I Do It with the Lights On Page 3

  “Whitney, if you put that in your book, I will never forgive you.”

  Gaining weight affected my mother deeply. She took to wearing stirrup pants and oversize T-shirts and sighed with disgust if she ever caught her reflection. She talked down to herself constantly and emphatically refused compliments. A magnet with the words Fatty, Fatty 2 × 4, Keep Your Hands Off This Door appeared on our refrigerator. Because of the new stress on her body, she developed aches and pains in her feet and back, so she spent a lot of her time lying on the couch, asking Hunter and me to pick up the phone if it rang. What I can easily recognize now is that my mother was fighting severe clinical depression, but at the time all I knew was that her temper got shorter and things that should have been easy became complicated. She was soon diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and eventually began losing weight, slimming down considerably by the time I graduated high school, and even more after that. She now wears a size 12 or 14, but she still refuses compliments.

  Thinking back to that time, and having now experienced clinical depression myself, I have an intense respect for my mother. There are days when I’m not depressed that it takes everything in me just to shower and feed my cat. How she managed to fulfill every motherly duty so well while raising two children is beyond my comprehension.

  I ended up winning the “Most Improved Swimmer” award that summer, growing two inches and losing about five pounds. I was unaware of the changes until I started sixth grade at my new middle school and a friend gushed at me from several yards down the sidewalk, “You’re so skinny!” Being skinny is not my natural body composition, but with the two inches gained and the five pounds lost due to a grueling daily swimming regimen, I had thinned out as much as my body type would allow. The first time I got called skinny was overwhelming. My cheeks flushed, my heart raced, and I glowed as though I’d won some coveted prize.

  On my first day of sixth grade I immediately noticed a really cute boy in my homeroom. He had longish dirty-blond hair and wore JNCO jeans. When school was over, my friend approached him, cupping her hands against his ear, asking him if he’d go out with me. He mumbled something back and walked out of the room. As she crossed the classroom, I braced myself for the bad news she was surely about to deliver.

  “He said yes,” she reported, all matter-of-fact. My mind reeled. “What?” I asked, my voice rising several octaves. “He said yes?” We jumped and clasped hands and raced out of the classroom and down the hallway toward the buses. I was in shock. Since when did cute boys want to go out with me? I bounded onto my school bus, plopping down next to my friend.

  “Guess what?” she prompted another friend who was sitting in front of her.

  “What?” he asked, half-interested at best.

  “Whitney’s gonna have a boyfriend.”

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Haaaa!” he howled, doubling over in his seat and holding his stomach.

  “What?” I asked, fearing I already knew the answer.

  “No one wants to go out with you,” he said firmly. “He’s probably playing a joke. You have thunder thighs.”

  As it turned out, due to some kind of childish sixth grade dating politics that I can’t even pretend to remember, the boy in the JNCOs and I ended up not taking the plunge. Still, as the first few weeks of school passed, I realized sixth grade was shaping up to be a far cry from fifth grade. I was actually popular and people weren’t making fun of me for being fat. I was suddenly immersed in a new world—one where boys vied for my attention through whispers, phone calls, and love letters, and one where the seat next to me in the cafeteria was never empty.

  That autumn we had our first middle school dance. It wasn’t a formal event, and I was in my grunge phase, so I arrived at school decked out in my brother’s old worn jeans and a flannel shirt, sporting fringe bangs that were appropriate only in the nineties. The dance began directly after class in the darkened gymnasium, and it was phenomenal. Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” was blaring and I was gyrating my pelvis within inches of a boy named Paul. Soon, just like in the movies, a circle formed around us, a chain of sweaty preteens chanting, “Go Whitney! Go Pau-al! Go Whitney! Go Pau-al!” After the dance, Paul and I exchanged phone numbers, his written in pencil on the torn edge of his school planner. I talked to him for hours that night, taking my family’s new cordless phone into my bedroom closet for supreme privacy. And just like that, Paul became my first boyfriend. Our romance was short-lived, partly because it was sixth grade and partly because he was gay—something I don’t think either one of us realized until high school.

