Basically, anything that tasted good.
As an impressionable and insecure middle-schooler, all I knew was that Elizabeth’s mom was beautiful, smart, happy, confident, and thin. She had it all together, the answer to everything, and on top of that, she fit in. Oh, to have her confidence and ease around people. I wanted a fraction of it. If I dieted, maybe I could have what she had.
By the time I turned thirteen, I became hyperaware of the bodies of girls and women around me, including my own mother. People told me how much I resembled her, which I thought was utterly ridiculous. “Yeah,” I’d say with sarcasm, “I’m the troll version.” My mom didn’t like it when I said that, but I had proof! When the movie American Pie came out later that year, I became known as the Shermanator (a loser character who loved Terminator movies) to my peers, while my mom was voted, by the same peers (thank you, horny middle-school boys!), number-one MILF (Mom I’d Like to Fuck)—the only social honor I’d be remotely associated with, by the way. She thought that was gross. I thought it was way better than being the Shermanator.
I had a one-track mind and continued to be meticulous about what I put in my mouth, when, and how often. My weight was slowly decreasing, but not to the point where the doctor my mom took me to found it concerning.
“Linda, she is really active. I really don’t think anything is wrong. This has been happening since she was little,” the doctor said, adjusting his thin glasses onto his slightly crooked nose.
“I know, but I am just making sure, because she seems to be watching herself lately,” my mom said in a low voice.
I wanted to scream and signal with my hands, “Yoo-hoo, Mom, I can hear you. I am right here,” but I refrained.
“Dani, is this true?” I felt the doctor look at me, his big brown eyes like spotlights. He knew me so well, having been my pediatrician since I was a baby. It was hard for me to lie to him. Hard, but not impossible.
“No,” I quietly answered, twisting my curly brown hair into a bun on top of my head and wondering how I could similarly twist this conversation.
“Then you won’t mind if we add milkshakes to your diet to help you gain weight?” he inquired, as if testing me by my reaction to his request.
“As long as it’s vanilla,” I instinctively blurted. “Can I have that instead of vegetables?” I added, trying to sound like the naive child they hoped I was.
And BINGO, they loved that answer. My mom and the doctor were both satisfied with my fake childish request, but, the truth was, all I could think about was how I was going to compensate for those shakes.
They didn’t know how good the empty pit in my stomach felt. They didn’t know how satisfying it was to have control over one damn thing in my life. I couldn’t control how hard it was for me to keep up academically without anxiously studying 24/7 or what people thought of me, and gosh it gets tiring trying to please everyone. In fact, nothing seemed to come naturally to me but this—dieting. And I wasn’t going to be the one to let them in on my secret, that it was deliberate, especially when they were so intent on taking it away from me.
To placate my mother, I drank those awful milkshakes twice a day to gain back some of the weight. After just a few weeks and pounds gained, my mom let me go back to “regular eating.” She even stopped watching over me, thinking I must be fine. The physician hadn’t said I had an eating disorder. GPs weren’t as aware of identifying and responding to eating disorders as they are now. Eating disorder awareness and knowledge of it as a mental illness wasn’t as widespread back in the ‘90s. He just said I should gain a couple of pounds and, once I did, that was that.
Aside from observing how thin or heavy other girls my age were, I decided to try “fitting in,” and started to pay attention to what popular girls did and wore. At thirteen, I began straightening my hair with a flat iron every night. I started to wear tight jeans and even tighter tops. Thanks to the skinless, juiceless, tasteless chicken I had eaten over the months, I finally felt confident enough in my body to wear something besides sweatpants. I began putting on eye makeup in the morning, carefully curling my lashes with a metal device that looked like a torture implement.
Surprisingly, I managed to fall in with a group of girls who were considered popular, Elizabeth included. Even more surprising, I got my first boyfriend. We never spoke. Actually, our breakup talk—initiated by me—was our longest conversation during our entire daylong relationship. The reason I bailed: his previous girlfriend implied I’d have to make out with him, and my inner perfectionist shouted, “What if you are a bad kisser?!” I couldn’t risk it and was too terrified to go through with it. Overall, really skinny seemed to be treating me well, at least from an outside perspective.
As I fried away my frizz for hours a night, thinking, Take that, Fluffy, Dani Sherman was changing. Yes, I was changing my look, but my desire to fit in was tested by the biggest change of all.
Books like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret make getting your first period sound exciting, something to be eagerly anticipated. But really, is there any rite of passage more humiliating? At least that’s how I felt. Everything about this change into something unknown to me—a woman—freaked me out. First, the act itself was disgusting—like ewww gross, a horror movie in your panties. Second, this intensely mortifying gross experience is somehow never private. I decided I could avoid some of this by not telling my mom. So I concealed the blood, using tissues as pads. Reality check: tissues last only so long. I needed parental guidance to tell me what to do to stop Scream 4: Panties Edition from staining all of my clothes.
“Mom, I think I may have gotten my period,” I blurted to her the next day, tears dripping down my face. I wanted to disappear.
“Oh wow, congratulations. My little girl is growing up. Wait, you think? Are you bleeding?”
“Yep!” I shouted between sobs.
“Why are you crying? This is great news.”
“I don’t know,” was all I could say, through broken tears and heavy breaths.
My mom, having gotten the confirmation she was looking for, put her arms around me, holding me tightly. Ugh, teary-eyed and huggy. Like, please, anything but that reaction. And, as I predicted, everyone wound up finding out: aunts, uncles, cousins, my father. The very moment when I most wanted to crawl into bed, hide, and never be noticed by anyone in the outside world was the same moment that all attention was on me, with mazels and the Jewish minhag (ritual) of the slap in the face—and that slap hurt!
Then no sooner did my mother bring home my first box of pads than I got boobs. Does anything scream, “Look at me!” more than two protruding knobs of flab? I was becoming a woman, except I could never compare to the women around me, like my own mom and Elizabeth’s. They belonged in this upper-class town, and there was one thing I knew for certain—I sure as hell didn’t.
I was different from this town and privileged life I grew up in. I didn’t belong here, and I hated it. I hated the fact that it was so hard for me to find my place, to fit in, to be normal. I hated the fact that I felt so different—so weird—and I couldn’t put my finger on why. But most of all, I hated myself for hating it so much. I knew these were lucky problems, and how dare I feel bad about myself when there were so many real problems in the world? I also felt like I could never do enough to make up for all I was given. I would never be enough.
I calmed this guilt and self-hate with the only control I had, control over food. This meant further tightening the reins on my eating, thinking the less I ate, the better I would feel. I would chew on Cotton Candy Bubblicious instead
