People | Family | Bodies

What Adopting a Dog Taught Me About My Eating Disorder

During those first weeks, I was in a never-ending, often failing battle with Penny, then an eight-pound roly-poly of a beagle

The difference between not having a dog and having a dog is that I no longer leave things lying around. Before her, my messes—clothes, coffee grounds, salt and sand and dirt from the bottom of my Docs in winter—accumulated on my apartment floor until I grew too ashamed to invite people over, or until I found a cockroach scurrying from beneath my bookcase. With her, my floor is spotless, save for the clumps of dog hair that collect themselves around the questionably sticky edges of the bottom row of kitchen cabinets.

Though I’m careful, at least three times a day I end up with one hand gripping her bottom jaw, the other feeling for whatever paper tag or shred of aluminum foil she found on the floor. Between her teeth sits proof of everything I can’t quite keep together. I spend most of my time worrying about what she ingests.

I got the dog after the first of twelve weeks quarantining in Maine with my big sister, Emilie, and her boyfriend, Nate. The idea to stay with them was Emilie’s, though less of a decision and more of a flight response when it was clear that New York was hours away from lockdown. We had terrible Wi-Fi and barely spoke and checked our temperatures daily. The house was crowded with mice in the winter and mosquitos in the spring. It sat on a frozen lake, an empty and lifeless display.

The idea to get the dog was mine, only approved when Emilie and Nate saw a photo of her big, stupid eyes and white-sock paws. She was born in a Mississippi shelter that January and arrived in Maine at the start of the pandemic with five siblings—the Mario Litter, the shelter called them. She was Princess Daisy until I scooped her off the foster family’s snowed-in porch and named her Penny. Her tiny body shook against my chest, and I said I would take her. Of course I would take her.

During those first weeks, I was in a never-ending, often-failing battle with Penny, then an eight-pound roly-poly of a beagle. I chased her around the house, begging her not to eat the carpet or tear out the wires behind the TV. A couple days after I brought her home, I gave Penny to my sister to watch for an hour while I napped in another room. I spent that hour crying over how severely I missed the sweet smell that wafted from the back of her neck. Her uneven baby breathing was the only sound I could fall asleep to.

When I could get her to nap in her crate, I baked—it was one of my reliable solaces during those early pandemic months. The kitchen was coated in flour and half-melted licks of butter, the countertops covered in breads and pies and sourdough crackers made with the starter I had been feeding since the beginning of the end. For the crackers, I added dusts of parmesan cheese, cracked black pepper, and too-big flakes of dried sage my father grew himself and gifted us in an emptied ice cream tub.

The baked goods were all that made it through the barrier between me and my new housemates. I rarely ate any of what I baked—I struggled to eat much of anything—but they ate all they could and never threw anything away, even when they couldn’t finish. They were afraid to offend, I think, or to rob me of an opportunity to eat. Even when the breads turned tough and green, and the cookies decayed to dust, they left the food wrapped in plastic on the counter. It was only when no one was looking that I scooped up the remains and wordlessly discarded them.

I come from a family that doesn’t know what to do with discomfort, as though something magnetic repels us from stating the obvious when the obvious hurts, as though the best kind of love is the kind that leaves you alone. This trait wasn’t unique to the house on the lake, but it had never tried to withstand the hurt of a pandemic, of endless uncertainty and rawness with each new death count.

There were days when I looked in the trash and winced at how much I wasted.

I’d then think about my favorite Paige Lewis poem. In it, the universe poses a single question: How dare you? I felt like it was being directed at me, personally. At my hands, rolling out another slab of dough: How dare you? At my mouth, closed and wanting: How dare you? It was a question I feared and craved: direct, urgent, maybe even loving if held up in the right light. It was a question no one in that house knew to ask, even when it was clear I was unceremoniously starving.

It was a question I feared and craved: direct, urgent, maybe even loving if held up in the right light.

I’ve been stuck in the tides of my eating disorder since I was a child. The more severe waves of it hit me over the last few years until a therapist noticed, insisted I saw a dietitian, and listened to me promise over and over that I was ready to finally let go of its false sense of safety. My family knew only to stand aside and, afraid to make anything worse, tried to pretend they didn’t see me struggle.

By the time we left Maine, the dog and I had watched every fiddlehead along the dirt driveway turn to fern. A gaggle of Canada geese returned to their rightful summer home in our front yard. It seemed like Manhattan was safer, and the guilt of having left the city worked its way out of my heaving chest and somewhere closer to my jaw, spitting out the words I just can’t stay here. Going back to the city wouldn’t be a solution to the disorder, but it would, at least, be home. Penny was almost six months old then. Adaptable, I called her. I let her sprint through the bee-filled grass one final time and silently apologized for how abruptly her life would change.

*

On a too-warm morning in the middle of June, my mother called for the first time since I returned to the city. We weren’t talking much then, and when we did, we stuck to safe topics: weather, work, the funny thing Penny did yesterday.

