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