Ask Me About My Uterus Page 9

  As I began to grow—my body shooting up closer to the sky, chest punctuated with painful breast buds that I despised, hair on my legs that seemed darker than any hair I’d ever seen on my head—my mother’s resentment of me became more personal. At least, that’s how it felt to me at that age. I understand now that it was all to do with her, and she more than likely didn’t hate me. She hated herself so much she didn’t have the energy to hate—or love—anyone else.

  One thing I found jarring in those years was that both my mother and my grandmother seemed to lack certain boundaries. It was almost as though my body was just an extension of them, and that they needed to be in control of it. One example of this being that Mum insisted on washing my hair until I was into my preteen years, which she justified by saying that I couldn’t do it well enough myself. That may very well have been true, because I had never been taught.

  Even as a child, I thought that she was exacting more control over me than was strictly necessary, and that if she felt that I was doing things incorrectly, then, as the parent, the solution should be to teach me to do them properly—rather than enforcing learned helplessness. Mum always maintained that I “never needed her” as a child, though what I recall of my childhood with her makes me suspect that she, in some way, came to need me.

  She exacted much control over my appearance, even rouging my cheeks when I was in elementary school—I imagine so that I wouldn’t look so pale. My pallor being evidence of the other area in which she dictated every decision: food. I wasn’t allowed to eat unless she specifically gave me a pre-portioned snack or meal. I was hungry most of the day, and soon got into the habit of stealing food at school, which I subsequently started to hoard.

  While I had been gaining inches and experience, she had been getting smaller, as had her world. Sometimes she’d be slumped on the scratchy living-room carpet, and she’d ask me to come rub her back. I would cower, turning my head as I lifted up her nightdress. I could count each of her ribs; they protruded so severely that I thought they’d rip straight through her skin. If she moved, even slightly, I could see the outline of her internal organs, which pulsated slowly, almost as though they were grinding up against one another. Her once pretty jet black hair had thinned, and she wore it cropped close to her skull. Her face, if she would turn it up to look at me (which she rarely did), was hollowed out, her eyes sunk so far back into her skull that they were nothing but shadows, like cut-out eyes in a mask. Her lips were dry and cracked, caked with blood or vomit in the corners. She was pale, her skin papery thin and translucent. She was always freezing cold, and the bones of her hands, joints, and knees stuck out at strange angles.

  During these years, I had a recurring nightmare of a skeleton chasing me, its bony fingers curling, reaching for me—begging me to help them find their skin.

  Although she faltered, as all mothers do, one thing Mum imparted to me, that I give credit to her unequivocally and with deep appreciation, was a love of books. The only memories I have of her that are not besmirched by food, or anger, or purgatives, are those of her reading. She read all the time, every day, unceasingly. Before she became gravely ill, she could easily read a few books a week. She read voraciously, and she read everything: the more obvious choices, like cookbooks and self-help, but there were always dog-eared biographies of queens and contemporary fiction about. There were books everywhere, all around her, around us. I was very fortunate that books were so highly accessible to me so early in life.

  While Mum may have denied me some food and some love, she never denied me a book. It didn’t matter what the topic was, who the author was, or even how much it cost. She would never say no to a book. Even when I was in the fifth grade and developed an inexhaustible fascination with the Kennedy family, deciding I wanted to read every biography that had ever been written on every member of the clan (of which there are many, many, many). At one point I came across a gorgeous coffee-table book of all the gowns that had been designed for Jackie, mostly by Oleg Cassini. The book cost $50.00 and it wasn’t a book that most people would sit down and read cover to cover—but I would. And my mother knew that, so she bought it for me. Fifteen years later, I still have it on my bookshelf.

  It was around this time, or maybe a bit before, that the family pediatrician deemed me “precocious”—which, in spite of our mutual love of books, was really the last breed of child Mum wanted to deal with. Namely, because her entire existence was based on secrecy, the success of which depended on the stupidity, self-absorption, and obliviousness of those around her.

