Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia Read Online Free PDF Page A

skeptical eyebrows lifted as I regaled her with babbled tales of flying just that afternoon, her narrow, ramrod back swishing about the house as I trotted after her, trying to cut through her selective deafness: Mom. Mom . MOM! What ? she'd finally say, Don't shout . I remember her as she tried to read in the living room when I was four, hand to her ear as I randomly banged away on the piano, crowing, “Mom, listen! Mom, listen!” “What is it, Marya?” she asked.
    “I'm playing Bach! Mom!” She lifted herself from the couch and left the room, voice and the scent of Chanel No. 5 trailing behind her:
    “Oh, Marya,” she said. “That isn't Bach.”
    I stopped banging. I thought, I know that .
    In the therapy charts, my parents are quoted as saying that they felt a need to “scale down my expectations.” They apparently mentioned, not once but four times in a single session, plans I made when I was three for a birthday party that was, admittedly, a bit elaborate. Their “scaling down” of my expectations, which seemed to me more like an abiding doubt in my ability to do so much as blow my nose properly, would continue from early childhood until, oh, last year. It had an interesting effect: My behavior became ever more grandiose, while I myself became progressively less certain that I could accomplish even simple tasks, let alone achieve any significant success.2 My parents, I sense, thought I was a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Who knows? Maybe they were right. They say, in the charts: fears, nightmares, too much fantasy .
    The scream in the night, the sobbing as I fumbled my dark run across
    2Whatever success is. For further musings on the mutable meaning of success, see also chapter 5. My own uncertainty about achievement and success, combined with my agitated certainty of its importance, would lead to frenetic workaholism by the time I was sixteen, and would also feed into my idea that an eating disorder—or “thinness”—was the only success that I would ever fully achieve.
    the endless house to the door of my parents' bedroom, the incoherent rambling about monsters that were stealing pennies from my penny jar, the desperate weeping: I won't know how many I have now, I howled. My father, stubbled and striped-pajamaed, sitting sleepily up in bed, carting me back to my room, sitting by my bed, singing me songs in the dark until I fell asleep. The tape recorder playing books-on-tape that I placed under my pillow. I would lay my head on it, listening to the story over and over as the night wore on, sure that if I kept listening long enough, morning would come, but if I did not, the horrible prayer would come true: If I should die before I wake—
    The shrinks scrawl these words on their notepads: Magical thinking .
    Their books call it “a disposition to regard the metaphoric as the concrete” and “to attribute primitive magical powers” to objects.3
    One might, for example, attribute magical powers to food. For example, if I am three years old and standing on a chair making myself an apple sandwich, and if I eat this apple sandwich in precisely twenty bites , no more no less, then I will be happy. If I eat it in more than twenty bites, I will be sad. If I am nineteen years old, sixty pounds, and eating a carton of yogurt a day, and it takes me precisely two hours to eat this carton of yogurt, and I smoke a cigarette every fifteen minutes to prove that I can stop eating, then I will be safe, retaining my dictatorial grip on my body, my life, my world. By contrast, if I so much as taste a bit of unsafe food on my tongue, it will not travel through my body in the usual biological fashion but will magically make me grow, like Alice taking a bite of the wrong cake.
    It is not uncommon for young children to develop elaborate, self-protective systems to give themselves a sense of control over their surroundings: imaginary friends, particular arrangements of stuffed animals in their arms in bed. Eventually,