Born Round Page 7

  “And when you find him, are you going to hide behind the car to take your clothes off?” she asked. It was a reference to an episode she couldn’t stop ribbing me about. She and Amy had been with Mark and me in a parking lot where he and I had to change our shirts before meeting the rest of our family for dinner out. While Mark took off his T-shirt and put on a button-down in front of them, untroubled by their presence, I walked to the far side of the car and squatted slightly so I was completely hidden from them. The parking lot wasn’t a pool, and this wasn’t a swim meet: I didn’t have to let others see what paunch and love handles I still had.

  The next fall Mark left for Amherst College, a sticker Mom was thrilled to put on the back window of her car. Harry joined me at Loomis as a freshman, becoming my new partner for the commute. He also became a new member of the swim team, of which I was now cocaptain, and decided to concentrate on diving instead of the other events: it suited his talent for solitary focus. But his real passion was Star Trek. He’d sometimes invite fellow “trekkies” from school to the house on weekends for all-night Star Trek viewing marathons.

  I wrote letters to Ann, who had gone off to college in Washington, D.C. On weekend nights I hung out with Adrian, as much as he would let me. On weeknights at home I often tucked in Adelle, who was now eleven, and whose bed had a lacy, undulating canopy over it. I’d study that canopy as I snuggled with her and sang her my favorite slow songs from the radio. We’d been doing this for years and I could tell it was about to end: she liked it less than she had at eight. She was getting so much older so fast and in so many ways, including her growing worry about her weight, with which she struggled. That was part of our bond, part of what separated us from Mark and Harry.

  But I couldn’t yet talk to her about the things I’d shared with Ann, and with Ann gone I needed a new confidante. Soon after the start of senior year, I got one. She turned out to be more than just a confidante. She was my unofficial diet guru.

  Beth came to Loomis as a senior, transferring from a public high school, to try to bolster her chances of getting into Yale, on which she’d set her sights. She was among the slight minority of Loomis kids who boarded there rather than living at home. She had to: her family’s house in southern Connecticut was nearly ninety minutes away.

  She was a swimmer, a good one, and that was how we got to know each other. But I was drawn to her mainly because of her appearance: the oddity of it, the way it didn’t add up.

  Her height matched mine: nearly five feet, eleven inches. Due to genes and sports, she had the broad shoulders and thick upper arms of a football player. The thighs, too. And though her stomach was flat, her waist was broad. That was the genes more than the sports. In some ways they’d been cruel to her.

  In other ways they’d been magnificent. She had a gorgeous face. I once read a profile of the actress Elizabeth McGovern—I’m not sure if this was just before or just after I met Beth—and its writer described her as having skin so flawless a butterfly could skate on it. That was the skin Beth had. The curve of her jaw was sharp. Her cheekbones were high and the creamy flesh right below them slightly sunken. Her eyes were the color of a Tiffany box. And if she’d nudged her hair toward a pale shade seldom seen outside Scandinavian countries and strip clubs—well, didn’t eyes like hers call for blondness like that?

  I picked up instantly on her awareness of the discrepancy between how she looked from the neck up and how she looked from the neck down. I recognized the signs. Like me she favored loose clothing. Like me she spent less time than other swimmers strolling around the pool deck in a bathing suit and hustled from the locker room into the water, or from the water to wherever a T-shirt or warm-up suit was waiting. In the school cafeteria she assembled strange combinations of food or walked the length of the salad bar rattling off the calorie counts of everything in it, citing one of the many nutrition books she’d read. She was waging a war with her body, and obviously felt estranged from it. I knew how that was.

