Asked what that means, what “having a life” might look and feel like were concerns about food and weight simply deleted from consciousness, Beverly falls silent. “I don’t know,” she says, finally. “It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to wake up in the morning and just be oblivious to all that. To not know and not care how much I weighed or how my butt looked or what clothes I could or couldn’t fit into. It’s sort of overwhelming to even think about that. It’s like . . . what would I think about?”
Precisely. The great anxious focus on the minutiae of appetite—on calories and portion size and what’s going into the body versus what’s being expended, on shoes and hair and abs of steel—keeps the larger, more fearsome questions of desire blurred and out of focus. American women spend approximately $1 million every hour on cosmetics. This may or may not say something about female vanity, but it certainly says something about female energy, about where it is and is not focused. Easier to worry about the body than the soul, easier to fit the self into the narrow slots of identity our culture offers to women than to create one from scratch, easier to worship at socially sanctioned altars of desire than to construct your own, one that allows for the expression of all passions, the satisfaction of all appetites. The great preoccupation with things like food and shopping and appearance, in turn, is less of a genuine focus on hunger—indulging it, understanding it, making decisions about it—than it is a monumental distraction from hunger.
What is this drive to be thinner, prettier, better dressed, other? Who exactly is this other and what does she look like beyond the jacket she’s wearing or the food she’s not eating? What might we be doing, thinking, feeling about if we didn’t think about body image, ever? These are the questions that pain me when I think of myself at twenty-one and twenty-two and twenty-three, a set of bones hunkered over a tiny saucer, nibbling at those miniature squares of apple and cheese. What was I feeling? What was I trying, so desperately, not to feel?
2
THE MOTHER CONNECTION
HUNGER AND THE COSTS OF FREEDOM
NOT LONG AGO, I HEARD a story about a woman who went to visit her mother for the weekend. Their relationship was, and still is, stormy and complicated, but she got through it with relative serenity—counted to ten under her breath a lot, recounted like mantras lessons learned in decades of therapy, kept her cool. But then, on her way to the airport, this grown, self-aware woman—a paragon of reason and maturity—was overcome with the compulsion to pull her rental car into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven, walk in, and steal a bottle of water. She could not resist; she snagged eight ounces of Evian and fled, embarrassed and confused.
I love that story, it captures so perfectly the mysterious, changeable quality of appetite, the way it bumps up against a feeling and then molds itself into a new impulse, attaches itself to something so seemingly random. But I’d love the story even more if the woman in question had stolen a bottle of milk, perhaps even a jar of strained peaches. For if you peel back another layer from the onion, dig a little deeper toward the core of appetite and the complexity of feeling it can evoke, that’s where you begin to go: to the realm of mothers and daughters, to the ancient places where our sense of desire was first molded and shaped and observed. There can be love in this territory, and deep identification and attachment, but there may also be a great deal of confusion, and anguish, and a steady, pressing throb of guilt.
My mother did not know how to respond to anorexia, or how to make sense of it; she’d never heard of it before, she couldn’t imagine what it meant or what purposes it might have served, and although she noticed me grow thinner and thinner, she said nothing about it for a long time. I think she didn’t know whether to worry, or how much, and I think I was deeply ambivalent about broaching the subject, desperate for her to notice, but also unwilling to admit how seriously the compulsion had taken hold, and mostly afraid; aware on some level that at least a piece of it had to do with us: mother and daughter.
The desperate part broke through a few years in, my weight below ninety pounds by then. I’d come home from Providence one weekend early in the spring, and on the pretense of changing into warmer clothes, I pulled off my sweatshirt in front of my mother and reached into my bag for a wool sweater. The two of us were in the kitchen, where she took her afternoon tea. Underneath the sweatshirt, I was wearing a camisole and I stood there for an extra moment, rummaging in the bag. I wanted her to see how the bones in my chest and shoulders stuck out, and how skeletal my arms were, and I wanted the sight of this to tell her something I couldn’t have begun to communicate myself: something about pain certainly, but something about less accessible feelings, too, an amalgam of buried wishes and unspoken fears, some exquisitely tangled blend of love and rage. I was vaguely aware of the complexity of this feeling at the time: I remember standing there, bones exposed, hoping in the most inarticulable way that the sight of my body might wound her and also cry out to her, and plead and sob and cling, that it might deliver both a slap and an apology.
