Marilyn Horan
Dinnerexia Nervosa
Last
Sunday night my husband and I were invited to go to a “Help Us Clean out the
Refrigerator” dinner hosted by neighbors who were leaving their Brooklyn home
for their winter residence in Florida.
The concept was not the most appetizing idea for a meal and reminded me
of the time our next-door neighbors volunteered to give us the contents of
their refrigerator that they needed to clean in preparation for the Jewish
holidays. That “present” consisted
of plastic bags filled with a variety of vegetables and fruits in all stages of
decomposition and decay, papery onion skins attached to the whole mess. It was obvious they had simply dumped
the crisper drawers and left it to us to decide what, if anything, was salvageable.
This
clearing out the icebox party turned out to be much better than I expected. We
had butternut squash soup, roast pork, sliced steak, stuffed cabbage,
oven-browned sweet and white potatoes.
The defrosted and stale bread was the only disappointment. Dessert
consisted of fat-free vanilla pudding topped off with almond ice cream. The only dissonant notes at the event
came from the other women there, one forty-five years old and one in her
seventies, anorexics, friends and cohorts in their mutual disease. As the three men and I ate heartily,
both women ate like sparrows. The
only utterances from the younger woman involved food: “Oh, I can’t possibly eat that much.” “I’m stuffed already.” “I have to go to the gym tomorrow and
work this off.” I guess by “this”
she meant the one-eighth of a cabbage roll, one inch piece of steak, and a
slice of sweet potato. All the
while she was running her hands down her sides of her tight green sweater. She was the color of and as flat as
Gumby. “I’m down to ninety-six pounds,” she said mischievously, looking right
at her husband. The older woman,
thin to the point of skeletal and painful to look at, remarked at some point
that she had been a Playboy Bunny years ago. She simply went about preparing the food, a slight almost
beatific smile on her face. Bunny ate as little as she could privately, in
contrast to Gumby who beamed with delight at the tiny amount of food on her
plate. Bunny remarked that she was considering going back to eating meat soon,
but would have to start with a little piece of chicken so she wouldn’t choke in
disgust. Bunny’s husband chortled,
“That’ll be the day.”
Gumby’s
husband, our much beloved friend, pleaded with his wife to eat a little
more. “Marilyn,” he said
addressing me, “don’t you think she should eat more? Tell her how skinny she looks.”
“Gumby,”
I replied, “has a mirror and knows what she looks like. Obviously that’s how
she wants to look. “Gumby,” I
asked, you weigh 96 pounds now at 5’4”.
How much would you be happy weighing?” She just put her hands together on her chest and tittered
like a child, smiled shyly over at her husband, and said she didn’t know.
I
was not going down that road with Mr. Gumby. He knew I liked him and always took his side in every one of
their marital disagreements:
having children, going back to college, spending money, whose family to
spend Christmas with, and so on.
This time I would not bite.
I would not become the object of their arguing, a distraction when her
not eating herself to the grave was the real issue.
“I
must tell you, Bunny,” Gumby enthused, “you are my role model. I mean, you went from being fat,
smoking, drinking to losing all that weight, leading a healthy life, teaching
yoga. You really are my
heroine.”
“Yeah,”
I added, “you also stopped sleeping around with any man who asked you. You’re no longer the neighborhood
whore.” But I pronounced it
“who-a” to get more of a laugh, which I did. I always resort to humor to avoid sticky tar pits. But really I wanted to laugh at both of
them or slap them silly.
“Please!” I wanted to scream. “Are you two completely nuts? Gumby, Bunny is your role model for
what? Self-hatred? Suicide? Sickness? She
and you are so clearly trying to control your aging by controlling your
food. Neither one of you looks
pretty, only pathetic, and your self-satisfied smiles, sometimes so knowing and
secretive disgust me.”
What
is particularly disappointing is that Bunny is a woman I, too, have long
admired. When I first met her twenty
years ago, she was studying for her PhD in psychology and was a drug and
alcohol counselor and aspiring psychotherapist. She had been a nurse in her earlier days and she talked to
me about things other than how I looked or where she was teaching yoga, or
about the rock-climbing wall she had installed in her house. She was more outgoing and
sociable. Now she looks likes she
is shrinking not only in body, but also in presence. She seems to be willing her body away as though she could
become airy and incorporeal. She
clearly wants to disappear. “Oh
that this too, too solid flesh would melt/Thaw and resolve itself into a dew.” Like Hamlet, I imagine, she wants to
effervesce into nothingness.
So
it’s a sad situation for Bunny and her husband, but it seems sadistic for her
to have taken Gumby under her fragile and brittle wing to instruct her in the
ways of starving to death in a seemingly noble and admirable way. Yes, they are avoiding middle and
old age spread, the spare tires around the waist, the Ethel Merman wings of fat
hanging off their upper arms, but they risk osteoporosis, kidney failure,
wasting away of muscle, confused thinking, blotchy skin, depression,
sensitivity to cold, yellowing skin, and of course, death.
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