Then Again - Diane Keaton [34]
On the surface, all was going well. Woody slowly began to see me as something more than a gal pal. Our relationship wasn’t off and on, but it wasn’t exactly committed either. Even then Woody was the most disciplined, hardworking, dedicated, organized, and—ironically—resilient person I’d ever met. On a daily basis, he practiced his clarinet, appeared in the play, read all the works of Tolstoy, and wrote new jokes for appearances in Vegas at Caesars or in Reno, where Frank Sinatra Jr. opened for Sir Woody of Allen at the medieval-themed Cal Neva Hotel. He was always busy, so nothing much was required of me. I moved a few things into his new penthouse apartment, but I kept my studio on 82nd. When it got broken into, the police advised me to put bars on the windows. I didn’t listen. What did I care? The apartment was there for one thing only, to implement my routine.
Experts
A century ago, women struggled with mental problems like hysteria and anxiety, not bingeing. Today, mental-health experts believe bulimia is related to social class, income, education, the occupation of parents, and an introverted personality, which causes high rates of phobias, alcoholism, anxiety disorders, and panic attacks. Bulimic women differ from depressed women because they’re more likely to be overweight and to have overweight parents. Apparently, parents with high expectations create an atmosphere that fosters eating disorders. Lack of parental affection is one of the main reasons bulimics soothe themselves with food.
Spare me. I can’t stand the ease with which experts blame parents, especially mothers, for their teenage daughters’, slash soon to be young adults’, slash middle-aged women’s, slash angry old ladies’ food addictions. Come on. I’m sorry, but my mother was nothing if not affectionate. And, by the way, dazed is the word I would use to describe the effects of indulging in an eating disorder. The facts are the facts, but the reason one becomes bulimic is more complex than overweight mothers, which Dorothy was not.
Mom made every effort, particularly in the early days, to present a cheery worldview. She gave me everything I wanted—at least, as much as she could—but years of keeping things bottled up had their effect. Before I left home, the undertones in her silence were obvious. I must have been fourteen the first time I heard Mom and Dad fighting behind the closed door to their bedroom. I remember rushing to Randy’s room, where I caught him stuffing Playboy pictures of bare-breasted women under his bed. Panicked, I asked him if he heard Mom and Dad yelling about getting a divorce. Did he? Did he? His response was to run away, leaving me with their not-so-muffled screams. Did this incident make me more susceptible to fulfilling a future of MORE, so much MORE? I don’t know. Even if, early on, Mother had had the privilege of participating in the revelations of the analyst’s couch, would my insatiable hunger have taken a backseat to a less pathological method of satisfying my needs? It’s hard to say.
October 31, 2009, would have been her eighty-eighth birthday. Last Halloween she’d been dead for six weeks. This year it’s been four hundred and nine days and nights without my mother. I thought time was supposed to heal all wounds. As I wait for Dexter to come out of swim practice, in my Tahoe Hybrid parked at the top of Santa Monica City College, overlooking the local graveyard, I can still see Daphne Merkin’s plaintive face in the Polo Lounge this morning, whispering, “Diane, don’t you think they’ll come back to us? Don’t you think they’re coming back, our mothers?” Daphne … I wish. I wish they would. All of them. All the mothers.
Packing It In