Hungry

by Sheila Himmel

  lisa: I had soccer practice twice a week, which never wore me out. So, after practice I either went back to the gym or ran a few miles. I felt like a failure if I didn’t burn at least eight hundred calories. I even left practice early to go to the gym. Occasionally I would cut class if I knew ahead of time that I would not be able to fit the gym in that day. Weight dripped off me like a melting ice cream cone. I had to have been losing three or more pounds a week but I never really weighed myself. I could just tell by how my previously flattering pants hung on my bony hips and sagged, barely nearing my tiny legs. I went from a healthy size 5 to a size 3 but wanted to be a 1, and then that turned into a 0 and even a 0 did not seem quite right. Eventually I got to 00.

  My friends really noticed my efforts and complimented me, praised me, and even showed their jealousy. Some wondered how I spent so long at the gym. For a little while, I actually felt very pleased and content in my lean yet fit figure. At the start of my senior year I came back to school with such an obviously flat stomach and toned legs that I got even more praise. At that time I was actually eating well and balanced, exercising daily, and even starting to feel (kind of) pretty. Yet, internally, I still felt insufficient. I continued to dislike what I saw in the mirror. I took my lifestyle restrictions a step further: less food, more exercise, and this continued past my spring break until I had gone too far and couldn’t go back. The energetic self I had created a few months prior became replaced by a lethargic and listless little girl.

  I was extremely cold at night and tired all the time. I barely went out on the weekends because I had no energy after 10:00 p.m. Even when I did go to a party or somebody’s house, my mind was elsewhere, focused on returning to my safety net at home and the audible rumblings coming from my belly. I turned down any invites that included food in the plans, which severely decreased my social life. Every weekend, my friends went to eat and hang out downtown, or to the nearby taqueria. If I did go out, I didn’t eat. I hated the thought of anyone else seeing me eat as I assumed they were assessing each bite I took, examining my plate thinking how fat I was. I mean these were my friends and I knew in my right mind they wanted me to join them—sometimes begging—but my sick mind overpowered everything. I opted instead to remain at home to nurture my stringent meal plans. My friends and schoolmates were starting to notice how much weight I lost and many were concerned. Some would say they were afraid I was going to break if they touched me. Others, more in an effort to comfort me, said I was looking great and really skinny. I felt trapped in a conundrum. Was I really doing right by restricting and overexercising? I felt sick all the time, lethargic, and fatigued and yet I still received compliments. Now I look back and know these people were just trying to be nice and probably felt scared to say what they really thought: that I had become much too thin.

  On the rare occasion that I went out to eat with Mom I often became upset, thinking she was going to force me to eat too much food.

  sheila: Indeed, I did. But “force” to her was “ask” to me. As in, “Hmm, this looks good. Would you like to try the crispy boneless chicken with mango in a lemongrass-garlic sauce?”

  “No! Crispy always means fried.”

  “Ah, how about . . .” I cast about, pathetically, for some food Lisa would accept. Lisa’s restrictions had become set in cement, not quirks that we could wish away. As she moved into red-alert territory, Ned and I felt sick, not knowing where to find help. I have to admit that part of me was also annoyed. Here I had this great job that everyone else in the universe envied, and even Lisa still liked telling people about, but she was spitting on it. Of course I didn’t expect her to want to go out with us a lot, but couldn’t she enjoy it just a little? Even pretend to?

  One of our descents into hell occurred in a stylish Malaysian-Singaporean-Thai restaurant. Lisa hadn’t wanted to go, no surprise, but Banyan Garden would have lots of vegetarian dishes, salads, and stir-fries (more sauté than deep-fry), and I couldn’t help pointing out, “You used to love this kind of food.” Desperate to reignite the connection to happier times, I whined until she finally said okay. But I felt like my daughter was leaving the dock in a rickety little boat, and I was barely hanging on to the sides while she pulled away.

