by Abby Norman
On the surface, it’s not a very interesting story: I threw up at the Olive Garden. I don’t know why. I was fine beforehand, and then, quite suddenly, broke out into a cold sweat and leapt up from the table, dashing off toward the bathroom, having not yet had the opportunity to stuff any breadsticks into my purse. There was a moment of panic at the realization that I was about to vomit, mostly because it occurred to me that I hadn’t done so in a long time, and maybe I wouldn’t remember what to do.
Of course, it being an autonomic function, more or less, I didn’t really have to do anything. It just happened. But when it did, in that long moment that followed, something peculiar came over me. At first I thought it was relief—though I hadn’t even been nauseated beforehand, which is usually why people find vomiting to be so alleviating. No, it wasn’t relief. It was a kind of giddiness. I was flushed from head to toe in a deep, resonant calm. All the tension had melted from my body—tension that I hadn’t even realized had existed, except that I noted its absence. I had not realized that I could take such deep breaths, or that my fingers could be so soft and unfurled. I was a bit lightheaded, but not dizzy. I felt emptied of more than overpriced pasta—it was almost as though I’d had some kind of spiritual experience, an exorcism when I hadn’t even known I’d been possessed.
To be perfectly blunt, I felt high as fuck. I’d never done any “hard drugs,” but I’d smoked a little reefer in my day. I’d watched other people get high a lot, though, as I was often the token sober friend, the mom, the designated driver. Bongs made out of Arizona iced tea cans, technicolor tabs of acid that had cartoons on them like cereal box prizes, lines of coke on water-damaged manga you read from back to front. I knew what people looked like when they were high. I also knew what addiction looked like.
I leaned against the wall of the bathroom stall, letting my eyes close. There was a hesitant knock on the door, and someone asked if I was all right. I laughed in the affirmative. I felt fucking great. I flushed the toilet with my foot and stepped out of the stall to wash my hands. When I looked into the mirror over the sink, I stopped short.
My eyes were too wide, too alight, wild and dark. My face was flushed and I was smiling almost manically, showing all my teeth. I marveled at how much air I was breathing, how everything around me appeared brighter and anew. I returned to the table and to my friend, who had been worried. I took a swig of water and grabbed my purse, practically skipping out of the restaurant. She offered to drive, even though she technically didn’t have her license, because she was worried I was too ill.
I told her I wasn’t ill, that I felt fine. Amazing, in fact. I started the car, and it wasn’t until I put my hands on the wheel that I realized I was shaking, vibrating almost. I was energized, thoroughly charged. I amped the radio and drove too fast to get home.
The comedown came later, and I didn’t realize it was even happening at first. I just felt sleepy, overtired. Then my nerves crackled under my skin, snapping and popping. I stood in the bathroom and thought, for one grotesque moment, how delightful it would feel to let my skin slough off my bones, falling to the floor like a damp towel.
It hit me fast and hard—a sickening, terrifying realization, a mental nausea stilling me so that my hand had to shoot out to balance me against the wall, lest I fall. I wanted to throw up again. I wanted to throw up, because I wanted that feeling. I knew, instinctively, that I would feel that way, that I would get my reward. I knew that was why my mother had done it. The cycle of addiction, children of addicts becoming addicts. That’s why I’d only watched with vague fascination as my friends did drugs. Why I only pretended to drink, dumping a friend’s mother’s cheap boxed wine into a nearby potted plant. That’s why even when I was no longer afraid of disappointing my mother, I had scrubbed my hands until they were raw, because I knew it would only take one heave, one time, one single puke—
The disgust that I had come to feel toward my mother as a teenager was suddenly turned full force upon myself. I did not throw up that night. In fact, several more years would elapse, during which time my efforts to prevent it were motivated by a secret fear that I did not share with anyone, because I found it humiliating.