I don’t know what my mother felt at that moment; she said nothing, she didn’t know what to say.
My parents were not cold or unfeeling people; in many respects, they were two of the most psychically sophisticated people I’ve ever known, and they were also deeply devoted to their kids. I always could, and often did, call my mother at two A.M. on a bad night, sobbing over a boyfriend; neither my mother nor father were strangers to pain or depression or turmoil, but they did not make contact easily outside of a crisis and their sense of privacy was so pronounced it could make you feel invisible. Both of them came from households dominated by opinionated, strong-willed mothers, and both of them bent over backwards to avoid meddling, smothering, interfering. But sometimes a kid needs smothering. At dinner that night, I drank a lot of wine and finally started to cry at the table. I told my parents I was having “a problem,” that I didn’t know what to do about it. I said I thought I was anorexic. All I remember is the look in their eyes: concerned, a little scared, very helpless. They asked a lot of questions I couldn’t answer: Why? But aren’t you hungry? What can we do? It was a relief to talk to them, but only in the most general sense of generating their worry. Whatever I’d hoped to articulate in the kitchen that afternoon remained unexpressed; I don’t think any of us, least of all my mother and me, knew where to begin.
About a week later, my mother sent me a note in the mail. On a small square of white paper, she’d written one word in large block letters: “EAT.” I just stared at it, thinking: But I can’t. You have no idea, I just can’t.
EAT. Eat, eat! Those are the words of an Italian mamma, words of abundance and plenitude. They mean, Take what I have to offer, take this food, take this love, relish it, take it in.
This language was not familiar to my mother, at least not in an unequivocally nurturant way, and so it was not familiar to me; written down, the word looked strange and oddly threatening, and in a fundamental sense it was, not simply because starving had become a deeply-ingrained strategy and way of being by then but also because to truly eat—to take in, to relish, to partake in all senses of the word—would have involved a significant departure on my part, perhaps even a betrayal or a loss; it would have required adopting a new language, one I must have feared I could not share with my mother, might not ever share.
Like so many women of her generation, my mother had been introduced early on to a very clear language of desire, its grammar based on femininity and accommodation to specific ideals. Her parents, descendants of Russian Jews who emigrated to the United States in the 1890s and early 1900s, lived in Brookline, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. Her father was a self-made businessman, kind, gentle, cerebral, ultimately quite wealthy, and somewhat passive in family matters. That territory was ruled by my grandmother, an intelligent, extroverted, and opinionated woman equipped with a great deal of charm, a deep appreciation for the luxuries of new wealth, and an abiding interest in appearances. She maintained an impeccable, elegant home, fille
d with the finest furnishings; she loved shopping, fine dining, lavish parties. When we visited my grandparents’ home for Sunday dinners, a weekly event when I was a child, my grandmother would sit at the head of the table in the chandeliered dining room, reveling in her role as matriarch. At the first sign of an imperfection—the basket of popovers was empty, the platter of roast beef required refilling, the china needed to be cleared—she’d press down on a button hidden beneath the plush carpet by her chair and summon the cook, who’d arrive as if by magic and silently carry out the task. If I inherited a taste for luxury and fine things, I’m quite certain the gene came from her.
