Sandra Stephens's Open Salon Blog

Writing Down The Bones: How I Survived My Anorexia

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:11:37 -0500

It started when I was a thirteen-year-old high school freshman. I remember the exact day, in fact. I was in health class, taught by Mr. Carr, who was also the soccer coach and, apropos, a weird health nut. He was always extolling the virtues of wheat germ. He thought fruit was a *snack*.

He was a skinny guy with a big mustache and what I can now recognize as a great attitude, but he seemed to lack the ability to really connect with students. He talked to us like we were equals and we just weren’t ready for it. - we were too embarrassed by him, ourselves, and the class.

Although I do remember very vividly the sex education he provided – it was off the curriculum and as far as I know, no parents or teachers knew or cared what was covered in that class. So thanks to Mr. Carr I knew what a condom looked like both in and out of the wrapper, and I knew how it was supposed to go on a banana, if not a penis.

Coach Carr also brought us guest speakers – once, memorably, a teenaged mom. I didn’t need reminding of the consequences of sex – I thought about those all the time, even though I was a virgin. I thought about them because my parents were fond of reminding me that girls who had sex were sluts and would come to a bad end, every last one of them.

I didn’t need reminding. I was pretty clear on my parents’ worldview, which was that all girl were in danger of being, becoming or being thought of as sluts (this latter was worst of all, somehow), and the only way they could become un-sluts was to get married to a man they hadn’t had sex with yet.

"Boys only want one thing," my mom warned. "You only have one reputation," dad intoned. His tone made me think of my reputation as an egg - something fragile that was bound to break, so vulnerable to outside forces it would take all my diligence to protect it, and even then I might fail - it was enough for people to *think* the egg was cracked to ruin it, even if it remained whole and unblemished for all to see.

(aside: once my sister and I complained about how we’d be out walking and hear a car horn honk and look to see who it was – assuming of course we knew the honker – and it was always the same, some guy with a total pervy pedophile smile. My dad’s contribution to this conversation was typical: Nice girls don’t look.)

What I found memorable and remarkable about the teen mom was the fact that she still lived in her own home town after having a baby out of wedlock– I always figured that if I got pregnant, I’d run away to Hollywood and be a hooker. I knew it could be done because I saw it in a movie starring Linda Purl, and I remember thinking “Well, if I ever do get raped and pregnant at least I won’t have to kill myself.” This was my safety net, my backup plan – something I needed, because my parents were quite clear on the consequences of pregnancy: they would disown me, if I survived the beating I was sure to get. The relief of that movie! I knew exactly where to go to – someplace called Sunset Strip.

I did not feel an ounce of self pity about any of this. It was just the way it was. I had some girl friends, but none very close – certainly none close enough to come over to my house and witness my parents, at any rate. Boys I dated of course had to meet my dad, and that was bad enough. They’d all say the same thing: your dad doesn’t seem so bad. (A few brought me home late and found out they were right – my dad wasn’t so bad; my dad was really bad, and none of them ever came around me again, not even in the relative safety of school). When the most popular boy in my class informed me he’d asked me out because he wanted to see if the rumors about my dad were true, I finally just stopped dating.

Years later I conferred with my sister and found out she too had a plan to run away and become a drug addicted teenaged hooker rather than face the consequence of evidence she’d had premarital sex (she saw the same Linda Purl movie as me) We made a pact: if one of us got pregnant, we’d run away and figure out how to take care of one another. My sis and I are close.

So back to the momentous day in health class. It was late spring, school nearly out. I was wearing a pink strappy ‘baby doll’ top and a pair of white shorts. I remember looking down into my lap during the class and thinking, how is it that I haven’t noticed before how fat I am? The evidence was right there, in my (relatively new) breasts pushing at the thin fabric of my pink top, my tanned thighs on the desk seat. I suddenly felt very naked and exposed – and entirely gross. I was 5’2” and weighed 104 lbs.

I set to work fiercely, with all the considerable power of my self disgust. Breakfast became an orange that I peeled and sectioned, eating maybe 2 slices and putting the rest in a baggie for the next day. I could make an orange last a week that way. My parents didn’t notice, but my sister did. “You’re being so weird!” she’d exclaim. “Mom, she’s only eating an orange!” “She better not be,” my mom remarked disinterestedly, then went back to being depressed.

Lunch was skipped, though sometimes I’d buy a pack of Starbursts and eat one or two. If I didn’t have a softball game, track meet or cross country race, I’d have to eat dinner – but if I did have some after school activity, my dinner would be waiting in the oven and more often than not, no one was around to see me scrape it into the garbage.

My weight dropped to around 90 lbs and stayed there for the rest of my high school career. No one ever said anything negative to me about my weight – probably because, if you looked at my grades and performance on the track and trail and softball diamond, there didn’t seem to be a problem. Anything I did, I did well; more, I crushed the competition. In the case of my anorexia, the competition was, in a way, my body. It didn’t stand a chance.

