I’d been bingeing and purging since seventh grade; I didn’t need to use my finger. All I had to do was bend over the toilet. When I was done purging, I ran the shower to clean myself up before my roommate returned from a study group. My stomach felt like it would split open lengthwise. Steam billowed in the tiny bathroom, and I hugged the wall, waiting to see if more vomit was coming. Black dots swirled in my vision. I sank into the floor, half in the shower and half out. Before everything went black, I thought: This is it; this is how I die, bingeing myself into oblivion and moping over a boy.
I dialed Rory’s number. Mercifully, her recorded voice greeted me, and then the beep. My turn. In a voice barely above a whisper, I recounted all the cabbage and the five postdinner apples. After I hung up, I threw my phone across the bedroom. It clattered across the hardwood floors. “Goddammit!” I yelled into my apartment, as I punched my pillows. In one moment, I thought: Why am I doing this? It hurts too much. Then: Why didn’t I get to Dr. Rosen sooner?
I called Rory again the next night, and it wasn’t one bit easier. My hands still shook and I threw my phone across the room when I was done telling her voice mail what I’d eaten. My arms ached with phantom pain as if I’d literally wrestled to keep hold of my precious secret. By the third night, when the voice mail beeped, I almost said “ditto from yesterday,” I forced myself to enumerate each apple and cabbage leaf.
The fourth night was the worst. Seven apples. Enough for a prizewinning pie at the state fair. I wanted to hide the reality of those seven apples, but I was midway on a tightrope. If I told her, could I scurry, quick like, to the platform ahead? Either way, I wanted off the tightrope.
It’s not going to work if you don’t do the hard thing, I told myself. Deep breath. “Seven fucking apples.”
6
Dr. Rosen was a snake charmer. He could ask a pointed question and secrets from our past would slither out. He’d coax Rory into recounting details of her father’s harrowing escape from Poland, urging her to speak in her father’s Old World accent. At Dr. Rosen’s urging, Colonel Sanders described the dubious therapy he had with an unlicensed doctor who treated him for PTSD after his service in Vietnam. Dr. Rosen could get Carlos talking about the stepbrother who abused him after Sunday school, and Patrice misting up over her brother who hanged himself in the family orchard. Dr. Rosen sensed where our shame and grief was hidden and knew how to extract it. He prodded me to talk about Hawaii and bulimia almost every session.
Every Tuesday morning, I rode the train eleven stops from my apartment to the Washington stop on the Red Line, where I would climb to the street level around seven ten. Twenty minutes early. The day I’d committed to joining a group, I stopped sleeping through the night. I could fall asleep around ten, but then I’d bolt awake at two or three, and never get back to sleep, so it was easy to get downtown early. But I didn’t want to drag my anxious, furiously beating heart to the waiting room to sit there among addiction books waiting for the door to swing open. I’d walk around the block—past Old Navy, down to Carson Pirie Scott, and then east toward the El tracks on Wabash. Sometimes I made two loops, assuring myself: You’re just a woman going to therapy; you’re going to sit in a circle and talk for ninety minutes. Easy peasy.
Sometimes sessions were as emotionally charged as a juicer demonstration at Sam’s Club. One week we spent an entire session discussing the insurance forms that Carlos wanted Dr. Rosen to sign. Another time, when Patrice showed up with two different colored knee-high stockings (one midnight indigo, the other ebony), we debated for fifteen minutes whether it was progress for fastidious Patrice to mess up her hosiery or whether she was backsliding into self-neglect. There was no tidy conclusion, no resolution.
There were disclosures. There was feedback. There was looking, seeing, and being seen. There were no answers.
I wanted answers.
Pivots happened without warning. One second, quiet Marty, the guy who started the same day I did, would be crying as he described his disturbing cache of death mementos—namely, the cyanide tablets he kept in his bedside table in case he ever wanted to end it all—and then suddenly the group conversation pinged to the time I had pinworm in kindergarten. Pinworm, a common childhood parasite, produces agonizing nighttime anal itching. I told the group how, at five years old, alone in my room at 6644 Thackeray Avenue, I scratched my ass like a feral dog for hours into the night, long after my parents flipped off The Tonight Show and went to sleep.
“Did your parents know you had it?” Rory asked.
“Wait,” I said, holding up my hands. “We were talking about Marty’s cyanide.” How had the group landed on my five-year-old butt?
“The group has a way of uncovering things you might need to let go of,” Dr. Rosen said.
Dr. Rosen loved detail, so I took a deep breath and described how my parents gave me a tube of Desitin for pinworm, but it didn’t relieve the itching. By morning, the stinky white paste was ground under my fingernails and smeared all over my sheets, my nightgown, my butt,
