Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (20 page)

Belittlement is one of the terrors that choice holds, and I think that’s the real reason we don’t hear Wendy talking about possible alternatives to being a secretary in the registrar’s office. She had her bachelor’s degree in journalism and would be eligible for her pension from the university soon. She said she wanted to write, and she had a million ideas for stories and novels, some of which she took to leaving on my answering machine, thinking I needed the material rather than trying it for herself. Her blog and Angry Fat Girlz were amazingly open and accepting places for her to speak out, but when I offered to help her with some of the awkwardness of her writing, she thanked me but never got around to asking for specifics. Writing is hard work and hard on the writer—she could expect nothing but criticism for years at a time. It’s a calling that requires its practitioner to be both a perfectionist and a vagabond because the writer doesn’t know where the day will take her or what the next project will be, and the failures inherent in jumping out of the airplane are her own.

That state of unpredictability and culpability was not for Wendy. For the woman who chooses to make her career an active part of her life, culpability and unpredictability are part of the equation of success. Just ask Mimi, who, as she advanced in her field and had fewer people to answer to, was the one who got blamed if something dire happened, or Lindsay, who would be on her own once she finished her doctorate.

Perhaps everyone, fat or thin, has the courage to face failure in only one or two areas of her life. I’m not sure I’m brave enough anymore to face the stress of dating or the decimation of breaking up. I tell myself I’ll look for a boyfriend when I’ve lost more weight, knowing it’s time I’m playing for, and with it, the hope that I’ll be so secure with who I am that I’ll be slick as Teflon by the time I get there. Whatever gunk men come with—kids, running a business, allergies, whatever—will slide right off me.

Or perhaps we don’t pick our battles. Perhaps our battles pick us.

I was surprised how judgmental heavy women are of what constitutes fat, obese, thin, skinny, and freakish at either extreme. Ann, a nurse, based her distinctions clinically on rolls and muscle definition, adding, “Thin women have ease in their carriage and no stress as they move.”

Gee
, I thought,
tell that to my friend Kay, who broke her back but has remained a size 4 for twenty years after a long history of yo-yoing from a 4 to a 16 twice a year, or my niece Lisa, who so hates having to dress up that she looked frozen in her wedding finery.

Lia, the Freudian blogger, responded to my question on my Amazon blog by writing, “Thin is sizes 6 and 8. Size 10 is regular (or normal, or average), size 12 is chubby, while that wearisome 14 is overweight. If you fit sizes to 16 or 18, you’re fat, and 20 to 24 labels mean you’re obese.” A 26 to “no-size muumuu” is morbidly obese in Lia’s categories, and after that you’re in what I bluntly call freakishly fat and how-do-they-live-that-way fat. At that point, Lia says, clothing doesn’t matter so much as bed linens and a Discovery Channel intervention.

These pairings make me think of how thin I felt and how good my legs looked in the sizes Lia defines as overweight. As I lost weight, I never, once, felt “chubby” in a size 12, and fitting a 6 or 8 meant, to me, that I could shop anywhere in SoHo or on Madison Avenue. I felt surprised—that I could be that small, that there is another category of clothing there—but not thinner as a 6 than I had at 12. Until, of course, I began
gaining
weight.

My friend B.J. recently came across a term neither of us had heard before for that bedridden woman who writes pleading letters to Richard Simmons:
super morbid obesity
. It’s defined, I learned, by having a body mass of fifty or above. At our heaviest, I was one point into super morbid obesity and Wendy was one-tenth of a point into it. It’s both a horrible and wonderful designation, admitting the blockbuster heroism that it takes to create and live in such hampered bodies and expectations.

Another friend, Monica, refers to brand names in considering classifications of clothing sizes. The obese woman can fit into size 3X’s in department stores; the morbidly obese can sometimes fit into Lane Bryant’s largest sizes; the freakishly fat, my phrasing which she rightly took umbrage to, can fit into some of Roaman’s clothing and she needs help getting around. Like Lia, Monica thinks the how-does-she-live-that-way fat woman needs clothing made for her and is immobile.

B.J., Monica, Ann, Lia, and I were all obese as we discussed these differences. B.J. had recently gotten married. Monica runs a successful business that requires constant commuting by bus and plane. Ann teaches nursing and is raising two sons on her own. Lia has completed all but her dissertation in clinical psychology and worked at a big-city law firm while conducting a busy social life with her husband and a circle of intellectual friends.

