thought: smart and ambitious and quirky and cute, with a big honking laugh—but by junior year she turned out to be yet another boring ano-fucking-rexic. Her doe eyes went bug over the course of the spring. Plain iceberg lettuce her big thing. Quirky interesting smarts starve-starve-starved away.
You’re not having lunch? I would ask, chowing. Eating, and heartily, in public: my big protest. One-woman sit-in, private-school performance art: masticating food that I would then actually digest.
I already ate . You weren’t supposed to say anything to the anorexics. It was considered rude.
Oh, really? What’d you eat?
She glared at me. Stupid cliché! Teachers didn’t seem to care, her parents didn’t seem to care, none of the other girls seemed to care, and in good time the admissions committee at Harvard didn’t worry about it too much, either.
There were the teeny-tiny girls (always popular), big-boned early-to-develop girls (never popular), A-list girls and B-list girls and C-list girls and D-list girls. The B-list girls who got a new haircut and the accessory of the moment or landed a guy of note and suddenly found themselves catapulted to the top. The C-list girls who just banded together to create their own little utopia.
Those are the girls you want to be, it couldn’t be clearer in hindsight. Early anarchists. Badasses. They didn’t bother, exempted themselves, turned their backs and took up softball, computer science, gardening, poetry, sewing. Those are the ones with a shot at becoming fairly content happy/tough/certain/fulfilled/gray-haired grown women.
An important takeaway from those horrible, if hazy, years: whoever tries hardest is out. Too loud, too much makeup, fast talk? Detectable need? Fragility? Any indication of effort? Automatic out.
Disqualified.
Thank the good Lord almighty there was no Internet back then. Thank fucking Christ there was not yet Internet.
Why couldn’t I just enjoy it? Why couldn’t I be calm and at peace and fulfilled and engorged and certain and calm? Why did lack of sleep make me feel like I was going to die? And why then couldn’t I simply hand the baby over to someone else and take a nap? And why, when he cried, when I had nursed and burped and hugged and kissed and changed and nursed and burped and changed again, when he kept crying, when the crying went on and he wouldn’t sleep and the days unwound sunrise to sunset, when I hadn’t eaten or changed clothes or bathed, when I had no one to talk to, no one to sit with, did I feel like putting him safely down in his crib and walking out into the park and sitting on a bench without my coat on until I died? Why so numb, so incapable, so enraged, so broken?
It’s in your blood , my mother said, and laughed.
Rest for a while , Paul would say.
No, there would be no rest for me. There was no rest to be had. There was no escaping the brutal enormity of it: I had had a baby. I had been cut in half for no good reason, and no number of dissolving stitches was ever going to make me whole again. The hysterical imperative was to Feed Him from Myself continuously, no compromise. I had to be vigilant. Omnipresent. I had fallen victim to a commonplace violence, and now I had this baby and there was too much at stake. I had failed him out of the gate. Deprived him the vital, epic journey through the birth canal, my poor doped-up kitten. Poor helpless boy.
We found a grandma stand-in finally, hired her for a couple hours a week. She was kind, the mother of two grown girls. She did whatever I asked, obedient and efficient, but I didn’t want to ask. I yearned to be told. I needed to be shown. Also she was not my mother. She politely left the room whenever I bared a breast. Made terrible small talk when all I wanted was quiet. And me sitting there so wrecked, unable to give a straight answer about the kind of detergent I prefer she use for a regular load.
Why so jittery, so jumpy, so on edge, so upset?
Paul tried. He
You’re not having lunch? I would ask, chowing. Eating, and heartily, in public: my big protest. One-woman sit-in, private-school performance art: masticating food that I would then actually digest.
I already ate . You weren’t supposed to say anything to the anorexics. It was considered rude.
Oh, really? What’d you eat?
She glared at me. Stupid cliché! Teachers didn’t seem to care, her parents didn’t seem to care, none of the other girls seemed to care, and in good time the admissions committee at Harvard didn’t worry about it too much, either.
There were the teeny-tiny girls (always popular), big-boned early-to-develop girls (never popular), A-list girls and B-list girls and C-list girls and D-list girls. The B-list girls who got a new haircut and the accessory of the moment or landed a guy of note and suddenly found themselves catapulted to the top. The C-list girls who just banded together to create their own little utopia.
Those are the girls you want to be, it couldn’t be clearer in hindsight. Early anarchists. Badasses. They didn’t bother, exempted themselves, turned their backs and took up softball, computer science, gardening, poetry, sewing. Those are the ones with a shot at becoming fairly content happy/tough/certain/fulfilled/gray-haired grown women.
An important takeaway from those horrible, if hazy, years: whoever tries hardest is out. Too loud, too much makeup, fast talk? Detectable need? Fragility? Any indication of effort? Automatic out.
Disqualified.
Thank the good Lord almighty there was no Internet back then. Thank fucking Christ there was not yet Internet.
Why couldn’t I just enjoy it? Why couldn’t I be calm and at peace and fulfilled and engorged and certain and calm? Why did lack of sleep make me feel like I was going to die? And why then couldn’t I simply hand the baby over to someone else and take a nap? And why, when he cried, when I had nursed and burped and hugged and kissed and changed and nursed and burped and changed again, when he kept crying, when the crying went on and he wouldn’t sleep and the days unwound sunrise to sunset, when I hadn’t eaten or changed clothes or bathed, when I had no one to talk to, no one to sit with, did I feel like putting him safely down in his crib and walking out into the park and sitting on a bench without my coat on until I died? Why so numb, so incapable, so enraged, so broken?
It’s in your blood , my mother said, and laughed.
Rest for a while , Paul would say.
No, there would be no rest for me. There was no rest to be had. There was no escaping the brutal enormity of it: I had had a baby. I had been cut in half for no good reason, and no number of dissolving stitches was ever going to make me whole again. The hysterical imperative was to Feed Him from Myself continuously, no compromise. I had to be vigilant. Omnipresent. I had fallen victim to a commonplace violence, and now I had this baby and there was too much at stake. I had failed him out of the gate. Deprived him the vital, epic journey through the birth canal, my poor doped-up kitten. Poor helpless boy.
We found a grandma stand-in finally, hired her for a couple hours a week. She was kind, the mother of two grown girls. She did whatever I asked, obedient and efficient, but I didn’t want to ask. I yearned to be told. I needed to be shown. Also she was not my mother. She politely left the room whenever I bared a breast. Made terrible small talk when all I wanted was quiet. And me sitting there so wrecked, unable to give a straight answer about the kind of detergent I prefer she use for a regular load.
Why so jittery, so jumpy, so on edge, so upset?
Paul tried. He
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