To Starve To Die
  by Laura Madeline Wiseman

The first time you consider starving you’re thirteen. You’ve had your period for a year. The flow fills a pad per class period. The girls’ bathroom stinks on the first floor. It’s the necessitous one you use daily between third and fourth on the way to geography, the class the teacher clips his toenails in. Metal boxes attached to the wall harbor burgeoning wads of toilet paper stained dark red. The sign on the stall door reads: Do not flush feminine products (tampons, pads, etc.) What is the “etc.” you wonder. Is there something else of which you’re not aware?

At night, you plan what to wear the next day. Dark colors are best. Thick material, better, given the absorbency. Items that can be tied around the waist or cover the butt. It’s not that you want to bleed on your wardrobe or scrape dried blood from the seams of your favorite jeans. But you need an additional safeguard between you and the plastic yellow desk chair. You have seen smears, marked by fabric weave like a thumb print. You don’t want those blood trails to be yours and so into your mother’s bedroom you go to pilfer jeans.

“Don’t yours fit anymore?” she asks while muting The Young and the Restless.

“No.”

“You’re bigger than me then. Bigger than your sister.” The next time you consider starving is the summer before high school. You have two best friends, but they don’t know about each other. It’s stupid really to have only one best friend. Why have one, when you can have more.

They starve. The Red Head has two practices: 1) Eating less. 2) Throwing up by toothbrush. You try purging, but you’re not good at it. Your mother hears you. You say you’re sick. Like she believes that. You did it while she was home, in the only bathroom. Dumb. The next time you wait until you’re alone. You love the giddy moment you flush the toilet, the languor of job well done.

You’re also good at eating less. In competitive fashion, you and the Red Head see how little you can stomach. It’s like a game, how rangy you can become. And it’s something to do. Something to talk about. Look in the mirror, Oh, I’m so fat, you say so your friend can say, No, you’re thin. I’m fat. And around it goes. You’ve just begun a cartography of the body, where the recalcitrant pudge hides the slim lines of bone.

Your other best friend, the Blonde, approaches starving differently: 1) She has given up fat, entirely. 2) She exercises. With her, you do these things. At a local store you five-finger-discount a gym bag of fatfree candy. You eat what she eats: rice with sugar, canned green beans, fat-free cheese slices. You give up what she has: bread, meat, chocolate. Most of this sticks. It is this summer that you become a vegetarian. Years and years later, people will ask you why you became a vegetarian. You never say: meat has fat. That would be ridiculous. Sometimes you make up stories about animals you saw killed: a deer by tractor, your uncle cleaning fish. But usually, you shrug and look off into the distance as if you’re thinking. Not all questions have to be answered.

You walk all summer with the Blonde. Granted, you don’t have a car and you live within five city blocks of her. She does aerobics, Abs of Steel, Callanetics. You don’t because she won’t let you. She does let you watch. Mostly though, you travel from your house to hers many times over.

By the time you get to high school, by that first year, you now know a thing or two about management, about coping. When you see the Red Head, you compare notes. By your second year, she leaves town for another school where they have a recovering anorexia and bulimia club for girls, all size 00. She also starts augmenting her eating little and purging with drugs, which, of course, sheds weight effectively. She gives you tips, and you take them. Little white tabs of epinephrine. Carnation-colored powder in lines. And a baggie full of assorted pills she gives you for a birthday gift.

“Each a surprise,” she says, “like chocolates without guilt.” The Blonde and you lose touch. Later you’ll see how this is about class, rather than something specifically wrong with you. Her family is middle-class, urbane in branded clothes, haircuts and highlights, indulgent shopping trips that mark your friend as fitting in and you as not. Your family is poor, gets welfare, food stamps, Title 19, and ADC. So of course, any designer labels you have are the ones you stole. You do talk to the Blonde when you bump into her awkwardly in the hall. She doesn’t talk of starving now, but of boys.

“He’s amazing,” she says, her chin trembling, a bony hand rests against the corded muscles in her neck.

Alright, fine then. Friends come and friends go. Sometimes you’re the henchmen, sometimes you’re the cantankerous boss. Mostly you like when you go it alone. Just you and your skills, which you cling to, given that they are all you’ve got. That first year of high school you start at 128 and end up at 115, through eating less and avoiding fat. All day you eat nothing, but at night, at home you might spoon the insides of a ripe cantaloupe.

