Then Again - Diane Keaton [35]
Woody didn’t have a clue what I was up to in the privacy of his bathrooms. He did marvel at my remarkable appetite, saying I could really “pack it in.” Ever vigilant and always on the lookout, I made sure he never caught me. This is not to say that Woody was oblivious to my problems. He knew how insecure I was. It must have been annoying as hell to be the brunt of my constant need for support and encouragement. After Play it Again, Sam closed, I couldn’t get a job. It seemed like every audition was lost to either Blythe Danner or Jill Clayburgh, who weren’t “too nutty.” A year came and went without work. When I landed a commercial for Hour After Hour deodorant, where I wore a tracksuit and bit my husband’s ear, saying, “Hour After Hour … it won’t wear out before the day is over,” I hit bottom. The bingeing was off the charts. What would Woody think if he knew my secret? Why couldn’t I get a job? I kept fixating over something Lee Ann Fahey, another aspiring actress, said about “making it” before you’re twenty-five. I was twenty-five. What was I going to do? It wasn’t enough to be Woody’s washed-out Ali MacGraw girlfriend. What was going to happen? Should I quit? Woody suggested I see an analyst named Felicia Lydia Landau.
Monday through Friday I walked up Fifth Avenue to 94th and Madison; got on the elevator of the nondescript red brick building; pressed the button to the sixth floor; made my exit, walked down the narrow hallway, and pushed the buzzer outside Dr. Landau’s office. When she opened the door, I would say hello and hit the couch. Once on my back, with the ceiling as my horizon, I was ready to map out the history of my neurosis. We couldn’t have been a more unlikely pair—me, the firstborn daughter of a sunny-looking family from Southern California; she, a Jew from Poland who escaped on the eve of Hitler’s invasion.
After another year of throwing up, intermittent joblessness, and learning how to talk to the ceiling with my back on a couch, I finally blurted out, “I stick my finger down my throat three times a day and throw up. I’ve been throwing up for years. I’m bulimic. Okay? I have no intention of stopping. Ever. Why would I? I don’t want to. Get it? I’m not stopping. That’s it. End of discussion. And nothing you say will ever convince me to change. I hope we’re clear on this. We’re clear, Dr. Landau, right? Right! Okay!!”
Six months later I stopped. One morning I went to the freezer and didn’t open a half gallon of rocky road ice cream. I don’t know why. I know one thing though: All those disjointed words and half sentences, all those complaining, awkward phrases shaping incomplete monologues blurted out to a sixty-five-year-old woman smoking a cigarette for fifty minutes five times a week, made the difference. It was the talking cure; the talking cure that gave me a way out of addiction; the damn talking cure.
Secrets
I used to think of myself as an attractive victim, a sort of sweet, misunderstood casualty. No one mistook me for the fat woman in the freak show. But I was. And I got away with it. I became a master, as well as a fraud. My secret, with all the little secrets it spawned, encouraged a broad spectrum of subterfuge. I lied to myself, and I kept lying. I never owned up to the truth of bulimia’s predatory nature. Yet I gave five years of my life to a ravenous hunger that had to be filled at any expense. I lived under the shadow of isolation in a self-made prison of secrets and lies.
In a culture where confession is a means to broader economic horizons, coming clean at such a late date is not only suspect but anticlimactic. I wish I’d been brave enough to tell Mom before she became entrenched in the uncertainty of Alzheimer’s. I told my sisters recently. Dorrie was sympathetic, and Robin remembered I ate a lot of hamburgers back in the day, but neither had much curiosity. Who cares thirty years after the fact? Nobody, really. The thought of becoming number—what?—seventy-five on a “Famous Bulimics” list is like aspiring to footnote status in a file labeled “Eating Disorders.” Why bother? I guess