Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (26 page)

She took a long sniff and pulled away from Tanny. “Is there gonna be salad today?”

The Body’s Politics

L
osing weight in order to get a man never works,” Mimi said as we fingered filigree earrings at a Union Square Holiday Market kiosk. We had met a half hour earlier at Penn Station, for the first time. It was my fiftieth birthday. I wanted to share it with someone who had crossed this boundary, two old maids who had blogged their way into being bubulas. We had gotten an email the night before about Wendy’s new war on men, and between cooing over Christmas ornaments and jewelry, we relished the latest pronouncement. “You either give up halfway through or gain it all back,” Mimi said as we walked on to a display of Polish handblown ornaments.

If anyone would know, I learned that day, it’s Mimi.

Fine-boned and clear-skinned as a Dresden doll, Mimi is the prettiest of the Angry Fat Girls. She is also the daintiest. At five feet three inches tall, she has spent much of her life not only shopping for large sizes but petite ones as well. Her choices have gotten more numerous over the years but dressing room mirrors send her into spirals.

Larger sizes were just beginning to claim a share of the fashion market in 1980, when Mimi moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to work in the Health Sciences Library at the university. She lived in a parlor-floor apartment, her first one-bedroom in this, her second post-graduate school job. It was a peeling Victorian on a quiet street off Mount Carmel Church Road, a name she came to view as prescient for Elijah’s warning on that ancient ground: “…if the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him.” She loved her apartment’s hardwood floors, the bay window in what had been the parlor, the scuffed oak table she had found in Carrboro and sanded and painted herself, and the closets that were big enough to fit several of her 245-pound selves into.

In many ways, her seven years in Chapel Hill should have been among the best of her life. The winters were mild and the landscape was beautiful. In accepting the job, she’d accepted a promotion and had been promoted since. The choirmaster at her Episcopalian church took a great sigh and turned his eyes heavenward when she auditioned. “Thank God,” Stephen said. “Our alto section has been saved.”

She became active in St. Alban’s, not only in the choir but in its spiritual outreach, going on and later helping to organize retreats. St. Alban’s provided a pool of like-minded women she found herself, for the first and last time in her life, doing things with—shopping, going to recitals and concerts in Durham, exploring Raleigh, and having brunch after Sunday services. Professionally and socially, Mimi felt she belonged.

She hated every minute of her life.

It’s not easy being more than a hundred pounds overweight when you’re surrounded by medical school professors and students. She saw every article on obesity in every periodical the library subscribed to, and she saw the looks when she went to the cafeteria.

She had arrived at the University of North Carolina two years earlier weighing 160 pounds, fifteen pounds more than her lowest adult weight, achieved through Weight Watchers in graduate school. In her first two years in Chapel Hill, she gained eighty-five pounds. The shame felt like another fifty pounds on her aching body.

She entered a rigorous weight-loss program at Dicken-Harriman Hospital. Six weeks of behavioral therapy followed by three twelve-week sessions of supervised fasting with six-week breaks between each fast. She lost a hundred pounds and her hair in ten months, developed acute gastritis, and despite classes in transition taught by a nutritionist, gained her weight back within a year.

Her misery was so potent that people started to notice. “Is everything alright at work?” Mary Jo, one of the priests’ wives asked. “How was your trip home? Are your parents well?”

“I
hate
myself,” Mimi blurted. She was shocked that she’s said it out loud, said it to another person. “My mother couldn’t
believe
how much weight I’d gained. It was the most humiliating conversation I’ve had with her since I lived at home. I wanted to die.” She stopped and considered whether to say it all. “Sometimes,” she said slowly, “I stand in front of my mirror and think about how I’d do it. I’d slit my wrists, I think—or the dorsalis pedis artery.” She smiled wryly. “Being a medical librarian hasn’t helped me lose weight, but it’s great for plotting suicide.”

“Have you talked to anyone about this?” Mary Jo asked.

“Yeah. You.”

“You need to talk to someone professional,” she said. “You can’t harbor self-hatred and suicidal thoughts.”

