Some Girls: My Life in a Harem (24 page)

“Super,” said Brittany. “Start out with one and work your way up to two a day.”

I had begun about fifteen thousand diets in my eighteen years on earth. I had started my first diet when I was nine. But I wasn’t done yet, not even close. I’d diet until I liked myself, goddammit. I was convinced it was possible, even though all of the evidence showed that it didn’t work. Not the diet part; that usually worked just fine. It was the liking-myself part that never happened.

The landscape of my body over the years, the deposits and erosions, the seasons of it seen next to each other would look like a time-lapse movie that spans thousands of years in a few minutes. I am a curvy, sturdy lass by nature, with thick peasant hands and hips to balance a laundry basket on. I generally lean toward the fecundity of spring but occasionally tilt madly toward winter. I like to, when I can, shed my leaves so that the branches are bare, brittle. I like my blood to run cold as the snow—no fuel to feed the fire that warms it.

Basically, I am a chubby girl with fits of anorexia and bulimia. And nothing makes me feel better than to have that delicious sensation of control when the numbers start peeling off the scale. In high school, I imagined I could subsist on the minerals from the air, like an orchid. I tried to grow thin, thin, thin, no longer bound to the earth, to my family and its landslide of pain.

It worked. I did it. I was finally light as a ballerina, my arms lovely ribbons, my ribs a keyboard. My skin was blue pale, my body so immaterial that it seemed to me the light of inspiration, the light of God himself, could shine through me. Touch my bony chest and you could feel my heart so close to the surface that it thumped like a funk bass line through a subwoofer. Except nobody touched me. People turned their eyes away. I noticed, but no longer cared. I was impeccable. I had never felt so clean.

My lips turned purple. I wore layers of sweaters and filled my pockets with quarters in anticipation of the surprise attacks of the school nurse, who would pop out of doorways and drag me onto a scale, looking for a number low enough to warrant hospitalization. Even as the spring sun revived the muddy winter lawns, I stayed cold. I wrapped my body in boots and long skirts and petticoats. I braided my hair and imagined myself a tragic consumptive character out of a Jane Austen novel.

In a condo in Roseland, a few miles down a stretch of Route 10, my grandmother grew thinner and thinner too, as her cancer gained strength and mass. She had mesothelioma, cancer of the lining of the internal organs. She got it from breathing in the asbestos fibers that had permeated the air inside the Newark schools where she had worked for so many years as a librarian. There are so many ways poison can take hold.

She told me one day, as I massaged the chain of knots that her spine had become, that she didn’t want to have to watch me die, that her dying was hard enough as it was. She asked me to eat.

Her request was enough to inspire my eating a carefully measured quantity of brown rice, seaweed, and vegetables each day. I gave the eulogy at her funeral and then got out of New Jersey about five minutes after they lowered her coffin into the ground. My grandmother had been my best friend and I spent her last year so hungry that I couldn’t pay attention, so self-obsessed that I forgot to ask her about her life, even though I knew she’d be dead before the year was out. If I didn’t ask, who would? She never kept a journal, so her memories are gone now, a treasure buried without a map.

When I got to NYU I started drinking and the drinking led me back to eating and within six months I had gained the fifty pounds back and more. I had lost all that time, starving and distracted and unable to think clearly enough to ask her even what Vienna had been like before the war, for nothing.

And not only did I commit that crime, but I didn’t learn from it. Because still, I thought this time would be different. The little pill went down with a swig of iced tea and I imagined I was swallowing not speed, not poison, but hope, help.

 

I took the phentermine pills and started quietly obsessing about losing weight again. I wasn’t alone. Most of the girls in Brunei took pills. We drank laxative teas. Even though we could have ordered any food we wanted, we ordered plain chicken and steamed veggies and tried to fill up on lettuce sprinkled with lemon juice and balsamic vinegar. This is the Faustian bargain for many women who make their bodies their livelihood. Your body will be worshipped by others but hated by you. It will give others pleasure but it will give you only pain. In the mirrors at the gym, we watched for the appearance of every new hollow and cut as we did the Cindy Crawford workout on a screen the size of a whole wall, Cindy’s mole the size of a tennis ball. I tirelessly admired my own clavicle.

