Today in Group Annoying Girl talks about how fat she feels. Nearly Dead Girl sitting next to me smacks her sugarless gum and rolls her eyes. We are supposed to be taking notes in our assigned diaries so as to make Annoying Girl feel like we are really listening. I doodle a lopsided heart that looks more like a pear than a symbol of love. Nearly Dead Girl pens absolutely nothing.
“And yesterday, when I ate those three bites of romaine lettuce,” Annoying Girl whines. I watch Annoying Girl’s limp scarecrow hair. It is hard to look at Annoying Girl face-on. You can see all the bones circling her neck like some sort of prehistoric necklace a kid wears for a Flintstones Halloween costume. Annoying Girl’s cheeks are sagging, deflated balloons. The nurses here claim I look just like Annoying Girl, but really I am much, so much, heavier than her. Trust me, I know—with no mirrors to stare at all I can do is compare myself to my fellow freaks. Annoying Girl can circle her wrist with her thumb and pointer finger overlapping. I can barely get my thumb and middle finger to touch. The strangest thing about Annoying Girl is that she won’t let any of us see her eyes. She always—always—wears these gigantic, sixties-style sunglasses that make her face look even more shrunken and dehydrated.
I call us anorexics “bobble heads,” like the dolls they sell at novelty stores. My little brother has a bobble-head Abraham Lincoln taped to the dashboard of his Chrysler. Whenever my little brother speeds or hits a speed bump, Abe Lincoln bobs his consent. Us girls are just that: nodding, gigantic heads, and tiny, starved bodies. But I don’t see that when I look at myself. I see my round, protruding belly. I see a Stomach. A Stomach so round and large I dream of slicing it off with a big serrated knife and letting the fat ooze out until I am as Thin and free and light as air. I would mash the greasy lard from my stomach between my fists, I would celebrate, dance even, do the motherfucking Macarena even, as my fat oozed between my slippery fingers. This desire is part of the sickness, or so Nurse Sally and Sister Mary tell me. Whenever Sister Mary reminds me of this she looks upwards, as if she expects a booming voice to break open the heavens and tell me I’m Crazy.
The Clinic my parents put me in is part convent, part hospital. I meet twice a day with a psychologist, once a day with a nutritionist, and every night with a Sister. Because my parents currently pay for my life, I have to do what they ask and go where they send me. It’s not like I could get a job. At the bookstore where I used to work, I collapsed while stacking a couple copies of Goodnight Moon. My bosses kindly gave me medical leave. I told them to shove their medical leave up their bookworm asses. Then I got fired.
I had to give up my favorite red Keds when I checked in here because of The Clinic’s stupid no-string rule. Nobody entering The Clinic is allowed to bring anything that could be used as a noose—so no shoelaces, no headphones, and definitely no necklaces. In my opinion, if a girl really wants to die she will find a way with something that is allowed. Or they’ll just do what I do and sleep all day Tuesday until they’re forced to wake up and eat. But the morons who run this place don’t seem to understand that. My red Keds always had nice, shiny, white shoelaces that I cleaned daily and replaced on the second Monday of every other month. No matter how dirty or misshapen my clothes were, my shoelaces were always spick and span. This was my quirk, the one thing I’m most likely to be remembered by at my high school reunion. When the nurses who checked me in told me I had to take the laces out of my shoes, I screamed. My parents—who had been sitting in the Waiting Room with nothing to comfort them but magazines with names like Healthy Living and Soul Food—rushed in, my dad already shouting about a lawsuit (once a lawyer, always lawyer), my mother crying about what a mistake it was to put her beloved daughter in this hell-hole, and there I was, their “too-thin” daughter, screaming and crying over having to untie her Keds. I couldn’t do it. I compare it to pulling out a baby’s hair. So my parents took the shoes home with them and the nursing staff found me a pair of slippers that were three sizes too large.
