1983, Pennsylvania

By Anna Katz

Few people know that I have an eating disorder, and perhaps that’s because I don’t fit the typical picture.

I’m not thin; I’m average, at 145 pounds and 5 feet 6 inches. I don’t binge and vomit, though I do sometimes gag (and sometimes do a bit more than gag) before or during mealtimes, but never purposely. Perhaps the biggest difference between me and most people who suffer from an eating disorder is that I don’t think that I’m fat.

But I go through weeks where I can’t eat. I starve myself, sometimes from only food and sometimes from both food and water. Just walking into the kitchen can bring on anxiety, fear, and memories – memories of pain, memories of unwanted sexual arousal, and memories of violation. I don’t starve myself because I’m afraid of becoming fat. I starve myself because I’m terrified of my uncle raping me.

The fact that my uncle has been dead for 15 years, or that I live nowhere near the town I grew up in, doesn’t abate my belief that something terrible will happen if I eat.

My uncle, a sadistic, sick bastard, was a brainwashing genius. His meticulous, calculated assault against my body and mind proves that he wanted more than to please himself for the moment. He wanted to exert control over me when I was under his roof and when I was far away.

His abuse began when I was just 6 years old. My younger sibling was ill in the hospital, and my parents entrusted him and his wife with my care. I slept over in their house, in a room at the top of a spiral, carpeted stairway.

My parents were so busy with my sibling that they never noticed how I couldn’t walk straight when they visited me. When I cried for them not to leave me there, I assume that they attributed my tears to normal homesick sadness. When I screamed and begged for my father to take me home, he reacted first with amusement, secondly with anger.

They didn’t understand that my uncle was torturing me. And I couldn’t tell them. He would kill me.

I’m not going to detail the ways he hurt me at night, invading my bedroom, restraining my wrists and ankles with a nylon dog leash, and tearing apart my body and soul. I’m affected by those experiences, but they aren’t the cause of my self-imposed starvation. It’s what he would do in the morning, before sending me off to school, that caused my eating disorder.

In the kitchen, he’d sit across from me at a small round table. With my feet dangling below me, not yet reaching the floor, I’d sit pushed up against the table edge. My uncle would pour a bowl of cereal and milk, place it in front of him on the table, and ask me, “Do you want this?”

I knew the routine. It happened every morning while my aunt was busy caring for her children upstairs. “Yes,” I would say, my throat tight.

“You can’t put this in your mouth unless you promise to put me in your mouth later. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“You sure you want it?”

“Yes.”

“You want to eat this cereal?”

“Yes.”

“You want to eat me?”

I knew what I had to say to get my breakfast. I didn’t want to say it. I promise you that I wanted more than anything to push away from that breakfast table, run out the front door, and hide. But I was terrified. He told me that he would kill me if I ran away. He told me that if I told anyone, he would tie me up in his basement and hurt me whenever he felt like it “forever and ever.” So I said what I didn’t want to say because I wanted to live.

“Yes.”

“Yes you want to eat me, Anna?”

“Yes,” I’d say, my voice shaking. “I want to eat you.”

He’d pass over the bowl to me. And I’d stare at the Cheerios, watching the milk acids break down the grain and turn the crunchy morning meal into a disgusting, brown mush.

I don’t remember if I ever managed to eat much of the cereal. I remember only the cold metal spoon in my hands, the way my body shivered uncontrollably, and the taste and smell of him in my mouth – my mind reminding me what would come later.

But this isn’t the worst of what he did to me in the mornings during breakfast. Maybe he got bored watching me quiver at the table, bored with only forcing me to agree to please him orally later at night. Men like my uncle don’t enjoy simply torturing children. I believe that they get more pleasure thinking up what they could do worse, how to up the ante.

One morning, after days of going through the routine, he pushed me against the table, as always, but instead of sitting across from me, he stood behind me. And he placed the cereal bowl right in front of my seat. I didn’t know what to do or think. Do I just eat? Do I wait?

“Go ahead,” he told me. “Eat.”

When I reached for the spoon, he kneeled down behind my chair. I froze.

“Eat, Anna.”

I picked up the spoon and placed it into my cereal. I felt his hands reach around me, pulling the elastic on my pants away from my waist and slipping his hand between my legs. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. There was no way that I could fucking eat.

“Anna. Eat. Now.”

I did my best to put the spoon into the bowl, take a bite of the cereal, and when I started to chew, his fingers moved. I stopped chewing. He stopped touching. I began to chew again. His fingers moved again.

“Keep eating. Don’t stop.”

I wanted to gag, and I don’t know how I didn’t. Maybe I did, and I just don’t remember that part. I do remember that any time I was not chewing, any time I was moving my spoon between the bowl and my mouth, any time I was doing anything but moving around the food in my mouth, he didn’t move his hands.

With every bite I took and every moment I was desperately trying to break apart the Cheerios, he rubbed me, he pushed his fingers inside me, and as I tried to chew faster to make it stop sooner, he moved his fingers faster and faster. Until he reached a point where my body betrayed me, and did what every healthy body does when stimulated that way – I had an orgasm.

When my body convulsed, he pulled me closer, put his face disgustingly close to my ear, and whispered, “You see? I knew you liked to eat.” Then, in a voice and with suddenness that frightened me, he pulled his hands away from me and said, “You are such a bad girl,” and he walked away.

When he died, my fears did not die with him. But I did get pleasure from thinking about how he died, slowly from complications of diabetes, losing his limbs one by one, his organs consumed by the gangrene the doctors could not stop.

At his funeral, I’d look at my cousins, my aunts and uncles, and they would be crying for him. I didn’t understand. When the Rabbi spoke of the great good he did for the community, the charity he gave, how he would “always be remembered,” I felt a surge of anger.

I never told anyone what he did to me, but was it possible that I was the only one he hurt? Was I the only one at the funeral who looked on with a cold heart at the casket, felt relief that he was gone, and had to hold back the small grin that edged onto my face when I thought about his long, painful journey toward death?

I felt guilty. And maybe I should have forgiven him. Perhaps his painful death should be enough to please my desire for justice. But I’m still living with the aftermath of his mind games. There are few days that pass without me thinking about the things he did to me, re-experiencing the bodily feelings he forced onto me.

I do have one more chance to get revenge. After a particularly long self-imposed starvation period, my body decided to revolt, and I became ill enough to be hospitalized.

My little secret became public, as my doctor could not understand why a young, healthy woman became so ill. I told her about what I do to myself, and despite my fear of her rejecting me, she offered warmth, love, and help.

I’m getting better now. I don’t know how long it will be before I can walk into a kitchen without thinking of my uncle, but I’m starting to believe that it will happen one day. And when it does, when my uncle’s voice and abuse leaves my mind, then my uncle will really be dead. He won’t be able to continue hurting me, and I will live, eat, and drink without pain.

And that will be the sweetest revenge.

An award-winning poet and short-story writer, Anna Katz writes mainly nonfiction, her articles and essays appearing in numerous publications around the world. She is using a pseudonym, and some details have been changed to protect the identity of the author and her family.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 | Email This Post

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