  I didn’t believe for one second that the hours she spent behind the closed bathroom door were spent “brushing her teeth.” Yes, there was some tooth-brushing involved in the end (evidenced by the occasional sour taste on the bristles of my toothbrush), but I knew she was up to something else entirely. I couldn’t prove it, but I also wasn’t sure I wanted to know the truth.

  We lived in a thin-walled, double-wide trailer, and they don’t accommodate secret-keeping. It was always dark, no matter the time of day, because there were blankets draped over the windows. A heavy layer of dust covered everything, because nothing was ever touched or moved from its resting place; it was a museum of unheld things. The whir of fans running year-round kept it chilled like a tomb. It was its own kind of bizarre sensory deprivation; time and place, day and night, were simply lost to me in those years.

  From the outside, it didn’t look much different from any other weather-worn Maine house: crooked and derelict. A set of rickety stairs, painted pale blue, chipped away after years of neglect, was balanced somewhat haphazardly against the door. There was a gap between the siding and the top step, and as soon as I stepped onto it from the trailer, it would give beneath me, the whole staircase wobbling a bit to the side. I’d reach for the splintered railing, the bright sun disorienting. Leaving the house was always like waking up from a bad dream.

  In photographs I often appear worn and tired, dark circles under my eyes. I was a dervish in a doll’s house: pale, porcelain skin, thin in the way a little girl shouldn’t be. But I’m almost always smiling, sometimes painfully so. My hair was a mousy brown and very fine, which meant it erred on the side of greasy. I wore crookedly cut bangs across my forehead, the rest of it dusting my shoulders, and later (and for most of my life thereafter) in an impish, chin-length bob. I harbored fantasies about someone brushing it for me.

  I was alone so much that one morning, when I was probably around seven or eight, I woke up and decided I must be a ghost. It seemed plausible: no one could apparently see me or hear me, and I was slowly losing my ability to feel things (like emotions and hunger pains).

  I was a proficient haunt by the age of ten, a clandestine child biting the inside of her cheek until it went raw. Pain meant I was corporeal, but I kept my humanness cleverly concealed by porcelain baby teeth and chapped lips, as if not to trouble anyone else with it.

  I used to sit in my father’s closet, tucked away behind his golf clubs, torn shoe boxes, and sweaters I’d never seen him wear, with my back pressed up against the wall. On the other side, the washer and dryer would run at least a few times a day, and their humming became a mechanical comfort. I would close my eyes and let the warmth of the vents soothe me, the gentle ka-thump… ka-thump… ka-thump of the dryer cycle like a heartbeat against my fledgling human form. I daydreamed of a soft-spoken lady, aglow like the angels in Sunday school, opening the door and her arms to me. Then, the dryer would stop, and I would grow cold. At first, I would reach up to gently stroke the sleeve of my father’s unworn sweaters, but I would later discover that I was allergic to wool.

  I was not a ghost. I was a little girl with needs and wants and allergies. Still, I hung soundlessly, as weightlessly as I could, in the air. The living can haunt a house, too.

  All the doors in the trailer were made of some kind of plywood, with a plasticky, Barbie-House-style, lacquered finish that gave them a rather wimpy appearance. I spent a large part of my childhood with my back up ag
ainst those doors, my ear pressed against the cool surfaces. What I’m saying is, I know my modular home doors.

  These memories, like many things that later prove fatal, start with a cough.

  It was a hollow sound my mother made. I thought she must practically have her head in the sink because of how it echoed. Acoustics were the first clue. Time would pass while I sat outside the bathroom door, wearing down the carpet trying to figure out if I was a girl or a ghost. She would emerge, bleary-eyed and hoarse, and snap at me upon realizing I’d been sitting there listening.

  At the time, I took it personally, as little children do. I would slip inside the bathroom in her wake and immediately be pummeled with the sickly, sour smell that I knew, but couldn’t quite place. A smell invariably mixed with the homespun scent of Lysol. Occasionally, it would be laced with lavender soap, a feeble spritz in an attempt to hide the stench.

