Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (21 page)

If you want to know more about what it’s like to be fat, don this ensemble on a July afternoon. People will look at you and wonder if you’re crazy, which is not unlike Gwyneth Paltrow’s realization, when she strolled around Tribeca in her
Shallow Hal
fat suit, that “nobody would even make eye contact with me…when someone [is] slightly outside what we all consider normal, you think, oh it’s polite not to look. But actually, it’s incredibly isolating.”
⁵⁹

If you are fat and want to know what it’s like not to have so much weight anchoring you to the ground (this is not for the faint of heart), lift the apron of fat on your belly onto the kitchen counter. Feel the relief in your feet and lower back. Think what you would do if your body always felt that light—where you would walk, how you would dance, the places you could reach.

Then put on a piece of music you’re not familiar with—say, Igor Stravinsky’s “Circus Polka.” Tap your feet to the time, and you’ll find the beat shifts away from you, like the shore in a receding wave. As soon as you feel the elephants bending their knees and swaying with the tuba, the trumpets usher in a star turn, not lithe—that belongs to the woodwinds—but deft, certain, and sometimes dancing with the fluty ballerinas.

Stravinsky wrote the polka at the request of George Balanchine, who was the choreographer for the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus in the early forties. Stravinsky agreed to do it only if the elephants were “very young.” Did he want the animals smaller or more limber and able to move in counterpoint to the many voices the music speaks in? Would classically trained elephants resist the bursts the polka asks them to dance to?

You are listening to a world. Fifty elephants and fifty beautiful girls parade around the center ring, the elephants’ huge feet smacking the sawdust, which forms a faint gauze in the air that is rich with the smell of popcorn and cotton candy. Madoc, the prima pachyderma, tricked out in six-foot pink plumes and a glittering white-and-pink saddle, kicks and bows as her cohorts sway in contrasting rhythm. Kids laugh, squeal, cry, whine as the strings pick up the brass section to repeat the music’s theme, joining the cymbals two octaves higher than the bass drum. You can feel yourself in the bleachers, astonished at what the elephants can create because, let’s face it, as beautiful as the beautiful girls are, as brightly dressed and daringly décolleté, they can’t compete with the plumed elephants that outweigh them and outperform them. Any beautiful girl can perform a
pas de bourrée en arrière.
When an elephant does it, the circus has achieved a hybrid of music, dance, and Gothic architecture.

Think of eleven-year-old Wendy hearing symphonic music for the first time.
The Nutcracker Suite
or
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
would have been as radical to her tender new ears as our polka, duping her as surely as Stravinsky floats a tune and plunges it into a series of six flat notes. Wendy is listening to the world. She may have felt fat when she listened to the records the audiologist suggested, the adagios more graceful and the scherzos more supple than she knew herself to be. She may have felt as dumb as her teachers had told her she was because she didn’t know how such music was made, how Mozart heard it in his head before writing it down, or what it takes for violins to sound as sweet and right as her cat’s paw. Such music may have made her feel small and weak, as it was so much bigger, older, and tested than she was. It may also have made her feel courageous because she was looking for the story in the massive dark tunnel of this message from beyond her ken.

One day she will move from the E-Z listening classical albums to late-night college radio’s twentieth-century music, which she’ll have to turn up to hear. It’s a choice between eighties soft rock on 860 AM or the Kronos quartet on 88.9 FM, a choice between music or calling Lindsay to cry about Cal. Calling Lindsay will mean going home or sitting in the car outside Five Continents. On and on the choices go, filling the day with the struggle to feel okay, almost okay, loved despite everything we think we are that isn’t okay, and the occasional hope that comes from seeing Madoc the Elephant starring in her own show.

The Old and the Other and the Restless

I
f publishing was searching for a motto, one candidate would be “never let them see you sweat.” I am well-schooled, after fifteen years in the business, and know that for an agent this means never letting anyone question your success. For an author, I know from coaching former clients, it means the same, as well as always being excitedly in the middle of a project that is timely and oozing potential.

