Icarus

            by Emily Judd

 

            Most kids have tried to fly.  We have jumped off of walls and play structures, tied kites to our belts, or just willed ourselves to levitate.  At some point, most of us gave up and left it to birds, bugs, and bats.  I was just a little slower to realize the foolishness of trying to fly.

            When I was young and light, my brother was a kite-fanatic and I used to go kite flying with him at the Marina.  My kite-flying was limited to holding the one-string kite, watching it dance about in the sky.  More often, I liked to sit and watch him as he steered one of his numerous trick-kites, leaning back against its pull and guiding it through loops and complicated figures.  Sometimes I wandered off the paths to lie in the tall grass where it was warm and quiet so I could pretend the kites I saw were dancing of their own accord.  One day I decided to try the trick-kite.  After a lot of ineffective yanking on the strings, I got it up and was trying to figure out how to make it dance when the wind picked me up. At first I was euphoric; I was finally airborne.  But as my feet dragged across a gopher hole, I got nervous that the kite would carry me off into the bay.  As I began imagining all sorts of giant, prehistoric fish munching on my bones, my brother rescued me by grabbing my hands, grounding me while still flying the kite.  I could have let go of the strings, but this obvious and sensible solution somehow didn’t occur to me.  After this, my brother gave me a smaller kite and showed me how to lean back against the pull and to yank my arms down to bring the kite up. I never got as good as my brother at flying kites, but I learned to stay on the ground and out of the bay while the kite did the flying.

            My fear of being carried off and dying some random, horrific death did little to diminish my obsession with flight.  Whenever my friends came to visit, we put on capes or squashed wings from fairy or butterfly costumes and ran around the house shrieking.  When the Harry Potter books came out, we held broomsticks and ran up and down the driveway while throwing a bouncy ball to act as the snitch.  But the best flying for me was when it was my turn to sit on the triangular pillow and careen down the stairs, speeding headfirst towards the wall.  When the pillow lost too much foam, we sat in sleeping bags and bumped our way down.  This technique hurt more and was a lot less satisfying.

            I had a reoccurring dream of sitting in a tiny plastic chair and hurtling down the stairs.  This was probably the closest I got to a flying dream, so I tended to play out my flying in real life.  However, I wasn’t quite willing to try throwing myself down the stairs in a tiny plastic chair.  Eventually we took turns climbing up the rope dangling from my ceiling and hung there while the friends below twisted the rope as tightly as they could and then let go.  Or we squeezed through the slim gap between the locked gate and the fence at Malcolm X.  Once through, we ran to the swings and each tried to swing a little higher than the other.  One time, running across the hot cement, we saw that one swing was looped around the bar it hung from.  We wondered how this could have happened, and decided by committee that some other kid had flown so high they had swung all the way around.  From then on, we attempted to emulate the brave pioneer who had managed this incredible feat and tried to see if we could pump ourselves high enough to loop around the bar. Sadly, our cowardice, which hardly permitted us to leap from the swing to the tarry rubber, never let us reach this height.

            At our own school, there was a short ledge around the bushes where the mice lived.  Most of the time we fed the mice, but sometimes we pretended to commit suicide by jumping off the ledge, waving our arms and wailing ‘aaaargh’.  Secretly, I imagined I was flying in the two-foot free-fall before my feet struck ground. 

            In middle school, we were all too self-absorbed and angsty for any one to be well-grounded.  Instead, we pretended to have our feet firmly on the ground, by looking like everyone else.  I decided that middle school was my chance to fit in; no one would remember me as the buck-toothed shrimp who wore her brother’s old hand-me-down clothing and got stuck in trees.  Dragging my mother along as a wallet and some measure of common sense, I went out.

            “What about these pants?”

            My mother looked up from The New Yorker to see my head peering from the changing room of Goodwill.

            “I can’t see them,” she laughed.

            Reluctantly, I emerged.  They were so large that they formed a bucket in the back.  I retreated back into the room and took the next pair from the pile on the bench.  These jeans were so tight they couldn’t squeeze past my hips.  As I tried to pull them off, it became clear that they were quite firmly stuck.  I tried to sit on the bench, but I couldn’t bend my knees. Silently, I tried to scootch out of them.  That didn’t work.  Neither did wriggling, hopping, or flailing.

            My mom finished an article about the democratic nominees, “Emily, did you fall asleep in there?”

            After an overly-long silence, I squeaked out with rising panic, “I’m stuck! I’m never going to get out!”

            “Open the door so I can come in,” she told me as I toppled into the wall. “If worse comes to worst, we can buy them and cut them off at home.”

            I considered the idea of trying to bike home in the pants, then considered the alternative of walking in them.  Neither seemed particularly appealing or even feasible.

            Fortunately, with some well placed tugs below the knee, where I couldn’t bend to reach, she freed me from the dreadful jeans.  Careful of my bruised hips, I tried the next pair.