It’s a sad thing to me, even now, how much approval I got for being so thin. Even at the time, I didn’t care for the compliments , as much as I craved them. Many of them were the “I wish *I* could be anorexic for just a week” variety. Those comments made me angry – I’d want to shout back in their face “It’s HARD to be like this! I have to think about it every single fucking minute of every single fucking day! It’s not a life!” I felt like those compliments further trapped me in the prison I’d built for myself. I felt panic at the thought of having to live my entire life like that - because if people approved of me that way, it meant that I couldn’t or shouldn’t change. No one would like me if I did and nothing could convince me otherwise - after all, I had the proof in their compliments.

I gained a few pounds as a freshman, reaching the terrible weight of 112 lbs. I discovered this when the softball team had the annual player physicals - including a weigh- in - just prior to sophomore year. I was flabbergasted. How could I have let myself go like that? I set out with a grim determination to not just eliminate the weight but destroy it. This time I got my weight down to less than 90, and I stayed there through my undergrad years.

During my master’s, my weight hovered at 85, dropping for about 9 months into the sub-80 zone. I was hospitalized a few times, but got my weight back up to the low 90s in time to head to Indiana to begin my Ph.D. program when I was 21. I had now been anorexic for 8 years – one third of my life spent thinking obsessively about not eating more than, not weiging more than, not wanting more than.

That’s the what and the when. But what most people want to know about is the how, and the why.

The how was simple. I was not a bulimic – someone who binges and purges. I thought they were gross, lacked control. I fancied myself a purist, someone who could exist without food. I ate like a consumptive sparrow and I exercised like a crazed hamster and on the few occasions when I broke down and ate something with more than 500 calories in one sitting, I immediately vomited it up, an act I hated and wasn’t very good at. Luckily, there was the University Counseling Center, where I attended a weekly group counseling session for girls with eating disorders. There, I learned many of the finer points of how to purge. There were all kinds of tricks to make it easier, for example drinking lots of liquids, especially warm ones, before and after eating.

I also learned to use foreign objects when my finger was no longer adequate to start the gag reflex. After hearing the tale of a girl whose mom found a butter knife under her mattress, I decided to try that trick. But I used a long serrated bread knife, not anticipating that the violent gag reflex would sharply thrust the knife into the back of my throat. At first I tried to hide what I’d done to myself, but the blood sluicing down my throat frightened me. When I finally vomited it was a spontaneous rather than forced action, and looked like someone had dumped a bucket of blood in the bathroom. When I screamed for help, my voice gargled like I was drowning. Which in a way, I was. I was 17.

After the knife episode, I taught myself to vomit by pressing into my stomach at the same time I depressed the back of my tongue – I’d heard of the trick from another girl in the therapy session, and though she annoyed me and struck me as dumb, it worked like a charm. When the back of my hand started scarring, I turned my left handed batting glove inside out and put it on my right hand to protect the skin of my knuckles from my teeth. I didn’t share this trick with her, the better to be superior to her as she sat with her thin scarred hands knotted together during group session, denying she’d relapsed.

I went through a lot of terrible but completely predictable physical changes. But though I was, literally, wasting away, the changes seemed to be only skin deep. Somehow I managed to continue performing at a level that allowed me to keep my academic and athletic scholarships. Looking back, my life was mostly notable not because of anything I did , but mostly in what I didn’t do – which was, be a kid, be independent, be young. Be happy.

I never really thought of life as something to be enjoyed and so I didn’t. It wasn’t until decades later that I realized I didn’t really know how to be happy. I knew how to be content, and I took great pleasure in contributing to other people’s happiness. My own was never expected and therefore wholly expendable. The thing is, I didn’t mind. I didn’t even know.

When I dropped below 90 lbs during grad school my parents were forced to acknowledge something was happening to me. My father bought me a coat. My mother hissed “What will people think when they find out?” She also briefly adopted the practice of purging - I know because my sister caught her in the act.

“What are you doing, mom? “ she asked my mom as she was vomiting into the toilet. She knew mom wasn’t sick or anything – she’d just been chatting with her outside the bathroom door. “Um, nothing,” mom told her, and continued for a few months, finally managing to lose some of the weight she always found so difficult to shed. For awhile anyway. I was enraged - how dare she use my methods! I wasn't worried for her health at all - I was angry because I didn't want there to be any commonality between us.

My brother called me from school and asked me to get better. I started to tear up until he said “Mom and dad weren’t that bad – you know it could have been a lot worse.” My rage at that statement should have been a clue, I guess, but at the time I just hung up the phone and continued my campaign to stay brutally, accusingly, monastically thin.

