9th
chapter 3 : SKIN & BONES
My sophomore year in high school I was on the winter track team for exactly two weeks. During one practice, before I knew it would be my last, I collapsed on the side of the track during a half-mile sprint. The whole team ran over to my limp body and asked if I was all right, but I just kept staring up at the pale sky, wondering why the winter clouds were so substantial and puffy. I finally sat up when my coach joined the crowd of gawkers, and my first instinct was to apologize.
“Sorry coach!” I thought that would be that, and we’d get back to running. I was wrong.
He raised his voice, “Gem, you can’t do this, you can’t be on this team if you can’t eat. You need energy. You are unhealthy and it’s dangerous. I can’t have you running on empty. I can’t have you fainting. You have to choose. Realize what you’re doing! Go change and go home!”
My coach never explicitly told me I was off the team. He gave me a choice, and we both knew I had already made it, and that for me it wasn’t even a choice at all. But I understood where he was coming from. If I did get hurt, if I fell down and never got up, he would be responsible, even though it essentially would be my fault. I appreciated his concern and that he wasn’t overbearing about it, so I didn’t want to get him in trouble. He was also my Honors English teacher, which made it a little awkward. He’d always keep me after class and ask “How are you doing?” and I’d say “Great” like I was unaware of the subtext, but I knew all he really wanted to know was if I was eating.
That afternoon I walked away from the track and field, and never returned once. On my way past the bleachers, my friend ran up to me and said she saw what happened. She grabbed my cold hands intimately, as if she was concerned. I was sure she was going to ask if I was okay, but with fascination and disgust, all she ended up muttering was “God, even your fingers look anorexic.”
I loved and I hated all the attention my bones would get me. This one time when I was at my aunt’s house, my cousin and I were lying on the floor watching MTV reruns. A commercial for M&M’s had just started. It was the one where the two giant M&Ms are deprived of color until they make their advertising pitch; after, the should-be yellow M&M drinks water and is suddenly revived with color. Anyway, this commercial started and I looked over at my cousin who was staring intently at the screen, letting the dancing shapes control the motion of his pupils. It was like he was being brainwashed. Maybe I felt uncomfortable, or maybe I was just bored, but I put my hand on his arm and enthusiastically requested, “Watch this!”
I lifted my shirt to reveal my stomach, and smiled at the individual ribs violently protruding outwards against my thin layer of flesh. It was beautiful, like they striving to break free, one by one. I loved it, so I didn’t understand why my cousin’s face cringed as he shut his eyes and started wailing like a mad man. In a way he made me feel like one of those bloody car wrecks on the highway that cause traffic jams forcing people drive past real slow, because despite his effort to look away, I could’ve sworn he kept trying to take another peek between his fingers.
“Cool, huh?” I asked.
He yelled at me to stop. He stormed out of the room without looking back.
Why do they always walk away?, I thought. I fixed my attention back to the screen, where the yellow M&M just morphed from black and white to yellow. I smiled. I always got a kick out of those talking M&Ms.
On my fifteenth birthday my aunt, uncle and cousins spent the evening at my house. My brother came home from Yale to join the small celebration. I had been pretty used to the underlying unspoken tension, and the way they all looked at me like I was one of those starving children on TV people always wanted to feed. Ever since my teachers went to the guidance counselor to suggest I had a ‘terrible eating disorder’ and should ‘seek proper treatment,’ my parents never ceased scrutinizing me. They had known I was wavering the line between sickness and health, but never realized how bad I was until Mrs. Dunne from school called our home. I thought I had deceived them with lies and baggy clothing, and for a while there maybe I did. But now they were on my case, asking daily questions about when-where-and-what I ate, if I was hungry or wanted to go to my favorite restaurant. Were they crazy? I hated restaurants. Sometimes their comments were passive aggressive, but other times full of genuine, loving concern. They didn’t know what to do or how to act and—aside from their intent to ‘fix me’—I think that’s what bothered me the most. Even when they didn’t say anything at all I could feel their eyes clawing at my bones. It started to get on my nerves
But on my fifteenth birthday, I was grateful to be surrounded by my family. We played silly games, told funny stories, teased one another, and in those moments I felt that much closer to childhood. I basked in the comfort. After a while, my brothers and cousins migrated upstairs to play videogames, but I went to the living room to lie on the couch and nurse a headache that had arrived just in time to wish me happy birthday. All the adults were huddled around the kitchen table, a few feet away from me. I didn’t realize they thought I was upstairs until I heard my father in a low and serious voice ask his sister, “How does she look? Still too thin, right?” My aunt must have shaken her head to agree, because my father continued, “Yeah, we need to make her eat or something. It’s a shame. She looks just awful.” I bit my bottom lip hard, hoping to distract myself from the anguish sweeping over me. I peeked my head over the couch and saw my mother staring out the window with desperate, disappointed eyes. I popped up from the couch and startled them with my presence. They smiled at me anxiously and remained overwhelmingly silent. I ran to my room in tears.
An hour passed before I came downstairs, recomposed and ready to pretend like nothing happened. They were waiting for me at the table, like a united front ready to take me down.
“You missed dinner. I made it for your birthday,” my mother sighed.
“Sorry mom. I’m not hungry right now, maybe later.”
My father let out a cold ironic laugh, and placed a bowl of pasta on the table. He pushed it in front of me.
“Eat it.” He insisted, both warmly and forcefully. I felt my whole family glare at me from around the table. I could swear they were all watching. Dad, mom, uncle, aunt, Pete, cousins… all waiting for me to grab the jam-packed bowl of carbohydrates and red sauce, all waiting for me to pig out like I hadn’t eaten in days. And I hadn’t. I didn’t know if they were joking.
“No, that’s okay.” I refused.
“Gem. We said eat the pasta.” My uncle wouldn’t take no for an answer. Once when I was four he cut off my hair because I kept chewing on my bangs. A disgusting habit, but it was my hair and I was only a child. He was an intimidating man, a police officer, and when he said to eat the pasta I knew better than to defy him. This was no joke. I was only a child.
So at my fifteenth birthday party, I sat on a stool in front of my entire family and started to scoop spaghetti up from the bowl and into my mouth. It hurt my jaw to chew, to move up and down in sickeningly repetitive motions. I swallowed and felt the ball of dough scratch against the walls of my throat. And then another forkful. I started to breathe heavily and when I realized I was weeping, I shut my eyes tightly and tried to pretend like I was all alone again in the dark with car sirens singing me to sleep. For a while I left my own body and sat on the other side of the table, joined my family in viewing the spectacle: skin and bones and bad posture, a feeble girl on her fifteenth birthday, barely able to hold herself upright on a kitchen stool. Why are her eyes so sad? With all this attention why’s she so detached? And then just like that I was her again, having to pretend my whole family wasn’t watching me weep while I choked on pasta and tears on my birthday. I whimpered weakly and wiped away the red sauce that had blended with the thick streams dripping down my cheekbones. A fine shade of pink, I am sure. I pushed the bowl back across the table and walked to my room in silence.
