by Terri Cheney
“I’d prefer that you put the goddamned phone down and listen to what I’m trying to say.”
“I heard you,” he said. “I’m just trying to fix it.”
I crossed the room and took the phone out of his hand. My voice came out sounding curt and strangled, a good half-octave higher than normal.
“Sometimes it just can’t be fixed, Rick. It’s a disease. For once, stop trying to make it better and just let it be. Just ask me where it hurts.”
We stared at each other, the tension rising between us like heat. I could feel it on my skin, a prickly wave of fear and irritation. And I could see it reflected in Rick’s stormy eyes: the moment we’d both been avoiding for years.
“Admit it, Rick,” I insisted. “Sometimes it just can’t be fixed, not even by you.”
Rick reached down behind me and picked up the phone. His eyes were still defiant, but his voice was deadly calm. “Mashed potatoes or creamed spinach?”
And so I hit him. I reached back into years of pent-up anger and resentment, years of pretending to be all better because better was what Rick had bought and paid for, because he was the fixer and I the fixee, and better was part of the bargain. I reached way back and I hit him with all the force I could muster, square on the chin. This was no movie star slap. It was a bare-bones wallop—so hard that he staggered backward and would have fallen if the sofa hadn’t come to his rescue, so hard that I broke the skin on two of my knuckles.
I hit him so hard that for a moment—for one moment only, but it was enough—the history between us was knocked awry, and we stood facing each other like two strangers in absolute silence. Then remorse rushed in, and I burst into tears and tried to throw myself into his arms. But he refused to hold me. He refused even to look at me. He just sat there, motionless, staring up at the ceiling as I cried.
“It’s not me,” I pleaded. “It’s this bizarre mixed state. All week long I’ve been feeling a desperate need to hit something. It’s almost overwhelming. I can’t explain it. But I never meant for it to be you. Please, please say you understand.”
“Okay, I understand,” he said, still staring at the ceiling.
“Then you forgive me?” I asked.
“I forgive you,” he said.
“And it’s all okay?”
He finally looked down at me. “You know, sometimes it just can’t be fixed,” he said. Then he stood up, walked into the bedroom, and began to pack.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that was our last conversation. True to form, Rick arranged all the details to see that I got home safely, but when I arrived, it was to an empty house and a silent phone.
It took ten days for the skin on my knuckles to heal. By that time, the mixed state had passed and I was back on the familiar ground of plain old depression. Every time I looked at the wound above my ring finger, I was overwhelmed by shame. I couldn’t fathom how I—the great pacifist—could have done it, especially to Rick, who was no doubt the great love of my life. For months, I stared at that small raised reminder and despaired of ever understanding, much less forgiving, myself.
And then it struck again: the strange agitation, coupled with a despondence so profound I felt like I could barely breathe. The only thing that helped relieve my discomfort was the sound of breaking glass, and I smashed half-a-dozen teacups before it dawned on me that this, too, was familiar ground. But it took several more episodes before I really began to comprehend the mixed state’s awesome power of destruction. Few things are strong enough to survive that deadly clash of mania and depression. Certainly not love. Love is far too fragile: it is a picture window, just begging to be shattered.
15
It’s impossible, in my opinion, to have a normal relationship with food if you’re manic-depressive. I have a theory: the disease significantly impairs the hypothalamus, which is the part of the brain that regulates appetite. But I don’t need theories to prove my point. The empirical evidence, in my case at least, is overwhelming. For as far back as I can remember, food has always been inextricably linked to mood.
It’s been ages since I’ve eaten a simple sandwich—longer still since I’ve swallowed an entire meal. There’s no one simple reason I can give you as to why I can’t eat like a normal human being. There are dozens of reasons, actually, but in the end there are none. It’s an inexplicable phenomena. I really don’t know why, after years of steady abuse, my body finally chose this moment in my early forties to fall spectacularly apart. Suffice to say, my body now treats food like a foreign invader. Only minuscule amounts are allowed to enter before the entire system goes on the attack. One bite too many, and my stomach suddenly swells to such an enormous girth that strangers eye me anxiously and ask when I am due. And then the pains begin: sharp, shooting stabs all along my lower abdomen, so intense they make me shiver uncontrollably and cry out loud for help.