Even my sister couldn't get through, much as I loved her. At Chrismtas one year, she came to sit with me on the couch - an annual ritual - and listen to my commentary on the different aunts and uncles and cousins swirling through the house. But nothing I said made her laugh. I must be losing my touch, I remarked. Her brown eyes were teary.

It's this song, she said. I always cry when I hear this song. I listened, and from the kitchen radio came the strains of Karen Carpenter, dead these long years now from anorexia, singing The Christmas song.

We looked at each other for a long minute, and maybe I might have listened then. But dad appeared before us and took a picture - one of the rare ones from those years. In it, Karen looks directly at the camera, brown eyes shining. I am looking at her, my profile thin and sharp as a fox, almost urecognizable even to myself except for the sweater that I still have.

So why? Why did I choose to be anorexic?

I think the simple answer is, because denying myself food when I was hungry, and exercising when I didn’t feel like it – these things felt like punishment, and I’d grown up believing that I deserved to be punished – for anything and everything. I did not inherit my dad’s addiction to alcohol, but maybe I did inherit a tendency towards addictive behaviors – and anorexia is definitely an addictive behavior. Even I knew that, at some point, there was no longer a 'why' - I’d simply become accustomed to living that way.

Many years after my recovery, I read the book Leaving Las Vegas, in which the main characters, both bent on self destruction, have this unforgettable conversation:

Sera: I just want to know, Why are you killing yourself?

Ben: I don't remember. I just know that I want to.

Sera: Is your drinking a way to kill yourself?

Ben: Or killing myself is a way to drink.

At some point with the anorexia it was the same thing – I didn’t remember why I wanted to starve myself, I just knew that I did. “You’re killing yourself!” my boyfriend Rick said to me, at which I scoffed. Such a dramatic turn of phrase. Oh brother, I told him, rolling my eyes. No one is going die around here. Something I stubbornly insisted on even as some of the girls in my therapy group did, in fact, die. Not relevant, I airily told the boyfriend.

I refused to consider that I was killing myself or even hurting myself. I knew I was *limiting* myself in some ways, of course – you can’t think about being thin 24x7 and not know this - but the health consequences of my behaviors just never seemed real to me. A funny observation from a girl with such low body fat her fingernails were bluish, but there you go. Is that why?

I came by my obsession with food and weight honestly. My mother was overweight for most of my life, and hated herself and everyone else for it. She went through a severe depression while the rest of us pretended that she didn’t – even when she stopped leaving the house, brushing her teeth and bathing, we all kept pretending that everything was normal. Is that why?

When I think of those years, it’s always the same image: the matted shag carpeting still holding the faint scent of old cigarettes, the small kitchen with its unforgiving fluorescent light, my mom in her faded, creased and stained old clothes – always black or blue, like a bruise. The smell of her unwashed hair. The hunched look of her shoulders, as if bowed by some mysterious weight. Was it sadness?Anger ? Disappointment? I never knew for sure.

I was the only one she didn’t get along with, though I never knew why. The nature of the divide between us eluded me, but it was undoubtedly there. “I have to love you because I’m your mom, but I don’t like you very much,” she was fond of telling me. Is that why?

I’d been taught at home and school and church to not be vain or full of myself, to not have opinions or thoughts that weren’t like my parents’, that nothing I said or thought was worth anything, that I must of all things guard against “getting above myself”. My dad had a precarious grip on his role as provider; his anxiety and fear, and the scars of his own physical abuse and emotional deprivation, made for a combustible combination and turned our house into a war zone. Is that why?

My mom suffered most of all, but this was small comfort to me when it was my turn for his attentions. And it was a double betrayal when she turned on me too with her justifications for failing to protect me. I wish I’d never come home, I sobbed one Christmas (the last one I’d go home for, as it turns out). I’d been home all of three hours and dad had fired his opening salvos. Why does he get to be as horrible s he wants? We don’t have to take it, we’re not his dogs, I fumed. Mom’s response: “Well, maybe you shouldn’t come home. It’s more peaceful without you.” Is that why?

I went to the counseling center like the good girl I was, for weekly group sessions. Those sessions taught me a lot about what it meant to come from a difficult home life. There was the girl who went with her family on a camping vacation to Disney World. She was raped and sodomized in the campground shower, and her parents asked her to move out - they couldn't 'deal with it'. She had a reason to point to for her bulimia, no one could doubt it.

There was the girl who sometimes didn't show up becuase her dad was in town visiting her - the childhood incidents of incest had continued into her adulthood. I was always struck dumb when she talked about anything - with a life like hers, what right did the rest of us have to claim unhappiness? She had a reason to point to for her anorexia, no one could doubt it.