“I called because I was just thinking about you and Penny,” she said. She did this often, said she was thinking about my life as though it were novel. I knew it wasn’t, and it felt childish to critique that phrase, a baby crying when her mother turns her back for a moment. You can call me for no reason at all, I wanted to say.

But instead, we discussed the dog—how she was sleeping, how she was eating. I was sitting in Central Park under my favorite black cherry tree on the outskirts of the Ramble. As we talked, a trickle of families laid out their blankets, took off their masks, and schmeared their sesame seed bagels. The birds sang and screamed to themselves as though none of us were there to listen.

“Are,” my mother began to ask. I knew the words that would follow. She asked them only once a year, but she sucked in her breath in the same way each time. “Are you eating?”

I usually said yes. Or that I was trying my best. Or that I was still seeing the dietitian. This time, I broke.

“That’s not the question,” I said. “And I think you know that’s not the question.”

I wanted to be asked why. I wanted to be asked, “What’s wrong?” I wanted to yell and be yelled at, for the silence to snap in two. I became mouthy, and angry, and I surprised myself and my mother, both. I was struck so hard by my own cruelty toward her I expected to wake with bruises on my chin.

*

The dog destroys so much, so easily. Every new toy I buy her diminishes to threads in minutes. Teddy bears and plush sunflowers, tennis balls with squeaky insides—all of them ripped open, oozing cotton and plastic. Her puppy teeth were tiny and razor-sharp and slid through skin when she got too excited. Once, when trying to snatch an old receipt out of her mouth, I moved my hand toward her at the wrong moment and ended up with a three-inch-long gash through my palm.

When she began losing her teeth, I found bloodied molars scattered across the floor. I picked up each one with surgical precision, collected them in a jar I kept beside the pink collar she wore on her first car ride home. Sheepishly, I asked a friend who calls herself Penny’s godmother if she wanted me to send her one.

“This might be weird . . . ,” I started.

“I thought you’d never ask,” she told me, both of us laughing.

“I love you,” we said.

Her adult teeth are less sharp but many times bigger. She has not learned bite inhibition, which is my fault. Her mouthiness is always out of play, not aggression, and she never so much as grins at the sight of other dogs and humans. Still, I am terrified by the thought that she could one day hurt herself or someone else.

All the websites say to teach her by howling and acting as though you are in sudden pain any time she starts nipping, replicating the way puppies learn to be gentle with one another. I spent months yelping at the sight of her teeth, but nothing changed. I go to bed most nights with my hands covered in small red marks, the occasional microscopic bruise. I know I have to teach her better, and soon. I know we’re both stubborn and doing our best.

*

When I was in Maine, I ate dinner by myself, too early, before Nate and Emilie were anywhere near the kitchen. Each meal was a production set to the sound of Penny whimpering at my feet. I started from scratch at four thirty, half an hour after I gave myself permission to pour a shot or two of gin over ice.

It was the same thing every night—piles of chopped root vegetables, roasted, stretched out with bunches of kale and lemon juice and salt and the occasional sautéed tofu slice. It took an hour to make, an hour to eat. When I could see the shining bottom of the bowl, I would add more kale and salt until the lemon juice was gone. By six thirty, I would take out the dog, call a friend, and doomscroll until the sun went down.

People are going hungry, said Twitter.

How dare you?

I remember those months less by what made it onto my plate and more by what I snuck into my mouth when I thought I wasn’t paying attention. I’d turn giant carrots into long, meaty strips and stick the dirt-filled tops between my teeth, crunch the sand and leafy stem. I’d suck the bitterness off cauliflower cores, peel a fleck of cooked garlic that burned to the stove the day before and place it on my tongue. Rub my fingers along the glass jar holding my sourdough starter and catch the flakes, then lick them off my palms.

No part of this ritual made me worry. I baked Emilie a tray of cookies today, I’d say to myself. And gin has calories. Most mornings, I would open my email drafts and type, “dinner: stir-fry with rice and tofu” in my food log for the dietitian.

My weeks were just a series of well-told half-truths, the kind that work until you realize you’re fooling no one but yourself.

One night, stabbing pain shuddered through my stomach until I could barely breathe. I woke up my sister, who brought me lukewarm ginger ale and Tylenol while scrolling WebMD. We ruled out appendicitis, gallstones, the stomach flu. Panicked, we called our mother, who drove from our parents’ home an hour away. When she arrived, she shifted between safety and risk—six feet away, then placing a hand on mine, then halfway out of the room. Mask above her nose, beneath her chin, in her pocket.

They both asked me what I’d had to eat that day, and I spit a lie into the air between us, knowing they were afraid to ask more questions, knowing my body was contorting itself around carrot tops and kale stems and screaming at me through its starvation.