  So that she would come with us this time, I didn’t mention where Banyan Garden was—across the bay, a thirty-minute drive if the rush-hour traffic wasn’t too bad and there weren’t any accidents. The location could have been a deal-breaker.

  In the armpit of a gangly shopping center, “Banyan Garden hides its charms under a bushel of Chinese restaurants. Even its exterior looks darkly forbidding,” my review would observe. But it often happens in Silicon Valley that good food lurks in ugly strip malls, where new immigrants are able to pay the rent. Banyan Garden’s deep red interior gave it a touch of class, and the ambitious, hundred-item menu leaped from Roti Canai to Malaysia Bean Curd, String Beans, Lady Fingers, and Eggplant on to Fish Head Curry Casserole. Ordering was going to take a while.

  “We try to satisfy all customers,” the manager-owner told me when I called later to set up an appointment for the photographer. Jimmy Cheng had majored in hospitality management in college. Banyan Garden’s owners were two Taiwanese Chinese, one Filipino Chinese, one Indonesian, and the Malaysian chef. They wanted to design a menu that appealed to those populations, their base, but also that didn’t scare away novices, who in the long run would make or break the restaurant. Thus the very long menu and options like Curry Mix and Match (pick a curry and a meat, seafood, or vegetable). It was like a flowchart or an outline of your meal. Lisa allowed as how the mixed broccoli, green beans, and potatoes were nicely cooked, and bathed in the hot-sweet-sour flavors of Malaysian dry curry. But the Aromatic Chicken and the Siam Jumbo Prawns with Shell both turned out to be deep-fried. Lisa wouldn’t touch them or their luscious sauces.

  Part of my job was to evaluate the beverages, to determine whether they were appropriate for the menu. Banyan Garden had a brief but helpfully annotated beer and wine list, including two bargain-priced California gewürztraminers friendly to spicy foods and a pinot grigio noted for being especially good with noodle dishes. Ned and I tested a few of their wine suggestions and were studying the desserts when Lisa went to the bathroom for the second time.

  She was gone for a long while. We continued talking about mango sticky rice, sweet potato tapioca, and the five flavors of ice cream. Lisa returned to the table, but before ordering, I went to the women’s room, and then I had no stomach for dessert. There were two stalls. I considered just picking one, using it like a normal person would, and if I didn’t notice anything, oh well, nothing happened. But I had to lift the seat, and yes, someone had vomited.

  Lisa wasn’t going to own up to it. She was already mad about the long drive, the dithering over what to order, having agreed to come in the first place. I looked around the restaurant and saw plenty of other suspects. It could have been any of the young women or one of the skinny young men, I decided to believe. Compounding my wishful thinking, I mentioned this incident in “A Daughter’s Inner Battle,” the 2003 story Lisa and I wrote for the Mercury News: “Lisa defiantly denied it was her. Today, she tells me the truth, and it is sometimes more than I want to know.” That sentence should have read, “Sometimes she tells me the truth, and it is pretty much always more than I want to know.”

  The women’s room at Banyan Garden became my private Gates of Hell. My stubborn innocence died there. It became such a bad memory, I wanted never to see that restaurant again. But three years later a colleague from another paper asked me to meet him for dinner at Banyan Garden, because he needed to review it. The restroom was just a restroom.

  lisa: One day at the Y, while getting ready for the first round of my daily elliptical training sessions, I noticed Shape magazine. It spoke to me right away. Here were the answers on how to better “shape my life.” And so, I got on my machine, plugged in my thirty minutes, and dove into my new companion. My eyes quickly fixated on an article titled
(as best as I can remember, but isn’t it always something like this?) “Your Diet and Your Workout.” This article provided a meal plan coordinated to when one worked out. Since I always exercised in the afternoon, my biggest meal of the day should be lunch, and the ideal was a burrito with “the works.” By “the works” they meant a whole wheat tortilla, salsa (for all the great vitamins), some guacamole (watching portion sizes as avocados are high in fat and calories), black beans, and perhaps some chicken. Definitely skip the cheese. Get complex carbohydrates in the morning and afternoon, and make sure to wait at least two hours after completing a meal to exercise. Then, dinner should be small, no more than 500 calories made up of mainly lean protein and vegetables (trying to avoid starch!).