Then, my first year at Sarah Lawrence, it happened again. I don’t remember exactly what preceded it. I’d probably been up too late having too much coffee. I think I’d eaten a strange concoction of crispy, undercooked Ramen and fuzzy candy I’d dug out from the bottom of my messenger bag. I tried, earnestly, not to vomit. Soon, though, I realized that I was wasting time—precious time that I needed to work and, God willing, to sleep. It was over in half a second, and there wasn’t even much to show for it. But immediately I was flooded by that feeling that couldn’t be matched, that I hadn’t forgotten but had been too afraid to chase. Unlike when I’d had the peculiar experience in high school, by the time I was in college I’d smoked rich-kid marijuana and taught myself how to orgasm. So when I felt my knees buckle under the weight of that serene ecstasy, I knew just how good it really was. So, too, I understood how dangerous it was, how potentially fatal.
I sat in the bathroom with my back pressed up against the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink. Several weeks earlier, I’d dropped a cherished earring down the drain. At first I panicked, until I remembered that I’d brought along a toolkit that was living in my closet, still in plastic. I calmly laid out the wrench, the pliers, a small auger. I threw down some towels, grabbed a big bowl from the kitchen to stick under the sink, and rolled up my sleeves. It was a problem that I had everything I needed to solve. The distress I’d felt watching the tiny amethyst disappear into the dark was replaced by a sense of assurance. I knew I would be able to retrieve it if I focused and employed a bit of elbow-grease. Sometime later, I shimmied out from beneath the sink, the tiny jewel shimmering in my damp palm. I smiled, pleased with myself for being able to avert a crisis without having to ask for help.
Leaning up against that sink weeks later, I realized that being good in a crisis required more than a passing knowledge of plumbing, and that there were some catastrophes that couldn’t be handled alone. I went back to bed and lay awake for the rest of the night, convincing myself that I had enough self-control to keep myself from getting sick again. I thought that having thrown up was the crisis, but the real danger lay in the fact that I knew, as I fell asleep, that I would wake up in the morning and want, desperately, to do it again.
Years later, I’d lay awake in bed all night, too exhausted to sleep. The first six months after I got sick, those fears of inevitable bulimia and anorexia came back to me. The nausea that had started at Sarah Lawrence had not left me, and after months of not eating much, it had turned into a vicious cycle: eventually, the not-eating nauseated me just as much as trying to eat. No matter what I did, my guts were in a constant state of churning that often got so severe it stole my breath. I knew I had to find something I could tolerate, because I was losing too much weight, and too fast. My attempts to investigate food and find something that worked preoccupied me so much that I began to display the very kind of eating-disordered behaviors that my mother had.
Eventually, I found certain things that I could tolerate: saltines, dried cranberries, clear soups. But I became terrified of everything else. I spent an inordinate amount of time Googling pictures of all the foods that I couldn’t eat anymore, and stared pathetically at them at 1 a.m. when I was wide awake from malnourishment, pain, and the fear that all of this was some kind of prophecy—self-fulfilling or otherwise. I soon figured out that not-eating gave me a similarly calm, high feeling. It wasn’t as full-bodied or delicious as the one that I got when I threw up, but it was the only feeling, besides pain, that my body seemed to be able to generate. I fought against it, plied my body with nutrition—only to be so nauseated, as my body attempted to digest even small amounts of food, that I would once again be saddled by the feeling of impending doom.
Things were different now in a terrifying way: before when I had thrown up, I had not been depressed. I’d ha
d other things to focus on, and abounding happiness in most areas of my life that gave me the resolve I needed to avoid descending into an addiction I could see I was at risk for developing. But when all of that was taken from me, and my days became an endless slog of strange, elongated hours of pain endured in darkened rooms, I would close my eyes against the spinning world and give myself a simple, but sobering, warning: If you throw up now, you’ll never stop.
WHEN I WAS ABOUT TWELVE years old, Mum almost died. Her weight had plummeted—she weighed about the average for an eight-year-old girl. Not surprisingly, she had become nearly comatose from malnutrition and was actively dying. I sat in the back seat as Nana drove us a few hours south to commit Mum to a hospital.