I watched these girls tell their terrible stories, their huge eyes in their starved faces, and I wondered what in the world united us in our choice of behaviors (even as a voice whispered to me, you have no right, you should be stronger, you don't belong here with them, they are victims and you are a fake). Was it our fathers? Was that why?

Here's what I think: my anorexia was in part a response to my home life, but not in the way most people assume. I wasn’t devastated by the treatment I received from my parents. I knew they were wrong. I was a good girl - from what I could see of the behavior of my peers and friends, better than most (but oh how that doubt lingers; how guilty I feel, laying claim to goodness, as if I were never good, and knowingly lying here).

Mostly I could just see for myself that my mom and dad had issues that went way beyond me. My mom and dad were flawed, but they loved me, I knew that. I resented and lamented their mistakes but I didn’t believe that I was the cause of them. I wanted them to approve of me but I knew it wasn’t my fault that they didn’t.

But for some reason, even as I ran away from them and their message, I carried their message with me. Maybe anorexia was a way to keep myself small and inconsequential in the world, the place my father feared and my mother hid from.

Like many addicts I was a sly creature - a double agent. Even as I lashed myself with deprivation and rigid expectations of titanic accomplishment, I took a secret, gloating pleasure in the pathos of my appearance. I liked imagining that when I returned home for the holidays and attended church with my family, that people were noting my weight and looking with disapproval at my parents. My starved body was testimony to the fact that something was wrong.

I liked the way my appearance belied our happy family picture – a picture we were too-well trained not to project. You can scream with your mouth and nobody hears, I learned; I also learned that you can scream with your body, and people can hear with their eyes.

Which leads me to conclude that my anorexia was probably a lot more about rage than anything else. Rage at being made to feel worthless. But when I moved away from home I found that abuse and rage were all I knew – they were the only tools I had for handling pressure. Anorexia was a way to continue the campaign of abuse and rage that I’d endured under my parent’s roof, only this time there was no escaping because I was the abuser as well as the abused; I was the hater as well as the hated, I was the one enraged, and I turned all that rage on myself.

I kept more pressure on myself to perform than my parents ever could have – I had three majors (and graduated with three degrees) four minors, a full time athletic scholarship, a partial athletic scholarship in another sport, two academic scholarships, two loans, a work-study job for 20 hours per week, a job at a Donut Shop (that was actually the name) for 20 hours per week and a job at McDonald’s for 29 hours per week. I also went a couple times a month with my friend who volunteered at a house for wayward deaf boys (where I learned sign language for curse words, among other things). I did this all in just under four years - and, of course, with a sharp eye on my weight every step of the way.

I started to stop when I met the man who would become my first husband. It was the strangest thing, but when I first saw him I decided, instantly, on the spot, that I wanted to be with him. Something in his face – a calm, confident intelligence, a place where rage could not take root and grow – drew me to him. Turned out I was a good snap judge of character, because in our 18 years of marriage we had exactly one fight, and he never ever raised his voice to me. “Wow, you’re really smart,” he said when he looked at my bookcase. “Not really,” I said, not because I believed it but because I didn’t want to get above myself. He gave me a look. “Well, you know best,” he said neutrally, and I flushed darkly. My methods were backfiring.

It was summer and we had only two months of dating before we returned to our respective universities – he at the University of Illinois for his senior year, me at Indiana University for my doctoral program. There was no miracle or anything – I simply spent time with someone I admired and who was openly admiring of me, and gradually being anorexic began to seem like a burden, like something I was awkwardly carrying around rather than something I *was*. My soon-to-be husband thought my thinness was the least interesting and least attractive thing about me - a bit of perspective I was both ready and grateful for.

And by the time I arrived at my apartment in Bloomington that fall , I realized I was just tired of it. I didn’t want to be the thin girl any more. I didn’t want to remind myself to be unhappy any more. I was tired of resenting my parents for mistakes they couldn't make up for. Tired of keeping the memory of their mistakes alive by cataloging them on my body.

I was beginning to forget why I was so unhappy, and why starving myself proved it. I was appalled to realize how much time I’d spent slowly killing myself, and how close I’d come. I couldn’t remember what hurt so much I thought I needed to die over it – I only remembered that I had wanted to, and now I didn’t.

Are you there?

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:11:00 -0500

Sometimes, you’ll read my blog and wonder, is the “I” her? Is she the “me”? Often I don’t say one way or another . But this time, I’ll say it - the I is me, it is me talking to you.

I had a dream. It was so disturbing that the force of that disturbance propelled me up and out of REM sleep to a state of upright, blinking wakefulness. Once in that state I immediately and thoroughly squashed all memory of the dream. Wherever it went, in my mind – some dark out of the way place – there it stayed. That was maybe three, four weeks ago. Three, I think. Yes.

