Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (22 page)

I am too restless to sit still in meetings, read myself to sleep at night, journal my days, stay in the moment. I was restless when I was my other self, too, but it was a restlessness to do and experience, whereas this is a restlessness to be. My old self was rarely restless, consistently anesthetized by carbohydrates into the stillness of a snowwoman.

My old self had an elaborate fantasy life. Parts of it depended on being thin, such as the oncologist husband and our daughter named Maggie, or teaching at a la-di-dah Eastern college and having my hag’s fag’s baby. I had designs for my literary fame that included a thatched house in the Cotswolds, which I decorated before falling asleep at night. I retreated to Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy’s life after their I-do. (I should have written that last one. I could have led the pack in the continuation of their saga and bought the house in Stow-on-the-Wold.)

Twelve-step Think has a bajillion mottos that stick whether I want them to or not. “One day at a time” destroyed those ongoing fantasies. It’s not that I don’t want things anymore. Not long after the party, Katie passed on a chain email that asked a lot of personal questions our friends might not know about us. The last question was “What would you like to accomplish/do before you die?” I surprised myself with my answer: “EVERYTHING. Write great books, live in Venice, own a Victorian house, have more dogs, be thin, go to Prague, be in love & be loved back…” One difference between my answer to that questionnaire and my old dreams is that I actually make an effort at getting thin and writing. Another difference is that I figure they’re all achievable if I keep my eyes on the work at hand. There was never any possibility that I’d wake up next to Mr. Darcy one morning.

For all the fantasies my old self played with after I turned out the light, I had no hope. More precisely, my hope was a child’s rubber hammer rather than a chisel. Want is the stepchild of hope: I wanted to write and to be thin, but I didn’t hope for them because I had no sustained, finished success with them. In March 2006 when I saw 250 pounds on the greyhounds’ scale, I was still in possession of the hope born of success, and I had precise tools with which to carve an other self.

I just didn’t have the energy to pick up my planner and scorp to whittle away at my cravings.

In the anticlimax of my night of glamour with Scott and with bags of Halloween candy and pumpkin pies filling the shelves of the neighborhood stores, I was in the high state of cravings that comes with cool weather and the expectations of the food pentathlon of the holidays looming ahead. I knew there was another relapse looming. What size would I be when I went to visit my parents at Christmas? Worse, what size would I be when I got back to Brooklyn?

I tend to be a bed-binger, which is uncomfortably close to night-eating disorder.
⁶⁰
I like to be under the covers with a sedative already twining through my system before I pour on the sugar. I like the setting because I know I’ll be asleep soon, and it’s luxurious to be in as close an approximation of the womb as is compatible with food. I eat late at night—a common time for wrong-eaters—because I’m at my loneliest and weakest, because I have no immediate responsibilities to fill, because I survived another day, because I am dissatisfied with the net results of the day, or occasionally because I am pleased and want to celebrate them. Dissatisfaction—regret at having goofed off instead of writing, guilt that I didn’t give the dogs enough playtime, anger that I didn’t do simple chores—is the worst demon in the bunch. I eat before sleep to forget I was fatuously awake.

A typical bedtime “snack” for me could be a box of Honey Bunches of Oats, milk, and Entenmann’s chocolate doughnuts—4,400 calories—or a pint of Ben & Jerry’s chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream and a twelve-pack of Oreo Cakesters—2,580 calories. You can understand my dismay, then, when I looked up the definition of a binge, a recent addition to the classes of eating disorders. Specialists are vague about fixing on a precise definition, but the Mayo Clinic says,

Two hours? Ten
thousand
calories? I graze in my parents’ house, often in the middle of the night when I wake up and can’t get back to sleep, edging closer to being an official night-eater, but I can’t honestly remember purposefully assembling the food necessary to eat for two hours.

