I tried vomiting. I knew other girls who did it. They were assholes,
but it isn’t only assholes who want to be thin.
I didn’t
like the vomiting, but for what it’s worth, it worked. I’d eat, go to the
bathroom, gag myself, vomit, take a breath mint. I’d be back in the cafeteria
or in class in just a couple of minutes. It takes me longer to shit than it did
when I used to make myself puke.
But I hated
it. And I gave it up. Because I like—no, I actually love—the way things taste. Throwing them back up again just messes
it up completely. Nothing tastes like a cheeseburger or a bagel with lite
cream-cheese or Mom’s carrot cake after it’s been acidulated or whatever by
your gastric juices. Everything ends up tasting like puke. Because by that
point, that’s all it is. And it makes you never want to eat it again in its original
state, either.
So I gave
up the vomiting.
The last
thing that was supposed to happen was for my sister to find out. She’s my
little sister, but she loves me like a mother cat loves her kitten, skewering it
by the scruff of its neck. It’s love, I guess. But it hurts. I’d never be that
kind of mother.
According
to my sister, I’ll never be a mother at all. I’ve messed up my periods
According to my sister, I’ll give myself ulcers. According to her I have bad
teeth. Except I don’t have bad teeth. It’s that my mother had pneumonia when
she was carrying me. They had to put her on antibiotics. The milder ones didn’t
work, so they ended up giving her drugs that crossed the placenta and left me
with a yellow tinge to my teeth and enamel that’s softer than normal.
So I’ve
always flossed. And especially when I was vomiting I always flossed. And
brushed. I’ve never even had a cavity. Maybe vomiting would have given me a cavity
if I hadn’t been so careful. But I had been.
You couldn’t
tell that to my sister, though. Not that I even tried. She found out about the
vomiting and told Mom and Mom called my dad and told him, though he had very
little to say on the subject. He has very little to say on any subject.
