Devil in the Details by Jennifer Traig

“Uhh…Jenny Craig…looks like you’ve
already been there…uh, yeah.” Besides, there were plenty of other
things to tease me about. My tiny head, for one.
    I’d been hoping for a swelled one. A few of my mother’s friends
had lost a lot of weight and afterward they’d beamed with pride. “I
just feel fantastic,” they said. “It’s like I’ve stepped out of a
cocoon. A cocoon of fat. Now I’m a beautiful butterfly. And I know
I’ll never be fat again, because nothing tastes as good as being
thin feels.”
    I didn’t think it felt so hot. It was frightening, being this
small. Before, I’d been big enough to take on anyone. Now that I
was going to school with hulking ninth-graders, with kids whose
beards were so heavy they had to shave between classes, I was too
small to protect myself.
    I was also freezing. Without the extra layer of fat I was cold
all the time. My parents kept the thermostat set to a balmy 60
degrees. Years later, when my parents dropped several sizes on a
stint in Weight Watchers, they would issue a formal apology for
keeping it so cold. “We had no idea,” they swore. “It’s a wonder
you didn’t use your bedroom furniture for kindling.”
    It was turning into a miserable year. I was cold and unhappy and
obsessed with food. At this point I didn’t particularly want to
lose any more weight, but I couldn’t stop. I had learned to take
satisfaction in lack, in the spaces between my ribs, in the things
I denied myself. Why would I stop? I was so good at it. We could
have charged admission.
    Or maybe we couldn’t; everyone had seen this show before. I was
the first anorexic in my grade, but the disease itself was nothing
new. I knew eighth-graders who subsisted on celery and ice water,
ninth-graders who exercised three hours a day. We read books about
it, gave oral reports on it, saw after-school movies about it. I
loved nothing more than made-for-TV dramas, but I was a little
embarrassed to be starring in my own. It was all there, all the
tired touchstones and topoi. Cue the scene of me examining my
vertebrae in the mirror, of me crying at the dinner table, of my
parents pleading with me to eat, of my sister tearfully apologizing
for calling me fat, asking if this was all her fault.
    Cue the anthropological analysis. I was trying to be perfect,
like the girls in the magazines. I was ashamed of all I had and I
felt too guilty to eat. I was trying to take up less space in the
world. Or: I was trying to delay puberty, to make myself sexless,
scared that if I opened my mouth for a grape, Mickey Rourke would
follow with a shovel full of cherry pie filling. And if I wasn’t
scared 9½ Weeks , I was scared of nine months, for what was
pregnancy except an exercise in getting appallingly fat? Or: I
wasn’t sick, society was. How ironic that my mother’s family had
come to America to escape famine. They didn’t know that famine
would become our national industry, that we would learn to market
it, to repackage it, new and improved.
    Oh, whatever. Eating disorders are unfortunate but inevitable, a
rite of passage, expected among girls of a certain class. Of course
I developed anorexia. Given my background, it would have been
surprising only if I hadn’t. There’s a great tradition of the holy
fasting girl, and an even greater tradition of the
upper-middle-class overly self-conscious dieting girl. Anorexia is
the suburban equivalent of getting jumped into a gang. It’s like a
bat mitzvah, only with fewer ice sculptures and more laxative
abuse. It’s a trope. It’s a cliché.
    Even at twelve, I knew this. It had already been done to death,
and this bothered me. At least some of my previous compulsions had
been inventive. But this, this. This was embarrassing. So it was a
relief, sort of, when the disease mutated into something a little
more interesting. By February I was starting to do things the girls
in the after-school movies didn’t. They didn’t wash their celery
three times in salt