First Dinner

I don’t remember what meal was served that first evening, at 5:30 p.m. exactly - “the early bird special” I would call it later – but I do remember that I was really hungry to eat it.  I hadn’t eaten much of anything the first day, and my eating pattern at that time consisted more or less of one meal a day, and that meal was dinner.  Every day I looked forward to dinner, salivating almost, to let myself eat, though in this environment being hungry was something to be ashamed of, at least if you were classified, as I was, as a “restrictor.”  Bulimics are allowed to be hungry, but the majority of the girls seemed to dread the call to meals.  They crowded around the medicine window to get anti-anxiety pills.  They paced back and forth.  They practically vibrated with fear.

At Remuda, there are three tables for meals.  A monitor sits at each, surrounded on either side by patients each of whom have been seated in a complex pattern according to their “Ranch age.”  The longer you had been in, the “older” you were.   “Younger” patients are seated closer to the monitor and “older patients” further away.  The monitor is there to ensure that every girl finishes her food in the allotted time period – 30 minutes for meals, 15 minutes for snacks – and refrains from using food rituals at the table.  Food ritual is catch phrase they use at Remuda to classify any and all behavior that falls outside the norm as Remuda defines it.  There is a long list of possible food rituals, none of which we were allowed to do.  Among the myriad forbidden behaviors are the following:  putting ice in milk, cutting food into small pieces, peeling grapes, eating food one by one, eating food in a particular order.  We were required to keep our elbows on the table at all times and to turn our pocketed sweatshirts inside out, though depending on who was monitoring your table at any given time, the rules would change.  

You can imagine how awkward it was for me sitting down to a much anticipated first meal, hungry, looking forward to some real conversation with the other girls, only to find that meals are not a pleasant experience at the Ranch.  They are highly regulated, tense, exercises in restraint and for most of us, withdrawal from the addiction of food restriction.  What is more, the first three days, I was put on the “gentle diet,” mostly soups, jellos, and juices to get my stomach accustomed to eating again.  Little did they know, of course, that I would eat pretty much anything (hot wings, beer, chili) just not very much of it.  I was, therefore, very disappointed by the prison fair that lay before me.    The other girls had larger meals that they had chosen themselves:  spaghetti and meat balls, baked chicken and rice, hamburgers.   There was virtually no conversation.  A few girls may have asked me where I was from and exchanged a few words with each other about the day’s events, but other than that, it was silent.  Girls cut their food into tiny pieces and slowly, painfully, put each bite into their mouths and chewed.  It was excruciating to watch.  Being hungry and bereft of conversation to distract me, I scarfed down my soup and jello in a matter of minutes, and then had to sit there and watch the remainder of the painful proceedings.  I thought finishing my food quickly was a good thing, that it would somehow prove I didn’t need to be at the Ranch after all; however, finishing too fast is just as bad as finishing too late.   It’s all about pacing.  No wonder all the girls had been silent.  They were concentrating.  They were counting the minutes, counting the bites, trying not to go outside the parameters of this imprisonment.