Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (23 page)

He cleared his throat. His unease about where to start was as tangible as the ceramic handle on my coffee mug. “We met through my blog,” he said. “We’ve been writing and talking for a while. You’d like her.”

“I’m sure I would,” I lied through my clenched teeth. “Is it serious?”

He laughed. “You know me. I don’t know where I’ll be next summer. She lives in upstate New York and she’s busy and I’m busy. It has its complications. But we seem to have a thing, and obviously, I wouldn’t mention it if I didn’t think you should know about her.”

Ah.
The old “there’s something I need to talk to you about” speech. He had relied on me to circle the conversation back to her, making me look as possessive and jealous as I felt and wanted to hide. I didn’t know whether to think him a coward or brave, finally, for telling me.
He must be falling in love,
I thought,
and I must be important to him if he’s calling me the day after she left.
My heart took a slow stroll to my throat, like a snowball working its way uphill and gathering more snow as it went.

“I’m glad for you. You deserve—the best.”

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

“I have to admit, though, that I—” My voice faltered. I took a breath and bit my lips between my teeth. “I guess I hoped we’d get it together sometime. You and me.” I laughed. Harshly, for his benefit.
You’re off the hook, Scott: I won’t make a scene.
“I fail to understand why you’re not madly in love with me.”

He laughed, too, more warmly. “It’s one of those things you can’t explain, hon.”

Hon.
Oh, the stupidity of men.

“I know. It’s not like I haven’t been in love with other men in the last five years.” I’d had crushes and affairs in that time, some of them serious, most of them with many extra pounds. Another thing I’d brought from my other self was the knowledge of how to flirt and that, in middle age, while thin is nice, it’s not essential for every, or even, most men. “I just kept kind of coming back to you.”

“Like I said, Frances, I don’t know what I’m doing. But this is good now.”

“I’ll adjust,” I said, wondering how I could bear this news, the ache in my throat that was assuming the hugeness of a love that had survived other loves, a love that had survived as much punishment as I’d hurled at myself in the last three years. “We’ll talk when I get back to New York. I’m a blob when I’m with Mom and Dad.”

We did talk, Scott and I, desultorily, from time to time. I let him do the calling; I answered emails and sent the occasional joke or political analysis along, but I didn’t initiate contact. In the spring, he called to share the news of a job offer and in the conversation mentioned he was coming down with Sarah’s cold.

They’d been together longer than he and I had. I reached out and kneaded Daisy’s ears. Without waking, she shifted and rolled onto her back for a tummy rub, legs akimbo, profoundly trusting. “So things are…good…” I put out tentatively.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s been a tough time financially. She’s made it better than it would have been.”

“Good.”

I answered his questions, offering little information or news of my own. We said good-bye quietly. Later I emailed Mimi, Wendy, and Lindsay, whose boy troubles are a common denominator Katie didn’t share at the time, that I had to tell Scott we couldn’t be friends. One by one, each called to offer support and assurance. I wrote a loving farewell email and received one in return. After nearly six years it was over. Only an impotent ache survived the loss of the man who had become a best friend, my dim flickering expectation that we would be more than friends, the survivals of breakups he’d put me through, and a hundred lesser demons loosed from the well in my heart.

But I was also proud of having finally cut the ties between Scott and me, something I’d needed to do for years. Thin or fat, I’d helplessly allowed the feeble candle of Scott to go on burning. Something was shifting.

One chilly cornflower blue morning that October, I chucked my backpack and leashes on a bench in the dog run and started throwing balls.

It was more work throwing balls for Henry than for Daisy, even though Daisy yapped constantly for the next toss. Henry’s attention span was such that he tended to drop his ball as he meandered back, which meant I then had to go find it. I took satisfaction in doing a physical job at fifty years of age. The experience of having been thin gave me the confidence to get up every morning and collect these magnificent beasts, walking them one-handed as I smoked a cigarette and steered them out of people’s way, dividing the world into dog friendly and dog phobic with a radar that became second nature.

I learned a lot about humans from the dogs, and I’ve learned that the stupidest humans are other dog owners.

A very lovely blonde woman with several preadolescent daughters came into the park with a bouncing blonde golden doodle—that year’s It Dog, half golden retriever, half standard American poodle. With the golden’s affability and gentleness, and the poodle’s intelligence and lack of shedding, they’ve become popular with families.

