Devil in the Details (11 page)

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 water, then carefully dry it on clean paper
towels before deciding it wasn’t clean enough to eat and throwing
it out. They didn’t hide Ziploc bags full of meatballs in their
sweater drawer while they combed the Torah to see if it was okay to
eat them. They didn’t throw out blood oranges because they were
convinced that they were, in fact, infused with blood.

I did. Something had changed. I was still obsessed with food,
but suddenly dietetics weren’t the concern. I had discovered
kashrut, or rather, I had invented a new and super-sterile form.
This was the master class, an advanced mathematics. Now I wasn’t
counting just calories, but things you couldn’t see, atoms and
associations and invisible demerits.

Now I was limiting my intake in an entirely different way. This
was an extraordinary exercise in subterfuge, a tremendous feat of
logic and dissection. Every meal was a puzzle to be pieced apart
and rationalized. Behold, the dinner of meat loaf with tomato
sauce, baked beans, and broccoli. This was my theater of war, with
meat and dairy troops to divide and conquer, pork products to
vanquish and defeat.

It was an excruciating and painstaking process. First, I would
drink my milk just to get that out of the way. The broccoli was
buttered, dairy, so that came next, but that was trickier. It had
been buttered from the tub, which was just tainted beyond belief,
loaded with not-kosher toast crumbs, contaminated by knives that
had cut steak and then come back to reload the baked potato. There
were probably whole discs of pepperoni floating in there too, but
who could find them under the big chunks of shrimp?

It was a mess. I had to blot off all the butter, and once the
broccoli was bare, I could eat only enough to evade detection,
since it was so unkosher that I probably shouldn’t be eating it in
the first place. Then I would push food around my plate for twenty
minutes or so, a pause between the meat and the milk.

“It’s too hot,” I explained, blowing on the lukewarm, congealing
mass. “I’m just waiting for it to cool off.”

Finally it was time for the meat loaf, trickiest of all, deadly
but compulsory. It was crowned by a tomato sauce topping that my
mother made, inexplicably, with a powdered dairy creamer, which had
to be scraped off and moved aside. The fork was now irretrievably
tainted, so I would have to drop it and go get a new one. The next
problem was that the meat had been baked in a loaf pan that had
been greased with generic-brand shortening, containing
lard
,
actual
lard
. The entire perimeter was tainted. Only the
center could be eaten, and of this, as little as possible, because
it wasn’t kosher beef to begin with. The beans were too porky to
eat at all and had to be hidden under the meat loaf rinds.

“Very nice,” my sister observed, clearing the table. “Once again
Jenny has turned her dinner into a work of art.” She cocked her
head and peered at the meat loaf columns. “I shall title this one
‘The Barfenon.’”

But as long as I ate at least something substantive, I got away
with it. At this point I’d been so weird about food for so long
that the new weirdness went largely unnoticed. And my parents had
given up on table manners long ago. We came to dinner in our
bathing suits, sat on our feet, chewed with our mouths open, and
belched at will. Only once did they actually banish one of us from
the table. My sister was five and newly enamored of a rather
colorful phrase. She was sent to finish her dinner down the hall.
“If you’re going to use bathroom words at the dinner table, then
you can eat your dinner in the bathroom,” my mother shouted after
her. For Vicky this wasn’t a punishment but a novel pleasure. The
neighbors happened to drop by in the middle of this and were
baffled to find my sister sitting on the bath mat with her plate on
the toilet seat, happily shoveling down her supper.

But some picking and stalling, that was fine. For months, my
parents didn’t ask and I didn’t offer. To come right out and say it
was unthinkable. Keeping kosher was so embarrassing and strange. My
father had already put the kibosh on my earlier attempts to become
a fruitarian, to go macrobiotic, to subsist on nothing but Alba
shakes and fun-size candy bars. There was no way he was going to
endorse kashrut.

Even if he had, even if we’d approached the whole process
sanely, keeping kosher properly would have been impossible. In the
early ‘80
s
, in rural California, there just wasn’t
much kosher food available. You could get pickles and raisins and
little else. People hadn’t gotten uptight about animal fats yet,
and there was still lard and beef tallow in just about everything.
In a civilized society you expect cereal and juice to be meat-free,
but in 1983 that just wasn’t the case. There was meat in ice cream
and frosting, in potato chips and pancake mix. Oh, not a lot, sure,
but it was the little amounts that bothered me.

Was it because I had shrunk? I had lost all this weight. I was
moving in the wrong direction, getting smaller, and my focus had
shrunk, too. Now I had eyes only for details, specks, fine print. I
lost interest in paperbacks and began reading packaging instead,
studying ingredient lists with myopic fascination.

Soon I was spending all my free time looking up food additives
in the encyclopedia. Most teens liked
Tiger Beat
. I was more
interested in propylene glycol, sodium stearoyl lactylate,
carrageenan, and xanthan gum. The things that could be in your
food! The carmine that colored fruit punch, it turned out, was
derived from lice. There were calf enzymes in cheese, snouts and
sawdust in luncheon meat. I began writing exposes for the school
newspaper on subjects like ‘Jerky: What You Don’t Know
Can
Hurt You’ and ‘The Truth About Corn Dogs.’

