Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

by Carrie Brownstein

  After camp, on a springtime backyard tent sleepover, Tammy arranged for a group of boys to sneak in. She instructed each of us, paired us up, and told us how to use our tongues when we kissed, which as a preteen is an unrelenting technique that requires one’s mouth to be open longer and wider than during a dental exam. Tammy zipped herself into a sleeping bag with a boy. The rest of us were sitting upright, not sure what to do horizontally and thus not wanting to commit to one person. We traded kisses in a humid tent that smelled of Drakkar Noir, cigarettes, and mint liqueur. Almost immediately I cut the lips of a kid named Ricky with my braces. I retired for the night; I felt inept at this carefree, outdoorsy, group sexiness, but I made an eager, loyal follower. I liked being part of a gang.

  Jennifer was my other friend. She had an older brother named Michael whose heavy-metal tape collection I admired: Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Van Halen. More important, however, her aunt worked for Huey Lewis. Jennifer had a framed picture of him in the house. That fact alone was enough for her family to seem magical to me. My connection to this rock star with countless hits on the radio and whose albums I owned was clearly tenuous—it was my friend’s aunt, whom I’d never met and who didn’t live in Redmond and who possibly was no longer working for Huey Lewis or for the News. Maybe she had done a job for him at some point? Or she had talked about working for him? Maybe she had wanted to? Maybe she was employed by someone, but not by Huey Lewis? Maybe, like me, she was a fan of his album Sports. The facts were mutable and hard to pin down, but there was that framed photo. And that was something, something real. And I had been in the house with that photo. And that person in the photo was famous. These are the ways fans maneuver through the world, with flimsy connections and strong hopes.

  Despite all the sleepovers, or the sneaking out to drape toilet paper over someone’s house, or the weeks at summer camp together, Tammy, Jennifer, and I drifted apart once we entered junior high. But they were my cohorts during my happiest childhood years, the ones during which my mom was healthy and present enough to help me with my homework, not to mention that ridiculous election speech, and when it didn’t seem odd that my dad bought a motorcycle and drove off to Canyonlands on a vacation with a male buddy.

  CHAPTER 3

  DISAPPEARANCE

  I first heard the term “anorexic” in the backseat of a car on the way home from the movies. It was the summer before seventh grade. From the burgundy insides of a Chevy Blazer, we all turned to look at a jogger, a woman, a sinewy form devoid of curves, angles only, rib cage and clavicles protruding, like some sort of moving body diagram, inside out. The driver of the car, my friend’s mother, said the word that we did not know. What it described was what we had just seen: a skeleton in Nikes.

  The word “anorexia” was like a prize I had won in a drawing someone entered for me on my behalf; unexpected, sure, but I would find a use for it. And I did. At the dinner table I inserted it into the conversation. I added it to the lyrics of popular songs and sang them while my mother slowly pushed her food around a plate, rarely lifting the fork to her mouth, every morsel a lame horse on a track, never reaching the finish line. I taunted my mother with the word as if anorexia were something she might desire, not something she already had.

  My mother was fair-skinned with a delicate, bony strand of a nose and dark, straight hair. Her eyes were a deep brown, and I think of her as unblinking, as if she were always looking at something suspended between horror and sadness. She smiled with a strained, hesitant warmth. In the years before my mother’s illness, it’s not her body that I recall being different, though obviously it was—her cheeks fuller and brighter, her hair shinier, her breasts and stomach softer—but rather her presence. She was noticeable: she was in the car and in the kitchen, putting curlers in her hair and shopping for clothes, talking with her friends, helping me with my homework, attending school plays, walking, talking, sitting, eating, being, existing.

  In a photo from several years later, the last family vacation we would ever take, my mother is standing on the beach in Hawaii. Bikini-clad, burnt red like she’d been dipped in cherry Kool-Aid, bags of white pus forming on her sternum, bones for days. Thin, brittle hair—it had been falling out for a while now. Hollow eyes and cheeks. She is somewhere between rotting and a fossil. Maybe she hoped that the smaller she got, the easier it would be to disappear.

