Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (10 page)

One day Beth announced that she was starting a new diet, but not just any diet. I was intrigued.

“Let’s
both
do it,” I said, suddenly convinced that together we’d reach what neither of us had reached alone: the wondrous Xanadu of the willfully emaciated.

She told me she had a book in her dormitory room that was just what we needed, and later that day she put a thin paperback in my hands.

“Read this,” she said. “Then we’ll fast.”

The book talked about the evil that sweets did to blood sugar levels, the spikes and valleys they created, the insatiable hungers they bred. It recommended a three-day cleanse—no food, only water—that would break the cycle, purify the body. It promised mental clarity in the aftermath, along with an ability to manage cravings, if they even returned.

“When do we start?” I asked.

We chose a three-day span that didn’t nudge up against any important swim meets or tests. Then we embarked on our mission.

“You’re doing what?” Mom asked when I refused dinner on day one.

“Fasting,” I responded.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. Even Mom had limits.

“This book Beth gave me says a person can last a really long time without food,” I explained. “Longer than we think.”

“If you want to diet,” she said, “why don’t you do low-carbohydrate?”

“I don’t want to do Atkins,” I said. “I need to purify myself.” I imagined these little bubbles, each carrying a sign that said FAT-MAKING TOXIN, cascading from my body, oozing out my pores.

“We should go to Weight Watchers,” Mom said, my own madness pushing her closer to sanity. “I’ll pay for Weight Watchers. I’ll do it with you.”

“It won’t cleanse me the way a fast will,” I argued. I had gone without food for only about eighteen hours at that point, but I was suddenly an expert. A messiah.

“I’ll broil you some chicken,” she said.

“No.”

“I’ll take off the skin,” she offered.

“I’m fasting.”

“Just eat the white meat,” she pleaded, “not the dark meat.”

“I’m only going to have some hot water with lemon. I’m allowed to have lemon.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, and stormed away. She hated losing. I figured she’d do something mean, like make a fresh batch of brownies, just to get the better of me. But she let me be, no doubt figuring I’d cave soon enough.

On day two I struggled. The novelty of the experiment had worn off, and my stomach gurgled and seethed, like lava in an active volcano. I also began to feel light-headed, but chalked it up to euphoria, to the purge of those toxins from my sugar-racked body. I resolved to fast like this once a month. It would be the cornerstone of a thinner, better life.

At school I quizzed Beth. “You
really
haven’t eaten anything?”

“Nothing,” she said, but I wasn’t sure I believed her. She didn’t have the winnowed midriff that I was determined to believe I had already achieved.

“Not even a Diet Coke?” I asked. “You know that diet drinks aren’t allowed!”

“Just water,” she said. “With some lemon. And I don’t feel hungry at all!” I saw her steal a nibble of a cuticle. Hmm. Was that cheating? Was it tasty?

At the beginning of day three, I slipped.

I snuck a few crackers around breakfast time. I drank some milk around lunchtime, because my stomach-volcano was poised for its own Pompeii. At dinnertime I accepted that I’d strayed from the plan and rationalized that I might as well stray some more. I ate a burger. But I didn’t put the beef on a bun. I had to preserve some shred of dignity.

Although my clothes felt looser at the end of three days, I knew I couldn’t do this fasting thing again. It was too grueling. I told Beth, confessing in the process that I’d cheated a little, and of course she had a plan B.

“Protein powder,” she said, producing a new paperback filled with recipes for fat-burning shakes you could make with nonfat powders, water and a few low-cal flavor additives—some strawberries, say, or banana slices—in a blender. Over the following weeks we made a bunch of these, but they didn’t really work, quite possibly because we kept sneaking things like vanilla ice cream and peanut butter into them, to obscure their chalky, yeasty essence.

Beth was like a mysterious witch doctor with a stock of potions that never ran out. Pills, too. She’d found someone in her dormitory with a pipeline to amphetamines, these tiny pale blue ovals with dark blue flecks. They looked like shrunken robin’s eggs.

We swallowed them to stay up all night in advance of important exams. We swallowed them before some swim meets, along with capsules of bee pollen, which we’d decided was another energy booster. And we swallowed them to keep from eating. They did the job nicely. I was slimmer senior year than I had been junior year, and it was largely thanks to Beth and her little eggs.

Maybe because of Beth, I also set my sights on Yale. We both got in, and briefly fantasized about the eating pacts and years of leanness ahead of us. But I also ended up winning a merit-based scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from the Morehead Foundation, which provided an entirely free education, plus spending money and other perks, to private-school students whom it wanted to lure away from the Ivy League and down to Carolina.

I took the scholarship. Although Dad and Mom had more than enough money to pay for college and insisted that I not consider the cost, I couldn’t ignore it. I figured Mom could live with a Carolina sticker next to the Amherst one. And I reasoned that a state school in the South would actually be more of an adventure for someone who’d gone to a Northeastern prep school than Yale would.

On top of everything else, the Morehead came with interesting, foundation-funded summer adventures: an Outward Bound wilderness survival course before freshman year, a “public safety” internship riding around with big-city police officers before sophomore year, foreign travel after senior year.

I left for the Outward Bound course—twenty-four days in the mountains of Oregon—a few weeks after my Loomis graduation. Right before I went into the wild I talked on the phone with Beth, who was back home in southern Connecticut. She told me she wished she could go, too.

“You wouldn’t last an hour without your lip gloss,” I teased.

“It’d be worth it,” she said.

“Exactly
which part
would be worth it?”

“All of it.”

“You mean the sleeping in a sleeping bag for weeks on end?”