And then I remembered the dream, just like that. Right out of the blue. I was at the symphony last night and I was listening to the drenched beauty of Bach, he of the sparkling flutes and wedding strings. I closed my eyes and my mind wandered, creating stories as it often does, and in the middle of this a snapshot of a scene from the dream bloomed in the forefront of my mindscreen like a rancid black rose.

I remembered the dream – relived the dream – as Bach washed over me:

I was in a room, surrounded by old friends and new, and strangers too. We were gathered for some purpose though that purpose wasn’t clear. It appeared to be celebratory, and formal: most of the folks in the dream room were wearing some kind of formal attire and though I couldn't see myself I knew I was too.

You were the only person in the room sitting. I spoke to you as if there were not two years of silence between us, and you answered. I do not recall what we said exactly but I do know that my comment was cautious and ambiguous; you r reply, warm, and welcoming, which filled me with the most shameful relief.

My mind leaped into action like some beefy oiled onsie-wearing powerlifter on Muscle Beach, flexing around to find the perfect thing to say to you that would show my happiness at the closing of the distance between us while not taking any responsibility for that distance or the pain it caused you but not as much as me.

But before I could speak your face turned pink then red then a shocking bruised plum staining rapidly to black, your face caving and softening like a rotting fruit. You fell sideways in the chair. I kept talking to you, superstitiously believing that the power of my relief, my desire to be your friend again, could somehow restore you. That can happen in dreams I'm told, though miracles of flight and escape and resurrrection always seem to elude me in my own own dreams.

Your blackened face was terrible to see, so terrible my eyes opened to blot out the vision.

Why would I dream such a thing I pretended was my fisrt thought when I woke, but my first real thought was really Did you touch me on your way past?

“She’s not doing so well, I heard.” Those words about you, uttered about a month ago. Words that have stealthily followed me every night down to sleep and slipped in just under the lids, words that have staked out territory behind my eyes. Words that weigh so much less than your wispy frame but weigh me down like concrete boots.

I was hoping the dream self would say, I don’t know why I let the friendship end. I was hoping but she didn't.

I don’t know why I didn’t reach out, why I could only focus on the fact that you didn’t to justify why I shouldn’t, couldn’t. Wouldn’t.

I hope it was just a dream. It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like a finger has pressed deeply into the blood dark balloonskin of my heart, leaving a frostbite print in its wake. The print emanates a cold force field that makes me clumsy and slow, but at some point I feel certain I’ll break through to where my thinking is clear, and I'll go to you and tell you all these things. Also how I’ve missed you, and love you. If you’re there.

The Bow Heard Round The World

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:11:10 -0500

uh oh, there's toilet paper stuck to my shoe!

Pundits are going crazy over - get this - Obama bowing as he met the Emperor of Japan. Apparently, none of the pundits has ever stepped foot off American soil, nor have they read a book, nor do they have access to the interwebs - how else to explain such complete ignorance of the fact that different cultures have different customs. As in, different from ours?

A bow in the US is anachronistic at best, but mostly just sort of weird. We don't bow. There are no bowing occasions in the US. We tend to think of bowing as indicating subservience, heaven only knows why. Probably something to do with the fact that we emigrated from England, where bowing was a forced acknowledgement of the social position of those born (and therefore would stay) higher up than us. In general, we Americans associate bowing with servants - or, if you're a Merchant Ivory fan, elegant bejeweled women accepting some old-fashioned gentlemanly homage. So it makes sense that we not only don't bow, we don't like the *idea* of bowing. On our turf, that makes sense.

But bowing in Japan does not have the same loaded meanings it has for We-are-number-one! Americans. Bowing, or ojigi, is as integral to Japanese culture as smiling is to American culture.

In Japan the bow is practiced by everyone, and it has many meanings. Japanese greet each other by bowing - shaking hands is reserved for westerners, though many Japanese are cleary uncomfortable with the physical contact. In addition to greeting, bowing can express respect, thanks, and apology.

Bows can range from slighly more than a sort of reverse incline of the head ('hello' or 'yes, I heard that') to the commonplace 15 degree bow (hello, goodbye, thank you, nice to meet you, whoops sorry for getting in your way, you go first!).

A deep bow expresses deference to the other person's age, and/or respectful acknowledgement of their position, or accomplishments.

Always, always if the person is higher status or older than you are, you should bow deeper and longer. To fail to do so is impolite at best, and an intentional insult at worst.

President Obama's bow to the emperor was entirely correct (if a little awkward - deep bows should be executed at the waist, and Obama's has a weird hunched back thing going). Still the Japanese are a fine and understanding people, happy to overlook awkwardnesses such as these. I know, I committed them often enough. Once I bonked heads with another bower, ouch. Once I saw two guys bonk heads as they took tipsy leave of one another outside a bar; one staggered off, the other settled down for a nap ont he sidewalk. See how much worse trouble Obama could have gotten into with the bowing?

