Karen J. Weyant's essays have been published in 3 Elements Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Barren Magazine, Crab Creek Review, Cream City Review, Lake Effect, Potomac Review, and Storm Cellar. She is an Associate Professor of English at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York. She lives, reads, and writes in northern Pennsylvania.  

Bathroom Stalls

“Jenn’s throwing up again,” Kim said, shrugging as if this was an everyday occurrence with her roommate. I could also tell Kim felt slightly annoyed because after all, Jenn had locked her out of the bathroom.

“Is she sick?” I asked. I didn’t know either Kim or Jenn very well – they were just two girls who lived down the hall in my dorm.  Kim was tall and athletic with a tan that seemed to stay with her all year, even in a small Pennsylvania college, while Jenn was smaller, with rosy skin and short hair. Jenn had clear blue eyes with eyelashes so dark she didn’t need mascara. She always seemed to be cheerful, wearing a wide smile that showed off a slight dimple in her right cheek. Campus rumors whispered that Jenn had done some modeling. If these rumors were true, I could see why.

“No, her mother was just here,”  Kim said, shrugging again.  “She always scarfs and barfs after her mother visits. She’s on Jenn about her weight.”  Kim reached up to pull her ponytail tight and sighed.  “Her mother is such a bitch.”

Scarfs and barfs. That was a saying I had heard again and again since I had arrived at college. It was 1992, and that was how college girls stayed thin and avoided the famous Freshman 15. They ate, sometimes binging, and with help of a finger, toothbrush or butter knife in the back of their throat, they vomited up their last meal in a nearby toilet. It seemed to be some kind of crude college survival trick that I didn’t know anything about.   

But I did.

“I just don’t understand. How could someone purposely starve themselves to death?”

I listened to the two women in front of me as I stood in line at the local grocery store, my leg moving our shopping cart gently back and forth. I had been ordered to “Hold our place in line” by my mother who left to pick up a “few things” she forgot. I was impatient, sure that I had better things to do than accompany my mother on her weekly shopping excursions.  But for that moment, I found what the two women had to say interesting.

“I know,” said her companion, picking up one of the magazines that lined the counter. 

I hoisted myself up on the bottom rim of the shopping cart to see who they were talking about, even though I should have guessed.  A glossy magazine cover showed the photo of a gaunt Karen Carpenter, who had just died the week before.

I knew all about Karen Carpenter. She, along with her brother Richard, formed The Carpenters, a music duo popular in the 1970s. A fan of the Carpenters’ music, my mother sang their songs around the house. “Top of the World,” “Close to You,” “Only Yesterday,” “Rainy Days and Mondays” – my mother knew them all. 

But it wasn’t the Carpenters’ music that was the subject of the conversation. Karen Carpenter died from complications of Anorexia Nervosa. Although people, especially women, have always suffered from eating disorders, Karen Carpenter was now putting a face to an issue that few had talked about. I leaned in to the cart, placing my hand on a few grocery items that were beginning to wobble under my weight. I was ten years old, the age where my body wasn’t yet changing except for the fact that my sharp hips, knees and elbows seemed to be rounding into softer shapes. I knew my body would be changing soon, and I wasn’t looking forward to these developments, but from afar I admired the older girls in my neighborhood and their comfort in their changing bodies.

Still, there was a part of me that was slowly growing cynical of adults and their advice. I was learning that their advice about bedtimes, curfews, and boys was far from practical, and I was sure that in general, they didn’t always tell the truth. Certainly, they always knew more about some subjects than what they were willing to say out loud.

“I just don’t understand,” said the woman placing the magazine back on the rack. The cover folded slightly, so I could see a slight crease down the middle of Karen Carpenter’s face. Her companion nodded in agreement.

But somehow, I knew that they did.

By the time we were in ninth grade, we had all read The Best Little Girl in the World by Steven Levenkron, who, ironically, had also been Karen Carpenter’s therapist for a time. Published in 1978, the book told the story of a seemingly perfect teenager who was slowly killing herself by not eating, and even throwing up her food. It was a concept that we said we didn’t understand.

“We don’t know anyone who would starve themselves to death,” we all said. 

But we did.

Helen Wilson was a girl in our grade who was rumored to have an eating disorder. We had no real proof of this, of course, except for the way that she looked. Tall and thin, her cheekbones protruded from her angled face, and her eyes were sunken, a feature she could almost hide behind her oversized pink plastic frames. But none of us really got a good look at her. She wore baggy clothes to school, even in the early heat of mid May. In gym class, while the rest of the girls changed near lockers, throwing jeans, underwear, and bras on the benches before wrapping ourselves in towels and heading toward the showers, she darted into one of the bathroom stalls to change, then avoided the showers altogether.

Once I heard her in the girls’ restroom in high school. Stall closed tight, the bathroom air thick with Verve perfume and Aqua Net hairspray, I heard a strangled gag and cough. I stood staring at my own reflection in the mirror debating about what to do. I wanted to see if she was okay. I came close, my fist raised to the closed bathroom stall door. I took a deep breath. I stared at the crude stick figure graffiti carved in the wood, my knuckles poised ready to knock.

But I didn’t.

Just a few hours after I heard about Jenn and her recent visit with her mother, I ran into her in the hallway. She looked cheery enough, wearing blush to mask her pale skin and a cherry-colored lip gloss.

But her eyes gave her away.

Red-rimmed, with a stray eyelash on her cheek, she looked exhausted.

“Hey Jenn,” I said, and then paused, studying her. Here I was, once again, a mere observer to a world I didn’t understand. I wondered if what I read about women suffering with eating disorders was true. Was she really losing her hair? Was she growing a fur-like covering on parts of her body? Was she missing her period on a regular basis?

But my thoughts quickly changed. It’s true that I didn’t really know Jenn, but she looked so incredibly sad.

I tried. “How are you doing? How are you feeling?”

She looked startled, as if she didn’t understand how I knew her secret. Then, she regrouped.

“I’m fine,” she said, turning away. “Just fine.”

But she wasn’t.