Chapter 15 Amelia Blue
“Let’s start with this question.” Dr. Mackenzie clasps her hands over her knee. “Why do you think you restrict?”
“If photographs of your most awkward moments were splashed across trashy magazines by the time you were in elementary school, you might be worried about how you looked, too.”
Not only was I born with the wrong nose but (apparently) I grew the wrong hair, too.
When I was twelve, Georgia took me to get highlights, complaining to the stylist that my dark hair clashed with my pale skin.
I spent all of seventh grade waiting for the terrible stripes on my head to grow out.
The next year, it was a chemical straightening treatment.
Eventually, I was no longer famous enough (rather, my parents were no longer famous enough) to qualify for even the Star Tracks section of People magazine, but there were still plenty of blogs and fan sites that tracked the lives of celebrity children almost exclusively, showing off, with wicked glee, the chubby little girl who didn’t know better than to smile for the camera and, later, the pimply preteen whose bad posture added ten pounds to her frame.
In the comments, people expressed their condolences, as though not inheriting my parents’ good looks and speedy metabolisms were the real tragedies of my life.
Unlike the rest of my generation, I never understood about good angles and finding my light.
“That must have been difficult,” Dr. Mackenzie says, but I know she doesn’t mean it. She’s the kind of beautiful that doesn’t have a bad angle, the sort of person who can consider makeup and diets superficial even as she turns heads every time she walks down the street.
Half the time when someone befriended me, it was only to get a photo they could sell later. When I got to grad school and people talked about the friends they’d had since kindergarten, I nodded along as though I’d built lasting relationships, too.
Dr. Mackenzie adds, “I imagine it’s not uncommon among children of celebrities. Your parents spend their lives—their careers—seeking out the spotlight, but you’re born into it, never given a choice in the matter.”
There are, of course, endless videos and pictures of my parents on the internet.
My father, the sort of skinny that would be gawky on anyone else, looking strung out and dangerous.
His every move was serpentine, his fingers flying over the bass, his hair buzzed short and dyed orange for a music video.
Somehow, in every photograph Georgia looks the same, and not only because she never stopped dressing like it was 1992.
As she aged her stomach grew less taut, the skin on her upper arms turned crepey, but her actual weight remained the same.
And unlike me, she walked with her shoulders thrown back, like she was proud of every step she took.
I shift my gaze from Dr. Mackenzie to the wall of windows behind her, retracing the spins I took down the rabbit hole last night.
Normally, I spend my time online creeping around the #proana and #promia corners of the internet.
I’ve certainly never made contact with a Georgia fan.
Over the years, they’ve attempted to contact me, sometimes quite literally: When I was little, there were fans who showed up at school drop-off and hugged me tight, like they couldn’t believe they were in the presence of my DNA.
It’s snowing lightly outside, not enough to stick but pretty as a postcard nonetheless, the front of which would have Wish You Were Here scrawled across it.
There’s a fire burning in the fireplace, but the wall of windows creates the illusion of being outdoors so that when I exhale I almost expect to see my breath.
“Is that why you feel safer restricting?” Dr. Mackenzie prompts. “For more flattering pictures on the internet?”
I try to imagine how Georgia would react to a reductive question like that (Is that why you do drugs, so you can always be the life of the party?).
I clutch my coffee mug like a stuffed animal. Dr. Mackenzie leans back in her seat, making herself larger like they say you should when confronted with a bear or mountain lion on the hiking trails back home. I always thought I would get eaten immediately.
“I restrict because of patriarchy, classism, fatphobia, sizeism, sexism, misogyny.” I rattle off the words like I’m reading from a manual. “We live in a fucked-up world.” I slouch and my stomach curls inward, a C shape. Hollow. Empty.
“Yes, we do,” Dr. Mackenzie agrees.
I wonder if this place was designed to help its patients forget how fucked-up the world is. Sitting in this room is like sitting in a snow globe.
Then again, less than an hour ago, Dr. Mackenzie was studying my body for scars and bruises. Rush’s Recovery may have thick towels, organic lotions, and fine coffee, but my stay here isn’t a luxurious vacation no matter how hard they try to disguise it as one.
The center doesn’t even have a website. If you search hard enough, you can find mentions of an unnamed center where the disgraced Hollywood producer went for sex addiction, the rehab where some billionaire hedge-fund manager went after he’d gambled away other people’s money while high on coke, the recovery facility where a pop star went for “exhaustion,” trying to salvage her reputation after a terrible scandal.
I shift the conversation. “Am I your only patient while I’m here?”
Dr. Mackenzie nods. “Each guest has their own care manager.”
“How many ‘guests’ can Rush’s Recovery accommodate at one time?”