“You’re missing the point.”

“You mean the lack of access to a bathroom or, for that matter,
toilet paper
?”

“All for a higher cause.”

“What,” I said, “are you talking about?”

“Aren’t you going to be hiking up steep hills and mountainsides every day, for hours on end?”

“Unfortunately, yes! With a heavy pack on my back.”

“How heavy?”

“I don’t know. Someone told me it could be as heavy as thirty-five pounds, maybe forty.”

“Perfect.”

“Are we talking about the same thing? Earth to Beth! Come back, Beth!”

She laughed dismissively. “Hours of hiking, with a forty-pound pack, every day for several weeks,” she said, going back through it all. “Think about it.”

I did, and realized what she was getting at. “By the time I get back,” I began, but she cut me off, finishing the thought.

“
You are going to be a rail,
” she said.

“There’s no way that
won’t
happen, is there?” I asked. “I mean, no way at all?”

“I’m drinking nothing but protein shakes the whole time you’re away,” she said.

“For twenty-four days?”

“Well, maybe every other day.”

“OK, that’s manageable. Lay off the peanut butter and ice cream.”

I knew she wouldn’t, because she was just like me.

 

 

 

 

On the seventh or so day of Outward Bound, I walked in soggy boots from the tarp under which I would be spending the night to the tarp belonging to Dan, one of the two instructors for my group of eleven campers. I told him I had something serious to discuss.

“At the start of this,” I reminded him, “you said that there were ways—if someone in the group got hurt, for example, or if someone had another kind of medical problem or a really pressing need—to get that person out of the wilderness midcourse.”

“Yes,” said Dan.

“Well, I need to get out,” I told him. “I can’t do this anymore.”

By that moment, I’d long stopped thinking about all the great exercise I was getting. If my scratchy wool pants were looser on me than when the course had started, or if there was a bigger pouch of excess material where my scratchy wool shirt hung over my stomach, I didn’t notice or care. My misery blotted out anything else.

Its source? Well, let’s start with the snow.
In late June.
No one had warned me about it. And somehow I hadn’t processed the fact that the mountain-climbing element of my particular Outward Bound course, in the Central Cascade Mountains of Oregon, meant high elevations, and that high elevations meant snow, even in summer.

Snow, in turn, meant wet boots. And wet socks beneath them. Wet pants, too, along with cold fingers, chapped hands—the whole winter works. At night the temperature dropped low, and we didn’t have tents, just these slanting tarps, which provided protection from anything falling straight down from the sky, like snow or rain, but not from frigid gusts of air coming in sideways. I turned my sleeping bag into a body bag, zipped all the way over my head. And if I didn’t doze off right away I lay there in utter darkness, entombed, with almost no range of movement, listening to the wind shriek and the evergreens thrash. Fifteen minutes became a lifetime. An hour was an eternity.

On the first and second days of the course, and maybe on the third day as well, the temperature had been relatively pleasant, and we hadn’t climbed high enough to hit snow-covered ground yet, so I could have chosen to sleep without the bag zipped up all the way. I zipped it nonetheless. I’d noticed that our wilderness area was home to a teeming population of ants, along with other, bigger, uglier bugs. And I’d convinced myself that they’d crawl all over me at night if I wasn’t vigilant, if I didn’t create an impermeable barrier between me and them. Never mind how hot it got in that sleeping bag. If I was going to feel something crawling down my leg, I’d take a trickle of sweat over the kind of hard-shelled, glittering, poisonous black beetle I’d seen several times along the trail. The poisonous part was merely a suspicion, but my philosophy about bugs had always been: assume the worst, and reach for the Raid.

In the wilderness I didn’t have any Raid. Any shampoo, either, because there weren’t any showers in which to use it, and there wouldn’t be any showers for the entire twenty-four days. This fact I had indeed processed in advance, but I’d shrugged it off as unimportant, because I knew that a wilderness area would have streams at the least, and quite possibly narrow rivers or lakes, and I’d planned on dipping into one every other day or so and keeping sufficiently clean that way. I hadn’t gambled on water temperatures well below sixty degrees. When I lowered my hand into the first stream we passed by, and instantly felt my fingers go numb, I realized I was going to have to get comfortable with a grungy, funky, smelly Frank.

But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. My scalp itched from the way my oily hair was matted against it; my cheeks itched from the stubble of my incipient beard. My face felt as if it were not just caked with dirt but somehow calcified by it. By day seven I wasn’t sure I even qualified as human anymore.

I had blisters on my heels. I’d never been a big walker, and my boots didn’t fit quite right. At night I’d take them off and see dark brown spots on the backs of my socks: bloodstains. The stains got darker each day, even though I’d cover the blisters with adhesive bandages. I bled right through them.

“I’m sorry,” I told Dan during my talk with him. “But I’m finished.”

“What you are,” said Dan, “is a spoiled brat.”

“I’m spoiled?” I said, flabbergasted. “Spoiled? Because I don’t enjoy walking for miles on end with bloody feet, wet clothes and close to fifty pounds on my back?” It probably wasn’t that much—the kerosene stove and the rock-climbing gear and the sleeping bag and the too-few changes of clothes—but it was a lot.

“I’ve never been camping before,” I continued, trying to make Dan understand how hard all of this was for me. “Not even in a Winnebago. And I’ve never, ever been able to tie knots.” We’d had two knot-tying lessons already in the course, and there were more to come. And they mattered, not just because the right knots kept your tarp from fluttering away in the middle of the night. The right knots kept you from tumbling down a cliff to your death during rock-climbing exercises, of which we’d done several, God help us.