Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (13 page)

Each time we remember them, stories like the Fable of the Scale and other original myths jigger at the adult demeanor we have invented for the world, like a mosquito swarm on a warm summer night that starts with one bite, which leads to another until we scratch ourselves raw. Or eat.

What sobers me in Mimi’s account is that so many of us were handed a supremely adult task when we were too young for insight or even sustained attention. By failing to lose and maintain weight, we failed adulthood before we learned the multiplication tables or how to use tampons.

Further, Mimi did manage to lose weight, but the rules of the challenge she’d been set had changed. It wasn’t
enough
that she was terribly sorry or that she ultimately succeeded. Instead of teaching her a lesson about lying or about the patience required in dieting, nothing she could do to make up for an act of desperation was
enough
. By extension,
she
wasn’t enough. At the same time, the torment of being forty pounds overweight, wanting to eat all the time, wanting to go on her youth group’s trip so much, her wild tears and wild promises were
too much
. And so the original myth of the Good but Fat, Ugly Mimi took on additional significance in which one thirteen-year-old girl was profligate in appetites and short on values—or value.

I like to think of the original myth as a postmodern, Judeo-Christian version of the Native American dream quest gone wrong. It’s as though the young Lakota boy, after sitting in his circle, fasting, and meditating for a couple of days, meets not the bear or crow that other kids encounter, but a not overly bright mosquito. Mimi, like so many of us, has met her spirit guide in one of those stinging, venomous, bloodsucking mites.

If the Lakota boy comes down from his hill a man, even with a silly protector, ready to tell his story to the medicine man who will both teach him how to use it in his life and add it to the spiritual treasury of the tribe, modern Occidentals spend their lives either getting over and beyond their original myths or living up to them. Often it’s both. When she told me the story of the scale, Mimi was just back from a national conference of medical librarians, where she addressed three hundred people. She led the development team for access at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. But despite her telling her parents that she does not want them to talk about her weight with her, the first night she is with them on any given visit to their retirement community in South Carolina, her mother asks if she has considered Lap-Band.

Mothers and their daughters’ weight is, of course, one of the primal stories of the last hundred years, just as domestic accomplishments and virginity were for a little girl growing up in nineteenth-century Anytown, U.S.A. The primary difference between these stories of pressure and nonconformity is that virginity is not work and sewing a pinafore is a learned skill. What a daughter whose weight is a problem has in common with that girl who might have stepped out of
The Music Man
is how much the fat daughter betrays her mother. “I’m the same weight as I was on my wedding day,” Mimi’s mother bragged, and forty years later she is still a size 10.

Likewise, Lindsay’s mother, a Sicilian American who could well have turned potato-shaped after the birth of three daughters, used to say that her husband could divorce her if she ever weighed more than 135 pounds. Lindsay was a normal-sized child: it wasn’t until her senior year in high school that she started to binge and gain weight. Her sister Janice, less than two years younger, was designated the criminal chubby one in the family because she weighed the same as Lindsay for much of her childhood. The pictures Lindsay has shown me make this label grossly unfair. Lindsay, slightly taller, has bird-thin arms while Janice’s arms are as fleshy as most little girls’. The pressure was on Janice, but fat was so anathema in the family and so closely studied on the body of her sister, that Lindsay absorbed much of the fat and ugly myth.

The ugly part attached itself to her when she was four and holding her cousin’s beagle puppy. Janice tried to pull it away from her by its head, and the dog turned and bit Lindsay on the lip. The three stitches left a scar that has made her self-conscious ever since.

The Longhettis are a close family, and a loving one, but Lindsay is adamant that there is nothing worse in the complex of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins than being fat. Nowhere in her stories is there a mention of what was considered “good.” Pretty must have approached it: perhaps, like the proverbial horse and carriage, it belongs to “thin.” Three stitches and the myth of ugly was off and running. If Lindsay’s other qualities—her good grades, athletic talent, and uncannily intuitive grasp of computers at the age of eleven—were not enough to lift her four-year-old’s fear of what would happen if Mom gained weight, her scarred face clumped her in a category that was also rejectable.

