The night before I bought a dragon, I dreamed of marine iguanas. I had seen a short video of them from National Geographic, these brine-crusted, prehistoric beasts that dove off the islands of the Galapagos, that could hold their breath underwater for 40 minutes. They graze on sea grass and algae and snort saltwater out of their noses. As for me, I have never liked to swim.
My past impulse purchases include a pair of green suede loafers, an antique necklace with a lock of someone else’s hair in it, and plane tickets to Paris. But really, anyone can buy a pair of loafers. Who walks into PetSmart with their mother to buy dog food, and says, I’ll just look at the bearded dragons? Who sees the little tank of baby dragons, bodies like toothpicks and heads the size of almonds, and says, I’ll just hold one, just for a minute? And who, when a tiny, precious, baby bearded dragon snuggles into the palm of her hand to absorb her body’s warmth, who could resist? Especially when he’s on sale?
“His name is Pancake,” I tell the other patients at treatment. “He is very cute.”
I already have a dozen photos of him on my phone. Pancake sitting on his log, Pancake eating a blueberry. Pancake thinking his reflection in my vanity mirror is another lizard, and bopping his little nose into the glass tank (this one is a video). I feel proud, like my mother says she is of me each day. But I do not see how she can be proud anymore.
It is lunch time. I have to have four carbohydrates, three proteins, and two lipid exchanges (we’re not allowed to use the word “fat” here). I also have to have a challenge food — today, chocolate milk. I make the meal mechanically; show Joanna the amount of peanut butter on my bread before I close the sandwich. Two carbohydrates, two fats, and a protein. We measure our meal plans in exchanges because we aren’t allowed to count calories. I tried to count them here at first, but I lost track. It was easier to add small numbers.
At treatment we have group therapy and individual therapy, and three supervised meals each day — well, the second meal is morning snack, but the calories in it are enough for a normal person’s meal. But don’t worry, I tell Joanna, I am not counting.
The therapists and aides are hyper-cheerful at mealtimes. They know how hard it can be to make a sandwich and eat it too, so they distract us with memory games or stories from their weekends. Some days, it is easy to get lost in their narratives, to recall as many synonyms for satisfy as I can — placate, nourish, fill, complete, please — and I don’t notice I’ve had one-and-a-half Nutrition Facts’ servings of cheese and crackers.
Today is not one of these rapturous days. I take small sips of chocolate milk out of a hot pink straw, and try not to think about how much is going down my throat, filling me, thick, cold, and brown. Drinking feels like vomiting in reverse. I want to stop. I look at Joanna. She smiles and lifts a spoonful of blueberry yogurt in my direction. Cheers. I wish Pancake were here.
In afternoon session one girl tells us how she smashed her Fitbit with a hammer, and how she hasn’t gone on a run in a week. Not even a compulsive little one around the block. Joanna is proud of her. She will move on to weekly therapy sessions soon. I’m not even eligible until I’ve been here five weeks.
My mom meets me in the parking lot. She’s a doctor, and she’s been working half-days ever since I began treatment two weeks ago. It’s not snowing, but the asphalt is thick with brown slush. I pull the seatbelt across my big winter parka. I can feel the belt through my coat, tight across my hip bones. Mom has my afternoon snack with her in the car.
“I thought we could go somewhere new today, before we go home,” she says. “Is that okay with you?”
I shrug.
“You’re going to like it, Georgia.”
“I guess.”
The destination in question is a low, white-washed building attached to a dingy garage near a busy intersection. There’s a folding sign in the gravel parking lot: Herps Alive Reptile Rescue.
“It’s short for herpetology,” Mom says as she pulls the car into park. “At first, I thought, you know, but then — ” she looks at me, looking for the smile that should be on my face by now. Instead, I un-click my seatbelt. I hear my mother sigh.
“Joanna says that you need something to care about.”
“I have Pancake,” I say. But still I follow her to the building.
BEWARE: BOA CONSTRICTOR ON PREMISES, the door says, below Yes! We’re open :)
A plastic frog greets me when I open the door. The air smells like turtle pee and aquarium rocks. The walls are lined in glass tanks, each with a laminated paper taped to it naming and describing the reptile inside. There are typos on lots of the signs, transposed letters, missing verb endings. Most of the animals are available for adoption. Some are familiar to me — iguanas, turtles, geckos — but others I have never heard of, like a tegu, the big, leathery lizard with a black tongue. His name is Romeo. I like to eat scrambled eggs, his sign says, as a treat.
