The girls sat at the table
nearest ours. Actually, they were women,
or almost women, but that was something I discovered only after I got to know
one of them. Until then I had no idea
that their illness had trapped their adult selves inside the bodies of
lost little girls.
At 21 years old I didn’t
understand my own issues, let alone anyone else’s. The various groups in residence never
mixed, except during the odd sanctioned event designed to cheer us up. Three times a day we just shuffled past each
other into the cafeteria, our eyes fixed firmly ahead of us. No one suddenly leapt from their group’s
designated table and dashed across the room, shouting, “FREEDOM!” as they crashed
through the invisible barriers separating us.
We didn’t want to know each other.
We didn’t even want to know ourselves.
The cafeteria still managed to be
a somewhat cheerful place despite the palpable misery its diners inflicted upon
each other. Light streamed in through large
windows, and someone had thought to paint the walls in bright spring colors, providing
a kind of warmth we could no longer generate on our own. Considerable effort had gone into the food as
well. It was nothing fancy, but we got
enough and it tasted good. I actually sort of enjoyed mealtime. It provided a fleeting break from the non-stop
horror show taking place upstairs in our designated corner of the building.
For the girls at the table
nearest ours, though, each confrontation with food took on the aspect of death . The rules of their unit required
that they eat a certain amount. Given that
I gladly and willingly polished off every morsel on my tray it never occurred
to me that for the thin girls sitting a few feet away, eating
constituted a kind of mental violence imposed on them for their own good. This was partly because the girls currently
in residence were hardened combat veterans; they’d reached a grim detente with
their food. None of them seemed exactly
happy at mealtime, but neither did they let on just how difficult chewing and
swallowing could be.
And then the new girl showed up.
Like the others, she looked
young. Too young. Ghost-white, swimming in her clothes, and with
limp black hair scraped back into a high ponytail, she viewed the cafeteria
scene with dark terrified eyes that were too large for her gaunt
face. A woman wearing a sympathetic
smile set a tray in front of her. As the
new girl gazed down at the food, teardrops began rolling down her cheeks. The woman took her hand and held it. I watched the girl wrestle with something
terrible inside of her before I lowered my eyes, embarrassed by my
interest.
Everyone in the cafeteria had problems
that felt like a knife against the jugular. The alcoholics, the drug addicts, the women
in my group who recoiled from our own histories—we all bled. And yet watching the skeletal girl struggle
to bring even a forkful of food to her mouth, I experienced a kind of grief for
her that I could never quite manage for myself.
The most basic of requirements had become her enemy. During a joint outing one of the viciously
skinny girls who turned out to be 23 years old told me she’d stopped eating to wrest
back control of her life. Except that in
the end, the cure for a lifetime of pain had become a potentially fatal condition
in its own right. Irony could feel like
the worst kind of practical joke sometimes.
I understood this because I, too,
had just declared war on my own “coping mechanism.” Which was why I found myself somewhere with pristine
green lawns and a so-called trust course and the rule that no one could have any
sharp objects in their room. We had all
come to this place technically out of choice, but the distinction between us
and those in a psych ward was a fine one.
If you wanted to shave your
armpits, you still had to go to the nurse’s station, ask for your razor, and
proceed under the nurse’s watchful eye.
Just like how a nurse had to check on you every 15 minutes all day long,
to make sure you hadn’t hanged yourself with a bed sheet, or god knows what. Suicide threats had that effect on the staff.
It was the last chance saloon for
those of us on the verge of giving up. We did our time and went home again, a few of the
massive holes in our internal fabric partially mended, most of the others still
gaping. The trick was to either learn
how to live with these holes, or to find a way to stitch them up
ourselves. To hope we could pull that off sometimes
seemed absurd when we were surrounded by so much agony, but every small
breakthrough personally experienced or witnessed in another extended the
possibility.
By the time I checked out of the treatment
center, the girl with the high ponytail could eat without the nurse holding her
hand. But these types of wars are never really won. The best one can hope for is fewer engagements
of a less brutal kind. Although I never knew what happened to her I have to believe the girl is still fighting—that 25 years later she is somewhere
eating her dinner, and smiling.