The Mayo Clinic and other eating-disorder clinics gloss over the emotional and physical damage caused by my measly four thousand calories or Lindsay’s low-fat craze in her twenties when she’d chomp a couple of cups of dry Grape-Nuts through the night for an 832-calorie well of shame and weight gain. When I walk down Montague Street, I am sure their definitions are too stringent when they claim that anorexia nervosa and bulimia are the most common expressions of eating disorders. I may sleep like the (sweaty) dead after my ice cream and cookies, but I wake to shame, self-punishing soliloquies, no taste for my ritual coffee and cigarettes, increased hunger through the day, and diarrhea. Even eating abstinent food in too much quantity at the wrong time produces those feelings and physical reactions.

“I still haven’t decided if I’m a food addict or just fucked up,” Lindsay said in IM one morning.
Everyone is a food addict
, I thought to myself. It’s biological necessity.

Twelve-step-ese, with its extensive nomenclature, can distort one’s identity. We introduce ourselves, according to the kind of meeting we’re at, as “compulsive overeaters,” “compulsive eaters,” or “food addicts.” Sometimes we preface our statement with the words “I’m a gratefully recovering [food addict/compulsive overeater].” I have the First Compulsive Bite discussion with Patty at least once a month. The FCB, as I’ve noted earlier, is the demarcation between abstinence and relapse. But when I’m hungry (and hunger feels like a terminal illness to me),
every
bite, weighed, measured, without sugar or flour, is compulsive, not to mention savage. “Can we change that to the First Compulsive Bite
after
we’ve eaten what we’re supposed to?” I ask.

Even after all these years in the Rooms, the jargon still irks me.

“Hey! How are you? Are you abstinent?” a friend will ask after not seeing me in a while.
No
, I’m aching to say.
I’m Frances.
“At least you’re abstinent!” Patty said the day I sobbed that the state demanded another five hundred dollars that I didn’t have. That was certainly a comfort.

When Lindsay wondered whether she was a food addict, I realized that when I raise my hand I may use the meeting’s going jargon—a food addict or compulsive overeater—but I add that I am a sugar addict. I’m also a starch/fats/protein addict, but at some point I have to shut up.

In the course of two months, Katie’s one piece of dark chocolate a day had turned into a cinnamon toast mania, and by October she had regained twenty pounds, seven less than she’d started out at in June. When I inevitably bought a box of orange-frosted cupcakes, I hated myself for being relieved that we were in the same boat. A woman on a needed diet often avoids women who need to diet and aren’t doing so. Free eating is infectious because we envy it, even when we are flush with success and excitement. Katie and I avoided each other when we weren’t in sync, but she was the only one who understood a twelve-stepper’s steep hill and no brakes when it came to alternating sugar and fasting.

“Do you think I can get abstinent?” I pleaded from under the covers of my bed, scratching Daisy’s butt as she hunkered tightly against me.

“Do you think
I
will?” she countered.

“Yes,” I said staunchly. “Something’s going to bottom out, and you’ll go back to Program.”

“What if I don’t bottom out? I mean, I weigh 420 pounds. I can’t go anywhere or do anything. What’s it going to take?”

“Getting really, really tired of food or not being able to do stuff. Getting tired of belonging to food instead of yourself. I don’t know.”

“God, yes, that’s so right: belonging to food. Me and my food. We’re a club.”

“Me, too,” I said. I reached down to stroke Daisy’s ears and she shifted away from me. I felt like my club had just been reduced. “I gotta start going to meetings, but I’m so tired all the time.”

“I frigging hate meetings,” Katie said in an exhalation of something pent up. “I hate walking in all fat and gross-looking, and seeing people I knew from before.”

“It’s not your fault. You’re a compulsive overeater. It’s what you
do
. It could be any one of them in a year.”

“Except it’s now, and it’s not them who are fat. It’s me and I can’t stop.”

“I know,” I said softly. “Me, either.” The clock read ten. It wasn’t that cold outside and Gristedes was still open. If I had vanilla Oreos and ice cream, I’d sleep well. If Katie got to, why couldn’t I?

“Get abstinent, Frances. I need you to. I need to see a success I like for a change.”