The second and third year you are less successful and purge instead. On the days you do not work at your part-time job, you come home and eat, topping everything with chocolate mint ice cream you flush away. Your fourth year you opt for calorie management and end at 120. You wake in the middle of the nights, though, a taste like syrup in your mouth, a fleeting image of pancakes in your mind, and a terrible guilt vibrating in you, making your thighs and breasts feel thick.

The thing is you never get big. You might feel large, but you’re never actually monstrous. Maybe a bit over 130 at your fattest. Maybe at 110 at your skinniest. Fluky, really, this whole business. You don’t have a scale at home and so rely on the annual student athlete trips to the nurses’ office or when you luck into a friend’s bathroom and one is stowed behind the john. During all this time you don’t date, you don’t do boys. Okay, maybe you have a boyfriend or three or four, but never like the tv romances. And maybe you kiss a few more guys than that, but nothing comes of it. One in the back of a friend’s car at night. He kisses you and you feel the kiss bloom in your cunt. You open your eyes, blink, startled. You see him next at a multi-school dance.

“Hi,” he says, pushing glasses up his nose. A nerd.

“Hi,” you return, conjure an excuse to leave. Years after, once you’ve forgotten his name, his face, you’ll wonder about his kiss, about what the kiss promised. But for now, you can’t get past his looks. You never seem to be skinny enough to attract the types of men who you should be attracted to. You only get the duds. But then again, you aren’t really starving yourself for them.

In college and the one semester you try grad school, you suspend most of your habits, for two reasons: 1) Any exercise or evasion of specific foods doesn’t work. 2) You go on the pill a brief nine months and gain thirty pounds. But here’s the kicker, whether you’re 120 or 155, suddenly all types of men find you attractive. From the pill or genetics, your breasts grow large, a bright glim in your body’s life. You learn to flirt. You have sex. Okay, you have a good deal of sex. You ask them individually, you clad in a red satin babydoll, “Do I look fat?”

“No,” they say while staring at your tits.

“But I feel fat.”

“No,” they say, “You feel just right.”

You do try to starve, but nothing comes of it. So instead you exercise because it’s healthy, a restitution for all the bad you’ve done. You attempt to eat decently to be healthy. You do change size, but not because you try. You lose ten pounds in London and another five in New Zealand. Weight, size, stones all seem arbitrary. A construct to measure yourself against. And whether you look in the mirror at 140 or 120, it’s always you looking back.

Now that you’re an adult you see body size and weight worry as a privilege of youth. You still worry, but have less time with work, friends, the husband. Mostly, you have less mental energy to devote to fat count, to watch your size. You exercise, but sporadically, which you blame on the husband.

“Run with me,” you say.

“I hate running.”

“Will you go for a walk.”

“Tomorrow. I’m tired.”

“Fine.” You circuit the block alone, as squirrels chatter, birds chirp, trains call, and cars soar by you, their drivers middle-aged, overweight, smug.

When you get pregnant with your one and only child, you gain thirtyfive pounds. The first five entirely water weight, which you lose within a week of delivery. Vaginal birth. Epidural, thank you. You breastfeed, too. Not because you’re a smug hippie. Not because you’re less superficial than the women who formula feed to put off the inevitable sag of time. No, you breast-feed because you read somewhere that nursing causes your uterus to contract, which causes your belly to resemble as close as possible its pre-pregnancy state. Ha. Pre-pregnancy myth. Only attainable for those with personal trainers, dieticians, chefs who can make food taste like it has calories, fat, carbs. So you resign yourself to fading stretch marks, the lengthening of your breasts, the extra pad around your middle, a klatch of women with similar complaints. You know you have abdominal muscles, but you will never see them again.

Since both you and the husband work, your daughter is raised by day care. She grows up to be a well adjusted middle-classer. She’s thin, but not too thin, and you try never to say anything about size to her. You don’t want that to be your legacy. But sometimes you’re convinced she’s picked it up. At thanksgiving she eats only a salad and chunks of cheddar cheese.

“I made the Italian cream cake you like,” you say.

“Mom,” she says, “I’m more than full.” Her fork clatters to the plate where she thrusts it.

“Sorry,” you say, your own fork set silently on the folded linen napkin.

