by Laura Ingram

“Turn around,” the nursing assistant tells me, her stubby, manicured fingers wrapped tightly around my upper arm. I notice that they overlap. She cannot let me fall, could lose her job. I step backwards on the scale, know better, by now, than to ask for the number. It doesn’t matter much yet—I weighed myself twice while the ambulance that brought me shrieked its way down the drive. The clicking of the computer as she inputs the weight echoes my chattering teeth as I slip my bones beneath the scratch hospital blankets, like a love letter some aging war widow reads every night before sliding it back in its envelope. I curl up, cursive, my body illegible, my body my signature on the dotted line, my body the spidery loop of my name. The night nurse brings with her a pillar of unnatural light, asks for my arm. I know what she wants. I offer it to her, don’t flinch at the needle. Even in the early dark, I can squint out the blue typeface on the IV bag. D5. Sugar water. I wait until her sneakers squeak away before I bend my elbow over my head, already wincing at the pull. I hold my arm up at that angle all night to keep the sugar water from dripping down.  Pins and needles pain prickles down.

I have been starving myself since I was eleven.

We tell ourselves stories to get to know our own ghosts. We write down what happened in the same way a man might carry a photo of his wife in his wallet. The heart is, itself, a billfold, rattling with coins and receipts and cinema ticket stubs, maybe a sun-faded picture of some smiling face. We tell ourselves stories to use both for comfort and for currency. We mythologize our own dead. This way, we remember. That family recipe for fudge as fairy-tale, mom and dad’s first date, creation myth, genesis, In the Beginning God.

Recently, my father has taken on the project of digitizing all the home movies he made throughout the nineties and early two-thousands. At sixty-four, he teaches physics to high-school seniors through the days, spends the after-hours crouched over the millennium camcorder, watching my older sister and me splash in pink plastic backyard pool, deliberate over which cookies to leave out for Santa—reindeer iced sugar or chocolate snowman— and nearly wreck the Barbie Jeep.  Sometimes, he calls my name, over and over, and I come to my parents’ bedroom, too many blues to breathe in, the paisley comforter and cabbage rose wallpaper spanning decades. Sometimes, it seems to be centuries. I sit beside him, waiting.

“Watch this” he says, pushing his wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose, pressing play. I toddle onto the tiny screen, plastic tiara atop my brown bob, every little finger festooned with a different gaudy rhinestone ring. I laugh, watching as I slide on my socked feet into the kitchen.

“Attention,” baby me trills. “Princess Laura needs to know what we are going to have for dessert tonight!” I laugh, as do my parents in the film, but when I turn to face my father, his face crumples. It takes me a few seconds to realize; I have never seen him cry. I do not know if I can bear to touch him, he sits so close.

“I remember,” he sobs. I wait for him to say more, but that is his heartache. He remembers. I stare at the stilled screen, fix my focus on the wall-clock in the movie kitchen. Four pm. The curtains were different then, the wallpaper printed with illustrations of spices and herbs. He restarts the clip. My un-greyed grandmother lifts me up in her arms and shows me to the pantry for a cookie. I giggle. I bite into it, chocolate chips smearing streaks across my cheeks, big brown eyes crinkling with a grin. “Don’t you remember?” His voice, peeling at the corners like the wallpaper. Tomorrow, I turn twenty-seven. This morning, I weighed in at forty-eight pounds.

“I remember,” he repeats.

I leave the room.

Aristotle did not believe in the concept of zero. Like all scholars, the promenade of doctors and therapists consulted about my case urged me to begin at the beginning. In the beginning, only darkness. (In the beginning god.) Sometimes I would say it came from my mother. Sometimes I would tell them it came to me in a dream, sitting up straighter on the parade of uncomfortable, bright-colored couches, lifting my wasted legs up and down over and over and over again, daring the often faceless doctor to doubt my power as a prophet, all  fifty-odd pounds of me, voodoo doll fashioned from wishbone half and gossamer, the paradox of an anorexic’s power lying in that, like any god—or any girl—she must perform the impossible to be believed. God had miracles, the loaves and fishes, the parted seas— and I had magic—rather than multiply, I could disappear completely.

