Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (16 page)

She also cut back to part-time work because she’d decided to take her interest in politics and feminism back to school, this time for a PhD. Kent has a fine women’s studies program, and Lindsay was consumed with excitement about her required courses, anticipating getting to work on dissertation politics, staying at the library until mid-evening, studying and talking with fellow graduate students.

“We never see each other anymore,” Jalen complained two semesters into her degree. She was struck by how queasy his statement made her and how much an escape being on campus felt. She fell to thinking about how
heavy
it sometimes felt to be married. She had been the chief income producer for the first six years they were married, head cook and vacuum queen, the one who remembered his mom’s birthday and when to use bleach in the wash. Each February she filed their taxes, knowing what credit card she’d pay off with the refund, and she did the bookkeeping as Jalen and Patra set up their personal trainer business.

Patra. Five feet nine inches of legs and suntan and long blonde hair, Jalen’s best friend and running partner. There were times, of course, Lindsay’d been jealous, but they passed quickly. Patra had notoriously little patience for Jalen’s moods.

As he preened in front of the mirror before and after his morning run, Lindsay thought she understood Jalen’s concern for his looks. It was one of his selling points. But while he looked great and was a talented athlete and teacher, he took little satisfaction in competing well or mastering a new form of exercise. Lindsay made up for it by being his cheerleader, clapping and yelling from the sidelines, a cup of Gatorade ready for him to grab, framing his instructor certifications, newspaper cuttings, and finish-line photos.

While working thirty hours a week and doing her doctorate coursework, she had jollied him through setting up his business, selling himself to new clients, researching the demographics of age and income with the probable form of exercise those clients would require. Home Fit held promise but in the twelve years she and Jalen had been together, whenever he took a day off, he collapsed into epic-length naps, acting nervous and cranky when he was awake.
It’s only natural
, she sympathized. She, too, depended on exercise to keep her on an even keel. The difference was that when she’d had to quit running as she recovered from an injury or put yoga on hold when she got too busy, she still was able to show up for school and take care of Jalen, her family, work, and housekeeping. Jalen was so touchy about skipping a workout that she learned not to suggest alternate exercise or rest when he had blisters or a cold. It was easier to have gauze or chicken soup and Cold-EEZE waiting when he got home.

The next semester, Lindsay took a seminar in feminist theory and the body. A classmate presented a paper on exercise bulimia—overexercising in order to burn up excess calories. The profile didn’t fit Jalen, who wasn’t the food junkie that Lindsay has it in her to be, but it sent her back to the Internet, looking frantically for a word or a phrase for her husband’s joyless beauty and strength.

In the summer of 2005, a year before Janice’s wedding, Lindsay invited Jalen out to dinner at their favorite Chinese place. “There’s this
thing
,” she said slowly, willing her eyes off the lunar animal zodiac place mat to look him in the face. “It’s not anybody’s fault. It’s not like…I don’t know, herpes or malaria—” She smiled at him, prodding him to laugh. “It’s more like alcoholism. You didn’t go out and do something risky and then get sick because of it.”

“Are you sick, Lins?” he asked.

“No. I mean, in a way, yeah, because I encourage it. I’m worried about you, actually.”

“I’m fine,” he said, his voice going flat, the way it always did when they talked about him beyond practical matters. “Those bruises are fading. Patra suggested that self-tanning stuff every other night to help cover them.”

“That’s kinda what I’m talking about, babe. Running on black ice, running after you’ve dinged yourself up on black ice, self-tanning lotion—”

“Spray,” he corrected her.

“Whatever. Don’t you ever think it’s kind of nuts?” He looked blank. “I mean, do you ever feel like you couldn’t stop if you wanted to? Do you notice how happy your clients are when they can squeeze out ten more reps or, like, the pictures you took when I finished the Danskin?” His expression hadn’t changed. “Most people rest an injury,” she plowed on, the air getting heavier with each sentence. “Most people are pleased when they improve their time or finish a race. Hell, I get excited when I lose one pound!”