Despite the seasonal lapse, I held on to that 220 pounds. But seven months after seeing 250 on the scale, I hadn’t lost the weight I should have. I knew exactly what to do, and yet I didn’t do it consistently and rigorously enough. It was a double failure, this maintenance of regained fat. What was the point of trying when I was so pointless myself?

The hundred-pound gain was disappointment on a grand scale. The list goes on and on: a hundred pounds, for God’s sake:
ten
clothing sizes in the extremely limited storage space of the Bat Cave! Should I have left publishing, or was I cut out for it in the first place? There was the novel I wanted to write and didn’t, and the man who could have come to love me whom I broke up with for Scott. It was depressing, but I’m coming to believe that depression—and compulsive eating—are fraternal twins and just as dodgy as my old fantasy life. Food and depression isolate me, keep me as self-bound and self-preoccupied as fantasy did. Each, if I’m not careful, is the black hole of futility at the end of the day. What’s the difference between spending an evening making up a story about spending a winter in Venice, and digging a pit with my failures and insufficiencies and filling it with ice cream? Neither is reality. Neither is constructive. Neither qualifies as being aware and connected.

Five mostly abstinent years and a loss of 188 pounds means I’ll never really leave the Rooms. They work too well to leave forever because they operate on a rock bottom of truth and honesty. I
did
hurt people by my compulsive eating; I have character flaws to enumerate and work on that I carried into my other life. The danger of my tether to the Rooms was that there was no need to rush because sooner or later I’d be desperate, return to the meetings, my food plan, being answerable to a sponsor and to the steps. You can’t go off to Sugarland when you’ve been in a twelve-step program without taking the knowledge with you that you’re a compulsive overeater and food addict, for which you have found only one treatment.

Seven months earlier, in the greyhounds’ bathroom, I
knew
that I had to lose the hundred pounds. My old self wanted to lose weight, but it wasn’t an inviolable certitude. In my restlessness, my capacity to hope, decide, commit, dare, try, stretch, change, achieve is tied to the food plan that I lose weight on. I wanted my sanity more than whatever looks I possessed, and I wanted to reclaim my victory over my worst enemies, foremost among them, my compulsion and myself.

Hope, the antecedent of intention and action, kept me from giving my thin clothes away. My friend B.J. has not gotten rid of her thin clothes, either, but neither has she put any effort or expression into the size she wears now. In fact, she’s adamant on the subject. “I won’t spend serious money until I’m 135 pounds,” she says. B.J. works outdoors, so she, too, trash-dresses. I haven’t seen her when she’s not working, but I assume she makes do with a uniform of black pants, a big white shirt, and slightly scary boots. The glamour I want from velvet she claims by wearing her sunflower-sized diamond stud earrings pretty much 24/7.

Katie kept her thin clothes until deciding to remedy some of her financial distress by selling them online. (“Gently used” is the code for shoes and clothes that didn’t make it beyond a season. “Gently used” when we were thin and didn’t perspire so much or so rankly, when we didn’t spill salad dressing on our bosoms, when we didn’t wear out the thighs of trousers and the soles of our shoes.) She said that those clothes belong to a different Katie, perhaps not other, as I think of myself wearing 8s and 10s, but a past Katie, a Katie she wants to change (to harden, to love), work she continued as she struggled to stick to her food plan.

I decided to let the matter of my other clothes go until I fit into them. Like Katie, I was working hard to shore up weaknesses that contributed to my relapse. I wouldn’t be the other Frances or, if I could help it, this restless Frances. I hoped to fit into those clothes one day, but the question was whether they would fit
me
.

It came quickly to pass that Scott called me while I was spending the holidays with my parents in Arizona to wish me a happy New Year. In the course of telling me he saw
Charlotte’s Web
on Christmas, he mentioned that Sarah came down on Boxing Day.

I let a beat pass. “That sounds nice,” I said calmly, and let the conversation go where Scott wanted—to his freelance PR gigs and his crazy bosses, my parents’ health, or the exploits of his kitten. I was barely there, sick at heart, and burning with curiosity. Fifteen minutes later, in a lull of chat, I said, “So. Who’s Sarah?”