  Over the years, we all became scent-blind to the smell of stagnant vomit. I became deaf to the sound of her retching. Like the whir of a box fan or the cyclical thud of the dryer, it was just the din of my home.

  These sights, sounds, and smells were frequently interlaced with those of my brother’s tantrums, which years later we’d find out were a hallmark of autism. When he was little, they almost always culminated with literal shit-slinging. He wasn’t potty trained for an inordinately long time, and when he was frustrated, lacking the proper communication skills, more often than not, he’d wipe feces on the walls or grind it into the rugs. I used to sit in the middle of the living-room floor and pretend the bleach spots in the carpet were islands for my Barbies to lounge on.

  Mum was exhausted from her constant cycle of bingeing and purging, but my brother’s harrowing tantrums would have been enough to fray the nerves of someone far better adjusted than she was.

  I was ten when Andrea Yates drowned her children in the bathtub, and I remember the news coverage quite vividly. Newscasters didn’t mince words about what she had done, and I’m sure most kids that age can comprehend what killing is. I don’t suppose, however, that most children would have understood how such a thing could have happened. Yates was a fragile, dark-haired, somber-looking woman, like Mum. Whenever they showed her image on TV, I would stare unflinchingly at her—the way I had never dared to look at my own mother.

  As the broadcasts droned on in the living room, I remember standing in the hallway, once again on the other side of that closed bathroom door, wondering if Mum ever thought about drowning us. A fear flitted through me. Not because I thought she might—but because some nights, I wished that she would.

  The only control my mother had—or believed she had—was the command she had over food. As a child, I interpreted her restriction of my food as cruelty. As hatred. But as I’ve gotten older and have come to understand the psychology, and physiology, of eating disorders, I see that for her, there was no other choice.

  That being said, whatever her intentions may have been, the fact remains that I spent a large part of my childhood hungry. Really hungry. I would come home from school and have eaten my dinner—my last supper—by four o’clock in the afternoon. My father usually was home from work by five, at which time Mum disappeared into her bedroom, not to be seen again until the following morning. I would sometimes watch my father eat, which unsettled him deeply. I’d sit there, wordlessly staring at whatever he was eating, trying to imagine that I was eating it too. Mum generally only let me eat very specific things, and in very small portions. I remember seeing a great deal of skinless chicken breast, bland almost to the point of being sterile, on equally colorless plates, or slightly withered patties of ground beef that seemed oddly vulnerable in the absence of a bun.

  By the time the sun had gone down and my father was staring blankly at the TV, I’d tiptoe into the kitchen to forage. Dad was in the next room—a living room that might as well have been in the middle of the kitchen, given the narrow length of the trailer we lived in—but he was far away. I would move silently, methodically, having planned out my moves like a highly trained operative. I’d envision my success several times before I put my plan in motion: I calculated how many steps from my bedroom to the kitchen, tried to map out how to move a kitchen chair, soundlessly, and place it in front of the counter so I could reach the cabinets. Sometimes, if moving a chair felt too risky, I’d just throw a leg over the edge of the sink and yank my little body up until it came down with a thump against the countertops with some impressive parkour. As I struggled to maintain my balance, I would duck and open the green cabinet door, quickly scanning the contents. I was looking for something quick, easy, and quiet that would hold me over until morning.

  Dad would sit motionless in his chair watching television while I moved like a thief in the night, feeling like I was robbing my own house.

  Sometimes I was successful. I would retreat to my room with a handful or two of pretzels in the dip of my nightdress, which I would yank up in front of me like a little food hammock, a pouch. But sometimes, I wouldn’t succeed. Sometimes Mum would hear me, and she’d come stomping out of her dark cave, half-asleep and angry. If I heard her open the door, I’d scamper down off the counter and into my room like a feral animal, maybe a pretzel or two crammed in my mouth. But if she moved soundlessly, and snuck up on me like a predator on her prey, then the bark of her voice from the dark would send me crashing down onto the floor, having toppled from the counter empty-handed, breathless, scared. A few times, the edge of the sink caught my leg or my arm, painfully wrenching it, nearly dislodging it from its hip or shoulder socket. We would stare each other down before retreating back into the night, both of us empty, hungry, and alone.