The number one rule for an author is to be always excitedly in the middle of a project that is timely and oozing potential. In October 2006, I was closer in spirit and lifestyle to dogs than to the author I had inhabited two years earlier—the thin one who was fully immersed in the publishing world. When I left the Bat Cave at ten thirty one gleaming, cool morning, I was in my work uniform: muddy sweatpants, worn-down Crocs, holey thirty-year-old ragg wool sweater speckled with blond, yellow, and brown dog hair, ponytail tucked into a sweaty baseball cap, grime under my nails, glasses clouded by dog kisses. My knickers were in a twist because after I took Daisy, Hero, Mellie, and Boomer to the dog run, a two-hour gig of throwing balls, being jumped on, and pulling Boomer out of fights by whatever appendage I could hang on to, I had to muster as much of my inner author as possible.

My former publisher was throwing itself an anniversary bash on the Upper West Side that evening. I was about to arm myself to meet my past. It felt as much like a medieval ritual as it sounds. Any number of ghosts could appear, lance and flail at the ready, to reopen old, barely scabbed wounds.

My darling erstwhile editor would be there with all the people I’d worked with on
Passing for Thin
and editors I’d known as an agent. It was quite possible either or both of my former bosses and their associates would show up among the platters of satay and trays of appletinis. The talk show host whose staff hauled me out to L.A. and dismissed me the next day might be mingling with the bestselling authoress of Chubby Chick Lit. And these were the ghosts from one imprint among twenty. Who knew what cousins might show up?

I was going because I know the cardinal rule of this game, in which I still need my former publisher’s support, is to make them want me.

The Frances who last made her way to the offices overlooking the Hudson had hair that was perfectly cut and colored, her eyebrows waxed and eyelashes dyed. Her fingernails were the envy of the editorial staff when they passed around the feature about her that ran in
Time
magazine. She had clothes for any occasion, and she was courted and admired by the press and readers. If I no longer had all of these assets in my obesity, at least I knew where to go for the primping. I hoped I could fake everything else.

Over the course of seven months of bouncing in and out of abstinence since March, I’d lost thirty pounds with a lot of lapses along the way. I’d held on to 220 pounds for two months, gaining a little, then re-losing it. Was I afraid of life as it approached two hundred pounds, that threshold of misses’ departments and the glow of publishing
Passing for Thin
? I’d begun taking Klonopin, an antianxiety medication in the Valium family, in order to overcome the social anxiety I’d developed in my shrunken world. I went to therapy and to twelve-step meetings as faithfully as I could manage, working on the steps with Patty, my sponsor. That autumn, I invested in some new clothes that were the antithesis of my work duds—velvets, mostly, and satins and pearl-buttoned blouses, in chocolate, deep purple, black, and white. They were 18s and 20s, down two sizes from March, and numbers that felt closer to home.

I made my choices in order to get as far away as possible from dogs and the Bat Cave. Tonight was my debut as thinner, fancier, more sociable than I’d been in a grim long time.

I hurried the dogs home so I could get a quick manicure before picking up another pack. When the afternoon posse was delivered to their doors, I scuttled to have my hair washed and blown out. By the time the door buzzed, I’d gotten halfway through Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach’s
Painted from Memory
, hair and makeup, conservative wool trousers and blazer paired with a sheer blouse showing my prettiest, midnight blue bra.

“Hi,” he said, and my heart split in two, one part dropping to the pit of my stomach, the other rising first to my throat and then to my forehead, which always burned in his presence. The night’s first ghost, the man who had broken me four years ago, the friend we’d worked hard to save from the lover who stopped loving me, had kindly agreed to squire me, a verb as literal as it was figurative. His “hi” ran a falling scale of four notes and warmed me like caramel, and his face was still always the face that met me on the Metro-North platform, looking up at me from the steel steps, smiling, saying, emphatically, “Yes.”

“Hi,” I said briskly. “I’ve been running all day, but I’ll be ready in five minutes.

