Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (19 page)

On the other hand, it was a perfectly logical conversation given that our connection is predicated on losing weight. Down the rabbit hole of weight loss, the voices speak such nonsense that there is nothing to do but keep talking out loud until you can hear your own contradictions. The truth lies somewhere in between.

The next day, determined to make up for her nighttime woe, Wendy headed over to Five Continents for a salad after work. She flirted with the Cheese Pimp but only had a smidgen of Esrom and another of Ardi Gansa, which was so sweetly salty that she knew she’d spend the weekend wanting it. To allay the craving, she dropped by Target and got a cute fisherman’s sweater on sale for twelve bucks and a box of hundred-calorie chocolate chip cookie snack packs.

The sweater presented a problem. She folded it in the Rubbermaid bin of clothes that almost fit and, in doing so, had to look at the bins of clothes that no longer fit, no longer fit but which she liked too much to give up, and the clothes that fit and needed to be put away. The other messes in her four-room apartment popped into unwelcome focus: the piles of magazines and CD jewel cases and catalogs on her coffee table, the dishes she hadn’t washed and the groceries she hadn’t put away, the clothes tossed over doors, laundry spilling on the bedroom floor, books by her bed, the tangle of jewelry in the bathroom and on her bureau, and the sand her cats had kicked out of the litter box during the week.

“You need to make a list,” she told herself sternly. “Get one thing cleaned and you’ll feel better.”

She decided to attack the clothes that were too big the next night.

“Too big,” that weekend, meant sizes 24–28. Some, she decided, needed to be thrown out. The hard part was deciding whether to send things to friends from her blog community, go to Goodwill, or sell what still had tags. A.J., a Weight Watcher blogger in Arkansas and an Angry Fat Girlz responder whom Wendy had become good friends with, might like the purple knit tunic, and she’d lost some weight so a 24 would probably fit. The 26 green blazer would be great for Mimi and—hey, she remembered—she’d seen some hilarious Anne Taintor stamps at Barnes & Noble. Mimi spends a fortune on her hair—she’d love the bitchy blonde ones. She’d zip out and get a few things to add to the packages.

Mimi hated the blazer. It made her look like Dopey dressed up for St. Patrick’s Day, the sleeves too long and a size too big, let alone the color. The stamps were funny, and she thought of the men she had stupidly loved when she read the one about running into an ex and backing up to run over him again. The lilac lotion was yummy although she stuck by H
₂
O products. But why, she puzzled, the yellow dishcloth? What was
that
about?

As the evening progressed, Mimi found herself increasingly irritated by the blazer. Above all, Wendy was loyal. She commented on every entry on Mimi’s personal blog, Dieting on the Dewey Decimal System, and faithfully checked her Flickr album online, so she knew Mimi was wearing a size 24 and she knew how short she was. When Mimi posted photos of the Phoenix conference, she lavished praise on how the pink or red tops she favored added to the luster of her fine skin. With so much information, why did Wendy assume the blazer would be in any way something Mimi would wear? Did she think Mimi was
that
fat?

Mimi called and cautiously thanked her. “Don’t you love that jacket?” Wendy rushed in. “It’s hard to find wool blazers in that size.”

Mimi’s hand clenched the phone as she took a deep silent breath. “It must have looked great on you,” she said calmly. “Green is definitely your color.”

“But that was ages ago,” Wendy said. “I tried it on, and I looked like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

Touché
, Mimi thought.

“I’m going to Talbots this weekend,” Wendy rattled on. “I went to Lane Bryant last night because I had some coupons, and the manager said I needed to be fit for a new bra. Madeline—you remember, we grew up together—told me when I posted those new pictures on Flickr that my bra was too big but I didn’t believe her. So this manager gets out a tape measure and it turns out I’m a 40 DD. I said, ‘No way,’ and she pulled at my old bra and said, ‘You’ve got four extra inches you don’t need there.’ So I try on the bra she recommends and
guess what? It fit!
I take my coupons and buy four bras for fifty dollars. I’ve noticed the bra makes my stomach look smaller and that I have a waist. When I left the dressing room, the manager said, ‘You need a new blouse, too. That one’s too big.’”