Annoying Girl has finally stopped talking; the last word I heard her utter was “calorie.” I’m not sure if she said calorie or if I was just thinking it. That is what we think about. There are seventy-six calories in one hard-boiled egg. A medium sized tomato contains twenty-two calories and three grams of sugar. I look up from my doodled heart that I’ve blacked in with one of my few remaining felt-tip black pens. I’ll have to write Dad for more. Mom has yet to answer my letters. She has a lot on her mind, Dad explains in a P.S. at the end of all his letters under the Best Wishes, Dad. When Mom finally writes she will sign her letters Love, Mom.
I realize that everyone in Group is staring at me.
“What?” I ask. I close my diary.
“You’re doodling,” the group-leader-slash-psychiatrist-slash-recovering-alcoholic informs me. She’s slightly overweight, a fact that her plus-sized floral dress does not hide but rather accentuates. It’s pretty dumb for an eating disorder clinic to have a pudgy shrink tell a group of anorexics that they need to eat. Let me tell you, none of us want to end up looking like this sad woman. She’d do well at a clinic for suburban mothers wanting to lose their pregnancy weight. Group Leader continues, “Your neighbor pointed it out to us. We are here to learn from one another, dear, to let the good thoughts in while we let the bad ones out. How can you heal with your group partners when you aren’t even paying attention?”
I quickly glare at Nearly Dead Girl and apologize to Annoying Girl, careful not to say her name because I honestly can’t remember if it is Cheryl or Sheanna. I know it’s something bright and perky, like the sorority house from which she defected. When Annoying Girl talks about her “sisters” she often isn’t talking about the flock of penguins smothering us, but rather about the good ol’ gals back home who send Annoying Girl weekly packages of cookies. The fact that a sorority girl is anorexic is so cliché, I almost hate her just for proving a stereotype true. Of course, Annoying Girl throws out the treats, but she appreciates the thought. She told us so yesterday in Group. Group Leader congratulated her on her progress.
Annoying Girl goes back to whining. I go back to doodling. Annoying Girl worries that her parents will never love her, and Group Leader tells her that that is nonsense. Annoying Girl manages to squeeze out a tear and a hiccup. Group Leader, taking this small sign of emotion as a valid one, gets up and hugs Annoying Girl. Over Group Leader’s shoulder Annoying Girl grins big and scary like the clown of a child’s nightmare. Annoying Girl may be an annoying cunt, but she has the game down pat. She gives the people what they want. You would think Group Leader would learn to be less gullible considering the fatality rate this place has. In a whisper, I gently remind Nearly Dead Girl that each stick of gum has five calories. Not because I worry about the calories in a stick of gum (one hundred chews cures that problem), but because I know that it will drive her fucking nuts. The bitch deserves a good scare for ratting on me. I mean, I didn’t squeal on her when I caught her vomiting two days ago.
The girls in my particular group are in Beginning Stage of The Recovery Program. I’ve been in Beginning Stage for six months, a fact that most of the staff tries to keep quiet when parents and their sicko daughters tour. I am their “Troubled Teen.” I am just the most aware. Us girls in Beginning Stage look at the girls in Middle and End Stages and don’t want to be them. You can’t see their ribs. How can these girls be comfortable if they can’t touch their skin and feel the bone sticking out like a trophy just waiting to be petted and loved? These people, these doctors, they don’t get it. I love my body. The shrinks keep harping that it is what is on the inside that counts. Well, I love my insides so much I want to rid myself of my exterior.
These “cured” girls are being lead astray. They eat all of their salad, even the three whole-wheat croutons. One girl, rumor has it, ate one of the Brownie-Bites. Nobody eats the Brownie-Bites—not even the Fully Recovereds. Hell, my own mother never ate Brownie Bites and she looks fantastic, even the nurses and shrinks here would agree. This girl had to be bulimic and threw it up somewhere where none of the nuns or nurses could find it.