  With my newfound popularity, I had no trouble finding more boys to take the position of my boyfriend. But that popularity came with a price, I learned. In February, just before Valentine’s Day, I opened my locker and a glittery, heart-shaped piece of pink construction paper fluttered out. I smiled inwardly, knowing it must be from one of my admirers. As I bent down to pick it up, I saw my name written on the front in bubble letters, but when I opened it, the message inside was far from sweet. In black Sharpie it read:

  Die, bitch, die.

  From,

  Friends.

  I later learned that the culprits were a group of girls whom I considered to be my friends. Soon, the “Baby Beluga” song from fifth grade was replaced with a new one. This one went:

  Whitney Thore is a whore

  On the floor

  Of the store

  She lies down and asks for more.

  The first time I heard this song about myself, I actually consulted a dictionary, naively searching for the meaning of “whore” in the “H” section. Of course, I couldn’t find it. I was twelve years old and, although I’d had boyfriends, I’d never kissed anyone. By the time sixth grade was over, however, I would have my first kiss and I would also learn the meaning of that word. More important, I would realize that if you were a girl and people didn’t like you, the worst thing they could call you was fat, and if you weren’t that, calling you a whore was next. (And as a thirty-two-year-old, I hate to report that not much has changed for women.) In some ways I was happy to trade the identity of “fat girl” for “whore.” I’m not sure which one I thought was worse. Just like the year before, when I’d seen the commercial for the eating disorders clinic and wished for a mental illness, I was happy to swap being fat for being practically anything else. I’d finally gotten a taste of what it was like to be one of the thin, pretty girls I’d always envied, and I made up my mind that I would sacrifice anything to make sure it stayed that way.

  * * *

  * Ogden CL, Fryar CD, Carroll MD, Flegal KM. “Mean body weight, height, and body mass index, United States 1960–2002.” Advance data from vital and health statistics; no. 347. Hyattsville, Maryland: National Center for Health Statistics, 2004.

  3

  I DON’T WANT TO KILL MYSELF WHEN I LOOK IN THE MIRROR (ANYMORE)

  “When was the last time Whitney saw 90210?” a girl in the middle school locker room asked, unaware that I could hear her, her voice carrying all the way to where I sat hidden inside a toilet stall.

  “I don’t know. When?” someone wanted to know. I wanted to know, too, because I’d never seen an episode of 90210. I clenched, waiting to pee so as not to give myself away.

  “When she stepped on the scale!”

  A bellow of laughter followed, a raucous noise that sounded more like the entire student body than a handful of girls on the seventh-grade soccer team. I sat frozen until I heard their cleats retreating, tapping toward the rear of the locker room. I exhaled the deep breath I’d been holding, finally peed, and then exited the stall with a dejected sigh. Sixth grade had proven to be like a bratty child who’d bestowed a fantastic toy upon me, only to outstretch its grubby little hands and demand it back the minute I started enjoying it. Just one year had passed since I’d escaped the damnation of being labeled “fat,” and I wasn’t ready to reclaim the title. As I pumped slimy, Pepto-Bismol-pink soap into my hands, I eyeballed my reflection. In rea
lity, I looked like a completely average seventh grader, neither fat nor skinny, not ugly or striking. But instead of being reassuring, my unexceptional appearance was disheartening. On that day it was like looking into a fun-house mirror that magnified all my flaws and created new ones out of thin air. My brown, shoulder-length hair suddenly seemed mousy and greasy. It wasn’t thin, but it wasn’t thick enough, either. Unable to decide if it wanted to be curly or stick-straight, it had an annoying wave that never went away. I still had the dreadful fringe bangs that somehow parted in the middle, no matter how many times I tried to wrangle them with my round brush. My face was weird, too, the mirror now confirmed. My natural eyebrows now looked bushy and unmanicured, like caterpillars crawling up my forehead. I had the odd pimple and oily-dry combination skin. The new braces I had weren’t helping matters, either. On top of all that, I knew I’d gained a little weight, but I wasn’t sure how much.