How we live and what we believe, as if Wendy’s contrariness hasn’t illustrated, are two completely different things.

Despite all the caterwauling in the press and medical communities, and the screeds about fatties you can find online and in crude comics’ shticks, being fat isn’t what it used to be when there was only the Lane Bryant catalog and doctors who readily dispensed amphetamines and thyroid pills without testing. It’s expensive to be fat but increasingly feasible, health-and fashion-conscious, and social.

It has been difficult, for instance, to ascertain correct readings from too-small blood pressure cuffs. Many fat patients now take their own examination gown and larger cuffs to the doctor’s office, along with their personal seat belt extender to the airport. MRI machines and even operating tables have been enlarged and strengthened.

Fat travelers now have destinations of their own, tailored to their needs. Freedom Paradise opened its twelve-room Riviera Maya in Mexico in 2004. It features armless chairs and ladderless swimming pools, and staff tutored by psychologists to look their guests in the eye. BBW (Big Beautiful Woman) Travel offers size-friendly trips to the Caribbean, Mexico, Las Vegas, and Disney World, and packages catering to sports fans, skiers, and golfers. They also offer group, semi-escorted, and individual plans for trips to Europe, the major American cities, South America, and the Near East. The proprietress of BBW Travel, Jo-Ellen Hodgkins, is especially enamored of cruises.

Unlike other travel websites, BBW Travel features links to purchase hard-to-find plus-sized travel items such as fanny packs and plus-sized garment bags, explanations of travel clothes and extra-wide hangers. I recently received a catalog offering such products and more. I studied it in horrified fascination for the insights it offers into the needs of the super morbidly obese: raised toilet seats that will bear eight hundred pounds, convex replacement rods that extend a bathtub shower several feet outwards, roomy lawn chairs, and stronger, wider bicycle seats. I felt like a rookie as I filed the catalog in a folder, and I wondered if its patrons mind that the models, while more discernibly hefty than most so-called plus-sized models, are beautiful, tanned, sporty, and sexy size 20s with 48-inch waists. These models clearly don’t need the scale that weighs up to a thousand pounds.

None of this is cheap, which makes fat good for the American economy by creating a burgeoning “fatonomics,” as Daniel Gross describes it.
⁵⁷
The increased premiums that the overweight and obese pay, often for no other reason than the number on the scale, are stuffing the pockets of major HMOs and insurance companies. Fat people are advised, both by the National Association to Advance Fat Americans (NAAFA) and the airlines, to consider buying either two economy or one first-class seat. That is double the ticket money for Delta for half the passengers.

Fat people may have contributed to the survival of e-commerce because the Internet is often the only way to avail ourselves of goods and services. If you want one of Yuliya Zeltser’s delicious IGIGI evening gowns, most women are going to have to go online to make the selection. IGIGI is a smaller business that has been built on the understanding that fat women’s bodies have shapes. The buyer has some guarantee that she won’t shriek when she looks in the mirror and then scurry to locate something else and return the disaster for a refund. Such boutiques are featured on many blogs and online communities, decreasing the need for advertising.

Among the already-more-expensive plus sizes, there is another 5 to 10 percent price difference between sizes. The cute chocolate tweed sweater at Woman Within that sells for $34.99 in sizes medium (14/16W) through 1X (22/24W) is $39.99 in sizes 2X (26/28W) to 4X (34/36W). A fat woman’s purchases often inflate because of Desperate Shopper’s Syndrome: if it fits, I’d better buy it because you never know when I’ll find something else. Once a woman gets to those bigger sizes, DSS isn’t frivolous. In looking at the OneStopPlus website that features clothing from three Redcats’ brands that all fat women know well—Woman Within, Roaman’s, and Jessica London—there were seven newly arrived items in 4X/36W. The washable suede skirt that could reasonably make the fifty-inch-waisted woman feel sexy is ten dollars more than its smaller sizes.

Plus-sized clothing is one of the biggest growth areas in the fashion industry, IGIGI’s Yuliya Zeltser notes. Even the most coveted designers are claiming their slice of the pie—with inferior goods. Cruise the misses’ racks and compare a skirt or pair of jeans with its twin on the plus-sized racks. You’ll find a marked difference in material and workmanship. And yet I’m heartened to see that, up to about size 24, fat women can now shop many of the same brands as the thin. When I was growing up, there was little chance to make the kind of statement about who I was or wanted to be from the clothes I could buy. Now I can sate my fantasies at J. Jill (
très artistique
), Cold water Creek (boardroom to ballroom in florid prose), and Eddie Bauer (another sunrise at tree line, ho-hum).