I have no doubt that any Japanese watching the bow thought how excellent it was that the American president showed an understanding of Japanese custom. And then immediately stopped thinking about it, and started thinking about something else, like what to have for dinner.

It's incredible to me, how so many are 'outraged' about our president acknowledging that the rest of the world has its own customs. Amusing, too, how easily so many let their personal fears inform their complaint. There is a ton of literature on bowing protocol in Japan -- and Bill Bennett's meaning for a bow (I'm subservient! Less of a rule than you! Hell, less of a man than you! And I make less money!) is not Emperor Akihito or the country of Japan's meaning.

And so there's no doubt, here is Bill Bennett's stated meaning for this bow:

"It's ugly. I don't want to see it. We don't defer to emperors. We don't defer to kings or emperors. The president of the United States -- this coupled with so many apologies from the United States -- is just another thing." Bennett said on CNN's program State of the Union.

Well Bill, here's another thing. It's JAPAN. Not the US. It's a bow, not an unconditional surrender. Here's a thought: other countries don't really give a shit what you think of their social customs. See, you're not there on a regular basis to tell them how they're being too deferential and 'ugly' in their habitual behaviors. And somehow, without your guidance, they've developed a custom that - surprise - has many meanings, all of them based on the presumption that two human beings of mutual repsect are coming together in an air of cooperative courtesy.

It's not like they kissed on the lips and went for a walk hand-in-hand in the garden or anything....

There is always tomorrow.

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:11:23 -0500

She went to bed energized; enervated for the tasks of the following day. Make coffee. Read mail. Pay bills. Go to store, get milk, get bread. Maybe, maybe wine (but maybe not). Go to post office. Gym?

Yes, gym. She would work out. Maybe run on the treadmill. Maybe even start training. She’d once been a runner, and pretty good too. She could reclaim that part of herself. A marathon perhaps. This last thought filled her with a small excitement.

Maybe I should just get up now and go, she thought. Its open 24 Hours, right? Right. She laughed at the silliness of herself, of traipsing through the dark streets with her gym bag, passing unseen beneath the windows of hundreds, maybe even thousands of citizens stacked on top of one another like sleep cars on a train of houses.

If she went on such a walk she might dance in the round yellow pools of light from the streetlights, twirling like a ballerina from spotlight to spotlight up the dark deserted street, her gym bag flying at her side. The thought made her giggle and she glanced nervously around the room.

“Silly!” She said to herself. “It’s late and high time you slept what with all you have to do tomorrow.” This mock stern lecture was delivered using her Bustling Aunt voice, a voice that belonged to strict, proper, matronly but ultimately lenient Victorian gentlewoman who dispensed wisdom to her silly young charges.

Not that she was that young anymore. The thought caused her smile to dry up a little at the corners. She tried to focus on the image of herself as a ballerina whirling up the empty nighttime street, but the image was far away, twirling from dark shadows to pool of light, dark shadows to pool of light until she was tiny as the ballerina that twirled in her jewelry box she had as a little girl, the dancer with the dainty tutu and legs that ended in sharpened points that could poke your eye out, the one with the painted blue eyes she would sometimes stare at, to see if she could catch them shift.

She fell asleep watching her eyelid movie, the ballerina whirling up the street, flashing in and out of the shadows as if fleeing out of sight, an image that made her feel just a tiny bit bereft. But just a tiny bit. Mostly she still felt pleased with her plan of attack for the following day. And she wouldn’t even make a big deal of it!

That would be the thing, really – that she’d just act like it was always the way she acted, to go out and about and get things done. (Out and about, how she loved those words, how they went together like iced and tea). Like it was just another day on a raft of days just like it, this would be just another ordinary day that stood on a raft of ordinary days that floated on a sea of ordinary days with herself astride and her face lifted to the sun, days where she was out and about, just doing…..things. Any things.

Like she hadn’t laid in bed more than ten hours for the last however many days it had been, breathing the stale air in shallow breaths, her body mysteriously limp and heavy as a puppet with severed strings. Like her heart wasn't a feral child peering from the closet to see if the monsters were gone off to work yet, leaving her to prowl the empty house. Like she wouldn’t go to bed with the same thoughts of the same tomorrow.

A Constellation of Moments (Now With Pictures!)

Mon, 9 Nov 2009 15:11:29 -0500

The symphony The h’s mom is in town. This is a building trip; building ties with the little one, whose school is having a Grandparent’s Day, and building bridges with the h. This past summer at the lake house there was not one, but two conversations that roamed over the subjects of religion, Obama, health care and finance reform like a scorpion over hot rocks.

