Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (15 page)

On the ferry, the rush of air whipping her ponytail and making her T-shirt flap made anything seem possible. By the time they stepped onto Main Street, with its smells of horses and chocolate and roses, she was ready to make that run and be rested and on time to the church. When they turned up the long drive to the hotel, she was plotting whether to make love before or after the run. Or both, she smiled over the green, green lawn and deep shade of the verandah.

Jalen plopped on the bed just as she hoped. “That was an exhausting drive,” he sighed, and reached for the remote control. He’d found a golf tournament and was snoring before she got her dresses hung up.

In Wally Lamb’s
She’s Come Undone
, Dolores realizes that the foundation of her obesity was being raped and overindulged in compensation and that she has fused the perpetrator with her father. As she inches up the ladder of these original myths—and further down the scale—her therapist prods her in such a way that the truth of her emerging body allows the truth of her past to emerge: “‘How much do you weigh now?’ he’d ask. ‘One-sixty? One sixty-five? The ladder can hold you. Go on.’”
²⁹

Weight and eating are once again the metaphors for missing truth: “‘So what if you died? So what? I’m not keeping your fucking secrets anymore! I’m sick…He hurt me, Mommy! He kept hurting me and hurting me, Mommy, and I’m not eating any more of your—’”
³⁰

Find the truth and it shall set ye free.

If we keep Dolores’s trick of imagining her food covered in mold in mind, along with a copy of
It’s Not About Food
at our elbows, all we need is our own
eureka!
moment.

The problem is that for each ah-ha! moment, there are many more uh-oh’s that strip the body/life-in-process of its achievements and momentum. And for the woman who has regained and is trying to re-lose weight, there are more and deeper questions, about the body as well as the psyche, than sudden discoveries:

 

• Am I meant to be fat? Is this as much a part of me as the color of my eyes? Is being fat being true to my essential, inner self?
  
 

 

• Am I
  doomed
  to be fat? Will I be in prison with the feelings my fat inspires forever?
  
 

 

• If I couldn’t keep my weight off on X diet, will Y work? Is an altogether different mind-set about food/eating/my body the answer?
  
 

 

• Did I get too cocky when I lost weight? Should I have not dated/traveled/changed jobs/moved across the country/had a baby?
  
 

 

• Did I lose weight for the wrong reasons?
  
 

 

• Do I really want to be fat and I haven’t realized it?
  
 

 

• Are the triggers to eat too compelling to ignore? Do I really want to live with those original myths that are so painful but which I can blunt with food?
  
 

 

• What, for that matter, is fat? What is thin? Did I lose too much or not enough?
  
 

 

• Do I need to readjust my goals?
  
 

These are plotlines not only of a growing number of American women’s lives, but of the big bucks of mass media. Call it Chubby Chick Lit—or Chubby Chick Trash or Chubby Chick Flicks. Pop culture has begun to wonder, and to judge, how the world of fat versus thin feels and operates, and it’s come up with a couple of basic scenarios: Victoria Ransom’s spontaneous remission, Jemima J’s conscious weight loss, and Cannie Shapiro’s fat acceptance.
³¹
Are these mirrors we look into when we search out literary companions, or is real life and real weight loss different from the fairy tales we ante up ten or fifteen bucks a pop for?

“Please be friendly,” Lindsay hissed after the photographer had finished with the families. “It’s the last wedding for Mom and Dad and it’s extra-special.”

Jalen pursed his lips but grunted in agreement. As though the universe had decided to throw its supreme test Jalen’s way, Lindsay’s aunt Carol broke away from talking to the maid of honor.

“Jan is the perfect bride,” she gushed at them. “Such a tiny waist! It’s really set off by her gown.” She reached up and pinched Lindsay’s cheek, twinkling madly. “You’ve lost weight, haven’t you, Linny?”

“Yeah, I—”

“Jalen must be proud,” she rushed on. “Has he gotten you on an exercise regime?”

