Within three weeks of spring break I had lost five of the offending ten pounds. Within six weeks I had lost the other five. To say that my success was intoxicating is to grossly understate the way I felt about it. My success was like winning an Oscar, or discovering a cure for polio, or cancer, or for that matter, death. To understand why it felt so big you have to consider the story that came before, the one that had been building up around my weight since fifth grade and that finally exploded on the Bard College campus. You have to consider what those ten unwanted pounds (I can’t even say “extra,” because this supposes that I was overweight by any standard, which I was not) said to me about my womanhood, my sexual being, my human being. You have to consider the way that those ten pounds were imbued with a kind of magical power, which I believed was responsible for every less-than-satisfactory thing that had happened in my life up to that moment in my eighteenth year.
In searching for the source of my weight’s magical powers, I come back time and again to two particular events. The first takes place at my fifth grade school lunch table. Classmate Randy Russell waits for me to finish gnawing a chicken drumstick, then asks, “What happened to you? You were cute in second grade.”
What had “happened” was that, for a few months before I would reach my full height of five feet, nine inches tall, the weight which would be distributed nicely on my new lanky frame pooled in a rounded belly, an extra chin, and jiggling thighs. In addition (though I add the following only to give a narrator’s full account of things as they were, and not to suggest that anything other than the weight mattered), I had recently gotten my long ropy hair cut into heavy bangs, transitioned into a pair of oversized, octagonal, wire-rimmed eyeglasses whose lenses were distorting and too thick for their frames, and been fitted for braces on my teeth.
I can’t think about Randy Russell’s comment without recalling the cold metal frame of the folding lunch table pushing into the tops of my thighs, and the acrid smell of yeast rolls co-mingling in the air with the sickly-sweet perfume of cornflake-marshmallow bars. Randy Russell’s assessment of the ground lost between ages seven and ten is a psychic memento frozen in the fusty air of a schoolroom cafeteria. Along with the realization that I’ve been deemed “no longer cute” is the concomitant realization that an earlier assessment had taken place, that of “cute,” but this kinder analysis doesn’t matter. Assessment is the operative event here, and it wakes me to all kinds of realities about my life, the main one being that I have never and can never putter happily and invisibly around the playground of my own head, immune to the appraisals of others. It is this sudden thrusting into the (as I see it) cruel light of outside opinion that means I will have to forevermore divide my attention between the blissfully private inner park of imagination and the problem of outer image. Later I will read that anorexia is the embodiment of the struggle between a desire for invisibility and a yearning for recognition, and will marvel at the irony of it: how vanishing makes others look harder at you. But until then, there is the problem of Randy Russell’s commentary, the sudden jolt that is the beast of self-censure now waking in me, now asking forevermore, what happened?