She’s So Heavy
By
Jennifer Hensley
Published by Jennifer Hensley at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Jennifer Hensley
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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I have eaten meagerly, but ruminated much...
—Gustave Flaubert
There are no prizes.
—Michael Ondaatje,
Coming Through Slaughter
*prologue
What the fuck is happening to me?
Pain: blinding, wrenching pain in my head. I bang my head against the wall over and over. It does not help.
The drugstore is a nightmare. Rows and rows of shelves full of painkillers, but none of them will be right. None of them will work. All of them will kill me. They will not kill the pain, they will kill me.
My head hurts, I keep banging it against the wall. It is not working. Nothing will work.
I am screaming aloud. My cat runs from me. I am screaming, I am crying I cannot stop. My head hurts, there are thoughts there that do not belong to me. Where have these stupid thoughts come from?
My thoughts are maddening. I am changing. I am turning into a mad woman.
No one notices my madness. College is full of mad people. Skinny girls and weird boys and craziness. But I am crazed. I have gone mad. I always knew I would. I always knew that someday I would lose my mind. I just did not know it would look like this.
You are a freak. You are twenty 26, seventy five pounds.
You are a goddamn freak.
I try everything to get rid of the headaches. Ice, cold packs, heat, steam.
Nothing works. Ibuprofen: that is what I need. That will work. I go to the drugstore. Again the nightmare. The shelves full of pain killers. Full of things that might help me. I search and search. None of them are right. Which one is the right one? How can I find the right one? I look at each bottle, each package, none of them are right.
Just one tiny little pill. Just one pill, and this will be over. I can fix this with one pill.
please please please take something- just take one tiny goddamned pill!
I berate myself, I try everything to convince myself to do it.
This will go away. It will go away, it has to go away. Go the fuck away.
Get out.
* footnote (January of 1996. The doctor tells me the name of this madness. He is excited. He is excited because he has studied this disease, it was his specialty in grad school. He is smiling. I am not. You have told me what this is called, now fix it. I don’t care how excited you are to have first diagnosed me with this disease. Just fucking fix it. I need knowledge. I need help. I am not excited. This madness has a name. I hate it.)
*pill splitter
The doctor writes me a script. Pills, again. Paxil and Anafranil. I don’t know what to do. I cannot take a pill, I am afraid. I split the pills with a tiny pill-splitter. Crush them. I am not good at trickery.
I have OCD. ocd ocd ocd. I repeat it over and over. What does it mean? What does it mean to have ocd? What does it mean that my thoughts have a life of their own, that they are out of control, that I have lost control over them? The thoughts move through my brain so fast I can feel the heat. I argue with my brain I constantly push against it. I wash my hands until they are raw and bleeding, yet they are never clean. How can this be so? I am not blind. I can see that my hands are clean. Logic tells me that hot water and soap will kill the germs. But it won’t, my brain says. You have to keep washing until I am convinced. My hands suffered. They hurt from the fifty or so washings every day. I am tired of washing my hands but I cannot stop.
*footnote: the pills, well that’s another story. my mind will not let go... it was the eighties, in chicago, someone—who was it?—snuck into drugstores and laced thecapsules with cyanide—they never found him seven or eight dead never found him safety caps on all bottles after that never safe enough
*nostalgia/nausea
My nostalgia for Knoxville is wrapped up in several things: the memory of my first apartment and the poem written about it; the Cafe Mozart, now defunct; Stone Mountain, a store in the strip on Melrose that burned down in 1994 or‘95. The Old City, especially the diner on the corner where I used to eat grilled cheese sandwiches; the stepped library, and all its quiet places; my second, third and fourth apartments, all different, mostly bad but at least one good; Gemstone video, which had the largest foreign film section ever; the Italian place on Sutherland, where you could eat real Italian food and bring your own wine; the store that was down the street from the rented house on Highland, where you could buy single cigs and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. The dollar theater, where I saw many movies with my college boyfriend.