            With my array of too-big pants that were probably meant to be tight, and the first normal-looking shoes I had found (which just happened to be the new basketball shoes), I succeeded in being not particularly interesting.  However, my success was a somewhat lonely one.  Rather than having impassioned conversations about the gods of the underworld in the sewage system, I stared into the distance and worried about whether or not my friends secretly hated me. My paranoia made me wonder if the friends I cared about were really my friends.  So I finally came up with a somewhat bizarre solution to life.  It incorporated a technique used in a health survey in science class-- I would write down everything I ate.  Somehow, in my mind, this seemed like a good idea.  My miracle plan would make me perfect so I could catch the perfect friend, or else I would simply fly away.  I didn’t particularly care which.

            I was efficient in carrying out my plan, and soon began to feel the effects.  I felt isolated from everyone and was glad. I wore every jacket I had, trying to warm up from a chill that seemed to seep out of my bones.  I was so tired that I barely managed to call up enough energy to stagger up the stairs to class.  But when I ran I didn’t need anything.  Without any excess fat, I was in complete control.  I was all muscle and had no breasts to bounce around, no extra weight to carry; everything worked together.  When I ran, I flew.  The night air froze my wrists to wings as I leaped over the shadows and cracks in the sidewalk.   The rest of the time I was cold and snappy, but when I ran, I was sociable.  I got along with my dad and sometimes contributed a question or two to his nearly constant chatter.  He’d tell me how electronic signals worked, how elements were synthesized, the plot of the last book he’d read, how he met my mom.  The rest of the time I wanted to sleep and was worn out simply from lifting my unwilling eyelids.  I was too tired to move my tongue to talk.  Too tired to think of anything to say.  But never too tired to run.  I was alive for those hours.

            I stopped caring about much.  When I got too upset, I’d lie on my stomach with my hands pressed against it to quiet the empty ache. Not worrying or dreaming about anything just blank.  I was in control of myself -- free and independent and very tired.  Of course, I was more alone than before; I had no energy to go about being friends with people.  I barely had enough energy to wear all the jackets and scarves I piled on, much less do anything.  But I was glad to be alone.  Running my hands along my ribs I felt the power unmasked by fat.  I was strong.  I didn’t need to eat, only to fly.  I would never be a powerless fat woman stuck on the ground.  Each night I soared higher and higher.

            Meanwhile, I got more short-tempered and depressed.  More reluctant to move from my bed.  Colder.  I wore every jacket in the house and looked like a bag lady.  Usually, I remembered to smile around my friends, but sometimes they’d tell me I seemed like some sort of black hole; that it was scaring them.  I lied more and more.  My parents were puzzled, but couldn’t pin down what was happening.

            “Aren’t you going to eat breakfast?” My dad would ask in surprise.

            “I did,” I’d snap in exasperation, “I ate it while you were in the bathroom.”  Sometimes I had eaten breakfast--a raisin because it was sweet.  I leaned against the heater even though the metal was so hot it burned.

            I packed my own lunches - a small chunk of rice-cake.  Often I settled down on the ledge to eat it during snack time, and my hungry friend exclaimed, “Ooooh!  You have rice-cakes!  Can I have a piece?” I gave her the only piece I’d brought.  It was mostly air anyways.  I shivered through all my classes and ignored all the lectures, except in art class where there were none.

            I ate dinner around three to be alone.  This meal consisted of an apple and a corn tortilla.  Maybe, feeling indulgent, I tossed on a little cheese and a piece of lettuce.  I’d microwave it, but I still felt cold.  That was ok though because I could fly.  I was a fairy.  Someday I’d glide away and never be cold again.  Sometimes it’s not a good thing to believe in yourself.

            At one point, rejoicing at having the house to myself, I stood on the scale in my parent’s room.  It pointed to the number 65.  That sounded like a nice number, but I figured I could get lighter.  The heaviest eagles only weigh around 30 pounds.  I never got much below 65 pounds.  I guess I must have flown too close to the sun, because one night everything came tumbling down.

            The zig-zag plaid was flashing in front of my eyes.  Liar liar liar.  I was panicking and breathing sharply.  Liar liar liar.  I tried to close my eyes against it; just sleep and let it drain away in the night and be forgotten in the mist of daytime.  Liar.  I couldn’t ignore it.  I tumbled out of bed and, shaking, made my way to my parent’s room.  My mom was away, but my dad was sitting at his desk playing solitaire and scratching his bushy beard with a crackling noise.  I stood in the doorway, and felt better.  I turned to go back to bed and forget about the incident when another wave of guilt tore at me. Liar! Liar!  I let out a sob and my dad turned, surprised.

            I don’t remember what I said, how much I told him.  Sometimes I’ll mention something about this time and my parents won’t have heard that detail yet. Somehow I confessed that I had lied about eating.

