Word Is
Chuck has me lean against a wall he has covered in white paper. A fountain trickles in the room, and wood instruments play from a hidden CD player. He positions my feet shoulder-width apart, my arms straight, my fingers splayed. His wire glasses slip down his nose as he traces my frame against the paper with a red Sharpie. I wonder what he’ll do when he gets near my groin, and I feel a chill. But even in fear, I somehow pity him, even though he is siphoning money out of my confused, desperate parents. Going upward, he barely makes it past my knees before he draws a line connecting one leg to the other, making it look like I’m wearing a modest skirt. Pussy, I think in relief.
Just before this, I am told to draw an outline of myself on the same paper with a blue Sharpie. I’ve seen this done on an HBO documentary, and I wonder if that’s where he got the idea.
He finishes tracing, and we pull away to observe our markings.
Chuck looks disappointed. He expected to see a blue balloon-animal of a girl, her swollen limbs encasing a red stick figure. He expected to see distortion. He wanted to see distortion. But the blues and reds overlap in most places, and the etching is of just one tiny person.
I feel like he’s going to reproach me somehow. But he exhales and rubs his brow with his thumb and forefinger. He offers me a pack of Oreo minis from the basket none of us touch, and asks how I would like to spend the remaining forty minutes before my mom comes back. There is a pang in my chest as I think about how much this, whatever this is, is costing my parents.
***
They put Molly, who suffers from binge eating disorder, in group with us because they think we can all help each other. Word is that between our sicknesses, there is a magical spot of sanity where girls don’t eat too little or too much.
We meet in the big room with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook a cactus garden. Meditation cushions are stacked in the corner, and the lamplight gets warmer as the sun sets behind the hills of Redlands. For a moment, this feels like somewhere I’d want to be. But then Buck clears his throat for us to get started.
Unlike the me and the other girls, curled up in hoodies and oversized sweaters, Molly sits upright. Her eyes are big and blue, her lips glossy pink like wet flower petals, and her studded jeans adhere to her thighs. She is quiet until prompted by Chuck to discuss her “binges,” which she describes without regret – whole boxes of Lucky Charms with 2% milk, In-N-Out four-by-fours with fries, cases of Miller High Life. She says she is only here because her dad put her here. Her face is radiant with defiance in the amber lamplight.
***
At lunch, my best friend Amelia and I buy Diet Dr. Peppers and lay in out in the hazy orange sun. This year, Korean writer Han Kang would publish The Vegetarian, where a homemaker, Yeong-hye, refuses meat, and then all food, in resistance to the violence of man. She eventually derives her energy from sunlight, and as Amelia and I lay on concrete, held by the sun and drinking its warmth, we maybe know a little bit of how she feels.
After school, we watch Sex and the City on Amelia’s bedroom floor, surrounded by Andy Warhol soup cans and Bob Dylan posters. Between us, we share our one daily meal: a bag of cold red grapes we bought for a dollar a pound at Albertsons. We toss the little globes into our mouths and savor the juicy pop. We watch, eyes wide, as Carrie and Miranda cram folded slices of New York cheese pizza into their enormous, open mouths. They talk about fucking their boyfriends while they chew, their cheeks full, jaws smacking.
***
Amelia and I go to separate clinics. Our parents want it this way, and maybe we do, too. Neither of us wants to get better, but we don’t want to interfere with the recovery of the other. It hurts to think about; we are each other’s first loves. It’s only when we think about the other’s body that we understand that it can give out.
We catch up on AIM after treatment, and I try to drown out the sound of my brothers with a Napster playlist. They’re in our bathroom getting ready to go out on a weeknight, and I hear mention of 4 Locos, car parts, and Arnold’s and juice (anabolic steroids), and words like “cock tease,” “skank,” and “faggot.” I find comfort in the “bloop” sounds of Amelia’s messages. Before signing off and going to bed, we share photos of Beck, our celebrity crush, looking lanky, androgynous, indifferent.
***
After my first kiss at fourteen, I decide that I don’t want a woman’s body.
My boyfriend is almost eighteen, a senior. He is a foot and a half taller than me. He is the drummer of an okay band. He calls my house before six and isn’t fazed when my brothers are dicks on the other end of the line. He’s an older brother, too.
He waits for me outside of my fourth period biology class to carry my books, and I see a prince bent at the waist, hand extended. We walk to the grassy hill for lunch, arm in arm, and everything feels sweet, like an early Beatles song.