Actually, he began as my just-out-of-high-school boyfriend, his first year of college. I was going to community college (a complete waste of time) and working at the Victoria’s Secret at the mall. He was a friend of my cousin M’s, and how we got together I can’t remember. Did we meet at a party, perhaps? We must have begun in the summer, before he went back to UT, years before I would move to Knoxville. We must have had a few dates during that summer, then saw each other on the weekends he came home. I snuck to Knoxville to see him at least twice, using the convenience of having another friend who lived in Cookeville, halfway between Knoxville and Nashville. Just another hour or so; not stretching the truth too much. I did have to pass through Cookeville, so there you have it. I also got caught the second time, that being the last. But those two stolen trips— oh what trips they were! Underage drinking, college parties, football games, bongs, pizza. Loss of virginity. My first experience with the Pill, also the last.
So there were memories for my college boyfriend and me: a history between us, a history of firsts for me. Comfortable, funny memories that gave us a place to start, and a sense of familiarity that doesn’t usually come quickly. We were friends, we had a foundation. We already knew what the other felt like, tasted like; what things would set the other off. What things we had in common. It was easy to fall back into friend/lover territory. I was new in Knoxville in 1994: I had him and cousin Mike, and that was it. I needed a support system that was familiar, and they were it.
That first January in Knoxville was exhilarating, intoxicating, scary. My first apartment alone, my first classes at a real four-year college. I loved it I was in love with everything around me: the apartment, the college, the buildings, the city. The new friendship with an ex-boyfriend. Everything new, everything shiny. The first night I spent in the apartment was spent in a down sleeping bag, on the floor, in the light of a 13-inch T.V. I’d had for years. I had practically no furniture, very little hung on the walls. But it didn’t matter: what mattered was the life I was beginning, the life I was leading. I loved it.
The ex and I spent those first couple of months hanging out practically all the time. Movies, drinks, dinner, football, hockey games— whatever we could do together, we did.
*images of Knoxville
Black hat, long thick hunter green sweater, doc martens. long, spiraled hair, thick. round glasses. flowery dresses, birkenstocks, dating boys younger than me.
cheesecake from cafe mozart. pizza from stefano’s.
days inn: late shifts, home at 4 or 6 am? class at noon or one; subway, snickers, living with mike, driving his stick shift car, laundry at gryphons, people under the stairs, stalker/hulk guy from class, basketball games, green & black kilt skirt from limited, candles from that new age store in west knox, west knox news, wine from biltmore, driving pizza, buddha, trip to new york, cats miserable, swimming at workout center on campus, walking up the hill, first apple computer, double life, published in phoenix, crush on adam, working on beacon newspaper, homecoming game, peyton manning, pina coladas at grady’s, visits with parents, trips to gatlinburg, death of grandmother, little sisters jewelry in old city, coffee at java, german class in summer.
(am i trying to find a path in all of this, a path that leads to the decline? am i confused about how happy i was at first & how i came to be in such a miserable state when i left? is there a link? is there a pattern? do i yearn for that time because it was before my life changed for good?)
*barclay house
College apartments. Small, cramped, stuffed with stuff. Messy, horrendous awful abodes. One after another, all the same, cheap and small. The last house we rented torn down nearly the day we vacated, and the bar/laundromat down the block, gone too. Gryphons, it was called. Bar on one side of a dingy house, washers and dryers on the other, creaky uneven floors and dusty walls. And a ping-pong table thrown in as well. Two blocks from our house, just close enough to walk with a basket full of clothes. Then the next hole, a small so-called apartment in a U-shaped building right on campus, though unclaimed by the school. I would not claim it either. It was so small that I could barely navigate through it, even with only a twin bed and one chair. No doors on the closet, and air from a window unit that never worked. The cat and I were miserable that summer; we stayed in a hotel one night, sixty dollars, and I turned the air down so cold that I shivered all night. She was content.
The mirage of the next apartment— well, it was just lovely. I loved that apartment building. I harassed them for months, waiting for an opening. The outside was plain, just red brick, three or four stories, simple. Unassuming. It was on Laurel street, next to the married student housing, those tall, poor and academic-looking apartments. It was across from some lovely dark red brick buildings with the dark green ivy creeping up. If I walked down the block and crossed the street, I would reach the Laurel Theater, where I had gone many times for poetry readings.
