8. Wasting Girls
The African bullfrog survives the dry season by burying itself 6 to 8 inches underground and exuding a mucus membrane that hardens into a cocoon. It can stay in this cocoon for up to 7 years while it waits for rain. When rain arrives, moisture softens the mucus sac, waking the frog, calling it to life and love. Like cave fish becoming sightless or cuttlefish changing color, a child in school develops certain psychic fractures, defenses, camouflage, that allow her to survive in her environment. This much is a foregone conclusion. The matter of some suspense is whether those deformations will be reversible, whether they will soften and melt away when rain finally comes, or whether they will calcify and turn to stone.
When I came to understand that illness bought a day of freedom from school, I began to pray for sore throats and swollen lymph nodes, for pustules and rashes, for headaches and fevers. Oh, how I rued my persistent, insistent, relentless health! My body’s seemingly inexhaustible ability to fight off infection, to maintain its temperature, its vigor, its rosy glow of wellness! I read and re-read books where young heroines wasted away to near death, their skin wan against the pillowcase, their families gathered round in a sweet hush of pity and adoration. I wondered how such a thing could be accomplished. When I awoke with a cough with that croupy barking sound that worried my mother, my heart filled with joy. A glorious day spread before me, full of pleasure and possibilities.
But then the next day brought health, and sorrow.
My favorite in the “wasting-girl” genre of literature was Heidi, who very nearly dies of city life and school, then regains her health through truancy and mountains. This spoke to two of my deepest desires, for freedom and for wildness; for in those years the area around Norbrook Hills continued “developing” at an alarming rate. Westhaven Avenue was widened from two lanes to four and then six; a cluster of twenty-story-apartment buildings went up by the shopping center; what we were assured was the world’s largest “Sears” went in past the Drug Bazaar. The last remnant of old Cooper’s Farm was bulldozed for another subdivision. The dirt lane that ran past a mulberry tree, an old draft horse, sunflowers, bullfrogs and butterflies, was widened and paved over. The little creek that ran across the cow pasture and then into a clump of woods bounded with honeysuckle and ferns was diverted into another concrete culvert underground.
To accommodate all the new kids who moved into the new subdivisions, another patch of forest was flattened and a new junior high school materialized. A wetland alive with songbirds and iridescent dragonflies was dredged and filled for the parking lot. Trees and vines and moss-covered boulders were replaced with grayish-beige brick, gray linoleum tile, and cinderblock painted in exhausted grayish pastels. Forest-dappled light flickering through green leaves was replaced by fluorescent bulbs and gray metal blinds. Soft breezes scented with pine and dark soil were replaced by a forced-air HVAC system pumping climate-controlled air into sealed rooms with windows that did not open.
At 3:00 a.m. I would wake up with a sinking feeling in my gullet. The feeling would slide uneasily down, down toward my belly, carrying with it regrets about the day before, about something I said, or did, or was, until it slowly congealed into a cold, heavy, undigested sensation of my own badness. Then slowly the sensation of badness would rise back up the gullet and blossom into the realization that I was going to throw up.
In the dark I would go to wake my mother. Sometimes she would open her eyes as I stood there and looked at her. Sometimes I would tap her on the shoulder. “Do you feel sick?” she would ask. Then she would take me back to bed, fetch a stainless steel basin, and hold it, and my hair, while I vomited.
You may not think that stainless steel has a smell, but it does.
Nausea has its rhythms, which I came to know. After each bout of vomiting there would be a few minutes of blessed relief. My mother would sit by my side, gently stroking my hair. A deeply peaceful feeling would come over me, a sweet deep sinking into sleep. My eyes would close, my breathing would become slow and deep. Quietly my mother would get up and go back to bed. Then, slowly at first, then gradually gathering steam, the sickness would seep back in like smoke, tainting the air, souring the darkness, building in pressure, until at last it erupted once more.
The larger pattern was that this would go on for exactly twelve hours. I would be sick again and again and again— once I counted over thirty times— my mother coming and going through the pale dawn hours and the ripening day, bringing the steel bowl, emptying it, rinsing it, bringing it back. She tended me assiduously, she plumped my pillows, smoothed my blankets, brought me ice chips, pressed cool washcloths to my hot forehead. Then she would go back to the kitchen. She would bring me water, empty my trash, and back to the kitchen. Medication, bowl, kitchen.
Nothing I could do would keep her in there.
Ill as I was, I resorted to stratagems. I tried moaning melodramatically; I tried throwing the back of my hand across my forehead the way I had seen an actress do in a movie. Once I remember wailing (a bit theatrically, although the sentiment was sincere) Oh, can’t somebody please just hit me over the head with a hammer and knock me out! But no matter how eloquently I suffered, an invisible elastic band always pulled her back to the kitchen, to her newspaper, to her small portable TV with its daytime news shows, to the piles of laundry, piles of dishes, piles of notes and papers and clippings and books that she pored over in her capacity as chair of the League of Women Voters Southeast Asia policy research committee. She left the dinner bell on the bedside table so I could ring if I needed her.
When I had to throw up again, I would ring and she would come. Then, during the brief respite afterward, she would sit with me and stroke my hair — about twelve to fourteen times. Her hand would touch so softly, her skin dry and cool, brushing so gently over my forehead, her fingers raking back my hot damp hair, smooth nails tracing sweet curves on my anguished skull, a sensation so sweet it would blossom like rose petals, like angel’s wings, across my face and lips, down my neck and spine, down my arms to the tips of my fingers.
Then she would leave again.