“You know what Clinton and Stacy always say,” Mimi answered. “It’s all in the foundation.” They laughed together at that. They’d spent more than a few Friday nights on the phone while watching
What Not to Wear
.

“Yeah,” Wendy sighed happily. “I told my mom and she said, ‘
Forty DD?
That’s almost a normal person’s size.’ So I’m going to see what Talbots has. I might even fit some misses’ blouses.”

What could Mimi say? She had re-lost nine pounds of ten she’d put on last year. She felt cautiously hopeful but was a long way from misses’ sizes. “Wow,” she said. “Good luck.”

“Almost a normal person’s size” are five of the most dangerous words in the lexicon of weight loss. To Wendy, with a severe hearing impairment and coming from 330 pounds, being “a normal person” stands out in sharp relief against “almost” and “size.” It’s so tantalizing, in fact, that it ignores the questions of what a normal and abnormal person are.

If we consider normal and average as near synonyms, we can compile a highly inaccurate typical peer. The average American woman is slightly less than five feet four inches tall and, averaging the averages reported in different surveys, 149 pounds.
⁵¹
She wears a size 14 dress,
⁵²
a 36C bra,
⁵³
and an 8 wide shoe,
⁵⁴
and her BMI is 26.3,
⁵⁵
which is one point into the overweight category and slightly less than the average American man. The average American woman consumes about 1,840 calories a day, of which an average of 20 percent comes from refined sugars. Fifty-six percent of American women are on a diet at any given time.
⁵⁶

But Wendy isn’t average, any more than the rest of us Angry Fat Girls are. Even leaving off how much she weighs, she is five inches taller that this “average” American women. If Wendy woke up one random Tuesday morning fitting and fit into a size 14, her blog readers and AFG comrades would never hear the end of it, and Talbots would be forced to initiate a lawsuit against the redheaded woman who had moved a sleeping bag under its sales racks. To Wendy, a size 14 might as well be a size 4.

Can you see my rage when Jennifer Weiner’s Cannie wails on about being fat at size 16? Part of my diffidence is my problem, not Weiner’s. Fat is far more an attitude than it is a hard-and-fast category imposed by the National Institutes of Health or the American Obesity Association. Cannie
feels
fat in her size 16 lawyer suits, especially when she looks at her sister, Maggie. Wendy
feels
almost normal when she buys a 40DD bra.

Wendy is the lone AFG who has not been thin as an adult. It’s hard, to the fat outsider, to believe that the flood tide of self-help and spirituality books, tapes, DVDs, and seminars are selling to women who don’t have a weight problem. The ever thin are trying to feel “normal,” too, and who knows what haunts them as they leaf through Marianne Williamson or scan their nearby Bikram studio’s offerings?

We who have lived on the Planet of Girls know that being thin and looking normal doesn’t make us confident, loved, connected, or fulfilled. If anything, not having the present-tense scapegoat of obesity, the newly thin turn on themselves when things go wrong and with such ferocity that losing one’s conscience to food has the rightness of true north. Regaining our pulchritude is the reunion of the two last surviving classmates, you and your fat, who hated each other back in the day. It’s—almost—worth the exponentially increased self-loathing, regret, and embarrassment, the reimposed physical barriers and life limitations, to have that familiar enemy to fill up the silences that the chorus of food, fat, and dieting once loudly drowned out.

On the other hand, Wendy has the longest romantic history of the Angry Fat Girls, including high school and college boyfriends, and a twenty-year marriage. She was at her adult low of 220 pounds when she married Leo and down thirty pounds from her highest weight of 330 pounds when she met and dated Cal.

Do Wendy’s experiences belie my former belief, still held out of habit rather than my limited experiments, that a fat woman can’t find love with a man unless she’s willing to settle for a great deal less than what she hopes for or needs? Does a working definition of
fat
include remaining single or being part of a cartoon couple like Jack and the nameless Mrs. Spratt?

