Chapter 22
IT WAS A GIVEN IN MY FAMILY THAT JIM, JOHN, AND I WEREN’T going to college unless someone helped us. That’s what happened in my case. Lenore Saunders had a sister who was nothing like her. Nelle was kind on the few occasions I’d met her while Mom was hospitalized.
My freshman year I continued my passion for tennis.
I hadn’t given up on the dream that one day I might dramatically improve and play professionally.
The fall semester I played on the men’s team and became close friends with tennis pro Bob Helton and his wife, Julie.
He began coaching me, and I babysat their two girls.
The summer after my freshman year I lived on campus and worked in Bob’s tennis camp.
He’d have me spar with his twelve-year-old protégée Margie Brown, who beat me badly.
It began to dawn on me that I wasn’t going to make it as a tennis player.
To continue hoping otherwise was ridiculous.
The highest I’d been ranked was only fourteenth in North Carolina, and that wasn’t going to propel me on to Forest Hills or Wimbledon.
It was one thing to play local tournaments when I was in high school.
College and a pro tour were something else entirely.
I was devastated and became depressed, fixating on my weight, soon enough thinking about nothing else.
I’d see how long I could go without eating, my dorm room filled with bottles of Tab and Fresca.
That’s all I’d have as I attended classes and practiced with the tennis team while wondering why bother with anything.
The writing was on the wall. I was a failure. The longest I could go without eating was three days. Then I’d resume and anxiety would settle in. I needed to lose weight. I was fat. At 110 pounds, I wasn’t. But when I looked in the mirror, I looked huge and felt disgusted.
Every ugly thing anyone had ever said to me sounded in my mind like a chorus of hateful voices.
You’re no good.
So, I’d starve myself again.
You’re no good!
I’d eat too much, and on it went.
YOU’RE NO GOOD!
By the late summer of 1975, I was overdosing on chocolate Ex-Lax, taking an entire box of the laxative after binging.
Then I read an article about the eating disorders anorexia nervosa and bulimia.
That was the first I’d heard about people throwing up everything they ate.
Apparently, the ancient Romans used to do it all the time.
Researching bulimia like I do everything else, I got to be an expert at purging.
I began dropping weight rapidly as I became more deeply depressed.
I started cutting classes and slept through my English final exam.
At the beginning of 1976 during my sophomore year, I went to Rome, Italy, for January term.
By then I was down to eighty-nine pounds.
My fingernails were chronically blue and chipping. I couldn’t stay warm.
The first night in Rome a classmate and I set out on foot to find the Colosseum.
I remember thinking how small it looked in person.
On our way back to the hotel, we got lost and wandered for hours, the temperature in the low forties.
Neither of us spoke a word of Italian and had no luck when trying to ask for directions.
We finally found our way to the hotel, both of us exhausted and practically hypothermic.
That was the beginning of the end for me.
I couldn’t sleep at night because of the cars and small trucks rumbling below my window at all hours.
My roommate, Liz, snored from the other bed, and sometimes heels clicked along the marble corridor, people returning from the bars before the hotel doors locked at 1 a.m. I was increasingly exhausted.
Early evenings I’d go for strolls with Liz. We visited the Trevi Fountain, where Italian soldiers leaned against the basin wall waiting for Americans to buy them drinks or cigarettes. Liz would toss a lira into the water.
“Patsy, pitch a coin into the fountain and you’ll come back to Rome someday,” she’d tell me, her voice muted by loud splashing.
I stared at sculpted Triton blowing into a large shell, and Oceanus in his chariot while Salubrity held a cup as a serpent drank from it.
The gods in all their majesty and austerity were silent, their empty eyes looking back at me as if I were invisible.
I didn’t throw in a coin, assuming there was no chance I’d return to Rome.
Life was seeming hopeless, and it wouldn’t have entered my most wishful thoughts that one day I’d visit the Trevi Fountain while meeting with my Italian publisher.
In future decades I’d be back to Italy many times doing research for my Scarpetta novels, my forensic sleuth a first-generation Italian.
On our way back to the hotel, Liz and I would skirt the Forum. We’d watch shadowy cats prowling in search of food, their dark shapes darting beneath arches and through rostrums. The walks and my eating disorder took their toll swiftly, and soon I was too weak to keep up with the group.
