I stole jeans from Sue’s locker during my sophomore year, 1980. I’d watched Traci—or Lisa—pass the pair to Sue in the foyer, where we huddled, waiting until the first bell, one girl borrowing cute clothes from another. Me, outside the margin, only included because I ran track and made the cheerleading squad. By second period, I’d secured a bathroom pass, snuck into Sue’s locker, swiped the jeans, tucked them in my track duffel. Before lunch, they found them. When I say “they,” I mean Sue and the other girls. And yes, they turned me in.
They planted them, I told the vice principal.
Since the girls went through your locker without permission, I don’t have proof, now do I? he asked.
I kept silent.
Do you need to talk . . . to someone? he asked.
What do you mean?
Smart enough to play dumb, dumb enough to be good at it, and broken enough to enjoy his squirm as he looked for words to help a girl like me: disturbed. Years later and far too late, I would realize how he understood my cry for help.
Air Force Active Duty and stationed in England, I earned a decent income, at least compared to my upbringing, and I discovered a love for fashion and high-end make-up. By high-end, I mean Loreal, not Gucci or Tom Ford. This is 1986, a time for big hair, Top Gun (which we watched weekly), and Cool Ranch Doritos.
I shopped at the local Base Exchange wearing one layer of clothing—meaning a jacket and jeans. Shoes without socks. No bra, no panties, no shirt. I scooped hangers by the handfuls, the pile in my arms bigger than me—100-pound me. By this time, I’d struggled with anorexia and bulimia for over a year; they—the therapists—called it bulimia nervosa. They nicknamed them Ana and Mia, like best friends. By today’s standards, I might have been diagnosed with more: orthorexia and atypical anorexia, binge-purge anorexia and OCD, and. . . .
In the dressing room, I re-layered after removing tags—a tank, a button-up, a scarf, five or six pairs of thongs, easily hidden beneath my baggy jeans. My clothes hung, though, I called it draping. I called it fashion.
Today, I’d call it denial.
I added a purse, a bracelet.
Before I left the Exchange, I purchased one thing to avoid suspicion: lip gloss, Trident, a magazine. I did this often. I did this weekly. I did this without worry that they would catch me, without the wonder of security cameras, without concern I could end up court-martialed or dishonorably discharged. I paid little mind to consequences or outcomes.
Looking back, I’m sure I was a klepto, impulsive and reckless and erratic, like everyone I knew, nineteen and living on their own overseas in uniform, trying to comply with rigid standards of dress and appearance and Cold War threat.
My method of stress relief—starving and stealing—seemed harmless.
I found myself before my commanding officer one morning.
You’re just so, so thin, she said, and, I think you should have a full eval at Wilford Hall. In-patient.
We both knew her suggestion as an order.
I performed well as an in-patient. I carefully applied make-up, dressed like a model, asked for the share stick. Asked for it often. I knew how to look healthy. The write-ups on me, well, stunning. Until they caught me stealing during our outing to the Base Exchange. They detained me. They pulled me to a back office, the walls stark and gray, and, I swear, an interrogation bulb dangled overhead. They: the Base Exchange Security.
As I sat in a folded metal chair, hands folded on the table, I probably prayed.
My supervising clinician burst through the door.
She’s under our care, he said, voice steady.
We caught her stealing, the guard said.
What did you steal? the clinician asked.
Laxatives, I said.
We found this in her front shirt pocket, the guard said, tossing lip gloss, the kind in the little glass bottle with the tiny steel roller ball that smoothed like silk ’cross your lips, left them sticky and strawberried.
That’s not true, I said.
What is true was that I’d stolen that gloss from a different Exchange. Everything on my body—new and nabbed—grabbed in fragments and spurts between duty and deployment.
With that, they released me. I felt only slight relief.
As I write this, I wonder. What was wrong with me?
Maybe then, I’d nothing left to lose—weight, dignity, virginity.
Outside of thieving and binging food, I followed the rules. I adhered to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I ironed my uniform into creases you could shave with. I measured, yes, with a ruler, the placement of my ribbons and rank and nametag on my shirts and blazers. I buffed my shoes before bed and re-buffed them before dressing for work. As a child, I didn’t dare break house rules. I knew I’d suffer more; Daddy’s night visits fueled me with unbearable rage whenever I acted disobedient.
I blamed my thievery on my mother.
I blame most of my flaws on my mother.
Around eighth grade, we lived in a shack in Wheatfield, Indiana. I mowed our lawn with a bladed push mower because we couldn’t afford the gas for a real one. Okay, we couldn’t afford a real mower either. I cut the front lawn, more gravel than grass, with scissors, much easier than pushing that rusty, unmotorized mower.