My mother inherited no such gene. Much to my grandmother’s chagrin, she never took much interest in womanly things, particularly appearances; she was whipsmart, painfully shy, bookish, and solitary as a girl, and if she found her mother’s materialistic bent oppressive, she also knew it was a difficult force to resist. Maternal love, in her experience, was deeply entwined with judgment, and her own interests—books, art, the natural world—lay in realms her mother seemed either to disdain or to judge harshly. This made for a lot of powerful conflicts, literal and psychic. Some of these my mother won; she went to college at age seventeen, then took off to Paris to study art, then spent her twenties living on her own and cultivating a career as a painter, an occupation her mother never quite knew what to make of and almost never praised. Other conflicts she lost; in her mid-twenties, she fell in love with and nearly married a young man named Jerry, who’d received an injury during the war that had left him with a rather pronounced limp. Her mother could not get past the “deformity,” could not accept it, and my mother could not get past the criticism and lack of approval: She obeyed her mother and ended the relationship.
In 1955, still unmarried at the then-advanced age of twenty-seven, she met my father, a handsome, intellectual, intensely introspective psychiatrist whose personal résumé raised all kinds of eyebrows; eleven years her senior, he was from upstate New York WASP stock, a non-Jew, separated, and father of three children, one of them blind and severely retarded. That summer, he spent six weeks in Nevada securing a divorce, and he wrote my mother the most beautiful letters, passionate and wooing, full of intellectual exchange (she introduced him to Melville, he introduced her to Joseph Conrad), and brimming with curiosity about her: how her mind worked, what drove her, what fueled her painting. He found her beautiful and deep, and he seemed both to see and to appreciate the sides of her that had been waved away at home for so long, the creativity and sensitivity and passion for ideas. They married the following June; her mother was suspicious and huffy about the decision but did not fight it, and the wedding, held in the garden of her Brookline home, was exquisite.
This was a radical move on my mother’s part, this choice of a rogue psychiatrist, and it suggests how far she’d come in her efforts to free herself from her mother’s grip, to create a language of desire that reflected her own intellect and aesthetic. But to say that my mother had unleashed herself from a world of stricture and constraint would be inaccurate. I think her own history of incurred disapproval, amassed from childhood in a small sea of petty criticisms and withheld praise, would dog her all her life, leaving her deeply unsure of herself and wary of her own hungers, as though she’d crossed into unfamiliar territory and wasn’t quite sure what the rules were, or how safe she’d be.
I also suspect this sensation received its share of reinforcement over time, bolstered by both personal and cultural circumstance. By the early 1960s, my mother had three children: my brother, born in 1957, and my sister and me, born two years later. Her life had receded into a sea of diapers, bottles, blankets, small shrill voices shrieking in the night. Her canvases languished, untouched. Her marriage had proven to be difficult, less of a partnership than she might have hoped, and my father had come with a bit more baggage than she’d anticipated. Shortly after the wedding, no doubt livid about this new union, his ex-wife had claimed that she could no longer care for their blind son, then ten years old, and she’d dispatched him to live with my parents, where he would stay for nearly three years, an explosive, impossible child whose care fell almost entirely to my mother. My father, who buried himself in his work and never once cooked a meal or pushed a vacuum across a carpet, kept promising he’d help and never did. What must have been my mother’s early sense of optimism—a feeling that she’d entered a world in sync with her own hungers—began a long slow evaporation. She was exhausted, frustrated, and quietly enraged, and when I try to picture her back then, I imagine a young woman feeling deeply agitated without always knowing why, conflicted about her own desires and wants, which she wasn’t quite sure she was entitled to in the first place, and ashamed of her own needs, which she herself could barely acknowledge. It took all the courage she could muster to tell my father she could no longer take care of his child.
This could—perhaps should—have been a promising, hopeful time. It was, after all, the early sixties; my parents had begun their marriage in Cambridge, a place where the early whispers of feminism were not only audible but embraced, particularly in the left-leaning, liberal circles my mother and father inhabited. But the mandates that defined femininity for her generation—the mandates that her own mother so fervidly adhered to and upheld—were still very much alive, and I suspect that like many women of her time, my mother found herself torn, some central part of her aware that certain rules were unequivocal: Women (wives and mothers in particular) were to defer, to meet and anticipate the needs of others, to seek self-definition through family, and—perhaps above all—to convert their own strivings (for love, work, sexual expression) into caring for and responding to others.