  My own anger at not being naturally thin—and at having this hunger that threatened to tug me ever further from thinness—opened the door to grievances over not being so many other things. I was unwilling to accept how slowly and lightly I tanned, so I bought a tiny, cheap sunlamp, put it on the desk in my bedroom and sat closer to it than the instructions deemed permissible, feeling the bulb’s fire on my face, which seemed to crackle. I sprayed store-bought bleaches in my hair, then blamed the brassy, uneven outcome on swimming pool chlorine. My class-mates bought the excuse, but Mom couldn’t abide the brassiness. She dragged me to her salon, saying that if I was intent on being a blond, I should at least be a credible, presentable blond, and she had her hairdresser frost my hair by pulling strands of it through this weird cap with scores of tiny holes. She dragged Beth along with us, having made the executive decision that Beth should have her own shade of platinum toned down.

  For my high school yearbook,

  I’m suddenly and magically blond.

  One day Beth announced that she was starting a new diet, but not just any diet. I was intrigued.

  “Let’s both do it,” I said, suddenly convinced that together we’d reach what neither of us had reached alone: the wondrous Xanadu of the willfully emaciated.

  She told me she had a book in her dormitory room that was just what we needed, and later that day she put a thin paperback in my hands.

  “Read this,” she said. “Then we’ll fast.”

  The book talked about the evil that sweets did to blood sugar levels, the spikes and valleys they created, the insatiable hungers they bred. It recommended a three-day cleanse—no food, only water—that would break the cycle, purify the body. It promised mental clarity in the aftermath, along with an ability to manage cravings, if they even returned.

  “When do we start?” I asked.

  We chose a three-day span that didn’t nudge up against any important swim meets or tests. Then we embarked on our mission.

  “You’re doing what?” Mom asked when I refused dinner on day one.

  “Fasting,” I responded.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said. Even Mom had limits.

  “This book Beth gave me says a person can last a really long time without food,” I explained. “Longer than we think.”

  “If you want to diet,” she said, “why don’t you do low-carbohydrate?”

  “I don’t want to do Atkins,” I said. “I need to purify myself.” I imagined these little bubbles, each carrying a sign that said FAT-MAKING TOXIN, cascading from my body, oozing out my pores.

  “We should go to Weight Watchers,” Mom said, my own madness pushing her closer to sanity. “I’ll pay for Weight Watchers. I’ll do it with you.”

  “It won’t cleanse me the way a fast will,” I argued. I had gone without food for only about eighteen hours at that point, but I was suddenly an expert. A messiah.

  “I’ll broil you some chicken,” she said.

  “No.”

  “I’ll take off the skin,” she offered.

  “I’m fasting.”

  “Just eat the white meat,” she pleaded, “not the dark meat.”

  “I’m only going to have some hot water with lemon. I’m allowed to have lemon.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said, and stormed away. She hated losing. I figured she’d do something mean, like make a fresh batch of brownies, just to get the better of me. But she let me be, no doubt figuring I’d cave soon enough.

  On day two I struggled. The novelty of the experiment had worn off, and my stomach gurgled and seethed, like lava in an active volcano. I also began to feel light-headed, but chalked it up to euphoria, to the purge of those toxins from my sugar-racked body. I resolved to fast like this once a month. It would be the cornerstone of a thinner, better life.

  At school I quizzed Beth. “You really haven’t eaten anything?”

  “Nothing,” she said, but I wasn’t sure I believed her. She didn’t have the winnowed midriff that I was determined to believe I had
already achieved.

  “Not even a Diet Coke?” I asked. “You know that diet drinks aren’t allowed!”

  “Just water,” she said. “With some lemon. And I don’t feel hungry at all!” I saw her steal a nibble of a cuticle. Hmm. Was that cheating? Was it tasty?

  At the beginning of day three, I slipped.

  I snuck a few crackers around breakfast time. I drank some milk around lunchtime, because my stomach-volcano was poised for its own Pompeii. At dinnertime I accepted that I’d strayed from the plan and rationalized that I might as well stray some more. I ate a burger. But I didn’t put the beef on a bun. I had to preserve some shred of dignity.

  Although my clothes felt looser at the end of three days, I knew I couldn’t do this fasting thing again. It was too grueling. I told Beth, confessing in the process that I’d cheated a little, and of course she had a plan B.