I should divorce your cheating ass, my stepfather said to my mother. Me, below the window snipping blades. Me, thankful, he targeted her instead.
Please. Don’t leave me, she cried, probably on her knees, hands in prayer. We all behaved that way: kneeling in prayer to the Father.
You went and got yourself fired, he yelled.
It didn’t matter he was jobless. It didn’t matter he’d been unemployed for years. It didn’t matter she juggled two, maybe three jobs. Anger filled me. Stealing. Stealing and losing her job. Weren’t we poor enough? Today, I imagine her desperation to keep her man, to keep her job. To lose herself over and over again out of fear of losing her man.
Years before this, in our house in Cedar Lake, Indiana, my Great Aunt Gladys, who wasn’t my aunt, moved in with us. Gladys, her sister, Lil, and her brother, Harry, grew up in the same orphanage as my grandmother, my mother’s mother. So yes, family by choice. After Glady’s had stroked, her left side hung—hand limp in lap, face drooping—both her feet strapped in a wheelchair. She’d lived with Harry and Lil, but now she needed more care than they could manage. That is, if you call what happened in our home “care.”
Mother traced Gladys’s name. Over and over.
She signed for Gladys—prescriptions, doctor slips, appointments.
One night, my mother’s sister, Karen, “had words” with my mother while I sat overlooked, sipping soda at our kitchen table.
You forged her name, Karen said softly.
We earned that money taking care of her.
No, they paid you, Karen said, even quieter.
That wasn’t what we agreed on.
It’s stealing, Pearl. From family. Stealing.
Gladys isn’t really family.
I’m not sure when Gladys moved back with Harry and Lil. But soon after, she passed. Then Lil died of a heart attack. Harry, brutally murdered by a burglary gone bad. I never saw any of them again. At some point, I put it together—my mother had forged Gladys’s name on blank checks.
I mastered forging in fourth grade, the year I’d won the Spelling Bee for the entire school. I won a Snoopy trophy the size of my hand and a lunch outing with my teacher. I penned my mother’s name in her beautiful, loopy handwriting on the permission slip. I ordered a BLT, extra fries, and a large milkshake, and suffered a belly ache for nearly three days after. I ate so slow my teacher asked if I wanted to take my meal home, which I couldn’t. I just wanted lunch to last. Forever.
Throughout my school years, I secured summer jobs to fund track spikes, cheerleading Keds, notebooks, and pens. Along with my jobs, I quit lunch, stowing the two dollars a day my mother left for me on the kitchen counter. I stashed my cash in the back of my sock drawer. I skipped and skimped.
One night, I ruffled through my socks. No money. I stayed awake until after midnight when my mother arrived from one of her waitressing shifts.
Did you take my money?
She shrugged and said, I gave you that for lunch. If you didn’t eat, you should’ve given it back.
It wasn’t just lunch money. It was detasseling money. It was picking asparagus money. It was peeling onions money. I saved all summer.
And then she started. I’d failed to notice the knife in her hand when I’d confronted her, but now she attacked my ribbons thumbtacked to the walls. Blue and red. First and second places lined in perfect rows from floor to ceiling, like wallpaper.
As she shredded, she shouted:
You show off.
You and your tanned, skinny legs.
No one cares that you won a stupid race.
She kept my money, and I cleaned her mess, threw what remained of my ribbons in the trash.
Now, my youngest son asks why I never display my SportAerobic national and world-level ribbons and medals. Asks why I stow my pageant crown and sash on the top shelf in my closet. Asks why I’ve never framed any of my diplomas or degrees.
Well, here’s my military ribbons, I show him, centered on my home office shelf.
At my worst, while in the military, I stole from my suitemate, Michelle. I stole her food. Don’t get me wrong. I could afford food. My problem? I’d begin a binge and run out of food. I needed to distend my belly to my throat. This tipping point enables the purge, which helps things pour back out with less effort—just a slight bend at the waist and up, out, and down the drain. I’d plan for enough food but not enough for binges. Sometimes one binge immediately followed another. Sometimes, ten binges a day. Usually, my time off duty. The following day, I’d spend recuperating, repairing myself. I iced busted capillaries beneath my eyes and swollen lymphnodes under my lobes.
I felt thin and in control. This mattered.
Once, I snuck into Michelle’s room, pulled open her food drawer to snag a roll of Ritz and a can of soup, and found her items plastered in Post-Its: Stop It! I swear, my whole body heated. I rushed to my room, chugged a gallon of water to top the binge. I never stole from her again. I pretended those notes weren’t for me—because See?—I’m not stealing.