“Can I help you?” A gruff man walks up to us, holding a tortoise under his arm like a clutch purse. “Name’s Keith.”
“Yes,” my mom says. She pulls me away from Romeo to look at the man. “My daughter, Georgia, would like to volunteer here once a week.”
“She would?”
“I would?”
“Yes,” Mom repeats. “She has a dragon at home.”
Keith scratches his chin with the tortoise’s shell. “Chinese water dragon?”
“Bearded,” I say. “His name is Pancake.”
“Cute,” says Keith. “Well, we have volunteer forms here, but we’ll take just about anyone. You just have to like reptiles, and…you can lift 25 pounds?”
I know he is looking at my body, shallow in its clothes. I dig my hands into my parka pockets. The smell of turtle pee is making me feel sick. I can feel the chocolate milk sloshing in my stomach. I swallow.
“I’m stronger than I look,” I say.
—
My first task at Herps Alive is to water the snakes. The ball pythons and corn snakes are kept at the back of the rescue, away from the turtles and the ribbiting doorbell, in a set of IKEA shelves rigged up with heat lamps and plastic shoeboxes. Each snake has a water dish and a hide (a hollow log, an upside-down Tupperware) in a bed of sawdust. My job is to take each dish, dump its residue into a bucket, then fill it with water from another bucket. Then I move on to the big snakes, in locked tanks on the far wall, and do the same. Except for with Bernie and Clyde, the yellow Burmese pythons whose tanks need two people to open. By the time I get to the lizards, I am lugging two utility buckets of water — one full, soiled with snakeskin and sawdust, the other with a thin crescent of clear water at the bottom. I am wearing a green tech-fabric polo that nears the knees of my loose leggings. Herps Alive! it says.
Keith walks past with a bucket of his own, full of dead frozen rats. Thankfully, I haven’t had afternoon snack yet, or I might have thrown up into the snakewater.
“Hey Keith,” I manage. “What do I do after the lizards?”
Keith barely pauses; he’s the only full-time employee at Herps Alive, so he’s always moving.
“Go behind the counter and get the kale, and feed it to the iguanas and tortoises in the tortoise pen.”
“Iguanas in the — ”
“We rotate the big iguanas in the tortoise pen.” Keith grabs a long pair of tongs, for some ratty business, I presume. “Right now it’s Iggy; I had to take Mushu out because he kept sitting on Gloria’s back. Rides her like a horse.”
“Oh?” I set down my buckets. The handles are digging past my finger pads and into my bones. When my body is underweight it feels incomplete, unstable, not-quite solid. It is like certain muscles haven’t grown in yet; I am missing finger pads and knee ligaments, the underparts of my skin. But realistically, the finger pads are not missing. My non-essential parts have died off, and must be remade. That’s what my mom says to me. When you do not feed yourself enough, your body breaks down and eats its own heart.
“How will I know how much to feed them?” I ask Keith. “The tortoises.”
“You’ll know.” Keith opens the door to the back. “Just fill the bowl.”
—
After my shift at Herps Alive I have dinner and PM snack, which I have to record in my food diary for treatment. I have to eat these in front of my mom; if I eat a meal unsupervised, it doesn’t count. But these meals are easier than the ones at treatment, because here, at home, I have Pancake.
As far as bearded dragons go, Pancake is magnificently ordinary. His coloring is not anything special — the same mottled browns and yellows of the bearded dragons at Herps Alive. But I’ve noticed that his irises are liquid gold; he has little orange spots on the ridges above his eyes. When he is stressed, black horseshoe marks appear on his stomach. When he is happy, he turns yellow. This is all ordinary but it is so beautiful.
Pancake is covered in spikes and ridges of cartilage, not pointed enough to hurt, but enough that if you tried to eat him, it would be an uncomfortable experience. I love the coolness of his scales, his bumpy back and spiked sides. I love that he is not a tender pet, a pet to cuddle and softly hold. At treatment I feel fragile; Joanna and my mother touch me so gingerly, it is like I will shatter into splinters in the hospital air-conditioning. At Herps Alive I carry my buckets and water the snakes, and Keith trusts that I can do it.
When I get home I take Pancake out of his tank to read with me while Mom cooks dinner. I’ve been following the syllabi for the classes I would have taken if I was in school this semester. Today’s is about medieval mystics, nuns who practiced self-denial to ascetic extreme, who starved themselves until they saw God. I feel an uncomfortable connection. Pancake sits on the pages and I have to pick him up when I want to turn them.
