Elizabeth is Chinese-American but she hates the look of Chinese men, utterly despises them. She bitches about them constantly. E’s got big bones and huge shoulders and she actually looks better heavy. She looks best as a middle linebacker. Sumo E. No matter how thin she gets the other girls call her “The tanker, Ms. Exxon Valdez.” When E drops fifteen, her inflated Miracle-Gro pumpkin head looks even bigger. It’s monstrous in the first place and with the weight of this hydrocephalic water-on-the-brain head of hers combined with weak neck muscles, the head flops around like some kind of rag doll, or it will loll to the side depending on which way the wind blows. It’s a damn watermelon. She looks like Oprah Winfrey whenever that international billionaire TV mogul takes her own diet to the starvation level, when she has twice-daily workouts with a personal trainer, or so they say in the tabloids. It’s all a crying shame since Oprah is not a bad-looking woman. Oprah looks far better with a little meat on her bones, at least in my opinion.

However, it is well known that you can’t reason with anorexics; they can never get thin enough. When it comes to body weight a puker is supremely deluded. Puker stories abound and no healthy American woman can fail to read the horror tales of anorexia/bulimia with anything less than astonishment, fascination, and smug self-righteousness. “There goes that walking skeleton now. Look at her, two months ago she was fatter than a hog! Thank God it isn’t me!” My favorite anorexic story is the tragic account of Karen Anne Carpenter who, if I’m not mistaken, may have been on a macrobiotic diet. They wrote a whole book about it. What utter depravity! If Elizabeth doesn’t watch her ass, she sure as shit is going to end up burning a hole through her esophagus. Her teeth will rot to nubs. Note: I don’t swear in front of my dad; it’s disconcerting to him, though he sure enough likes to cut loose with the foul language. With him it’s always “Motherfucker this,” “cocksucker that.” “Shit, fuck, piss, goddamn it, Jesus Harrison Christ,” and so on. He listens to Samuel L. Jackson swear and imitates him, Pulp Fiction–style. I’ve heard this sort of trash talking from Day One.

The hard-core anorexic lives on air and bottled water, the aforementioned Chinese tea, and now and then an occasional baby carrot or a ketchup packet. I have made an objective and impartial study of the yo-yo dieter. For a layperson I pretty much have my finger on the pulse of this problem. I got eyes. I can see.

When Elizabeth goes long enough without food she becomes positively evil. Once after a Valium-and-beer suicide attempt, she confessed to me that an eating binge gives her a pleasurable sugar rush comparable to getting trashed on Tsingtao beer.