Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (17 page)

This is not to denigrate the torment of being more moderately overweight. Nor should the reader consider the canon of chubby chicks to be reality. The novels and the movies are, after all, more or less sophisticated romances, while the tabloids turn tales of caution and hope into scandals that often shake their fingers at the reader.

On the other hand, I, and other women who have dealt with serious weight gains and losses, find the mounting bibliography of fiction to be almost criminal in how it sets us up for the day we achieve goal weight or goal size.

I wanted, for instance, to throw
Jemima J.
out the window. I weighed about 155 pounds when I read it, 181 pounds less than I had three years earlier. I knew the loathing that Jemima, who weighed 217 pounds in the first chapter, felt for herself when her thighs spread into the adjoining bus seat, her wistfulness when she studied her pretty face in the mirror, how “‘…fat…colors your whole life. Nobody wants to be seen with you, nobody notices you, or if they do it’s because they think you’re worthless.’”
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Her shyness, isolation, secret ambitions, and crushes are the stuff I, too, had made a life out of.

What I know from the other side of fat is that a woman who has been overweight most of her life and then loses a considerable amount of weight will, even at the age of twenty-seven, have some sagging skin, cellulite, broken veins, and stretch marks. Her boobs will hang. To lose ninety-six pounds in something like five months on less than five hundred calories a day, she would lose her hair and smell of a butcher’s shop, her breath ketonic from feasting on her own fat and muscle tissue. She will not know, her first time out in size 8 clothing, that men are ogling her. She will not have the skills, on that fateful size 8 day, to recognize and say to herself, “Bitches…they don’t matter,” when she overhears her roommates’ insults. She would, a few weeks later, emphatically
not
respond to her second sexual encounter
in her life
with immediate unfettered exhibitionism:

Jemima has some rough times as a consequence of her weight loss, but in the end we find her married to the man she has pined over for years, working in a magazine job she pined over for years, and “…no longer skinny…Jemima Jones is now a voluptuous, feminine, curvy size 10…”
⁴³

Excuse me?!
Since when does a size 10 equate with voluptuous?

In its way,
Jemima J.
and other such “miracle loss” books are as dangerous as the memoirs of anorectics were to Marya Hornbacher in
Wasted
, who used them as how-to guides. They promise too much, too soon, too easily, and the stakes are too high. Lindsay would fume to hear that a size 10 is Jemima’s concession to happiness. After much thought, Lindsay chose 155 pounds, a 10 to 12 clothing size for her, as her goal. She feels “skinny” at that weight—skinny and fit and energetic.
Jemima J.
is a slap in the face of women working hard to find the right weight to live comfortably.

The tabloid fat chicks are different from most of us because often they are unable to do their jobs as effectively or as lucratively when their weight balloons. Fame is also a curse. Lynn Redgrave, Lady Sarah Ferguson, Kirstie Alley, and Valerie Bertinelli have turned it to their pecuniary benefit by becoming spokeswomen for Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers, and Margaret Cho did a highly successful stand-up tour, film, and book about her experiences with ABC and
All American Girl
.

The tabloid chick who outs herself as honestly as Alley did has guts. One of the most hilariously honest scenes in all the chubby media I’ve looked at is the very first glimpse of Alley and her entourage in
Fat Actress
. Alley’s hair and makeup assistant sits by the pool snipping out a Lane Bryant 1X label from a sweater and replaces it with another reading Prada Size 8.

That Lane Bryant 1X is truth. Every woman with a weight problem of more than fifty pounds
knows
what that label means. It is at 1X where Ralph Lauren becomes sheets, Jones of New York is found among the sunglasses on the accessories floor, and Victoria’s Secret is a lip gloss in the Christmas stocking. For all the hype and irritation of Kirstie Alley, both as a character and on
Oprah
(“I don’t want to have fat sex…I know what I look like, and I just can’t see some guy’s eyes going, ‘Oh, my God!’”), scenes like the label replacement from
Fat Actress
speak of a humiliation that viewers can share (“
Oh, yeah: been there, done that
”), whereas the facts of obscuring pounds, inches, months, and labels make the process as esoteric as those epiphanies claqued over in
Body of Knowledge
or
Losing It
.

If Weiner’s Cannie Shapiro (or Rose Feller with her collection of feet-binding Manolo Blahnik mules in
In Her Shoes
) is not quite what a lot of us consider fat, the five-foot-eight, 220-pound Kirstie Alley was. So is Dolores in
She’s Come Undone
, whose descriptions of herself are plentiful and bleak: “My chin rested in a beard of fat. My eyes were small and piggy-looking.”
⁴⁴
Dolores is frustratingly vague on the actuality of her body, and it’s only on page 398 that she finally states her high weight of 263 pounds. Until then we know only that she had dieted successfully to 138 pounds, a weight at which she can plan in advance how to be the victimizer and the victim, mowing through her therapist, the man she stalks and marries, the assorted friends she relates to through anger.