Mom always cooks from recipes in a little red box of index cards. Some recipes are her own; others are written in her mother’s or grandmothers’ handwriting; some are cut from the pages of Cooking Light or Bon Appétit and carefully glued to cards. Tonight’s recipe is a Pinterest printout, folded into index-card shape.
“No lizards on the table,” my mom says as she sets the stir fry down between us.
“He’s not on the table,” I protest. “See? I put a napkin under him. He’s a civilized dragon.” Pancake looks up at me. He is clean and I clipped his little claws that morning before treatment. I am right.
Mom picks up her fork and moves to portion out stir fry for me.
“No, Joanna says I have to do my own meals now, remember? I have to learn how to get enough myself.”
“Right, sorry.” Mom tips the forkful of stir fry onto her own plate to let me go first. “This isn’t a full portion, by the way. This little bit I have.”
“Ha, ha.” I pick up the wok and scrape an initial pile tofu and rice to the edge of the pan.
Uncertainty consumes me. Am I supposed to have three carbs tonight, or was it four? And how can I measure the half-cup exchanges of rice when there are carrots and scallions mixed in, and what about the lipids in the peanut sauce? The wok is heavy on my wrist. This action feels unnatural. I do not know what I am doing. I am overwhelmed by my inability to measure life itself. And it frustrates me.
Mom is watching me but pretends she isn’t. I feel my face grow hot, from the steam or stress I am not sure. How am I ever supposed to share a normal meal with my mother if I have to count everything? I want to stop counting everything. Isn’t the whole point that I stop counting everything, and find fulfillment in something that doesn’t kill me?
“Oh, Pancake! Georgia!”
I look down from my rice crisis to see Pancake tasting a cube of carrot, his front feet on my plate. He decides the carrot is edible, and takes it into his mouth with his sticky tongue, munch, munch, munch. He looks up at me as if to say, get in here, it’s delicious.
Pancake cannot chew with his mouth closed; perhaps I overstated his table manners to Mom. I can’t help but smile. I forget how heavy the wok is.
“Will he be okay?” Mom takes the wok from my hands and finishes serving herself. “Your serving looks good, peach, just don’t eat the part he touched.”
“Yeah.” I pick up Pancake and move him back to his napkin. He looks very pleased with himself.
—
Saint Catherine of Siena lived in Italy in the 14th century. As a mystic and nun, she lived a life of extreme asceticism. Her personal denial was so intense that she ate nothing but the Body of Christ each day. Her priest and sisters begged her to eat more; to drink water, even, but she claimed her refusal to eat was a divine illness. She died at thirty-three, paralyzed by starvation, in the grace of God.
In the medieval history class I was supposed to take, I learn about Catherine and mystics like her. According to the readings, medieval women starved themselves, feigned seizures, and hallucinated visions in order to claim holy status, and therefore be valued by their communities. This claim for divine fame was double-edged; erratic behavior could make you a saint, but it could also kill you.
I sit with Pancake after treatment as I read about St. Catherine. Her severed head is kept in the Basilica of San Domenico in Siena. In the Catholic tradition, her head is incorrupt, meaning that God’s blessing has protected it from death’s decay. There’s an image of her head, sealed in its shrine, on her Wikipedia page. The skin is stretched thin across sharp cheekbones and hollowed eyes; her nose is broken and her teeth uneven and brown beneath shriveled lips. Someone has tried to make her look beautiful, with painted-on eyebrows above perfectly round eye sockets. But no shrine can hide the dull, lifeless skin, the crack of suffering in her jaw. There’s a stain on the white habit wrapped around her head, hiding the desiccated, grisly neck from view.
My baptismal name is Catherine. I wonder, too, if my illness is divinely ordained.
Pancake tries to lick St. Catherine’s nose on my screen. I smile. If I put my nose close enough, Pancake will lick it, to be sure that it is a part of me. I bring my face close to his, close my eyes. I cannot see St. Catherine.
I hear Pancake’s little claws as he scuttles across my keyboard. I open my eyes. He has closed the tab on St. Catherine, and run to the edge of my bed. If I don’t grab him, he will fall; he does not have good depth perception. I hear my mom in the kitchen, back with takeout, tonight’s challenge food. I put Pancake in his cage.
Pancake is not smart, but I love him. Not but, and. That is something Joanna tells me. I love Pancake and he is not smart. I can eat food and feel uncomfortable and feel alive. My name is Georgia Catherine Hawkins and I will not die of anorexia at thirty-three.