Later that night, I’d fall asleep with Penny curled on my stomach, the Tylenol slowly drifting the pain. But in the thick of our collective panic, I lay in bed with the comforter pulled down to my knees, a bag of frozen peas to my bare stomach, while they looked on from the bedroom doorway. Penny howled and barked, having never seen a stranger in our house before. I tried to shift the attention off of me by laughing about her need for it, relieved by her unashamed desire to be seen, held, loved. The bedside lamp shone on my mother’s stiff jaw, her teeth grinding without the permission of sleep. Bodies do not speak for us, and if mine did, it was not saying what any of us needed to hear.

“I just don’t know what to do,” Emilie said, after digging around the freezer for an ice pack. “I’m so sorry.”

*

When the dog and I returned to the city on a cool afternoon, we found ourselves in my dusty, forgotten apartment. It felt trapped in time, abandoned to tell a story that was no longer—would never be—relevant. All but three plants were dead, barely recognizable. My landlord removed the ancient, half-working fridge in my absence and left a gaping hole in its place. The empty corners were blackened with several tenants’ worth of grime.

Bodies do not speak for us, and if mine did, it was not saying what any of us needed to hear.

On that first night, I walked with Penny onto the sunlit street. I saw couples gripping each other’s hands, swinging gently. A mother held her young son on her hip and brought a plastic spoonful of ice cream to his gummy mouth until his cheeks were covered in chocolate and sprinkles. It was the first time I’d seen strangers touch each other in three months. I left a voice memo for Penny’s godmother. I told her to listen to the sound of cars and trucks and people.

There’s life here, I told her. I know I missed the worst of it. I know that. And it might get bad again. Still, I said. I feel safer here.

But the safety was short-lived and aspirational. My eating disorder continued to unravel me, and the pandemic summer left me cold and panting, checking for my pulse too many times a day, resting my hand on my chest and wishing my heart could give me something more. I picked up Penny when a big dog snapped at her on the sidewalk, and specks of purple and black flooded my vision, my balance no longer trustworthy.

I told this to the dietitian in July, and she said what I couldn’t: “You just can’t keep doing this.”

It was a moment I was terrified of but yearned for, as though I’d been waiting for someone to catch the debris between my teeth, to let them yank it away.

Penny’s godmother drove to New York from her coastal Maine home and back in a single day. She left with Penny, her favorite toys, and a new dog tag that would deliver her back to Ocean Whisper Drive should she ever wander.

“It’s her summer camp,” we said to each other, laughing, wiping away our tears. It would only be a couple weeks, we said. We were hopeful, or naive, or both.

The next day, I boarded a plane to Denver, home to the best eating disorder treatment my insurance would cover. Within an hour of landing, I was naked and shivering under a blue paper hospital gown. I stared at the all-white tile ceiling and wished someone had thought to place a calming photo there for me to gaze into, something with blue sky or daisies or anything kitsch and corny. A nurse with dyed red hair and faded tattoos tried for the fourth time to stick a needle into my veins.

“I’m new here,” she explained, brushing hair out of her eyes with her wrist.

“It’s okay,” I said, flinching. “I am too.” She said nothing at my bad joke, rotating my arm gently from side to side. It took everything in me not to apologize for being there.

I was taken to my room, where someone placed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a rolling cart beside the bed. It came served on a paper plate with a cup of room-temperature baby carrots. I took a bite of the sandwich and cried, as if the universe finally got to ask its question. How dare you stay so calm as you quietly destroy yourself? How dare you believe you are anything more than an obstinate animal, shaking and hungry and tired? I cried as if I could slowly, ungracefully stumble my way toward an answer.

*

Two months into treatment, Penny’s godmother sent me an illustrated poster of a wolf. The wolf is snarling, lips curled until they meet her ears. Her body is all bone and tendon, a spine and skull visible through the fur, which morphs into a cloudy night sky. Beneath the wolf, the illustrator wrote in all caps: Love has teeth.

*

Most nights in Denver, I lie awake thinking about Penny. I miss her weight, her warmth. I think about what I would be doing right now if I weren’t in Denver, if I were still mindlessly going through the motions of the disorder. It’s a thought exercise that feels ubiquitous in treatment, a way to settle into the lonely reality that you can equally miss and fear the thing that hurts you.

I replay each movement in my mind: I open my newly replaced fridge and kneel at the crisper drawer in prayer. The Manhattan humidity pushes its way inside, cutting through any attempt to cool down. I find my fingers peeling away ribbons of red cabbage like skin, or rose petal. Stuff each layer into my mouth until the shame leaves me exhausted enough to sleep. Penny sniffs her way to my knees to see what I’m doing, places her wet nose to my knuckles and returns to bed.

She wakes me at sunrise by chewing on my fingers and calling it play. My eyes closed, I take my free hand to scratch her ears until she flops to her side, paws hanging in the air. I kiss her belly and thank her for all she consumes.