A few years later, after I’d returned from the Persian Gulf War, I stopped stealing. Okay. That’s not accurate. War and post-war operations offered little time and opportunity to shop, fashion-trend, or binge. We ate MREs and chow hall meals and lived in tents shared with thirty-five other women. I tried to binge on MRE barbecue meatballs. I learned quickly, the denseness of meals-ready-to-eat—the caloric intake for a day, 1,300—high sodium, low fiber. The body bloats, constipates, and the food refuses to come back up.
I’m sure there’s a military study regarding this.
I portioned out my MREs and increased my output by teaching step aerobics in a tent after some GIs had built wooden boxes. I weighed even less or looked like I did, and my klepto-bulimia-nervosa turned into a new addiction: a yearning to die.
I spent that year devising ways to take my life. I never had the courage. As you can see, I’m still here, and how I arrived from there to here is another story, one too long for this rant, one I’ve written and rewritten in my attempt to understand my bruised methods of duplicity and survival. This—my master story—continuously surfaces in the center of my stories, my poems.
I wish I could tell you I’m food-recovered.
Wish I could say I’m symptom-free, free of disordered eating.
Food never worked that way for me.
Oh, I’ve managed successful moments and months, often due to deterrents, like war. Now I’ve parental guilt and obligation. My three sons. . . .
Keep me healthy.
They keep me.
And in keeping my sons on course, I’m kept busy.
Busy keeps me from binging.
Sometimes.
Only sometimes.
Tonight is not one of those times.
Remember that tipping point? Jeans pinch the waist; one meal too many ’cross a day. At the moment, the extra slice seems reasonable until I feel fat.
When my boys were younger, avoiding a binge came easy. They needed me. Now, in their almost-independence, I sneak snacks, tell my sons I’m off to soak, and then lock the bathroom door. My left eye twitches. Before I bend, I ask, Where’s the off switch?
I’m no dummy.
I see my pattern.
I’m sure every person with an addiction does.
Whenever I near love, happiness, or success, I binge. This is how I prove to myself I’m unworthy. Some might label this self-sabotage.
*
I wonder if there’s such a thing as kleptonervosa? Perhaps klepto and bulimia/anorexia are also siblings, like Mia and Ana. Both gift a sense of relief. Perhaps I cope with depression and adversity this way, stealing and binging to feel. . . .
Anything.
After either, I fill with shame and remorse.
After, I promise myself, Tomorrow I’ll be normal.
I wish I knew normal.
Today, still Bulimic, I’m theft-recovered, Thank you, Michelle.
Though I still steal—time, health, sanity.
Perhaps I’ve never quit thieving.
And there’s that: I’m not a quitter.
I’ve spent the last two years dating myself. Focused on activities that foster joy and self-care. Gardening, reading, sketching, hosting dinner parties. Things that keep my hands occupied, prevent a binge, bring relief. Maybe this is how all people with an addiction cope. The desire flames and flutters. Continuous moments of choice. You can turn your heart off and wake up on a binge, hate yourself after. Or you can restrain and try to love yourself.
Why is this so hard?
After tonight, after my binge, I sit out back, embers ashing in my fire pit, and launch into self-recrimination.
Stop.
Tomorrow.
Start again.
I should write Sue an apology. I should pen Michelle a thank you.
The Idaho sky fades from magenta to velvet blue as an orange-chested bird—the American Robin?—steals a cherry from my tree. She hops to the garden fence, perks, looks around like a criminal, then gulps.
She returns to the tree for more and more and more.
Go ahead, I say.
And, I understand.
And, I really do.
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If you are struggling with an eating disorder such as anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating, ANAD can help.
Voices on Addiction is a column devoted to true personal narratives of addiction, curated by Kelly Thompson, and authored by the spectrum of individuals affected by this illness. Through these essays, interviews, and book reviews we hope—in the words of Rebecca Solnit—to break the story by breaking the status quo of addiction: the shame, stigma, and hopelessness, and the lies and myths that surround it. Sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, adult children, extended family members, spouses, friends, employers or employees, boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbors, victims of crimes, and those who’ve committed crimes as addicts, and the personnel who often serve them, nurses, doctors, social workers, therapists, prison guards, police officers, policy makers and, of course, addicts themselves: Voices on Addiction will feature your stories. Because the story of addiction impacts us all. It’s time we break it. Submit here.
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Rumpus Original Illustration by Christian Philip Scott
