Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia Read Online Free Page A

or bloody a guy's nose without really trying, and if you hit me real hard in the stomach you'd probably break your hand. In other words I am built for boxing, not ballet.1 I came that way—even baby pictures show my solid diapered self tromping through the roses, tilted forward, headed for the gate.
    But at four I stood, a tiny Eve, choked with mortification at my body, the curve and plane of belly and thigh. At four I realized that I simply would not do. My body, being
    1There are few classes for four-year-old female would-be boxers, and I think my parents were trying to get me to be slightly more graceful (bull-in-china-shop syndrome).
    solid was too much. I went home from dance class that day, put on one of my father's sweaters, curled up on my bed, and cried. I crept into the kitchen that evening as my parents were making dinner, the corner of the counter just above my head. I remember telling them, barely able to get the sour confession past my lips: I'm fat.
    Since I was nothing of the sort, my parents had no good reason to think that I honest-to-god believed that. They both made the face, a face I would learn to despise, that oh please Marya don't be ridiculous face, and made the sound, a terrible sound, that dismissive sound, ttch . They kept making dinner. I slapped my little-kid belly hard, burst into tears. My mother's face, pinched in distaste, shot me a glance that I would later come to think of as the bug zapper face, as if by looking at me, she could zap me into disappearance. Tzzzt . I kicked the cupboards near my feet, and she warned: Watch it. I slunk to my room.
    And I remember the women's gym that my mother carted me along to. In front of the gym, I seem to remember a plastic statue of Venus de Milo, missing half a breast and both arms. The inside foreshadowed the 1980s “fitness” craze: women bopping around, butt busting and doggie leg lifting, sweating, wearing that pinched, panicky expression that conveyed the sentiment best captured by Galway Kinnell: “as if there is a hell and they will find it.” The club also had something called the Kiddie Koral. The Kiddie Koral was a cage. It had bars all the way up to the ceiling, and the sticky-fingered little varmints clung to the bars sobbing for Mommy.
    Mommy was wearing some stupid bathing suit contraption, lurching around on the floor with a bunch of skinny ladies, getting all bony and no fun to sit on anymore. All the little kiddies in the kiddie cage wept and argued over the one ball provided for our endless entertainment. I managed to unhook the door of the cage, a door of wrought iron bars, and stand on it, swinging back and forth as I watched my mother and the rest of these women hop and lurch after some state of grace.
    I remember watching my mother and the rest of these women's bodies reflected in the mirrors that lined the walls. Many many mad-looking ladies. Organizing them in my head, mentally lining them up in order of prettiness, hair color, bathing suit contraption color, and the most entertaining, in order of thinness.
    I would do a very similar thing, some ten years later, while vacationing at a little resort called the Methodist Hospital Eating Disorders Institute. Only this time the row of figures I lined up in my head included my own, and, bony as we were, none of us were bopping around. We were doing cross-stitch, or splayed on the floor playing solitaire, scrutinizing one another's bodies from the corners of our eyes, in a manner similar to the way women at a gym are wont to do, as they glance from one pair of hips to their own. Finding themselves, always, excessive. Taking more than their fair share of space.

I
was born in Walnut
    Creek, California, to a pair of exceptionally
    intelligent, funny, wonderful people who were perhaps less than ideal candidates for parenthood. It must also be noted that I was not very well suited to childhood and should have probably been born fully formed, like Mork and Mindy's kid, who hatched from