Those words from my father’s mouth flash over and over in my mind like a strobe light, and I can’t see past them. My sex life: that chain of one-night stands coiled tight around my throat. That sleaziness, the poisoned sweat streaked over my grotesque flabby flesh and the smell, the feeling that won’t come off my skin no matter how hard I scrub and burn myself under the shower nozzle. Going home with anyone. Fucking anyone who acknowledges my presence, glances over my body to measure its worth and takes it anyway.
I violently grind up food in my mouth and vomit, emptying myself into the toilet, imagining that I can make myself disappear, force myself to forget. I want to be pure but his words mark and scribble over me. Blood swells within me. My feet and fists slam into the walls, against the side of the bookshelf until it crashes down onto the linoleum, nails jutting out its back like a wounded animal. I wish I could stick his face on those rusty nails.
The image haunts me: my father sitting there across the table from me in at Cafe Roma in Berkeley, mouthing those words between sips of coffee while the memories from a dozen one-night stands claw their way inside of me. I am poisoned, ruined. I sink down into a rumpled pile of bones and worn-out muscles. Worthless.
I had hoped this visit would be different. I really did. He and my stepmom would be here for a day. One day, too much damage. My shrink put me on Prozac just before he came to visit, to somehow get me through it. But there is no barrier large enough to keep him from penetrating, implanting himself in my mind.
His words are like a virus. They enter on soundwaves, swelling out into my thighs and abdomen. At first I almost felt safe this time. Things even started off well. Throughout breakfast, there were no comments about my weight. No judgments. He seemed proud of me. And he was. Those words crawled out of his mouth in his calm, stoned-out drawl. They sliced through me: “I’m so proud of your sex life.”
With his words, these images flashed through me like a video on MTV: Tall, blond, nice-guy Todd painfully taking my virginity and leaving me the next morning. Randy, the cross-country star, my first love, sleeping with me and placing me under the shadow of his ideal dream woman, the sister of a friend of mine. Steve forcing my head down onto his penis at four in the morning in a room of guys, friends of mine, criticizing my lack of technique, commenting on the shape and size of my breasts. My friends wouldn’t speak to me for a month. It was my fault, not Steve’s. I had stained our relationship, fouled them with my excessive sexuality. The video ends with a still image of my body, fat rupturing the seams of my jeans, protruding over the top of my belt.
I’ll never be one of the beautiful people who glare down from the billboards, walk past me on the street, acting as if they own the world and I’m a pathological reject woman sullying it. My own words play over in my head like a broken record: “You’re so ugly, out of control, a disgusting fat slob. How could anyone love you?” I violently shovel food down my throat with my hand clenching my thigh, but the words won’t go away. The food tastes horrible: dried-out institutional cookies, extra-salty potato chips, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It’s hard to swallow. I can never get enough. My stomach is about to burst. I hate myself. “How could anyone love you?”
I lock myself in a bathroom stall on the first floor of the dormitory, near the entrance. There’s no one else in the room and I’m relieved. I guzzle half a can of Diet Coke and then pull my arms hard against my stomach to force the food out as I bend over the toilet. I watch the food shoot out of my mouth, the back of my throat going numb. I punch my stomach over and over again. I have to get all of the food out.
I hate my body.
“You are so ugly. You are disgusting.” It’s impossible to empty my body, to become pure. I get to the point when I can’t throw up anymore, so I go up the seven flights of stairs to my room, take a scalding hot shower, brush my teeth and curl up in bed, groggy from vomiting, skin pink and irritated. I want to forget but the room reminds me of the visit. The bookshelf broken on the floor with all my books sprawled out forms a barricade at the side of my bed.
Near the top of the pile is a letter from my dad telling me about his first year in college: crying and masturbating in his room to the image of his girlfriend back home. He is trying to help me. He means well. He tells me I should fuck around, an echo of his own words 10 years ago. What am I supposed to feel? “They are only words,” I think. They push me over the edge into a labyrinth of food and one-night stands. Nothing to hold onto. All I want is for those words to go away. They multiply, open up gaps. I learn to make them up myself. I tell myself the same stories until there is no one to blame for my anger except myself and my body. I bring to life a monster inside of me. That self-destroying, shouting creature ripping his way through my silence, forcing food into my mouth, giving away my body to strangers. I don’t eat for pleasure, only to satiate this huge beast, to make his stories go away. If only I could get high enough to numb myself, insulate myself from his torture, slit my wrists and feel the blood flowing out. Then my body would be mine. I could make it mine.
Maybe that would be pleasure.
I look at my body in the mirror. The flesh expands, skin becomes blotchy as I stand there. I am losing myself. I don’t know what I look like. I see myself as my father sees me – rounded and sexualized. A huge ugly mass of fatty tissue. A walking orifice. I cut myself off from him and he assumes different shapes, appearing distorted in other faces, other bodies. Each time, I think it’s new. Each time, I imagine that this is not my dad. Someone will protect me. He will wrap me in his arms and take me into another world where I am beautiful and loved and whole. The words are different but in the end they all turn out the same. I give him my body and he leaves me with nothing. He leaves his shame and guilt on my body. And I can never be pure or clean again. I become a whore, a fat disgusting whore. Serpents for hair and poison in my blood.
Maybe I asked for too much. Back in high school I remember a Sunday that I was away on a weekend with John. He and I and a bunch of our other friends were drunk and smoking pot -my first time ever getting stoned. It was strange. I had a hard time getting words out of my mouth. They came out all jumbled. I sat in the back of a jeep in a McDonald’s parking lot with this guy, Ron, smoking a cigarette. He kept touching me, and it made me feel kind of attractive so I blew smoke in his face, flirting, I guess. He said it meant I wanted to sleep with him.