The front steps to the Barclay House apartments were carpeted. There was a intercom box outside the door; to gain entrance you must have a code or call the manager’s office. I can’t recall the halls or the elevator; I do remember there was a back door which was easier to get to, from the parking lot in back. The first time I entered that building and saw my apartment, I was thrilled. This was not a hole: this was not some transient, for-the-moment apartment. There was not one thing that I did not love, absolutely love and adore, about this apartment. It was spacious: it was just a one bedroom, but that, over an efficiency, was an abundance. I loved that apartment. Parquet floors, all new appliances in the kitchen-—and this was an actual kitchen, not a kitchenette, or a stove and sink in a closet, as I’d once had. There were cabinets, a stove, a double sink, a pantry, and broom closet. There was a huge walk-in closet, walled on three sides. I barely had enough furniture to fill it. The bath was nice too, very sixties art deco, full of character. Nice, clean, lovely apartment! Plus a locked and coded entrance. A nice big gated pool in the back. A laundry room in the basement. It was all so nice, so lovely. It was the kind of apartment you could really do something with, it had character and warmth, it was a place that you could live in. It was a place that I could live in. Not just stay in. It’s so disgusting that I could not enjoy it, could not revel in it as much as I do now. The memory of the apartment itself might just be better than the time I actually spent in it.
*chloe dancer, crown of thorns
Chloe was a black and white tuxedo cat named after a song by Mother Love Bone. I moved her to Knoxville from her birthplace of Greenbrier, Tennessee, summer of 1996. It was the summer that Mike and I moved into the dilapidated grey house on Highland Avenue in the heart of Fort Sanders, the one with the broken window, and the five-sided front room. Chloe was just six weeks old: she wanted to play, she wanted attention. Butthead, Mike’s cat, was not fond of kittens: he was intolerant of all other animals and most humans. Mike had ruined this cat. I was convinced his behavior was due to excess exposure to bong smoke. But eventually, Chloe won Butthead over, to the point that they napped together often, Chloe using BH as a large orange-and-white-striped pillow.
Chloe was a catty-cat: she only did and liked things that were catlike. She grew up with the freedom of an open window and a big backyard. The neighborhood was full of college students, yards, trees, other cats and dogs. Both Chloe and BH frequently used the tree in the front yard, as well as the roof, as safe places from the dogs. It must have affected her deeply—more than I knew—to move away from all of this freedom to a small apartment on the third floor. She lost the freedom of coming and going as she pleased. She lost the company of another cat, another human besides me. Mike and BH had moved away. It was just the two of us in this big lonely apartment.
Was she as miserable as I? Being isolated, with just me to entertain her, did she also wish things were different? She surely didn’t understand what was happening, no more than I did. She was witness to all the crying jags, all the hand-washing rituals, all the raging against this unknown, the banging of my head against the bare white walls. Did she also feel the fear, the unbearable terror, the burden that I felt? I yelled at her, I did things that frightened her, I threw things. She must have had a smaller life then, not the life she might have imagined.
I felt guilt.
*panic
It feels as if you are losing ground—you can’t breathe, your heart is racing, you feel as if you are going to die. It’s interminable—never-ending. Lifetimes go by as you try to tough it out, talk yourself through it, talk yourself out of it. Just wait— another few moments and this will pass.
Suddenly, I was afraid of everything. Everything. It wasn’t a phobic fear, not like the fear of spiders, which I’d always had. This was a physical, intense fear. It wasn’t just that I was obsessing, turning things over in my mind, it was the things I was obsessing about.
Food. I was suddenly, inexplicably, afraid of food.
Food was the enemy. It wasn’t safe anymore.
My mind processed things differently than it had in the past. Differently than other people’s minds. Other. There were connections: thoughts. Thoughts of where my food had been, who had touched it... Who has been touching my food?
I had declared meat unfit two years before: an episode of food-borne illness had put me off of cows and fast food. Was that the reason—the catalyst—for my fear now? Maybe.
(maybe? no, certainly. it was an illness, a food-borne illness, from a fast food joint. the highest priority was to avoid that, to never get sick again. i was obsessed with poisoning by food. i could not accept that food would make you sick, kill you. i have to avoid that.
each time i drive by —, i feel trauma, i look away. it happened in 1993: i will avoid that number from now on. i will avoid i will avoid i will i will i will)
Nothing was safe anymore.