“I know you hate these questions,” I went on as he sat down at my computer and started doodling around, “and I know you don’t care what women wear, but I’m a wreck, so you’re going to have to choose.” In one hand, I held out a strand of heavy black Apache tears. In the other was a double loop of filigreed sterling silver with bolts of uncut turquoise.

“That one,” he said to the silver. “I don’t like big blocky jewelry. Speaking as a guy, of course. So I’m probably wrong.”

“Silver it is,” I said, and slipped the necklace on and started scratching through earrings for its match.

“You look great, by the way. I can see the difference.”

I’d learned several important rules from my first weight loss. One of them is to simply say thank you. Don’t defend, don’t explain, don’t demur. But this was Scott. No one knew me and my last three years better. “I feel like I’ve just stepped over the boundaries into my real body,” I added. “It feels good.”

Nothing felt better than his genuine, unsolicited “You look great.” As many men as I’d been with since we broke up, no matter that a couple of times I’d lost a bit of my heart to someone, hearing it from Scott was hearing it from someone who’d once flushed at my praise as well.

“’Course,” he said, “we hicks from Connecticut don’t cotton to women going out nekkid.” I grabbed my blazer thanking God I had cover.

At the door, the publisher gushed, “I loved your book!” I smiled at him, a nonanswer that shows my best asset, something Scott had taught me in our salad days of falling in love with the Other Frances. “If he loved it, he could have bought the next one,” I whispered to Scott as we inched into the two-story living room with library ladders that could slide around more books than I’d ever possessed, sold, lost, given away, donated, or worn out. It was hot, kaleidoscopic with a hundred people I couldn’t separate the faces of, champagne rather than martinis, and spanakopita-crabcakes-dolmades-eggrolls-crostini-shrimp passed by white-coated waiters. Scott fought his way to the seltzer and then I plowed our way to my ex-editor.

My ex-editor, who is so young and fresh that she could be a twelve-year-old, brimmed with excitement to see me, to meet Scott, to hear about his new book. She also brimmed with excitement when she spotted her assistant in another clump of happily boozing youngsters. I admired her professional glitter and let her get back to it as soon as possible, caught by my publicist for a quick hello and by my copy editor, whom I’d not met in person. Scott inspected name tags and gracefully stepped in when I introduced him to these few people and told them about his work. I wanted his handsome and self-assured presence to erase twenty pounds from my aura. It all went pretty quickly, with a couple of perfunctory hors d’oeuvres and our envious perambulation of domesticity on Central Park West, before I turned to Scott and begged, “Can we please leave now?”

Fittingly, because the party was thrown by part of the company that published Truman Capote, we ended up with a bucket of popcorn at
Infamous
. The aptness of our movie choice, made on the basis of what was playing soonest as we walked up Broadway, was mutually squeamish. Scott maintained he would never write his own memoir, which has some nice gory touches to it, while I had, and had done so with little sugarcoating for the major characters in my life, including Scott. It was Truman’s year, and the question of the year, in both
Infamous
and
Capote
, was how far he—or any writer—would go to get the best story. Scott and I knew that my answer would be whatever it takes for the story. We left the theater in silence, a wider margin of space between our shoulders than usual. The shelter of the cab brought us closer and when we pulled up at Grand Central, where he’d catch a train back to Connecticut, I kissed him good-bye and said, without thinking—as automatically as the next breath—“I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he said.

“I’ll talk to you in a minute.” I hurried the moment on with a wave to how often we spoke on the phone. He slid out of the car, and I craned out to add, “Thanks for walking me through that thing.”

“It was fun, hon. I enjoyed it.”

A half hour later, Daisy and I walked down Willow Street, past Truman Capote’s basement apartment in a yellow brick house I photographed seasonally for its window boxes and red climbing roses. I knew that, unlike that first time I’d told Scott I loved him, there would be no email waiting for me to say that I shouldn’t regret the words. “When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip,” Capote wrote in the preface of
Music for Chameleons.
“And the whip is good for self-flagellation solely.”