In 1976 there wasn’t much known about treating my affliction.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop what I was doing.
If I had so much as a piece of melba toast, I was seized by anxiety.
When I ate, I had to “get rid” of it. I couldn’t stay warm, barely able to function.
I called Mom from Rome and told her I needed help.
The only place to turn in those days was her alma mater Appalachian Hall.
She called Dr. Bill Griffin, explaining what was going on.
I’m not sure of the exact date I checked myself into the hospital, but it was a late afternoon in January when Mom picked me up at the Asheville airport after I’d flown in from Italy.
I was too weak to carry my suitcase, and John had to do it.
When we arrived at Appalachian Hall, I could tell how uncomfortable he was.
I sensed he was unnerved and didn’t want to be seen there.
I didn’t blame him. I remembered the lobby’s thick carpet, ornate lamps, handsome upholstered furniture, and coffee tables stacked with magazines.
Not long before Mom was discharged the first time a decade earlier, we were allowed to have lunch with her in the big dining room off the lobby. Afterward, she gave us a tour, and I remembered the ballroom and a bowling alley so old the pins had to be set up by hand.
“Mrs. Daniels, we’ll take Patsy now.” The nurse smiled while an orderly picked up my suitcase and disappeared with it.
I was told my belongings would be in my room when I got there later.
But first they had to do “routine checks,” and I needed to “answer a few questions.” Mom hugged me tight, and I saw the pain and sorrow in her eyes.
I watched through a window as she and John drove away in our old gold Impala.
The nurse rested her hand on my shoulder.
“They say it’s going to snow tonight,” she told me as I turned away from the window.
She led me through the lobby, where patients sat on couches reading or staring at nothing, their mouths open or jaws grinding. An elderly man was talking to someone who wasn’t there. Another man walking by stiffly with a dead stare reminded me of Frankenstein.
I remember Mom telling me about her shock treatments, knowing what was coming when instructed to change into her nightgown. She was taken to a treatment room and placed in a hospital bed where the sheets were tucked tightly around her so that she couldn’t move.
She remembered a metal box with knobs and dials, and electrodes placed on either side of her head.
“No, please, not again,” she’d say as a man in a white coat stuck a needle in her arm.
“Count to ten backwards, Mrs. Daniels.”
“Ten, nine, eight…”
Fog and heaviness. She’d close her eyes and see flashes of red and orange behind her lids. Waking up to lights and faces, she wouldn’t remember who she was until the next day, and that was the part she found so awful. She’d wander the hallways like an amnesiac, a zombie.
For the next few hours, I answered invasive questions while the nurse filled out paperwork.
Afterward, I was taken down a long first-floor hallway to the darkly paneled office of Dr. Bill Griffin, in his fifties with receding gray hair, lamplight winking off his glasses. I found him affable and warm.
I was shown into a room and instructed to take off all my clothing. Why was it necessary, I asked as my misgivings grew. I had to be “checked,” and was too frightened to argue.
The nurse left and wasn’t present when Dr. Bill walked in, shutting the door as I hid under the sheet. He pulled it down to my hips, his stethoscope cold against my skin as he listened to my heart and instructed me to take deep breaths.
“Lungs are good, but your pulse is fast,” he decided. “Are you nervous?”
“I guess so.”
“When your doctor gives you a breast exam,” he said while doing it, “do you know how to tell if he’s turned on?”
“No,” I barely uttered, embarrassed.
“His ears turn red.”
I looked at his and wasn’t sure if they were or not as he continued.
“I’m not going to give you a pelvic exam,” he said. “I’m assuming you’re still a virgin.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re morbidly underweight but all seems in order,” he decided, covering me with the sheet.
As he left the room, I wondered if he’d examined my mother like this when she was here.
I could imagine her reaction. She wouldn’t have liked it any more than I did.
After hurrying back into my clothes, I settled into a black leather chair inside Dr. Bill’s office, looking around at books and framed degrees on the walls.
He sat down behind his desk, lighting a pipe. I noticed hunting pictures and several severed hawk claws that were disturbing to look at.
“We’ll find out the reasons for your problems, Patsy,” he told me. “Then you’ll understand and be well.”