Choose Your Own Disaster Read online

And so you read a magazine telling you that you’re supposed to eat 1,800 calories a day to maintain your weight. You hadn’t been counting calories before. You might have been eating double that, triple that for all you know. That must be why your jeans have been tightening, why you see photographs of yourself and fixate on the size of your arm and whether or not there’s any flab visible. You hadn’t been counting your calories the way a thin, responsible chic woman should, the type of woman who wears all black and high heels and hails a taxi to chauffeur her to a high-powered job in New York City (most of your visions of what a successful woman looked like came from 13 Going on 30 and The Devil Wears Prada). You repeat those numbers like a mantra, and they infect your brain. You want to be smaller, so what do you do?

  What do you do?

  A. You think back to something from years ago, how in the back of your middle school library, you had come across a book that was more Lifetime movie than novel. It was about the perils of eating disorders and how easily this poor, cherubic suburban teenager became seduced by the demon that is bulimia when the popular girl in her class showed her the secret of putting a finger down her throat and canceling out the food before she digested it. The book was meant to scare the reader because of the horror and the shame, how even though the main character got skinny, it wasn’t worth it because she took it too far and had to deal with Consequences. You wouldn’t take it too far. You just don’t want your jeans to be too tight.

  Turn here.

  B. You Google images of models with bony thighs and arms like baby birds. They don’t pine over boys who gradually stop returning their instant messages or who only want to be friends with them. They don’t deal with awkward silences. If you lost weight, you could be one of them. And the faster you lose the weight, the faster your life would improve. You Google “how to lose ten pounds fast.” Then “how to lose ten pounds in a week.” There are people out there with the self-control and willpower to be skinny. They’re not better than you. You count the calories of everything you eat. You trap yourself within 1,800. If you don’t go over 1,800, you won’t gain weight. All you need to do from there is eat just a little bit less.

  Turn here.

  It began as a low murmur from down the hall: a door opening, multiple pairs of feet climbing stairs, giggles, the hushing of giggles. You were ostensibly in your pajamas, but you were still wearing a bra and cover-up. Too much makeup would have jinxed it—no, just a little bit of cover-up so if midnight came and went without you getting tapped for an a cappella group, you wouldn’t have to go through the tragic exercise of wiping away mascara gutters.

  But, you admit to yourself, allowing your stomach to somersault into your throat, you definitely hear something, in the hallway, definitely something. When you audition for college a cappella—going from room to room in the engineering building on a Thursday night, singing the same sixteen measures for each group, one at a time—you present them all with an index card featuring your name, voice range, and dorm room. The dorm room is so tonight, if you’ve been selected (and drafted through the proper procedures at the rigorous, highly secret, and invariably drunk meeting of the intergalactic council of a cappella), your new family will kidnap you at midnight. Those unlucky unselected wait by their windows all night like stood-up prom dates.

  The murmur becomes louder. And then, it’s a vigorous knocking on your door. “I’ll get it,” you shout to your roommate, leaping off your bed. Your roommate is in a bathrobe and fuzzy pink slippers like a 1950s housewife. She just looks at you.

  You fling the door open, and then you are suddenly face-to-face with every member of the Alef Beats, Brown University’s premiere Jewish-themed a cappella group.

  “You’re in the Bee-aaaats, and it feels so good!” they sing to the tune of The Lonely Island’s “I’ve Just Had Sex,” mouths gleefully wide, stomping and clapping until every door in the hallway has opened to reveal a peering face. “You’re in the Beeaaaaaats, and you’ll never go baaa-ack, to the not-in-the-Beats way of the past!”

  It feels a bit like a roomful of people singing “Happy Birthday” to you; you aren’t sure whether to sing along, or clap, or smile, and so you do a little bit of all of that. They fling Hershey’s Kisses and confetti into your room. A beatboxer, the heartthrob of the Jewish a cappella group, leans against the doorway and winks. “Grab your shoes!” someone shouts, and you retreat to your room to gather whatever basic necessities (phone? keys? money? will you need money?) are in easy grasp.

