Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (6 page)

Successful dieting relies on devout dieters, and the various programs have their own scriptures, saints, forms of worship, and accountability to some kind of authority, whether it’s a food journal, a weekly weigh-in, or Weight Watchers’ online POINTS Tracker with its twenty-seven thousand foods. Lindsay designed her own computer program, using the Weight Watchers Flex Plan points and the calorie deductions of her exercise regime, and one of our readers’ husband designed a computer spreadsheet program based on protein/carbohydrates/fats.

Programs, regimes, spreadsheets?

Then again, there’s always the “Unrequited Love Weight Loss Method.”

I’m hungry,
Wendy thought as she practiced pull-ups in the shallow end of the pool.

With that, she breathed in a large stream of water, proving that humans can scream under water. Marilyn, her instructor, waded over to help steady her while she sputtered and coughed.

“What happened?” Marilyn asked. “What made you panic?”

Wendy was still clearing water from her nose, making her accent more Southern and her voice as atonal as if she had a cold. “I lost my concentration.” Her heart broke open for the eighty-second time that day. Wendy had to remind herself that this wasn’t Marilyn’s problem.

“Why don’t you try the crawl over to the fourth lane and then pull up from it,” Marilyn suggested. “If you have more to concentrate on, you won’t lose your feet.”

She meant well, Marilyn did. This was Wendy’s third terrified swimmer’s class with Marilyn, and she didn’t almost drown very often anymore. She trusted Marilyn with her life the first time she put her face in the water and ended up sitting on the edge of the pool crying and shaking.

Wendy was rattled to her core. Her mind was on Five Continents and their warm, fresh tortilla chips. At the same time, she could feel her nose and chin tingling, the first sign she was fighting the water and a blasting body memory of that first class and Cal’s sucker punch to her heart seventeen days ago.

Wendy left her husband, Leo, in November of 2004, after one last argument concerning his love for her but complete lack of sexual desire for anyone. Out of habit, they went to her parents’ house for Thanksgiving, but by mid-December, Wendy was actively looking for a New Year’s Eve date. The habits of her twenty-year marriage quickly dribbled out.

She spent New Year’s Eve with her friend from the enrollment office, Susan, but she vowed the next year would be different.

It was and it wasn’t. Wendy is the supreme postponer: she and Leo were no closer to divorce than they’d been fifteen months earlier. She’d started dating Cal, but he had kids and their 2006 New Year’s Eve was phone sex.

Cal was boyfriend heaven. They were good together, she protested to herself for the millionth time. Okay, as Madeline pointed out, he had his kids on weekends and an ex-wife he continued to perform honey-do’s for. He was a mechanic; he wasn’t going to get any richer, and he wasn’t anywhere near rich now. He hadn’t gone to college, didn’t read, liked eighties pop music. But Cal was a big man, over six feet tall, muscles running a little to fat, swarthy and black-haired with a big handlebar mustache. For the first time she didn’t feel like she dwarfed a guy. He was handy when stuff like her three-year-old Honda Civic and her Mac notebook went bonkers. All of that amounted to a feeling of being protected and taken care of, a feeling she hadn’t had since before the rebellions of puberty when her daddy did everything he could to keep his little girl from getting hurt.

She was left with questions she couldn’t avoid. How many women had he cheated with? It took her three months of believing his excuses and lies before she actually tracked him down at
her
house. Such a fucking idiot! He sent Carol downstairs with the excuse that she had children and wouldn’t tolerate a scene, then he packed Wendy off to visit her childhood friend Madeline in Athens, Georgia. He promised that he’d break up with the bitch while she was gone. “We’ll get past this, babe. Trust me. You know me. You know how much I want you.”

On Sunday morning, as Madeline was brewing coffee and making cinnamon toast, Wendy checked her email and found what she was sure would be Cal’s description of the explosion with Carol.

She’d emailed him back immediately, which she now regretted. If she’d waited, she could have kept him on pins and needles and then been
really
cutting, she thought as she plodded toward the locker room:
Does she understand that your kids think she’s dumb as a box of rocks? Does she get that you cheat left and right? Does either of you know
any
rules of grammar?

Wendy was amazed that one body could hold so many tears. Madeline had kept her well supplied with reefer, vodka, busyness, and insults, nicknaming Cal “Idiot Man” and Carol “She-Male,” but the return to Williamsburg sent Wendy crashing. One thing about having a nervous breakdown out of town with your best friend, she realized, is that you can say I’ll have cheese dip with that.

Wearing her bra and underwear, Wendy padded over to the locker room scale, slid the top weight to 273. The end remained in place until she tapped it to 272.