The heroines of Chubby Chick Lit are too often women one wouldn’t want to know, larded with self-loathing and jealousy that may be lost with their excess pounds only to be replaced by smugness and revenge. “You’re a beautiful person,” Dolores’s therapist tells her at the beginning of her treatment with him. “‘Yeah, right, I’m Miss Universe,’ I snapped back. ‘I won it in the swimsuit competition.’”
⁴⁵
Dolores’s unremitting bitterness, sometimes dumb sarcasm, mistreatment of people, meanness, and blame make her one of the least likable heroines in Chubby Chick Lit. Despite years of therapy, Dolores fails to recognize she has a role in the disaster that is her life: her constant meanness to her mother and grandmother, her lackluster attempts in school or to fit in by behaving more pleasantly, stalking her ex-roommate’s ex-boyfriend and marrying him in a forest of lies and silence about her past. Her weight, as I’ve pointed out, is attributable to her mother, who unwittingly indulged her after her rape, and to her missing father.

While very few fictional treatments of being overweight explore the emotional reasons for their eating (
She’s Come Undone
and
Lady Oracle
are the exceptions among the novels, and
Eating
and
Now, Voyager
stand out among movies), some of the heroines at least shoulder the blame
and
the shame for their weight.

Insatiable emotional gorging is vividly replayed when Eleanor Samuels, a food writer, learns that her surrogate father has a short time to live, and she dashes out of the hospital before she has set down the spice cake that is Benny’s favorite.

It’s refreshing to read such admissions after so many stories that treat excess weight like acne: a condition that happens
to
you rather than a condition you perpetuate by eating, for reasons of your own.

Lindsay can tell you exactly how feminist theorists break down in deconstructing size and the female body. The anorectic and hysteric’s bodies are studied as psychological paradigms, while the fat body is an issue of political action.

How very stupid this is, and what a grave loss for some dissertationless graduate student somewhere. The overweight woman is as much an artifact as the anorectic, self-created in order to control a multitude of societal suppositions and impositions, needs and barrenness, social expectations and social rebellions. In the end, it’s the tabloid fat chick, rather than the fictional hefty heroine, who really has to decide whether her personal failings contribute to her weight. For the differing degrees of openness about the causes and reasons for their weight that women like Kirstie Alley, Sarah, Duchess of York, and Oprah Winfrey have shared, I am grateful. “If I hadn’t committed the mischief at hand,” writes the tabloids’ Duchess of Pork of her bashing from the press:

All of us who have regained, or are gaining, weight are at risk of destroying the lives we worked hard to make, whether that life is still separate in pieces or has come together as a whole. What we have, beside the chunky monkeys of craving and the drive to eat more, is the knowledge that our bodies bear witness to our truth. If once upon a time my body lost over a hundred pounds—or thirty or 250 pounds—it can do it again.

A relapse into weight gain can involve very small numbers and still be significant. Lindsay was driven to lose fifteen pounds for the 5K marathon, but in 2005, when Lindsay woke after midnight to find Jalen’s side of the bed empty and the distinct clink of weights hitting concrete, she knew what no one else had known. He had relapsed.

Jalen was exhausted and consumed with hatred for his body, making him sexually anorexic; his lack of interest made Lindsay feel crummier and crummier about her body and more needy of lovemaking for reassurance. “It was like, ‘I’m fat and that’s a turnoff to him,’” she remembered, and she turned to toast and cereal and grilled cheese sandwiches and a regain of fifteen pounds, which everyone in her family had something to say about. Finally she insisted Jalen go into therapy.

“My
mind
knows it’s not about me,” she told me in a long IM session one morning, “I’m working on my heart knowing it, too.” In therapy, she told me, Jalen personified his addiction to exercise as “Roberto,” a name fit for the romance novel cover model’s body he coveted. “He deals with Roberto. I just deal with him. If I see Roberto, I let him know, although I try not to monitor. Just if it’s really flagrantly bad behavior that needs to stop.” Lindsay has one of the few marriages in which it is the man who asks, “Am I fat?”

“One day I told Jalen, ‘Being in a relationship with an addict who doesn’t want to recover…’”

“And he said, ‘Pointless.’” We laughed. “He and Roberto went into therapy fifteen months ago and now I’m starting to get to the place where I can work on my own issues.”

Lindsay described the scene after the wedding reception to me two days after it happened. “It felt like an ouch. When you have a night where you feel gorgeous but end up sitting on a hotel room floor crying your eyes out, it’s a real ouch.” That weekend was an assault on the most vulnerable aspect of the person she has assembled (and remixed when the recipe wasn’t right) in the twelve years since leaving college. In the storm of her disappointment that night, it was impossible to repeat the first three steps of CoDA’s
⁴⁹
that usually help her keep a distance from Jalen’s sometimes callous or moody behavior. “I definitely saw my life go out of control because of my powerlessness over him,” she said, the frayed edges of that night catching on her laugh. “He got it that he’d fucked up, and we actually had a pretty nice morning walking around the town and up to Sugar Loaf.”

Part of working on authenticity is getting secure enough that Lindsay could confront Roberto and Jalen with what they had done and then move past the occasional bump in Jalen and her own recoveries. She didn’t demand a scene of him begging for forgiveness to match the intensity of her grief at being abandoned at the reception, and while she was obviously pained, it didn’t stop her from being in the moment of a sunny day on Mackinac Island with the man she loved.