  My popularity with boys was waning, and I hadn’t forged many solid friendships with girls, either. My soccer shorts still bunched up in the middle and I stayed awake nights trying to figure out how to rectify it. I’d made the middle school soccer team, which was a small victory, but I was definitely second-string. During our first game I’d stood on the sidelines, preparing to be subbed into the game at any minute. When nearly the whole first half had gone by, I finally took a seat, fielding confused glances from my dad, who didn’t understand why my middle school coach wasn’t playing me. Two years earlier my dad had begun coaching my extracurricular soccer team when our previous coach quit. Dad didn’t know the first thing about soccer, so he checked out library books and videotapes to learn the sport. Through his dedication to coaching, he rose up the ranks, becoming the president of the Greensboro Youth Soccer Association, and here I was, warming the bench. I wasn’t as technically skilled as the girls on the middle school team—they played for the top-tier league outside of school, and I played for the middle tier—but I was an above-average player who always hustled. As my dad instilled in me: “Hard work beats natural talent 99 percent of the time.” I tried to remember his words, but it was impossible not to relentlessly compare myself to the other girls. They were skinnier, prettier, faster, and, most important, they were on the field, not the sidelines. They were the ones who joked about my weight when they thought I wasn’t around. They were everything I wanted to be. Even now I can still recall the foreboding feeling that came over me when I looked at myself in that mirror hung on the dingy-tiled wall of the locker room. I can feel the pit forming in my stomach that affirmed that I was flawed, and that no amount of hair gel, face wash, or even weight loss could fix entirely. I had been born the wrong way, into the wrong body, and even though I was certain every attempt at correcting this would be in vain, I still had to try. Hard work beats natural talent 99 percent of the time.

  The day after the 90210 incident, we had sports physicals at school, which meant being weighed and measured in front of everyone. My teammate Anna was in front of me, and I peeked over her perfect shoulder when she got on the scale. She weighed 115 pounds. Then it was my turn. But when the teacher scribbled 117 lbs. next to my name, I didn’t feel relieved. I felt like a fucking whale. My teammate had a nice, slender figure with two pert B-cup breasts and a rounded backside. I wanted to be like her, but I had failed miserably, weighing in a whole two pounds more and standing two inches shorter. I know it seems trivial—two pounds—but to me the difference between my teammate and myself felt like an unbridgeable chasm.

  Today, after everything that I’ve gone through, I want to go back in time and shake those girls on the soccer team and ask them if they had any idea what they were doing—if they had any concept that a 117-pound girl shouldn’t be anyone’s definition of fat or the butt of a shitty joke. I wish I could go back and shake myself for taking it to heart, and I want to shake my 115-pound teammate, too, because she would later develop full-fledged anorexia and just barely graduate high school.

  But my seventh-grade self was rattled by the weigh-in, so when I got home that night, I pulled out a red marker and began writing NL and ND into the daily squares of September, October, November, and December on my soccer-themed calendar. “NL” stood for “no lunch” and “ND” for “no dinner.” I’d never eaten breakfast to begin with, and neither did anyone in my family. I figured by cutting my daily calorie intake in half, I could easily reduce my weight. I also began training in earnest outside of school. Four times around my block was roughly a mile, and I began running every day, listening to “Semi-Charmed Life” on my Walkman. (Am I the only one who just realized, like yesterday, that Third Eye Blind was singing about meth, by the way?) My mother begged me to run in the daylight, presumably for safety reasons, but I felt way more secure wrapped in a blanket of shadows, with only the moon poking holes in the darkness.

  As the year wore on, I started to notice that the attention I was getting from boys at school became markedly more sexual. Many commented on my “fat ass” and labeled me as “thick.” I didn’t appreciate either designation, as they both highlighted my fuller figure. When a boy asked me on the phone when he could “hit it,” I was oblivious to what he was proposing. Then he asked me when my last period was, and when I told him I hadn’t gotten it at all yet, he responded by saying, “Oh man, I wouldn’t even have to use a rubber.” For a girl who had been kissed only a few times in her life and wasn’t even entirely sure what intercourse was, this kind of talk was confusing. I didn’t know whether to be grateful for the attention or terrified by it.

  Posing with my exercise equipment on my thirteenth birthday (1997).