An important distinction to make in how I regard my bodies lies in the words
old
and
other
. My old body, ten years younger than the one I inhabited in October, verged on circus-freak fat. My “other” body differentiates my thin body as distinct, separate, alien (the imagery I explored in
Passing for Thin
). To say “my other body” is to say I have two bodies, the one I have on and the other one stashed away in closets and bins and air-sealed bags, waiting for the right occasion. While I no longer think of being thin as being alien, I do think of it as being a completely separate entity from the well-padded body I wore to the party. They’re all mine but, like shoes, my body now is a well-worn pair of Crocs, whereas my other body is my hand-embossed CYDWOQ heels. My old body is a pair of frayed Keds, worn without shoelaces because my feet are too fat to tie them.

For a fat kid, thin was a cure-all. It would end the teasing. My parents and brothers would love me and be proud of me. I would marry George Harrison. Later, I vaguely thought a simple spin of some dial would reward me with the tweed-coated guy from
Mystery Date
at my door. I’d dance en pointe and play ingénue roles. Later still, I’d wanted a heaping plate of cold revenge on all the people I’d envied for their looks, abilities, and/or successes. A mere glance from the corner of my eye would do it.

Most of all, I wanted being thin to blast depression from my body and my life.

But once we have lost a lifetime’s obesity and lived in a thin body, thin is a specific set of signifiers our desires and energies concentrate upon. For me, thin is a suit tailored for me in a Necco wafer brown with a box pleated skirt and short, vaguely military jacket, worn with a boatneck black sweater that has no back. Thin is a pair of velvet Blackwatch plaid jeans. Thin is having spaces between the joints of my fingers and sore knees from sleeping on my side.

Not long after the publishing party, I had dinner with Pam Peeke. The author of
Body for Life
had taken an interest in me,
Passing for Thin,
and this book. One thing about Pam is that she comes directly and bluntly to the point. “Do you
know
how lucky you are?” she asked in a tone that made me sit back on the banquette and assemble a hasty list (
to be alive, to have a successful book and a new contract, to have an education.
..) that might answer her question. “
You
gained
half
your weight back!”

I remained slumped away from the table.
Lucky?

“Statistically, you should have gained it
all
back, and then some. You’ve beaten the odds!”

I thought about it for a moment, nodded, and returned to my chicken.

“But you gotta stop fuckin’ around now. You’re fifty, Frances. Time is not on your side.”

The riot act had been read. I went home that night thinking about my twitchy weights that made me crazy. Sometimes crazy enough to walk Daisy to the deli for a pint of Ben & Jerry’s before bed.

Yes: I’m lucky. I did not return to the circus-freak fat of 338 pounds. I look like a lot of overweight women, a category I can describe by our clothing. In our most well-made, pretty outfits, we look like we are trying
so hard
to fake out spectators that our effort makes our seams look as though they are about to burst. In anything else, we either look as though we’re trying to be
au courant
(leggings are in—hurray! Isn’t this leopard-spotted blouse cute??) or too much as though we don’t care what we’re wearing. There are many of us, thankfully. Only once in my second obesity has someone insulted me directly, and I believe she was one of those original
Mayflower
passengers granted the privilege of blunt speech.

I grieve the loss of my other body. I fear my old body more than anything short of the death of my parents. The line at which I cross into my old body is 250 pounds. With such emotionally charged feelings about my weight, why, as Pam put it, was I fuckin’ around playing fat arpeggios in the same, eighteen-month-old range of thirty pounds?

There are many reasons I could give, but I think it comes down to the term I use for my body as it is between 200 and 250 pounds: restless. I am so restless to break the barrier of 220 and then 200 pounds that I can’t wait. When I do, for a while, and approach the slightly-too-big size 18, I get caught up in some crisis that I eat through, whether it’s boarding a difficult dog or visiting my parents or a dip into one of my periodic depressions.