Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher Page A
Authors: Marya Hornbacher
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Softsoap cover. You scrub hard, sniffing your hands and forearms. You look at your face. Thank you, God. No puffiness, eyes a little watery, but not red or bulging. You rinse your mouth with water, then look under the sink for mouthwash, find it, slosh it around. Redo your lipstick. Smile at the mirror, eyes bright and wide. Open the door, go downstairs.
Your friends turn and say, laughing, “Why was the water on?”
In Minnesota houses, water pipes run downward through the center of the house and end in the basement. Three floors away, you can hear water running. You laugh, and say, “I'm paranoid about people hearing me pee.” Everyone laughs. Your boyfriend, teasing, says,
“We heard anyway.”
You freeze, still smiling.
“No, I'm kidding,” he says. You laugh nervously, take your place beside him, sit on your hands to hide the shaking, the nicks on the knuckles of the first two fingers of your right hand.
Self-induced vomiting…causes abrasions on the back of the dominant hand or knuckles. Calluses form, creating what in medical parlance is called “Russell's sign.”13
My boyfriend was sweet. We had a little puppy love. My parents and his parents panicked. You are too young for all this, they said.
“All this” amounted to teddy bears at Valentine's Day, Saturday afternoons spent
13Ibid., 263.
sitting on the couch holding hands, watching movies while my father found countless excuses to traipse through the room, peering at us suspiciously. Kissing when he left, whispering dramatic things in long late-night phone calls, passing love notes in the halls. All was very chaste. I began to feel like I was wearing a sign on my forehead that said FUCKED UP in big neon letters. There was no visible reason for his parents to distrust me, nor for my parents to distrust my involvement with him. I had the feeling they knew something was wrong with me, some reason why I was problematic, but they couldn't pinpoint it.
The same held true at school. Rumors about me—that I was pregnant, I was easy, I was doing drugs—flew during seventh grade, which infuriated me, because none of these were true, yet. School was hell. My grades fell from As to Cs and Ds, the occasional F. I was in trouble all of the time. I was talking back, sitting in the back of the room with my head on the desk, reading a novel in my lap, whispering, passing notes, getting into screaming fights with boys who pissed me off. I developed a severe intolerance for any sort of irritant, especially the “in-crowd” boys, who were the main sources of those whispered rumors. These were boys who had money, played hockey, pinched girls' asses, told dirty jokes to make people blush, and never failed to solicit a loud string of obscenities from me. I spent a fair amount of time in detention, in-school suspension, or just plain kicked out.
Sitting in detention one day after school, I was reading and eating a bag of chips. The teacher didn't know it was the first thing I'd eaten that day, and would also be the last. She didn't know I was bulimic.
She was a nice person who encouraged my writing, often calling me into her classroom to say, in a very concerned voice, that I wasn't living up to my Potential. There was nothing wrong with her, so I don't blame her for this. She said, wagging her finger at me as I munched away on my bag of chips, “A moment on the lips, forever on the hips.”
I stopped midchew. Looked at her hips. She had big hips. She smiled at me. I smiled back. On my way out the door, I dropped my bag of chips in the garbage can, headed straight for the bathroom, threw up in the stall farthest from the door. Got dizzy as hell as I walked down the hall, footsteps echoing weirdly. I stumbled as I went down the stairs, hit
ting my head on the wall. I rubbed the bump and watched the patterns in the tile floor as they seemed to slide closer to my face, then veer away.
It was about then that I began to have regular, severe migraine headaches that
Your friends turn and say, laughing, “Why was the water on?”
In Minnesota houses, water pipes run downward through the center of the house and end in the basement. Three floors away, you can hear water running. You laugh, and say, “I'm paranoid about people hearing me pee.” Everyone laughs. Your boyfriend, teasing, says,
“We heard anyway.”
You freeze, still smiling.
“No, I'm kidding,” he says. You laugh nervously, take your place beside him, sit on your hands to hide the shaking, the nicks on the knuckles of the first two fingers of your right hand.
Self-induced vomiting…causes abrasions on the back of the dominant hand or knuckles. Calluses form, creating what in medical parlance is called “Russell's sign.”13
My boyfriend was sweet. We had a little puppy love. My parents and his parents panicked. You are too young for all this, they said.
“All this” amounted to teddy bears at Valentine's Day, Saturday afternoons spent
13Ibid., 263.
sitting on the couch holding hands, watching movies while my father found countless excuses to traipse through the room, peering at us suspiciously. Kissing when he left, whispering dramatic things in long late-night phone calls, passing love notes in the halls. All was very chaste. I began to feel like I was wearing a sign on my forehead that said FUCKED UP in big neon letters. There was no visible reason for his parents to distrust me, nor for my parents to distrust my involvement with him. I had the feeling they knew something was wrong with me, some reason why I was problematic, but they couldn't pinpoint it.
The same held true at school. Rumors about me—that I was pregnant, I was easy, I was doing drugs—flew during seventh grade, which infuriated me, because none of these were true, yet. School was hell. My grades fell from As to Cs and Ds, the occasional F. I was in trouble all of the time. I was talking back, sitting in the back of the room with my head on the desk, reading a novel in my lap, whispering, passing notes, getting into screaming fights with boys who pissed me off. I developed a severe intolerance for any sort of irritant, especially the “in-crowd” boys, who were the main sources of those whispered rumors. These were boys who had money, played hockey, pinched girls' asses, told dirty jokes to make people blush, and never failed to solicit a loud string of obscenities from me. I spent a fair amount of time in detention, in-school suspension, or just plain kicked out.
Sitting in detention one day after school, I was reading and eating a bag of chips. The teacher didn't know it was the first thing I'd eaten that day, and would also be the last. She didn't know I was bulimic.
She was a nice person who encouraged my writing, often calling me into her classroom to say, in a very concerned voice, that I wasn't living up to my Potential. There was nothing wrong with her, so I don't blame her for this. She said, wagging her finger at me as I munched away on my bag of chips, “A moment on the lips, forever on the hips.”
I stopped midchew. Looked at her hips. She had big hips. She smiled at me. I smiled back. On my way out the door, I dropped my bag of chips in the garbage can, headed straight for the bathroom, threw up in the stall farthest from the door. Got dizzy as hell as I walked down the hall, footsteps echoing weirdly. I stumbled as I went down the stairs, hit
ting my head on the wall. I rubbed the bump and watched the patterns in the tile floor as they seemed to slide closer to my face, then veer away.
It was about then that I began to have regular, severe migraine headaches that
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