The week starts off well, no mention of the stinging wounds of the recent past. The h has to leave for a few evenings and his mom takes his place next to me at the symphony. We dress up in black satin and heels, have champagne, and are delighted to find that we had identical reactions to the program: awestruck before the Russian violin soloist in the first part of the program who visibly sweated as he wrung magic from an instrument that seemed an extension of his bending, swaying body; then, spirits soaring with the strings of Beethoven’s 9^th . So entrancing is the second part of the program, it seems over in a few short minutes.

We discuss the meaning of the question 'Odds and Evens?" with respect to Beethoven's symphonies, and we both agree that it is a mood thing (though tonight, naturally, we are "odds"). We smile in kinship at our inability (refusal?) to limit ourselves when it comes to beauty.

We linger in our seats even after the orchestra players take their final bows and begin milling about on the stage because magic is still in the air and we still want to breathe it. After, we walk five sparkling city blocks through the balmy evening, a few cars blipping their horns at our finery, and arrive at the traditional post-culture restaurant Absinthe, where we have French onion soup, pommes frites with vinegar and aioli, and deep velvety glasses of cabernet.

Observe the fangs

The cookie decorating party: The little one has three friends over to ice Hallowe’en cookies. There are bats, cats, pumpkins, skull and crossbones. There are seventy eleven colors of icing and innumerable containers of red hots, bright dots, and other decorative doo dads. The results look like the product of Jackson Pollock’s bastard children in full manic phase. Green cats with red hot eyes and purple glitter, orange bats outlined in neon blue, tehnicolor moons, striped stars. There is the nonstop happy shrieking of little girls which is its own music, indescribable.

Hallowe'en The h, his mom, and I get dressed and walk over to the h's ex's house so we can all accompany the litte one for trick or treating. We are quite a trio: I am in my supergirl costume (blue velour top with S shield emroidered on it, red shiny skirt with matching cape, gold boots (and red fishnets!).

The H is in full vampire regalia, with black nail polish and black lipstick, and a snappy fedora; the h's mom is in my super fancy custom apron (courtesy of the skillz of OS's own Pretend Farmer), a hot pink Esurance girl wig and a martini glass.

We pass a family, the 6 year old boy and 8 year old girl dressed to perfection. “Sonny and Cher!” I cry out, and the parents are, if anything, more excited than the kids that the costumes are recognized. I offer them some of the Amazing Technicolor Cookies and the kids look at their parents for permission and then chastely choose small ones. Suddenly I am mobbed: a tiny ghost appears and grabs a cat; a chubby pumpkin reaches for a star, twin Spidermans wrestle for the black bats with red hot eyes. I escape with a few cookies, which is good, since this is supposed to be my contribution to the buffet at the ex’s house.

We all set out for Belvedere Street, which is blockaded to be a six block long promenande of trick or treaters and their gamely costumed parents. Hundreds of people are milling around in an amiable Norman Rockwellian mob. There is a family dressed as the cast from Where The Wild Things Are, the ten month old baby goggling beneath a hilariously hairy horned hood. There is Woody from Toy Story, with his cowgirl girlfriend. There are tiny draculas and a tooth fairy. Last year there were half a dozen Harry Potters, but this year is Maurice Sendak’s year, and little boys with tails and crowns caper everywhere I look.

It is a tradition on this street for houses to not just decorate but entertain, and we are drawn to a garage with a fantasic array of skulls heads that light up in computerized sequence to the tunes of Michael Jackson's Thriller. A crowd of kids, none of them over eight, is standing mesmerized, and all o fthem – the princesses, Batmans and Robins and Wild Things all throw up their arms and sing the word “Thriller!” though Michael Jackson will always be nothing more than a rumor and a myth to them.

Michael Jackson hasn’t really been relevant to my musical tastes for decades, but I remember like yesterday rushing home from class to sit in the living room of my dumpy, faintly beer-smellig house with my eight roommates to watch the world premier of Thriller, which was indeed thrilling. Standing on the sidewalk watching the little ones throw up their arms exuberantly, the childish falsetto “Thriller” ringing out in the crisp air, I smile, glad the prodigious talent of the man will outlive the tabloid tawdriness of his life.

At the neighborhood sidewalk sale. The day after Hallowe'en, the houses on our street had a giant sidewalk sale. We laid a huge rug in front of our house, set up a popcorn and lemonade stand, and then unloaded Hello Kitty paraphernalia for a couple of hours. Some of our neighbors were more high end: I scored a 1940s handbag for $15 and the h got a keyboard for $25.

A young woman rode up on her bike and asked if she could park at our stand while she wandered the street. No problem, we said, as she examined our Moroccan backgammon set. Her bike contained a cleverly mounted saddle bag that contained a two year old Maltese puppy. When she freed it , it came straight to me (“It’s me!”). It was adorable in that way that even people who hate small dogs have to admit is adorable, and I picked it up, it’s warm fragile little weight so much like my own little guy that tears came to my eyes and I had to duck my head and murmur to it.