Before I left for Brunei, Penny had given me Jeanette Winterson’s
Sexing the Cherry
to bring along with me. I read it while, pills or no, hunger gnawed at my stomach. The heroine in the book had a giant hiding inside her, a monster. That was me. Except inside me wasn’t a giant. Inside me was a skeleton. Lurking inside me was the anorexic girl whose elbow circumference had exceeded that of her forearm. I was that kind of monster. But that monster was the real me, I thought. When I starved myself, I was becoming that real me. To reduce yourself to only the very essential elements, that was poetry. Maybe Robin wouldn’t notice. Or maybe, conversely, it would make him finally notice me again.

I lost fourteen pounds in only a few weeks, and at the party one night Robin told me I was getting too thin. The tricky thing about starving yourself is that it starts out feeling terrible and then it feels great until you realize you can’t stop. By the time Robin mentioned it, I had already crossed that line. I knew I was hurting my chances with Robin but I was past logic. I wouldn’t—I couldn’t—start eating.

Fueled by ephedrine and willpower, I spent my late afternoons on the tennis courts, hitting ball after ball fired at me from the machines. I remember one particular day that when I finished, it was dusty pink twilight. I was steaming and drenched from the weather and the exertion. I walked over to the lower pool, shed my clothes, and slipped into the water. When I had cooled down, I pulled myself onto the pool deck and lay on my back, looking up at the crescent moon that was rising above the palace. At night, Brunei was breathtaking.

I lay in the shadow of a fairy-tale palace, breathing air so heavy with the smell of flowers it should have been bottled. I’m happy, I thought. Right now. Alone. In between the ground and the stars, in between the empty afternoon and the torturous evening. No mirrors. No party dresses. No one asking me for anything and nothing I want. And then the moment was over and it was time for the mirrors and the party dresses again.

 

A month came and went without my cycle. Was it possible that I was pregnant? A royal pregnancy was what all the girls hoped for because if you had the Prince’s baby, you would be taken care of for the rest of your life. Of course, you would be taken care of under armed guard. You would be installed in a luxury apartment in Singapore and would never have another boyfriend, never even be able to go out to dinner again without being watched. At first I was scared; then I began scheming.

There was no question that I would have the baby, but I would have to get out of Brunei first. I would have to do it without anyone knowing. It would be our secret, the baby’s and mine. One day I would tell her that her daddy was a fabulously wealthy, devilishly handsome Southeast Asian prince, and that I had loved him very much, but that I’d had to spirit her away to a life in which we could both be free. Maybe we would struggle, but it would be a life of such overwhelming love.

The thought of pregnancy gave me new hope, a new reason to stick it out in Brunei for a little while longer. I figured that my life with Robin was now a finite thing and that I would need all the money I could get. I hugged my chest and poked my fingertips into the sides of my breasts. They ached. They were definitely bigger. I strayed from my diet and snuck down to the dimly lit kitchen at five a.m. to stuff my face with cream puffs from the pastry tray. I didn’t sweat it too much; I told myself I was just having cravings.

But there was no pregnancy; I was just starving. And when I started eating for my imagined two, I got my period. I sat on the toilet and lay my chest on my knees. I saw that my secret baby fantasy was at best laughable, at worst delusional. For months I had been teetering on the edge of a depressive episode, and the day I saw blood the scales tipped. Of course I hadn’t been pregnant. I was all torn and sick inside. Nothing could live in me. I was toxic straight through.

The depression always crept back in, like carbon monoxide slipping under the crack in the door: colorless, odorless, sure to rob you of your oxygen and kill you silently if undetected. I barely bothered getting out of bed until it was time to go to the parties. I spent hours at a time in the bathtub. The volume on my self-loathing turned way up. I got obsessed with the cameras everywhere, the surveillance. I imagined the men watching me and laughing at my every flaw. I began to think of these invisible watchers as ghosts, spirits, creatures from another world who lived in the house with us even though we couldn’t see them.

