An Apple a Day (19 page)

In any case, congratulations for your excellent and courageous project. I'm sure there are many people (including me) rooting for you to succeed
.

Dr. Robinson

I had been nervous, writing about my psychiatrist. Admitting that he hadn't cured me seemed ungracious in the extreme, like impugning his professional skills. So it was a great relief to hear that Dr. Robinson was behind me in this project. Since then we've corresponded regularly by email—I actually feel more comfortable with him now than I did in eight years of face-to-face
consultations—and he's happy to answer my endless questions about anorexia, recovery, and conception.

A few months ago I was seriously considering fertility treatment. There are many slim women out there who manage to have babies despite their low body weight, and I've been getting so frustrated that I can't do the same. Thirty-three isn't old, but it isn't young either, on the fertility timeline. I long to get things moving. I did a lot of research on the Internet, and also talked to two older female friends about it, both of whom took Clomiphene decades ago, and both of whom have had breast cancer since. I spoke to Tom about it, who was excited and supportive at first, and then unsure when we looked at the risk factors. I spoke to my mum, who was absolutely against it, because of the possible cancer link. Eventually I emailed Dr. Robinson for a considered medical opinion:

It's much better, and healthier, to start your cycle naturally rather than use hormones. It's possible that if you're still doing a lot of exercise, you may have increased your muscle-to-fat ratio, and that can prolong the time, and increase the weight you need, before you get periods. Remember, the body's thinking behind the decision to switch on the ovaries is:

        
•
  
Is there enough energy stored (i.e., fat) to feed a baby through the nine months of pregnancy? and

        
•
  
Is there enough fat stored to allow the mother to produce milk after the birth? This rationale is not interested in muscle. Muscle is for running after mammoths. (That may seem very non-PC but I don't think Bernard Biology has feminism as a priority philosophy: babies, yes; women in the front line of battle, not really
.)

Best wishes
,

Dr.Robinson

In other words, in a biological sense, women need fat. Mother Nature does not care about muscle tone or skinny jeans or size zeros, not when it comes to making a baby. No amount of fruit or bread or cereal can substitute for solid reproductive building blocks. Fat triggers the hormones that trigger ovulation and conception and breast-feeding and cuddling. Fat prepares the uterus as a cozy nest for the embryo.

And fat is the thing I fear above all else.

Chapter 9

On the Road

“
You could be closer than you think
.”

A
ll it takes is a single egg, one healthy egg to be released (plus the miracle of conception) and we could have the makings of a baby. I've had all the tests, my blood results are healthy, my FSH (follicle stimulating hormone) isn't elevated, my ovarian reserve is good, and all other hormonal levels are normal. Next step is an ultrasound scan of my ovaries.

It's the start of May and I'm at home, packing for a trip to the States, when the letter from my doctor drops through the door.

Dear Miss Woolf
,

Following your recent blood tests, I can confirm that nothing abnormal has been detected. This is an encouraging set of results. I have now made a referral to the Royal Free Hospital for your ovarian scan, as requested. It is good news that you have managed to increase your weight; the results suggest to me that you may be close to ovulating. The process is impossible to predict with accuracy—as you know, the body is not a computer—but you could be closer than you think.

I'm over the moon as I dial Tom's cell number. Everything's healthy, and I could be close to ovulating. We could be close to the possibility of conceiving. Surely this is enough to make me eat?

* * *

The next day we're on the road, driving from Denver to San Francisco. Fifteen days, thirteen cities, ten hotels, 2,000 miles; even for travel junkies like me and Tom this is quite some trip. And, as everyone keeps telling me, America is the ideal place to “super-size” myself (a comment that causes me serious alarm).

We fly into Denver, the Mile High City, in the early hours of a Wednesday in the midst of a snowstorm. With a four-hour layover in Washington, D.C., we've been traveling for nearly twenty-four hours and we're aching all over: knees, back, and shoulders. “I swear the blood is pooling in my legs, my feet are like lead,” Tom murmurs as we stand at the baggage carousel. “Me too,” I say. “My head feels like a cannonball, too heavy for my neck.”