  “Protein powder,” she said, producing a new paperback filled with recipes for fat-burning shakes you could make with nonfat powders, water and a few low-cal flavor additives—some strawberries, say, or banana slices—in a blender. Over the following weeks we made a bunch of these, but they didn’t really work, quite possibly because we kept sneaking things like vanilla ice cream and peanut butter into them, to obscure their chalky, yeasty essence.

  Beth was like a mysterious witch doctor with a stock of potions that never ran out. Pills, too. She’d found someone in her dormitory with a pipeline to amphetamines, these tiny pale blue ovals with dark blue flecks. They looked like shrunken robin’s eggs.

  We swallowed them to stay up all night in advance of important exams. We swallowed them before some swim meets, along with capsules of bee pollen, which we’d decided was another energy booster. And we swallowed them to keep from eating. They did the job nicely. I was slimmer senior year than I had been junior year, and it was largely thanks to Beth and her little eggs.

  Maybe because of Beth, I also set my sights on Yale. We both got in, and briefly fantasized about the eating pacts and years of leanness ahead of us. But I also ended up winning a merit-based scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from the Morehead Foundation, which provided an entirely free education, plus spending money and other perks, to private-school students whom it wanted to lure away from the Ivy League and down to Carolina.

  I took the scholarship. Although Dad and Mom had more than enough money to pay for college and insisted that I not consider the cost, I couldn’t ignore it. I figured Mom could live with a Carolina sticker next to the Amherst one. And I reasoned that a state school in the South would actually be more of an adventure for someone who’d gone to a Northeastern prep school than Yale would.

  On top of everything else, the Morehead came with interesting, foundation-funded summer adventures: an Outward Bound wilderness survival course before freshman year, a “public safety” internship riding around with big-city police officers before sophomore year, foreign travel after senior year.

  I left for the Outward Bound course—twenty-four days in the mountains of Oregon—a few weeks after my Loomis graduation. Right before I went into the wild I talked on the phone with Beth, who was back home in southern Connecticut. She told me she wished she could go, too.

  “You wouldn’t last an hour without your lip gloss,” I teased.

  “It’d be worth it,” she said.

  “Exactly which part would be worth it?”

  “All of it.”

  “You mean the sleeping in a sleeping bag for weeks on end?”

  “You’re missing the point.”

  “You mean the lack of access to a bathroom or, for that matter, toilet paper?”

  “All for a higher cause.”

  “What,” I said, “are you talking about?”

  “Aren’t you going to be hiking up steep hills and mountainsides every day, for hours on end?”

  “Unfortunately, yes! With a heavy pack on my back.”

  “How heavy?”

  “I don’t know. Someone told me it could be as heavy as thirty-five pounds, maybe forty.”

  “Perfect.”

  “Are we talking about the same thing? Earth to Beth! Come back, Beth!”

  She laughed dismissively. “Hours of hiking, with a forty-pound pack, every day for several weeks,” she said, going back through it all. “Think about it.”

  I did, and realized what she was getting at. “By the time I get back,” I began, but she cut me off, finishing the thought.

  “You are going to be a rail,” she said.

  “There’s no way that won’t happen, is there?” I asked. “I mean, no way at all?”

  “I’m drinking nothing but protein shakes the whole time you’re away,” she said.

  “For twenty-four days?”

  “Well, maybe every other day.”

  “OK, that’s manageable. Lay off the peanut butter and ice cream.”

  I knew she wouldn’t, because she was just like me.

  On the seventh or so day of Outward Bound, I walked in soggy boots from the tarp under which I would be spending the night to the tarp belonging to Dan, one of the two instructors for my group of eleven campers. I told him I had something serious to discuss.

  “At the start of this,” I reminded him, “you said that there were ways—if someone in the group got hurt, for example, or if someone had another kind of medical problem or a really pressing need—to get that person out of the wilderness midcourse.”

  “Yes,” said Dan.

  “Well, I need to get out,” I told him. “I can’t do this anymore.”