Her illness was my first experience with doctors shrugging and scratching their heads a lot. Many of them lacked compassion for her, which frustrated me. I felt entitled to hate her, but where did they get off being so curiously unfeeling? I was under the impression that doctors were there to heal patients, not that patients existed so doctors could practice medicine.
There wasn’t much left to Mum by this point—physically or otherwise. We were both sitting in the back seat of my grandmother’s Taurus, and I watched as she struggled to find whatever remaining vim she had to protest. At one point during her requiem, I became uncharacteristically piqued. I announced, with exactly as much tact as you’d expect a preteen girl to have, that I was hoping she’d die so we could all move on with our lives. In response, she summoned the vestiges of her strength and slapped me hard across the face.
When she was admitted, I went to live with Nana, and although I was only twelve years old, I would never live with my parents again. At the time, I didn’t know that, and so I went to school the next day as if nothing were wrong. I casually informed my few close friends that it seemed my mother was finally dying—like, for real this time. They all had recognized on some level that she was a little off: she made a point of policing the food at birthday parties, for example, and she’d never been to one of my school plays. Although they didn’t know much about her, my pals seemed jarred by the news of her impending death. I suppose it really wasn’t so surprising. On the outside, it must have appeared quite simple: all they needed to know was that she was my mother, and that she was probably dying. At the very least, my calm and collected attitude about it must have unnerved them. The adults in my life, namely teachers, were none the wiser, as far as I could tell. I was my same old pedantic, weird self—dying mom or no.
The first time I intentionally reached out for scraps of love in a classroom setting was in the first grade. I had a soft-spoken, wool-sweater-clad teacher named Mrs. Neman. She had an airy halo of walnut hair and bright, kind eyes that always looked happy to see us. She read us Charlotte’s Web in her soft little lamb’s voice and assured me there was no reason girls couldn’t get excited about dinosaurs.
Mrs. Neman was perhaps the first person to notice my aptitude for language. She encouraged all of us to write our own stories, but I remember that she seemed particularly proud of me. Maybe she wasn’t. But since I’d never felt that someone was proud of me before, it felt magnanimous to me. I marveled every day that she paid me any attention at all. I was so overwhelmed every time she wrote “Wonderful!” in her pretty script at the top of my stories that it would make me cry. I still have a few of them, salvaged from moves and water damage and anger. In recent years, as an adult, I started looking back at them, reliving the stories I was really telling at the age of six and seven. They were quite revealing.
There were bad little children stealing food and being sent to their rooms. Mean mothers with angry inverted triangle eyebrows. What gutted me the most was a story about a family of mice in which I wrote they were “a very nice family—but baby was awful.”
Awful seems like such a strong and specific word for a little child to use, particularly when it seems to be something of an autobiographical statement. I’ve since been informed that in play therapy, children who have not yet acquired the kind of language that would permit them to put their experiences into words often repeat the same themes over and over again in their imaginative play. This is probably why the other kids stopped asking me to play house—unless I was the dad, in which case I left soon after the game began and went into a corner to read my book until “dinner” was served.
I guess I’ve been using storytelling to try to understand myself since childhood. Thanks to that first-grade teacher who thought my stories were wonderful, I became confident in my storytelling ability. I guess I just spent the rest of my young life hoping someone would think that I was wonderful even if I didn’t have a story to tell.
Many years after my baby-mice stories had long disappeared to collect dust in an old shoebox, there would be a person like that in my life: a vivacious and steadfast woman named Cass.
Once you arrived in middle school, you were informed posthaste that Mrs. Cassandra McCue, science teacher extraordinaire, was essentially everyone’s favorite teacher. Therefore, the competition for her affections was stiff.
As it is for many, middle school was a strange time for me. Most of the girls my age were bopping around in their hip-hugger jeans and writing Savage Garden lyrics in their notebooks with glitter gel pens. My wardrobe was entirely made up of a contrarian mix of black business suits and flea-market finery that made me look about twice my age. The only hint that I wasn’t an adult was that only rarely did these items of clothing end up on a proper hanger. Forgoing gel pens for black Pilots, I lined the margins of my notebooks with plot diagrams for X-Files fan fiction.
