Chapter 14: Slut-in-the-Making

Toward the end of high school, I got a scholarship to go to Adelphi University out in Nassau County. I had also gotten a scholarship to an architecture school in Rhode Island, but Mother and Father pleaded solvency, claimed they couldn’t cover the remaining cost and made too much money to qualify for financial aid—and I was forbidden to take out student loans, and didn’t know that I didn’t need my parents’ permission to do so.

But Adelphi’s rep had crashed when it was revealed that their former president had been embezzling from the university, and they were desperate for recruits. I got a full ride to attend their Honors College the same way I got into the Gifted & Talented program in 7th grade: I was in the right place at the right time. My GPA was a B+, I did well on the SATs, and I had lots of extracurricular activities on my profile.

But the scholarship didn’t cover dorm residence, and it was too long a drive to make every day. So my grandmother, who lived in Nassau, not far from the school, suggested I come stay with her. She was acquainted enough with my living situation and wanted to get me away from Father.

I had to fight for it, but by the time high school was nearing its end Father’s metaphorical grasp was beginning to loosen. He had started having an affair with a woman at work, didn’t always come home, and I was no longer the focus of his attention.

I started to come into myself. I came to understand that boys had been teasing me for years about my height because they might have actually liked it. The bulimia was well underway and gave me an “out” when I needed to let go for a minute, but I felt better about myself and had stopped bingeing to the point of near-asphyxiation. Boys started to want to talk to me, and I liked it. I started wearing a touch of makeup, and felt more safe in my skin. And the girls that had stopped talking to me in 7th grade wanted to be my friend again.

By the time my aunt’s boyfriend, Michael, came to our house with a van to help me move, I had brought nearly everything to my grandmother’s already in the little, hard-won Plymouth Horizon I had inherited from my paternal grandmother—all that was left was my mattress.

Toward the end of high school I had discovered laxatives as another handy bulimic tool, especially this rancid Chinese-brand “diet tea” that was quite effective if you made it exceptionally strong. I had had a few near-accidents in public but was far from deterred from exploring the range of over-the-counter oral solutions to my constipation and need to purge.

My second or third day at my grandmother’s I had a sudden and edifying urge to relieve myself; except I had a resistance to using the bathroom right outside my door that I shared with my uncle, and I wanted to do it within earshot of the small TV I had in my room. I won’t say what I defecated into that day, but regardless it wasn’t a viable, long-term solution, so I started keeping garbage bags in my room. I would weigh myself, shit and puke in them, then weigh them, then weigh myself again. But the math never added up, as careful as I was, as diligent as I was in my calculations –and it drove me crazy.

Where the fuck are those 2 pounds, didn’t they come out?

I was consistently broke, even working 3 part-time jobs, and sometimes I had to steal my laxatives from the nearby drugstore. I couldn’t go to the bathroom without them anymore, anyway, so I needed them and had no qualms about breaking the law. The only thing that worried me was the risk of getting caught, but my raging need superseded this fear.

My first semester of college I discovered sex. I had met Casey during orientation, but only from afar – he was the big guy on campus, and I didn’t notice that he noticed me, anyway why would he, since I was such a fucking loser? But a couple of weeks into the semester he asked me to hang out at his dorm with him and his roommates.

That day I was exploring Garden City and found a cathedral just outside of the campus. I wasn’t religious but I was intrigued by its architecture and expanse, so I went in. I knelt and prayed, and I cried for no apparent reason.

I didn’t know it yet but I couldn’t handle my liquor, and I laughed at Casey’s and his friends’ jokes, and drank like I could. The night is a hole in my memory, lost forever from the moment it happened. I must’ve gotten so messy that Casey put me on his bed. When he came to lie down next to me, we started making out. He told me later that’s as far as he thought we would go, and I guess I believe him, as hapless as he was; but I was on autopilot in my blackout state, I seemed lucid, and I was afraid of sex and wanted to get it over with. All my signals pointed to “ready” so he fucked me.

We dated for a few months after that, I don’t remember why he dumped me but when he did I cried bulimia – I needed him to know that I was struggling, or maybe I just wanted him to feel bad for ending things when I was more fucked up than I had let on.

Maybe a year or so later we would become friends, but, for me, it was natural to start something up. One day he was over at my grandmother’s during the day when no one was home, and we were about to have sex when I stopped him.

“That’s what boyfriends and girlfriends do!”

I didn’t want to get back together with him but saying no seemed like the right thing to do.

But it was too easy for me to dissociate from my body and not long after that we did, in fact, end up having sex, and on a regular basis. This was casual sex, and it was pure self-debasement disguised as self-empowerment: it wasn’t especially fun, I just had something to prove—both my prowess to the man who had had me when I knew nothing, and, more importantly, my ability to separate very definitively the physical from the emotional.

Because that’s what guys do.

My body was like a puppet on stage before a crowd, and my mind was the puppeteer; and that body was physically expressive of something I couldn’t actually feel, and naturally athletic, and clearly I was angry about something, and I schooled Casey in rough sex.

“Wow, you like it rough! I always thought girls usually like it when you’re gentle.”

I half-worried I had ruined him for other women, but more than that I reveled in the sense of redemption; no more naïve little virgin-girl. And I became a woman of the world—or, at least, of the world as I saw it.

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

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