“This is Macomber,” one of the girls said breathlessly as they all sat down on the bench where my stuff was stowed. “He’s five months old, and we’re meeting his littermate to play!”

Daisy was screeching for her ball, and Henry was winding in and out of my legs. “That’s nice,” I said, not really understanding her high-pitched, excited rush of words. Henry took one look at Macomber and sprang at him, ecstatic to make a new friend who was also a puppy, with a puppy’s sloppy energy. Macomber concurred and rolled over on his back as Henry darted around and over him, biting his neck.

“Henry’s a little necky,” I told the mom. “I can get him off if you don’t like it.”

“We’ll see what happens,” she said. I smiled and turned back to Daisy’s hopping, glass-breaking demands. A moment later, I saw that Macomber was stuck under low-slung Henry, who was gnawing the doodle’s collar.

“Henry!” I yelled, a futile gesture. Henry no more came when called than he balanced his checkbook. I reached out and hauled him off Macomber, who promptly took off after a play bow invitation for Henry to chase him.

Chase and catch—and go back to biting at his neck. Once again I hauled him off and this time Mom called Macomber onto the bench, where he sat on my backpack as she soothed him.

“I think your dog’s too rough,” she said.

“I’ll get him busy with the ball,” I answered, and lofted Henry’s favorite red Cuz to entice him out into the park. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed another party of young moms and kids entering the double gate at the top of the hill. Macomber’s littermate bounded down, followed by Charles, a black flat-coated retriever that lives down the block from us. Henry perked up at so much puppy energy and went back to wrestling.

This time Mom got hysterical. “Pull him off! Pull him off!” she cried from the bench she was now standing on. I was grabbing for Henry’s collar as he did his Mohammad Ali dance-like-a-butterfly-and-sting-like-a-bee routine. I needed another five or eight seconds to get hold of him successfully when she threw her coffee cup and hit Henry on the head.

Henry is a big baby. If a dog barks or nips at him, he cries and runs away. Had the wrestling match gone on any longer, he would have taken his turn on his back as the others went for
his
neck. There wasn’t a mean bone in his body, and next to the sixteen-year-old Lab that I walked in the afternoon, he was the dog I was least scared of being on the streets with. I didn’t expect the woman to know that, but throwing a cup of coffee—?

I pulled Henry away and turned to her as she climbed down to reclaim Macomber, who was shaking himself and waiting for Henry to take his next shot. I took one step up to her so that we were chest-to-chest, our faces two inches apart.

“Don’t you
ever
fucking hit a dog,” I yelled, jabbing my right index finger in the narrow space between us. “You want to hit a dog; you hit
me
. But don’t you
ever
fucking hit a dog. Do you understand?”

I stepped back and grabbed Henry’s collar again and walked him over to leash him. The woman half giggled to her friends, “I’m just surprised I hit him!”

I wasn’t surprised the next morning that I’d had a night of Zoloft-vivid dreams about Alix.

Don’t you
ever
fucking hit a dog.

Words I should have said to Alix.

When I told Patty, my sponsor, about the incident and the dreams, she studied her hands in her lap, and said, sadly, “We spend our lives trying to learn to protect the kid we once were.”

“I seem to be playing out my dramas through my dogs,” I said. We were sitting in front of the Supreme Court trying to catch the last autumn warmth. Downwind from the farmers’ market, the smell of coffee and moldering leaves, apples and basil and all the good things from the earth washed over us. “The problem is trying to learn,” I answered. “If I could learn, I might have a chance of finishing the job.”

“You’re getting more aware,” she said, and reached over to hold my hand. “That’s a gift.”

After eight years, I was more aware of what propelled me to eat. Part of controlling my disease is living with my dis-ease as I parse and mend it. I had protected Henry the way I should I have protected myself. I was proud of that. I thought it was an epiphany of sorts.

Perhaps it was. But reenacting one drama leaves so many others waiting their turn.

A week later I was trying to take a photo of the leaves piling up on a stoop across the street. Daisy was tossing a stick around, making the pictures blur until she settled at my feet to chew it. I had finally gotten a clear shot—no tugging on the leash, no traffic in the way—when suddenly she reared up from the sidewalk and jumped on a man, barking frantically. “Daisy!” I yelled, startled, my heart pounding. I pulled her off and yanked us both back a couple of steps.

“Does your dog always attack people?” He nodded toward the police notice about no parking that was taped to the post my shoulder had been twelve inches from as I took pictures. Daisy had been between me and the post. “I wanted to read the sign.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “you scared her.”