He knows I haven’t done anything with anyone. Sometimes we sit on broken furniture in his bandmate’s dusty hot barn cluttered with musical equipment, and he watches my face while he traces circles along my wrists and forearms with his fingertips. I feel like I’m being touched everywhere all at once and I swear he can tell.
My mom drops me off at his house while it’s still light out. The orange groves are fragrant with rotten citrus.
I’m wearing my favorite, most grown-up outfit—a lacy peasant top, cinched in at the waist, and a long tight skirt. At fourteen, my body is a bottom-heavy hourglass. I still expect to see a kid in the mirror, but I see a dramatic curve from waist to hip that feels startling and indiscreet.
He takes me by the hand into his parents’ basement, and a few minutes into The Cell with J. Lo in red latex, he pulls me into him on the sinking sofa, holds my chin in his fingers, and kisses me on the mouth.
It’s like the circles on my arms but better. When he flicks his tongue past my teeth and bites my lower lip, I feel an unfamiliar, almost suffocating throbbing, and I’m both afraid and long for more.
It starts to feel different when he runs his hands along my waist and says things like fuck I love your body; you have such an amazing body. My chest constricts in an embarrassment I can’t explain.
He swiftly moves his hand down my skirt, slips his fingers beneath my underwear line, and enters me in a motion I haven’t yet done to myself. I go rigid, stunned that there isn’t an invisible barrier between our bodies.
When I get home, I study my body in the mirror. My lips are still swollen and I hear his voice in my head, admiring my body, my waist, my legs, and I want to claw these parts away.
I stop eating easily, my guts churning each morning when I wake up. I am disgusted, not at him, but at my body. The thought of being touched that way again makes my breath catch, and when I tell my mom I’m going to break up with him, she says, “Just make sure you’re kind.”
I start to feel the swelling of a wound I don’t know how to name. In school, I make an effort to not do any assigned work. I stop going to choir because it requires noticeably using my body, I ditch assemblies and hide near the brick administrative offices with new friends whose wounds are also visible, and each day in second period, I refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance. I just sit with my legs curled beneath me and wish I could strip my body down to its most basic parts.
***
Even the “professionals” are lost.
I think of Molly and all our similarities that they’re not seeing when they put us in a room together. What they’re not seeing when they focus almost entirely on food and “normal” eating patterns. What they’re not seeing when they focus on how much weight we’ve gained or lost.
This is about weight distribution, but not in the way they think it is. This is about our bodies, but not in the way they think it is. Our bodies are not of our making, but the making of everyone around us.
No one is willing to look this thing, or at any of us, and say: “You are not the problem. And this thing you’re doing to your body – it’s not even the problem. Rather, we—and everyone around you have willed it into existence. Your body is of our doing.”
Perhaps Chuck and the rest cannot see, or choose not to see, “the symbolic power of eating practices in a patriarchal environment.” Perhaps it’s too disruptive to see eating disorders as “evidence of and responses to women’s subordination and norms of feminine self-sacrifice.”(1) Molly and the rest of us all try to siphon small bits of comfort from near-dry taps, and all of us try to make our bodies usable in ways that are just for ourselves. At the same time, we try to survive in what seem like counterintuitive ways. Kathleen Lebesco, who I wouldn’t read for another ten years, in graduate school, argues, “Fatness and thinness are linguistic antonyms, but much is lost in seeing them as mere opposites.”(2)
Many years in the future, I will still have daydreams where everyone, a great gray chorus of therapists, doctors, family, teachers, coaches, comes out with it and says, “Your body has been just as much ours as it is yours; it’s no wonder you tried to take it back!” And then, instead of asking, “How can we get you to change your relationship to your body?” they ask, patiently, thoughtfully, with a long loving pause, “How can we change our relationship to your body?”
But fixing women’s bodies one by one is easier than working to correct, or even look at, the whopping imbalances.
Susan Bordo nudges close to getting it right, at least concerning the whittling down: “Anorexia emerges out of what is, in our time, conventional feminine practice…The practice is pushed a little farther than the parameters of moderate dieting.”(3) Much of what she says is accurate to an embarrassing degree. She speaks straight to the desire to lose one’s “traditional feminine curves,” to “feel untouchable, out of reach of hurt” by not being “mark[ed]…as female.” That a woman’s “shrinking body is admired, not so much as an aesthetic or sexual object but for the strength of will and self-control it projects,” and therefore, its maleness. By shunning its woman-ness, the body does not offer to carry others. It does not offer to be hurt. It does not offer what it cannot give. Bordo describes “the experience” of perpetually shrinking as “intoxicating, habit-forming,” and it’s true: you’re basically high the entire time, astonished by how little you need.