  Soon I was reading a new magazine every month and trying to tie in each new workout they gave me to my daily regime. When I was already fairly deep into my eating disorder, I read an article on the “butt-blasting diet.” I had already starved away my butt, but it didn’t matter. The diet that was laid out on that page said to eat a small breakfast, an apple for a snack, a lean turkey sandwich on whole wheat without out any condiments (lettuce was okay), and then a small dinner. Since I already exercised at least two hours a day, following a strict plan like this would leave me with no spare calories and an extreme weight loss.

  By the end of junior year in the spring of 2002, my room was filled with Fitness and Shape magazines. I still had trouble controlling my dessert intake, so I cut out sweets completely. But for the most part I was feeling great and my parents were pleased with my healthy lifestyle. I didn’t eat carbs after 6:00 p.m., I stopped eating altogether after 8:00 p.m., and I rarely went out with friends because usually they ate fast food or pizza.

  Then, somehow, I stepped over the line.

  sheila: When Lisa started taking her diet in a healthy direction, we were pleased. She read nutrition labels and watched the sizes of her portions. She cut out red meat and fried foods. Even when she reduced her diet mainly to vegetables with maybe a piece of grilled chicken or, more likely, tofu, I cast about for ways to make it work. She could help me seek out vegetarian options in restaurants.

  On Mother’s Day of Lisa’s senior year, we met my parents, my aunt, and my cousin Peggy in San Francisco at the Hayes Street Grill, a well-known restaurant near Civic Center specializing in grilled fish, with lots of low-fat choices and about the best french fries in San Francisco. Lisa only ordered steamed broccoli, and picked at it. The rest of us pretended not to notice. Another day I dragged her to a popular local café that had lots of sandwiches listed on a chalkboard and a long line, so there was plenty of time to decide. We got to the front and still Lisa couldn’t pick a sandwich. None of them had the lack of ingredients she was looking for.

  Lisa no longer went to new restaurants with us, whether I was working or not. We would take too long and eat too much. As I write this now, I imagine for her it must’ve been something like being a small child in a restaurant waiting for the adults to finish their coffee. They finish a cup and you think, “Hooray! Finally we can get out of here!” But then the server comes by and refills the cup. It will be another five minutes, which might as well be hours. Especially when you didn’t want to be there in the first place, and then, like Lisa, you felt like throwing up.

  By this time Lisa could be so unpleasant that when I was working we didn’t want her to come. She disapproved of most of what we ate. She barely ate meals with us at home, either, and we stopped begging. It was a rare meal that didn’t start in tension and end in tears.

  “Come eat with us.”

  “I won’t eat what you’re having.”

  “I know, but just sit down with us.”

  Strain for safe conversation, as if we are strangers.

  “Want to try this?”

  “You know I don’t eat pork!”

  “Aren’t you still a little hungry?”

  “I knew it! You’re going to make me eat so much!”

  As Lisa acted even weirder around food—measuring out one cup of steamed vegetables and three ounces of protein and calling that dinner—we grasped for explanations. She was facing college applications, leaving home, life-size decisions. Maybe that anxiety, combined with the crazy-quilt patterns of wealth and the pressures of Silicon Valley, had gotten to her. Or was it the dot-com downturn? She said she feared becoming homeless. Wasn’t that just the way adolescents think, fantasizing that a personal catastrophe was about to happen at any moment?

  In casting about for explanations of this craziness, we found lists. In source after source, lists of factors leading to anorexia range from emotional states to cultural pressures and genetic history. Parents and patients naturally skip the part that says, “It’s not your fault!” and we measure our families against the items on the lists. The following causes, or triggers, turn up on a lot of lists:1. American society’s worship of ultra-thinness

  2. An anorexic mother or sister

  3. Parents who are highly focused on appearance, frequently go on diets, or make negative comments about their children’s bodies

  4. Trauma

  5. A perfectionistic personality

  6. A genetic predisposition to the disorder

  And always, the suggestion at the end of these lists is to get help early.