  After consulting a doctor and nutritionist, and probably not at all on account of my singing or tormenting, my mother finally did admit—to us, to her friends, to herself—that she was ill. And when I was fourteen, she checked herself into an eating disorder unit at a hospital in Ballard. She would be gone nearly a month.

  For the first two weeks my mom was away our kitchen was stocked with covered dishes prepared for my father, sister, and me by various women at my dad’s law firm. Casseroles mostly. Heat and serve. If you saw our crowded fridge, it might look like we were preparing for a big party, like the Super Bowl, or an unnamed celebration wherein the family stuff themselves while their wife or mother is in the hospital on account of starving herself. There was a dish consisting of tortilla chips, cheese, chicken, and a cream-of-something cream-colored, the final ingredient being the only one distinguishing it from nachos. This became our instant favorite. My dad learned how to make the tortilla casserole, we alternated those nights with bagel dogs, soft pretzels, or tamales from Costco, and we soon realized we might be able to survive on our own. In hindsight, I’m glad we had this time to practice.

  Meanwhile, at junior high school and among my peers, I was mildly enjoying the attention that having a mother in the hospital granted me. An illness in the family felt like the currency I needed to make myself more interesting. In home economics class we watched health movies that addressed the concerns of body dysmorphia, a TV special called Little Miss Perfect, and one about bulimia, Kate’s Secret, starring Meredith Baxter Birney. I felt as knowledgeable as the teacher and acted accordingly. I broke down the difference between bingeing and purging. I explained what ipecac was. And, yes, I said, with a hint of disbelief, bulimics sometimes hide bags of vomit under their beds. My mom was 88 pounds and anorexic, but apparently I had the market cornered on all eating disorders. I wasn’t the prettiest or the smartest one in school, I was desperate for a clear role among my friends, and now I had one. I was someone they felt sorry for.

  I also had a newfound status on the carpool circuit. I rode shotgun everywhere. While my friends were in the backseat discussing bra sizes and boys, I sat in the front and listened while their mothers opened up about a recent MS diagnosis, spousal drinking, and kitchen remodels. Trash compactors! Skylights! My own mother’s condition was a floodgate; apparently now I could understand something that these women’s daughters could not. We traded diseases and misfortunes, swapped them like baseball cards. I stared at the car radio knobs or the fading “5” of the gear shift, empathically nodding my head with the certainty of a scrubs-wearing career nurse on a lunch break. “It will be a long struggle, yes.” “You’ll get through it.”

  As my friends embarked on adolescence, developing what seemed to be a natural, God-given talent for makeup and hair removal, my nose grew too big, my gums appeared to be sliding down my two front teeth, and my chest and back remained indistinguishable from each other. I felt the confidence of my younger self slipping away. But that didn’t matter to their moms. And I imagine it was they who kept me on invite lists to birthday parties, weekend ski trips, and after-school mall excursions. After all, who else among their kids’ friends was mature enough to understand the nuanced joys of a recently procured coffee-table book on the Kennedys or the acquisition of a delicious chocolate fondue recipe? Plus, I was their number-one source for scene-by-scene summaries of films they were too harried to see. I stood next to them in the kitchen while they unloaded the dishwasher, sipping lemonade, casually leaning against the counter or sitting atop it, retelling the plots of Clue and Romancing the Stone from title sequence to end
credits. Meanwhile, my friend worked on homework or chatted on the phone in the other room. That was child’s play. I felt adult, important.

  When a friend’s father died of Lou Gehrig’s disease, her mother counted me among the first to be notified. I was getting ready for school when I received the call; I took the news like a pro. No tears. When was the funeral? Did they need anything? Later, in the school bathroom during lunch, I delivered the story to our other friends with the gravity and stoicism of a nightly-news anchor. Here were the facts. They wept streams of turquoise mascara while I stood near the paper towel dispenser and let them know that this was just how things were. This was life. Tough it out.

