Stars (The Butterfly Trilogy) (42 page)

     During her fifth week, when she had lost only another one and a half pounds, Philippa noticed that even though Dr. Hehr supposedly put out a
new menu each week, it was really all the same—an uninspired, unimaginative cycle of cottage cheese, vegetables, and fruit, with small amounts of bread and meat, but
always
wheat bread, and
always
hamburger or a lamb chop. And because the main problem the Saturday group shared was overwhelming cravings—"I'd rather be dead than live like this," one had said, threatening to quit until everyone talked her into staying—Philippa decided one evening to sit down and dissect the Tarzana Obesity Clinic diet.

     And what it boiled down to was a standard twelve-hundred-calorie reducing diet.

     What, therefore, was the magic to it? What made Dr. Hehr's menus so special, and so effective?

     Breaking the diet down further, and discovering that all the food fell into five classifications—fruit, vegetable, dairy, meat, and bread—Philippa then analyzed it even more closely. Referring to a calorie counter she had bought, she found that even though portions of food within each group were of different sizes—such as the one-half cup of beets allowed for lunch one day and the single carrot allowed the next—the caloric values were the same.

     "The calories are already counted for us," she told the group, which had grown to fourteen, the following Saturday. They took up one-half of the Denny's private dining room and lunched on salads and cottage cheese while Philippa enchanted them with a talk on her week of discoveries. "That's one of the reasons Dr. Hehr's diet is so easy. We don't have to count calories."

     "But there are still problems with it," Hannah said; she continued to have difficulties with the cabbage requirement. She had had an embarrassing moment involving Mr. Scadudo and the Teletype machine; she prayed he had thought the machine was responsible for the rude sound.

     "I know," Philippa said, "so I carried the formula one step further. I thought, What if you ate green beans for dinner instead of cabbage, so long as they were the same caloric equivalents? I mean, for example, what would happen if, instead of having the required half a grapefruit on day three, I ate an orange? And why couldn't the unlimited vegetables at dinner be spread throughout the day? It makes sense, doesn't it?"

     So they decided to experiment.

     The next day, Hannah arrived at Halliwell and Katz an hour early, when no one was there. Using the electric typewriter in the office of Mr. Katz's new secretary, she typed out the five food groups with those foods allowed on the diet listed underneath, with their specific portions. The bread list was the shortest, containing simply: "Wheat bread, one slice." The longest list was the unlimited vegetables, which contained twenty choices. Copying from Philippa's notes, Hannah then typed how much from each list was allowed per day, such as two slices of wheat bread, three fruits, two selections from the meat and fish list, and so on. After reading it over, she realized that Philippa was right: it was essentially still Dr. Hehr's diet, but it was flexible now, and more convenient. Plus it allowed for variety.

     She took copies to the group the following Saturday, where sixteen women met at Cut-Cost for the weigh-in and then moved on to Denny's for what they now called the "luncheon meeting." They all agreed to try the modified diet and see what happened.

     But there was still the problem with depression and discouragement. For some, the weight loss wasn't quick enough; for others, the results had not brought the happiness or solutions to their problems that they had expected. Many in the group operated on the philosophy of "If only I could lose weight, then...
I could get that job; get married; be rich; be happy.
" Others were encumbered with the burden of self-hatred. Miriam couldn't take that scale anymore, seeing the weight on the lower poise bar stick firmly at the three-hundred mark, so she took her needlepoint and went home. Thelma dropped out and said she was going to go to a marriage counselor. Mrs. Percy said she was too old and simply gave up.

     As Philippa and Hannah browsed through underwear at Monica's Overweight Shop, dubiously eyeing girdles and bras, the only items Hannah couldn't sew herself, Philippa said, "Something is missing. A diet menu isn't enough. We need something more, something to help us keep going when we feel like giving up."

     They paused at a rack displaying Playtex 18 Hour girdles, all white and thick and sensible looking. The new lacy lingerie that was starting to come out was going to be a long time getting to Monica's. "I've noticed something," Hannah said, wondering if she should spring for
another girdle. She owned the national average, four, because all women, even the skinny ones, wouldn't dream of going out without a girdle on. "Whenever you give the group one of your pep talks, you know, about believing in yourself and all that, they always leave feeling jazzed, eager to accomplish anything. But by the next Saturday, they've fizzled. Why not write a few words of encouragement that we can carry with us, like we do the menu cards?"

     So Philippa chose some inspiring words from her cloth-bound book and gave them to Hannah, who typed them onto three-by-five cards during her lunch hour. When Mr. Scadudo came by and tossed off a comment about "our industrious little Miss Ryan" with a smile, Hannah blushed and realized that he had just flirted with her for the first time.

     At the Denny's luncheon meeting, where the waitress, used to the large crowd by now, patiently distributed the salads and diet plates, Hannah handed out menus to those who had not just come from the clinic, and Philippa passed out the three-by-five cards, on which three sentences had been typed:

     "Believe in yourself."

     "You are special."

     "You can alter your life by altering your attitude."

     Cassie Marie said, "I use my grapefruit allowance as a dessert. I sprinkle cinnamon on half a grapefruit and stick it under the broiler for a minute. It tastes
decadent.
"

     Others then suddenly offered recipes they had been experimenting with, all perfectly within the bounds of the diet, but that they had been afraid to admit to. Hannah, thinking that this must be how the miracle of the loaves and fishes got started, wrote them all down to type them up and hand them out next week.

     Philippa reduced her fruit intake to one apple every evening. She lost four pounds the first week, two and a half the next. She ate vegetables all day long.

     As Ardeth Faulkner opened the file cabinet by Hannah's desk, she gave Hannah a wry look and said, "I've never seen you eat so much before. I thought you were trying to lose weight. You'll never lose weight if you eat constantly like that."

