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

an egg an old man and grew progressively younger. I was accidental. My conception caused my mother to lock herself in her bedroom and cry for three weeks while my father chain-smoked in the backyard under the cherry tree. They seem to have gotten it together by the time I was born, because I was met with considerably more joy than one might have expected. I had a happy childhood. I was not, personally, a happy child, but at least things were exciting. Certainly dramatic.
    I know there was a time when things were all right. I went climbing in the hills out back, slid down on paper bags over the gold-colored grass, played in the creek, climbed the cherry tree. I do not remember a childhood of chaos. Only in retrospect would I term it chaotic. I never knew where I stood with people, what they'd do next, whether they'd be there or gone, or mad or mean, or happy or warm. The colors in my mind of that time are green and gold—the trees and the hills—and the heat, the incredible heat. Tossing in bed those summer evenings, when the sun had not yet gone down.
    Through the open window, I could hear the clink of glasses and the music of voices and laughter out on the deck. I could smell the suffocating summer air, the dust, the garden, the glorious flowers, the narcotic spice of eucalyptus pouring into the lungs. Late-summer droughts, the wavering air above the road, out back behind the creek, the dapple-gray horse in the yard down the road, the chokecherries, sour, and lemon trees, walnut trees, women in white. The pink stone steps of somebody's pink stucco house, the oranges we ate with some lady. Perfume and cigarette smoke, late nights at parties when I fell asleep in the coats on the bed, the fleeting dreams of those sleeps, mingled with shadows and words. The three-footer's perspective on the world at butt level, searching for your mother's butt in the crowd, sensing the smell and glint of wine in glasses and men with beards and low belly laughs, tuxedos, some sense of an intricate dance of costumes and masks. It was a world that I, through the keyhole of years, watched and reached a small hand out and tried to touch.
    It was not an unhappy childhood. It was uneasy. I felt as if I were both living my life and watching my life simultaneously, longing for access and yet fearing the thing that I longed for. In fact, my whole life has been this, moving in and out of the day-to-day world, both fascinated by and afraid of its sheer voluptuousness. The parallels in my approach to food and my body are striking: bulimia, feasting on food and then throwing it back; anorexia, refusing food and feasting on hunger itself.
    As a child, I was always vaguely nervous, as if something was looming, something dark and threatening, some deeper place in the water, a place that was silent and cold. I was afraid that the shah of Iran was under my bed waiting to snatch me up and take me away.
    I was terribly, terribly afraid of the dark, and of my dreams of the horrible goat-man who kidnapped me at night as I slept. People made me nervous. I preferred to stay in my bedroom with the door shut tight, dresser shoved up against it (it was a very lightweight dresser), and curl into the corner of my bed with a book.
    Therapy charts ten years later, will note:
    Marya wants to live in a private world…is not open to trusting people…tends to shut people out if they try to get too close.
    The therapists will scribble down:
    Hypervigilant. Massive fear of abandonment. Controls fear of loss through fear of food.
    The world outside my room seemed a seductive, fascinating, but very dangerous place to me. That sense of danger may have come in part from my father's near-paranoid overprotectiveness. My own sense of inadequacy in the face of a threatening world may have come also in part from my mother's attempts to knock me down a notch or two. I misread her advice. She tells me now that she was worried I would dream too big and get hurt. What I saw, though, were her