Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (3 page)

As a memoirist who stuck to the bones of facts in my first book, I know that facts accumulate more facts, like dog hair or a good fit of the giggles, always
growing
, always piling up. I have a healthy distrust of facts because of this messiness, because they give way to new facts and, therefore, become moving targets of truth, which are still always there, in the background, as static, haunting, and untrue as your sixth-grade crush’s name inscribed in cement.

If I have had to bargain truth against facts in the pact I made in exchange for the privilege of complete access to four women’s lives, I have written about myself in the primary definition of truth, in conformity to fact, except for changing some names.

I have not changed the weight histories, relationship status, and ages of Katie, Lindsay, Mimi, Wendy, or myself. Here are some facts from March 2006:

Here is some additional information you can carry into reading this book.

Katie is, in a word, nuts, which made for difficult conversations. There is some inability in her to narrate in a straight line and, a native Californian who speed-talks like a Brooklyn lawyer, she relies on how things
feel
. Finding out what those things were or when they happened was like pulling teeth. I think she assumed I knew more about her than I did. Writing this book has involved more phone calls to get Katie’s time line right than with any other interviewee.

There’s a twelve-step adage that fits Katie perfectly: When a non-addict gets a flat tire, she calls AAA, but when an addict gets a flat tire, she calls 911. Katie is the crisis queen of the book, and sometimes every movement, every encounter, every thought was a physical and emotion hurdle that she had to be coached through.

In Katie’s world, there were few people on her side and no one who understood her for long. These feelings proved themselves to be both true and untrue, but she always waited for a friend to become an enemy and for insensitivity to show itself. Her story isn’t tangled into the friendships that developed between Lindsay, Mimi, and Wendy because she distrusts klatches in which it’s too easy to form sides. She knew that I viscerally understood her physical condition, and she trusted me for my brutal self-revelations in print and in cyberspace; I understood that Katie was someone in need of the pampering that a lot of fat women don’t get and cheerleading that, partly through her tense wait for disappointment, was missing in her life.

Katie was the most childlike of the five Angry Fat Girls, unable to wait to open a present on Christmas or her birthday, demanding to know what someone thought of the present she sent. She loved kids and doing kid things like going to the zoo. Our senses of humor were most alike, and we turn sarcastic and gritty when we talk to each other. Almost from the start we adopted a nasal drone in greeting each other. I always knew it was Katie calling when I heard the drawn-out, shallow vowels of my name: “Fraaann—cesss…”

Katie is as Irish as the Hills of Tara, although she wishes that she came from a Brooklyn Jewish family. She has auburn hair and sparkling green eyes, freckles and a big smile. At her highest weights, as was true for all of us, her face was dwarfed by her body, but she was lucky in that her eyes had never been swallowed up in fat, although they appear big when she’s thin—as does her nose. Thin isn’t always fair.

Wendy was the most eager to be interviewed, and she was the one case of hero worship among the Angry Fat Girls, an attitude that embarrasses me (I’d failed, after all), scares me (I am
not
Jesus, the Oracle of Delphi, and Sigmund Freud rolled into one person), and sometimes makes me distrustful (I have no star for you to hitch your wagon to). Interviews were difficult both because she’s hard of hearing and because she had a hardcore, deep-woods Virginia accent. Her words could get mangled between these two facts, and her voice often sounded like the unfortunate cliché of fingernails on a blackboard. Writing was often her preferred métier but she tended to get wrapped up in her sense of humor, which I didn’t always share. But I have laughed genuinely at her writing when it’s about her quirky history. The question she posed to her father about whether she’d ever eaten possum or the fight she had with her mother about her messy car in the church parking lot: this was Wendy at her most authentic.

Wendy is the most socially driven of the five of us. We met during her protracted separation from her husband when she was desperate to find a boyfriend. A prodigious reader, music buff, TV and movie watcher, Wendy subscribes to the
New Yorker
, is obsessed with Queen Victoria, and haunts the National Gallery of Art whenever she gets up to Washington, D.C. My first poetry teacher, Richard Hugo, called such people “culture vultures,” and it means that their drive is more class-and in-crowd-driven than it is thirsty curiosity. As a culture vulture, Wendy is the least introspective of the Angry Fat Girls. Her bouts of distress, I learned, often started off about one thing only to morph into another as I pressed further into what was bothering her. She might call in tears over a conversation with her boss when it was seeing her ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend the day before that was at the root of her wailing. When the AFGs suggested that she needed to fill the hole he left in her life, she would talk about online dating or harder workouts at the gym to lose more weight. It didn’t occur to her that taking a class or finding a church or taking bridge lessons—i.e., not filling the ex-boyfriend hole by finding another boyfriend who’s really meant to make the ex-boyfriend jealous—was a permanent way of filling a hole.

