Small Acts of Disappearance, page 9
When I left school I didn’t want to go to university and become a teacher and get married and so on. I didn’t even want to grow up; I didn’t want any responsibility…I was terrified of being an adult, of getting old and dying. I was even prepared to die young in a perverse attempt to cheat death. So I began to starve myself…[these] are conclusions I have come to over the years.
There’s so much story hinted at in the differences in these accounts, so much hard-won change that really appealed to me, at a time when I was constantly revising and reshaping what I thought I knew about my self, my life and my disease.
Virginia’s hunger is always explicitly tied to death, which seems to offer her the ultimate escape from her family and fate – perhaps the only escape that her adolescent self is able to envision – but it is also a sacrifice and a transcendence. Virginia’s fast began, according to her sister, after a teacher suggested that her students give up eating meat as an offering or penance for a dead schoolmate’s soul in Purgatory. Virginia, alone amongst her classmates, takes this advice so far as to stop eating altogether. She starts planning her funeral (‘she’s made a will with a description of the flowers and the music and the prayers…What she has is an incurable condition,’ her sister states). Her uncle describes her as having ‘a look of saintly self-denial and smugness’. Even her name, Virginia, is saintly, but also eternally childlike, untouchable, aloof.
The teenage Virginia constantly describes her own death, and writes too about things and people that have disappeared: the Indigenous inhabitants of Copperfield, her mother as a girl. My favourite of Virginia’s imagined deaths occurs in the younger woman’s diary, after she reads that adipose fat cells in corpses left in water become ‘suet-like’ in consistency as they decompose. She writes:
I like to think that if I ever did drown and stay in the water for a long time I would have so little fat on my body I would not turn to suet. Suet is one of the most horrible substances I have ever seen.
‘The body of a young woman which was washed up at Rocky Cape had undergone virtually no adipocene change owing to the almost total absence of fat in life. The coroner said “If this girl has been in the water for the length of time suggested by the weight of evidence, I am inclined to suggest she had been subjected to a rigorous program of starvation prior to death. I support this theory with further evidence that the stomach of the deceased woman was in fact in a remarkably shrunken state, and was completely empty of food.” Relatives of the deceased are being questioned concerning the young woman’s diet and eating habits over the past year and a half.’
In those waiting rooms, I was always thinking, I’m not as sick as her, so I’m okay. I never thought, when I was hungry, about my death because I thought that my hunger, the way that I was eating, was what I needed to do in order to stay alive, in order to manage and live with my physical condition. A doctor told me, at twenty-five, I had a metabolic age of twelve, and I thought this proved that I was fit and strong and well. In the lead-up to my first admission, I was given a letter to take to my GP, outlining the care that I would need:
In the initial stages of treatment, it is recommended that the patient has the following fortnightly blood tests and assessments: Hormone levels (oestrogen, progesterone, luteinising hormone, follicle stimulating hormone); vitamin D; bone mineral density; pulse and blood pressure; electrolytes, urea, creatinine, calcium, magnesium, phosphate, potassium, blood glucose level; white blood cell count; liver function, thyroid function; allergy diagnosis (self-reported allergies from eating disorder patients are often not reliable); body temperature. An ECG conducted monthly.
Heart, kidneys, liver, thyroid, hormones, bones: I hadn’t realised that so much could be going wrong. The nurse who stuck the ECG stickers on my sternum, wrists and ankles, in a half-circle underneath my prune of a left breast, clicked her tongue whenever she touched me. ‘No good,’ she said, ‘so skinny, no good at all.’
But what’s interesting about Virginia’s invented newspaper report is not so much her fascination with her own death – it’s been a part of her illness from the very beginning – but the implicit punishment of her family in the last line. Like Cloudstreet’s Rose, like Teresa in For Love Alone, Virginia wields her hunger like a weapon, against a father who doesn’t recognise or credit her desire to be a writer, and her mother, who has accepted the same conventional future that Virginia’s father sees for her (university, marriage, children) and has even come, in her imagination, to embody it.
Virginia writes, ‘My mother is so fat. She is fat and disgusting and she is so busy doing good works in the world and working for charity she wouldn’t even know if I fell down dead.’ Virginia’s thinness visibly and violently differentiates her from her mother, Margaret O’Day – Margaret is as fat as Virginia is thin, but they otherwise look very similar. Virginia’s uncle describes Virginia as ‘a pale, faded milky impression of her mother’ and their destinies too are designed to resemble one other. Virginia has seen photos of her mother, slim and beautiful, in her youth; Margaret’s weight gain is said to have occurred in bursts after the birth of each of her seven children. But alongside child-bearing and child-rearing, Virginia aligns other duties of domesticity, especially cooking and entertaining, with fat – and from this is borne her fear. In another extract from her diary, she writes:
Were all the fat women with shopping bags and tribes of children once graceful brides with shining hair and shining eyes?…The dainty hands have mixed and moulded and manufactured jellies and puddings and chocolate cakes with fluffy cream and strawberries and hundreds and thousands and hundreds and hundreds of legs of roast two-tooth…They bake yellow sponge cakes called Lemon Snowdrift and cream the butter and sugar thoroughly…for the Nectarine Soufflé they beat and beat the whites of eggs…they make ice-cream in three flavours and they pluck fresh fruit from the fruit trees… Knives spread with butter things that are spread with butter such as bread and scones and also fruitcake…Then they start pushing and poking and popping, tossing and slipping and jamming these fruits of the earth, these works of human hands, into their open mouths…
The level of detail in this passage, the encyclopedic listing, is an echo of an earlier description of Virginia lying in bed, taking imaginary stock of her mother’s pantry: candied almonds, tins of sardines, peanut butter, powdered milk. This too is a symptom of starvation syndrome, continual and uninterrupted obsessive thinking about food, looking at and lusting after that which the body is denied.