Culture certainly supported those rules, feminist stirrings notwithstanding. My mother married at a time when the institution of motherhood had been elevated to near saintliness, when female ambition was expected to find its expression in the cultivation and maintenance of domestic life, no more, no less. These ideals were by no means new—female desire has been tied up in apron strings and cloaked in domesticity for generations, centuries in some societies—but they were amped up in the years following World War II, during my mother’s adolescence and young adulthood, given a distinct look and feel that I can’t imagine she was immune to. The middle-class flight to the suburbs set the stage, ensconcing huge numbers of young women behind picket fences, fostering isolation in the process. The explosion of consumer culture set the tone; traditional assumptions about female desire were mass-marketed for the first time and writ large, given a particular June Cleaver twist on TV and in women’s magazines, movie scripts, and ads: See the perfect table, see the smiling children, the contented husband, the sparkling kitchen. The specificity of such images—the ideal of flawlessness—gave their messages a new quality of seductiveness and urgency; it also made them insidious in a new way; they are images that obliterate all the drudgery of domestic labor—the exhausting, dull, unpaid work of scouring and dusting and cooking and caregiving—and show only the fruits. Nowhere, in magazines like House Beautiful or in shows like Father Knows Best, do you see the actual grunt work women do to create a gourmet meal or to keep the bathroom tile gleaming or to pacify the husband and children; nowhere do you see any evidence of conflict about that work, either, or any despair about the pencil-thin conception of desire behind it.
My father appeared to support this picture, in fact if not in theory. The domestic sphere was my mother’s territory, always. He admired and respected her work, but made little effort to give her the time or space to pursue it. More insidiously, despite his early infatuated passion, he appeared to love her in what turned out to be a rather fantastical way, as an icon of idealized womanhood that didn’t exactly resemble Harriet Nelson or June Cleaver but that didn’t seem to give her much room to exist as a full human being, either, with a full range of human needs and passions and hungers. They had what he would describe to me years later, vaguely and with great discomfort, as “sexual problems,” the result of
what they would both refer to—equally vaguely—as some kind of “split” on his part, an inability to disentangle his feelings about my mother from his feelings about his own mother, a woman he’d worshipped as a child but also felt consumed by. Sexual and familial love appeared to exist on different planes for him; his first wife, a brassy, hard-drinking, extroverted woman, had represented the former plane, as well as an escape from his mother’s upper-crust overbearance. My mother represented a return of sorts; she was the graceful, reserved, cerebral center of family, an asexual and untouchable figure. From fairly early on in their marriage, he began to have affairs.
Years later, all of this would make sense to me; it explained the Pandora’s box sensation at home, the feeling that dark and dangerous feelings existed just inches beneath the hushed surfaces, the suspicion that my parents’ reserve, with its faint edges of preoccupation and sharp frustration, masked some immense disappointment and rage. But as a child, I knew nothing of such turmoil, only that my mother seemed boxed up in an indefinable way, that her passions seemed somehow squeezed into the margins, as though in constant competition with the needs and expectations of others.
Which, no doubt, they were. My mother was hardly June Cleaver—she hated housework, loathed entertaining, didn’t care a whit about the trappings of femininity or fashion—but in many ways she looked the part of a good, late-fifties wife and mother, nurturant and homebound. As far back as I can remember, she had breakfast on the table every morning, soup and sandwiches ready for my siblings and me every day when we came home for lunch, dinner on the table every night at six. With occasional help from a series of au pairs and none at all from my father, she did all the grocery shopping, all the laundry, all the cleaning and cooking. Dad boiled water for instant coffee; that’s about as far as his ambitions on the home front went. Mom did everything else—organized birthday parties, baked cakes, cared for the dogs, sewed Halloween costumes, bought and wrapped all the Christmas presents, helped us with our homework, attended every last school play.
Appetites Page 7