The puppy tilted it’s head back to gaze at me, its head resting on my heart, and despite what everyone knows about such things, it felt like something more was happening than a middle aged woman gazing blurrily at a dog

2:00 a.m. I wake, which is not unusual – I am a light sleeper and typically observe the dim outlines of the nightdark room at least three times while the house sleeps. I am not feeling well, I realize, and my slow rise from bed and shuffle across the room becomes a sprint. I just make it to the bathroom at the end of our long skinny Victorian hallway and spend the rest of the night helplessly along for the ride as my body enthusiastically throws off ballast from both the fore and aft decks.

At first I think, flu! Then, food poisoning? Then, as the night turns into morning and then afternoon, I continue to feel so sick I am psychologically paralyzed by the thought, what if this doesn’t go away? But I’m too weak to grapple with fear. And finally, it does go away (ya big baby, whispers the dad-voice that lives in my head) just in time for a grueling three day business trip to Mexico, which I begin with weak legs, chapped lips, a stomach that is about as empty as a stomach can get, a total of about 3 hours of sleep over the course of two nights, and a migraine sending its warning signs: sparkly pin dot lights in my peripheral vision, phantom aural sounds – for me, it’s always the same: marching band music playing on a radio in another room in the house, a sound I have more than once pursued physically, trying to locate its source, before the hammer of the migraine smashes into my temple.

It is not a trip I can postpone so I simply pretend the sparkly lights aren’t there, drink a lot of water, pack my passport and hope for the best.

At the hospital: I am sitting at a conference table with my sales and marketing team which is twelve strong. Nine surgeons are rotating in and out of the room lecturing on their procedures: angiogram, hip replacement and refurfacing, lumbar sugery, cataract, kidney transplant, pain management, gastroenterology…the ills of the body seem puny compared to the calm competence of these accomplished men and women in white coats who give thoughtful answers to the intelligent questions of my staff.

I look around the room and feel a rare moment of accomplishment – this time last year I sat in this same room, the sole occupant, in full business building mode. Now it’s a roomful of people I've known for less than a year (some for only a month), and I’m driving them hard: we’ve all taken 6:00 am. flights and here it is, 9 p.m. and the day is not over yet. My newest employee turns and gives me a big smile and a surreptitious thumbs up, and though my back still aches with the sprung muscles of my sickness, I feel the happiness that only a job well done can give me.

The cantina: After a grueling three days the team departs for home; three of us remain for a final day – they are having some dental work done, and I will rise bright and early for a day of interviews with MarketWatch, SmartMoney, and LeMonde. We share a margarita over dinner and begin the cautious business of getting to know one another. The restaurant begins to fill up, and there is an air of expectancy that doesn’t seem to have much to do with the guacamole, excellet though it is.

The mystery is solved when the karaoke machine is set up, and though I cordially loathe kaoroke, we have a grand time. A stocky young man gets up and sings first in Spanish then in English, his voice like Josh Groban only better, the passion masterfully tempered but leaking through every line.

The male of our party brings down the house with his Sinatra; I choose the Monkee’s “I’m a Believer” and, in deference to my knee high brown patent leather books, Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walking”. The beautiful blonde of our trio sings some Jewel, her voice quavering only a little, and then after she tells me with shining eyes about the time she had to be pulled off the stage in high school, struck dumb with terror Jan Brady-style. Tonight is her redemption and we do a shot of tequila to celebrate and then do a grand finale, the Beatle's Michelle, and the middle aged Mexican crowd sings along in French, and it is what I like to call an ‘international moment’.

In the parking garage: Saturday night 9p I arrive back in San Francisco utterly used up, a menu of work from the trip already queued up in my head and clamoring for attention NOW, trying to ignore the fact that my weekend is half gone before I’ve started it. And why does luggage gain weight as the trip progresses?

I lug my laptop and my suitcase up and down three different floors, despairingly looking for my car – in the mad dash to get to the gate on time (they closed it, literally, on our heels) I have forgotten where I left it, and keep returning to where it was parked last trip, and the trip before that, but it refuses to materialize. I drag myself back to the 2^nd floor for the third time, chafed so raw with exhaustion (and the anxiety of all the expectation riding on my ability to keep all those people employed) that the ding of the elevator opening actually pisses me off with its cheerfulness.

Standing there staring at me is a fuzzy yellow retriever pup, maybe eight months old. I drop all my bags and squat down, sideways (the sprung muscles of my back and stomach groaning in protest, my intestines whispering ‘not done yet’, sparkly pindots whirling in my peripheral vision) and hold my hand out for him to sniff but he ignores my hand and puts his paws on my knees (It’s me!) and gives me his version of a kiss and I am all right again, just like that.

have a cookie!