  By the time spring came, I decided to join the track-and-field team. One day, as I jogged alongside my dad down the street outside my house, I asked him if running would help flatten my stomach. He assured me that it would, so I picked up the pace even more, focusing on the rhythmic sound of my tennis shoes hitting the pavement while my dad coached me on my breathing. For my birthday in April, I didn’t ask for clothes or CDs like my other friends. Instead, I wanted an Ab Coach, an exercise mat, and dumbbells, presents I excitedly opened in front of the fireplace while my dad snapped photos. But I hadn’t succeeded in losing much, if any, weight. I thought back to the commercial I’d seen two years before and knew it was time to strategically implement an eating disorder in my life. It seemed like the next logical step, since modifications to my diet and exercise had proven fruitless, so I thought the only solution was to do more. I conjured up the images from the commercial that had first scared me and made me feel uncomfortable and pinned them to a mental bulletin board to use as inspiration and empowerment. Those women, though sick, had willpower, and as far as I could gauge, that was what I needed more of. Besides, I could always stop before I got sick.

  One afternoon when my parents weren’t home, I carried out my plan: I’d already cut down on my food intake, but not so much that anyone had noticed (except my ever-grumbling stomach, that is). I knew that full-blown anorexia would take a commitment to starvation that I wasn’t sure I possessed, and I never wanted to look as skeletal and gaunt as the woman I’d seen in the commercial years earlier, so I decided to try my hand at throwing up. I went into my parents’ bathroom and wiggled an old toothbrush out of the metal holder attached to the wall, rinsed it off in the sink, and put the handle in my mouth. I inserted it farther and farther down my throat until I felt a tickle and my eyes watered. Still, nothing happened, so I pushed it more forcefully, until I gagged. When the vomit came up, I leaned over the toilet, holding the bar on the shower door to steady myself. When I was done, I flushed and looked in the mirror. Beads of sweat dotted my forehead and my eyes were bloodshot. I rinsed the toothbrush and placed it back in the holder and gargled with my father’s Scope.

  I was still skipping lunches and dinners, and throwing up became a way to amend mistakes. If I was weak and ate pizza, I could throw up. If I gave in to my persistent hunger pangs and raided the pantry, I could throw up. I grew to crave the hollow feeling of an empty
stomach, the red rawness of my throat, and the acidic aftertaste that followed. I felt satisfied, strong, and hopeful. I felt clean.

  When I entered eighth grade, I still hadn’t lost any weight, and, despite my best efforts, had actually gained. I stood five-two, weighed 125 pounds, and wore a size 6 (sometimes an 8) from the Gap. I shopped at the store 5-7-9—named for the only desirable junior sizes—and I still thought I was enormous. I could not understand how I was gaining weight, considering all the emotional and physical energy I’d poured into getting the opposite outcome. I played soccer, ran track, and continued to compete with the swim team every summer. Now, of course, I know I gained those eight pounds between seventh and eighth grade because I was a young girl going through puberty, but at the time I couldn’t fathom why I didn’t have control over my body. Regardless, I promised myself that I would never stop striving for perfection. This meant restricting meals, usually skipping lunch, or eating just a cookie from my lunchbox, and throwing up if I ever felt too full. I knew I definitely couldn’t stop throwing up; if I had still managed to gain weight while doing it, I didn’t want to imagine the consequences of giving it up.

  On Halloween, a popular boy named David whom I’d had a crush on since sixth grade invited me and a bunch of our classmates to his house for a party. I attended with two girlfriends who had crushes on two of David’s friends. That night, the three boys led us three girls outside, away from the party, to an air-conditioning unit on the side of the house. The A/C hummed loudly as the three boys backed us up against it in a line and began kissing us. Out of the corner of my eye (yes, I was kissing with one eye open, because I was thirteen), I saw Jason’s hands fumbling with the waistband of Kristy’s jeans, just before I felt David’s hands grabbing mine. I didn’t feel pressured or uncomfortable in any way, save for the Oh my God, is this happening? feeling typical of a teenage girl’s first sexual encounter. And then, after a few awkward moments of groping, the three boys all went to third base at the same time. I was excited to hit such a major milestone.