Anorexia, the disease of nothing, of zero, null, l’appel du vide.  Aristotle did not believe in the concept of zero, but Sanskrit astronomer Aryabhata fathered absence as entity in infant mathematics. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I see a black hole open on the kitchen table. I fill a glass with water. I pretend not to notice. Matter cannot be created or destroyed, but the body recedes to the dark earth in time. Death is not nothing. Anorexia is nothing. Anorexia, as illness, is the sugar pill, the barren field, the pause between dreams that no one ever remembers when they wake up. This is not a story of how anorexia ends. Zero times zero times zero is zero.

***

I don’t know that I’ve ever read a story where nothing changes. The truth is, I didn’t notice when it started. I fell off the bottom of the growth curve shortly after birth. An endless stream of library hardbacks raised me into an eleven-year-old alone at the corner lunch table. My mother, in perhaps a Freudian fashion, berated my fourteen-year-old sister for filling out and failing pre-algebra. I took notice of it. I took notice of everything. I made friends, learned to speak some stilted French, took a field trip to Washington DC to see the Smithsonian, but there is nothing more ostracizing than girlhood, without exception. I did not know how to be a woman. What if I failed? Where would I live? Who would I call on my way home? I experienced a variety of panic attacks. I told no one because they always went away eventually. What I came to call The Dread could choke my heart with both its calloused hands no matter at school, or scouts, or staring at friend’s ceiling fans on Saturdays, promising each other not to tell anyone else we were playing with American Girl Dolls, making them succumb to cholera, imitating our precocious hysteria. I would tremble, throat closing, eyes unblinking, until whoever’s cluttered vanity or life-size Harry Styles cutout came back into focus. Female friendships at pivotal ages often manifest as more intimate and intense than any first romance. Despite this thrilling proximity to each other’s ingenuity and oddity, by thirteen, I could not bear any touch. I itched with allergy to self. My anaphylactic aloneness was the strange mouthful of fruit I kept swallowing and swallowing.

I was, like every anti-heroine, fourteen when everything changed. Skipping school lunch had become routine, along with scraping most of my dinner down the garbage disposal. One by one, my friends started carrying Tampax in their pencil cases, talking about boys, towering over me. I started trailing two steps behind when we walked together. Even now, so many years later, I am conscious of the crux of anorexia’s axiom; everyone else grew up, while I stayed the same. My classmates nicknamed me Auschwitz. Sometimes, I’d find food in my locker, hear laughter from somewhere I could not see. I let them laugh at me. I missed the bonfires and birthday parties. I counted hours, and days. I counted calories. I didn’t know what clothes to layer, or how long a kiss should last, but I knew, everyone knew, that Laura Ingram was the skinniest girl in school. I pretended not to know the name of this hunger I could call to me like some dark little dog. My family defended me from guidance counselors and nosy neighborhood mothers, and I withered beneath their denials. Three weeks after my fourteenth birthday, I followed my sister’s bigger footprints the whole half-mile to the mailbox, ripped into my acceptance letter to the Appomattox Regional Governor’s School for the Arts and Technology. Literary Arts. I sank to the hardened brown grass, bony knees aching at sudden contact with cold and cried hard for all I hoped could happen. No one there, I resolved, would ever learn my secret. It never occurred to me to stop.

At the arts school, for the first time, everyone I met could be called a friend. I sat with the seniors on the basement staircase during lunch, laughing together. I went to house parties where we tried to summon demons in someone’s parent’s garage or played hide and seek. It could always go either way. My geometry teacher lectured on the Pythagorean theorem from a snail puppet dubbed Euclid. I discovered poetry. I swept up awards, kept a stack of honor-roll ribbons under my bed, along with an eclectic collection of packaged snacks I would never, ever, ever eat. I could hold them, run my purpling fingers over the corners of candy bars, rustle the wrappers around cookies and crackers. Sleep became elusive, my bones rubbing angry red raw spots on my skin where they protruded, no matter how many pillows I positioned around myself. I’d wake up, small wet ring from my open mouth dark on the pillow where I’d tried to eat my dreams.

