Eating Disorders - Connecting the Dots : Part 2

Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders
by Aimee E. Liu

(Page 2 of 7)

As I hovered by the security checkpoint I wondered what I was looking for. I'd gained more than thirty pounds since high school, and current friends seeing my old modeling pictures would bluntly ask, "That's you?" Surely Candy would be equally transformed. But my thoughts kept sliding back to my last images of her. Seventeen years old, she sat alone in the corner of the cafeteria making a half hour meal out of a six-ounce container of plain yogurt. Though in many ways her mirror image, I rarely spoke to her. By then, we pitied each other. We also admired each other. We knew each other's secrets without knowing the details, and so, on a subliminal level, we feared each other.

"Aimee?" The voice came softly from my right. I turned and immediately recognized my friend from third grade. She still wore her hair long and straight, no makeup to hide her freckles; and her eyes were that same cerulean blue: quiet, steady, yet voracious.

When we hugged, her grip felt healthy, her body trim but solid. She smelled like Breck shampoo. So did her daughter, Ruby - a wary, dark-eyed child still sleepy from her nap on the plane. Ruby was the same age Candy and I had been when we first met.

On the drive to Santa Fe, Candace told me she and Ruby had moved to lower Manhattan three years earlier from San Francisco and were only now settling in. She glanced toward the backseat. Ruby, she said, was one of those kids who have just three friends and know everything about them from how they arranged their socks to what they muttered in their sleep. It hadn't been any easier for Ruby to find such friends in New York than it had been for her to deal with her parents? divorce.

"How long were you married?"

"Fifteen years." Her ex-husband, Candace explained, was her opposite: he'd voted for Bush, attended church, had workingclass parents who drank, and was happy to cruise for a year between jobs - largely because Candace covered the bills. Before disappearing, he'd cleaned out her bank account. Candace had nearly lost her own job while fighting her husband in court - to little avail. She'd also lost twenty pounds - the first relapse into anorexia since college."

"The divorce diet," I said, not joking.

She nodded. Five years later, she'd regained the weight but was still struggling to sort out what had gone wrong in the marriage. "I tried to tell him, 'I'm like a plant and you're overwatering me,?" she said. "But he was too needy, and when he couldn't have all my attention, he turned vengeful."

It seemed to me she was giving her ex more credit than he deserved, but I knew from my own experience there had to be more to the story. "It falls into the category of 'be careful what you wish for,'" I said when Candace asked about my separation. Superficially, my marriage had all the right ingredients. My husband was generous, smart, devoted to our sons, and more attractive to me with his silver hair at sixty than any man I'd dated in my twenties. Maybe the problem was the fourteen-year age gap. Maybe it was his latest business deal, which had turned him into a workaholic. Of course I'd never cared about the Lakers, and he couldn't stand to socialize, especially with my friends. Worse, we'd do anything to avoid honest confrontation . . . But all these were evasions. "I'm still sorting out my role in all this," I admitted. "But I guess the important realization is that I played one."

"You're ahead of the game," Candace said. "I didn't realize that until it was too late."

When we reached the ranch, the afternoon turned into a blur of activity as Carol showed off her painting and photography studios, and we played with the horses and dogs. We didn't settle down until evening, when Carol brought out a set of easybake mugs for us to paint at the large wooden table in the middle of her kitchen. As everyone got to work I felt like I'd landed back in art class in elementary school - the more so when I glanced up and saw Candace covering her mouth with her hand as she smiled at something Ruby had said. Carol drew hearts and horses, a miniature of the view from her window, with printed words of love. Ruby made free-form swirls, letting herself go. Candace created a meticulous, pointillist ocean of fishes. I stared at the surface of my cup.

I applied the marker. I erased the mark. A picture was supposed to present itself, but my mind was as blank as the clay. I stole another look at Candace's impeccable sea as Carol's husband, Wayne, strolled through the kitchen. He took one look at me and in his amused, laid-back way said, "Aimee. It's only a mug."

Candace threw me a look of sympathy. Carol frowned at Candace's mug. All those compulsively ordered dots. "This is supposed to be fun," Carol said.

Ruby grinned and held up her abstraction. "I'm having fun!"

We laughed, and I loosened up enough to deface my mug with a maze of inked leaves, but it wasn't fun for me.

When we talked about it later, Candace told me she often drew in points, trying to make pictures out of the negative space. "I guess it goes back to my failed attempts at therapy," she said. "They never connected the dots."

"What do you mean by dots?"

"You know. Weight and men, my body, my family." She described her longing to let loose. She felt she needed to make some enormous, meaningful gesture through her work or music. "But it's as if this impulse is gridlocked by the compulsion to always behave."

Copyright © 2007 by Aimee E. Liu

About the Author

My past lives include early childhood in India; middle childhood, adolescence, and anorexia in the Connecticut suburbs of New York City; three years of teenage modeling through the Wihelmina agency; a major in painting at Yale University followed by turns as a waitress in New York and a flight attendant with United Airlines. Between flights I wrote my first book, Solitaire, a chronicle of my passage through anorexia, which was published in 1979, when I was twenty-five.