  But the reality of my mom being in the eating disorders unit was far less glamorous and a lot more painful. There was little to brag about.

  —

  My parents grew up in the Chicago area, my father in Evanston, my mother in Skokie. They met at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign when my dad was in law school and my mom was an undergrad. For their wedding anniversary they drove a VW bus to Seattle, the city where I would be born. I know very little about my parents’ childhoods; the historical facts are hazy and scattered. My father’s dad was a doctor, his mother a housewife; “Dr. and Mrs. Stanley Brownstein” said the return address on the birthday and Valentine’s Day cards we received from them, containing either a five-dollar bill or a five-dollar check. My mother’s parents were less well-off. Her father was an accountant, then a comptroller in the auto industry. Her mother was a teacher.

  Kenny and Linda. My parents before they were married. Chicago, Illinois.

  Before my father sold my childhood home in Redmond to move to Seattle, I dug through boxes in the garage, salvaging old books and photos. I found letters my father and mother had written back and forth when they were engaged. He was working for the Washington state D.A. and she was still in college. My mother’s notes were sweet and longing; she expressed a yearning to be reunited, to be out of Illinois, to start a life. My father wrote considerate but formal responses, largely about his job and the Pacific Northwest.

  At holidays, descriptions of relatives were not about how they lived but rather how they died. My paternal grandmother would point to the faces in pictures and rattle off every kind of cancer you could think of—and ones you couldn’t think of. I’d tune into stories about our family, hoping to glean insight, only to have them quickly be disputed and left unfinished. Someone might mention an older brother or a baby, a vacation they once embarked on, a profession or a hobby, but the conversation inevitably and quickly devolved into a debate about the meaning of second cousins versus first cousins once removed. We never settled that debate, nor did I ever learn any solid information about my relatives or my family’s past.

  These convivial but otherwise circuitous talks are likely why my dad’s brother, Uncle Mike, often stepped up as the family storyteller and entertainer. When I was younger, my uncle was a thrice-married plastic surgeon (he’s now with his fourth wife, my aunt Denise) who had become one of the first and foremost sexual reassignment surgeons in America, specializing in top surgery for female-to-male transgender people. He was also—and still is—a life member of the NRA as well as a benefactor member, and he has voted conservative in every major election. He was passionate about all of it despite how strange this combination of traits might have appeared to others. A typical Thanksgiving involved him describing how a clitoris could be elongated into a penis or trying to explain the notion of “transgender” to a great-aunt who resembled a drag queen, her bony fingers drenched in costume jewelry clicking like a tap shoe routine as she gestured, hands flying up in the air to emphasize her bewilderment. One Thanksgiving my sister and cousin and I played catch with a silicone breast implant my uncle had lying around, while the movie Scarface played on the TV in the background. Another Thanksgiving, my grandmother sat at the dining table with taut skin and visible staples in her head from a recent facelift courtesy of one son, while the other son carved into the turkey with an electric knife.

  Our family liked to focus on activities instead of communication, so when we weren’t tossing around fake breasts or staging photos of relatives snorting flour off the counter to look like cocaine, we got the guns out. When my grandfather retired from medicine, he and my grandmother moved to Tucson, Arizona, which is where he developed an interest in collecting firearms and going to the shooting range. The grandkids loved to pose for pictures on the backyard brick patio, the bright orange Tucson sun and cactus-covered landscape behind us, our unloaded weapons pointed at the camera or, more likely, right at each other.

  My sister Stacey pointing a real gun at me in the backyard of our grandparents’ home in Tucson, Arizona.

  Though my family didn’t talk much to one another, we did talk about one another. My dad’s parents would refer to their daughter-in-law as “her” or “she,” talking as if my mother were invisible even though she sat right there at the table. “Does she ever eat?” they would say to my father. “Does she know how skinny she looks?” I suppose we were better observers than communicators; we were all subjects to be worried over, complained about, even adored, but never quite people to be held or loved. There was an intellectual, almost absurd distance.

