Born Round Page 9

  And then, a split second later, without any conscious transition, I hoped I’d throw up. It hit me: if I threw up, the evening’s eating would be expunged.

  I was already on the precipice of getting sick. With a little effort, could I get myself over the edge?

  Yes, yes, I could.

  By the time the semester was over and I headed home for the holidays, I was terrific at it.

  Do you want lasagna?” Mom asked me on my first day back in Avon. “I don’t really care,” I told her.

  “I bet Mark will want lasagna,” she said. “Mark always wants lasagna.” In fact Mom had begun making lasagna for the entire Amherst College swimming team. Anytime the team had a competition anywhere near Avon, she insisted that Mark, his teammates and his coaches stop by for dinner on the way back to school. She made lasagna for forty to fifty. By carefully mapping out the process and doing much of the preparation in advance, she was able to watch all but the last thirty minutes of the competition, race home ahead of the swimmers and have the lasagna ready for them within forty-five minutes of the team’s bus pulling into our driveway. It was an impressive feat, and she knew it. She reveled in it.

  “Lasagna’s fine,” I said.

  “I’ll make enough for leftovers,” Mom said, “since you and Mark will be home for a while. What do you want? Do you want chicken divan? You must want chicken divan.”

  Mom had this ridiculous recipe for chicken divan—involving not just sherry and sour cream but also cans of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup and buttered Ritz cracker crumbs—that had an effect on me not unlike that of violin music on the Frankenstein monster. Whenever she made chicken divan, the rest of the family ate about half the pan. Over the course of dinner and then a snack two hours later and then another snack two hours after that, I took care of the rest. Chicken divan didn’t have a shelf life in our house. I saw to that.

  Since Mark and I were now in college and couldn’t avail ourselves regularly of her food, Mom treated our holiday visits as Make-A-Wish Foundation moments, only all the wishes involved eating. She cooked anything and everything she assumed we wanted: lasagna, chicken divan, club sandwiches, chicken livers wrapped in bacon, scallops wrapped in bacon, and her newest experiment in bacon wrapping, hot dogs wrapped in bacon, which were arguably as close as she could come to wrapping bacon in bacon without being flagrantly redundant. Before she would wrap the hot dogs in bacon, she’d use a knife to carve grooves in them and fill the grooves with cheese. Her pig-on-pig action apparently needed a little cow.

  Me, my parents and my siblings during my college years.

  I’m suddenly and magically the thin one.

  Something else, too, had joined her repertoire: homemade Egg McMuffins. One of the glories of Mom’s approach to cooking was that she could get just as excited by lowbrow dishes as highbrow ones, bringing as much passion and precision to a faithful, by-the-numbers replica of a fast-food classic as to something torn from the pages of Julia Child. Although her beef Wellington was superb, her coquilles St. Jacques estimable, and her manicotti so fluffy and light they were fit for angels, she felt no greater vanity about these dishes than about her chicken divan or her bacon-wrapped hot dogs.

  Or her Egg McMuffins. She thought it was a kick on weekend mornings to have an electric warming basket—the kind used for dinner rolls—filled with the foil-wrapped egg and Canadian bacon sandwiches associated with on-the-run, on-the-road breakfasts of extreme convenience.

  “Aren’t mine better?” she’d ask my siblings and me or our friends—she especially liked to make Egg McMuffins if friends had slept over. She’d note that the English muffins on her Egg McMuffins were crisper than those on the ones at McDonald’s, and the egg in one of hers was less flat and dried out, as if besting a fast-food chain were a laudable triumph. Sometimes she’d offer to poach the egg to order, so that it had a firm yolk or a soft, runny one: take your pick!

  “You don’t have to have one of the McMuffins from the warmer,” she’d tell an overnight guest—overnight guests always got extra-special culinary treatment—as she gestured to the basket in which the already-made McMuffins sat. “I’ll make a fresh one!”

  While waiting for an answer, she’d tilt her head back and take a long swig of Diet Rite, from her third can in two hours.

  Dad, overhearing the conversation from his desk in the nearby study, would shout: “I ate my McMuffin from the warmer!” He was shading the truth. He hadn’t stopped at just one McMuffin.

  Mom would pretend not to hear him. “Soft yolk or hard yolk?” she’d ask the guest, sometimes adding, gratuitously: “McDonald’s doesn’t give you that choice.”

  After the guest departed, as Mom tidied the kitchen, she’d say, “I bet your friend doesn’t get McMuffins like that at home.”

  Dad, taking a break from his work in the study, would wrap her in a hug and say, “Nobody has a mom like your mom, huh? Nobody.”

  Then he’d ask her if she’d decided what we were having for dinner. It was already ten a.m., after all. How could he plan the day’s eating if he didn’t know?

  On my winter break from Carolina, I ate whatever Mom made, because this was vacation, and because the bathroom that connected my and Mark’s bedrooms was a very safe place. I’d lock the door on his side, so he wouldn’t walk in. I’d turn on the stereo in my room and set the volume to a level slightly louder than usual, to conceal any gagging or choking, but not so loud that Mom would show up to complain. I’d heave to the strains of Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf”—the cheeky choice was deliberate—or Tom Petty’s “Don’t Do Me Like That.”

  At Grandma’s house on Christmas Eve, she asked me if I missed her all the way down in North Carolina.

  “Constantly,” I said.

  She put another cutlet on my plate.

  Aunt Vicki asked me how I liked my roommate.

  “He’s OK,” I said.

  She gave me a tin of brownies for the road.

  Aunt Carolyn asked me what I was going to major in.

  “English, probably,” I said.

  She wrapped up an assortment of Christmas cookies for me.

  Almost a month into the spring semester, by which time I’d almost forgotten about him, Scott called.

  I had met him—sort of—just before the Christmas break, at a party in the offices of the Daily Tar Heel. He’d come with two of the women on staff, and all night long we’d thrown looks at each other, but we’d never managed to talk. I’d subsequently learned his name from the women, and he’d apparently learned mine, along with my phone number. Because here he was, on the other end of the line, asking me if I wanted to come over to his apartment for a drink sometime.

  I did, and made a point of setting the date a solid week into the future, so I could get ready for it. Every day leading up to it, I went to the track, and each time I ran more than two miles, pushing myself up to three, even three and a half.

  I took Ex-Lax. One day I took too much—nearly quadruple the recommended dose—and a few hours later, while walking across campus, had to stop, steady myself against a tree and press every relevant muscle into the service of warding off catastrophe. This was crazy, I told myself. I had gone too far. I had to shape up. From now on, I pledged, never more than three times the recommended dose.

  With the date approaching, I didn’t just want to be smaller. I had to be smaller, because if I got my wish and got to see and feel another person’s body in the way I wanted to, I’d have to let him see and feel mine. I’d be more exposed than I’d been in a Speedo; I’d have no floppy T-shirt or billowing towel to run to. I was as terrified as I was excited.

  By date night I didn’t feel as thin as I’d hoped to, so I wore a bulky black Windbreaker over my clothes.

  “Let me take your coat,” Scott said.

  “That’s OK,” I said, insisting that I was cold.

  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 prosp
ect 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.