  “I hope you’re going to come back to clean this up,” your roommate says, eyeing a single chocolate Kiss that dared to roll to her side of the room.

  “I will, I will!” you call over your shoulder, and you join the romping, frolicking horde, down the steps of the dorm and out into the night.

  The destination, you discover, is Jen’s house. You do not yet know who Jen is, nor where her house is, but that doesn’t matter when it’s midnight and you’re in college and you’re running across Lincoln Field singing a song about just having had sex (the flask that was passed around somehow helped the lyrics revert back to their original form). You learn a flurry of names in the dark: Ben, Korama, Alex, Anna, Ben G, Rachel, Sydney, Sofaya, and Jen—your host for an evening of bagels and Manischewitz, appropriate for your Jewish theme.

  “I swear,” Rachel says, “my friends thought I was in an a cappella group called the Olive Beats for a full year.”

  “That’s how you know who’s not Jewish,” one of the boys, maybe Ben, says.

  “I’m not Jewish!” Rachel calls back.

  Korama turns to you with a gaze of maternal benevolence, doing her duty to help the Baby Beats—as those who were inducted that night would be known for the next full year. “We’re like, half Jewish as a group, maybe.”

  “I’m half Jewish!” another girl, maybe Susan? offers.

  “Yeah,” Korama says. “Like, half. We’re Jew-ish.”

  You’ve made it to Jen’s off-campus place—an old Providence town house with wooden shutters and a big porch. Jen opens the creaking door and ushers the group into the kitchen. Korama grabs a bagel and then continues. “That means, like, we sing things if they have a tenuous Jewish connection. Like Maroon 5 counts. And obviously Yael Naim. But also, literally, whatever we want.”

  You sit gingerly on the strange couch. “So being the Jewish a cappella group means…?”

  “Jewish-themed,” Korama corrects. “Jewish-themed a cappella group. And it basically means we sing at high holiday services and drink Manischewitz. Speaking of which!”

  Someone—one of the boys—thrusts a paper cup filled with purple wine into your hand. “Oh, no thank you,” you say. “I don’t really drink. I mean, I have an early class tomorrow.”

  You don’t. But it’s easier than explaining that you’ve eaten all of your calories for the day. Besides, if you avoid drinking as a rule, you’ll probably prevent the freshman fifteen. Alcohol is all sugar anyway. It’s not like drinking is good for you.

  But it’s been hours since dinner in the cafeteria (salad with vinegar, grilled chicken breast, two sweet potato medallions) and as you watch the rest of the group tear into the bagel bag, smearing their selection with cream cheese off plastic knives, you wish you could too. But a bagel is the carb equivalent of at least five slices of bread, a voice with an unknown source chastises you. If you were to eat a bagel now, everything you’ve done to be skinny, everything you’ve sacrificed, would be for nothing.

  You have to leave before they realize you’re not eating or drinking anything. You can’t be that weird, restrictive-eating girl with a group of people you just met, who chose you and came to your dorm to sing to you in front of thirty other freshmen.

  “I think I have to head out,” you say. “That early class.”

  “Awwwww,” someone says.

  “See you at rehearsal,” Ben says.

  “BEATS FOR LIFE!” the other Ben says. He says life with two syllables. Ly-uff.

  And so, you sl
ink out onto the street, the first to leave the party, and speed-walk across the inky-wet grass until you’re back in your own room. Your roommate is asleep, complete with noise-canceling headphones and a Breakfast at Tiffany’s–style eye mask. You turn on your lamp and sit at your desk, too wired to sleep.

  You are hungry, you admit to yourself. And that chicken breast for dinner was small, probably just 60 calories and not the 100 you mentally accounted for. And you did only have those two slices of sweet potato, not an entire sweet potato (you had counted them as a whole one just to be safe). You could eat something else. Something small.

  So, with the deliberation of a neurosurgeon, you reach under your bed, into the plastic Container Store bin that your mother packed full of healthy dorm-room snacks, and unwrap a Kashi Honey Almond Flax bar (140 calories).