—
Pancake’s diet changes as he grows. As a baby his main food is pinhead crickets. They are tiny and they chirp at night; I can hear them from bed even when I keep them in my closet with the door closed. He eats some vegetables — a bit of kale here and there, or a shred of carrot (not stir-fried). As he gets older, Pancake will eat bigger bugs, but fewer of them, and he’ll (allegedly) develop a preference for vegetables. I don’t see this part happening; Pancake is a diva. I leave him with a salad each morning before treatment, and come back to find the greens untouched and shriveled, and Pancake sitting towards the door of my room, waiting for me to open the closet and take out the crickets.
Pancake eats when he is hungry and stops when he is full. This is not intuitive to me. I never feel hunger, or at least, I don’t admit to it, but I trust Pancake. I trust that he knows what to eat better than I do.
Because he is growing. When I bought him he fit in the palm of my hand, and now his tail rolls off the ends of my fingers. His skin is dull in places; Keith says this is a sign he will shed soon. I’ve seen the other bearded dragons at Herps Alive in shed before. They don’t shed like a snake all at once, but in pieces. One week their forearms, the next their tail; their entire back rolls off in one spiny sheet. A complete transformation seems much more attainable when it’s broken down. Bearded dragons even shed the insides of their nostrils.
I learn this at Herps Alive. I get to go twice a week after treatment, now, and I even get to drive myself — Mom is back working full days. It is thrilling to drive myself somewhere, to tap my fingernails on the steering wheel and play music so loud I can’t hear my own thoughts.
At Herps Alive I water the snakes and give kale to the lizards. I go into the tortoise room and dump greens into the bowls. The first time I did this, I divided the greens as evenly as I could. I took a handful of vegetables from one bowl, put them in another, then took a leaf back into the first. Then put it back again. I wished for a ruler, a measuring cup, something more precise than my hands. I wouldn’t leave the room until I was certain that the bowl on the platform for the big iguanas had enough, so that Iggy wouldn’t go hungry, wouldn’t have to scramble over the slow, sturdy tortoises for more leaf lettuce.
Today, I give the tortoises their greens without measuring. I sprinkle a few pieces of cut mango into Iggy’s bowl. I leave the room. Lizards eat when they are hungry and stop when they are full.
—
Mom is not back from work when I pull into the driveway. I check on Pancake as soon as I get inside. He is shedding; his fingers roll off in flakes. I put him on my shoulder and carry him into the kitchen. I feel a muted sensation in my stomach; it is almost dinner time.
The kitchen is clean. There are dry dishes in the drainer. I open a drawer to put away a mixing bowl, bending carefully so Pancake keeps his balance on my shoulder. I stop. Rub my finger against a hard water stain on the steel interior. See my reflection in the clean spot. Pancake on my shoulder.
I hold the mixing bowl in my hands like an offering, to a god, to a saint, to myself. I am not sure which. I feel a pressure in my heart, an uncertain flush of hope, or maybe I’m just dehydrated. Joanna didn’t say I could do this. I look at Pancake’s reflection. But maybe I can.
I straighten up. “You know what,” I say to Pancake. “Let’s just do it.”
I put the bowl on the counter and Pancake on a napkin. I reach for Mom’s index cards, flip through appetizers, salads, side dishes, to breakfast. Take out a card in my mom’s handwriting. Parts of the recipe are crossed-out and rewritten, but otherwise the card is clean, its instructions memorized.
I prop the card up next to Pancake, who licks the edge of his napkin. I go to the cabinet, open the fridge. Take out a second mixing bowl, measuring cup, table- and teaspoons, my great-grandmother’s red-handled spoon.
1 c all-purpose flour,1 tsp baking powder, ½ tsp baking soda, ¼ tsp salt, 2 T sugar. Mix, then, 1 egg, lightly beaten, 1 c nonfat buttermilk, 1 T vegetable oil. Chocolate chips, poured in without measure. Stirred just enough so that there are no flour clumps, but no more than that. I turn the stovetop on, place a griddle over the grates. Vegetable cooking spray, no measurement given.
Mom walks in the door as I lift the first pancakes onto a waiting plate. She stops with her shoes half-off, lowers her purse to the ground. I pick Pancake up from the counter; perhaps this is why she is staring.
“You’re back,” she says.
“Yes,” I say. “And I made dinner.”
—
For more information on eating disorders, please visit the website for the National Eating Disorders Association. To support lizards like Pancake, consider making a donation to the real Herps Alive in Cleveland, OH, via Facebook.
