Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (13 page)

We went into the kitchen to pour ourselves some wine. I kept the coat on.

We sat down on the living room couch to talk, me still in my coat.

We stretched out on the living room carpet and started kissing.

“Aren’t you going to take off your coat?” he asked, maybe noticing the sweat along my hairline.

I mumbled something about being cold, though there was clearly no reason I should be. We were indoors. The heat was on. Scott and his roommate weren’t behind on their utility bills.

I willed him to stop asking about the coat. As long as I kept it on, he couldn’t get a good sense of my body and possibly discover that I wasn’t as trim as he’d hoped I was and as I meant to be.

He fumbled with the coat’s zipper. I escaped briefly to the bathroom. He tugged at the coat’s arm. I swatted his hand away. After an hour and a half I couldn’t stand the heat and the awkwardness anymore. There was no alternative: I left. I figured I’d never hear from him again.

I did. We went back to his apartment and this time the coat came off, partly because I’d been better about eating and exercising in the interim, mostly because I was an eighteen-year-old male and my desire for sex won out over my desire to conceal whatever that calisthenics-class pincher had grabbed hold of and measured.

We dated for a month, after which I dated Joe for two weeks, then Mike for three. And the rapid-fire sequence of Scott and Joe and Mike meant that I ate less. I ran more. And in a pinch I threw up: sometimes every few days, sometimes just once a week. It depended on my excesses, and on how soon my next sleepover with Scott and then Joe and then Mike was. I believed—no, was
certain—
that a pound too many could change everything, and that some crucial junctures demanded a special effort. At those junctures, not throwing up would be nothing less than defeatist.

 

 

 

 

I often ate dinner with Abigail or with Jared, or with Abigail
and
Jared, my closest friends during freshman year. Abigail was my stand-in for Beth, another looker adept at weaving an air of melodrama around her. In her case, that skill was being honed for professional use: she planned to major in theater. She spent much of her time at auditions and rehearsals for campus productions. She spent much of the rest of it telling Jared and me about those auditions and rehearsals.

She had delicate moods and a way of making grand pronouncements about them. One night she pleaded for a change in our plans to go to a late-night movie, saying she would rather just drink some wine in one of our dorm rooms and talk.

“I’m just so
emotionally fatigued
,” she explained, and the phrase stayed with me for months—for years—because I wasn’t sure how emotional fatigue differed from garden-variety exhaustion, or a hangover, except that it was what people as sensitive and soulful as Abigail suffered.

So we talked: about how well her face, which was like a prettier version of Kelly McGillis’s, photographed; about how lucky she was to have such long, dark, wavy hair; about how unlucky she was to have hips slightly wider and thighs slightly bigger than those of the scrawny blond graduate student who got an ingénue part that Abigail had gone after.

“I think she’s sleeping with the director,” Abigail said, parroting the plaint of frustrated actresses since the Stone Age.

Jared was the gay man I wanted to be: quick with a quip, confident in his charms, slight enough to wear plaids and horizontal stripes. I was too intimidated by him to want more than his friendship, but I wanted that desperately. I wanted his insight and inside knowledge: over the fall semester, he had learned and retained a library’s worth of information about seemingly every openly and secretly gay student. He’d point to a waiter in a restaurant on Franklin Street and tell me about another waiter in a nearby restaurant who was sleeping with him. He’d point to an effeminate sophomore strolling across the main quad and tell me which black diva he’d dressed up as for the annual drag pageant at the gay bar near campus that I frequented—that
we
frequented, together. Jared had been the one to introduce me to it. Whenever we went, he made a dozen new friends and left with a half dozen promising phone numbers. I was lucky if I screwed up the courage to talk to the bartender.

Our dinners with Abigail happened about twice a week, usually somewhere on Franklin Street, where a meal could be cobbled together almost as cheaply as in the student cafeteria. Whether we ate Chinese, pub grub or Mexican, Jared picked at his food. Abigail could go either way—eating a lot, eating a little—and always explained why she was veering in one direction or the other. There are unexamined lives and examined lives, and then there are actors’ lives, examined in real time, out loud and ad infinitum, provided that there’s an audience at hand. Jared and I were an obliging audience.