But there’s no help, and I already know it. I’ve seen all the doctors, taken all their tests, swallowed their pills, and listened to them, one after another, give up. The colon, it appears, is a mysterious and powerful being: easily provoked but incredibly hard to appease, not unlike an ancient tribal god. Which finally makes sense. Because what we are dealing with, when all is said and done, is the primal curse of manic depression.
Although I had noticeable mood swings throughout my early childhood, I didn’t experience my first really, truly suicidal depression until I was sixteen years old. For well over a month, I slept twenty to twenty-two hours per day: fitful, dream-riddled slumber that left me even more exhausted. When I finally woke, I ate—and that’s all I did. I didn’t go to school; I didn’t talk to family or friends; I didn’t even read, which was the biggest loss. But I didn’t care. Nothing mattered to me anymore but the consummate frenzy of hand-to-mouth, hand-to-mouth feeding.
I never stopped to ask myself why I was so hungry. All I knew was that as long as I was engaged in the process of chewing and swallowing, I didn’t think about anything else. Sensation completely replaced emotion. I didn’t feel anything more complex than salty or sweet, smooth or crunchy. And I didn’t give a damn about anything beyond the next bite.
Nor did I care what I was actually putting into my mouth. At first the food was fairly normal, although in increasingly large amounts: mashed potatoes, baby-backed ribs, leftover meatloaf, and mounds of spaghetti—whatever was in the refrigerator that night and relatively easy to prepare. But pretty soon I became too ravenous to wait for the food to heat up. I entered my raw stage, eating all the fruits and vegetables in the crisper. Cereal was quicker without the milk. Rice and pasta were a whole lot faster without the water, too.
My mother went grocery shopping one day a week, usually on Sunday, so by Friday we’d be almost completely out of food. I clearly remember those endless Friday nights when there was nothing left in the cupboard and depression was gnawing a hole in my stomach. I had to eat something, anything. Toward the end of my depression, I ate whatever was there: iced coffee packets, bags of flour, spices ranging from anise to fennel to marjoram to thyme. Of course my body eventually rebelled and I wound up throwing up half of what I frantically shoved down my throat. I didn’t stop until I finally fell asleep, exhausted, with my hand still clutching whatever I was eating.
My father finally found me late one night, sprawled out across the living room sofa, too sick to move. I’d just consumed an entire box of baking soda, and I was lying there trying to muster the strength to get up and vomit. “I heard a noise…” my father said, then he stopped short when he saw the white powder on my face, and the empty box of baking soda lying on the pillow. “What the hell?” he said, and the sound of his voice made me shrink with shame. “Honey, look at me,” he pleaded; and perhaps it was the “honey” or the tenderness of his tone, but with his words, my body came back into being. And with it came all the feelings I had been trying so hard to suppress.
I grabbed my father’s hand and looked up at him through a sudden flood of tears. “Daddy, I’ve lost control,”
I whispered, the first time in my life that I had ever admitted that to anyone, most importantly myself. I told him all about the food, about the raging hunger. I even told him what I feared the most: that mouthful by mouthful, bite by bite, I was steadily devouring my sanity.
My father had just recently stopped smoking, so he knew a thing or two about the inner demons of appetite. He squeezed my hand and reassured me that if he could stop smoking, I could certainly stop eating. But it would take a little outside help, and he knew just the place to get it.
Daddy had conquered his nicotine cravings with the help of an outfit named the Schott Center, which was all the rage in the mid-1970s. Controversy clung to the Schott Center, but I didn’t know why. All I knew from the brochures that my father had brought home was that it was a behavioral modification program for the treatment of smoking and obesity—but what that entailed, I had no clear idea. My father hadn’t told me much about his own experience, but that was nothing new. Daddy was never much of a talker. For him, actions were more important than words.