  So. We all face the societal pressures to be ultra-thin. I am not anorexic, and Lisa doesn’t have a sister, but her brother is not anorexic. If Ned and I are highly focused on appearance, it is to wear jeans and T-shirts as often as possible, although we do clean up when the occasion demands it. Ned grumbles every day when putting on a coat and tie. I have one little black dress, and one blue-green crepe number that I inherited fifteen years ago from a fashion shoot. Henry David Thoreau is our mentor on this matter: “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”

  What about frequent dieting? Me, never; Ned, maybe once a year when he cooks his cabbage soup. Negative comments about our children’s bodies? I don’t think so. Negative comments about the revealing clothes Lisa sometimes puts on her body? For sure. As for genetic predisposition, how would we know? There was no family history of eating disorders. That left trauma.

  Lisa did have a short fuse, but was that because of a trauma? We always thought that was just Lisa. We looked up old school reports for clues.

  “She can feel wounded with the slightest confrontation and aggressive exchange, and then will internalize and withdraw into herself,” Lisa’s wonderful first- and second-grade teacher, Jeannette Wei, wrote at the end of the first year. “It would be very important to help her verbalize and clarify her feelings. She lets go of those negative and depressing feelings when I talk over things with her, point out her erroneous perceptions, and help find some other solutions and options. In time, she will acquire more skills, grow in maturity, and be more able to handle those negative feelings.”

  At the end of second grade, Jeannette was pleased. “Lisa is a delightful and charming person, full of humor and wit. She is honest and fair, quick to own up to mistakes, and fast to forgive. . . . Now she has learned to present her point of view, use good reasoning power, win people to her side because she now can figure out what is good for all of us as a group. Now, isn’t that mature for a child her age?!”

  When the kids were young, we belonged to a babysitting co-op. Each family lived within a mile or two and had to be recommended by another family. There were constant phone calls and annual meetings, but the most serious problems ever mentioned were parents who consistently came home later than they’d promised. One night Lisa did run screaming to the car before we left. Did that mean more than “Stay home and play with me”? Lisa always wanted to be in the spotlight. As she had said one day in the kitchen, watching Ned and me kissing, “Stop falling in love, and pay attention to me!”

  Now she was in high school and definitely not in the spotlight. Henry M. Gunn High School is known as the city’s math-science school, and Lisa was having a lot of trouble in math and science and with t
aking timed tests. She agreed to an interview with the school psychologist, who wrote, “Lisa self-reports that she worries frequently and has mood swings during school.” But a battery of tests was inconclusive. She did consistently well on reasoning tests, written expression, and listening comprehension, although “there is some indication of processing difficulties in the areas of attention and auditory processing especially verbal memory,” the psychologist noted. She had a B-plus average. It was recommended that she work with a peer tutor in math and science and check out the adolescent counseling service that coordinated with the school, and that we consider a medical evaluation for auditory processing problems. Practical suggestions, all fulfilled. If there had been an underlying trauma, we were still missing it.

  lisa: Early in junior year, we wrote essays for English class about our career aspirations. My eating habits had soured me on nutrition:While growing up I often found myself outnumbered three to one. My mom, dad, and brother all played club tennis whereas I never touched a racket, but rather found athletic excitement on the soccer field. My parents both graduated from UC Berkeley and my brother is currently studying architecture there, whereas I will not be joining them. School never came easy for me. My mom would often remind me when I was feeling down that I had a talent that many people struggle to possess. “You have a real understanding for people, Lisa, and you care about what they have to say. Though you might not get a grade for that, find a way to be able to let that talent show in your everyday life.” She did not have to actually say the word, but I knew what her advice was adding up to: psychology. Yes, that was it. I wanted to be a psychologist.