In July, Mimi, Lindsay, Wendy, and I created a closed Flickr album and posted childhood photos of ourselves in an act of archaeology. We were astonished with each other because the pictures didn’t always mesh with our descriptions of our childhood self-images. One night we all sat down and looked at the gallery while we were on Instant Messenger. “What scar?” Wendy commented on IM as she looked at a photo of Lindsay lounging deep in a couch with a book. “I don’t see a scar.”

“I
know
,” Lindsay replied. “I look at photographs now, and I can’t even see it. But I spent
hours
studying it in the mirror when I was a kid, poring over every picture of me—when I got caught, that is. I
hated
having my picture taken.”

Listening to these histories, I can’t recall being tortured with what would not happen because I was fat. The things I liked and was good at—swimming, reading, playing the piano, living in my dream worlds that were informed by musical comedies and books—were tacitly regarded as the stuff out of which I would make my future. In my mother’s defense, if going to work meant a loss of protection and security for me, it might also have been an example of how my life would depend on pursuing my passions.

It was also my mother, my father told me recently, who forbid him from harping on my weight.

Katie’s original myth includes the story that was told to her of being six months old when her pediatrician advised her mother to switch her to low-fat milk because she was overweight. She was seven when her mother came home with a copy of
Help Your Child Lose Weight and Keep It Off
. When she couldn’t help Katie herself, she took her to Weight Watchers. “It was so dull,” Katie says. “I’d complain about it, but Mom would start in on ‘You’re never gonna get a job, you’re never gonna get a boyfriend.’ I mean, I was nine years old when she started in with this shit, you know? I think it set me up so that I never want to do anything.”

A script like that can certainly dim a kid’s dreams. Perhaps it’s part of why Katie has drifted from job to job and climbed up and down the scale so much. She would like to go back to school and get a master’s degree in counseling so that she could work with troubled teens, but she hasn’t pursued it to the point of getting grants and enrolling. The “you’re never” scenario makes such work pointless because, as long as Katie is so blatantly obese, she’ll never get the grant, never be admitted, never do well in class, never connect with the people involved in her practicum, etc. She settles for reality television and eavesdropping on other people’s lives.

The fat child, unlike a child who may be dyslexic or epileptic, or suffering from the latest learning disorder, often becomes the “problem child.” The family wants, badly, to “do something about” her weight if only she would cooperate. And, because weight is a hypervisible problem that reflects on the state or status of the whole family, other problems can be ignored or considered more solvable. This was Katie’s case. Her younger brothers were in constant trouble for truancy, tricked out as punk rockers, carrying a mean attitude. They were sent off to live with their father while Katie went through a series of emotional traumas with her mother, who kicked her out of the house when she was eighteen in the hopes that, out in the real world, having to support herself, she would stop eating.

“That’s awful,” I retorted when she told me this.

“She had every right,” Katie says defensively. “My mom and I are very co. I can’t stand it when my therapist starts in on her. She was sick of me.”

“Sick of what?” I asked, inwardly gawping at the sadistic thrill her mother must get from a codependency that involves kicking her daughter out of the house.

“Sick of my fat. Sick of my eating. ‘You have to be on your own,’ she’d yell. That was supposed to make me lose weight and fix everything. But I was eighteen, and I kept getting these roommates who were bad news. One kid’s friends—he went to my high school—all tried to get in bed with me when they were drunk. So I moved back home and then out.” She sighs. “I was always looking for a new kitchen.”

I ask her point-blank what her original myth is, and while she doesn’t answer the question with a story, she gives me the result of her mother’s label of fat and too emotional. “I’m not good enough. I have such a deep level of shame. It’s like a barnacle on a ship.”