Mimi knew about talk therapy, of course. Who didn’t? But she had no idea how to march out and find the right person to talk to. No one she knew well had been in therapy, and her parents spoke of it as a scam. If you have a problem, she’d been taught, you take it to God.

“Maybe I should talk to someone at the church,” Mimi answered. “The doctors can’t help, and I can’t help myself even to go back to Weight Watchers.”

“Why don’t you talk to Michael?” Mary Jo said. “I know I’m his wife, but everyone says he’s a wonderful counselor. And…he’s been worried about you, too. I know he’ll want to help.”

Mimi went into pastoral counseling with Michael Clark, going over her history of eating and how it had eroded her self-esteem. She told him how she had scared herself when she had dieted down to 145 pounds at the age of twenty-five.

“Everyone was going into the next stage of their life,” she told him. “They’d already gone through the rights of passage—dating, breakups, living together. I was always buying engagement or wedding presents, and I’d never been on a date.”

In the course of the next two years, they talked a lot about how she felt toward men. Was her eating a substitute for love? What if it wasn’t about loving the taste and texture and temperature that filled her with a sense of connection to all of time? Could food and fat be the wall she put up to keep men away?

She didn’t know. She’d had sex once, with a bus driver she met on a trip to Spain the summer she was at her thinnest. “It was painful,” she said when Father Mike asked about it. “I bled profusely.” He was sympathetic. That was the first session he ended with a hug and a recommendation that she read a book called
Becoming Orgasmic.

Despite the obesity center’s prohibition against doing a second round of fasts, Mimi entered the Dicken-Harriman program for a second time. She got through one twelve-week session and lost twenty-five pounds but had to quit because of chronic stomach cramps and constipation. Instead, she joined the hospital’s WiseWeight group and counted calories and fats, minutes on a stationary bike, and ounces of water. Slowly, she lost more weight. She liked being able to occasionally find clothes in the petite sections, liked her increasing energy. She took a trip to Scotland with her mother, and enjoyed walking in the mountains and cobbled-street towns.

Father Mike kept recommending books.
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex and Were Afraid to Ask
,
The Art of Sensual Loving
—even, oddly, Gael Greene’s
Delicious Sex
. “Appetite is natural,” he assured her. “Let’s see what happens to your cravings for chocolate as you fulfill another appetite.”

Sometimes he dropped by her apartment with a novel he thought she’d enjoy or a CD of choral works. He would stay for iced tea, and they’d talk about the choir or a parishioner’s illness she’d investigated for him. One dank July evening in 1984, he dropped in with a bottle of Liebfraumilch and a video cassette. “I think you’ll like this,” he said, handing her the sturdy ceramic bottle and the black rental box. “I know you like sweet things, and this movie reminds me a lot of you.”

She poured the wine and took out the cassette.
The Devil in Miss Jones.

She did not find it impressive and asked, rather crankily, why all the naughty stuff featured heroines named Justine?

Father Mike didn’t answer and didn’t seem to notice when she got up to wash their wineglasses during the last sex scene. She returned in time to see Georgina Spelvin pleading with her milquetoast, flyobsessed roommate in hell.

“Some people might think I stepped over a line,” he said, “but I wanted you to see what pleasure is like, what a man can teach a woman.” He slipped the video back into its case. “Think about it, Mimi. Think of all the possibilities that await you as you lose more weight.”

His tongue tasted of stale wine and, faintly, toothpaste. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was deeply disturbing. She wondered what it would be like to do that with his hand under her shirt.

It was her thirty-fifth birthday and she weighed 211 pounds.

Her involvement with Michael Clark—which consisted of making out on an irregular basis—continued for the next two years. It was hell: a relationship that could not speak its own name. She and Mary Jo were friends. Trying to act natural with her was a struggle. Those were the days before the Internet and free long-distance calling, so she couldn’t talk to old friends and she certainly couldn’t confide in friends at church. The only good thing, besides how thrilling it was to be held and kissed, was that she maintained her 211 pounds.

