Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite by Frank Bruni Page A

eating; the amount of privacy they offer; whether—if they’re public bathrooms with more than one stall—you can hear the door swing open and the footfall of a visitor with enough advance notice to stop what you’re doing and keep from being found out.
    You need to be conscious of time. There’s no such thing as bulimia on the fly; a span of at least ten minutes in the bathroom is optimal, because you may need five of them to linger at the sink, splash cold water on your face and let the redness in it die down. You should always carry a toothbrush and toothpaste, integral to eliminating telltale signs of your transgression and to rejoining polite society without any offense to it. Bulimia is a logistical and tactical challenge as much as anything else. It demands planning.
    My preferred bathroom was in a back corner of the student union at Carolina, right above the office of the campus newspaper, where I was first a movie and music critic, then the assistant arts editor, and then—toward the end of freshman year—an editorial writer. It was a public bathroom with multiple stalls, but the stalls were a decent distance from the door, and the door opened noisily. Few people used this bathroom, anyway. I could walk to it in about three minutes from the university cafeteria, so neither lunch nor dinner had to sit in my stomach for long. I could get there even faster from the newspaper offices, where I spent many hours a day, and where I’d sometimes eat a slice of pizza or a half tuna salad sandwich too many. With a quick jaunt up the stairs, these excesses could be erased.
    I thought that I was clever—that I was doing something lots of other people would if they just had the nerve, the poise, the industry. I knew it was supposed to be dangerous: I’d read stories in newspapers and magazines about this behavior, always characterized as a disorder, an affliction. It was these stories that had given me the idea. From them I concluded that people who threw up their meals tended to get carried away with what was an otherwise solid, tenable plan, especially if they fell prey to anorexia as well, and I was an unlikely candidate for that. Even a fast of merely three days had foiled me. But if a person just threw up the occasional meal, the meal that had gotten out of hand, well, what was the harm in that?
    And consider the benefits . My willpower could waver, I could gobble down more than I had meant to, and I wouldn’t have to go to bed haunted by the looming toll on my waistline, or wake up the next morning owing the gods of weight management even more of a sacrifice than I had owed them the day before. Throwing up was my safety valve. My mulligan.
    It usually happened like this: I’d go to the cafeteria, begin to assemble my dinner. I’d get a salad, or something similarly virtuous. I’d pick at it slowly, hoisting the picayune cherry tomatoes and wan slices of cucumber into my mouth one at a time, in slow motion, and then chewing and chewing and chewing, as if there were some odometer rigged to my jaw and I could stave off hunger by pushing the numbers on it high enough.
    There’d be a few jagged cubes of feta in the salad, each one an event I would pause and savor for half a minute. They and the croutons, all four of them, were islands of excitement in a dead sea.
    Upon finishing the salad, I wouldn’t be anywhere close to satisfied. I wouldn’t be in the same hemisphere as satisfied. And the sound of that dissatisfaction, like a drumbeat in the center of my brain, would grow louder and louder.
    Pum-pum. I could have had a burger. I had seen the cafeteria workers cooking burgers on a griddle. There were burgers to be ordered. I could have had one.
    Pum-PUM. Macaroni and cheese. There’d been macaroni and cheese. It looked sort of congealed and stiff at the edges. I love it when it’s sort of congealed and stiff at the edges.
    PUM-PUM. Remember the smell of the hot oil that still clung to the fried chicken on the