So I did.
We tumbled out of the jeep and walked around the parking lot looking for a “safe” place. Underneath the dumpster was too visible, behind the car was too obvious. So we climbed over a wall and lay on the ground. There were houses up above us on the hillside. Anyone could’ve seen us. He yanked down my shorts and underwear. I was too messed up to do anything, and in a few minutes it was over. I pulled my shorts back on and walked into McDonald’s to wait for my ride back to school.
Afterward I thought I would feel beautiful. Someone wanted me at least. My drunkenness saved me from terrorizing myself that night, but over the next couple of weeks I began to see myself differently. Shame crawled under my skin. I convinced myself that I was some kind of nymphomaniac. I slept with another guy the following weekend to establish this truth. I became proud of my sexual exploits. I thought that was what I wanted. I drank more and more so I wouldn’t have to think. And for the few minutes each guy took to seduce me, to drag me onto a bed or some other flat surface, I was beautiful in his eyes, or at least attractive enough to touch. I gave my body away because I thought that was what they wanted. Then they would love me.
Flash forward to my present in Berkeley, I pull on a pair of jeans and a sweater, walk out into the orange fluorescent twilight until I am surrounded by people I recognize from the dorm. My friend Shani and I crash some party and I start taking swigs off a bottle of tequila that’s being passed around. I drink about half the bottle. A hand pulls me downstairs and I’m lying on the floor with this guy’s tongue shoved down my throat before I realize what’s going on. His body is pressed tightly against mine. I can’t move.
The lights come on and my friend Shani walks in, sees what is going on. Maybe she saw him drag me down there.
“Hey, Cat, you want to go? Do you want to be here?”
“No.”
She pulls the guy off me and shoves him out the door, not without resistance from him.
“You fucking asshole, you stay the fuck away from her!”
She helps me to my feet and I lean up against her. She wraps her arm around me, holding me up.
“Let’s get out of here.”
“Okay.”
We leave to go to another party. We end up at a fraternity house across the street from the dorm. I sit down on a couch and while Shani went back to the kitchen to grab some beer.
She hands me one.
“What an asshole. What did he think he was going to get away with?”
“I don’t know. It’s my fault. I let him take me down there. I let him.” I feel myself starting to cry, but squelch it by drinking my beer.
“Hush, it’s okay. It’s all over. It’s not your fault. He was a nothing.”
Just then, he walks into the room. We are all sprawled out across the couch and he sits directly across from me. A gorgeous woman glides onto his lap. She’s so much thinner than I am. I slam down the rest of my beer before I stumble out the door, trying to drown out the realization that I mean so little to this guy. I made no impression on him. The memory of his body trapping me, forcing me onto the bed, will be forever imprinted on my mind. And no matter how many times Shani tells me it isn’t my fault, I still feel the guilt living, breathing, expanding in the flesh of my stomach, hips, and thighs.
I fall asleep wondering when this will end. In my drunken haze, I imagine a day when I can look at myself in the mirror unashamed and unafraid. I’ll be beautiful and respected like that other woman who was sitting on his lap, like the models in Vogue. A day without vomiting when I can ignore my hunger, ignore my anger. A day when my body is mine. I imagine models aren’t really happy either. Their lives are probably just as fucked-up as mine. But at least their bodies are worth something even if they lose ownership of them. I wonder what it would be like to be the ideal woman, magnificently clothed and perfumed, sexualized in the photographs but admired, idolized, acting out this cultural fiction. They look safe, as though no one would ever hurt them. They can’t feel the way I do. I’d do anything to live out that fantasy of power and pleasure – no matter what it would take. Maybe then someone would love me. People would have respect for me.
Even my dad.
He shut up about my weight once, when I was skinny. I got thin enough that I could have been a model. I was skinnier than most of them. That year, dad bought me a bikini. He said he’d buy me one every year. He was so proud of my body, as if it were an extension of his own. My weight seemed to affect him personally. It was an affront to his ego when I was overweight, and the ultimate flattery when I was thin. My stepmom hated me for that. She still hasn’t forgiven me, but now she’s as skinny as I was.
My eyes are swollen from crying in the night, my hands shaking from all the beer and tequila. The sun soaks through my black down comforter, leaving a thin layer of sticky, toxic sweat on my body. I get up and throw on the extra-large sweatshirt my dad bought for me. At breakfast, I gather as much food as will fit on my tray, grabbing doughnuts and sausage and eggs and Coca-Cola. I can feel people’s eyes following me through the dining commons. They watch me. All they see is this out-of-control body sucking up food like a high-powered vacuum cleaner. “No self-respect.” I go back again and again to gather more food, cramming it down my throat with a violence no one can imagine. “You are such a fuck-up. It’s written all over your body.”
This time, there is someone else in the bathroom and I have to sit and wait in the stall until she leaves. I have to keep this dark secret, the horrible monster that lurks within. In boarding school everyone knew. I used to throw up in the sink in my room to try to keep it a secret, until one day the sink filled up with this gray, mucky water that spilled out into my room and the room next door. No one ever spoke to me about that. I could feel their judgment through the walls of my room, in their whispered conversations.
Here, I am an anonymous bulimic – filling the bathroom with the stench of my vomit. Until they connect my face with the sounds and smells emitting from the bathroom, at least no one will know that I am crazy. Sometimes that makes it even lonelier. No one knows how much I want to be thin. If only they could see me now, the time and energy I spend throwing up. I have no time for anything else.