Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen - Dyan Sheldon [35]
“Have my dessert, have my supper, have anything you want.”
I could hear Paula shouting as she went back to the kitchen, “Mary says I can have her dessert.”
The next person at my door was Karen Kapok herself. Banging.
“What’s going on?” demanded my mother.
“I’m on a hunger strike,” I screamed back over Stu Wolff singing No more … no more… I’ve found the door…, “I’m like Gandhi, driven to desperate measures by the insensitivity of the British Government. Not one morsel will pass my lips until you say I can go see Sidartha.”
“You have two minutes to get to the table,” said my mother. “If you don’t, the insensitive British Government is going to take your door off its hinges and drag you out.”
You have to appreciate the way an unimaginative, practical mind like my mother’s works. She thought that if I was forced to sit at the table and watch the rest of them feeding, hunger would overcome my iron resolve and I would give in.
Ignoring my pale skin and the dark circles under my eyes, she made me sit through every meal.
At first my mother kept asking me to pass her stuff: “Mary, could you please pass the salad?”; “Mary, would you please pass the salt?”; “Would you mind passing the vegetables, Mary?”
When my mother wasn’t asking me to hand her every edible item on the table, she was oohing and ahhing over every atom that touched her lips.
The twins were even less subtle. They kept waving pieces of food in my face and shrieking, “Don’t you want some, Mare? It’s really good.”
Recalling my Joan of Arc phase, I refused to be tempted, responding to the crass coercion of my family with stoic dignity and grace.
“Of course,” I’d say every time my mother asked for something. I’d smile gently as though it pleased me that her appetite was so healthy. “No thank you,” I’d whisper whenever Pam or Paula shoved a piece of garlic bread or a cookie in my nose.
On Friday, my mother brought in the heavy artillery: she made lasagne, my most favourite dish in the entire universe. Just the smell of it nearly made me swoon. But I was strong and resolute, and full of doughnuts, so her strategy didn’t work.
Great actors know what real determination and dedication are. Ordinary people, however, do not. They give up easily. By breakfast on Saturday my family had gone back to totally ignoring me as usual. They munched away at their pancakes, all three of them talking at the same time, as if a victim of oppression and injustice weren’t sitting among them, staring at her empty plate, as isolated from their food and trivial chit-chat as a prisoner in a Mexican jail.
I took this, of course, as a good sign. The twins were already bored with the game, and my mother, also bored with the game, had obviously decided that I’d give up if I didn’t get any attention. My mother’s understanding of the psychology of the gifted is pretty limited.
I wouldn’t give up. I would step up my resistance instead.
I sipped my glass of water and smiled at them wanly all through the meal, and when it was over I said I was going back to bed because I was feeling so tired.
I spent Saturday languishing in my room. I managed to stagger out to sip my water while they stuffed their faces with supper, but a sudden wave of dizziness forced me to leave the table halfway through. “I’m sorry,” I whispered apologetically, “but I’m too weak to sit here. I have to lie down.”
I was still languishing on Sunday. By then, of course, I was too weak and exhausted to come out to watch them eat breakfast.
“I can’t,” I called hoarsely through my closed bedroom door. “The room spins whenever I stand up.”
My mother was her usual cynical self.
“Why don’t you just crawl out, then?” she shouted back.
My father called that afternoon, but I was too weak to make it to the phone. By putting a glass to my door and my ear to the glass, I could just make out my mother explaining to my father that she was starving me to death.
“She’s doing Gandhi this week,” said my mother. “She’s on a hunger strike until I say she can go to some concert at the Garden.”
There