But it wasn’t an obligation. It was a privilege, to be sitting in a booth at Sadlack’s, a deli on Franklin Street that served gigantic submarine sandwiches, with Jared and Abigail, each so commanding, each so self-possessed. I felt bigger around them, but in a good way.

“Be right back,” I said one night, clambering out of our booth and heading to the bathroom in the back of the restaurant.

I’d eaten too much: a whole tuna submarine, when half would have been more than enough. No way was I going to let all of that linger in my stomach. The bathroom at Sadlack’s was for one person only, and it locked, so I had the privacy I needed. I ran water from the sink to camouflage any sound I might make. I got to work immediately. I kept getting speedier and speedier at this.

Within forty-five seconds the sandwich was gone. I flushed the toilet, then went to the sink and scooped some cold water into my mouth to rinse it. I splashed some water on my face. I studied myself in the mirror. I needed to wait a bit longer before returning to the booth. I was still too red.

After a minute, I made a fresh appraisal: pink now. Much better. Almost there.

Thirty seconds later, I was good to go. My eyes were still watery, and faintly bloodshot. But how much of a giveaway, really, was that? Eyes could look the way mine did for any number of reasons. Allergies. Dirty contact lenses. Those were two reasons right off the top of my head.

Jared and Abigail weren’t talking when I returned. And they were looking at each other in a puffed-up, purposeful way. Then they were looking at me.

“So,” Jared asked, “did it taste as good coming up as it did going down?”

“What?” I asked, going through his words one at a time, twice over. Could they have a meaning other than the obvious one? Could he be asking about something other than what I’d just done in the bathroom?

I didn’t think so, but I didn’t cop to anything right away. I feigned confusion.

Jared rolled his eyes.

Abigail threw back her hair, all Rita-Hayworth-in-
Gilda
-like. “Do you really think we don’t know what’s happening when you disappear into the bathroom the minute you stop eating?” she asked.

“When do I do that?” I asked, trying for a tone of indignation, because that’s how the falsely accused were supposed to sound.

“Um, I don’t know, maybe
half the time we eat with you
,” Jared said.

“So I go to the bathroom!” I said.

“And come back looking like you’ve been hit by food poisoning,” Abigail said. She emphasized and drew out the words “food poisoning.” Abigail didn’t just speak; she delivered lines.

I slumped. “You know,” I said, “it’s not such a bad thing.”

“Tell that to Karen Carpenter,” said Jared. She’d died that February. I’d read some of the articles. I’d actually taken a weird sort of comfort from them, because they included details like her possible use of ipecac to make herself vomit. I’d never even heard of ipecac before. The articles included pictures of her looking cadaverous. I’d need another
two
Outward Bound courses and a week of protein shakes to close in on bony.

But, truth be told, the articles—or, rather, the accompanying sidebars and television chatter about eating disorders—did spook me a little. They went through the effects this bulimia thing could have on your skin (bad), hair (worse), gums (eek!) and fingernails (nasty). For me the whole point of throwing up was to look better, and I was having trouble ignoring the prospect of looking worse if I kept at it long enough. A slim worse, true. A worse with—potentially—a thirty-two-inch waist. But worse all the same. That wasn’t my intent.

And now Jared and Abigail were telling me I wasn’t even succeeding in keeping my throwing up a secret. This was an additional problem. Not necessarily in terms of my relationship with the two of them: I suspected that at some level they found my bulimia interesting, and found me more interesting because of it. It was the kind of neurotic flaw in a person that amused Jared and the kind of personal mini-drama that mirrored Abigail’s own tumultuous sense of self.

But if the two of them knew about me, who
else
did? I apparently didn’t have full control over that, and that wasn’t okay with me at all. No one was going to admire or want to sleep with a person known to be thin only by dint of regular vomiting. That person was destined instead to be the object of tittering, the butt of jokes.