If only I liked the way I actually look in the toile skirt from JCPenney’s or the quilted red silk jacket from Spiegel…

Among the sectors you might not think of profiting from fatonomics are the automobile and petroleum industries. In
Fat Chicks Rule!
Lara Frater devotes three pages to buying a car that is fat friendly, including the companies that do and don’t offer seat belt extenders. These are products that Mimi, Wendy, Katie, and I have needed and use in common with the most militant Bod Squad Cheerleader. But the Angry Fat Girls pay more to keep fatonomics thriving by buying into some of the diet, scholarly, medical, and political industries. Wendy, Mimi, and Lindsay fork over a monthly $46.90 to Weight Watchers, and Katie and I toss a buck or two in a basket at meetings. It costs about $1,400 a year to join the gym around the corner and just over $900 dollars to join the nearest Y (a five-dollar, subway ride away, adding $750 if I went three times a week), or $1,600 for a yearlong membership in the nearest Bikram Yoga studio.

I should move. Mimi’s local Y in West Philadelphia is $567 a year and her closest yoga studio is $1,236 a year.
⁵⁸

On the other hand, if I don’t get down to 180 pounds, which would put me in a size 12 and two points into the NIH category for overweight, I’m doing all the thin, funny, well-read, tall, leggy, blue-eyed, self-exposed, talented people a huge favor: I am less likely to find a job or make as much money as that Thin Frances X. If I do find a job, I’m less likely to receive good work reviews and less likely to be promoted. If I have to move for my job, I will find it harder to rent an apartment.

The one-third of the American public that is not overweight or obese should be sending us flowers and Godiva chocolates in gratitude.

For the less than half of American women who are in normal bodies (whether they like their bodies or not), this is what it’s really like to be fat.

Put on a pair of leggings or long underwear, and a pair of thick, knee-high socks. Pull on a T-shirt, followed by a turtleneck, and a stout wool sweater. Next you will need a pair of down-filled ski pants, a size too small. Last, add boots and a long, down-filled coat. It’s seventy-two degrees inside but that’s okay because you’re about to go out and walk a couple of big rambunctious dogs in a strong windchill that will have you pushing against it with your shoulders as the dogs pull you in three separate, shifting directions.

When you stoop to pick up a dropped leash or a pile of shit, you will strain—against so many clothes and the trousers that bind at your waist and thighs. You struggle to hitch two thick layers up in order to half squat to bend over, and you will grunt with the effort. Your coat may unsnap in these maneuvers, but you’ll thank God your ass is hidden by it: the squat-bend ought to be rented by mattress and beer companies as advertising space.

When you get home, you need to pee too urgently to take your clothes off first. You unsnap your coat and hurdle yourself to the toilet, your loosened coat catching on the doorsill and, perhaps, ripping. You are now beginning to feel the new circumference your body occupies. Your arms are so inflated that you can’t draw them tightly to yourself; your legs so constrained that despite sitting with your knees wide apart, your thighs touch. Try to change the toilet paper or another task requiring you to reach one arm across yourself. Try to scratch your back. Try to wipe yourself. Feel how narrow your range of motion is when you wash your hands or untie your boots. Take note of the exertion required to do these things. Note the damp places on your body. The small of your back. The secret creases of your groin. Your scalp. Your upper lip. If you take your socks off, they will stiffen from your sweat. The back of the knees of your leggings will be moist. The crotch of your underwear will be as wet as if you’d wet yourself, and the cups of your bra will be fetid with sweat.

Hug someone. Her hands won’t meet where they customarily do. and she may not hug you the way she usually does. She may be so confused by your self-presentation that she opts to hold you by the upper arms and buss you instead. Nor, equally sadly, will your arms reach around her. Sit down and try to cross your legs. Pick up a baby or cat or pillow and let it sit in your lap, noting whether it slides off or whether you can nuzzle it comfortably. Sit on a low seat and stand up. You will have to plant your hands on your knees to do this and you may have to rock into the movement to achieve the momentum to accomplish it.