Lindsay jabbed him in the ribs, silently screeching that he defend her. “Who wouldn’t be proud to be married to Lindsay,” he ought to say. Or, “What weight?” in a bewildered tone. He could go so far as to say, “You could use an exercise regime yourself, Carol. No wedding cake for you!”

He smiled at her aunt and straightened his tie, striped like a stick of grape hard candy, and said, “Are Jilly and Terri here? I’m under strict orders to dance with the whole family today.”

When the DJ played “Never Can Say Goodbye,” Lindsay went back to the hotel room with Jalen. That August day, on the lawn of a Victorian hotel on Mackinac Island, he was the only man she wanted to dance with, and he was dancing with every woman at the reception except her.

Lindsay cracked. Everything she had been proud of being and doing slipped away. No longer was she a grown-up and elegant woman in her black gown and grandmother’s pearls, all but dissertation in women’s studies, a computer whiz for Kent State technical support, and 5K marathon survivor. She wasn’t Lindsay Maria Longhetti or Mrs. Jalen Easton. Once splintered, she couldn’t face Jalen with any one of these claims to give her confidence or the words to explain her grief.

That night she was a size 14.

The operative word in her identity was
a
, an indefinite article denoting, her dictionary could tell her, a single but unspecified
thing
.

So what if her gown was a loose 14, a little baggy across her chest. The gleaming black deep V-neck and spaghetti straps, she saw in the powder room mirror as she repaired her mascara, emphasized the girth of her arms, the expanse of her back. What had been an achievement—
almost a 12!
—made her look matronly, bigger than the label. As always, facts evade truth, and the truth is not a solution.

Sitting with her father and drinking warm champagne, pistol-whipped from going from feeling thin and desirable to fat as a thundercloud, Lindsay was smack-dab in an old literary paradigm: Jane Eyre getting her first close look at (the statuesquely beautiful) Blanche Ingram; Scarlett O’Hara greeting (the modest, bookish) Melanie at Twelve Oaks; Bridget Jones, feeling like “an enormous pudding,” discovering her boyfriend’s (skinny, tan) new lover.
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Bridget Jones is not fat, but she’s made millions of women more aware of the company we keep each time we step on the scale. That she curses her eighteen-inch thighs may be annoying to those of us thundering along the sidewalk, but the reader can substitute her own agonies of the scale and the two novels make sense.

In August, when Lindsay weighed 168 pounds on her way to her goal of 155, she was not far off Bridget’s ambitions for her body. Bridget reaches a high of 138 pounds (
“…oh God, hell. Beelzebub and all his subpoltergeists
”) in the Christmas season near the end of
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
, and a low of 119 pounds (“After eighteen years…I have finally achieved it. It is no trick of the scales but confirmed by jeans. I am thin.”) for at least three days in
Diary
.
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Bridget’s thirteen pounds versus Lindsay’s nineteen pounds is not an unreasonable comparison, and the press was obsessed by the hows and whens of Renée Zellweger’s twenty-pound gain (and subsequent loss) for the role.

But what, then, of Lindsay’s high weight of 215 pounds, an eighty-pound gain over the years after her college graduation? Were those eighty pounds a metaphor?

Like Bridget, Lindsay was in her early thirties and had had career crises over what to do with her undergraduate English degree. Lindsay and Jalen were living together when she started a master’s degree program in creative writing. She was a teaching assistant while he was making an unpredictable twenty dollars an hour at a gym and taking courses toward a BA in human movement studies. No matter how many times she explained their majors to her father, his consternation scared her.

“So let’s say you write a really
great
poem,” her father said, working out the problem like a logarithm. “How much could you sell it for? Have you ever thought about, you know, teaching high school English? The benefits are good, and you have your summers off: you should think about it, Linny.”

Because she’d starved all day and binged all night at a high school where accessorizing meant a John Deere baseball cap, the idea of teaching made her hands sweat. Still, Lindsay had much of her father’s pragmatism. Where was their future?

