Empty

by Susan Burton

Part of recovery from an eating disorder, no matter who you are or what variety you have, involves learning, or relearning, how to eat. It also means learning who you are, or could be, without the illness and why you needed it in the first place.

It’s a beautiful fall Saturday morning, the sky a coastal New England blue; a perfect morning, which I could not inhabit if I tried; a perfect morning, which I am ruining. Have already ruined, because being on the way to doing this is tantamount to having done it.

Eating disorders are primarily women’s illnesses and exist within a patriarchal culture that diminishes female suffering.

The term “picky eater” didn’t apply to me. Picky eaters had to be reminded to pay attention to their plates. But I never forgot about food, in the way you never forget about anything you fear.

Being thin was important in our family: “Oh, I’m so glad I have thin grandchildren,” my grandmother had said once, clapping her hands in the dressing room where my sister, Betsy, and I were trying on back-to-school clothes.

At the end of dinner, I felt such pleasure, the first spark of something I would come to know intimately later. The power of renunciation, of waiting out a meal. Of rising from a table still empty.

“I KNEW NOBODY WOULD EVER love me for my body,” my mother said. “They would have to love me for my mind.”

Over winter break I caught a stomach virus, and though it lasted only twenty-four hours, I lost two pounds. This was the kind of information the women in my family shared, and at Christmas dinner, I mentioned it.

I was catching up to my parents, to the years in which they were people I could imagine.

What I do with food has always reflected in some way what I do with people, and my secrets have never been just about facts but about intensity of feeling. I have never been hiding only what I want but how much.

I lived by signs, relied on them. I was indecisive, and signs were easier. How else were you going to choose?

Far more than I wanted people’s bodies next to mine, I wanted them to be mine. Not in a covetous cosmetic way, like, Oh, I wish I had that supermodel’s flat stomach. I didn’t want parts of bodies. I looked at other people’s bodies and I wanted to inhabit them. I wanted to feel what they did. I wanted to feel the way I once had.

In the morning my father had a few hours before he had to return to Stamford. We walked down West 23rd Street, and from a sidewalk vendor he bought an old coin. “I will always remember buying this coin with you,” he said, and I felt so glad that I’d been able to take days off from work and be with him. Whenever I walk on that block now, I see us under the white sky of that August morning and I think, This is where my father bought the coin. It is like a memory we own together. I have the tails side of it, and he the heads.

Everyone with an eating disorder record-keeps.