“Oh, no, you don’t,” he said, his voice rising. “Don’t you put the blame on me. You should be apologizing, not blaming!”

“I’m sorry, sir.” My own voice was coming from somewhere behind me, controlled, level, quiet. “I did apologize. I just wanted to explain
why
she jumped at you. She was scared.”

“Now I know why your dog is crazy,” he yelled.

“I’m sorry,” my voice said. “She’s a
dog
. She was scared.”

“Fuck you, woman.
Fuck. You
.”

“I’m
sorry
. She’s just a dog. She’s a
dog
. She gets scared. Don’t you understand?”

He had backed up some ten feet and was fumbling at his pocket. Was he going to call 911 or take a cell phone picture of us to post around the neighborhood? In the second it took me to question what he was doing, he whipped around and stomped down the steps to the apartment building he was in front of and disappeared.

I fell apart. We’d been on our way to do an errand, but halfway down the next block, Daisy stopped to sit on a stoop as I sobbed. She looked at me with her intelligent, enigmatic amber eyes. I reached out and scrunched up the loose skin of her neck to rub her. “You’re a dog,” I whispered, and sniffed. “You were scared. Couldn’t he understand?”

My reaction was not, of course, entirely about Daisy. Couldn’t Scott understand how much I hurt during the pre-breakups that became re-breakups, the casual mentions of his new love—even the sound of his voice?

Couldn’t all the ghosts understand how scared I was? How alone?

Apparently not. I hadn’t had the words to explain and they (Scott, Alix, my family) probably hadn’t had the ears to hear.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what’s behind my compulsion to overeat. That’s the hardest truth I carried with me as I ate myself a hundred pounds heavier.

I ate for two days after the incident with Daisy. Cookies, cake, ice cream, bread—and then more yet. My belly button wept from the volume. I slept heavily between bouts, accomplishing almost nothing, dreading waking up and still being too full to eat. I talked about the incidents with Henry and Daisy with the AFGs and with friends. I wasn’t searching for reassurance or love in sugar. It was oblivion I wanted, stilling my own voice, my history.
Don’t hit me. I’m scared. Don’t you understand?
But then I would wake up to another voice in the stew.
I disgust myself.

I knew what to do: make phone calls to people in the Rooms, write about it, pray over it, call Patty sixty times if I had to. But I didn’t. I willfully remained alone, thinking I should have shrugged it all off, wondering how other people let go of unpleasant interactions. I felt foolish and infantile, and I didn’t want to be a burden to my friends.

I will never be able to binge with the impunity I had in 1998—or in 2003 or in late October of 2006. I know too much. I’ve replayed my long-held dramas, spoken the words of protection and explanation about my dogs that are as much about me, and learned that the words are only important to me—important, horrifying, essential, and pointless if I’m not awake and functioning to move to the next unsaid words and the next clean day, all the way to the happy ending I owe us all.

Diets, Food Plans, Pills, and Treadmills

N
ovember was sobbing rain, the water falling down the diner windows in waves. Wendy sat across from Mark—the Invisible Man, her August boyfriend—and let out a ragged breath. She could feel her face turning red in blotches, the unfortunate fate of very fair redheads who are determined to hold it together during a breakup scene.

“Please try to understand,” Mark said. He slid out of his side of the booth and sat down next to her. “I’m working seventy-two hours a week and trying to see my kids whenever I can. On top of that, it’s an hour’s drive to your place. My life is too complicated to be involved with anyone right now.”

“Does ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ come next?” she croaked.

“It
is
me.” He put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her into him. “If things were different, I might be able to have a relationship.” Wendy’s shoulders were shaking, the first sob about to crest. “I can’t juggle this many plates. I’ve tried and I can’t. It’s not fair to you.”

That did it. Wendy grabbed a wad of napkins and began to cry. Loudly.

“Oh, honey…” Mark said helplessly.

Do all men work from the same script? She dropped her napkins on the scrambled eggs, grabbed another handful, and blew her nose. Loudly.

“Would you excuse me?” she said. As always, she was pleased that she could slide out of a booth without lurching and without a grease stain in the shape of a half piece of buttered toast on her chest. Still crying, silently now, she walked out of the diner and headed toward home.