Mrs. McCue took a liking to me at first because of my rather unique fashion sense. She still recalls, some fifteen years later, a pastel yellow trench coat the color of an Easter basket that I wore with aplomb. I imagine she thought a little positive attention from her, as opposed to being mercilessly teased by my peers, might help me socially.
I laugh today about my penchant for wearing vintage dresses, many of which were God-awful hand-me-downs from friends of Nana, or yard-sale finds. I was quite ahead of my time in terms of hipster trends, I guess. I even had a very respectable collection of silk scarves, which I wore daily—another affinity I shared with Mrs. McCue.
The year before we started high school, it was announced that she would be reassigned, therefore moving up with us to teach ninth grade. Everyone was thrilled, but for me it was also a relief, because I’d taken to confiding in Mrs. McCue (who became just “Cass” to me after school when I’d hang around), about my problems at home.
Cass, meanwhile, didn’t seem to have quite so many problems. She was in her late forties, well-dressed, with coiffed, caramel-highlighted chestnut hair. Like me, she wore high heels every day, and my classmates said that when they heard the clacking down the hallway, they could never tell which one of us it was. Also like me, she had a carefully constructed wardrobe, though unlike me, she had an enviable jewelry collection as well, and she always smelled of Chanel perfume. In small-town Maine, these are things that automatically set you apart.
Over the years, unbeknownst to me at the time, many of my teachers had figured out that something “wasn’t right at home.” It was a difficult position for them to be in, since they couldn’t exactly prove it. I never came to school bruised, I was always clean and well-dressed, and other than stealing food and having occasional dizzy spells, there wasn’t a whole lot off about me. I was a very good student, and I had enough friends by the time I got to high school to be considered socially capable (though I had always preferred the company of adults). I was certainly a little odd—what with my Leave It to Beaver wardrobe and book reports on Profiles in Courage, but I didn’t appear to be truly dysfunctional.
Cass, however, was not content to just wonder. And she risked her job to save me.
The fall of my last year of middle school, our class went on some kind of rural expedition that was meant to build character and encourage us to challenge ourselves. A kind of emotional fortification be
fore we were lobbed into high school and peak puberty. It was the first year that Cass had attended this retreat as a chaperone, and she clearly had some apprehensions. With her not-a-strand-out-of-place hair and tailored wardrobe, she was simply too fabulous to be mucking about in the woods with a bunch of off-the-leash preteen girls. Despite my similarly neat-and-tidy wardrobe, I was appreciative of the trip. It meant a few days away from home. That in and of itself made it worth trading my sensible black pumps for sensible black flats.
Though I had no plans to get in a canoe or scale a rock wall, I knew it would be satisfying to observe my peers do so. Many of them had probably never had the kind of adrenaline rush that I lived with every single day, growing up in an unpredictable environment. I never sought thrills, because just surviving was a rush enough for me.
Cass and I, partners in crime as we were, set the tone for the trip as we were packing up the bus. She watched me traipsing across the parking lot with my two suitcases and cackled heartily.
“We’re only going to be gone a few days,” she said, hoisting them into the back.
I put my hands on my pencil-skirt-clad hips, half-feigning indignation, “Hey! Remember who brought the hairdryer!”
She smiled affectionately at me, then gave me a wink, “I know, dahhhling,” she trilled, gesturing wildly toward the bus. “Now go on!”
In my middle-school diary, which I dug out for the purpose of telling this story, there’s a rather emotional passage where I describe walking back from a campfire alongside Mrs. McCue and blurting out—with the endearing awkwardness of a preteen girl, I imagine—that I wished she was my mother. She put her arm around my shoulder and said that she’d always be there for me, no matter what. Neither of us spoke, and I realized she was trying not to cry.