  The next morning I would wake up for school and revel in those blissful few moments before my body was fully awake, numb to hunger and shame. Mum would already be puking in the bathroom next to my room, trying to achieve the same effect.

  Hunger was more difficult to ignore at school because it often interfered with my ability to concentrate. On the other hand, school was the better place to be because it was easier to get snacks. I was the queen of “Are you going to eat that?” by the time I reached the third grade. I subsisted on other people’s scraps, which would have horrified my mother, had she caught me—obviously, because it was food, but also because I was exposing myself to germs. If there was one thing that troubled Mum more than food, it was illness—especially the vomiting variety.

  It might seem odd, since vomiting was her whole life—but seeing or hearing someone else do it was enormously triggering for her, since she was so profoundly bulimic. It had, by proxy, become enormously triggering for me, too. I just didn’t understand what, exactly, I was afraid of.

  All I know is that I can tell you every single time I vomited as a child. On every occasion, I was terrified and she was angry, disgusted, and dismissive. I didn’t grasp that she felt that way about herself, not me. Her transference of misplaced blame was too much nuance for me, especially when I was sick in the middle of the night.

  Fearing this, whenever I begged for other kids’ snacks, my heart would thump away wildly in my chest. Is it worth it to eat this if it makes me sick? Is it better to go hungry than get germs on me? I would weigh these options every single time, so much so that it became something of a mantra. Some days, the fear of getting sick and making Mum angry was too great, so I wouldn’t eat. Some days, the hunger won. As I got older and tried to grow, the hunger won a lot more. Still, during the months of the year when influenza circulated, I would become paralyzed with fear, therefore not eating enough, and would wind up in the nurse’s station. I wouldn’t be able to see the chalkboard, or I’d start shaking from low blood sugar, slumping onto the floor, or not be able to play at recess. I’d lie on a scratchy cot in the nurse’s office and cry.

  By the time elementary school came to an end, I still wasn’t sure what I was supposed to fear more: what would happen if I ate, or what would happen if I didn’t.

  When I got sick, cruelly, one of the first and
most persistent symptoms I had was intractable nausea. Regardless of whatever food was in front of me, I couldn’t have more than a few bites. To compound the issue, I wasn’t sleeping well. I had always been an early-to-bed, early-to-rise kind of girl. At college, I’d only pulled an all-nighter once, and really, it hadn’t been a true all-nighter, because I was in bed before 4 a.m. But now, the pain and nausea, combined with my mounting anxiety, kept me awake all night, every night, for about six weeks. I was so sleep- and nutrient-deprived that I remember very little about that period of my life. Luckily, I journaled constantly. The journal entries reflect the chaos of that time, the overwhelming sadness and confusion, the pain—and the preoccupations.

  One thing that happened almost immediately was that I became fearful I was developing an eating disorder like my mother. Even though I wanted to eat, and it seemed to be something mechanical that was causing my stomach to reject my efforts, I thought about my mother all the time. I wondered if all of this was my subconscious trying to make me anorexic, or, worse yet, bulimic.

  Although I had downright feared vomiting as a child, by the time I entered college, and even toward the end of high school, I had the distinct displeasure of cleaning up after drunken pals, and I became a bit desensitized. I was still apprehensive about getting sick on a somewhat visceral level that I couldn’t quite explain. It felt as though my body was afraid of something that my mind hadn’t yet been made aware of, and at so much as the mention of a stomach virus circulating, or the potential of food poisoning, I felt an inexplicable panic that couldn’t be quelled. I tried to explain to myself that it was just holdover from my childhood, a kind of vomitrocious posttraumatic stress. It wasn’t until I was nearly out of high school that I had an experience that contextualized that fear.