Despite the tears running down her face, she could feel her dignity pulsing like a well-used muscle. Wendy Harriet Wicks, formerly 342 pounds, once stuck solidly in a Red Lobster chair, could now leave a booth, leave her eggs and sausage, leave a man to his clichés, and walk home.

At that, she started sobbing again. Eighty pounds lighter, and she still couldn’t keep a man. She cried harder when Mark pulled up beside her, opened the passenger door, and held out a four-inch stack of napkins.

They talked all afternoon, and Wendy was ravenous by the time Mark left for Fredericksburg. She had nothing ready to eat in the house except for a box of one-hundred-calorie bags of Doritos and another of fudge-striped cookies, and one can of refried beans. Wendy had some juggling of her own to do.

Were the beans a vegetable, starch, or protein? She had instituted a half-plate rule: one side vegetables, the other side protein and starch.

Tomorrow was Monday. What would she take to work for lunch?

Mark was not the love of her life, but it had been a long haul and a lot of first dates between Cal and the next boyfriend. And oh, how she longed for a boyfriend.

Mark wanted to be friends. He still wanted to go to her cousin’s Thanksgiving family reunion with her as they had planned. It would be an overnight trip to Pulaski, a five-hour drive west, and they would be sharing a motel room. Would they have sex? Why would he still want to be her date?

As puffy-eyed and drained as she was, Wendy pulled on a pair of sneakers and drove to Five Continents. Yogurt, Diet Coke, tomatoes, apples, salad bar, rotisserie chicken: she figured that should see her through the next couple of days.

She came home with the Diet Coke and a sizable chunk of imported Cheddar cheese.

Refried beans are a vegetable, she decided. And they were fat free. With one tiny bag of nachos and not even two ounces of the strong cheese, she’d be well under her Weight Watchers points for the day.

If only Mark had been there to take away the cheese and the other six bags of nachos.

Lindsay, Mimi, and Wendy are all on Weight Watchers’ Flex Plan, which assigns a point value, calculated by fat, fiber, and calories, for every serving of food found in the continental United States. “There’s no need to give up your favorite foods,” according to the description of this option, although how
much
an individual can eat is based on gender (and lactation), age, height, weight, activity level, and how many extra “points” are left for the week.

Of course, the promise of having my cake and eating it, too, prompted me to calculate my daily points (including the averaged five of thirty-five weekly Flex Points). Thus that slice of thin-crust pizza topped with vegetables, featured on their website and in their introductory material, would be about one-sixth of my day’s food allotment.

Wendy’s dinner of three one-hundred-calorie bags of nacho Doritos, refried beans, and what came suspiciously close to six ounces of cheese came to six, three, and sixteen points, respectively. “I overdid it,” she told me the next day when she called, sad and defeated over the Invisible Man, “but considering what I
wanted
to eat and didn’t, I’ll take some success there.”

I wish I could point my finger at Wendy but I can’t. As long as I’ve known her, she hasn’t finished a night with the incalculable number of points contained in an entire box of Honey Bunches of Oats (1,820 calories), the better part of a quart of skim milk (320 calories), and an eight-pack of Entenmann’s frosted devil’s food doughnuts (2,480 calories). I wish I could say the same for me.

Americans
love
diets. In June 2007, based on the recommendations of nutritionists and diet experts,
Consumer Reports
ranked the best diet plans and books in the following order:

 


Barbara J. Rolls’s
The Volumetrics Eating Plan


 


 


Weight Watchers in a near tie with…


 


 


Jenny Craig


 


 


Slim-Fast


 


 


eDiets


 


 


Barry Sears’s men’s diet from
The Zone


 


 


Dean Ornish’s
Eat More, Weigh Less


 


 


Atkins Diet


 

In 2004,
Medical News Daily
didn’t weigh the top diets of the year, but selected the eight most popular:

 


Atkins Diet


 


 


Barry Sears’s
The Zone


 


 


Nicholas Perricone’s
The Perricone Prescription


 


 


Weight Watchers


 


 


Dean Ornish’s
Eat More, Weigh Less


 


 


Macrobiotics


 


 


Raw foods


 

Of these eleven diet plans, Lindsay, Katie, Wendy, Mimi, and I have tried about a third. We are underrepresented in these canons because there are an infinite number of diets on the shelves, in store-fronts, on the Internet, on the covers of magazines, in hospitals and workshops and church basements. Because
Consumer Reports
and
Medical News Daily
have listed eleven popular diets doesn’t mean that those other methods are always ineffective or unhealthy.

