LITMIR.BIZ

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I use my social security checks. They come on Fridays. My bathroom is covered with vomit. I’m sure it is a metaphor.

      My mother agrees to come to therapy. I am dreading it, and I can’t wait. The truth will come out. That she never notices me. That I am a burden she doesn’t want to carry. That I had a chance to be light and happy and instead I am dark and miserable and should be flushed down the toilet along with my dinner. I have lost twenty-three and a half pounds. “Hey you!” I want to yell. “Your daughter is painfully thin. Did it occur to you that maybe it is because of something you did? Something you neglected?” I walk in the office and my mother is already there. She looks terrified. Her arms are crossed. I kiss her hello and she actually flinches. It is the saddest thing in the world. My psychiatrist says to my mother, “Thank you for coming.” My mother scrutinizes me and my carefully chosen ensemble. “Is that my sweater?” is all she says.

      My oldest sister, Carly, is home for Christmas. While I am snorting up in my mother’s bathroom she tells me, “As long as you are throwing up and doing drugs I don’t feel comfortable engaging with you.” Leslie agrees. I look at them and see that they are fat. My brother, who is home too, takes me into my mother’s bathroom a couple of hours later and says, “Kid, they think you are headed for serious trouble.” I wait for the part about how he is worried but he says, “I told them you are a relatively smart girl and you’ll either figure it out…or you won’t.” And he leaves. I stare out the window at Washington Square Park and am thoroughly dissatisfied with my family. I go in the kitchen and slice myself a cucumber and start eating it with a pair of chopsticks and my mother, who has been glaring at me, says, “Are you going to throw that up?” I look at her with such disbelief and hatred and say, “No. Comments like that make me throw up. Not cucumbers.” And I go in her bathroom and throw up.

      

      My friends at Barnard stop talking to me. They taught me how to vomit, they taught me how to dress, they drew up the plans for my renovation. They reinvented me. I am nothing without them

      It seems like a good time to transfer. I decide to apply to the drama department at NYU. I know it is what I was meant to do. I can cry on a dime and I have impeccable comic timing. I tell my mother, now a department head at NYU, how much money she would save if I transfer. “Sure,” she says. “I could get you in.” Until she put it like that I assumed I was good enough to get in myself.

      

      Dr. Mellman thinks I am a danger to myself. She tells me to go home and pack a bag and meet her back at her office so she can bring me to a facility that can help me. I call my sisters, whom I haven’t spoken to for months. Neither of them is home. I don’t call my brother because I am mad at him. He comes to New York periodically and doesn’t call me. Some people, he said, think blood is thicker than water but he doesn’t. Just because I am his sister, he said, doesn’t necessarily mean he is interested in me. What an asshole. But I wish I were more interesting. I look at my clothes. I have nothing to wear at a mental hospital. I call my mother. What a shock: she is out of the country. I don’t want to be locked up. No one will know where I am. I close the door to my room and don’t come out for three days. I stop doing cocaine but I never go back to Dr. Mellman. Fuck her.

      

      I take an apartment downtown so I can be closer to NYU and farther away from my bullshit friends at Barnard. I am in a van, driving the rest of my stuff from West 108th Street to Thirteenth Street. I see cop cars lined up in front of my new building. “What’s going on?” I ask a person on the street. “Someone got robbed, I think,” they say. Wouldn’t that be funny if it was my apartment, I joke to the man with a van as we carry the last of my belongings up the stairs. When I open the front door to my new apartment I see that my stereo is gone, my TV is gone, every garbage bag filled with my stuff is sliced open. The contents of my life are strewn all over the floor of my new living room. I pick everything up and try to make a home. It is a cute apartment. I guess I just have to keep the gate locked on the fire escape, and step over the junkies in the front hall, and not light the oven when I am alone so all the mice that fly out from the broiler don’t run over my feet.

      I am sure I will feel better when my roommate comes. Her boyfriend, Chuck, moves in with us. Chuck is news to me. I don’t like running into Chuck and his shlong in the morning. We get a kitten for the mice and to keep me company. Chuck rolls over on it one night and kills it under the weight of his left arm. We fight about money. Chuck thinks we should split everything two ways, even though, as I point out, there are actually three of us. The halls stink like pee and Chuck never makes the rent because he is always lending money to one of the guys on the stoop I have to step over. I complain to my mother. She says, “I’ll call the housing department tomorrow. I’m sure I can get you a staff apartment.” As usual, I am nothing without her and because of her.

      

      I can’t eat anywhere if the bathroom doesn’t have a single stall and if the sink isn’t close enough to the toilet because I need warm water and I need the water running to help me throw up. I eat, vomit, and go jogging. I’ve given up cleaning the bathroom. Today there was blood in the toilet along with everything else. It scared the shit out of me. My aggression and despair were aimed at my mother and myself. I never wanted to hurt my internal organs. I call my mother.

      “I found a place to help me.”

      “Well good,” she says. Her voice is flat as a pancake.

      “They have a session that starts next month. I have to give them a deposit to hold my place.”

      “How much is it?”

      “Six hundred dollars.” She doesn’t say anything. “It is supposed to be really good.” She still doesn’t say anything. “Will you pay for it?” I ask finally. She sighs. “What is it?” I ask. She still hasn’t said yes or no.

      “I don’t want to give you the money. Why will it be different this time? When will you get over it? I have been paying for your goddamn psychiatrists for six years and none of them have done you any good.”

      “That’s not true.”

      “What have they done? You are still bulimic, you still lie, you are still angry. When will you get over it? What are you going to do with your life?”

      “There is blood coming out of my stomach and it frightens me,” I say.

      There is a protracted sigh, and finally, “I’m giving you the money but I don’t believe you. It is part of your disease, I read about it. You are in denial and you lie.”

      

      The program is a success even though the woman who runs it is chubby and addicted to cocaine the whole time and gets her license suspended six months later. I make one friend. She is in worse shape than me. She shits all over her apartment and cuts herself and finally commits herself to Columbia Presbyterian.

      It was surprisingly easy for me to stop. I told them I would stop throwing up if I could lose weight while I digested. I am on Weight Watchers. I am a happy little digester. My mother is glad.

       MY ROARING TWENTIES

      Dinner at my mother’s apartment. Alex and Molly are there. I hate Alex and Molly because every dinner I think I am having alone with my mother is ruined when she opens the door and says, “Alex and Molly are here.” My mother adores them. They are Canadian and, as my mother is so fond of pointing out, “Alex is a genius.” “So what,” I tell her. “He’s pretentious and a phony.”

      “He is not. He’s just very, very, very, bright. He won a MacArthur, you know.”

      We are in the living room nibbling on my mother’s typical pre-meal fare, olives and a variety of cheeses from Balducci’s. My mother always forgets to put out bread for the cheese and never provides a dish for the olive pits. Her hostessing style is both gracious and awkward. “Tell us again, Goldie,” Molly coos, rolling an olive pit around in the palm of her hand. “Tell

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