You, having reached the pinnacle of your career, begin to loathe women who look twenty at fifty. Some do the plastic surgery thing. All dye their hair. Most spend many hours at the gym. The husbands meanwhile get thicker around the middle, drink scotch, and play the occasional round of golf. Though your husband is forty-five pounds heavier than when you first met him, takes pills daily for cholesterol and high blood pressure, he does not now, nor ever has, starved. You could chalk this up to one of many double standards. But it’s more than that, isn’t it.

When you start to lose weight without trying in your fifties, you don’t think much of it. After a lifetime of trying and not trying to be a particular size, you’re convinced that the body has a different agenda than the mind and thus you must abide by its wishes. You don’t even lose much, ten pounds, and it’s not like your ass looks like it did in your forties. But you do lose and your friends ask two things: 1) What new diet you’re on, because you look fantastic. 2) How your health is. There’s nothing wrong, you assure yourself, but think about it thereafter. You hate looking for a problem, but find yourself palpitating your breasts, your lymph nodes, your stomach for hard nodules of disease. Because you worry, you begin eating better and exercising regularly. Your health problems continue to be, as they always have been, minor. Not enough calcium. A little too much sugar. At your annual check-up you ask about your weight.

“You’re fine,” your doctor assures you. “Absolutely healthy for a woman your age.”

“Even at 130,” you ask.

He shrugs, “even at 130.”

As you put back on your clothes, you sigh. Fine, you think, but you wonder about health. You’ve spent a life never eating after seven at night, avoiding saturated fats or carbs or whatever is the fashion at the moment. Are you healthy because you’ve never weighed more than 160, because you exercise, because you’ve starved? Or are you healthy because you would have been, due to genetics or whatnot, no matter what? What if you’d licked the plate after large slices of peanut butter cup pie nightly and sucked the salt and grease from your fingertips after weekly meals of fried chicken? Would your dreams never have been filled with food?

It’s extraordinary then when your friends die of starvation. One from your high school, who you first knew as an egoist, but developed an amicable relationship with after the twenty year class reunion. There was a blockage in her bowels. Painful. She ate less because the less she passed the less blood she saw in the toilet. When she died, only her husband had been aware of her ruddy trails. At the funeral of her open casket, lilies with their open throats and stems fattened by the distortion of water crowd the viewing.

“I’m so sorry,” you say to her husband you hardly knew, “but she looks beautiful.”

The second friend died of forced starvation. As a Florida resident she had gotten tired, and frankly, too old to head inland every time a hurricane rumbled her retirement community. Trapped in her garage for two weeks with access only to the bottles previously delivered by the waterman, she survived the town’s flooding, the power outage, any body crushing accidents. Yet locked in her garage by fallen tree limbs, disintegrating walls, she had only the water. A neighbor found her in the backseat of her car, dehydrated and winnowed, clutching pizza ads, the corners of the ads nibbled away.

Two other friends starved the old fashioned way. They battled cancer, the disease of age, and lost. Both gave up. Both were survived by husbands who nursed them through weeks of delirious mumblings on OxyContin. Rather than starving to be thin, they starved to die. Not suicide. Not assisted suicide. Not murder. Just a tiredness emanating from within, when breathing becomes a labor without a time clock in sight.

It doesn’t come as a surprise then, your own plummet from 130 to 110. When your father died several years back from testicular cancer, you were the one to go through his estate. It was easy, a feeding frenzy of friends and distant relatives who had their eye on great-grandmother’s depression dishes or a collection of vinyl records, Little Feet, Emmylou Harris, Karen Carpenter. Most everything else went to Goodwill. But in the bathroom a child’s height chart still hung on the inside of the yellow painted door. You kept that. It marked the dates, heights, and weights of your childhood. You thought it funny to see at age eleven you were 103 and get this, actually in the 80s and 90s before you reached the age of ten. You call your sister and tell her about the chart. “Did you know when I was ten I weighed 83 pounds?”

“What does the chart say I weighed?”

“75.”

After 110, the pounds shake off like a dog in rain and snow. In the hospice center, your husband and daughter weep at your 80 pound hide. You would have died at home, but didn’t want to burden your husband with that. Your ghost. Your memory. Haunted rooms he would have to live in. It would have been nice to die in your own bed, but that would have been selfish. So you smooth the stiff white sheets changed daily. You listen to nurses clucking, the volunteers who sigh.

You have inoperable late-stage cancer already in your blood. Meaning, essentially, it wasn’t detected early enough and you’re too old. Drugs drip sweetly into your veins. You feel light. Perfect, really. You could float away.