  You stare at the yellow oat flakes and artificially glistening almond pieces. You usually don’t eat after ten as a rule because you read somewhere that those calories become belly fat.

  Fuck it. You eat the oat bar and it tastes more delicious than anything you can remember eating ever before. Your chewing becomes mechanical. Maybe this is your first orgasm.

  Still chewing its final bite, you unwrap a second Kashi Honey Almond Flax bar and while you’re making the decision of whether or not you should eat it, it’s already gone and you’re throwing away both wrappers in the trash, burying them deep so you won’t have to look at them.

  There are only two bars left in the box. As soon as they’re gone, you won’t be tempted anymore. And so, for the greater good, you finish the two last bars and bury them with their brethren. You’re full but it doesn’t hurt yet. You don’t feel the sides of your stomach pressing up against you from the inside. You’ve been hungry for so long, and now you want to be full. What’s the worst that could happen? You’re only a few hundred calories over your limit for the day. Maybe you’ll gain a fraction of a pound. Even if the worst happened, if you gained a pound, it would be fine. You grant yourself permission to gain one pound. You got picked for an a cappella group. You deserve to celebrate.

  What else is in your room? Three-quarters of a box of Kashi GOLEAN cereal, sawdusty rabbit food they describe as “protein twigs.” Back home you used to pour three times the quarter cup for a breakfast with only 9 grams of sugar. (Years later, you still remember that number. You could be using that brain space to remember names, places, lines of poetry. Instead, you remember how much sugar was in a portion of cereal. Sherlock Holmes would be ashamed of your use of attic space.) You had been scared, coming to college, and a little panicked, because you weren’t going to have constant use of a measuring cup to protect yourself from too much cereal. Your mom had known, when she saw you fingering the plastic measuring cups at Bed Bath & Beyond. “Dana. Honey,” she said with such sadness in her voice. “Don’t be that person at college.”

  Well, no measuring cup now. You pour a mound into the Plexiglas bowl you also use to microwave 100-calorie packets of oatmeal with water. You slosh almond milk on top of the mountain of cereal until it floats, far more than the half-cup estimate you usually limit yourself to, and you inhale the bowl’s contents in the semidarkness of your room, not listening to music or watching television, just focusing on getting the food inside your body quickly, before your brain could change its mind. You drink the remaining almond milk from the bowl and pour another mound of cereal to drown in yet more almond milk. Only a quarter of a box left now. As soon as it’s gone, you won’t be tempted anymore.

  Next, a powdery packet of oatmeal you heat in the microwave without even rinsing the bowl first. You squeeze in two sticks of honey your mom sent you in your Rosh Hashanah package back in the fall. You hadn’t touched them until now—too much sugar. You squeeze the rest of the honey sticks directly into your mouth, gnawing at the crystalized corners with your teeth. As soon as they’re gone, you won’t be tempted anymore.

  By the time you’ve finished three bowls of oatmeal, your brain begins to acknowledge the ache in your stomach. It hurts to move. You aren’t sure whether you’re imagining it or whether you’ve actually eaten enough for the stuff to have filled your stomach completely and begun piling on top of itself and crawling up your gullet. You feel like a goose being fattened for foie gras, and yet you are so, so close to drowning the knot of anxiety in your stomach.

  You try to count the calories of your feast but give up when you hit 2,000. You’ve put on at least a pound, but that’s okay; you could gain a pound. When you drag yourself to the clean cell of the shared one-person bathroom in the hallway, then try to stick your finger down your throat, it’s not because you’re scared to gain that tiny increment of weight; no, it’s just your stomach feels so uncomfortable. You don’t want to feel like this anymore. You want a clean start, for the contents of your stomach to disappear from your stomach and deposit themselves neatly into a toilet where they can be swept away down pipes and you can forget all about this and never let it happen again.

  Does it happen again?

