“What about confidentiality?” I said.
“We don’t do that here,” Rory said. Patrice and Carlos confirmed with vigorous nodding. The memory of my mother scolding me in high school flashed in my mind. I’d bent the vow to let 12-step people in, but they were bound by the spiritual principle of anonymity, which was right there in the name of the program. What were these jokers bound by?
“How are we supposed to feel safe?”
“What makes you think confidentiality makes you safe?” Dr. Rosen looked energized, ready to school me.
“Group therapy’s always confidential.” My authority on group therapy was one friend from graduate school who had to sign a confidentiality agreement when she joined a group. “Maybe I don’t want my secrets all over your group grapevine.”
“Why not?”
“You don’t get why I want privacy?” There were zero expressions of outrage on the faces staring back at me.
“You might want to look at why you’re so invested in privacy.”
“Isn’t it standard practice?”
“It might be, but keeping secrets for other people is more toxic than other people knowing your business. Holding on to secrets is a way to hold shame that doesn’t belong to you.”
On one level I understood what he was saying. Food addicts in recovery meetings got well when they told their stories. But at the beginning of every 12-step meeting, there is a reminder: What you hear here, when you leave here, stays here. When that line is read, people in the meeting respond: here, here! Dr. Rosen was ethically bound to keep my secrets as my psychiatrist, but there were five other people who would hear every word I said. The walls of the group room were not a barrier to the information flowing out. What if I one day embezzled money from my future law firm? What if I developed irritable bowel syndrome and shit my pants on Michigan Avenue? What if I slept with someone who couldn’t use punctuation properly? How was I going to feel knowing that some Joe Schmo in the Wednesday men’s group might know details about the acrobatic sex I one day hoped to have?
“What am I going to get out of this?” I didn’t know then that this question would come out of my mouth so many times that it would become part mantra, part catchphrase.
“A place to come where everything is speakable, and you are not asked to hold any secrets for anyone. Ever.”
At the end of the session, Dr. Rosen pressed his palms together. “We’ll stop there for today.” Everyone stood up. To me, Dr. Rosen said, “We close the same way they close twelve-step meetings, holding hands in a circle saying the Serenity Prayer. If you are not comfortable with that, you don’t have to participate.”
I flashed him my “this ain’t my first rodeo” smile. I’d just sat through ninety minutes of group therapy; if anyone needed the Serenity Prayer, it was me. The familiar prayer was meant to help addicts get in touch with a power greater than themselves without invoking any particular religious tradition: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
After we recited the prayer, everyone turned to the person next to them and embraced. Rory and Patrice. Marty and Ed. Carlos and Dr. Rosen. I watched them, unprepared to step forward and press my body to theirs, but when Patrice opened her arms to me, I stepped forward and let her hug me. My arms hung at my sides like empty sleeves. Dr. Rosen stood in front of his chair, and my group members stepped over to hug him, one by one.
I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around Dr. Rosen’s shoulders and gave a quick squeeze—too quick to smell him or to retain memory of his arms around my body or mine around his. So quick it felt like it didn’t happen. There was no imprint on my body. I hugged him because I wanted to fit in, do what everyone else was doing, and not draw any attention to myself. Years later, I’d watch new patients come in and refuse to hug anyone, especially Dr. Rosen, and my jaw would drop open, realizing it never once occurred to me not to hug him. I didn’t have that kind of no anywhere in my body.
After group, I rode the Red Line train north to school, my head buzzing with the new faces, the new feelings vocabulary, the new world I’d just joined. Dr. Rosen acted like he knew all about me. His definitive statement—you don’t like having sex at all—stung. So cocky! Just because he was a fancy psychiatrist didn’t mean he knew everything. I’d once been open to pleasure, and if he ever bothered to ask me about it, I would look him and each of the group members in the eye with my legs uncrossed and tell them all about it.
* * *
The night of my first big O the spring weather in Texas was pleasant enough that I had my bedroom window open at 6644 Thackeray Avenue.