            Oddly enough, my dad didn’t seem to care about the lying part.  He took me downstairs and told me to eat something.  He sank into one of the old, sagging green chairs sitting around the dining table and I took down the box of saltine crackers.  The box was red and had a picture of five crackers lying against each other.  I wondered why people always seemed to pick odd numbers to make things seem random. I decided it was because people liked that they weren’t all paired off.  I ate five crackers, nibbling off the perforated edges on each one.  One serving.  Sixty calories. My dad sighed at the table and I turned to look at him.  His eyebrows met at a crease above his nose and he looked so worried that I almost cried.  The chair creaked as he took down a large chemistry handbook with gold-edged pages and duct-tape holding the cover together.  He began to scan lists of foods and their respective calories.

            “How much have you been eating?”

            Even though it was lying that had brought me down here I edged away from as much unpleasantry as I could and lied again.

            “I dunno.”

            I had records of everything I ate, down to the last calorie.

            He flipped through the book and said to be careful about eating too little, especially as a runner.  This soon became a familiar routine.  I’d confess to not eating more than the cereal they made me eat in the morning and a grapefruit.  My dad would flip through the book and talk about the metabolism digesting muscle when it had nothing else to burn.  I’d cry and promise to eat more.  The next day he’d tell me about people developing holes in their hearts from not eating.  I’d cry and promise to eat more.  The next day it’d be the same.  At times I’d sneak onto the scale.  I let myself plump up to 67 pounds.

            My mom took me to see the doctor, who was also a family friend.  He believed I could get better on my own and, although I didn’t know it at the time, he was the one who saved me from being institutionalized.  He challenged me to get to 75 pounds.  He asked what I thought of my body and though I didn’t believe it, I said I was too skinny because I knew what he wanted to hear.  After the appointment, my mom bought me ice-cream sandwiches and let me eat three of them one after another.  Practically every day I came home to the aroma of fresh cookies and delicious soups my mom and dad made to convince me that eating is a fun thing to do. She enthused over every crumpled drawing I brought home from art class, hoping that this would distract me from counting calories.  I made it up to 69 pounds. My dad flipped through his book.  I cried and made it up to eating 1000 calories a day.  Things continued in a similar vein until I got sick.

            I’ve always gotten sick a lot.  I got baby measles twice within my first six months in this world.  But this time I was so weak that what seemed like a mild cold soon progressed to a flu.  My fever sauntered on up to 105 and I complained of my hands being sandbags.  I was too weak to get up the stairs to my room, so I slept on the couch.  At one point my head fell off and I worried that it’d get kicked around or stolen. As my mom put a tepid cloth on my head and took away the blankets to lower my temperature, she apologized for the cold.  When I complained, she held my hand quietly.  When I let her hand free, she stood up and got the phone.

            I lay in a shivering daze as she talked in a hushed voice on the phone.  I found out only later that the people on the phone were telling her to put me in a clinic for anorexics and she was arguing that what mattered now was how to bring down the fever.  My dad read me some chapters from a science fiction book by Andre Norton.  My fever dropped later that day. I drank all the orange juice we had.  I felt better the next day, but when I tried to run I started coughing and wheezing.

            My mom took me to the doctor again and they told us that I had Restricted Airway Distress.  They called it RAD.  My dad and I laughed at this as we bounced around trying to warm up at the 10k starting line of the Far Side Run in San Francisco a couple of days later.  But he made me bring my inhaler.  As we were running up the hill in the beginning of the race it began to rain and I began to cough.  I clung to my dad’s arm and kept running.  When I saw the finish line with my mother waving a collapsed umbrella from the sidelines, I dropped my dad’s arm and sprinted.  I was going fast, but I wasn’t flying.  The photographer clicked photographs as people neared the finish line.  I finished third for my age group and ran my best time for the 10k.  Months later I looked at the picture of me and burst out laughing.  At my new weight of 77 pounds, I looked nothing like the scrawny drowned rat in the picture.

            I gave up flying.  When I reached 85 pounds and a towering four foot seven, I developed a figure which I got teased about and had no idea how to deal with.  I panicked after every meal, but ignored it.  I named my stomach Bertie and translated his gurgles for my friends to laugh at.  My belly button was no longer a shameful, childish ‘outy’, but a marvelously grown-up ‘inny’.  I sat around the house patting my belly, feeling bored and faintly miserable.  I was afraid to do anything I had done while anorexic in case the guilt returned.  Eventually I realized that I had turned my back on more than I needed to.  So I began running again, ignoring my frustration at running with this new body which didn’t stay together and bounced every which way.

            But I got used to it.

            This summer I went on an airplane for the first time.  When the plane first accelerated, I felt alternately sick and incredibly excited.  After the early turbulence, it was remarkably boring.  I could see out the window only if I got up and stood in front of the door of the bathroom, which bothered the people shifting from foot to foot as they waited in line. The view was beautiful, but after 10 hours of blue interrupted only by anxious bathroom goers flinging open the brown plastic door, I was glad for the scenery change of the fasten seat-belt sign.  We had been in daylight for 22 hours.  As we plunged towards the quaint, red-roofed houses which were the first I ever saw of a foreign country, I felt a little bit like I was flying again.