Women who have struggled with their weight and have had success with weight loss tend to revert to the tried and true.

Which is not to say we haven’t been unfaithful to our successes. This is a list, by name or type, of the diets Lindsay, Katie, Wendy, Mimi, and I have tried in the past:

Few of these diets failed. To one degree or another, it was we who failed the diets. In making yet another honest effort to lose weight, we’ve had to grapple with what parameters we can work within and those that are too difficult, too easy, too self-destructive, or too expensive for our lives and the severity of our tendency toward violence with food.

Lindsay gained weight on her low-fat regimen, eating dry cereal by the handfuls and pasta by the bucket, and one of my ex-sisters-in-law turns orange every few years when she turns to carrots as an alternative to more caloric eating compulsions.

The AFGs’ expectations of Thanksgiving ranged from the usual, Lindsay and Jalen would take salad to her parents’ house in Akron, to the eclectic, Mimi and I had potlucks for the unfamilied we always attended, for which she always made her family’s traditional sweet potato and apple casserole and I had decided to make Paul Prudhomme’s sweet-potato pecan pie. I was obviously not planning an abstinent Thanksgiving and had only weak hopes that I’d get enough clean days in the next three weeks that my father wouldn’t greet me with a comment or a knowing squeeze of my back fat when he hugged me hello.
⁶²

Katie’s Thanksgiving was foisted on her. Her mother had announced that she wanted no visitors and that dinner would be at the country club.

“This is
sooo
deliberate,” she hissed when I called after reading about the latest family feud on her blog. “Stephen’s wife is mad at me because I couldn’t babysit Lily and Nicholas last month when her mother was in the hospital. So I have no place to stay and Mom’s banking on me being too ashamed to be seen at the club.”

“Hoity-toity,” I said.

“But my brother Michael is coming down from Portland with Annie and the girls. They’re staying at Stephen’s house. So do I drive five hours for dried-out turkey and Pam glaring at me, or do I go to my grandma’s?”

“I’d take Grandma for two hundred dollars.”

“Which is fine except then there will be a million questions. My niece, Zoë, called me last night. ‘We’re goin’ on the pane, Auntie Kay. Will you come play with us?’ She wouldn’t stop begging until I told her I had to work so I can send her and Hailey Christmas presents.”

“Yiii,” I breathed. What could I say?

“Oh, and I’m purging, Frances,” she went on as though talking about playing Wednesday-night bridge or doing counted cross stitch. “Do you know what it’s like to throw up when you weigh more than four hundred pounds? My back is killing me, and God knows what it’s doing to my heart and blood pressure.”

“God, Katie, stop. Please?” I could attest to how a box or even a double dose of Ex-lax can limit life. It’s painful, humiliating, dehydrating, and sets off a bout of irritable bowel syndrome.

Wendy, despite the women in her family’s country cooking, was resolved to not eat at all. It seemed easier than just a bite.

Medically supervised starvation is another risk we’ve taken and suffered the consequences of. Mimi went through five rounds of protein-sparing modified fasts through Dicken-Harriman Hospital. “I love to eat, I love the texture and taste of food, and hated the horrible sludge that we had to drink instead,” she recalls. “It was hard to be social, it was hard to not eat, it was hard to have my hair fall out and my bowels cramp. It was also wicked expensive. Mostly it was weird.”

I’ve done two medical fasts, at St. Luke’s and Mount Sinai hospitals in New York City. The protein drinks had to be made in a blender with ice in order to be barely palatable, and while I lost weight rapidly, my weekly blood tests showed my cholesterol was at high risk levels. I found it odd that the St. Luke’s doctor made no comment on it.

My father grunted when I read him my blood test results. “How’s your breath?”

My breath? I held my hand in front of my mouth and exhaled. Ugh.

“Like a charnel house.”

“Ketoacidosis.”

Daddy enjoys swinging around medical terms that I won’t possibly understand. “Don’t you mean supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?”

“I mean you’re eating your own body, honey. You’re existing on your fat, which is being released into your blood in order to feed your cells. It’s too bad you’re not protesting something. If you’re going to starve, you might as well try to end a war.”

I
was
trying to end a war, the one I had with my body. But for the three months of drinking chalk, my mind was full of what I would eat when the fast was over. (Pizza after St. Luke’s; prime rib and about a pint of sour cream on a football-sized potato after Mount Sinai.)