very little and exercised a lot. But then came that Thanksgiving at her family home, a deluxe spread on a white table cloth, dark wings and gravy and sweet potatoes, all these Thanksgiving colors, brown and cream and auburn. That was the first time the desire struck. She felt so full and gross. Oh my God, she thought, I’ve gotta get it out!
She went to the bathroom and stuck a finger down her throat and out it came, a quickening waterfall of holiday colors. Stuffing. Gravy. Cranberry sauce. Turkey, in chunks and strings. White potatoes. Orange potatoes. The fact that it was coming out of her, this heaping serving she had put in, was thrilling. The aspect she loved best was the control. Later in life Sloane would hear the singer Amy Winehouse say of bulimia, It’s the best diet in the world. Why doesn’t everybody do it? This resonated with Sloane. This works, she thought, better than anything else in my life has ever worked. It felt easy, and even natural.
From then on the disorder became her secret friend. She became not only an anorexic-bulimic, but the absolute best anorexic-bulimic she could be. She was strategic, clean, informed. She knew, for example, that the worst kind of vomit is the kind that isn’t properly chewed up. Lobes of steak that rise up your throat like Lincoln Logs. Ice cream is also a problem. It’s too soft and comes back up like liquid; it doesn’t feel like expelling anything at all and you can’t be sure it didn’t stick to the walls of your stomach.
Then of course there is the question of timing. Everything in life is timing and with vomiting it’s no different. Too soon after you eat, and nothing comes up. You wreck your throat trying to regurgitate. Too late, and only the tail end of the meal comes; your finger is slicked in fawn fluid for nothing. You do it too soon or too early and you make too much noise because your body isn’t prepared. With vomiting, you have to work with your body. There is no working against it. You have to respect the process.
The hope each morning was that she would barely eat—a pan-cooked chicken breast, an orange, lemon water. But if she failed—peanut M&M’s, a bite of someone’s birthday cake—then she would accept the failure at the same time that she would not accept the failure. She would go to the bathroom. Flush twice. Clean up. And reenter the conversation.
It worked, for the most part. Field hockey suffered. In the ninth grade she had been a pretty serious athlete, but by the spring of tenth grade she was so skinny she could barely make varsity. School, in general, suffered. She stopped doing homework and stopped paying attention in class.
Her family didn’t question her new body or her new habit. The closest her mother came to Why are you trying to kill yourself? was Why do you flush the toilet so many times?
That question, though, was brutal in itself. Sloane could think of nothing worse in the world than having her dirty secret found out. She knew some people, or has known some people since, who just come out with it, like, I just binged and purged LOL. But for Sloane it was dirty. It would mean other people could see inside her brain, could see the need and the fear in there. She flushed twice. Three times. She always had gum on her person. She was careful about where and when.
She came to favor the sink over the toilet. Throwing up in a toilet felt too bulimic. Proficient and practiced in the art though she might have been, Sloane was a bulimic in denial. Plus, there was often a disposal. The one she liked best was in the half bath right near the television room. When her family was watching television, she had to go elsewhere, but otherwise she would go to that sink right after dinner, while the others were washing up or still talking. The family preferred anodyne game shows like Jeopardy! and slapstick comedies. Watching Airplane! was the extent to which her father rebelled against his upbringing. When Sloane heard a laugh track, she looked sadly at her favorite sink as she passed it on her way upstairs to the bathroom.
For a very long time nobody asked the sort of questions that made Sloane’s knees buckle. She was not humiliated. After all, she had a routine that involved mints and