Chapter 39: Anorexia Nervosa

The trauma didn’t end there. More peripety was to follow.

In addition to my grief, I was feeling like a piece of shit, for cheating on my wife. I can’t imagine she’d cheated on me. She never seemed like the type, but, in all honesty, I didn’t really know her. That’s right. I’d didn’t really know the person I’d married.

We’d rushed in. We’d eloped. In Miami, she was this laidback, fun person, with a wonderful sense of humor, and the cutest smile and prettiest brown eyes I’d ever seen. She was tall and model slim. Looked like a model.

There were beautiful women everywhere in Austria and Europe. In fact, modeling agencies would come out there and just set up a booth on the street, recruiting prospective models, literally just pointing at passersby or having pretty young things walk up to them. My wife herself had done some modeling. With her slim features, high cheekbones and thin long narrow nose, she was exactly what you’d expect to see in a makeup ad.

But like many models, she had struggled with an eating disorder. In her case it was anorexia. I had no idea about it, thought she was naturally thin, and she’d never had any problems eating back in South Beach.

However, in Austria, as I mentioned before, her closet jampacked with skeletons kicked open its doors, and the skeletons, her ghosts took possession of her, and tore her away from me.

It might sound like hyperbole. But it’s true. She was as if overtaken, possessed by malevolent forces, became a different being, a new person.

She started to refuse to eat. Shed numerous pounds off her already thin frame, started to look frail, bony. Her face sunk in. She’d wear these striped pajamas at night and would, seriously, look like something in a concentration camp. Given Austria’s history, and my being Jewish, it disturbed me in several ways, seeing her in those pajamas.

Not only were her looks starting to go, but she began to smell. This awful, sour smell, like milk that’d turned. This sour stench emitted from her, especially in the bed. It was because she’d been starving herself, and so her body was eating itself, in an attempt at nourishment, causing this wretched stink.

She’d fly off the handle, too, accuse me of trying to kill her if I didn’t want to eat something, storming off. She’d been working in a hotel, part-time, and had gotten fired because guests were complaining about how she looked, that she was so skinny. It was scaring people.

At first, I couldn’t understand what was with her, why she was being like this. I didn’t know anything about anorexia. Though I did know of bulimia, as a teacher I’d had in high school, as well as a girl I’d gone to high school with had had bulimia and that was why their teeth were slightly rotted and crooked. But anorexia, I’d only heard topical things about, and I knew of its existence, but it was hard for me to know it was happening to her.

I think also, too, I was in denial. I didn’t want to believe there was a problem. Or subconsciously I wanted the demons to leave her body so much that I thought they would. I somehow thought that it was a temporary condition, like a cold, and that it would resolve itself. I remember, later, looking at pictures of her from this period and thinking of how frail and skeletal she appeared.

But I never saw her like that, with my eyes. I’ve heard it said that the camera adds pounds, and in this case, it was my mind’s camera, my skewed perception, my own eyes that were adding pounds. My eyes were lying to me.

Finally, I confronted her, and grimly, like a witness in the courtroom, she spilled her skeletons. Confessed she’d had this problem for years. That in South Beach, she was in remission, but when we got to Austria it boomeranged back.

Worse though, was that she confessed she was in a secret eating contest with everyone else. That she challenged herself to eat less than everyone. Including me. Since we’d gotten to Austria, she’d taken over the majority of the cooking, as this is usually the custom there, that the woman does the cooking (my FIL and BIL had thought it strange that I’d cooked some of our dinners).

I’d noticed her making larger and larger portions. Very fattening food, too. Lots of cheeses and sausages. Cakes. Not that I can complain too much. Her cooking was excellent, if not extravagant, but I was seeing her serving me increasingly gluttonous sizes of food, taking less and less for herself, and her becoming enraged if I didn’t clean my plate.

Needless to say, I ballooned in weight, going from 160 to 200 in only a few months. My six-pack replaced with a Buddha belly and bitch tits...

Not that I can totally blame her, because I certainly had a part in it, but once she confessed that she was in an eating contest with me, I knew what was going on. Like in the Hansel and Gretel story, I was being fattened up.

Not to be eaten, though, by a witch, although with how erratic she was becoming, her eventually cannibalizing me seemed like a possibility, but it was that she was mentally cannibalizing me, was deliberately trying to make me fat, make me eat heaps of food, so she could feel better about herself. And she wasn’t doing this only to me. She was constantly cooking, preparing these massive plates of sausages, cheese dishes, and heavy cream-laden desserts, huge and piling high cakes, and bringing them around to everyone in the neighborhood, feeding everyone, while she starved, wasted away, shrunk to bone.

It was horrific. Seeing that happen to her.

But it got worse when I caught her cutting herself.

I’d come back from working with Gertrud’s dad and stumbled upon her in our bed, with a steak knife, slowly tracing it on her upper thigh.

Blood trickling, I ran towards her, pried away and seized the knife. She offered no resistance.

I’ll never forget the look on her face. It was so blank. So empty. So numb. Her eyes, once so warm, were cold, haggard, empty.

She was listening to “Scar Tissue” by RHCP, a record she listened to over and over, and a record that to this day haunts me of her.

I’d noticed before that there were a few scars on her upper thighs. They looked like tracts left on fresh ice by skates. But I never asked about it. I’d thought that since she’d done gardening work, maybe they’d come from accidents involving gardening. It seemed plausible. I’d always thought of people who cut themselves to be raving lunatics or something. She’d seemed to be far too well-adjusted and sane to do such a malicious act of self-harm.