But that doesn’t answer or explain other things: the fear of people, the anxiety the proximity of others suddenly brought. The feeling of being something other, something alien. I am different. I can’t have anyone touch me, get close to me.
Fear. It’s filling up my mind, forcing everything else out. It’s taking over.
Fear, anxiety, depression, obsession.
These are the tyrants of my mind.
How did this happen? Is there someone to blame for what is happening to me? Everything is driving me crazy ... my mind is overactive, so full of spinning thoughts and anxiety-provoking images, it’s racing racing and I can’t keep up. I don’t want to.
I notice everything. Every single little thing, details I would never have noticed before. I pay attention to things that never caught my eye before. I am too sensitive: my overactive mind is taking in too much information. Unnecessary information. Stuff I don’t want to know. Things that never mattered before that are suddenly mattering in the keenest of ways. It matters now what I touch, what I bring into my home, what I put into my body. It suddenly all matters too much.
*ritual
Germs are everywhere.
They are on doorknobs, they are on the floor of my apartment. They are in the bathrooms of the Humanities building: in particular, they are in the bathroom where the girl got sick. I wouldn’t use the bathrooms at school after that. Whatever germs she had, I did not want them. I open the double doors of Humanities with my elbows, or I go in behind someone. I do not touch the doors. If I must touch something, I use only the left hand, never the right hand.
In the six blocks that I walk home, I do not step on a single crack (step on a crack, break your mother's back).I take either small steps or very big steps to avoid them. I climb the hill in this manner, breathing hard by the time I reach the top. My apartment building is two blocks over from 17th Street. By the time I reach the apartment, I am starving.
One piece of bread a day is all my mind will allow. I try to argue, to struggle against it, but it’s no use. Everything I bring home from the store is contaminated, unsafe in some way. The outsides of packages are driving me crazy. I want to get the bread out without touching the outside package: how can I do this? I begin the ritual in this way: I open the package of bread, and leave the plastic as wide open as possible. I wash my hands in scalding hot water. I reach into the package, careful not to touch the plastic at all, and extract the piece of bread, making absolutely sure that the bread never touches the plastic. Sometimes I use a fork to do this, in order not to touch the bread with my hands at all. I place the bread on a cookie sheet, that has been carefully covered with aluminum foil. I heat the oven to 500.
I have dishes, cookware, silverware. I can no longer use any of them. I wash them, over and over, and leave them to dry on a wooden drying rack. I cover them with paper towels. Three days later, I wash them again. The only thing I use is the cookie sheet, covered in aluminum foil. The rest are washed and rewashed and never used.
By December, I throw away the silverware. I now only use plastic.
My laundry becomes subject to the same treatment. If clothing or towels fall to the floor, they must be rewashed. Sometimes I just throw things away. I cannot keep up with all of the thoughts and fears and anxieties. I cannot keep washing my hands in this manner: they are beginning to crack and bleed between the fingers. But I have to wash them before folding clean clothes. I have to wash them, I have to make sure that my hands are clean.
I never touch my face. I do not eat with my hands, I do not touch my face with my hands. How did I wash my face? I can’t remember. I wash my hands before I brush my teeth, and I rinse my mouth for ten minutes, I have developed a new fear of toothpaste. It was on the news, some boy had gotten sick? died? after ingesting some toothpaste.
I must avoid death by toothpaste.
*cracker girl
I don’t remember my mind before this year. Before this moment. All I can think of is food. The hunger gnaws at me. I ignore it and yet I obsess about food. There is this cable channel, the Food Network. I watch it all the time. I think how lovely it would be for someone else to cook for me, for someone else to deal with the horror of the kitchen, the washing and cleaning, the proper cooking of food. There is guilt involved. I buy food, tons of food; my pantry is full and so is the freezer. I know that I will never eat it. It looks good in the store, I feel safe about it in the store. I bring it home and suddenly it is dangerous. I cannot eat it, I will not eat it. The acceptable food list has shrunk, it keeps on shrinking and I am helpless to stop it. I am down to one piece of bread per day. I drink a lot of liquids. Can I live on liquids? The question never occurs to me. I keep a lot of crackers, one kind in particular. I eat them because they are salty and sweet and melt in my mouth. I don’t even have to chew.