     Hannah was snacking from a plastic container of carrot and celery sticks. She was near the end of the second week of their experimental diet, and she had already lost four more pounds. But she didn't say anything. She was staring at Mr. Scadudo, who was bent over his desk with the phone to his ear, talking excitedly about an over-the-counter stock that had just gone up two points. Apparently he owned shares in it. Ardeth was saying something about "constant eating makes you fat," and all Hannah could think about was the day that was going to come when Mr. Scadudo would finally notice her as a thin woman. He had nice lips, she thought. Although her experience in kissing was limited to an unfortunate eleventh-grade dance called Tropical Dream, which she had attended with a clammy cousin named Alvin, her imagination told her that it could be very pleasant with a man who knew what he was doing. So she ignored Ardeth and kept munching on her carrots, watching those tight pants over that tight butt.

     At the next Saturday meeting, which had to be moved to Hannah's house because six members who were losing weight successfully had brought friends and Denny's could no longer accommodate them all, everyone agreed that the experimental diet, while effective, was still boring. Philippa got to work and injected more variety into it by adding strawberries (one-half cup), and pineapple (one-quarter of the whole fruit), and white bread, as a break from the monotony of wheat.

     The following week, she had lost two more pounds, Hannah had lost another pound and a half, and the group, now numbering twenty-two, was so thrilled with the diet that it took Philippa five minutes to call the meeting to order.

     Philippa finally told Dr. Hehr she was leaving. The fact that Dottie and Millie Fink and the others had already left didn't seem to ruffle him, because his waiting room was as full as ever with hopeful new patients.

     "Well," he said congenially, "no hard feelings. You girls always think you can do these things on your own. What you don't realize is that you need someone to keep you in line, make sure you don't cheat."

     "But I've been losing weight, Dr. Hehr. And I've improved the diet."

     "Oh, I doubt that, little girl. Everyone's an expert these days."

     When she tried to show him her own typed list, he waved it away good-naturedly and said, "You'll be back. I guarantee it, you'll be sitting in that chair again one day real soon."

     It was late one November afternoon when the stock market was very active and the office of Halliwell and Katz on Ventura Boulevard was hectic that Ardeth Faulkner came by Hannah's desk and said, "You know, honey, you don't want to overdo this diet of yours. You look fine just as you are. You should stop now. You don't want to lose too much weight."

     And then Renata, the switchboard operator, came by and said, "You're losing too much weight. You have to think of your health."

     And Hannah had thought: Stop now? At one seventy-five?

     She had twenty-five pounds yet to lose.

     On the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains, Sheri, the lunch counter waitress who made twice as much money as Philippa because she could fit into the uniform, came up to her in Cold Remedies, where she was stacking aspirin boxes in neat rows, and said, "You been sick? You're getting awfully thin. You should see a doctor."

     At the following Saturday meeting, where twenty-nine women of all ages, shapes, and sizes marched through Hannah's bewildered mother's kitchen to step up on the bath room scale and shout out their week's success, Hannah and Philippa exchanged their strikingly similar stories. Shirley said, "They liked us fat because they had someone to look down on!" Shirley had lost twenty-one pounds and her sister-in-law had stopped speaking to her. But she was getting her orgasms back.

     Hannah came to work one morning and, as she was hurrying down the aisle, Mr. Driscoll, who had once tried to stiff her for the price of a sandwich, grabbed her by the wrist and said, "You're looking good, kiddo."

     By now, Philippa had expanded the bread list to include one-half a bagel and one-half a hot dog bun; to the dairy list she had added one ounce of cheddar cheese; the meat list now included a pork chop and a frankfurter. The variety made the diet easier to follow, and she had started calling these interchangeable portions "exchanges." No one in the group
got bored anymore; there were no more problems with undigestible cabbage or fruit that made you shaky. And when they felt their spirits lag, they read Philippa's homey little aphorisms, such as, "As you think, so shall you be," and they kept losing weight.

     As did Hannah. Rescuing her wrist from Mr. Driscoll, she continued on her way back to the cage, where she noticed, for the first time, that Mr. Scadudo was watching her.

     When Philippa had lost fifty pounds, she approached Mr. Reed, her manager at Cut-Cost, for a promotion and a raise, saying that she had been there for nearly six years and had earned it and that the toffee-pink clerk's smock now swam on her. He said no and she quit, handing him the smock.

     Hannah went to an employment agency and placed applications. She had lost forty-five pounds with fifteen to go. A week later she interviewed for a top secretarial position with McMasters and Sons on Sherman Way in Reseda. They offered her $450 a month if she could start in two weeks. It was more than Mr. Katz's secretary made. She hated to leave Mr. Scadudo, but she needed the money if she was going to go to Greer. She gave it a day's deliberation. Alan's rear end lost.

     Hannah and Philippa decided to get an apartment together in the Valley, since all of the group members, who now numbered over thirty, lived in either Encino, Tarzana, or Woodland Hills. Philippa got a job as assistant manager at Fox's Drugstore on White Oak in Encino, and she finally had to tell Mrs. Chadwick that she was moving out.

     Mrs. Chadwick, who had seen it coming after Philippa lost the first twenty pounds, gave her a hug and a stuffed pale blue poodle with a yellow bow around its neck and said, "You're going to go far, honey. Just don't forget me. I'd like a visit now and then."

     The first Saturday meeting they held in their apartment on Collins Street behind Ventura Boulevard consisted of thirty-four women, many of whom had been with them since the turquoise Cut-Cost booth months ago; the rest were friends and relatives who had joined since. All were considerably thinner, and happier.