  The ways that oddity and detachment intersected in the family might best be summed up in the story of the family dog. Buffy, a forty-pound golden retriever mix we adopted from the pound when I was six and my sister was three, had been smothered with love in her youth. Buffy, for whom we took a pet first-aid class in order to learn how to be responsible owners, who was the muse for my grade-school poetry exercises (“Buffy is fluffy!”), our sidekick for picnics and outings, on the sidelines for soccer games, and the subject most featured in my first roll of film—posing on my baby blanket and wearing sunglasses—after I was given a camera for my birthday. Buffy, who followed us around the cul-de-sacs while we engaged in dirt clod fights with the neighbor kids, and trotted after us while we rode Big Wheels and eventually bikes. Buffy, who suffered the sting of the archaic idea that you could punish a dog by smacking it on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper and whose tail was run over by my mother as she backed the car out of the driveway. And Buffy, turned back into a stray in her own home on account of the rest of us surrendering to emptiness, drifting away from anything we could call familiar, her skin itching and inflamed, covered with sores and bites, like tattoos, like skywriting, screaming with redness, as if to say Please, please pet me! But we didn’t. When we decided to put her down, not because she was sick but because she was old and neglected—a remnant of a family we no longer recognized—my father asked my sister to do it. My sister was sixteen. She drove the dog to the vet one day after school by herself. No one else said good-bye.

  After I was given my first camera I set up many photo shoots. Here I am posing atop my baby blanket with an asymmetrical haircut, my Cabbage Patch Kid, a Snugglebum toy, and my dog Buffy.

  The distance and detachment created a loneliness. We couldn’t name the source of it, but there was a blankness around which we gathered, one that grew colder and darker, and seeped into everything we did. I think for my mother it was most pronounced. I would lie in bed at night and hear her on the phone with my father, who was away for weeks on business in Europe or Asia or Australia. She was crying, scared, frustrated, lonely. Her anxiety made her brittle, easy to anger. But I didn’t feel sympathetic. I felt fear, neglect. I felt resentment.

  My mother and I started to fight all the time. She was retreating from the world, a slow-motion magic trick. Meanwhile, I was getting louder, angrier, wilder. I experimented with early forms of my own amplification—of self, of voice, of fury—while my mother’s volume was turned down lower and lower, only ever audible when she broadcast searing feedback and static; broken, tuneless sounds. We vacillated between shouting and silence, the megaphone and the mute. We scrapped and scraped. I’d rile her up until medicine bottles were hur
led my way and I responded with a piece of pizza. She threatened to wear a raincoat in the house so she could deal with “all of the flying shit.” Everything was a projectile, an indoor hailstorm.

  —

  The first time we visited my mother in the eating disorder unit of the hospital, the thing she thought to warn us about was not her own condition but that some of the other patients shopped at thrift stores and that we shouldn’t judge. Her upwardly mobile sense of middle-class decorum was still intact, despite the fact that her clothing drooped, almost slithered, off her body as if it were seeking elsewhere to perch, looking hardly different on her than it would on a wire hanger.

  In her concern and preoccupation over how we might handle the class and lifestyle differences in the EDU, she neglected to mention that her roommate in the hospital was my exact age. Breanna was a goth, a cool city kid with black hair, blunt bangs, and a knack for liquid eyeliner. She might have been the exact kind of girl I’d be friends with, or who I’d want to actually be, but right now she was my mom’s friend and confidante. While I had discussed my mom’s illness with my friends’ parents, I had never thought to talk about it with my own mother. And now there was a surrogate me. Breanna could share and understand the one thing about my mother that I never could, her disease. Later, after they were both released, they’d hang out and watch movies together, grown-up movies, like the film adaptation of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, that I had no interest in. I felt sophomoric and callow, but I was only fourteen. Plus, I didn’t want a friend, I wanted a mom.