He says that from a young age he’d always felt as though he were observing all the people around him as if through glass. That everyone always seemed to know how to have friends and joke around and that he didn’t. That they all seemed to know what to do with boyfriends and girlfriends and that it all looked so easy.
When he gets to the part about an accomplished older brother who’d been a Rhodes Scholar, a genius and an athlete who excelled at everything, sweat prickles my scalp. When he says that his anxiety was so awful that he couldn’t even learn how to drive, I can’t catch my breath.
This man may as well be talking about me.
His parents divorced when he was a sophomore, the same age I was when my mom left. He says that liquor helped. He calls himself a double winner and says that he’s part of the “beverage program” and that he’s an alcoholic. But then drinking turned to drugs, which quickly became destructive, so he turned to food. His freshman year of college, he’d ballooned to almost three hundred pounds.
That’s when he took matters into his own hands. He’d vomited, chewed and spat food, tried every commercial diet possible. From eating only pepper-infused water, Weight Watchers, Paleo, meal-replacement cookies, eating for his blood type, Whole30, Atkins.
A memory bobs up from the time I tried Atkins in high school. I’d lost eight pounds but had eaten so much cheese and bacon, peeing every ten minutes until I realized I hadn’t taken a crap in almost three days, eventually passing a gruesomely painful bowel movement the consistency of a diamond after straining on the toilet for so long my legs went numb and I saw stars.
He’d had his ears stapled, his jaw wired. He’d even lost the deposit on gastric bypass surgery because at the very last minute he found these rooms instead.
He said he’d never forget how it felt to finally name these feelings. To learn that there are others like him. He recalls a checklist from his early days. And as he goes down it, reciting offhand the signals, I realize with a sickening clarity that we really are the same.
Have I eaten spoiled food? Yes.
Burned food? Yes.
Frozen food? Yes.
Stolen food?
More times than I can count.
It’s as if there’s a key turning in my heart. I picture myself groggily, helplessly eating my roommate’s brownies from the trash in the middle of the night. Chewing around the dish soap I’d squeezed onto them to thwart myself.
The stories around the room are astounding. I experience the repeated diagnosis of a feeling I had no words to articulate before. Secrets I didn’t even know I was hiding. They talk about how desperately they believed that if they only lost enough weight that they’d feel at home in their bodies.
That if they were skinny they’d finally be treated the way they deserved.
But it’s not the high drama or the gross-out stories of abused GI tracts that break my heart.
It’s the psychosis of knowing that your eyes are broken. That we all know what it’s like to look at yourself in the mirror one minute and then see something completely different the next.
Most of us have left our bodies in times of crisis. We’ve been stuck in scribbly, maddening thoughts of what to eat for lunch, paralyzed that a wrong choice will turn us down the road to a binge that ends with aching bellies and sour mouths.
A binge is defined as that freight-train feeling I know too well. That rush. The helplessness. The hostage situation. The compulsion to eat everything to blot out the feelings of anything else. The peace of feeling as though you’re choking because putting things in your mouth and then taking them out is the only thing in an unmanageable world that feel you can control.
Shit.
ShitShitShitShit.
I am them.
They are me.
I’ve canceled plans to eat or not eat. I’ve “called in fat” to work. I’ve gone to the gym instead of confronting someone. Eaten or gotten shitfaced instead of standing up for myself. I’ve been stunned and injured when I’ve lost the weight and not been given the respect or recognition I knew I deserved. I’ve starved myself skinny and been absolutely fucking miserable.
A notebook lands in my lap. There they all are. Everyone’s names and phone numbers, just like they said. There are no last names, but this blackmail collateral is breathtaking to me. It’s unbelievable, this trust fall. I can’t bring myself to add my name, but I’m moved by the gesture. It’s the stupidest, most touching gift I’ve ever known.
There’s so much laughter. Not mean-spirited, contemptuous mirth, but joyful, knowing laughter. Every invitation to an impending social event that necessitated the losing of ten, five, three, forty pounds in two days inspires the snapping of fingers. Chuckling at fights picked at the table so we wouldn’t have to eat pasta. Or so that we could eat the pasta and then storm off to buy secret ice cream on the way home.
There’s talk of cake. Leftover birthday cake. One of the mothers had gotten up to eat a sliver. Then another. And another, until the whole thing was gone. She’d had to put a rush order in at the specialty bakery with a slew of lies to have another one made. Another frosted intergalactic spaceship that she’d had to eat down to the same spot to make things right. I think of how prepared I was to go to H-E-B in the middle of the night for pie. And how the pie I’d eaten after hadn’t changed the perception of my childhood home.
I have never felt so known. So fucking spied on. It’s the limited-edition ginger ice cream. The loaves of bread, the peanut butter. Ramyun. Coq au vin. Ketchup.
There are stories of hope. How things have changed. Hollow teeth salvaged. Missing periods retrieved. Bridges burned and mended. Families left and returned to.
Then a woman with a tidy brown bob and wire-framed glasses, wearing a preppy fisherman’s sweater, cries about her father who died a week ago. After eight years of freedom, she’d started throwing up and hasn’t been able to stop. Tears slide down her cheeks, and she calmly removes her glasses to wipe her eyes. Last night she’d slept for an hour on the bathroom floor next to her toilet. When her three minutes are up, I’m enraged that she’s not given more time. But she smiles and thanks the room and says she knows it will get better because it has so many times before.
There are only ten more minutes of the meeting left, but I’m desperate to leave. I need air. I grab my things to duck out, refusing to look over my shoulder.
In the narrow, airless hallway, I see her come out of the bathroom. Cruella. A vision in lilac with her dog in her arms. Up close she’s somehow younger than I thought even though I’d never assigned her an age. She was nothing more than a cartoon. A caricature of the unwell. She’s wearing a lilac sweatsuit with a matching fringed cowboy vest to match her dog’s hat. The ink slick of her hair is drawn into a bun so tight, it slants her eyes.
“I thought that was you,” she says. As when Jeremy first talked to me, it’s like a painting peeled itself off the canvas to address me.
Her voice is a revelation. It’s far lower and more mellifluous than I could have ever conceived. Cruella has NPR voice.
I’m so stunned that I don’t know what to say.
“Ingrid,” she says, placing her hand on her chest. “We don’t really know each other, but we also do. I see you all the time near my apartment. You must go to fashion school. I can tell because your eyeliner’s always perfect.”