“We have three cottages,” she says, which isn’t exactly an answer.
“How long have you worked here?”
“Just under three years.”
“So you weren’t here when my mother was.”
“No.”
“So for all you know, they used to run this place totally differently.”
“While I don’t know exactly how things worked before I came here, I can assure you that at every turn, our goal is to keep our guests safe and secure during their stay. We want Rush’s Recovery to be a refuge.”
The word brings to mind wildlife trapped inside fences where poachers can’t reach them. Or my great-grandparents, refugees from a government that wanted them dead, forced to give up the lives they’d built in Germany. Refuges can keep you safe, but they come with a cost.
“You can’t guarantee your patients’ safety,” I counter.
“Guests,” Dr. Mackenzie corrects. Her expression softens, like she thinks I’m scared of what I might do to myself if left unsupervised. “I assure you that I will never be more than a few moments away. In fact, I checked on you overnight while you slept.”
“You did?” The skin on the back of my hands feels hot.
“After you went to bed at eleven, I set my alarm to look in on you. Once at two a.m., and then again at five.” She sounds as though she thinks I’ll be relieved to hear it.
“So you’re going to check on me every night at two and five?” I ask.
“Will it make you feel safer to know the schedule?” Dr. Mackenzie asks.
“Yes,” I say quickly.
It’s almost the truth.
In the afternoon, a woman with an Australian accent who tells me her name is Leonie arrives.
She leads me to a yoga studio on the cottage’s lower level, passing (I assume) the bedrooms where Maurice, Izabela, and Dr. Mackenzie sleep, where Dr. Mackenzie sets her alarm to check on me like I’m her sick child.
The yoga studio has mirrors along one side, floor to ceiling, like the room where Georgia sent me to ballet class when I was little.
I always wanted to be a ballerina, she said. But Grandma Naomi said that kind of thing was a waste of money. No one makes a living as a ballerina. Georgia mimicked her mother’s voice when she said that. I was supposed to laugh, but I didn’t.
Six years old and you already take her side over mine.
There’s a barre against one wall, and I resist the urge to stand next to it and plié, practicing first position, second position, all the way up to fifth. My ballet teacher said I had bad feet, and Naomi pulled me out of class in fifth grade.
Naomi also decided I should go to boarding school in Big Sur when I turned fifteen (harder for Georgia to show up smashed to parent-teacher conferences that were 350 miles away), followed by college in the Northeast, with the semester abroad (Paris) my junior year, followed by graduate school in New York City.
I think this may have been the first place I actually asked her to send me.
Despite the cold weather, Leonie is wearing only leggings and a sports bra.
Her arms are long and lean, her legs tightly muscled, her obliques visible on either side of her torso.
She leads me through restorative postures, putting her hands on my hips when I’m in down dog, and I can feel my spine lengthening as she pushes me, like she’s trying to force me to get bigger.
This isn’t the first treatment center that thought yoga would make me feel more connected to my body, more inside my body.
They believe having someone else’s hands on my skin will lead to some kind of breakthrough and I’ll realize that I take up space; I have borders and edges that can’t be breached.
They always talk about my body as though it’s an entity all its own.
Love your body.
Feed your body.
Move your body.
Their words are like a refrain from a song I can’t get out of my head.
As though my body is a stray dog found by the side of the road that needs to be cleaned up before it can be adopted by a family who will love it forever.
#Proana influencers like to talk about historical figures who were sainted for starvation.
Of heroes who went on hunger strikes to protest an unjust occupation, a war, a right deprived.
Suffragettes would pin ribbons to their chests, proudly announcing to the world for how many days they’d gone without.
But no one holds people like me as heroic.
I wonder if my fit, cheerful yoga teacher knows that most theories about eating disorders (they’re all about control, they’re exclusive to rich white women…
, etc) have been debunked, or at least augmented by other explanations.
Some research suggests they may in fact be neurobiological, which means all those therapists who complained about ED patients, calling us “difficult,” really ought to apologize, because we weren’t being difficult when we resisted treatment at odds with out brains’ wiring.
After yoga, I pick up my phone and see a text from my grandmother: I love you. I write back, I love you, too.
And another message from Jonah: Take all the space you need. Just glad you’re okay.
Okay is a vague term, covering a multitude of scenarios Jonah (who grew up in a house both his parents called home, with Christmas dinner and family vacations to Disney World) can’t possibly imagine. Not even after everything that happened.
Leonie and Dr. Mackenzie think I need to put on five, ten, fifteen pounds to be healthy. If I were truly healthy, I would be twenty-five pounds heavier right now, at least, but they don’t know that.
No one does, except Jonah.