  A. No. It doesn’t. You can stop yourself. You have better self-control than this, don’t you? You had the willpower to count calories for two years straight, and now you’re going to let some Kashi get the best of you? Kashi tastes like wet cardboard. You know it, they know it, everyone knows it. It’s wet cardboard that women eat to punish themselves like that albino monk self-flagellating in The Da Vinci Code. You ate all of the Kashi in your room and now your punishment is complete. Time to get back to normal.

  Turn here.

  B. Yes. Again and again, eating until you can’t move and then throwing it up becomes less of a habit and more of a hobby, something you look forward to like reruns of a favorite television show. It fills the time. It will make you skinny. It will make you feel better.

  Continue reading.

  It was so easy in that kids’ book about bulimia, that preteen specter of what was to come for you, the Ghost of Self-Sabotage Future. In the book’s second chapter, the chubby protagonist with frizzy brown hair walked in on the most popular girl in school retching her guts out in the girls’ bathroom at lunch. “It’s easy,” the popular girl said, waggling her first two fingers (fingers are always waggling in these types of scenarios). The frizzy-haired protagonist held up a finger before her like Horatio’s skull and made the fateful decision to insert it into her gullet, emptying herself of everything she’d eaten that day and sealing her deal with the devil to get skinny.

  It is not easy for you.

  You shove two fingers into your mouth until your front teeth graze your last knuckle. You waggle like your life depends on it, all the while mentally counting down the imaginary one-hour deadline you remember reading about somewhere until calories are absorbed.

  All you need to do is trigger a gag reflex and then all of this will be over: the sweating, the nausea, the kneeling in a freshman dorm bathroom stall, the fear that someone will hear what you’re doing. Just trigger a gag reflex.

  It doesn’t work. You spit in the toilet and wash your hands and then crawl back into your bed, where you click mindlessly through the Internet until it’s dark outside your window.

  Before you try again, you read tips on websites with warning labels at the top, and study excerpts from books about people who overcame eating disorders like they were how-to manuals. Most of the tricks don’t work for you, but some of them do—tricks that you won’t write here because however interesting the particular details of your misery might be, it’s far outweighed by the certainty that someone would want to try them.

  Here is what happens when you finally manage to make yourself throw up: shaking as if you have a fever; sweating so much your shirt sticks to your back and your hair turns freezing cold along your scalp; the acidy sour taste of vomit living in your throat and under your tongue and on your toothbrush; feeling the icy splash of toilet water on your face when you manage to get something out.

  Here is what they never told you in those pretty finger-wagging books: It never all c
omes up, and it doesn’t come up like the vomit you’re used to, the salmon-colored mush of stomach flu or airport sushi. This comes up in bready lumps like the pictures of aborted fetuses they put on billboards when you drive an hour outside a big city. These are pieces that were never meant to come up the other way.

  You imagine the scene like the black-and-white introduction of a TV infomercial: you on your knees, gagging and clenching, hair wet with sweat and toilet water turning straight to the camera and breaking the fourth wall: “There’s got to be a better way!” You try cutting your feast with massive quantities of Diet Coke by the strange logic that the carbonation might levitate mush out of your belly when you gag like it’s Wonka’s Fizzy Lifting Drink. You Google syrup of ipecac. You check the CVS on the corner. They don’t have it. You call the CVS in town.

  “Excuse me,” you say. You’re already walking toward the store. It’s a twenty-minute walk but there’s nothing more important to do today than get yourself clean of everything you ate. “Do you have syrup of ipecac?”

  The CVS employee sounds confused when she says, “I don’t think so. What do you need that for?”

  “My dog,” you say. “I need to make my dog throw up. She ate chocolate.”

  “No,” the woman on the other end of the phone says with pity and derision in her voice. “No, we definitely don’t sell that here.”

  You’d read one magazine piece about a celebrity who made it through the other side of bulimia to share her misery porn with the People magazine–reading public. She said that she would start all of her binges with a “marker food,” something fluorescent-colored, vivid enough so that when she finally saw streaks of orange Cheetos dust or blood-red sugar-free Jell-O, she’d know she’d vomited the entire binge up, reached the final stratum layer of compounded carbohydrates like an archaeologist excavating deeper and deeper into the earth.