I am to write a short story for class. A short-short story. There is a contest for the best short-short story sponsored by a college in Florida, and we are all to enter. I write my story; it is only about five hundred words. It is about food. It is about crackers. It is about me.
I call the story “Close Craving.” The story has no meaning, except to me. My ass hurts when I go to class and I am very conscious of it. I wonder why I have not noticed these hard chairs before.
The store begins to be scary, dangerous. I begin to collect lists of things in my mind, things that I must remove from the acceptable list of food. I hear stories: I incorporate those stories into my life, they instill fear in me on a level I can’t comprehend. The news is full of horror—fast food joints with contaminated meat, killing people; apples and sprouts and other vegetables also contaminated; this outbreak and that outbreak and my world is shrinking. Nothing is safe what am I going to eat when everything is contaminated? The hungrier I get the less I eat. The less I eat, the hungrier I am. This is beginning to be unmanageable.
I go to the store. I don’t want to touch the carts; I carry what I can in my arms, and that is all that I buy. All of the checkout lines are busy; I go from line to line, trying to find one that looks acceptable. Every one of the lines is filled with women who are buying meat; they are all buying raw meat. I begin to feel anxious. I go to each line and each one is unacceptable. No raw meat—I cannot check out behind someone with raw meat. No sprouts, no chicken, no apples—no no no there is no safe line I have to leave.
I leave the store in a panic. My heart is beating and I want to cry. I go back to my apartment, and I begin the rituals. First, I have to wash my hands.
***
Raw and bleeding, my hands hurt. I begin the bread ritual.
***
I wander through the store, Target this time, stocking up on paper. Paper towels, tissue, and plastics, forks, knives, plates, baggies. I am grateful for these things: I need the tissue to touch my face; I need the plastic utensils to eat my bread with. I need the paper towels in order to dry my hands, to open doors with. I take the tissues to class, so that I may open doors there too. I use these things to function: I am functioning.
***
I take the basket of clothes down the two floors to the laundry room. In my hand is a paper towel, in order to open and close doors with. My own door is the worst: I have to open it after having been out in the world, after having touched so many things, so many unacceptable things. When I bring the clean clothes back, I drop some on the floor: they must go back in the dirty clothes pile, to be rewashed. How many times they must be rewashed just depends on me, on the anxiety.
*red shirt
I heard my sister vomiting in the bathroom. I was immediately on alert: What is wrong with her? Why is she sick? Will I catch it? Did I touch her? Have I touched anything that she touched? Immediately millions of questions all at once, whirling around in my head. I must have had the look of a deer in headlights: Mom wanted to know what was wrong with me. Can’t you hear Suzanne? She’s sick. No, Mom said.She is just putting her coat and luggage in the closet.
So, I thought, hallucinations. I was so nervous and on edge that I had actually mistaken what I heard for something I was afraid to hear. No one else had mistaken the sound of a coat being hung up with the sound of a sick person. Only me.
I should be used to this insanity by now. It was December, and graduation was the next day. The fall had been hard. I had guilt for not enjoying it more. I felt that, since it was the last semester, I should have had more fun, done more, made more friends. I had no trouble with school: my G.P.A. was actually the highest it had ever been. But the past four months had been a struggle, me wrestling with my mind, trying to hold it together until graduation, until I had time to fall apart. It was all happening in a vacuum. No one knew.
After they ate dinner, Mom and sis and I went shopping. Something new to wear to graduation. The mall was crowded, making us irritable. Actually, I was the one that made us all miserable. We went from store to store, picking over pretty sweaters and skirts and pants, looking for that perfect outfit. I cannot recall if I had some notion of what I was looking for: perhaps there was some color or style that had already been chosen. If so, we never found it. Two hours of shopping produced nothing. I could not decide on anything. Nothing looked right, felt right, had the right vibe. My mother was really getting fed up with me, and I’m sure we argued. I had not eaten dinner, so part of the irritability I felt was from hunger. But looking and not finding annoyed me more. My legs hurt, I was exhausted, and why couldn’t I make up my mind? By the time we finished, I was near tears. I just wanted to go home and crawl into bed.