Group Leader stands up and smiles. She applauds Annoying Girl’s courage and says that we are all doing “good work.” We should be proud. Group Leader fidgets with the American flag pin she wears on her red sweater, a gift from her military husband. I hate that pin, but at least sometimes I get the joy of watching it get spun until the American flag is upside down. Group Leader coughs. Then Group Leader blushes and tells us that we’ll notice a remarkable change in her appearance—she’s two months pregnant! Nearly Dead Girl jumps up and hugs Group Leader. Nearly Dead Girl’s skull get smushed between Group Leader’s large breasts. I roll my eyes and feel bad for the unborn kid. It is a known fact around here that the most fucked-up girls are daughters of shrinks.
After Group Leader leaves we sit on our plastic blue chairs. I stare at my hands. They’re unnaturally yellow in the fluorescent lighting. My middle finger ring tan is fading. Two weeks ago the nurses made me give up my ring, a gift from my grandmother. She gave it to me a month before she died of Cancer. I used the ring to measure how much fat was on my hands. If I could slide the ring neatly off, I was thin. If it stuck a little, I had gained some weight. The head nurse, Nurse Samantha, found this detrimental to my recovery and took the ring. I was so hysterical two men had to hold me down while they shot tranquilizer into my arm. Of course, I moved so much—even while being gripped by two burly men in green medical suits—that the shot ripped the vein more than it should have and my blood got everywhere. One orderly looked so ridiculous with my blood dripping down his chin that I burst out laughing. I woke up hours later still smiling until I realized what had happened. I lost my favorite white blouse and my grandmother’s ring that day. The only good part about that day was that it rained.
“I’m bored,” speaks up New Girl. When New Girl entered this fine establishment she was exactly four feet and ten inches tall and weighed a total of sixty pounds. New Girl always wears pink. If, for some reason, she is not wearing a pink shirt, skirt, or dress, she will paint pink sparkly nail polish on her fingernails. New Girl does not come from a history of self-violence so she is allowed to paint her nails without the supervision of a Sister. Instead, a Sister waits outside her door and takes the nail polish from New Girl when she is done so she cannot sell it on the black market. It is the hospital’s black market that allows me access to laxatives twice a month. The nuns are desperate to shut down the black market, but seeing as how I run it and am not going anywhere, that is impossible. I dare the nuns to try and take me down. I’m the Tony Soprano of Anorexics. I should get a show on HBO. Then my thinness would not look like a disease, but one of the pains of fame.
I would hate New Girl if I didn’t feel so bad for her. New Girl came in to The Clinic after suffering through her third heart attack. It was late at night and most of us were sitting around watching The Sound of Music. Maria’s cheerful singing was overshadowed by the screams of New Girl’s mother who, along with an army of doctors and assistants, came bursting waving her checkbook and shouting that if her daughter wasn’t “Fixed” she would sue. Her Nerves Could Not Handle This. With a mother like that, it doesn’t take one of our qualified psychoanalysts to deduce why New Girl is so fucked-up.
I shrug and bite my nails. They are getting long but I refuse to cut them in front of a nurse, as if I would kill myself with something as cliché as a nail trimmer. This is why my legs are hairy. The Clinic does not give me enough credit. If I commit suicide, it’s not going to be some lame-ass way involving razors or shoestrings or scissors.
New Girl stares at me as I bite-trim my pointer finger. “Relax,” I say. “There are no calories in nails.” New Girl looks away. I look at New Girl’s feet, which are twitching. She, too, wears slippers too large.
Annoying Girl glares at me. “What’s your problem, today?”
Annoying Girl loaned me her tape measure the night before without my having to blackmail her so I decide to play nice. “It’s the anniversary of my mother’s death,” I reply, looking up from New Girl’s feet. Nobody says anything. While Annoying Girl is so thin that blood can barely make it to her cheeks, she does manage a slight blush.
