Kelsey Osgood - How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia

W HEN THEY WHEELED THIRTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD A NNALISES stretcher onto the unit, the patients stood along the hallway walls and tried not to gape.

Now thats a lesson in moderation, someone said.

I wasnt there when she was admitted. I was still enrolled in college, spending most of my time hiding from my watchful roommates and trying to rid myself of my last vice, sugared bubblegum. When I arrived a month after her admission, a younger patient told me about Annalises first day, about how all the units inhabitants had quieted in horror at her presence. She stayed in her bed by order of the doctor the entire month I was a patient there. Occasionally, she would get a phone call and a nurse would wheel her out of her bedroom and down the corridor. She would lift the phone off the receiver and dial with the ends of her long yellow fingernails, the nails of a Chinese aristocrat of old, ones belonging to idle hands. She spoke only to her mother, and her voice was a weak croak. When I walked by her room, I would peek in and smile hello, fascinated by the disgusting creature who so rarely exited her bed. Eventually, we got to talking and she told me about how she was admitted to the hospital this time.

I told my mother, Okay, you can call 911. Her eyes rolled and she smirked, revealing holes where teeth ought to have been. She lifted up her arm to show me her biceps, where doctors had inserted nineteen bags of IV fluid. Her skin was covered in stretch marks, jaundiced and flaky. The room stank of dead cells. Her hair was so severely dreadlocked that the staff had been forced to chop it off. She emerged from the bathroom a cadaver with a pageboy coif. I think about all the images of Annalise that together complete her pitiful, humiliating montage: the staff wheeling her into the bathroom, me watching and knowing that inside they would hold her over a pot while she tried in vain to shit, her whimpering about the amount of apple juice she was forced to drink.

The juice is always really hard for me.

Her first steps down the hallway on rangy, atrophied legs, her terror at the prospect of being tube-fed. When the lawyers for patient rights came to visit, she requested a meeting. Two lawyers sat by the pay phones with Annalise as she looked at the papers. The lawyers turned the sheets for her one by one, and I imagined the spectacle of her in court, arguing to a judge that she knew better than the hospital did, that she could do it on her own, really. How could the judge not laugh in her face?

She told me she liked children, and I thought that kids would probably cross the street when they saw her. They would point and stare and make brazen comments to the adult that held their hands.

Mommy, whats wrong with that lady?

She was the worst, and perhaps most successful, anorexic I had ever seen.

One in ten anorexics will die from the disease, a therapist had said when I was first hospitalized, three years before I met Annalise. Look around the room. At least one of you will not make it.

I googled Annalise periodically after I left New York Presbyterian Westchester Hospital that time, as I did with many of the people I met in treatment. After nearly eight years of googling with no results, one day I stumbled upon her death notice on a funeral home website. Someone wrote that she had passed away after a long and courageous battle. There was a picture of her in the Slide Show of Memories, and though she was only forty in it, she looked closer to seventy. Her cheeks were full and chipmunkish, but her jugular was oddly pronounced and her closed-mouth smile awkward and sunken, betraying her lack of teeth. It was the only picture in the slide show, and it remained on the screen as a Muzak version of Amazing Grace played on repeat.