Two or three in the morning at a friend’s house, I went searching for water. Twisting the tap, I ducked down to drink, standing, startling, I backed away from another mirror that wanted to kill me, reciting my own name over and over, my jagged black shape in the dark a Rorschach of want. I did not want to be beautiful, no. I wanted to be invisible to the untrained eye, never revealing myself to the non-believer, like an eight-eyed angel or an apparition that floats in through the second-story window, long dress glowing yellow like the late-night news.  Always an angel, already a ghost.  Never an ingenue. In the catechism of yearning, no amount of suffering ever elevated a girl to a god.

Desire is sin. Prayer is desire, prayer is want, prayer is ache.

 Dear God, I prayed, curling back up under my friend’s snoopy comforter beside her warm body, please let me be skinny forever and ever. As skinny as I am now, or even skinnier. Amen.

 When we woke up, a couple clumps of my hair had come out on my friend’s flowered pillowcase. I panicked and stuffed the strands inside of it.

My mother took me shopping a few days before my sixteenth birthday to prepare for throwing a party, the theme an appropriately vague “Black and Pink.”  She produced a parade of dresses from the second story of Macy’s; bubblegum taffeta, synthetic magenta silk, zebra stripes, black mesh. A litany of glitter and lace. And none of them fit, not zero, not even double zero, not even with the fistful of safety pins she summoned from her purse for the occasion, gathering and tucking fabric around bones.  A thicket of pins flashing fluorescent under the dressing room’s bare bulb. She knew. She had to know.

“Turn around,” my mother said, muttering, tugging taffeta. “Shit.”

Still cursing, she led me to the Little Girl’s department. I hosted my Sweet Sixteen wearing a First Communion dress. The itchy tag said age seven.

 The week after my birthday party, the school administration called Child Protective Services on my parents. Jaundiced and vacant, you could see my teeth through the skin of my cheeks. I had no idea that by the end of sophomore year I would be forced into the first of fifteen hospitalizations, none of which had lasting results.

In the cerebral half-dream of hospital morning, the nursing assistant, assigned to sit with me 24/7, cracks her back against the green vinyl chair she holds her salaried vigil in.

“Please put your arm down, Laura, you know the team will give you nutrition however they have to.”

I grit my teeth.

“We know all the tricks.” She wraps a blood pressure cuff around my other arm. Stamped across the side it says, “Size: Infant.” A drop of dextrose dribbles down. I relent, for now. The Acute Center for Eating Disorders and Severe Malnutrition asserts on their website that no eating disorder is too extreme for them to treat. In the past three years, I have been emergently admitted eight times. The unit has three crash carts, stationed in a set number of rooms apart. The telemetry monitoring flashes our sputtering heartbeats on flat screens for the nurses to make note of. The doctors who don’t know what to do with me pass out pamphlets at medical conferences, glossy pages populated by the sterility of stock photos of smiling men and women having their blood pressure and temperature taken, smiling men and women who have definitely never shoplifted laxatives from CVS or shoved an uneaten sandwich in their underwear. I suppose I have gotten to the point where I find hotlines and infographics insulting.

A decade of hospitals, residential programs, intensive outpatient, and not once has anyone with the clipboard offered anything beyond a label of “severe and enduring.”

Above the door to every room at Acute some idiot has painted an inspirational quote in wiggly white script. I rip out my feeding tube twice under the words of Pema Chödrön. Minutes before midnight, New Year’s Eve, I roll over in the hospital bed, sheets rustling. Facing away from the distant fireworks flashing across my neon window, I close my eyes. My heart, replaced with a Rubik’s Cube, unsolved, spins its array of reds. I press my call button. The nurse sprints in, squats by the bed.

“Where does it hurt?” Her tenderness disarms me. I pull the scratchy blanket up.

“Everywhere.” I tell her.

~~~~~

Laura Ingram is a poet living and writing in rural Virginia. Her poetry and prose have been featured in over one-hundred literary journals and magazines, among them Juked and The Roadrunner Review. Laura is also the author of six collections of poetry; The Taffeta Parable, Mirabilis, Junior Citizen’s Discount, Animal Sentinel, The Solitude of the Female Preying Mantis, and The Ghost Gospels. Laura enjoys most books and all cats.