Really Good, Actually(4)
Tragically, I was the victim of a supportive home life, which had led to an alarmingly robust self-esteem, and went to an arts-friendly high school that channeled most of my latent sexual energy into overwrought plays about middle-aged women with oral fixations. And so I did not date, and remained chubby and happy, until roughly twelfth grade, when not having been laid was enough heartbreak to make me lose, rapidly and with no real effort except abstention from solid food and constant monitoring and recording of my caloric intake, fifty-five pounds. Everyone was very happy for me until I fainted in math class after having a popsicle for lunch.
The truth is, if you start your eating disorder even slightly overweight, no one will notice until things are very much at the “what if two meals a day were soup” stage. There was some tutting and discussion about nutrition and balance, then I went to a hypnotist who told me to imagine being beautiful in a bathing suit and I was cured, just kidding. Really what happened was I fell in love and I forgot about it for a bit. These days I was comfortably soft-bodied, the kind of woman people condescendingly referred to as “shapely” or “curvy” or, more often, “confident,” the word practically buckling under its euphemistic load. Sometimes, during periods of stress or after reading too many magazines or listening to a much-thinner friend complain about the size of her legs, I could feel myself tiptoe back toward counting, consuming an egg and thinking: seventy. But, I reasoned, no one has a completely healthy relationship to food and exercise, at least not anybody who came of age during the period when the cover story of every supermarket tabloid was some variation on “This Beach Hag Has Cellulite.” As long as I wasn’t writing out the daily caloric inventories of my teenage years, I considered myself more or less healthy.
However, the temptation in this moment to dust off the ol’ ED—to become one of those heroines in novels whose bones begin to jut concerningly, frightening their friends and rendering them absolutely gorgeous with grief—was strong. “Her big eyes somehow more blue for the dark smudges beneath them, Maggie was too sad to eat, because too many people wanted to have sex with her,” or whatever. I was not about to be the first woman alive to experience emotional devastation without the sudden, dramatic emergence of my collarbones.
But I had recovered too well in that area, was annoyingly committed to nourishing myself, and so my soft butt and I stayed fed. Meals were the only thing that broke up the long, slow hours of that first week without Jon. I worked my way through our cupboards, unearthing long-forgotten curry pastes and the instant noodles we stockpiled “for emergencies.” Every time I tucked into a comforting stir-fry or cut open an oozing homemade quesadilla, I’d imagine David Attenborough’s tranquil narration: even in the darkest times, life . . . goes on. Eventually, I knew, I would run out of food, which was stressful, because I could not imagine leaving the house to acquire more.
Not sleeping was less concerning; no one sleeps well anymore. The world is falling apart, and our phones are just there, glowing in our faces, full of news about what the president has said and which of our exes have recently gotten haircuts. If I really craved rest, I could always drink or take sleeping pills. Jon had told me he was taking them before he left, though I thought maybe this was because the couch was so uncomfortable. He offered me one when he was moving out. I wanted to say yes but felt like it was some kind of statement about How I Was Doing to say no, and so I stayed up most nights watching British murder television on Netflix.
Previously I had found these shows too scary—we (I) lived in a ground floor apartment with very suspect window fixtures, and we (I) slept lightly and frightened easily. Now I found them soothing. There was a pattern to them, a clear hierarchy of right and wrong. Maybe the troubled detective inspector drank too much and cheated on his wife, but he was not a murderer-pedophile living in some kind of pervert’s bunker in Swansea. The murderer-pedophile was always caught eventually, and the beleaguered partner always had to admit the detective inspector was bloody good at his job. It was nice to feel that the difference between guilty and not guilty could be so clear. It was nice to hear David Tennant swearing. Also, a lot of the tension had been drained from these dramas when I realized the murderer is always whoever speaks slowest.
When I did manage to sleep, I would wake up in the middle of the night, groggy and confused. I’d reach across the now-enormous bed, my hands searching for the warm, familiar lump of Jon’s body . . . and feel nothing. Fear would course through me and my eyes would spring open, struggling to adjust in the dark. I’d break into a sweat, confused and scared and a little irked. Had I missed a text? We were supposed to communicate about this stuff! Telling one another when you were going to be home late was one of the main Things of marriage! Then, of course, I would remember.
When this happened, I felt, in order: stupid; sad; disappointed; vindicated when I remembered something similar had happened to Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking; embarrassed again that I’d grasped at this connection to Joan Didion; quietly proud, like maybe there were some similarities; then more sad; and, eventually, tired. But I was not an incredibly chic voice of a generation who had lost her life’s love. I could not even figure out the new pant shape, and my greatest work was an incomplete PhD dissertation about the “lived history of objects” in early modern theater. Even when it was finished, no one would read it. I hadn’t lost my husband, I had left him. Or, rather, I had suggested he leave, and he had taken me up on this incredibly quickly. In many ways it was the last thing we agreed on.