Group

suck it in, make it disappear. She favored the girls whose leotards didn’t bulge and whose upper thighs didn’t quite touch. I wanted more than anything to be a ballerina and to be adored by my teacher, and the one thing holding me back on both fronts was the size of my body. I also suspected that my mother’s sighs when I modeled new clothes in the Joske’s and Dillard’s dressing rooms were proof that she wished I was thin-boned. I know I did. I believed that slim, lithe girls like my sister and the Jennifers and Melissas in ballet class were happier because of their smaller bodies. They were certainly better loved. In attempts to become one of those small-bodied girls, I engaged in minor skirmishes with my appetite—trying to eat half a sandwich at lunch or skipping dessert—but my appetite always won. Every day, I’d enter the kitchen with the intention of getting a glass of water and three Club crackers, yet ended up consuming a fistful of Chips Ahoy and knocking back half a pitcher of grape Kool-Aid. Why couldn’t I control my appetite? Why was my body keeping me from being who I was supposed to be?

I was a sensitive kid already gearing up for a years-long war with my body through bulimia, but in my dark room with my hand between my legs, I experienced unalloyed body pleasure. For those few minutes, I could make peace with my flesh and drift off to sleep.

Dr. Rosen didn’t know about little Christie’s forays into self-pleasure. That little girl had the guts to turn up the radio and explore.

5

“Christie, why don’t you tell the group what you ate yesterday,” Dr. Rosen said.

“No!” My voice ricocheted off the walls. I jumped out of my chair and hopped around in the middle of the circle like I was trying to put out a fire. “No, no, no! Please, Dr. Rosen. Don’t make me!” I begged like a child. Not this; please not this. I’d never acted like this before. But no one had ever asked me point-blank about my food.

“Jesus, woman. If you’re going to act like that, then you have to tell us,” Carlos said.

We hadn’t even been talking about food. We’d been talking about the medical bills for Rory’s ferret.

I was one month into treatment. In four Tuesday sessions, the group and I had gone through all the getting-to-know-you rituals. They knew I came to group because I struggled with relationships. They knew about the bulimia, and they knew about me and Dr. Ruth. But this? Telling the seven people in front of me what I’d eaten the day before? Impossible.

My eating disorder was no longer the stuff of a Lifetime movie—I didn’t go from drive-through to drive-through eating and puking, but I ate like a weirdo. Exhibit A: Every single morning I ate a slice of mozzarella cheese rolled up in a cabbage leaf, along with a bowl of microwaved apple pieces that I poured skim milk over and ate with a spoon. “Apple Jacks,” I called them. This had been my breakfast for almost three years straight. Never a Sausage McMuffin, chocolate croissant, or granola bar. If I couldn’t have my secret special breakfast, alone in the privacy of my kitchen, then I skipped breakfast. This breakfast was safe. It never, ever beckoned me toward a binge.

My law school friends saw my odd lunch every day because I couldn’t hide it: a can of tuna in springwater over a bed of green cabbage doused with French’s Classic Yellow Mustard. They justifiably made fun of me for how disgusting and unimaginative it was. A normal person would never eat this lunch more than once; I ate it every single day. At lunchtime, the other students would saunter across campus for subs loaded with pink-and-white meats and cheeses, dripping with chunky jardinière sauce, while I sat back in the student lounge eating like a rabbit at a ballpark, prepping for the next class. They didn’t know that before I got into recovery, my relationship with food led me to crouch, face-to-toilet, after most meals. The body memory of losing control of my appetite and ending up literally in the toilet haunted me. I almost met my ignominious death in college. You could say a lot about my lunch—it was flavorless, deprivational, and guaranteed to induce heartburn—but it kept me from losing control. Could those fancy subs do that?

For dinner, I ate sautéed ground turkey mixed with broccoli, carrots, or cauliflower and a tablespoon of Parmesan cheese. Every now and then I’d mix it up and use ground chicken instead of turkey. Once I tried ground lamb, but it was greasy and made my apartment smell gamy. When I got into recovery for bulimia, I picked a handful of foods that seemed “safe” because I’d never binged on them. I didn’t have the courage to veer from my safe foods.

The bingeing popped up elsewhere, though. That was the secret rotting inside me. Every night, for “dessert,” I’d have three or four red apples—often more. Sometimes as many as eight. When I hinted at my apple consumption to my sponsor Cady back in Texas, she assured me that as long as I didn’t eat white sugar, it didn’t matter if I ate a bushel of apples three times a day. White sugar was the devil’s poison to many people in recovery—it would lead you to a death by doughnuts. Cady gave me permission to keep apples on the “safe food” list no matter how many bushels I went through per week.

I spent more on apples than I spent on cable, gas, and transportation combined. Apples were the reason I didn’t have a roommate—I was terrified of being found out, but I also couldn’t imagine eating only a single apple every night.

“Tell us,” Rory said, her voice soft and gentle.

I squeezed my eyes shut and spoke fast, like an auctioneer at a cattle sale. “Cheese,