She quit the MFA program and went to work in real estate. There was always something to put in her mouth in the Century 21 office where every effort was made to welcome clients and build staff solidarity. The secretaries brought in homemade brownies and pancakesized chocolate chip cookies, there were birthday cakes and seasonal specialties, and rousing choruses of “let’s order pizza” at lunch, and drinking Petrifiers with coworkers a couple of nights a week.

She hated real estate.

She hated living in Akron, talking young single mothers into boxy apartments with views of parking lots. Her weight zoomed to 215 pounds and, a year after college graduation, she wore a size 16 dress for her wedding.

Underemployment is part of the Chick Lit formula, and it’s one of the ingredients that separates Chick Lit from romance novels (along with, among other things, their generally comic writing, the genre’s inclusive focus on friends and family relationships, and some sort of issue—i.e., alcohol and drug abuse in Marian Keyes’s
Rachel’s Holiday
or bad parenting in Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus’s
The Nanny Diaries
). Finding the perfect job isn’t necessarily contingent on a major life change in Chick Lit at large, nor is it in life. Lindsay got into graduate school at over two hundred pounds, and Mimi has steadily worked her way up the academic library ladder during a weight career that has many hundreds of pounds lost and, mostly, gained. Still, one of the promises generated in fat fiction is self-fulfillment, the authentic life of following our bliss, through weight loss. Lindsay Faith Rech sums up this Emerald City aspect of Chubby Chick Lit in her novel,
Losing It
, in the journal that Diana starts writing during a break at the diner where (what else?) she works the night shift:

 


Be skinny.


 


 


Find happier job.


 


 


Have sex again before I die.
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Diana has a counterpart in the overweight woman who is happily employed but whose contentment is undermined either by someone else’s condemnation of her weight or her own misery regarding it. This paradigm can be snatched from the tabloid headlines and Hollywood reporters in any given week. Kirstie Alley, playing a fictionalized version of herself in
Fat Actress
, uses the casting couch twice to secure a lucrative holding deal from NBC but even so, she’s told she’ll have to lose weight before the network will create a show for her. From a “future so bright I had to wear shades,” Margaret Cho was driven to physical collapse when her network informed her she had to lose significant weight (“They are concerned about the fullness of your face”) in two weeks.

Cho’s agent was appalled. “…if that is who they think you are, this show isn’t going to work!”
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Cho wasn’t particularly overweight, and her agent’s reaction was prescient. At the same time, it’s a philosophy—
skinny isn’t who you are
—that a lot of Chick Lit and Flicks, and tabloids sell their audiences.

Bucking that philosophy doesn’t go unpunished. “You’re going to go crazy again,” Evie’s fiancé warns when she sets herself to lose forty pounds so that she can walk down the aisle in a Vera Wang.
³⁶
He’s right, but it’s not the diet that drives her around the bend this time, it’s her success. Smugly delighted with her ultrathin body, she taps out her credit cards on new clothes and sleeps with her personal trainer. She’s fired from work, her engagement is broken, and she eats her way back to plumpness within months—although, this being a sophisticated form of romance novel, the ending is a more mature, happily self-employed Evie.

Lindsay was immediately happier when she returned to Kent in the late nineties to finish her MFA and she liked working with the geeks in the university’s technical support center. She lost weight slowly, and just before she turned thirty, she read Ingrid Molnar’s
You Don’t Have to Be Thin to Win
and decided that if she was going to plateau forever at 180 pounds, she could still be fit.

She set her sights on the Danskin Women’s Triathlon. It was enough, she says, to try one last time to lose weight. “I wanted to get people off my back by being able to say I’d tried everything and nothing worked. I went to a nutritionist and got a food plan based on the American Diabetes Association diet. I started losing weight at about one pound a week.” She felt good about her performance in the triathlon and her 155-pound body, but maintenance eluded her. In two years she regained twenty pounds, and trying to control her weight with exercise resulted in serious tendonitis.