“It’s my job to be my fittest, Lindsay. It’s a
job
.”

“You know, when I go for a run or to yoga, I feel really good. I’m calmer, I can think better, I have more energy, I’m proud of myself. But you take no joy in working out. Your mood is always about how much faster you could have run or how much longer you should have stayed in the weight room. I remember how, when you’d get home, you’d still be hopping from foot to foot and laughing at people you’d seen or what you’d been thinking about. Now your workouts are never enough for you. Never good enough, never effective enough. You have a problem, babe. Jobs can be fun. You’re allowed to feel good about yourself for doing it well, and you’re allowed sick days and vacation. I don’t think being fit is just your job, Jay. I think it’s an addiction, and I think it’s a problem you need to address.”

How often the truth comes to us is in moments of opposition.

For Lindsay, as for the forty-pounds-overweight Rose, truth glimmered with the word
you
. In saying it, Lindsay took the first step in handing off the responsibility for how her husband felt and acted, just as Rose stopped supporting Maggie’s waywardness. It required one step more for each woman to realize what she had done to someone they loved by holding on to that responsibility so tightly. Lindsay puts it this way: “My biggest battle is not to get control of my weight but to bring some sanity to those voices inside my head. Those voices can alternately sound like family members, like my husband, or just like a crazy version of myself. I tend to worry too much about what other people think of me and not enough of what I think of myself. This promotes a cycle of ‘be good’ and then ‘rebel.’”

After their night at Bangkok Gardens, Lindsay headed straight for Melody Beattie’s
Codependent No More
. Saying “you have a problem” to Jalen meant that she had one just as big.

I have to admit that I prefer entertainment to self-improvement. Chick Lit as a genre was a newborn when I was losing weight, and my journal informs me that I read
Bridget Jones’s Diary
on the beach at Flathead the summer I went home to Montana and discovered I was a size 10. I looked to these novels for reassurance that I wasn’t alone in being number-conscious, boy crazy, spendthrift, label-mad, and confounded by how to talk to my parents as I scrabbled to collect my new life. It made me feel like I was one of the rank and file, and it made me laugh enough that I continued to read it in relapse.

The woman who has vacillated between distinctly different-sized bodies is a multiple self-invention, sometimes hidden in a mansion of fat, sometimes naked in the truth of what she looks like, retaining her obesity long after she’s thin by having to hide, minimize, or remove the damages weight and dieting have wrought on her body. The mental states of thin and fat are even slower to change.

Consider
Lady Oracle
, one of the first serious attempts to consider how weight loss turns a woman into a double agent:

Joan Foster loses a hundred pounds at the age of eighteen and spends the rest of the novel keeping her childhood obesity a desperately held secret. Atwood does not tell us why her past is so shameful or perhaps we are meant to understand that Joan’s weight, like Dolores’s and Victoria’s, is a metaphor of more family secrets encased (ah—“encased”: one of the words of living fat!) in her tormented relationship with her mother.

Two of the bestselling Chick Lit novels that came immediately on the heels of
Bridget Jones
were Jane Green’s
Jemima J.
and Jennifer Weiner’s
Good in Bed
. Both novels feature overweight heroines but the characters, Jemima and Cannie, come to exactly opposite terms with their fat.

The first difficulty with looking to Chubby Chick Lit for the charms it offers the overweight reader is that it’s usually difficult to pin down just what each heroine’s statistics are. The novel may mention what the heroine weighs when she’s fat or thin, but doesn’t mention her height. We may be told what size she attains but not what label she wore when she started. Hints may be hidden in seasons as to the time it takes to lose a certain amount of weight, but we have to reread to ferret them out.