I wasn’t the only one who was haunted. Rumor was that the guesthouses had resident ghosts. There was even a night when mass hysteria had sent four of the girls in house six running out the front door in the wee hours, insisting that they each had been visited by a weight, a presence, something or someone who had crawled into bed with them.

I had thought, with not a small measure of misogyny, Why, when a bunch of girls get together, does it inevitably turn into
The Crucible
? Now I wasn’t so sure they’d been wrong. I kept seeing shadows flicker in the corners of the room, kept looking over my shoulder in the dark hallways. On top of this, Robin had put me in cold storage. I sat there every night maintaining my perfect posture and my strained smile as he ignored me.

When I couldn’t take it anymore, I begged to leave. I told Ari that my father was having surgery and I needed to be there. My father’s surgery was long over, but it’s always good to couch a lie in the truth. That way you’re less likely to forget what you said. Ari was sympathetic and arranged for me to go home, insisting that I promise to return in three weeks.

Maybe if I hadn’t been so restless I could have stuck it out for longer and stockpiled a greater fortune. But I had no idea what it meant to be patient. I had no idea what kind of windfall I had stumbled into. I thought diamond Bulgari sets and money in $100,000 increments fell from the sky every once in a while. I told myself that maybe I’d come back and maybe I wouldn’t.

Some girls in Brunei came and went like weekend guests, and some became the lady of the manor for a time. I started out the belle of the ball, but I became the crazy lady in the attic. I was more fragile than I ever would have thought. Delia, older, wiser, more mentally stable, tried to talk me out of leaving, but I was determined. The truth was, windfall or no windfall, I needed to go home to guard what was left of my sanity.

Robin was in London on business when I left. I didn’t even get to say good-bye.

 

 

 

 

A
s I packed my bags, something alternately rose and sank in me, like a tide. I’d be going home—home to New York and my real life and my real friends and family, where I could remember who I really was. Would I turn right back around?

At the party the night before I left, my friends among the Asian girls buzzed around me. They never got to go home until they were going home for good, so they wanted to hear all about what I was going to do and whom I was going to see and where I lived and what my family was like.

Winston, with his kind eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, asked me, “What are you going to do when you get back to reality?”

I answered coyly, carefully. This was my default mode in Brunei, even with Winston. “This isn’t reality?”

“No,” he said, with rare clarity. Everyone in Brunei usually acted like the parties would go on and on. “This isn’t reality for any of us. It’s a dream and someday we’ll all wake up.”

Eddie took me out into the hallway and sat down with me on the staircase, where the peach-colored carpeting shone with threads of real gold. He handed me a fat stack of notes each worth 10,000 Singapore dollars and then he put a wide, square box in my lap. I opened it to find a gold Tiffany set that belonged on Cleopatra—a basket-weave choker and a matching bracelet and earrings. The jewelry no longer shocked me. I would have been crestfallen if, after all that time, I hadn’t received an outrageous gift. I had Eddie help me with the clasp.

When I returned to the party, Fiona said, “I hope your father feels better.”

She looked at me like she was on to me.

“I know you’ll be back soon. I’ll say bon voyage, not good-bye.”

I added my new Tiffany set to the heart necklace, the Cartier watch, and the diamond-face Rolex that Robin had given me already, threw my jewels and my money into my carry-on to Singapore, and managed to cram the rest of my clothes into four suitcases. Ari gave me a lecture on how to get my loot and myself back into the country safely. Then she gave me a hug, my passport, a ticket home, and a ticket to return again in three weeks. My housemates all stood behind the porch’s marble banister and waved good-bye as the car pulled away.

 

In Singapore, I carried myself confidently, like I knew what I was doing. I pretended it wasn’t my first time trying to negotiate the streets of a foreign country alone. I was a CIA operative, fluent in seven languages and highly trained for covert ops. If I faltered, if I showed a soft spot, it was all part of my cover.

Ari had instructed me to change my money at a bank in Singapore in order to avoid the IRS inquiry that would result if I changed it over in the United States. In line at the bank in Singapore, everyone stood about three centimeters from the person in front of them. I breathed in the earwax smell of the pomade in the hair of the man in front of me, could smell the bubble-gum breath of the woman behind me.