“It’s really pretty gross,” Abigail said at one point, and I couldn’t quibble. I’d persuaded myself that it was resourceful, but I always knew that it was disgusting. And at this point it was, indisputably, a habit. I hadn’t planned on letting that happen.

So that was that: I’d stop. And I did, for the most part. Although there’d occasionally be a pig-out so preposterous that I couldn’t let it be or an imminent event so skinniness-demanding that I had to draw on every skinny-making tactic available, I threw up less and less, until I wasn’t throwing up at all anymore. I also stopped keeping a store of laxatives around. It was impossible to acknowledge the grossness of the vomiting without acknowledging that this other waste disposal project wasn’t so pretty, either.

You could see the movie
Flashdance
and marvel at the moxie of the single gal, welding steel by day and stoking lust by night. You could see
Flashdance
and wonder at the ability of a Giorgio Moroder score and an Irene Cara theme song to hold together a threadbare, derivative plot: the distaff
Rocky
,
Cinderella
with a blowtorch.

Or you could see
Flashdance
and think,
a bicycle! I need to get a bicycle!
That’s what the Jennifer Beals character used to propel herself through smoky, gritty Pittsburgh, burning calories and developing muscle tone all day long. The movie didn’t exactly present her mode of transit as a considered beauty regimen; what
Flashdance
was telegraphing was her scrappy determination to make do on a budget too tight for a two-door hatchback. But I detected an additional message—and a profoundly useful one at that. Jennifer looked that good and danced that well because of that bicycle. No doubt about it.

So I bought one toward the end of the summer between freshman and sophomore year, the summer when
Flashdance
ruled the box office. I saw the movie three times, in part to be sure I was fully processing the immense life wisdom it had to share, and in part because I was doing a summer internship in Minneapolis, had somehow ended up in an apartment in a sleepy suburb and was going bonkers with boredom. The internship involved observing police officers at work—the Morehead scholarship administrators thought this would help us understand society better—and I spent hour upon tedious hour riding in the backseats of police cruisers that responded to 911 calls. The cops I accompanied never seemed to catch a homicide or anything like that. They caught domestic disturbances, and left me in the car as they entered yet another home for yet another session of marriage counseling that, as they practiced it, involved handcuffs, headlocks and restraining orders.

The bicycle I bought upon returning to Chapel Hill had ten speeds. It was deep purple and sleek. It had a cradle for a water bottle, because I’d be needing big restorative gulps of fluid to stay hydrated as I pedaled and pedaled, traveling everywhere on the strength of my ever-pumping legs, a metabolic furnace with no off switch. Although I brought my father’s old four-door Mercury Grand Marquis, more tanker than sedan, to school with me that year, I intended to use it only for select nighttime excursions, or long weekend trips, or major shopping, the kind that entailed large objects or bags. Otherwise, I’d be on the bike. I’d be all about the bike.

I was living off campus, in an apartment instead of a dorm room, with a theater major I’d met through Abigail and a computer sciences major I’d met through Jared. Our building was just under five miles from campus: a totally workable bike ride. Just outside the building’s entrance stood a bike rack where I could park and lock my bike. Part of the route from there to campus was a bona fide bike trail. Everything was falling into place.

But on the first day of class, I had a bonehead’s epiphany: North Carolina’s late-summer, early-fall weather—as steamy as a Turkish bath—wasn’t well suited to a bike ride of more than a few blocks, not unless you were okay with arriving at your Shakespeare class looking like someone had just taken a hose to you.

So for the month of September I parked the bike, trading it for Dad’s old tanker. I took the bike out again in October, when I was educated in another of its drawbacks, one unrelated to weather: helmet hair. I had untamable helmet hair. And while such an unruly tangle had worked for Jennifer Beals, it looked laughable on me.

So much for the bike. Onward I went, but not on two wheels.

 

 

 

 

That was the story of college: one obsession after another; an advance followed by a retreat; a breakthrough dissolving into a setback. It was a reprise of the years preceding it and an omen of the years to come.It It could be broken down into the forces and schemes that propelled me toward thinness and the obstacles and quirks that tugged me in the opposite direction.