These are statistics that nearly every American woman calculates more readily than she does her Visa balance. When vital information is hidden or missing, it deprives us of the facts of what to expect from a diet and of where we fit in the pantheon of fatocity. It’s possible that the authors of these novels want to be inclusive—that is, they want to appeal to women of all weights and all weight concerns. Or perhaps it’s because the authors are both mystified and appalled by weights/sizes that seem fat to them personally. But because these stories stress weight loss, they leave every woman who has lost and regained asking, what does the world consider fat and thin, and what is fat and thin
for me
?

Jennifer Weiner maintains an active blog that crusades for her specific peeves and causes: the dignity of Chick Lit, writers who sell out,
The New York Times Book Review
’s paucity of new and/or female writers, etc. Author photos show a pretty, slightly apple-cheeked young woman. She has become known as the Voice of the Fat Heroine.

The opening premise of Weiner’s first and most weight-oriented novel,
Good in Bed
, is the eponymous essay the heroine’s ex-boyfriend has published about her in a popular women’s magazine: “At five foot ten inches, with a linebacker’s build and a weight that would have put her right at home on a pro football team’s roster, C. couldn’t make herself invisible.”
³⁹
Given that in 2006 the average pro football player’s weight was 248 pounds, that would give Cannie a body mass index of 35.6, classing her, according to bariatricedge.com, as “severely obese.”

Cannie’s
attitude
toward her body, and how her life is affected by it, bears out these facts. “Twenty-eight years old, with thirty looming on the horizon. Drunk. Fat. Alone. Unloved. And, worst of all, a cliché. Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones put together, which was probably about how much I weighed…”
⁴⁰

The hitch in Weiner’s setup comes on the following page. “I lurched toward [my bed], flung myself down, my arms and legs splayed out, like a size-sixteen starfish stapled to the comforter…”

Size 16 is the gown Lindsay wore for her own wedding and the black-and-white fashion photos she and a friend had taken as a lark. She is rueful when she looks at those pictures, but she’s glowing as she and Jalen run down the aisle after their I-dos and her face is softened and eyes interestingly enigmatic in the pictures of her non-modeling portfolio. She weighed about 215 pounds at the time. She may have been deeply unhappy about her weight, but she was vibrantly alive with her family, new marriage, and girlfriends.

So a size 16 is
not
248 pounds, especially on a large-boned, five-foot-ten-inch frame. A size 16 is less-than-ideal shopping in the misses’ department. It’s Ralph Lauren and Jones of New York and the scalloped laser-cut purple disco striped panties from Victoria’s Secret that her ex-boyfriend lamented not being able to buy her for Valentine’s Day—or the black teddy Jalen gave Lindsay, her size 16 wedding dress on the floor of their hotel room. A size 16 is overweight, a few months of dieting away from a size 12 and being able to suck up bargains at the end-of-season sales.

It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out how these statistics make a woman who is five foot four inches and really does weigh 248 pounds feel. For the woman who has regained that weight, it’s twice the rip-off. I didn’t notice the first time I went down through size 16 because I was so focused on that and the next day’s abstinence. Going up and past it was a mixture of shame and denial because I was failing—failing at maintenance but failing, too (and this is due in some small part to the low ceiling of most Chubby Chick Lit), to appreciate that getting bigger was not, ipso facto, freakish or humongous or the size 32 I wore only a few years earlier.

There are a number of these forty-or fifty-pound transformation stories, including Jackie Rose’s
Slim Chance
and Lindsay Faith Rech’s
Losing It
, whose heroines’ self-hatred at what must be a size 18 body and rapid change of attitude as they lose weight makes for irritating reading to those who are truly hamstrung by their weight. As one woman posted on my Amazon blog after reading Judith Moore’s
Fat Girl
, “What I found so nuts was [that she] still chooses to distance herself from the truly fat by saying she’d always been able to buckle her seat belt on a plane. My reaction? *Snort* AMATEUR. So what’s her point? ‘
I’m Fat, but for God’s sake I’m not as fat as those losers? I’m a ‘fat girl,’ but not the ‘Fattest Girl?
’”