I couldn’t sleep, so I flipped on the radio and heard, “Sexually Speaking, you’re on the air.” Ooooh. This radio program was not for kids. I burrowed deeper under the covers. Sister Mary Margaret told us that sex was only for married couples trying to make a baby—having sex under any other circumstances would lead to hell, far away from God, our parents, and our pets. My mom affirmed that Catholic truth over dinner one night when she explained that there were two sins that would get you a one-way ticket to eternal damnation: “Murder and premarital sex.”
It was not hard to imagine myself slipping from God’s favor as I scooched up the volume on the radio.
A caller confessed that she was unable to reach orgasms with her partner. What followed were Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s instructions on how to get to know your body through masturbation. Helpfully, Dr. Ruth explained where the clitoris was and what it did. It was almost like she knew she was talking to a fourth grader.
I couldn’t let all that sage advice go to waste. I slid my hand between my legs and touched the delicate pearl that sometimes hurt when I rode my bike for too long. Slowly, I circled it with my finger until I felt something happening—a warm wave building, making my legs go stiff. My fantasy reel: Tad Martin from All My Children kissed my face and told me he loved me more than all the women in Pine Valley. I rubbed myself harder. The extra pressure didn’t hurt. My body climbed toward its first glorious sexual release. Then my whole body shuddered with pleasure just as Dr. Ruth promised. For the first time in my life, I thought: My body is exquisite and powerful.
There in the balmy, darkened privacy of my childhood bedroom, I tripped into my sexuality under the gentle tutelage of Dr. Ruth. I felt grown-up to have discovered the sexual secrets of adulthood. This touching myself and the warm wave of intense body pleasure must have been naughty because nobody ever talked about doing it. Masturbation was the grossest-sounding word I could imagine, and I’d never ever say it.
By fourth grade, I’d been marinating in body hatred for a few years. My stomach was too big—that was the message I received starting at age four from my beloved ballet teacher. “Christie,” she’d say. “Stomach.” A reminder to suck it in, make it disappear. She favored the girls whose leotards didn’t bulge and whose upper thighs didn’t quite touch. I wanted more than anything to be a ballerina and to be adored by my teacher, and the one thing holding me back on both fronts was the size of my body. I also suspected that my mother’s sighs when I modeled new clothes in the Joske’s and Dillard’s dressing rooms were proof that she wished I was thin-boned. I know I did. I believed that slim, lithe girls like my sister and the Jennifers and Melissas in ballet class were happier because of their smaller bodies. They were certainly better loved. In attempts to become one of those small-bodied girls, I engaged in minor skirmishes with my appetite—trying to eat half a sandwich at lunch or skipping dessert—but my appetite always won. Every day, I’d enter the kitchen with the intention of getting a glass of water and three Club crackers, yet ended up consuming a fistful of Chips Ahoy and knocking back half a pitcher of grape Kool-Aid. Why couldn’t I control my appetite? Why was my body keeping me from being who I was supposed to be?
I was a sensitive kid already gearing up for a years-long war with my body through bulimia, but in my dark room with my hand between my legs,
I experienced unalloyed body pleasure. For those few minutes, I could make peace with my flesh and drift off to sleep.
* * *
Dr. Rosen didn’t know about little Christie’s forays into self-pleasure. That little girl had the guts to turn up the radio and explore.
5
“Christie, why don’t you tell the group what you ate yesterday,” Dr. Rosen said.
“No!” My voice ricocheted off the walls. I jumped out of my chair and hopped around in the middle of the circle like I was trying to put out a fire. “No, no, no! Please, Dr. Rosen. Don’t make me!” I begged like a child. Not this; please not this. I’d never acted like this before. But no one had ever asked me point-blank about my food.
“Jesus, woman. If you’re going to act like that, then you have to tell us,” Carlos said.
We hadn’t even been talking about food. We’d been talking about the medical bills for Rory’s ferret.
I was one month into treatment. In four Tuesday sessions, the group and I had gone through all the getting-to-know-you rituals. They knew I came to group because I struggled with relationships. They knew about the bulimia, and they knew about me and Dr. Ruth. But this? Telling the seven people in front of me what I’d eaten the day before? Impossible.