By nine A.M. the following morning, Daddy had already enrolled me in the Schott Center’s obesity program. He insisted on driving me himself. At first I was grateful for the moral support, but by the third freeway interchange I’d undergone a total change of heart.
“This is stupid,” I said. “Turn the car around.”
My father continued to whistle “You Are My Sunshine” through the gap in his two front teeth.
“I’m not obese,” I argued. Which was certainly true. I had inherited my mother’s small frame and quick metabolism. Sopping wet and in my stocking feet, I stood five feet five inches and weighed an average of one hundred and ten pounds. Granted, the past few months of nonstop eating had packed a few extra inches on my stomach and thighs, but no one would call me obese.
“This is not about your weight,” my father countered. “It’s about control.”
We pulled off the freeway, rounded a corner, and stopped in front of a small, nondescript gray building. “This is it,” he said. “I’ll be waiting here for you when you get out.”
“You’re not coming in with me?”
“I think this is something you need to do for yourself,” he said, and then he leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I waited for the magic words, our secret battle cry, and I wasn’t disappointed. “Give ’em hell, baby,” my father said.
It was just as I thought: I was the only thin person in the waiting room. I quickly gave my name to the zaftig receptionist, then I buried myself in a promotional brochure, trying hard not to notice the curious and, in a few cases, downright hostile looks that kept coming my way. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait very long before a young man dressed all in white came to fetch me.
“I’m Joe,” he said. “I’ll be your counselor today.” He led me into a small, dimly lit room furnished with two chairs, a sink, and a table. On top of the table was an assortment of foods, ranging from potato chips to cheese to bagels to salami, plus a wide variety of desserts, from muffins to Twinkies to what looked like some seriously tasty cookies.
Joe waved his hand over the spread. “Pick your very favorite,” he said. “The one you can least resist.”
No contest there. I’d already started salivating at the sight of the oatmeal raisin cookies. These looked like the really good kind, too—lacy crisp at the edges and soft and doughy in the center, with just the right amount of raisins. Joe noticed where my eyes had landed. “So it’s oatmeal raisin cookies, is it?” he asked. “That’s excellent.” Then he piled five cookies on a small paper plate, handed them to me, and directed me to sit down in front of the sink.
“I want you to close your eyes now, take a big bite of cookie, and chew,” Joe ordered. I did what he said, or at least I tried to comply, but the moment I bit down into the cookie I felt like I had been hit by lightning. I opened my eyes, and saw Joe grinning down at me with a long metal stick in his hand.
“It’s along the same principles as your standard-issue cattle prod,” he told me, waving the metallic wand in the air. “But it doesn’t leave a mark. Now take another bite and chew—but don’t swallow.”
I bit, I chewed, and zap! another jolt of electricity shot through me. “Now spit it all out into the sink,” Joe said. I was embarrassed but willing. I spat out a wad of half-masticated cookie.
“Look at it. Touch it. What does it remind you of?” Joe asked me. Chewed-up cookie, was all that came to my mind.
“No, really look at it,” Joe commanded. “Dig your fingers in there deep. Smell it. Lick it. Roll it around on your tongue. You know what it reminds me of? Poo-poo diapers. Baby shit. That’s what you’ve been stuffing your face with all this time. Baby shit.” Then he zapped me several times in a row.
Now I realized what the brochure’s vague reference to “aversion therapy” had meant. The only problem was, I wasn’t developing any aversion whatsoever to oatmeal raisin cookies. Rather, I was developing a serious aversion to the Schott Center itself: to that dimly lit cubicle, that gleaming, stainless-steel sink, and most especially to that grinning idiot Joe, with his cheery scatological chatter and mega-watt stick.