Wendy is the only Angry Fat Girl who has never been thin in her adult life. Among the many and complicated feelings I have for her is a physical retraction in her presence, and this demonstrates how well I lie to myself. I’m five feet eight inches, not a shrimp, but Wendy is a couple of inches taller and she seems so
big
despite our being closest in clothing size among the AFGs. She is rawboned and lantern-jawed, and she has a long stride and keeps her head down when she walks as though her destination was clear and near, giving a sense of hurry that takes up yet more metaphorical room.

Her favorite thing about herself is her red hair. She is prettiest when she is grinning; it softens her face.

As the instigator of Angry Fat Girlz and a compulsive reader of other blogs, Wendy had the scoop on what the respondents’ real names were on Amazon and on our shared blog, what each did for a living, if they were married, if they were happily married, what method they were using to lose weight, and how well it was working. Every holiday merited a card, every bout of blues was a summons to leave her desk and call the person in crisis, every item of clothing that became too big was passed on to someone a size beyond her. She was and is underemployed and bored, generous and sympathetic, eager to learn and devoid of the innate talent for self-study, and starving for love. Such a personality could be dazzling and overwhelming.

I loved Mimi from the start. She is fact oriented and pragmatic. Her email signature never varied: “Sometimes men are just stupid,” and it was a philosophy for her rather than an accusation. It meant, “Pull yourself together. Learn to stand on your own two feet. Depend on no one for free help or sympathy. Trust your own kind.”

Mimi is irreproachable. That was her ironic summary of what it meant to be the oldest child and a girl in her family. “You’re right, I guess,” I conceded to her admonition that I couldn’t afford to bid on a mink coat on eBay.

“Of course I am,” she chirped in her smug Mary Poppins voice that is saved by a combination of irony and girlishness. “I’m perfect.”

Also part of being the oldest was how hard she worked in one profession, making her the most tenured and stable of the five of us. She has moved around all her life, living in Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and while she has some close professional friends, she has few personal friends, preferring her own company so that she can cook, garden, work on her blogs and website, and pursue her many interests. Mimi and I get excited about Chinatown and the Qi Gong massage joint on Grant Street, share a love of Christmas festivities, and have similar tastes in movies. I consider her my closest all-round friend. There are friends who might know me better, but they weren’t present for me in the way that Mimi was—my best friend from first grade and I rarely touch base, for example, and B.J. is my best bud on the streets of Brooklyn Heights but is mercurial and prone to grudges. Yet Mimi, who probably has fewer friends than I, would not say the same of me.

Mimi is the prettiest of the AFGs. She has the looks of a Victorian German doll—a lustrous, porcelain complexion, blonde hair, blue eyes, and a pensive sweetness. She has a sexy voice, smooth as maple syrup, girlish, but backed up by intelligence and confidence.

I liked and admired Lindsay from our first conversation. She is a perpetual student, simultaneously seeing herself as a slacker and the lifeblood of practicality in her marriage and in her Italian family. She was working on a doctorate during the time I wrote this book and was an invaluable resource for literary theory and a support via the daily early morning phone calls we made while working on our writing commitments. Lindsay was the most cautious interviewee I had. She, like Mimi, is an old soul. It is hard to remember that she is nearly twenty years my junior. She is fresh-faced and wears her dark hair long and straight, owning the prerogative of a jock and graduate student’s exemption from primping.

Despite her managerial talents, Lindsay has a streak of naïveté, partly because of her age. She had been to her grandmother’s hometown in Italy and to Boston when we started Angry Fat Girlz, but had lived in Ohio her entire life and married straight out of college. There was an apparent safety net as she dabbled around trying to figure out what to do with her English degree. When I compared her to us other Girls, I didn’t have the same sense of walking a tightrope with little training for the stunt. Was it because her weight had never achieved superobesity? Was it because her family was near at hand? Or was it that, in a crisis, Lindsay’s practicality and self-protection take over? There is little spillage when she is in duress and she looks doggedly for answers to painful problems. Joining the Spiritualist Church may not appear to be a practical way to mend a marriage that is in trouble and yet Lindsay found a deep sense of connection there that helped give her the strength to seek out remedies for the specific problems she and her husband faced.

Over time, I saw us assuming roles in our small circle. Mimi’s empathy and genius for listening gave her the role of a mother, while Katie, with whom I share a raunchy, vicious sense of humor and a history of intensive therapy and daily antidepressant cocktails, was my twin. Lindsay vacillated between being my older or my kid sister. In complicated, infuriating ways, I feel like Wendy was my daughter.

This is our story—mine, Katie’s, Lindsay’s, Mimi’s, and Wendy’s. Though not completely factual, it is the truth as we lived it.

I hope that you will learn something of the extreme effort of living fat and of dieting from our year of struggle. I hope that you will come away with more compassion or with self-forgiveness when nature wins out over intention. Most of all, I hope that more friendships come out of this book. When women come together in order to tell their stories and their truths, they become collectively strong in their individual weaknesses. That is the positive power of anger. It can open a me-too that we so rarely feel in the horrible loneliness of being fat or diffident dieting. We are none of us either the only one or alone.