My eating disorder was no longer the stuff of a Lifetime movie—I didn’t go from drive-through to drive-through eating and puking, but I ate like a weirdo. Exhibit A: Every single morning I ate a slice of mozzarella cheese rolled up in a cabbage leaf, along with a bowl of microwaved apple pieces that I poured skim milk over and ate with a spoon. “Apple Jacks,” I called them. This had been my breakfast for almost three years straight. Never a Sausage McMuffin, chocolate croissant, or granola bar. If I couldn’t have my secret special breakfast, alone in the privacy of my kitchen, then I skipped breakfast. This breakfast was safe. It never, ever beckoned me toward a binge.
My law school friends saw my odd lunch every day because I couldn’t hide it: a can of tuna in springwater over a bed of green cabbage doused with French’s Classic Yellow Mustard. They justifiably made fun of me for how disgusting and unimaginative it was. A normal person would never eat this lunch more than once; I ate it every single day. At lunchtime, the other students would saunter across campus for subs loaded with pink-and-white meats and cheeses, dripping with chunky jardinière sauce, while I sat back in the student lounge eating like a rabbit at a ballpark, prepping for the next class. They didn’t know that before I got into recovery, my relationship with food led me to crouch, face-to-toilet, after most meals. The body memory of losing control of my appetite and ending up literally in the toilet haunted me. I almost met my ignominious death in college. You could say a lot about my lunch—it was flavorless, deprivational, and guaranteed to induce heartburn—but it kept me from losing control. Could those fancy subs do that?
For dinner, I ate sautéed ground turkey mixed with broccoli, carrots, or cauliflower and a tablespoon of Parmesan cheese. Every now and then I’d mix it up and use ground chicken instead of turkey. Once I tried ground lamb, but it was greasy and made my apartment smell gamy. When I got into recovery for bulimia, I picked a handful of foods that seemed “safe” because I’d never binged on them. I didn’t have the courage to veer from my safe foods.
The bingeing popped up elsewhere, though. That was the secret rotting inside me. Every night, for “dessert,” I’d have three or four red apples—often more. Sometimes as many as eight. When I hinted at my apple consumption to my sponsor Cady back in Texas, she assured me that as long as I didn’t eat white sugar, it didn’t matter if I ate a bushel of apples three times a day. White sugar was the devil’s poison to many people in recovery—it would lead you to a death by doughnuts. Cady gave me permission to keep apples on the “safe food” list no matter how many bushels I went through per week.
I spent more on apples than I spent on cable, gas, and transportation combined. Apples were the reason I didn’t have a roommate—I was terrified of being found out, but I also couldn’t imagine eating only a single apple every night.
“Tell us,” Rory said, her voice soft and gentle.
I squeezed my eyes shut and spoke fast, like an auctioneer at a cattle sale. “Cheese, cabbage, apple, milk, cabbage, tuna, mustard, an orange, chicken, carrots, and spinach.” I paused, scared to go on. I couldn’t imagine telling them about the apples, but keeping the secret suddenly felt unbearable. They would say I had had no recovery, that I hadn’t properly worked the steps, and that I was a failure. Inwardly, I screamed hysterically. But somehow, I blurted out: “Then I ate six more apples.”
Hard to say which shame burned hotter: eating half a dozen apples after dinner or that the villain of my food diary was the innocuous darling of the produce section. I’d sat in hundreds of 12-step meetings listening to people report bizarre and appalling things they did with cherry cheesecake, black licorice, scalloped potatoes. And there was me with a bag of apples on my lap.
The previous night’s binge had been routine. I ate one apple right after dinner and swore I was done eating for the day. But there was a stirring in my belly: Was I still hungry? Was it a somatic signal that I needed more calories? I had no idea. A woman I knew from recovery always said that if you craved food after dinner, you should sit on your bed until it passed. I tried it—sitting cross-legged atop my comforter listening to sounds on the street below—but the craving for apples drew me off the bed and into the kitchen, where I grabbed another one from the fridge drawer. I ate another apple, fast, like maybe it wouldn’t count if I ate it in under sixty seconds. Then the shame—the buzzword I’d learned in group—of speed-eating an apple alone in my apartment crested, so I ate two more. My belly was tender to the touch. What the fuck was I doing? I didn’t know, but I ate two more Red Delicious. When I finally crawled under the covers to sleep, the sharp edges of the apple bits I’d failed to chew properly poked the edges of my stomach. Acid burned my throat.
