Chapter Seven: Jennifer
Some years ago, I wrote a book about my ten days in an eating disorder treatment center. It was never published, but now I feel like sharing some of it. I’m going to post random chapters to be enjoyed in little servings like this. –Juliana
Jennifer is twenty-three. She looks like a life-size Victorian porcelain doll. Her long dark brown hair forms perfect natural ringlets after she washes it. She twirls the long silky curls around her fingers when she is watching TV in the main room or when she is listening, or maybe daydreaming, as others talk about their feelings in group check-in.
Jennifer, a bulimic, has milky white skin and beautiful delicate features and a voluptuous figure. There is softness in her demeanor, too. She seems very nice, pleasant. Demure. She never complains.
Jennifer recently got out of McLean Hospital. She went home for a brief period and then she came here. I wanted to go to McLean, where various literary and musical talents did time (Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, James Taylor). It has a great reputation as a mental health facility and their “womens program” (which Jennifer was in) seemed tailor-made for me, designed as it was to tackle a number of interwoven problems together, including depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. McLean wouldn’t accept my particular insurance plan, though, so I ended up here.
Jennifer’s parents keep sending her to different residential treatment programs. They must be rich, I think. They would have to be, in order to keep their adult daughter in perpetual treatment.
In her free time Jennifer can usually be found sitting, legs crossed under her, on one of the couches in the main room with a magazine or two or three in her lap and a pair of scissors in one hand, turning the pages with her other hand, and cutting when she comes upon an image—a photo or illustration or word or group of words—that she likes. She snips and snips and all the magazines in the common area have shapes cut out of them; empty shapes made of negative space, where there used to be something.
I imagine there is a big paperboard collage somewhere that Jennifer is constantly tweaking. A work in progress, never finished, never just right. But I’ve never seen it.