My Life as a Villainess by Laura Lippman

Author:Laura Lippman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

6.

I was on a state highway west of Waco, heading to an interview, when I heard that Karen Carpenter had died. I’ve forgotten so much about my life, but I can summon up that scene, that precise moment. It was an overcast February day in Central Texas. I was probably thinking about my love life. I was forever thinking about my love life. My San Antonio boyfriend and I had started discussing whether to strike out for a new city where we might live together. Within weeks, he would tell me that he had decided to move to Guatemala and I cried into my chicken-fried steak, which happened to be the first solid food I had eaten in days. (I was in the middle of my wisdom teeth extraction.) But on that particular February day, we were still considering moving in together and I’m sure that was on my mind.

Karen Carpenter, dead. I hadn’t thought about her in ages. I was much too cool for Karen Carpenter, whose records had been my soundtrack in junior high. My tastes had migrated to punk and New Wave and, because of my San Antonio boyfriend, lots of blues and jazz and conjunto. Initial news reports noted Carpenter had suffered from anorexia, but believed herself cured. It was several days before anorexia was listed as the cause of her heart failure.

This was what an eating disorder looked like to most people in the early 1980s—an extreme case of anorexia nervosa, like the one in the book and the TV movie The Best Little Girl in the World. Bulimic practices were everywhere—I knew girls at college who vomited and took laxatives—but purging had not yet had its movie-of-the-week (Kate’s Secret), much less been entered into the DSM. An eating disorder was life-threatening. Everything else was just, you know, a funny thing you did sometimes, another anecdote. Almost every woman I knew made the same joke at least once: If only I could be anorexic for just a little while.

Years passed before I realized that although I never crossed the line into a full-out disorder, I was pretty screwed up about food. At the time, I would have simply told you I was hungry. I was always hungry, forever hungry.

The bottomless feeling had started in college. There could never be enough food. I wanted pizza and burgers and pancakes. I wanted endless bowls of vanilla pudding from the dorm dining room. I wanted peanut M&M’s and chocolate-covered peanuts and Acme oatmeal chocolate chip cookies and hot fudge sundaes and frozen yogurt with salted peanuts. I didn’t know what hunger was, so I didn’t know what satiety was.

A good friend occasionally grabbed a grape or a cherry as we grocery-shopped. I was appalled. I don’t think I registered the act as theft, merely as unusual, maybe unsanitary. The fruit hadn’t been washed! How could you? I would ask my friend. Also—fruit, blech.

Yet not even two years later, I found myself wandering Waco’s supermarkets after my evening shifts

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