The rest of that afternoon went by in a blur. I chewed up and spat out four more of the cookies, and was forced to swallow several mouthfuls of regurgitated mess. I did whatever Joe asked me to do, hoping to somehow avoid or lessen the shocks. But the more compliant I became, the more shocks I received. There was simply no logic to it. I, who had always done so well on tests, could not seem to please this teacher at all. By the time I left, I was fighting back tears.
That was the end of my ill-fated experiment with the Schott Center, but not the end of my troubles with food. Fortunately, the depression that devastated my sixteenth year did not last forever. When it lifted, so did my abnormal cravings and hunger, for a while at least. They returned in full force with my next depression, but by then everything in my life had changed. I was no longer at home, with a well-stocked pantry open and available to me at all hours. I was in college, in a small town, where dinner was served from six to nine P.M. in the dining hall—period. There was one, and only one, alternative to campus food: D’Angelo’s Pizzeria, which delivered up until midnight. But they only delivered to the dorm itself, not to the individual rooms. If you wanted to pick up your pizza, you had to go downstairs to the common room, which was always filled with other students studying or playing poker or watching TV.
I was six months into my freshman year when the next depression struck. It was the dead of winter. As an L.A. native, I’d never experienced a New England winter before, and I thought it was surely the end of the world. My body ached with lethargy. I could barely even move to shift positions in bed. The hypersomnolence returned in full force, even worse this time than before: now I was sleeping several days in a row. When I finally did awake, it was to the old familiar hunger, the unappeasable lust to bite and swallow and chew.
The campus dining hall was out of the question. I was incapable of taking a shower or washing my hair or even brushing my teeth, and there was no way I was going to allow myself to be seen like that. That ruled out ordering pizza, too. I couldn’t risk being caught in the common room. So I stayed in my room, behind a locked door, only emerging in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.
At one point, I went seven days in a row without any food. By the eighth day, the pangs in my stomach were so intense I couldn’t ignore them anymore. Late that night, when everyone else was asleep, I prowled the empty halls, searching for food. This soon became my nightly routine. I’d go from trash can to trash can, rifling through the contents as quickly as I could. Every once in a while I’d hit pay dirt: a discarded pizza box with one or two half-eaten slices remaining. I’d grab them and run as fast as I could back to my room, my haven, where I’d devour them in wolfish delight.
I was caught pawing through the trash on a couple of occasions by the night security guard, but I covered by saying that I was looking for my class notes
, or a term paper, or something I had accidentally thrown out. As I saw it, I had no choice: I had to find food. My weight was dropping precipitously, and I was beginning to have severe dizzy spells. I was so fatigued it was all I could do just to drag myself from bin to bin to bin. Sometimes I was too weak even to hoist the lids. Finally, I passed out one night on the way back to my room. I woke the next morning in the infirmary, with a doctor at my side, shaking his head.
“We have to call her parents,” he said to the nurse. I listened through the door: “Yes sir, it’s treatable, but it’s a pretty bad case. Severe malnutrition. We don’t often see it up here at Vassar, but I did my residency in South Philly and I know all the signs.”
The doctor walked over to me and held out the phone. “Do you want to speak to your father?” I shook my head and turned my face to the wall, forcing myself to focus on the large pastel poster that was hanging next to the window. To this day, I still can’t see a Degas ballerina without instantly feeling a hot flood of shame.
There was no way I could explain my behavior to Daddy. He might understand about the strange eating habits—he had, after all, understood once before—but the root of those habits was beyond his comprehension. I knew, because I had already tried several times without success to tell him about the depression: “the black beast,” as I called it back then. But Daddy was from the simple, straightforward Kansas plains. Metaphors only made him itch between the shoulder blades. “Just tell me what’s wrong and we’ll fix it” was his infuriating reply. What was wrong? Everything and nothing, all at the same time.
When I got out of the hospital, a few pounds plumper but no wiser, I went back to my scavenging. I had become addicted to the risk, the thrill. I became good at it, too. By my junior year, I could dig through an entire bin in two minutes flat. I could hear the guard coming long in advance, and scurry back to my room before he could even catch a glimpse of my shadow.