Graduation was at ten a.m. the next day. The robes we wore covered up our clothing, so it really didn’t matter what we were all wearing underneath. Sometime during our shopping trip, I had chosen a bright red velvet shirt. Velvet was really making a comeback, and I chose red because of the holidays. I sat next to a blond guy, someone I actually kind of knew. He annoyed me because he told me that he was a stunt man for the “Incredible Hulk” show. This was not logically possible, in my mind. This was before graduation, and after he had taken to leaving notes and cards on my car. He is too young, not to mention too skinny, to be a stunt-man. He is a liar, I thought, and vowed not to engage him in conversation ever again. He probably wasn’t even graduating: he just showed up to annoy me, to sit next to me and annoy me. Thankfully, the ceremony didn’t last long, and I escaped as soon as it was over.
Everyone followed me back to my apartment, to finish packing up. I loved that apartment and was sad to leave it. I gave all of the food in the fridge and cabinets to Mike. It was easier to just give it to him than to haul it back to Nashville. There were two or three boxes full of food. After packing most everything up, we all went to what had been my favorite restaurant for dinner.
I can picture myself clearly in the restaurant, more clearly than any other point in that day. I am wearing the red velvet shirt, tight skinny black pants, black boots. My friend Cindy, from high school, is there. Several cousins, mom and dad, my sister, some other relatives. I move from table to table, talking, thanking, enjoying the praise and congratulations I am receiving. I get presents, money, lots of hugs. I see myself, moving around, and there is something wrong. I am too thin. The black pants do not hide it, nothing can hide it at this point. I have dropped to seventy-five pounds. It is painful, obvious.
Everyone eats their fill. I cannot remember eating at all. Eventually people leave, drive back to Nashville. We say our goodbyes in the parking lot. This is my last time in a restaurant for a very long time.
The Effects of Starvation
Increase in thoughts about food: also an interest in reading cookbooks,
and watching cooking shows.
Increase in talking about food, discussing meals.
Increased irritability.
Avoidance of social events, avoidance of people in general.
Inability to focus on anything for extended period of time.
Unable to read a book or watch long television programs.
Loss of menstrual cycle.
Early morning insomnia. Loss of ability to sleep well. Loss of dreams.
Loss of sexual desire or thoughts.
Anhedonia.
Apathy. Complete absence of emotion.
*new year’s eve, 1996
This is my admission.
Something is wrong with me.
I tell Mom this, in the middle of the revelry, the champagne—
There is something wrong with me.
I cry as I say the words—I need help.
I thought it was just stress, the stress of college, of exams, of graduation, of isolation. What had the student clinic doctor said to me? I had seen him over a year ago, and he pigeonholed me immediately. You’re a twenty-something college female, must be anorexia, an std, pregnancy.... It had been none of the above, and I knew that. It certainly wasn’t pregnancy: I had not bled in months. It was something else, this madness was something else.
But what was it? What is it?
***
I can see the cracks, where things want to bleed through. My mind is cracking, splintering, coming apart.
Flying apart.
I can no longer hold it together—what glue will hold me together?
Things want to bleed through.
Things want to be seen, dealt with.
Things do fall apart, not so gracefully as I’d like, but things are falling spectacularly to pieces.
*the conversation
Here’s how the conversation should have gone:
Dr: I’m sorry you’ve got this shitty disease. I’m sorry that you have been suffering with it for so long and had no help. Now, here’s what I’m going to do to fix it.
Instead, some brochures are thrust into my hands. Here’s some info.
That’s it? That’s all I get?
I need more than some goddamn brochures. I need a plan. I need help. You slam me with this diagnosis, this label, this ridiculous disease, and then you hand me a script and a brochure and that’s it?
I’m paying you way too much money to sit behind that desk and treat me like an idiot. I am not stupid: I have an illness and you have a degree, a degree from Vanderbilt which is prestigious to some but right now I could not give a fuck where your degree came from as long as I thought you might know what in the fuck you are talking about. You are supposed to have knowledge about this disease, knowledge you should be sharing with me, and instead you are shoving some marketing tools in my face that do not even begin to touch upon what hell I’ve been going through. This colorful advertisement for this disease, this medication, this is supposed to represent a disease that is killing me?