If and Only If: A Journal of Body Image and Eating Disorders Winter 2015 | Page 105

the realization that I’ve been deemed “no longer cute” is the concomitant realization that an earlier assessment had taken place, that of “cute,” but this kinder analysis doesn’t matter. Assessment is the operative event here, and it wakes me to all kinds of realities about my life, the main one being that I have never and can never putter happily and invisibly around the playground of my own head, immune to the appraisals of others. It is this sudden thrusting into the (as I see it) cruel light of outside opinion that means I will have to forevermore divide my attention between the blissfully private inner park of imagination and the problem of outer image. Later I will read that anorexia is the embodiment of the struggle between a desire for invisibility and a yearning for recognition, and will marvel at the irony of it: how vanishing makes others look harder at you. But until then, there is the problem of Randy Russell’s commentary, the sudden jolt that is the beast of self-censure now waking in me, now asking forevermore, what happened?

And the second event is this, also from my tenth year: I am in the upper parking lot of my synagogue. I’ve asked my mother for a dime for the Coke machine because I dropped the first one she gave me down the radiator in my Sunday school classroom. My mother doesn’t believe me and instead thinks I am angling for a second Coke. There is a pause, a gathering rage. Then she throws the second dime at me.

“Here,” she says, “You fat ugly pig.”

The first time I talk about this in the hospital I defend my mother.

“She thought I hadn’t really lost the first dime,” I explained. “She thought I’d already had one Coke, and that I was lying to get another one.”

“That’s not how you talk to a child,” the counselors said. “How did it make you feel?”

“The ice was good,” I joked, remembering the soft little ice cubes that fell into the cup ahead of the Coke and that crunched up cold and delicate as snow in my mouth.

The second time I talked about the episode, I expounded: “You don’t understand. My mother’s anger might have been misplaced, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t justified. She was a slave to an institution that was failing her!” (This eloquent summation, of my mother’s feelings about marriage and society and child rearing, would, I believed, win me insight points with the counselors. For wasn’t this what the conversation was really about: my mother’s feelings, not mine?)

“OK so she was a slave to her marriage,” the counselors said. “But how did her words make you feel?”

The third time I talked about it—my mother was unhappy, she didn’t want me to have too much sugar, I was the last child at home, a burden—the overhead lights in the group room buzzed noisily, their droning suddenly loud in the otherwise silent room. Ten faces—two counselors and eight other patients--stared at their laps. No one said, how did you feel about being called a fat ugly pig by your mother? No one said anything.