Going Hungry: Writers on Desire, Self-Denial, and Overcoming Anorexia - Softcover

Kate Taylor is a culture reporter at the New York Sun; her writing has also appeared in Slate and the New Yorker. She lives in New York.

HUNGER STRIKING

Maura Kelly

For a few weeks during the summer before high school, I resembled one of the catwalkers from the pages of The New York Times’ s style supplement, which covered my bedroom wall in a Scotch Tape collage. It wasn’t my face that was like theirs, or my clothes. (My usual look was a pocket T-shirt and cutoff jeans shorts, while the glossy girls wore kimono dresses, peacock-feather hats, and short pointy boots like white cockatoos.) It was my body. My stomach had caved in. My hip bones flared like wings. My legs met only at the knees and ankles: There was a teardrop-shaped gap between my thighs, and another between my calves. Knobby bones protruded dangerously from my wrists and elbows. My arms seemed longer, and from the ends of them, my enormous hands flopped, awkward as a marionette’s. I was barely thirteen, five feet and five inches tall, and down to 90 pounds from 110.

My transformation thrilled me.

Still, I wasn’t quite thin enough. So I kept going, and the changes became even more exciting. The colored hairbands I kept around my wrist got so loose that I could easily slide them up to my elbow. If I pressed my hand around the part of my arm where the shoulder met the biceps, I could touch my thumb with the pad of my ring finger. I could also put both hands around my thigh and touch thumb to thumb, pinky to pinky. I’d measure myself like that again and again when no one was watching, usually in the bathroom stall at school; it reassured me that I hadn’t somehow gotten fatter in the hours since I’d been on the scale that morning. My ribs became so visible that I could count them not only from the front but also, if I used two mirrors, from the back as they curved out from the knotted rope of my spine.

I began to resemble someone else tacked up in my room: Jesus Christ.

Now there was an icon. There was a guy who knew something about style: the original long-haired, emaciated, rock- star type. But it wasn’t just Jesus’ body that I admired; it was his suffering, too, and the way it made people love him. Jesus had been my first role model, and I still respected the guy, even if I was a full-fledged nonbeliever by then. As he hung from the crucifix my dead mother had positioned over my dresser, Jesus inspired me—with his skeleton hanging out of his skin, his blood dripping from his crown of thorns, and his face turned imploringly upward in the moment before his death as he said, “My God, my Father, why have you forsaken me?”
I knew how Jesus felt, asking that question. When my mother died of cancer the summer I turned eight, I felt pretty forsaken myself. I had no idea she was dying. I knew she was sick, of course, but my parents told my sister and me that she just had a very bad cold, kind of like chicken pox, except the bumps were inside.

Her illness replaced me—the baby—and became the most important thing in my mother’s life. Before she’d gotten sick, she loved everything I did, whether it was the Little Tea- pot dance, or one of my typically opinionated comments (“I don’t want to grow up to be like you, Mommy, always driv- ing my kids around”), or just burying my face in her neck to cry. But after she was diagnosed, I wasn’t as easy to love; at least, it was harder to get her full attention. For the last four years of her life, she spent one week out of every month in the hospital getting chemotherapy—a word I could say but not define—and when she was home, she spent a lot of time in bed with the curtains drawn. She didn’t like it when I was loud, and sometimes she was too weak to even kiss me back after I pressed my lips against her cheek. Her head would just stay on the pillow.

Whenever she wasn’t feeling well, I tried to leave her alone. I tried not to need anything from her. I became self-conscious: worried about what effect my actions would have, and aware of my own presence in a room.

Everyone—my parents, my other relatives, and the priests and nuns we knew, including my uncle Father Jimmy—told me that my mother might get better if I was a very good girl and asked God to help us. I would have done anything to get my mother back the way she used to be, so I prayed. I also sang at church with my family on Sunday mornings, as loudly and clearly as I could, because the pastor said singing was praising God twice. (I just hoped that Juan-Juan Santiago, who sat across the aisle from us with his parents and little brother, wouldn’t notice what a geek I was.) One of my favorite hymns was in praise of lasagna—or so I thought, till my mother caught on to what I was saying, and explained that the word was actually hosana, which means, roughly, “God is great.” And to show the devil I hated him, I’d jump up and down in the grass—as close to Hell as I could get—until I’d exhausted myself. Then I’d lie on the ground, blowing kisses up to the angels. Everyone said God was always watching over me, which was nice, especially since my mother wasn’t anymore. My growing love for God, and His for me, was helping to fill the hole my mother was making. I’d picture Him with the big white beard, in a white robe, in a white throne that floated on the clouds, smiling down at me, and I’d smile back.