And what is refused here, alongside food, is the domestic role of food-giver, carer, provider for the family, that her father’s conventional imagination has projected for her. Domesticated women are fat women, and Virginia fears this fate, aligning and even substituting control over her body for control over her future.
It’s interesting too that Virginia specifically rejects her mother’s food as ‘poison’, eating instead apple cores and scraps of food from rubbish bins, things that are discarded or forgotten, accidental. Later on, in Copperfield, Virginia puts her problem simply: ‘The trouble is, I am a girl.’ She realises, in what becomes something of a refrain for her adult self, that the ‘trap’ she is in is the trap of ‘her own nature’, her gender, and the expectations that come with it.
Virginia is finally sent away to stay with her cousins Bedrock and Carrillo Mean in Copperfield after she refuses to go to a family picnic in the Launceston Gorge (constantly referred to simply as ‘the Gorge’, in a beautifully perverse pun). Her excuse is that she is too weak to attend, that her hunger makes her as unable as she is unwilling to participate in the rituals of her family. But instead of staying in bed, she takes a bath and admires her protruding bones, she makes herself vomit as she imagines her family eating together at their picnic, and she walks to the cemetery to continue writing her novel. Her absence is discovered when her father returns to the house early, and his anger and confusion lead to the decision to send her to the country for a ‘spell’. Virginia’s writing and her hunger are the paired catalysts for her removal from her family; they hold her clear, and finally bring about the physical, as well spiritual separation from her parents that she craves.
It is in the strange town of Copperfield that Virginia really begins to struggle, both with her loneliness and isolation, and with the fear that comes when her patterns of eating are threatened and disturbed. Virginia’s uncle in particular is unyielding and unsympathetic to her hunger – he comments at meal times about people watching their figures and looks at Virginia as she eats, close to tears. But she continues to write, and her first diary entry from the town reads:
I am sad and lonely and I am very far from home. Today I have eaten nothing… Here with my aunt and cousins it will be different, and I will have to work out some different tricks…I escaped to my room without any dinner; I said I was too tired out from travelling. Tomorrow I must look for some scales in the bathroom.
I remember this from the hospital, the exposure of sudden transparency, a doctor sitting at the head of the table at every meal, coaching us on: just put a bit on your fork, they’d say, take some deep breaths, remember why you’re doing this, I need you to take another bite. I remember the horror when I realised, at the first meal, that the only way out was to eat it and eat it all, that none of my tricks would work here, that I was on my own, without my hunger. I remember clutching my stomach on the couch after each meal.
In Copperfield, Virginia spends most of her time in the library, writing in her notebook and reading Dickens. She is left alone, that is, for the very first time, to do just as she pleases, to be imaginative and unconstrained, and to satisfy her craving for stories, for art, for something beyond the world she knows. It is in the library that Virginia has her most important revelations about her disease; and it is in the library, surrounded by books, that she begins to eat again.
In the library, Virginia first eats under the soft duress of obligation, when her aunt brings her a biscuit and cup of tea, and stays to talk about Dickens. Virginia nibbles away at the edges of the biscuit until the whole thing disappears without her realising it, although she does feel scruitinised and watched the entire time. It’s a small act of surrender, but not a simple one, and it’s certainly not final. Describing the incident in her journal, Virginia is caustic and sarcastic, and it’s this description that has made the book so important to me now. Virginia imagines her uncle watching her eat her biscuit, minutely, slowly, hidden in a compartment in the library wall:
He lurks in the secret place behind the wall until I have eaten the whole biscuit and then he rushes down to the Palace and shouts to all the people that the fast has been broken; the drought has ended; the rivers will flow in the parched and searing desert; the princess has laughed; the sin is original, the niece will toe the line.
This description delights me because it’s such a beautiful negation of so many portrayals of recovery from eating disorders that I’ve read or seen, where the hungry woman suddenly decides that she’ll start eating again, suddenly comes to the table, as it were, and breaks the fast. I watched the first season of the BBC drama Skins with my housemates in my first sharehouse; an early episode centres on the anorexic Cassie, after her last day in a private eating disorders clinic. There’s a wonderful scene where she demonstrates to a friend precisely how she fooled people into thinking she was eating, mixing her food around on her plate, waving her cutlery and talking non-stop, distracting attention from the meal that she’s not eating. This I recognised. But the episode ends with Cassie sitting in a diner, taking a breath, and biting into a burger. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t pick the bun apart. Her hands don’t shake. We don’t see her shrunken stomach aching afterwards, her overwhelming need to sleep, the sadness that sweeps over her when the meal has been endured. It’s as if a switch simply needs to be flicked to turn the illness off, a tablet taken to cure the infection. But even as a teenager, Virginia knows this is not the case. She knows she has to dig her own way out of the trap that is a part of her very self.
