The Lady Will Have the Laxatives

In the Chili’s parking lot, I cradled two tiny blue pills in my palm. They were smooth like robin’s eggs, deceptively pretty to disguise their disgusting purpose.

To take laxatives or not to take laxatives? That was the question.

I tried not to during the week, when I woke early to teach undergraduate writing classes and worked on my thesis through the afternoon. I saved the pills for weekends. But that night I was already breaking all my anorexic rules.

That night, I was going on a first date.

Twitter Boy had asked me out via direct message. We’d never met in person, though we had a lot in common: We had attended the same college and had both immediately gone on to grad school, though he studied economics and I studied writing. We liked journalism, cared about local politics and had similar internet humor. I agreed to the date so long as he didn’t mind driving from Pittsburgh to Morgantown, W.Va.

I suggested we meet at Chili’s, not because it was conveniently located off the interstate, but because it was the only restaurant I could name. Despite living in Morgantown for a year and a half, I knew nothing about its food scene. Anorexia infected my life just as I started grad school. Halfway through my degree, I’d also chipped away half my total body weight.

I spent the week leading up to our date learning everything about the Chili’s menu. It is monstrous. Full of combos and platters and “Chicken Crispers” — whatever that means — and calories. So many calories. Even the section of the menu called “The Guiltless Grill” made me nervous. The lowest calorie option approached my total daily intake. Whoever wrote copy for Chili’s did not understand an anorexic’s capacity for guilt; I punished myself for eating two dried apricots when I could’ve white-knuckled teaching classes on one.

A Jeep with Pennsylvania plates pulled into the parking lot. I dry-swallowed the laxatives.

Twitter Boy wore a snug purple button down shirt, his hands fidgeting nervously as we walked toward each other. He told me I was even more beautiful in person. I glanced down at my dress, a new favorite — not because of its style or material but because it was a children’s size.

When we sat down across from each other, he opened the menu.

“I’ve never actually been to Chili’s,” he said. “What’s good here?”

“Oh, you have to do appetizers at Chili’s,” I gushed. I was playacting, forcing myself into the role of Girl Who Is Normal About Food. A deep, desperate part of me hoped that this date would help me become healthy again.

“You pick,” I told him, closing the menu. My mouth felt soft and cottony from the laxatives. I had fasted all day. Anorexic doomsday prepping.

Twitter Boy ordered the Triple Dipper with fried pickles, boneless Buffalo wings and southwestern egg rolls. I dug my nails into my tights.

“The drive was really easy, honestly,” he said. “Pretty, too.”

Right. Small talk. I asked him basic first-date questions and heard about his parents, his newfound love of making homemade ricotta, his high school musical theater phase and the death of his brother. He gave me those stories — sweet, funny, sad and so personal — and through it all I was trying to calculate the calories of our Triple Dipper in my head.

Anorexia makes you cold. Not just physically, as Twitter Boy noticed when our hands brushed, but emotionally. With your brain focused on the sole goal of losing weight and your body exhausted trying to survive on so few calories, there isn’t much room for empathy.

The waitress interrupted Twitter Boy with our Triple Dipper. Greasy little circles of breaded, fried pickles. Southwestern egg rolls with a ramekin of ranch dressing. Buffalo wings more electric orange than orange soda. It smelled — pungent.

My stomach growled, starved for anything. The fried pickles were the smallest option, so I grabbed one and brought it slowly to my mouth like a scientist interacting with dangerous materials.

Oh. It was good. Good like Kraft Mac & Cheese, Kool-Aid, Fun Dip, food that tastes like a chemical process. Good like drunk and need something to soak up the vodka soda. Good like shut up, Twitter Boy, so I can romance this fried pickle instead of you.

I wanted to be alone in that Chili’s in a booth tucked somewhere in the back, with no one but the rainbow pepper string lights to witness my shoving down the entire Triple Dipper.

Here is the secret: No one loves food like I do. I fear it, sure. I control it, yes. I avoid it, certainly. But food is what I long for. Food is what I constantly think about. Food is the thing around which I design my entire life.

I grabbed another fried pickle and let it sit, oh salty piece of heaven, on my tongue.

“Let’s split dessert,” Twitter Boy said. “I’m not even hungry, but I want to keep hanging out with you.”

We picked the Skillet Chocolate Chip Cookie. It’s more like a chocolate chip pie, I thought, watching our waitress carry over a deep cast-iron dish. A perfect scoop of vanilla ice cream topped the dessert off.

My anorexia screamed at the thought. It short-circuited through the same numbers, over and over again: the calories, my weight, the time of night, how long it takes for the laxative to start working. I hit snooze and surrendered to the temporary insanity of Chili’s.

I scraped my spoon through the cookie, gooey chocolate chips smearing together with melted ice cream. Anorexia zapped my sex drive, but that night, I wanted to sleep with the Skillet Chocolate Chip Cookie.

“Ladies get the last bite,” Twitter Boy said, pushing the skillet toward me. He broached the subject of a “next time” as we walked out of the restaurant. I scraped my tongue against my back molars, desperate for another morsel, one last taste of sweetness.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked abruptly, his question tumbling out. I looked down at him in the parking lot’s floodlights. He had big brown eyes. Flushed cheeks. A smear of buffalo sauce on his chin.

He was a real person, I realized. A real person who helped old people figure out their polling places and drove to a different state to buy dinner for a girl he’d never met.

With his economics degree and political aspirations, Twitter Boy planned to change the world. I planned to starve myself until I might look in the mirror and see a body with which I could live.

I leaned over and pressed my lips to his. I was not a real person like him, but I could pretend.

“I’ll drive down next week,” he said. “Let me take you out again.”

I imagined another date between us. What would it take?

“OK,” I’d have to tell him, “I struggle with disordered eating. So we can’t do restaurants. No cooking dinner, either. Best if there’s no food involved, in fact. Let’s go to the movies. I can order an extra-large Diet Coke, slouch down low in the dark and pretend to be the person I am on Twitter. No pesky body. You can hold my freezing, nerve-damaged hands. You can kiss me and I’ll savor the buttered popcorn on your tongue.”

Impossible.

I was already in a relationship. Anorexia demanded my time, attention and love. It dragged me into the dark, cold waters of starvation. Twitter Boy was a person, not a life-preserver. He could not save me. More likely, tied to a drowning woman, he’d be sucked into the depths, too.

He drove off into the night, back to Pennsylvania. I swayed alone in the parking lot, a hand pressed to my stomach, impatient for the familiar, grinding pain of the laxative to begin so I could make myself empty again.

With anorexia, that’s all life is: emptiness. It would take years of suffering and the near total destruction of my mental and physical health until doctors convinced me to start caring for myself.

I still can’t date anyone; my full-time relationship is with recovery now. I try not to tally all the opportunities I lost because of illness, but it’s hard not to wonder, “what if?”

Maybe Twitter Boy was the love of my life. Maybe we would have celebrated 50 years sitting across from each other in Chili’s, our wrinkled hands intertwined, smiling over a Skillet Chocolate Chip Cookie.