disordered eating

When she's on the bus and can't get a seat she looks at people's hands and cringes when she sees bitten nails. She used to bite her own but now, instead of feeling sympathy, there is only revulsion. She does remember the pain of a nail gnawed too short but mainly she remembers what it did to her teeth, and the shame she feels when in the presence of family who paid so much (all those years ago) for her teeth to be straight and nice... teeth she no longer has... (and that certainly helps her not to bite her nails now)

For a long time it seemed her fingernails were her main source of nutrition, since family mealtimes were so strained. She double-plus-ungood-dreaded weekend lunches because there was nothing to do after lunch so the meal would stretch out for hours, with her father sitting at the far end of the table, regaling (in his opinion, anyways) his wife and youngest child with tales of his priveliged youth. Oh, there was the bear in the forest and the strawberries in the forest and his mother with the carpet beater and his brother who liked to play chess on his own: plenty of material, certainly, but it was the same material over and over, and it was not told warmly but in a ranting fashion, and while she might manage a few bites at the start of the meal, as the regaling progressed, her head would sink lower and lower and she'd grip the black vinyl seat cushion with both hands and try, try, try not to cry.

Her mother suffered too, it's true, yet maintained her ability to eat. The child had always been skinny, "eats like a bird," as her mother used to say, but it wasn't for lack of appetite; she just found the actual business of eating difficult because it was so difficult to eat at home.

Nobody outside the family could believe that the charming silver-haired man was a tyrant at home, so her mother started secretly recording his rants - a tape deck placed discreetly behind the bread bin, or on top of the fridge, and eventually beneath the table itself - culminating in more than two hundred hours of the same thing over and over and over. She lent a sample of such (a mere seventeen hours) to the counsellor who led her assertiveness therapy group, not to garner sympathy for herself but to get help for her daughter... but it was the seventies, and despite the overwhelming evidence of emotional abuse, nobody did a damn thing.

Fast-forward thirty years, and the skinny child is now an obese woman. Funny how things work out - you spend twenty-three years not eating much at all, then suddenly you have permission to eat (the tyrant died), so you eat everything in sight. It wasn't that simple, of course (these things never are), but that was the gist of it.

An obese woman on the bus, declining to take a seat because she needs a whole seat to herself (to be halfway comfortable) and it's easier just to stand, looking at people's fingernails, and remembering.