It wasn’t just through physical actions that I tried to make myself God’s favorite; there were also the things I’d do in my head. During Mass, I’d recite the Penitential Rite with the rest of the congregation: “I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do.” I’d feel gravely sorry about all my transgressions: how I’d once again stuffed myself with chocolate-chip cookies and marshmallows in the morning, before my parents woke up; how I’d punched my sister in the rear end; how I’d stuck my tongue out at my father when he wasn’t watching. I’d pinch myself once on the thigh for each sin, and resolve to become a better person. I knew how important it was to God that my head be as pure as my actions, so whenever I had bad thoughts—like how much I hated the new Indian kid in our class, Raj, because he smelled funny and was hairy—I’d start to pray, trying to push the evil away. I was trying so hard and God loomed so large in my mind (even larger than Juan-Juan) that I was confident I was one of His favorites.

But I started to wonder if that was true after my mother died that August, twenty days after my birthday. I was so unprepared that when my father first told me I laughed. “Really, when can we pick her up from the hospital?” I said. “Tell me.” He only stared at me. “Tell me,” I insisted. Still, he didn’t speak, and my sister, sitting in his lap, started to cry. That unsettled me enough that I went to get a closer look at my father. When tears started coming down his face, too, I was terrified. Something had to be seriously wrong, but I was too young—or too shocked—to really understand what was going on.

I didn’t give up the hope that my mother might somehow pop out of her coffin until I first saw her in the wooden box at the wake. That’s when I started to appreciate what being dead meant. The rosy blush my mother usually wore had been replaced by two heavy circles of red on her cheeks; instead of her favorite mauve lipstick, there was a brown smear on her mouth. I could see the pores on her face as clearly as if they’d been made with a pencil. Her skin was thick and hard and unyielding under my fingertips, like football leather. I realized there was no way that body was going to sit up and say “Surprise!” and then reach out to tickle me under the arms. I climbed up on the kneeler and kissed her, maybe because I still had fairy-tale hopes about what that could do for a dead person. But it didn’t make any difference. Those rubber lips took away any doubt I had left—about her death, anyway.

But suddenly, everything else in my life was thrown into question. It wasn’t only my mother who was gone: It was my understanding of the universe, of myself, of God, and even of my own father. Overwhelmed by his grief, bills, and the responsibility of trying to raise two girls alone, he became a stranger to me: moody, unpredictable, and frightening—the big villain in my life. Suddenly, we were shouting at each other so much that I believed it when the first nanny we had after my mother died, a young woman from northern Ireland named Marie, told me again and again my father didn’t love me. Every night, I waited for him to come home with the worst longing and the most terrible fear, wondering if he would prove Marie right one more time.

I couldn’t count on my so-called Heavenly Father anymore, either, considering I was convinced that He’d killed my mother to punish me. (He couldn’t have had it out for anyone else in my family, I figured, since my connection to Him was more intense than theirs, for better and for worse.) What I couldn’t figure out was why God was so angry with me. In what way had I offended Him? I kept going over and over everything that I’d done and thought in the weeks leading up to my mother’s death, the way a guilty lover will after a suicide, and though there were all the usual little bad things—sneaking cookies, punching my sister, hating Raj—there wasn’t anything new and outstandingly wicked that would explain God’s act of vengeance against me. Also, I was nowhere near as bad as some of the other kids in my town, especially not the ones from the public middle school, who smoked cigarettes on the railroad tracks behind my house, or had sex in the old band shell at Memorial Park, or did drugs in their cars in the Burger King parking lot.

Since it seemed obvious I couldn’t have done anything to bring on the wrath of God, I figured there must be something inherently wrong with me. Did He hate me because I wasn’t as good in my heart as I’d thought? Probably. And maybe my mother hadn’t really loved me, either. Why else would she have left without even saying good-bye, or that she’d miss me?