It was around this time that I took to calling restaurants. At
home, I could see my mother preparing dishes so I knew exactly what
had been contaminated by tallow or broth, what had been baked in
the pan where we once found a dead spider and hence was inedible.
But in a restaurant they could be basting the lettuce with clam
juice for all I knew. It was possible. I’d heard stories. It was
widely rumored that the disgruntled busboys at one local
establishment peed in the minestrone.

What concerned me most, however, were not the bodily fluids that
went into the food but the ones that went onto the pans. Were they
greasing them, and if so, were they using a nice, hygienic,
vegetable-based spray like Pam, or did they reach right for the
treyf and hepatitis-contaminated suet? I was especially worried
about pizza pans and began calling pizzerias to ask for details.
The employee who answered had invariably just fielded ten prank
calls asking how thick her crust was and had no patience left for
me.

“You want to know what?”

“What you use to grease your pans.”

“Oh, we use K-Y, just like Julia Child. When we run low on that
we borrow a little motor oil from the delivery van. Okay? And if
you call here again, I’m phoning the cops.”

The anorexia had been plenty annoying for everyone, but my new
condition was even more irritating. I regretted that, but
everything else about it captivated and absorbed me. Scrupulosity
was anorexia amplified, anorexia applied to every area of life.
Anorexics only worried about food. I worried about shampoo, shoe
polish, water, air. Dust. What if some dust got in my mouth? Dust
was composed of skin flakes, I knew, and human skin wasn’t kosher.
It probably didn’t have any calories, sure, but what good is that
when you’re going to hell?

Anorexia and scrupulosity are, in fact, fairly closely related.
They are both obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders, treatable
with the same medications, one an almost logical extension of the
other. My severe bouts of scrupulosity were always immediately
preceded by bouts of anorexia, and it’s not at all uncommon to
suffer from both at one time or another. Simone Weil did, and the
combination proved fatal when she managed to die of starvation at
thirty-four. Saint Veronica died of the same thing at the same age,
despite the fact that she allowed herself to gorge on five orange
seeds every Friday. Saint Catherine, also dually afflicted,
preferred to snack on pus.

It’s a strange thing, the eating habits of saints, told in tales
that are not so much hagiography as gagiography. Oh, the stories:
Saint Angela of Foligno liked to wash lepers and drink the runoff,
growing ecstatic when the bathwater was chunky with scabs. Saint
Marguerite-Marie Alacoque had similar tastes, relishing the phlegm
and diarrhea of the infirm. At some point it seems it was fairly
standard practice among the extremely devout to consume the bodily
detritus of the lepers in their charge. This was especially common
in Italy and France, which seems strange given the tastiness of the
native cuisine. If an English nun chose, say, runny sore over
spotted dick, no one could blame her.

But man. Pus. My eating habits were plenty weird, but the saints
made me look healthy and normal. They made my
sister
look
healthy and normal. But we had something in common, these saints
and I, all of us weird in our own ways. I, Sister Infinity Fats,
belonged to the same order. Instead of a habit, I had habits, but
the principle was the same.

Scholars are careful to point out that the anorexia that plagued
medieval saints was very different from the anorexia that plagues
mall-going teens, and that’s true, but they bear some similarities.
What binds us are the fundamental links between faith, fasting, and
food, the holy trinity of the female religious neurotic from Saint
Catherine to Cherry Boone O’Neill. Who knows why these things hold
such appeal? Perhaps it’s because fasting humbles and purifies, or
perhaps it’s just because it fosters a cheap and easy high.

Or maybe it’s just because, hell, we like getting our way. There
is tremendous power in food refusal. Food, after all, is control.
Anorexics are tiny, tanned Somali warlords, cutting off the supply
of powdered milk and high-protein flour to the oppressed civilian
fat cells. We are kitchen dictators, steadfast and zealous,
righting everyone else’s wrongs. It’s a fantastic technique. We
have nothing to do with our mouths but preach. Every time a girl
refuses to eat, she one-ups Eve.

It may have been a brain-based organic condition that caused my
weirdness with food, but it was the power dynamics that perpetuated
it. What was the impetus to get better? For all the disadvantages –
loose teeth, bad skin, downy fur – there were plenty of rewards. If
you can keep the anorexia up long enough, you get
presents
for
eating
. Presents! And attention! My family revolved
around me throughout my entire adolescence. My sister’s occasional
teen partying was no competition for my skeletal fire and
brimstone. Valley of the Dolls can’t trump Valley of the Dry Bones.
I got all the attention. What was the reward for stopping? To get
fat and be ignored, then go to hell when you die? No thanks.

My parents were tougher than most, always reluctant to indulge
my craziness, but even they could only take so much, and I got my
way as often as not. They caved. You want to subsist on breath
mints today? Sure. Diet Coke popsicles for dinner? Okay, why not.
And you need to spend half an hour inspecting the flatware? Fine.
Sometimes it just wasn’t worth the battle. It was never mentioned,
but after my bat mitzvah pork quietly disappeared from the house.
The transition was so serene and natural that it never occurred to
me that this was for my benefit, and I was shocked the first
weekend I came home from college when I opened the refrigerator and
found an impenetrable wall of ham.