Another pound lost. Cal was good for something after all. Her best friend in Williamsburg, Susan, had been begging her to go to Weight Watchers with her. Maybe
they
could tell her what to eat when she was too sad to figure it out for herself.

Wendy was not alone in wondering what she could eat that would end her obesity. In 2006, the
Washington Post
reported that about 62 percent of American women were overweight or obese,
¹⁷
while 80 percent of American women think they are overweight.
¹⁸

In regaining weight, we (and 95 percent of us who lose weight will regain it, and more, within five years) betray the labor, struggle, financial investment, and newfound hopes about ourselves.
¹⁹
We unearthed time to go to meetings, buy and chop eggplants, sweat on treadmills, read books and labels and recipes instead of tearing open bags and boxes. We who blamed our obesity on laziness and lack of willpower obeyed programs and nutritionists and sponsors and personal trainers as though we were assembling the trickiest of Ikea bookcases.

That, in fact, is precisely what we were doing, making new pieces of furniture by taming our bodies. In the years it took to lose 275 or 190 or 100 pounds, we accumulated new hardware; our toolboxes included determination, commitment, hope, goals, shy pride, and self-possession as we said “no” to wedding cake and “help me” to experts and “does this fit?” to clerks in misses’ departments. We became bodies and characters we didn’t know but had spent our lives thinking about other women.
She’s beautiful. She’s so disciplined. I wish I could get away with wearing that. How does she do it?

And then, our self-invented strengths and bodies became bookcases that wobbled more every day. We were living fraudulently in our different bodies and our different ways of eating until the bookcase splintered apart.

That April, the cruelest month, when memory mixes with desire, we realized the facts of our thinness could not support the weighty truth of us.

The Unbearable Being of Lightness

I
t was a hundred degrees at two p.m. in Arizona, where I was visiting my parents that May. My Amazon blog was thriving as I wrote a brief entry from my parents’ bedroom computer. Over the next three days, there were nineteen responses or, more aptly, conversations. Spring cleaning and gardening, Pilates and exercise were on everyone’s mind as they enjoyed the seventy-degree weather beyond the blinding desert, and they were trading tips on breathing and yoga.

Lindsay wrote about trying not to panic over defending her dissertation proposal and finding relief, as she always did, in doing something physical. “I got rid of this big ugly bush this weekend. It was something I’d hacked at here and there for the last five years. I cut it down, and it looks so much better. I’ve been telling the story as the Parable of the Ugly Bush, as in, it was not in that bush’s nature to be anything but ugly. It wasn’t the bush’s fault, it wasn’t my fault. It just looked ugly and scratched the hell out of me every time I had to deal with it.” She didn’t say what the parable meant, but it could easily have applied to our struggles with weight.

Mimi was dealing with doctors regarding her arthritic knees, sleep apnea, and a diabetes scare. “I can be overweight and healthy, or I can be overweight and unhealthy. I want to be healthy regardless of what my weight is and that means sucking it up and having the tests and hearing harsh truths,” she wrote. The blog gave her a safe place to talk about the doctors and her history of obesity, her family’s concern, and the physical pain she was in—and to recognize that she was in emotional pain over these things. “Today, right now, I can deal with it, but some days I just can’t and it makes me cry and retreat into myself. I think I’ll take the rest of the day off, go outside, and walk barefoot in the grass and celebrate the fact the spring is finally apparently here. It’s taken forever.”

Wendy wrote that she was getting out of the top women’s sizes, but her elation was mixed with ennui. “I am sitting here [at work] tired, sad, and I want to go home and rest and reread the WW booklets and come up with a plan.”

At the time, Lindsay, Mimi, and Wendy were just three responders among others. I certainly didn’t think any of them would become my closest friends.

Katie didn’t contribute to the blog that day but I later found out that in May she had gone back to OA, Overeaters Anonymous, and found a sponsor. She was no longer suicidal and had realized she didn’t want to die so much as she wanted to get her family’s attention and compassion.

The readers of my Amazon blog needed the space I created, but they didn’t need me, which was fine. I was absorbed in my own life, walking dogs and doing research for this book, my ongoing confusion about what Scott—known as the Boy from Connecticut in
Passing for Thin
—and I were doing on the phone for hours every day at the same time that I was casually seeing and sleeping with another man. I was glad to see so much activity, but I have to admit I didn’t feel the same warmth for these women as they did for each other.