It's a long journey but we hold it together relatively well. There's a minor meltdown situation near the very end, in the car rental offices, but that's understandable. It's nearly 2
AM
local time when we clear customs and collect our luggage, so the National Car Rental offices are closed, with only a sign directing customers to report to Alamo Rental Services. This appears to be in another terminal entirely, and we find ourselves dragging heavy suitcases up and down the interminable airport concourses. When we find Alamo, by this point shivering in our thin sweaters, we wait twenty-five minutes in the snow for anyone to appear from inside the locked building.

At long last, after paperwork and insurance and driving license and credit card checks (both of us close to collapse behind the counter), we are sent out into the deserted parking lot, with the
instructions that we can choose “any compact or sport vehicle, Mustang through Oldsmobile, excepting hybrid and ultra versions.” Planning the road trip back home, we'd had excited discussions about the ideal car for these thousands of miles, but in my exhaustion, frankly, I couldn't care less. It is pitch black and at least ten degrees below, making it difficult to distinguish one model from another. We stagger around, our suitcase wheels hopeless in the snow drifts, wiping the ice from the back of cars with frozen fingers, working out which is which. By this point it is nearing 10
AM
U.K. time and we are cold, tired, and very hungry. Predictably I hadn't eaten much on the journey—I find airline food impossible—although I smuggled my usual apple on board and Tom brought a bunch of bananas. The car selection process is hard to care about when you're as ravenous as I am. I lean against a boxy little 4 x 4, muttering, “How about this one?” while Tom locates something more suitable for our epic journey . . . a convertible Mustang.

It gets us to our hotel that night, where we rouse the night porter with a doorbell, and are given the keys to a bedroom on the eighteenth floor. Floor-to-ceiling windows promise stunning views, but we are too tired to gaze out at downtown Denver glittering in the night below us; we stumble into the bedroom and look at each other, dazed with relief. It is warm, it is cozy, and, finally, we can drop our suitcases and kick off our shoes . . . The carpet is soft and thick beneath our feet, there are two huge double beds, the bathroom is tiny but spotlessly clean. There is also an orange goldfish flitting around in a large glass bowl, which for some reason spooks us, so we put it outside on a table in the hallway.

We pull back the fresh white sheets on one of the beds and Tom runs me a bath. Dropping my clothes on the floor, I submerge myself in the hot water, while Tom collapses onto the bed . . . Within
ten minutes I am curled in his arms in a damp towel I am too tired to unwind, and then we are both asleep.

And in the morning we discover our convertible Mustang is a fabulous fire-engine red.

Tom is writing a travel feature to coincide with the movie of Jack Kerouac's
On The Road
; I'm writing and doing research, so we're glued to our notebooks wherever we go, diving into museums and local heritage centers, always hunting for that extra detail, the story that might bring a town to life.

Between us, Tom and I keep the Moleskine company afloat: my notebooks are various rainbow colors (this one is turquoise) and Tom's are always black. His reporter's notebooks go back twenty years, since he started in journalism, and he's like a cold-turkey drug addict without them. Once every few days he has a “lost notebook” crisis; then we have to turn the hotel room upside down, gut the car, empty the suitcases, retrace our steps to the previous gas station—and then we find it tucked neatly in the side of his camera case or jacket pocket.

* * *

I've never been this far west. I've lived in New York, and I've traveled on Greyhound buses all over the Deep South, but never across to the West Coast. I can't wait to explore Saratoga, Sausalito, Sacramento, San Francisco. I love the names.

After two days in Denver, we head into the heart of Colorado's Rocky Mountains. In Central City we stay in the only hotel in town: Century City Casino, a faded warehouse of a building with all the glitz flaking off. It's sadder than you can imagine, this broken-down assortment of loners and losers, alcoholics and old folk, gambling their pensions, cashing in their social security checks, pouring their savings and homes and marriages into the
greedy slot machines. There's no skill or glamour to this kind of gambling: it's nickels and quarters rattling down the slots, plastic money bags; it's sick people shuffling around in slippers, an old woman with a dialysis machine attached to her wheelchair, an old man pulling his IV drip and catheter bag on a frame as he drags on a cigarette and feeds in the pennies.