How in the world could I call myself “in recovery” around food when I did this to myself every night? How would anyone love someone who ate like me? I’d been doing this for years. How would it ever stop?
Dr. Rosen asked if I wanted help. I nodded slowly, terrified he would suggest I eat bison burgers and artichoke pizza or a pint of Ben & Jerry’s every night like a normal lonely person. Or worse, that I stopped eating apples.
“Call Rory every night and tell her what you ate.”
Rory met my eyes with a smile so kind I had to look away or I would cry—like Dr. Rosen’s mazel tov for my class rank. Head-on kindness warmed my solar plexus like a heat lamp and made me tear up.
Having my ritual revealed at last, in detail, was like having a layer of skin removed. The defining feature of my eating was secrecy. In kindergarten, I snuck cookies from the snack bin. Thanksgiving weekend of junior year in high school, I snuck-ate the top layer off a pecan pie. I stole food from every roommate I’d ever had. Even in recovery, I let go of the vomiting, but I kept the secrecy. And some version of the bingeing.
“I’m not trying to keep you from eating apples,” Dr. Rosen said. “Eat as many as you want. The apples aren’t killing you; the secrecy is. And the point is”—he leaned close and lowered his voice—“if you can let this group into your relationship with food, you will be closer to intimate relationships. You’ll start with Rory.”
I looked at Rory and imagined telling her about every morsel I put in my mouth. My whole body clenched, mostly with fear, but there was also hope. Here was a chance to be known inside the messiness of my eating, something I’d never truly let myself have before.
It wasn’t a total surprise that my food stuff and relationship stuff sprouted from the same broken parts of me. What surprised me was that Dr. Rosen understood that. Paula D. hadn’t seen it, and I was actively vomiting back then.
“Will calling Rory cure my apple binges?”
“You don’t need a cure. You need a witness.”
I wanted a cure. Apples were expensive.
/>
* * *
Sophomore year in college I fell for the soulful Colombian with dimples deep as watering holes. He would drunk-dial me after the bars closed, and we would make out behind the Kappa Kappa Gamma house. He was the guy who taught me everything a kiss could be. Before him, I couldn’t grasp the big deal about touching my lips to someone else’s, but when his soft tongue met mine, I understood in an instant. A good kiss can reach every organ, every cell. It can steal your breath and make a cathedral of your mouth. Those kisses woke me up.
And then they fucked me up. The Colombian was a double whammy—an alcoholic with a serious girlfriend. The one time I slept over at his apartment, he was so drunk that he pissed in his closet because he thought it was the bathroom. Where was I when he relieved himself four feet from the bed at two A.M.? In his kitchen, shoving leftover birthday cake into my mouth. When I headed out for my walk of shame a few hours later, I ignored the amphitheater of black cake crumbs and the smear of frosting on the linoleum floor.
I was his secret side dish when his real girlfriend, the willowy Chi Omega with the straight blond hair, visited her parents in San Antonio.
The weekend of the Colombian’s fraternity spring formal in Galveston, Texas, I ran by his apartment. Like a creepy stalker I watched him and the Chi Omega load up his Ford Bronco with cases of Shiner Bock. He patted her ass; she threw back her hair.
Devastated, I ran back to my dorm and consumed every calorie in our tiny cinder-block room: Teddy Grahams, pretzels, popcorn, Pop-Tarts, and leftover Halloween candy my roommate kept in her closet. Then I walked the halls, scavenging food from the common trash bins. I pulled some other kid’s discarded pepperoni pizza out of the trash and popped it into the microwave for thirty seconds. While I waited for the cheese to melt, I devoured a batch of stale oatmeal raisin cookies that were still in a FedEx box from someone’s mom in Beaumont.
Group Page 4