Largely blind to what was happening, I merely smiled at Wendy playing the hostess. “Welcome,” she wrote to a newcomer who was mystified by the whole Amazon-blog thing. “We talk a lot here.” Nor did I notice when Mimi wrote to Wendy, “I’m sorry you’re sad. But rereading the WW booklets is a good thing. We can come up with a plan together, how’s that? And yes, I have IM and I’d
love
to visit with you that way! I’ll send you my name.”

In the same stream of responses to the short entry I wrote on May 4, Wendy wrote to another responder, “It’s true that we all seem to have a lot in common. Let me figure out a way to link a survey and we can have fun with statistics. (Or is that an oxymoron?)”

The Angry Fat Girls were born while I was in Sun City, Arizona, biting my nails in boredom and fear of my parents’ advancing age.

A long conversation broke out about whether there is a caste system for the obese. Lia’s position was beautifully articulated: “I think it’s more of a class system. Movement within a caste system is a lot harder than movement within a class system, and that’s one of the scariest things about being overweight—it’s a lot easier to move up (down) than it is to maintain your status.”

I heaved a sigh when I read that, thinking back three years to another return from Arizona to New York and the chain of events that led to the unraveling of my maintenance and my self.

I hadn’t yet sat down at my desk when the telephone rang.

“How are you, Frances?” my boss, Alix, asked in a voice more cheerful than I’d heard in months. “How was the conference? How were your parents?”

It was a Wednesday, my first day back from a writers’ conference and short visit with my parents in Arizona. “The conference was good,” I said, “and my parents are pretty well, considering.”

“Why don’t you make yourself a cup of tea and come in and join me?”

Humph
, I thought.
She’s barely spoken to me since the blowup and now she wants to have morning tea together?
Ignoring a pile of phone messages, I grabbed a legal pad to take dictation or make a list of things she wanted “us” to do.

“Shut the door,” she said. I sat down in the chair angled away from the view of Central Park twenty-nine floors below. It was distracting, and I found it hard enough to make sense of what Alix said.

I uncapped my pen as she flipped open her own legal pad. “I am sorry to say that your services will no longer be required at this agency. There is no good purpose in prolonging our association.” She popped a Nicorette between a molar and her cheek, looking rather like a pounce-ready dilophosaurus, and watched for my reaction. When I gave none, she pressed, as she always did, her questions a long fingernail scratching to catch me off guard or overreactive. “What do you have to say?”

I gawped as I scrambled for what I was feeling, then said, with eerie, momentary calm, “Relieved that I will never have to sit across from this desk again.”

If you read this scene carefully, you can see that articulating emotions comes slowly to me. I may experience an ache in my throat or gut, and I cry easily, but I can’t always tell you whether it’s anger or grief, nervousness or defensiveness. It’s not unusual for me to need a couple of weeks to have names for my responses.

My reticence is dormancy, however, not stupidity. Like Yellow-stone’s Mastiff Geyser, I erupt infrequently, briefly, but at 202 degrees and thirty feet in the air.

A few weeks before I was fired, I found a note attached to one of my clients’ book contracts. “Please write a letter and send,” it said in a coworker’s handwriting.

Customarily, Alix signed cover letters for contracts, including those of my clients, but in the beginning of our two years together, I signed those letters. I couldn’t remember when she took over the contract cover letters, and she had never stated this as a policy change as she did, for instance, forbidding flip-flops in the office. The agency was the Queen of Hearts’s croquet ground. Any Alice who wandered in would think it bizarre that we were painting rosebushes red, but we never knew whose head would roll next.

I looked at Abigail nervously. “Did Alix ask me to write a letter for her to sign, or does she want me to sign and send it?”

“She said for you to do the letter and send,” Abigail answered.

“Are you sure?”

“That’s what she said. I wrote it down verbatim.”

So I did and included a CC of the letter in the folder I gave her at the end of the day so she could keep apprised of the various projects I’d tended.

The next morning I found the copy of the letter on my desk with an angry scrawl.

We will discuss.

“We will discuss” were never good words from Alix.

The Mastiff Geyser percolated rapidly into action. When Alix arrived, an hour later, I was loaded for bear.

“Alix,” I said, meeting her in the hall and flapping the letter, “the note attached to the contract told me to write the cover letter and send the contract. I double-checked this with Abigail.”

“I don’t want to discuss it now, Frances.”

“But I do. I’m
sick
of never knowing what is policy and what isn’t, of not knowing what I can and can’t do. This is just one more damned thing I’m in trouble for because your directions weren’t clear to either Abigail or me.”

“Not now, Frances.”

“Then when?”

“I’ll call you.”

I turned back to my office, shutting the door to sit, doubled over, breathing hard, trying not to cry. It was a cloudy day. Not much light filled my north-facing office. I rarely turned on the overhead light, preferring the imagined anonymity of sitting in the small pool of my desk lamp. The gray swath of sky behind me, which matched Alix’s color scheme throughout the office, filled my veins. I felt trapped.