Around 7
AM
we go downstairs for breakfast—have you ever eaten in the restaurant of a casino? It's a canteen, reeking of fried food; the plates and even the cutlery are plastic. Every booth shows another hopeless human story: the middle-aged cowboy couple, anxiously counting their loose change; the young mother and father smoking, arguing, with three little children; the obese man ploughing his way through platefuls of egg and sausage and fried bread.

I take one look at the “menu”—option 1 is fried breakfast; option 2 is short-stack pancakes and maple syrup; option 3 is waffles and jelly—and nip back upstairs to collect a banana and a yogurt. Tom orders scrambled eggs “over easy,” bacon and fried tomatoes. We sit there, smiling at each other, dazed by our jet lag and the unreal scenes around us. I've never been to a casino before, so after breakfast Tom insists we have a flutter. The blackjack tables are closed, so we change up ten dollars and head for the slot machines; even at 8
AM
the casino is full. After losing $9 straight, we win $60 on our final $1 bet . . . jackpot! Of course we're hooked—and it's tempting to continue—but I drag Tom away from the slots and out of the casino. Even this kind of minor win is heady, but I don't need a gambling addiction as well as an eating disorder. And anyway, we have 290 miles to cover today.

We stay in various casinos on our way through Nevada. If the experience of visiting casinos is eye-opening, it's even weirder staying there. You might expect loud music, drunkenness, and general nocturnal disruption, but they are surprisingly quiet
places. The corridors of bedrooms are kept well away from the main gaming rooms, and anyway most of the other guests are occupied at the tables until 4 or 5
AM
, if they go to bed at all. Often casinos will give free bedrooms to their best customers, who maybe go for an hour's nap and a shower around dawn, but generally the business of casinos is winning or losing dollars. Why waste time sleeping when your life's savings are waiting to be lost?

As for casino “restaurants”—I don't eat in them, obviously, but even accompanying Tom down to breakfast in the mornings is depressing. Not just the 7
AM
gamblers, sad families with children, and desperately ill folk, but the general air of hopelessness. There is no air in a casino: no windows or clocks, so you can't keep track of time, no natural daylight or oxygen. There's little eye contact and people don't talk much.

For me, the breakfast choices at casinos are stomach turning: how can people exist without fresh food in the morning? At the risk of sounding like a middle-class, organic, raw-food hippy, I'll say it anyway—no fruit, no yogurt, no muesli, nothing but options 1, 2, and 3—fried platter, pancakes, eggs and biscuits (I think option 3 is supposed to be the healthy option!). Fortunately the coffee-refilling waitresses don't bat an eyelid at me bringing my own breakfast into the booth—they seem too jaded and world-weary to care. “Y'all come back, ya hear” they always murmur as we leave, but their hearts aren't really in it . . .

If casino catering falls somewhat short of my orthorexic obsession with pure and unadulterated food, American supermarkets more than make up for it. We stop regularly along the highways at Walmart, Target, and my personal favorite, Whole Foods. We restock the cooler in the trunk with huge baskets of strawberries and raspberries, luscious, sun-drenched oranges, enormous red apples. It's bewildering, the sheer range of products on offer—not five choices of bread, but ten or twenty (rye, wheat, whole-grain,
spelt, sourdough); vast coolers of yogurt; endless aisles of soft drinks, sodas, water, energy water; a million varieties of cereal. Tom keeps himself road-worthy with foot-long subs, some of which contain up to four different kinds of meat: turkey, ham, salami, and chicken. Everything in abundance and—looking at the obese shoppers, their carts piled high with sugar-free, fat-free food, the so-called “lighter options”—you realize that everything is excessive.