As the nausea intensified, as it swelled and grew enormous and crested like a wave, I learned to pare my survival strategies down to one: total surrender. I came to understand, at a gut level, so to speak, that anything I did or looked at or listened to or drank or ate or even thought of eating or drinking, any way I moved or anything I said or thought or wished for, any resistance, any desire, any thing at all, would make it worse, so much worse, unbearably, unbelievably, unfathomably worse. Just when it seemed that the misery was absolute, the key, I learned, was not to make it worse. The key was to vanish to a tiny still point; to let the boundaries of my body dissolve, become transparent, evaporate into air; to completely, utterly, disappear.
This turned out to be a skill I found useful later in life.
At last there would be nothing left inside me. The episodes of sweet sleep would lengthen with the afternoon shadows. I could let an ice chip melt slowly on my tongue and once again taste the sweetness of the water. By three in the afternoon my body would be drained, filled with a peace so soft and deep it was like sinking in a cloud.
A peace that felt like something remembered, and forgotten.
By the time I was in third grade this pattern was so familiar that when I awoke one morning at 3:00 am and realized that I was going to be sick, I was able to immediately comfort myself with the thought, At least I know that by three this afternoon it will be over. But then, in the predawn darkness, this thought was followed, for some reason, by a second thought:
What if it didn’t end this time? What if I stayed sick, and had to go to the hospital?
There are those who believe that we bring illness on ourselves; that it meets some emotional need, some deep desire, in the sufferer. If that is true, it’s a bargain we make with the devil without knowing our way around the specific neighborhoods of hell, because it would otherwise be impossible to wish upon oneself days and days of ferocious non-stop upchucking. But that golden autumn of 1966, I vomited without stopping for 79 hours, dropping from 47 to 42 pounds in three days, and was admitted on Thursday morning to the pediatric ward of Sisters of Mercy Hospital and placed in isolation on the suspicion that I had some rare and unknown virus.
In those days, hospitals did not normally accommodate parents who wished to remain with their sick children, taking the view that this was a nuisance that interfered with the smooth operation of Modern Science, but Mom parked herself like a lioness in that room and did not leave my side. She was so steadfast, so solid, that even now it barely occurs to me that she must have been frightened. Pragmatic soul that she was, she turned fear into action, grilling every doctor, checking every medication, watching every nurse like a hawk. As a masked Sister of Mercy pierced a dehydrated vein on the back of my hand to insert an IV and then taped my arm to a kind of board to keep me from pulling it out, Mom saw me staring at a large realistic crucifix hanging on the wall.
She looked at the needle piercing my hand. She looked at the nails pinning Christ’s hands to the cross. She looked at my glassy-eyed, nauseated face.
And then — never one to flinch at going head-to-head with Jesus (about which more later) — my mother took the Son of God off the wall and stuck Him in a drawer.
On the third day of my hospital stay they decided to do some tests. After eating nothing for six days, I was asked to swallow a gigantic cup of chalky foaming liquid. It’s like a milkshake, they lied. I think I must have whimpered and wept as I slowly, painfully, swallowed mouthful after mouthful of the vile brew; my mother sat by my side the entire time, stroking my hand, anchoring my dry little windswept soul to her calm steely one. Then they wheeled me in for a Barium contrast X-ray, which revealed a small, ambiguous speck on my stomach wall that the radiologist pronounced a suspected incipient ulcer.
Now before you start thinking, “What kind of little kid gets an ulcer in the third grade?” I’d like to point out that it is no longer believed that an ulcer is caused by stress, but that in most cases it is caused by an infection of the helicobacter pylori bacterium, treatable with ordinary antibiotics. But perhaps it doesn’t matter that the diagnosis was technically wrong, because the underlying message behind the diagnosis was the important thing, after all, and the truth of the matter was that I was exactly the kind of little kid who would get an ulcer in the third grade. (In fact, the current name for my actual condition is Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome, a disorder sometimes called an "abdominal migraine," which afflicts primarily… stressed-out little kids.) But since in the 1960’s we didn’t really know what stress was, we didn’t exactly have it yet, you had to have a concrete physical manifestation of your personsal despair, some sort of material proof, and in the 1960’s the classic such manifestation, the slam dunk corroboration of unsupportable tension, pressure, and anxiety, was an ulcer. In a child’s dim fish-like level of consciousness that swims darkly below the bright sunlight of verbal articulation, I think I believed that at last my anguish would be recognized. Something would be done. A solution would be found. Everybody would realize, in a flash, that what I really needed was….
…to eliminate fresh fruit from my diet.
Yes, once again I was destined to butt heads with Modern Science, which in 1966 was firm in its (incorrect) conviction that as an ulcer sufferer I must never eat fresh fruit (only canned), raw vegetables (only cooked), or anything fried or spicy. But since Modern Science was also completely (incorrectly) convinced that milk was the antidote to stomach acid, I had to drink an entire glass of milk on an empty stomach first thing in the morning, something which (try it sometime) immediately curdles your stomach contents and makes you too queasy to eat breakfast; and then, in order to entirely prevent a healthy sense of appetite from ever developing, halfway between breakfast and lunch, at exactly 10:30 am, I had to pull out a thermos and drink another cup of milk in the middle of class with all the other kids watching and thinking it was weird.
The ulcer, in short, was a colossal failure.
The dim fish-like idea that perhaps liberation lay in illness, however, continued to move in the murky waters of my consciousness — an obscure form that you never quite see clearly, but just a reflection here, a sudden movement there, a spiral of stirred up silt, a shadow that darts and leaves a quivering light.
Sickness, it was clear, had possibilities.
I was going to need a better one.