Yes and no. When Leo stopped wanting to have sex, she stayed with him for the safety and familiarity of a man she essentially liked and enjoyed. They had a dog and a house. She continues to call his mother every month or so. In our first conversation, a formal interview in June that was based on the questionnaire she had filled out for me, she said, “I used my extreme fatness to avoid situations. ‘I’ll stay fat and stay married and be unhappy and hope one day he will pay attention to me. I will stay fat and not bother to work out and be fit because “what’s the use.” You get old and you die,’” she says. It took years to trade a home, a best friend, and lack of sex for living on her secretarial salary and the hopes of 998 first dates.

Choice
is the oxygen of the planet of weight loss, the very fuel that lends it momentum. What do we eat? When can we eat? How much do we eat? How can we justify it? How much will we lose if we don’t eat it or eat at all? How long will we have to spend on the treadmill if we eat it? How will we feel about it in the morning? How long do we have before we weigh ourselves? What we “should” and “shouldn’t” eat (and who says so is yet another choice) is many dieters’ constant preoccupation.

These are the questions Wendy lives in. She blogs and talks about her food choices every other day. On days that she doesn’t have to shrug off post-swimming french fries, she is sincerely and hilariously pissed off at the thin guy who had two sides of macaroni and cheese with his lunchtime meat loaf.

Sometimes the monomania of eating lifts. When we don’t worry about what we are going to eat, that space in our brain is available to thoughts that can be difficult and as worrisome as the wanting to pop on over to the vending machines. Why are other people such
ass
holes? When is someone going to find out how incompetent, selfish, bitchy, stupid, and vain we are? Will we lose our jobs or friends or marriage when they do? Should we change jobs? Are we spending enough time with family? Mom’s moved to a rest home—how will we cope when she’s gone? How do we bear the loneliness and nakedness of not eating what, when, and as much as we want?

New questions lead to a new set of choices. Either we face the worries and deal with them, find new distractions, or get into a diet cycle of bad this week but a new diet next week will do the trick.

Wendy seesaws between the last two choices—taking a hard look at how she lives and having a week of slippery food—by shopping, justifying, and punishing herself. “I don’t like it when I shove giant gumdrops in my mouth because I’m ticked off,” she said of one sad weekend. Her options to eating leave her broke, with an apartment full of clothes, magazines, and CDs; obsessing over dating websites; and blogging about how long she spent on the treadmill and at what incline. Only once, in a crisis with her boss, have I heard her consider another campus secretarial position in which she’d be working with creative rather than administrative people. It seems as if Wendy willfully refuses to consider more ways to spend free time, how to express herself, or to find more fulfilling work. One advantage of having a lot of weight to lose is having the time to consider what kind of human being she’d like to become during and after the process. But Wendy is seduced by the numbers on the scale and labels, which are faulty markers of progress and time. “I’m not as fat as I used to be,” she explained during one of her brief disappearances from the personal ads, “but I’m still not attractive enough for men in my age bracket. If I want to date a sixty-nine-year-old, I’m hot, but that’s not my cup of tea.”

Choice—in cute clothes, cute men, taking any flight because the middle seat is just fine, a beach vacation—is also the treasured goal of weight loss, whether it’s fantasy of reality.

For Wendy, then, it’s not so much that
fat
means being less lovable than it means perceived limitations, and her balls-to-the-wind attitude toward dating is, in many ways, a continuation of obesity, holding out the possibility of safety and comfortableness. She was, that August, twenty pounds lighter than she’d been with Cal: love is possible at any weight. But her driving need to find a boyfriend is the desire to get out of the mating arena where judgments are made rapidly and sometimes cruelly, to have someone to complain to about her job and her parents, to be rescued, hopefully, from her precarious finances, to be behind a male set of walls. Limits are what Wendy has lived with her entire life, from the father who thought riding a bike was too dangerous to working as a secretary in the same system for nearly twenty years. She could reason away Mark’s unavailability that September by saying she didn’t really want a full-time boyfriend, and she could palm off how acutely Cal had belittled her by hurling invectives about the woman she calls “the she-male” who bewitched him away from her, but their unavailability pinched an old nerve nonetheless.