  By that moment, I’d long stopped thinking about all the great exercise I was getting. If my scratchy wool pants were looser on me than when the course had started, or if there was a bigger pouch of excess material where my scratchy wool shirt hung over my stomach, I didn’t notice or care. My misery blotted out anything else.

  Its source? Well, let’s start with the snow. In late June. No one had warned me about it. And somehow I hadn’t processed the fact that the mountain-climbing element of my particular Outward Bound course, in the Central Cascade Mountains of Oregon, meant high elevations, and that high elevations meant snow, even in summer.

  Snow, in turn, meant wet boots. And wet socks beneath them. Wet pants, too, along with cold fingers, chapped hands—the whole winter works. At night the temperature dropped low, and we didn’t have tents, just these slanting tarps, which provided protection from anything falling straight down from the sky, like snow or rain, but not from frigid gusts of air coming in sideways. I turned my sleeping bag into a body bag, zipped all the way over my head. And if I didn’t doze off right away I lay there in utter darkness, entombed, with almost no range of movement, listening to the wind shriek and the evergreens thrash. Fifteen minutes became a lifetime. An hour was an eternity.

  On the first and second days of the course, and maybe on the third day as well, the temperature had been relatively pleasant, and we hadn’t climbed high enough to hit snow-covered ground yet, so I could have chosen to sleep without the bag zipped up all the way. I zipped it nonetheless. I’d noticed that our wilderness area was home to a teeming population of ants, along with other, bigger, uglier bugs. And I’d convinced myself that they’d crawl all over me at night if I wasn’t vigilant, if I didn’t create an impermeable barrier between me and them. Never mind how hot it got in that sleeping bag. If I was going to feel something crawling down my leg, I’d take a trickle of sweat over the kind of hard-shelled, glittering, poisonous black beetle I’d seen several times along the trail. The poisonous part was merely a suspicion, but my philosophy about bugs had always been: assume the worst, and reach for the Raid.

  In the wilderness I didn’t have any Raid. Any shampoo, either, because there weren’t any showers in which to use it, and there wouldn’t be any showers for the entire twenty-four days. This fact I had indeed processed in advance, but I’d shrugged it off as unimportant, because I knew that a wilderness area would have streams at the least, and q
uite possibly narrow rivers or lakes, and I’d planned on dipping into one every other day or so and keeping sufficiently clean that way. I hadn’t gambled on water temperatures well below sixty degrees. When I lowered my hand into the first stream we passed by, and instantly felt my fingers go numb, I realized I was going to have to get comfortable with a grungy, funky, smelly Frank.

  But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. My scalp itched from the way my oily hair was matted against it; my cheeks itched from the stubble of my incipient beard. My face felt as if it were not just caked with dirt but somehow calcified by it. By day seven I wasn’t sure I even qualified as human anymore.

  I had blisters on my heels. I’d never been a big walker, and my boots didn’t fit quite right. At night I’d take them off and see dark brown spots on the backs of my socks: bloodstains. The stains got darker each day, even though I’d cover the blisters with adhesive bandages. I bled right through them.

  “I’m sorry,” I told Dan during my talk with him. “But I’m finished.”

  “What you are,” said Dan, “is a spoiled brat.”

  “I’m spoiled?” I said, flabbergasted. “Spoiled? Because I don’t enjoy walking for miles on end with bloody feet, wet clothes and close to fifty pounds on my back?” It probably wasn’t that much—the kerosene stove and the rock-climbing gear and the sleeping bag and the too-few changes of clothes—but it was a lot.

  “I’ve never been camping before,” I continued, trying to make Dan understand how hard all of this was for me. “Not even in a Winnebago. And I’ve never, ever been able to tie knots.” We’d had two knot-tying lessons already in the course, and there were more to come. And they mattered, not just because the right knots kept your tarp from fluttering away in the middle of the night. The right knots kept you from tumbling down a cliff to your death during rock-climbing exercises, of which we’d done several, God help us.