eat.

I avoided drinking from water fountains at school. I avoided drinking water at home.

The taste of water reminded me of water hoarding; the memory made me nauseous.

The regimented meal times at Children's made me accustomed to eating three meals a day, but it would be years before I felt comfortable eating spontaneously. Until I was in my early 20s I ate three meals a day, at exactly the same time, and one snack in the afternoon. I was healthy and ate food that was high in calories but wouldn't eat a

Hershey's kiss at a random hour in the day. The idea of eating an unplanned meal or snack filled me with anxiety. I was afraid I'd lose control and wouldn't know when to stop eating. I was afraid I'd gain a lot of weight over a short period oftime, have a panic attack and become anorexic all over again.

I stayed 108 pounds until I went to college. My anxiety over food and meal times waned as I got older and am now, at age 26, 125 pounds. It's possible I might be more; I only weigh myself a couple times a year at my mom's house and I do so mostly out of curiosity. In the same way a recovered alcoholic stays away from bars, I stay away from scales. I don't even own one. Maybe owning a scale and looking at caloric content wouldn't trigger my anorexia, but it's not worth finding out.

In a recent telephone conversation with my mom I asked her how often she came to visit me on the ward. Other than the day she dropped me off and picked me up, I have no memory of her being there. 117

"I was there every day," she says. I rake through my psych ward memories, trying to find her but can't.

"I don't remember you being there at all."

"Wow." My mom sighs. "Isn't that something?"

"How could I not remember?" I file through more visual memories, searching for her.

"You felt abandoned I think. You must have blocked me out," she says and then,

"it's normal for people who experience trauma to block things out." I know this, but I don't know why, of all things, I blocked out my mom.

"How often did dad visit?"

"Every day. We both came every day."

"What about Alex and Jo?"

"They came, too. I think Jo came with Daddy every time and Alex came with me

about once a week."

"What did you and I talk about?" I ask, now aware that the story I've written is full of holes, holes I can never fill on my own.

"Well, we'd talk about what you did that day. Or I would just hang out and watch.

You would play catch sometimes with the kids. I remember you guys had a ball."

Jeremy did have a basketball. Did we play catch with that? Where did we play? Her words do nothing to refresh my memory; so much of it is gone.

I do, however, remember the evening my tube was removed as clearly as if it had happened days ago. After a week of receiving tube feeding at night, a nurse from the 118

hospital visited my house. She came to take out my tube, to take my robot back to the

hospital. Both my mom and dad watched as she pulled the tape from my face.

"Is it going to hurt?'' I ask her.

"I don't think so," she says and begins to pull gently on the tube. The sensation

immediately causes my eyes to water. I'm used to this kind of pain by now so I don't say

anything, not so much as an "ouch." I feel tough, with tears streaming down my face and

the tube inching its way out of my gut.

"It's almost out, Bear," my dad says. When it's pulled out completely, my mother

gasps and scrunches up her face. The bottom two inches of the tube, the part that was in

my stomach, is colored brown. I don't understand the color; I suddenly feel scared.

"Oh my God," says my mom as she turns her head away.

"Maria," my dad gently scolds her from the side ofhis mouth. He's still looking at me, smiling.

"That's normal, Bear," he says.

"What is it?"

"The acid in your stomach turns it that color," says the nurse.

"Do you want to keep it?" my dad asks.

"Adrian," my mom says, appalled. My dad is sentimental.

"That's okay," I say looking at the colorful threads I wound around the end of the tube. I feel attached to it, but don't want to keep it. I hand it to the nurse, purposely not watching what she does with it. I couldn't stand to see her thrown it away; it fed me for 119

eight weeks, reached into my body and saved me. It doesn't belong in the trashcan. I don't know where it belongs.

"I could keep it for you," my dad offers.

"That's all right," I say. I say thank you to the nurse without looking at her or the tube. I walk down stairs to my bedroom in the basement, glancing once at my robot standing behind my father's chair, ready to be taken away. It's strange to me that my robot is returning to some supply room in a hospital where it will feed someone other than me. I sit on my bed, Indian style, and cry for a few minutes. I miss Jessica and

William. I think how being in the psych ward with them was just a small blip in my entire life and I have no idea what my life, from now on, will be like.

I know I'll go to school, have dinner with my parents, listen to music and do homework like I did before. But I don't know what my life on the inside will be like, what I'll think about and how I'll feel. I guess no one knows. I guess I have to be flexible, learn how to lighten up and not think so much. I pick up my guitar and strum the few chords I remember from the guitar lessons I took a year ago. I think how much more fun it is to play guitar than count heartbeats or jog in place. Maybe I'll start writing songs.

My first night without my feeding tube is surreal. I lie on my back, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars I pressed to my ceiling when I was twelve. My room is devastatingly quiet -- no churning grinding noise. I breathe deeply out of my nose, pulling currents of air through both nostrils. No tube, no tape. I scrunch up my face, twitch my nose, play with my facial muscles. I'm free. I like this feeling of freedom, but 120

I like even more how the robot made me feel, like no matter what I did during the day to hurt myself he would feed me, always, while I slept. Now whether or not I live or die is

entirely up to me.

Sometimes now, as I lie in bed at 2 a.m. and hear my stomach grumble, I miss my robot of twelve years ago. When I'm exhausted and too lazy to fix myself a snack, I remember the feeling of liquid filling my belly as I dozed off. When I was in the psych ward I was disappointed when I woke up to discover the blackbird in my dream was in fact my feeding machine. But soaring blackbirds and good dreams are fleeting. My robot was constant. While I don't seriously wish to have it back, part of me still feels cuts off. Part of me misses the constant drip, falling asleep knowing I'll be nourished, that I am out of my hands.