Those kinds of questions were hard to face, so eventually I convinced myself, as best as I could, that the problem wasn’t with me but with Catholicism. I’d tried so hard to follow the rules, in my actions and my thoughts, and what had it got- ten me but a dead mother? I didn’t want to live that way anymore. But I did want something to believe in—a system that was more transparent and would yield visible results. I wanted proof that I was good.
Dieting eventually became a replacement religion for me, with its own set of commandments and rituals. It became a way for me to be my own god and my own creation—Pygmalion and Galatea in the same human body. It became a perverse method for mothering myself: I structured my meals, my days, and my thoughts around it. Dieting became my internal compass. It became the new thing for me to be the best at. I was so devoted that I was practically ready to give up my life for it.

But when I first started losing weight, toward the end of eighth grade, I had no idea I would become a fanatic. It was far more simple than that. All I wanted was to look like I had at the beginning of the school year, before my abdomen began to protrude under the band of my Hanes underwear. Though I realize now it was just an early sign of puberty, that curve disgusted me. I felt like a dog in heat, with it poking out of me. I had to be out of control if I’d let my body turn into that. And I figured if I lost five pounds—just five—my stomach would be flat again. But as it turned out, I had to drop closer to fifteen pounds before the curve disappeared, and once I got that far, I couldn’t stop. I was addicted to losing.

Part of the appeal was how much dieting simplified my life. Nothing else mattered but the numbers: how many calories I’d eaten that day; how many pounds I’d lost in the last week, or month; how many leg lifts or push-ups I’d do that night. I’d add, subtract, and double-check constantly. I felt like I was moving toward some great new salvation. Instead of praying when I felt scared or guilty or lonely, I’d turn to the numbers, like my grandmother to her wooden rosary beads, and they’d calm me down.

My head became so full of equations and plans about what I would eat and what exercises I would do that I didn’t have room for much else. I stopped worrying about not having any boobs even though every other girl in my class had them. I stopped caring about how all the boys, including Juan-Juan, had a crush on my best friend, Catherine McMurtry. I stopped feeling guilty about all the games of Truth or Dare and Seven Minutes in Heaven I’d played, and how it made me feel weird and gross but also excited whenever there was a boy’s tongue in my mouth. I stopped thinking about all those times Marie had told me that my father didn’t love me. My calculations not only filled up all the empty spaces in my head; they also helped me determine the value of my self. On any day that I’d eaten less, worked out longer, or lost more, it didn’t mean I was good, but at least I wasn’t bad.

The most important number, though, was one I had no idea how to determine: the weight I’d have to be to let myself stop, the weight that would mean I was finally good enough. In the very beginning, I thought it would be 105. Then it became one hundred. Ninety-five. Ninety. By the time I weighed eighty-five, I started to wonder if I’d ever be able to predict what the right weight was. Maybe I wouldn’t know until I reached it.
That summer before high school, when the dieting fever really started to take hold, I was fighting more than ever with my father, an Irish immigrant who made his living paving people’s driveways and laying concrete. Maybe part of the problem was that there was no other adult in the house to help keep us in our corners: My father hadn’t (and still hasn’t) remarried, and we were between housekeepers at that point. He hired and fired sixteen different women before I got to college, but never before I got attached to them; each one of them seemed like some kind of mother to me.

Our door started to revolve after he kicked out Marie, who’d been with us for four years. She’d become slowly obsessed with my father, and eventually demanded that he marry her, though they’d never been romantically involved. She pleaded with him, saying that she was already acting like a mother to my sister and me; why not make her role official?

My father turned her down. One night shortly after the rejection, Marie pulled a huge knife out of the kitchen drawer and threatened to kill herself with it. I grabbed the cleaver away from her; my father ordered her out of the house, and we never saw her again, though for years she prank-called our house and one time even phoned Catherine McMurtry’s house, looking for me.

It wasn’t a coincidence that my obsession with dieting started soon after my father fired Marie. Screwed up as she was, she’d been a temporary stay against the confusion that ensued after my mother was gone. In the four years that she’d been with us, I’d come to depend on her, especially because I didn’t feel like I could depend on my father anymore. It never occurred to me to ask him if Marie was right all those times she said he didn’t love me; it seemed obvious he didn’t. After all, I apparently had a special talent for saying things that would infuriate him so much that he’d give me the silent treatment for days, even weeks. During those periods, he’d do everything he could to avoid looking at me, even keeping his head down if we were in the kitchen together.

Often our arguments would start over things in the news. My father was a conservative then, despite the fact that he also subscribed to The New York Times, whereas I was a born liberal, despite the fact that I’d represented Ronald Reagan in some faux presidential debate we’d had at school. I would read the Week in Review ...