Chapter 13: Constellation of Pleasure

I didn’t notice I had gotten big until that moment I awoke to a new body consciousness; but, once I did, it skyrocketed to the position of my single greatest problem, the biggest looming obstacle to my happiness. Paradoxically, on some level I perceived that the extra weight would render me unattractive, so that men – especially Father – would be deterred from commenting on my form. But eventually I came to realize: It didn’t work.

At 170 pounds I had become acutely aware of my thickness but was unable to stop overeating. I wanted to be thin like I was before I blew up in size. I was conflicted about being noticed by the opposite sex; but I knew, above all, I didn’t want to be like Mother, whom Father vilified and mocked for her weight and apparent lack of discipline, achievement, and mental agility. And I wanted all those things that she didn’t have, and I felt they were within my reach, and I was consistently punished for falling short. On some level it must have registered that the path to self-worth lay in becoming thin, and that this was the way to garner approval and maybe even a sliver of self-worth.

One weekend when Father was watching football, hollering loudly at the TV like he always did and stomping and flailing his arms like a man unhinged, I asked him if I could go to the shitty local mall so I could buy a baseball cap. I was into baseball caps because I thought they made me look cool and like I didn’t care, except one time when I was mistaken for a boy and then I cared—a lot.

Not surprisingly and for zero reason my request was shot down and I was forbidden to leave. I was afraid of him and knew he would take it out on Mother if he discovered I had left; or maybe I wanted to keep an eye on things at home in case something set him off. Mostly I felt it was incumbent upon me to stay and fight the good fight, until I finally got through to him with my compelling oratory and was given actual permission to leave the house.

But the next Sunday afternoon, while Father was hollering and flailing at the TV, I decided to forgo the endless arguing, and snuck out. I had a plan.

I tip-toed past the living room doorway, through the kitchen, and out the side door, hurrying down the patio steps and heading straight for the front yard. I cut through the grass and into the wooded part near the street, ducking between the trees, until I got to the waist-high wire fence at the border of our property. I waded through the pile of leaves that Mother had raked at Father’s command, almost sinking in the half-composted soil, and scurried up the street toward the woods. I didn’t hear him behind me and felt assured enough that he wasn’t coming after me.

I ducked into the woods and moved at a harried pace, my sneakers sinking into the sand with each step. I knew the trail pretty well and hastened along until I felt safe, then got off the path and went a little deeper into the trees. Finally, feeling safe, I settled on a spot and got down on my knees, and stuck my index finger into my mouth, probing and exploring my throat–and then convulsed with the first self-induced wretch, as the 4 bagels I ate before I left spewed out like a thick stew onto the bed of dead leaves.

This was the culmination of my crises, a last-resort effort. I had read it in a book and was so thankful to have finally discovered an effective reprieve. It was a strange, liberating, solitary moment out in the woods.

And I remember the way tension left my body like a demon exorcised, and how the neurons must have danced, tiny pin-pricks firing across the synapses in a constellation of pleasure. And how my eyes rolled back, and how I shivered with the intensity of my relief.

I didn’t know God back then but I thanked him anyway.

Dear God, thank you for this, the solution to all my problems.

I apologized to my body and got up and brushed myself off and covered the puddle of vomit with some leaves. I felt like a ton of weight had been lifted from my shoulders, and I was floating. And I reveled in the new and profound lightness, and practically skipped my way back along the path, all the way back along the trail that led to the road. And I walked back to the house, and I couldn’t remember ever feeling safer than I did now, not even before I knew that I should feel unsafe – or at least I didn’t care. In fact, I didn’t care about anything, and suddenly I felt like anything was fucking possible.

I walked back to the house, suddenly thinking, I better hurry before Father notices I’m gone. I walked back to the house, where I was at the mercy of a man’s foul and erratic temperament, and his entitlement to my body, and where it went and when, and what it was of use for. I walked back to the house, not knowing what to expect but nothing could hurt me now. I walked back to the house, and I felt autonomy slip away from me, and I had no say in anything that was my own—except now I did, and no one, not even him, could take it away from me. It was the one thing that was all mine, and I knew in that moment of bliss that I would go to the ends of the earth to keep it that way.

Purging was my savior for many years; sometimes it perked me up and sometimes it pulled me down, but it was always whatever I needed it to be. When I had the house to myself between school and basketball practice, and Father was at work and Mother was wherever, I would get giddy at the promise of that mind-blowing rush and release, and do a little dance en route to the bathroom; and when I threw myself on the altar of that heavenly God of Endorphins, I got goosebumps up and down my arms and legs, and all the way through to the tips of my fingers.

One afternoon when I was 16 and had an hour or so to myself before practice, I forgot to flush the toilet after I puked. Mother came home and saw it and made me weigh myself in front of her—as if one thing had fucking anything to do with the other.

According to the scale I weighed 155.