“Sorry,” she finally says. She likely feels superior because now she thinks she understands why I’m Sick. All us girls have these trite, easy answers to why we are the way we are. The problem is these answers are rarely the real answers. But that’s what the shrinks want, and nobody knows better than a girl with an eating disorder how to tell people what they want to hear. So we nod our bobble heads while remaining stuck to the dashboard of the car we cannot drive. When the shrinks ask how I am doing, I don’t tell them about how much glee I get out of shitting, watching the food I’m forced to eat leave my system and float in a messy goo in the toilet. Instead, I discuss how it’d be nice to be okay with my weight, when really I mean it’d be nice if I shit more or, most importantly, if the world would just leave me alone.
Mom is not dead. But bitch Annoying Girl should watch her tongue. I don’t say shit about her parents who have not once written or called. While Annoying Girl’s mother couldn’t care less about her daughter, my poor over-caring mom is probably at home crying over what a failure she is to have somehow raised an anorexic daughter. My mom is a great mom, a wonderful mom, the mom who always brought oatmeal cookies to the school plays even though I was never cast, the mom who always volunteered her house for PTA meetings even though she thought all the other moms were snobs with bad haircuts. Hell, I bet Annoying Girl’s mom is one of those PTA moms who would let my mom host all the parties and never bother to offer to help clean up. My mother is not a failure. I told her this hundreds of times, every time the Dean of College Affairs called my mom about several professors’ “concerns” about my weight, every time I fainted when driving, every time she caught me trying to throw up. She is a great mom, regardless of how sick I am. But my mom cannot understand this. Somehow, she manages to make my sickness about her. And it’s mine. Like my body. It’s mine and I wish people would stop trying to take it away from me.
“You know what?” I say, interrupting the silence in the room. I make my voice jovial, upbeat even. I always do this when I’m pissed: it both hides the anger and makes people want to like you. I look directly at Annoying Girl. “You look like you’ve gained a few pounds. Congrats, doll.”
Annoying Girl stares at me. Her mouth opens a little and I can see her perfect pink tongue jab at her yellow teeth. I know she wants to pinch her nonexistent stomach. I know she wants to find a scale-- which, of course, cannot be found anywhere but in the heavily guarded Nurse’s Station. I also know Annoying Girl also doesn’t want me to know how much I’ve hit her nerve. Usually, I don’t bother to do so with these girls. It’s just too easy.
Sister Mary enters. You always smell cinnamon right before Sister Mary walks into a room, it’s as if she passed through some grandmother’s kitchen on her way to work. Sister Mary looks like Mrs. Santa Claus—round, white-haired, jolly. Like all the people who work here, she has a penchant for pins. During the Christmas season Sister Mary wears this pin of a miniature Rudolph. Rudolph’s nose blinked red until it ran out of batteries.
“Hi, girls,” Sister Mary beams. She is met with tears from Annoying Girl and a bright smile from yours truly. Nearly Dead Girl rolls her eyes again and New Girl looks out the window as a pigeon flies by. “It’s time to walk to Chapel,” Sister Mary informs us. We stand. Sister Mary pats Annoying Girl on the shoulder and tells her to Be Strong. I laugh, but quietly enough that only New Girl hears. New Girl walks with me. It takes two of her steps to match one of mine. New Girl likes me and wants me to like her, I don’t know why. I’m pretty sure I could get New Girl to stop wearing pink if I wanted to. She should stay away from me like the rest of the girls.
New Girl asks if I am excited for Chapel and I shrug. At Chapel we will pray, begging God for assistance. We will sing hymns that sound beautiful even though they mean nothing. Just as in AA, we will leave our anxieties up to a Higher Power. While the girls around me pray, I will feel guilty about my mom. While the girls and the shrinks and the nuns and the doctors are cheering each other on to eat that one bite of chicken, I will admire my bones in the mirror. While the girls talk about how they can’t wait to get well, I will talk about how happy I am to be just where I am.