This relationship of mothers, daughters, and weight is totemic; the construction is from the maternal experience and ethos of the daughter’s identity through the size of her body. Wendy and her mother shared a heart-shaped face and cheek-splitting smile that diminishes their slight lantern jaws, as well as a weight problem. In Wendy’s cycle of original myths, fat “is all I can remember.” Her voice turned hoarse as she talked about that time, and her accent thickens with the memory of other voices. “When Ah was six, Ah heard mah mother tell mah aunt that I was up to a size 6X in a tone that verged on horror.” Unlike the rest of the AFGs, being fat was something Wendy had in common with her mother, who had also painted a layer of permanence or inevitability of obesity on herself. “My mom says she was overweight all her married life. But look at photos, and you can see she gradually gained through the years. She would say, ‘I don’t want you to end up like me.’”

How a mother “ends up,” whether she’s fat, psychotic, or a brain surgeon, is the benchmark against which a daughter measures herself. Wendy’s mother, Ida Wicks, is not the woman Wendy aspired to be, explaining that the best way to understand her mother is to read Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.” (“And if Stella-Rondo should come to me this minute, on bended knees, and
attempt
to explain the incidents of her life with Mr. Whitaker, I’d simply put my fingers in both my ears and refuse to listen” could have come from Ida’s mouth about her sister and sisters-in-law at any given six-month interval.)
²⁴

It would be easy to say that Ida Wicks was touchy and hypercritical and lived to judge others, but that underestimated her approach to life. Her abilities to outline any and all possible downsides of any given situation approached high art. In planning to drive almost three hours from Williamsburg to her hometown of Hillsville for a funeral, Wendy was faced not only with snow, but her mother’s quirks that are about keeping score and being open to censure. “I have to clean out my car,” Wendy complained. “Mama would not be happy if anyone saw what the inside of my car looks like. It’s so stupid—I mean, who goes around and looks inside of people’s cars at a funeral?” She thought a moment and answered her own question. “My mother.”

Wendy’s childhood weight problem was handled with as many techniques as a Cirque du Soleil juggler uses to handle his plates. As the only child and the beloved daughter/object Ida could control, Wendy was forced to diet as a companionable joint project. Wendy has fond memories of sitting on the couch with Ida, watching
Days of Our Lives
while they dipped into a box of Ayds candy. But by the age of fifteen, when she weighed around two hundred pounds, her mother’s dire spin on facts came to rest on Wendy’s weight. “My mom told Dr. Waterman that I was the laziest teenager she knew, and he prescribed [the stimulant] Eskatrol. It had to be the worst medicine I ever had in my life. I was mean, vicious, and nasty, and I threw away the pills. It turned out Jeffrey MacDonald was taking Eskatrol the week before he murdered his family, which is information I always find cheerful. I hated that she said I was the laziest teen. Now I say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that there was a contest; I would have tried harder.’”

Along with the “horror” of her weight, Wendy had a severe hearing loss. Her teachers thought she was retarded when she started school. In the alchemy of fat and ugly, the next ingredients are lazy and stupid. Wendy had hit a home run by the time she was a freshman in high school.

And so the totems build, with the face of the daughter on the bottom, the face of her mother above. Where are the fathers in this delicate process?

As part of the over-135-pounds Longhetti family joke, Lindsay’s father used to point at random women and joke to his three daughters and wife, “How would you like
that
woman for your new mom?” It doesn’t take rocket science to see why Lindsay drove herself crazy with worry about whether she physically appealed to Jalen, or that, perhaps in rebellion against his physical ideals, she had been bouncing around within a forty-pound range for the twelve years of their married life?

Her father’s own weight history was that of a skinny boy and young man who developed a potbelly as he got older. When his brother Ted developed diabetes in the mid-nineties, Dean didn’t take it very seriously, despite being Ted’s identical twin. Once in a while, he’d grill up a bunch of hamburger patties and lose weight quickly on a sort of Atkins diet. The pounds would come back, setting up a series of diets and failures that didn’t inspire Lindsay, Janice, or their baby sister, Alison, with much confidence. Each Sunday, Lindsay and Jalen visited the Longhettis, along with Janice and her new husband, and Alison. Lindsay referred to her parents’ house as “Carb City,” not so much because her mother was pressing cookies on them as because Lindsay was always famished before dinner was ready and succumbed to the lure of dinner rolls or holiday candy to tide her over. She and Jalen rarely had that stuff in their own home.