An hour later, the conversation quickly dwindled to the number of angels dancing on the nib of her Renzetti fountain pen.

“This has been always been procedure,” she insisted.

“Would you like me to bring copies of cover letters I’ve sent my clients in the past?”

She laughed, sarcastically. “You’ve never signed a cover letter.”

“
Bull
shit, Alix! You
raved
about the letter I sent with Hyacinth’s contract.”

She chewed the inside of her lip, considering this. That had been my biggest sale. “We made a mistake. I want it known as company policy that
I
sign all contract letters. Add it to the office manual and don’t let this happen again.”

“I
didn’t
let it happen again. Abigail took your instructions down word-for-word. We’re always taking letters and notes verbatim only to be told we did a terrible job later. Do you have any fucking idea what it’s like to try to work when everything you do is either wrong or subject to change?”

“Add it to the manual, Frances. I don’t want to discuss this any further.”

That was the second time in my two years with Alix that I’d exploded. The first time, I ran out of the office hyperventilating in an octave I didn’t know I could reach.

Having eaten instead of living with my feelings for most of my life, it’s an onerous task to sort out my reactions. I’m pretty clear about things like heartbreak and love, but strong outward emotions—such as fury and desire—and the middle ground of disappointment, being teased, and preserving boundaries—is shrouded in a fog of inexperience. Despite being Alix’s executive vice president, I couldn’t be evenhanded about that contract because I hadn’t questioned the shift in procedures when it first occurred. I couldn’t establish a working rapport because of the precedents of subservience I set up when I
asked
to go to the dentist or on vacation or to a funeral instead of
telling
her I was going. I especially had not told her that it was inappropriate to touch me. Put a couple of glasses of wine in Alix, and she was twisting my nose, stamping on my feet, insisting I hold her around the waist and hip bump in time to music. She did these things in front of our staff, colleagues, and clients. The hip-bumping incident got us thrown out of an important party.

“If we worked for Simon & Schuster,” I used to joke, “she’d be
so
fired.”

Within forty-eight hours of one of these scenes, I would be summoned to a meeting and told I was on the verge of being fired. It was classic hangover regrets and I knew it and I was too scared to confront any one part of it. I needed the job and Alix owned the company. What could I do?

Writing about this episode in my life is exquisitely painful because, years later, every time I binge, I dream of Alix or my former boss, Barbara. Before moving to Alix’s agency, I had worked within the irksomeness of being an outsider in Barbara’s family business, but it was nothing compared to the lack of oxygen in my shiny office twenty-some floors above Central Park. Barbara had encouraged the cultivation of promising authors, and she felt a lifetime commitment to them. Alix was interested in nursing advances but not talent, and she could be ruthless in terminating writers. I hadn’t been happy in either agency, but it couldn’t be dumb coincidence: surely, I was to blame?

I was to blame. I wasn’t a very good agent. Agents have to be ambitious. I wasn’t. The big advances that make agents successful don’t always make the writer successful, or not in the long run. I was content with smaller advances that the author had a reasonable chance of earning back, which would make a second book sale much more likely. (In fact, I instructed my own agent to be cautious in her ambitions for the sale of
Passing for Thin
for exactly this reason.) Such thinking was counterintuitive to these successful entrepreneurs who supported families on 15 percent rather than the salary I received. And I was burning out on the reading and demanding clients and disappointments that are inherent in the job.

It didn’t matter that I’d been fired with three months’ severance, with my own book to finish and publicize. I’d wanted to be a writer as much as I’d wanted to be thin, but everything “good” (interesting, intelligent, sociable, diligent, passionate, sensitive, funny—
hireable
) about me had been a false front waiting to topple. It had finally happened. My fifteen-year career was a fake.

My body, at 150 pounds, felt equally fake—borrowed or stolen, unfamiliar and unexplored. Did both counterfeits have to shatter simultaneously?

In the months after being fired, I flopped around trying to invent a new me, doing anything not to think about how I should have hissed, mid-nose-twisting,
Don’t you
ever
do that again,
to Alix, and trying anything that might keep me from eating.

I drifted, the invisible witness of the changeover in my wealthy Brooklyn neighborhood, picking up coffee as the Yups went to work, going to the store as the nannies and housekeepers and landscapers arrived, reading at Starbucks as the courthouse bureaucrats thronged Montague Street for lunch, heading to a twelve-step meeting as young bankers morphed into parents and the nannies crowded into the Mac store.