I promised her I would stop. But I had no intention of doing so; it was my sole refuge, and I wasn’t about to give that up – especially for her, The Cunt Among Traitors.

When the clock struck snuggle time, and Father hurled the ultimatum, watch TV with me or go to bed, I would choose bedtime, shuffling around the kitchen with urgency to make some buttered toast and grab some leftovers and a plastic bag to line my little garbage can, and I would retreat to my room in defiance, stuff my face with my spoils, get down on my knees before the garbage can in the dark, and silently spew with newfound skill and ardor. I had the light off–I was supposed to be asleep, plus Heaven forbid I should accidentally catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror on the back of the bedroom door. And anyway the darkness brought me closer to a bliss I can only describe as godly. Then I would take the garbage bag out of the can and tie the top in a knot and stash it in the back of my closet.

When I was a senior in high school an electrical fire set our house up in flames. As I watched the burly fireman put out the last embers, I looked up into my bedroom window.

Please God, don’t let them find the bag of puke in my closet.

Later after the fire, when we were living in the trailer in the backyard, I was ordered to help sift through the remains of our home. I never forgot the bag of puke I had hidden in my closet and was quick to retrieve it; I carried it around in a backpack for 3 days before I assessed that I could safely discard it in one of the garbage cans alongside the driveway.

Not long after the bulimia took off, I was hanging out after school with Shawna and Beth. I was looking for an out, I didn’t want to hang out with them for the rest of the afternoon and felt strangely compelled to announce my intentions.

“I think I’m just gonna go home, bake a cake, throw it up, and do some homework before basketball practice.”

What Shawna – she was the leader of our misfit threesome – said in response sent me reeling.

“What? But I thought you were a feminist!”

She did little to veil her contempt, and I felt myself melt into the ground; and, as the flesh slid off my bones, I could only look down at the puddle that had been me, oozing down the hill and curving around the meaty chunks of what used to be my insides.

At 16 I was still light years from having the capacity to explain my behavior, let alone defend my reputation as a “feminist” – whatever we thought that meant. But in one breath it was as if she had taken it all away from me. I knew that she just had to be wrong— I mean, I was still a feminist, right?—but I couldn’t explain why.

What one had anything to do with the other was beyond me; I was simply driven by a throbbing need and it just felt so fucking good, and it was all I had; but later in life I realized what she must have meant: as if, by inducing vomiting, I was striving to lose weight because I had given into the tacit, gender-specific expectations of our culture – the ones that told us how we were supposed to look and behave, the ones that we had already figured out existed largely to keep us feeling bad about ourselves, keep us hungry, keep us quiet.

The ones that told us, This is what men want.

But despite the sting of her implications, those moments bent over the toilet or on my knees in the dirt under the auspices of the barren trees were all I fucking had, and the notion of giving that up was more than I could bear. And how the fuck would I even know, at the age of 16, whether my “feminist” values and the godly bliss of self-induced vomiting were, in fact, mutually exclusive? I didn’t have the vocabulary to prove that they weren’t, and I was a pussy to begin with so I just laughed off her vicious query and crawled into myself even more. I was already mired in disgust with my body—both for the hairy hole down below and the layer of blubber that I carried as insulation—and her words served to deepen my shame, and I felt the quicksand begin to curdle up around my ears, slowly swallowing me as it beckoned me to give in and just stop fucking fighting.

In fact, I had always identified myself as driven, self-guided, independent, and defiant; and, because I just happened to have a vagina, that made me a strong woman—as much as that last word made me gag. But that’s what we were about, that’s what we stood for; in fact, the genesis of our union as partners-in-crime was grounded in our unique, shared attitude of defiance against cultural expectations and our angry—and sometimes goofy—assertion of our identity as strong women. It hadn’t occurred to me, until her indictment of my motives, that making myself throw up in any way in fact compromised this identity or challenged my right to call myself a fucking “feminist.”

Not like that would have stopped me, of course.

I hated feeling fat and gross, and I wanted my regular body back—the one I had before I lost control of my eating, the one I had before Father started petting and poking me and he and Mother started making fun of me; but, as much as I pined to be a regular size again, I didn’t puke so boys would like me, or whatever it was Shawna had in mind when she called me anti-feminist. It hadn’t ever occurred to me that I puked as a gesture of submission, or that it made me like those stupid girls at school, or, even worse, like my weak-ass fucking mother; I puked because I fucking needed to, I puked because it was the only thing that made me feel better. It was the only thing I had to look forward to, it was the only thing that I did that was my own idea and that I did on my own schedule, and it was the only thing Father couldn’t take away from me. It quelled the pernicious fire between my legs and stopped the churning in my brain, and smoothed over the pangs of dread that made me seize with fear every single fucking day. It put the spring back in my step and lit up my mind.

And with that heavenly rush of endorphins came a feeling of hope: maybe everything would be OK, after all.

This is part of a memoir-in-progress. Read the next chapter published on Vocal here.

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