How many men obsess about being perfect? For men, gener- ally, good enough is good enough. Dad had decided that Peter and I should go to boarding school, as was common at the time for families who could afford it. Peter was enrolled at the Fay School in Massachusetts and I at the Emma Willard School in Troy, N.Y. Starting my freshman year at Emma Willard, being very thin assumed dominance over good hair in the hierarchy of what really mattered. I remember cutting out a magazine ad that said with $2 and some box tops they would send you a special kind of gum that had tapeworm eggs in it and when you chewed it the worms would hatch and eat up all the food you consumed. It sounded like a splendid idea to me-a way to have your cake and eat it too, so to speak. I sent in my $2 and the box tops, but the gum never materialized. When I told this story to a friend recently, she said, "You're a smart girl, Jane. How did you get duped into believing this and sending in the money?" Because I was 13 (hence immortal) and health wasn't a factor if it meant getting thin. I knew tapeworms weren't fatal. If it had been a bubonic virus I was sending away for, I'd have thought ywice-maybe. But anything that would allow me to get thin without having to do something active seemed attractive. Mind you, I wasn't as extreme as a few other girls, who had to be hospitalized because they refused to eat, but I prided myself on being one of the thinnest in the class.
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