Starved - Anne McTiernan

Скачать книгу

was squeezing it shut—no food could get through that stricture. But I sped up my actions because I wanted the sister to like me. The buttons on the back of my dress gaped open—my arms were too short to reach them. I didn’t yet know how to tie my shoes, so I left the shoelaces loose. My hair remained tangled on one side of my head.

      “Jane, take Anne Marie down to the cafeteria,” Sister Mary Joseph said. Another older girl walked over to my bed. She said nothing as she escorted me down the long, dark staircase. As we descended to the bottom floor, sounds of girls’ chatter swelled and acrid smells of overcooked oatmeal and powdered eggs grew stronger. I stopped.

      “Please,” I whispered, “don’t make me go down there.”

      “Come on,” urged the girl. “Sister told me I have to bring you downstairs. I’ll get in trouble if I don’t do it.”

      “I feel sick,” I moaned.

      She dragged me down the stairs even as I begged her to let me go back up. Once at my assigned seat at the little girls’ table, I couldn’t eat. I could barely look at the neon yellow scrambled eggs or the congealed brown oatmeal the girl put on a tray for me.

      “You’d better eat or Sister will paddle you,” she said.

      With this threat, I lost what control I had over my stomach and spit up bile onto my lap. An old nun appeared quickly, gave me wet dishrags to clean myself, then told me to go back upstairs. Feeling very ashamed, I climbed the stairs. Sister Mary Joseph took one look at me, told me to get changed, and then brought me down to my new classroom. She barely spoke to me. I thought she must be mad at me and hoped she wouldn’t hit me.

      This reaction to food at Rosary repeated itself daily, and I threw up most mornings, sometimes before breakfast, sometimes afterward. I would proudly inform Sister Mary Joseph on the rare mornings that I didn’t get sick.

      I recognized the kindergarten room where my mother and Margie had left me the day before and I looked around, hoping to see them. Before I could register my disappointment, a lady in a blue dress walked over to me.

      “You must be Anne Marie,” she said. “I’m Mrs. O’Doyle. I’ll be your teacher.” She smiled as she looked at me. With her brown hair pulled up into a bun on top of her head, she looked like the picture of Cinderella from the book Margie read to me, all dressed up for the ball.

      “Come meet the other children,” she said.

      She took me by the hand and led me over to a table where three other girls sat. Each chair had a piece of paper with letters written on it.

      “That’s your name, Anne Marie,” she said. “This will be your seat. And these girls are Nancy, Diane, and Maria.”

      The morning went quickly. We colored, listened to the teacher’s songs, colored again, played at recess on the concrete playground, and heard a story. At 11:30 A.M., the teacher told us to clean our places and get our lunchboxes. Then she gave everyone a little carton of milk with a straw. I still didn’t feel hungry, but I wished I had a lunch and lunchbox like the other girls at my table. Seeing that I had no food, the teacher told me I’d eat in the cafeteria. I wanted to heave the milk I’d just drunk.

      Soon, several ladies arrived. As each walked in the door, a child would get up and run over to her. Usually the lady would bend down and either give the child a hug or pick her up. A couple of ladies had big bellies, so they just reached down to rub their child’s hair. I watched as each mother-child pair walked out the door. I stayed, wondering when my mother or Margie would arrive—but they never came.

      “Oh, Anne Marie,” said the teacher. “One of the older boarder girls will come by soon to get you for lunch.”

      “But I want my mommy or Margie to come get me.”

      The teacher squatted down until her face was in front of mine. “I know, dear. But you’ll soon have lots of friends among the boarders. And today you’ll have a nice lunch waiting for you in the cafeteria.”

      Finally an older girl arrived at the door.

      “I’m supposed to bring her to the cafeteria,” she said, pointing to me.

      “You’re fifteen minutes late. Next time you need to get here on time.”

      After we were out of the teacher’s sight, the big girl pinched my arm.

      “Ow,” I cried.

      “That’s so you don’t tell on me,” said the girl. “Or next time I’ll pinch you harder.”

      I arrived at the cafeteria in tears.

      “What’s wrong with her?” asked the nun who monitored the lunchroom.

      The girl shrugged.

      I wasn’t averse to all food at Rosary. I coveted the cream cheese and jelly sandwiches that another kindergartner, Marie, brought each day. Her mom cut off the bread crusts for her, which made the sandwiches even more enticing. One day Marie gave me a quarter of her sandwich—she must have noticed my hunger. The taste was even better than I had imagined. The next weekend, I asked my mother to make me a sandwich like Marie’s.

      “Cream cheese is Jew food. We don’t eat cream cheese.”

      I didn’t know what Jew food was. She made me cottage cheese and jelly sandwiches instead, and she didn’t cut off the crusts. The bread was soggy, and little curds fell out the back of the sandwich when I took a bite.

      My morning sickness at Rosary wasn’t an early case of bulimia—my fingers were too short to reach the back of my throat. No, this was real, honest-to-goodness heaving my guts out, like I was trying to exorcise something evil inside myself, something that made my mother banish me. I don’t recall lunches or dinners at Rosary, but I must have eaten very little. Over the next several months I steadily lost weight and soon looked like a skeletal version of myself. I was starving to death.

      I learned in medical school that pediatricians refer to this experience as “failure to thrive.” With just basic needs met—food, shelter, and loving caretaking—most kids will eat, grow, gain weight, and develop cognitive and emotional skills. Failure to thrive occurs when something goes very wrong, and it can be deadly: children raised in orphanages with minimal human touch have an increased risk of dying. The nomenclature is unfortunate, implying culpability on the child’s part. More appropriate would be to label the adult with “failure to parent” or “failure to care.”

      The nuns must have been concerned about my not eating and weight loss because they began to give me a sandwich each afternoon in the dormitory when the older girls were still in class. Sister Mary Joseph cut it into quarters just the way I liked it. Sometimes it would be spread with molasses, which made me gag, but other times it would be filled with peanut butter and honey, which I liked. None of the other girls were given food in the dormitory. I knew they would have been jealous.

      The kindergarten class was half-day. As the only boarder in that class, I was on my own in the afternoons. One winter day, I ventured on to the playground. I shivered in my coat and wool hat, as I sat on a wooden merry-go-round and idly pushed myself around with one foot. An image of a man scurrying away sticks in my mind. He wore a brown overcoat, a thick scarf, and a brown fedora pulled low on his head. Later, I’d tell my mother a boy put a stick into my bottom and it hurt to go to the bathroom. I wonder what really happened to me that day. Was the stick just a stick, or was it something else? Was the boy just a boy, or was it an older male? Whatever did or did not happen that day, it’s clear that I was vulnerable. No one was watching out for me.

      Frequently, I wandered the hallways at Rosary, not sure what to do with myself, feeling lost. The nuns did have me take a nap in the afternoon, so someone must have

Скачать книгу