***
Word is, I am going to die if I continue, which, I guess, means I am going to die.
***
At a weekly progress eval, Chuck asks me if my Social Distortion shirt has anything to do with my feelings: a dancing skeleton holding a martini and a cigarette. I smile the first smile I’ve had in this building.
“I honestly never thought of it until now, but yes, I think does, Chuck.”
He folds his hands over his belly, leans back in his office chair, jiggles his leg. There is a crumpled bag of Nutter Butters in his trash can and an empty ink cartridge.
He mentions my lack of progress. I mention his lack of credentials, even though I don’t know what they are.
On my way out, he weighs me on the hospital scale. I have been instructed to not look, so I turn around, the balance bar clanging with my smallest movements. Chuck clucks his tongue and scribbles a two-digit number.
At times I feel almost warm toward him. His wide flat ass. His shirt tucked in too tight so that his belly button peeks through the white linen.
But mostly I think I feel how I imagine Molly to feel.
Once in group, he asks her what she likes about life that isn’t food.
She does not blink or pause. “Sex.”
Chuck raises his eyebrows. “Sex.”
“Yes,” she says.
His eyebrows stay raised, and I wonder if she and I share images of violence directed at this man who is profiting off our families, our bodies. I wonder if she imagines eating him whole, like an anaconda would eat a child, inch by inch.
***
Word is, I don’t believe in consequences. Word is, I don’t believe in death.
***
When things come to a head and my body finally says when, my oldest brother is in jail. He has been for a while. Word is, he’s working in the kitchen, so he has it okay.
Now threats scribbled on notebook paper don’t appear on our doorstep, and no one is taking a baseball bat to our lamp posts. At least now we know where he is.
My other brother comes up behind me on my spot on the sectional couch and spoons me. I can’t stand without my head spinning and my heart racing. His hands, now the size and shape of my dad’s, lightly squeeze my sunken middle. He says nothing. We never touch, and we’re only ever serious with each other when we’re fighting.
It takes me a long time to get used to being held by him, to get used to his tenderness. When I finally let my body rest in his, I realize that, for the first time, I’m scared too.
***
The night after an electrocardiogram, I have a dream about Robert Smith from The Cure. We wear the same lipstick. We kiss and it feels like finger painting.
He tells me that there are ways to eat the sadness and not eat the self. That there are ways to be heard.
And he explains how.
What he tells me makes perfect, obvious sense, but when I wake up, his words don’t translate into this life.
I burrow into my comforter and try to hop back into the dream like I’m chasing a moving train. If I can just find Robert Smith and kiss him again, he can tell me the same thing, but in a way that is decipherable, so I can actually use those words, and use them to shape myself. My whole self.
I don’t fall back asleep, but I hear a voice, whispering from the core of my pillow: the answer is not in words.
***
In group meditation, we are instructed to chant, “I have a body but I am not my body. I have a body but I am not my body,” and these words, this lie, tastes bitter on the sides of my tongue.
Even in this moment, I know, at the very least, that everything I am and will be is determined by, contained within, and understood through my body.
But what I don’t yet know is that one day, my little world will become large. That I will know, as well as anyone can, how to eat the sadness without eating the self. That my body would become a place of rest, joy, shattering loss, instinctive healing, and unapologetic hunger.
(1) LeBesco, Kathleen, “Weight management, good health, and the will to normality,” Critical Feminist Approaches to Eating Dis/Orders, ed. Helen Malson and Maree Burns, Routledge, 2009. Referencing Elspeth Probyn and Susan Bordo.
(2) LeBesco.
(3) Bordo, Susan. “Hunger as Ideology: The Woman Who Doesn’t Eat Much” (1993), Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. University of California Press, 2004.
Stephanie Couey is from Riverside, California. She obtained an MFA in Poetry from the University of Colorado Boulder where she is now a PhD candidate in English. She teaches courses in literature, creative writing, and rhetoric and composition, and her poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction appear or are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, The Manifest-Station, Literary Orphans, and elsewhere.