It is in the library too where Virginia realises exactly what it is that she needs to do. Writing in her notebook, she remembers seeing a doll that once belonged to Elizabeth Batman, the daughter of the founding father of Melbourne, on display in a museum. The doll, she remembers, had become an object as impersonal as any other artefact, removed from its world and its purpose. In her first direct and conscious statement about her hunger and her writing, and the links between them, she writes:
Dear Diary, I feel like a doll…I feel like the doll in the glass case with the harpoon gun and the revolver. And I believe I have realised, dear Diary, that my way out of the glass case, my way out of the trap, is through writing…I will learn to use words like tempered steel to cut my way out….if I can’t get out of my own glass coffin, through my own forest, I would rather be dead.
I sometimes think that this is all I’m doing, trying to use words to cut my way out of the trap. They’re not enough, but they are the strongest steel I have.
Virginia’s recovery is not outlined in The Bluebird Café, but it is present in the space between the voices and perspectives of the character at different ages. The adult Virginia can illuminate the thoughts behind her teenage counterpart’s writings, the voice that’s being suppressed alongside the appetite, and we’re left to notice what has shifted, what has changed. This is most powerful, when the adult Virginia describes her time in Copperfield, in the library, as the time when she recognised the symbolic value with which she had inadvertently burdened food. She describes a local boy, Jack Fisher, coming to visit her in the library with produce from his family’s farm:
He tempted me with apples…lovely little red apples that looked so sweet and crisp. In the end I started eating them…Jack somehow changed my outlook…and made me take the simple way out which was to start being honest about what I wanted, I started by eating the apple I wanted to eat, and then, after quite some time, you understand, I was able to explain to my aunt and then to my father that I wanted to be a writer.
‘After quite some time, you understand,’ is such a small moment of qualification, but one that makes all the difference. It’s one thing for Virginia to realise that she has been suppressing what she wants, what she is hungry for, another thing entirely to be able to seek it out, to give herself permission to incorporate it into her life and her body. The average time for a recovery from an eating disorder is said to be seven years – the same length of time it takes for all of the cells in a human body to be replaced.
And as with Rose, hunger leaves its shadow on Virginia, her body never forgets. It is the legacy of Virginia’s teenage hunger, her obsession with disappearance and death that guides her choice of subject matter for her play about Copperfield. She has been given free scope in her commission, but her interest is held by the now-mythic story of Lovelygod Mean, who disappeared from her bed one night, aged ten, never to be seen again. Lovelygod is thought of with the same measure of speculation and fascination as the equally fictional Miranda from Picnic at Hanging Rock – and she is certainly another incarnation of the almost archetypal Australian legend of the missing child.
But Lovelygod also represents another version of the narrative the teenage Virginia was trying to construct for herself through her hunger: the girl who will never grow up, whose body has become a thing of mystery, a thing that disappears, never to be found. I think it is this that the adult playwright finds haunting in the story, this act of disappearance that obsessed her younger self for so long.
What writing offers Virginia, above all else, is as a way to shape her self and her experiences, especially as a teenager, when the only other way she had to do this is through her body, and her body’s own extremity. I know that writing has always been the only thing, besides my hunger, that helps me make sense of the world, to find patterns and connections and with them, some kind of solidity or definition; it is also a kind of striving, a reaching for something more. Writing has always been the thing that allows me to voice what is too difficult to speak.
But even so, I resisted, for a very long time, ever writing about my illness – although my doctors had been encouraging me to do so, even from the outset of my treatment. I didn’t want to write about myself, least of all about my vulnerabilities, I didn’t want to be exposed or to expose the thing I thought was ugliest within me, I didn’t want to show it to myself. Even the poems I wrote while I was ill are sometimes strangely disembodied – my writing group often pointed out that there was no self within them, but I didn’t know how to do things otherwise, didn’t want to show too much. What there was, instead, was detail, and other peoples’ voices, a focus on the world around me, but never my place within it.
I realise now this was, at least in part, probably tied to my pathology: the last hospital I attended was headed by a doctor who believes that at the root of all anorexia is a fear of vulnerability, of intimacy, of the possibility of rejection; a fear that we allay by making ourselves impermeable and untouchable, unimpeachable in our hunger.
But when I did begin to write about my hunger, I was flooded with both apprehension and an intense exhilaration. Unlike Virginia, whose writing always centres on disappearance, for me, writing about my hunger demanded that it be seen. And because hunger thrives on secrecy, on that private, inviolable inner world (the very thing that makes it so appealing to Rose Pickles), it is less potent when it is public.
IN GROUP
There are some conversations that you shouldn’t have with your mother, especially if you are a poet, and especially if you are a poet four months into your third stint of group therapy.