“Now you know why I took a day off from work to spend your birthday with you.” She laughed dryly. “I’ll do anything I can to help birthday haters like their birthday.”

On another languidly hot day, waiting for thunderstorms to roll in, Mike invited Mimi to his house. They sat on his porch and drank sweet tea. “There’s something I have to tell you,” he finally said. “While Mary Jo and Amanda have been visiting her parents, I’ve moved all my stuff into an apartment. She’s getting home in a couple of hours. I’ll tell her tonight.”

Mimi was silent. Hope and guilt and grief were doing a square dance in her chest. Mary Jo would be devastated and so would Amanda, a chubby fourteen-year-old Mimi adored. And yet—to go away to the mountains with Michael or to a concert—to make dinner for him…

“I wanted you to be the first to know,” he went on. “Mary Jo and Amanda are going to need you.”

Their need, which was great, was the end of her involvement with Father Clark. He dropped by once or twice and then disappeared from her life. She quit the choir at St. Alban’s and stopped attending services. Her weight rocketed. In the summer of 1987, she took a job in Burlington, Vermont. It was a step up professionally, but in that lonely, confused winter, with more snow than she’d ever imagined possible, she spent nights and weekends stewing in blame for being a two-faced, lying adulteress.

From the time the maples turned to the time the lilacs were in bloom, Mimi gained ninety pounds.

The story of Father Mike carried us through a search for a dumpling place I couldn’t find and a terrible Chinese dive lunch and back up Mott to Mulberry, where I had my heart set on sugar. “Men are sooo not a motivation for losing weight,” she concluded as we nibbled at desserts—hazelnut gelato for her, Italian ricotta cheesecake for me—in Ferrara’s. “I don’t think Wendy’s ever going to get that.”

I stood in front of the pastry case and said, “Do I look really fat?” My reflection in the gold-veined mirror along the opposite wall looked like a portly clown.

Mimi sighed. Now it was Wendy
and
Frances who were annoying her.

“You look good,” she said.

“It’s the trousers, isn’t it? They’re too big.”

“They are too big, yes.” At that, she lifted her camera and took a picture of me. I was smiling the secret smile of someone who has undergrown her current favorite item of clothing. I was also ashamed of putting her through that vampirish series of questions about size. The question “Do I look fat?” is a lie because what we really want to know is “Do I look thin?” followed by an infinitude of adjectives that we rarely give voice to. Am I pretty? Am I smart? Am I good at my job? Am I nice? Am I lovable? Just
how
much am I these things? The answer “no” to the question of size is not truly reassuring because we forced it out of our acquaintance. Would Mimi have had the brute honesty to say yes to one of her favorite authors whom she had just met for the first time in order to celebrate her friend’s fiftieth birthday?

Perhaps only Lindsay would have cut me off or answered yes. She was the least tolerant of us and had learned not to indulge the games played by people she loved.

As overweight as I was on my birthday, I’m six inches taller than Mimi, and my bones are so strong that my bone density is literally off the chart. I also walked dogs for a living and lived in a city where picking up a prescription or getting a quart of milk adds another half mile of walking a day. My questions about my size were deeply insensitive to a woman who is so short and so broad, in so much pain from her knee that much of the world beyond cars and trains is grievously inaccessible to her. Mimi goes to business conventions and Wiccan events that are important to her and to see her parents in Florida, but she has to brace herself for the humiliation and discomfort of airplanes and passengers alike. With a trip to Florida coming up in ten days, she was hoping against probability for the magic empty middle seat.

Some months later, in April 2007, Mimi mentioned in an email that she was too furious to think about some other matter. She was reading an MSNBC message board discussion of a recent article on etiquette and planning for the fat air traveler. The snarkiness of the responses was a flashback to her most recent flight, of bambling down the aisle to her seat, trying not to look at the two businessmen in A and B. I emailed back that she
must
stop reading the message board, then took a look at it for myself. The article was balanced, but it was the ensuing remarks that had Mimi shaking and crying, she admitted in the next email. Almost seven hundred posts had turned up and a fair share of them reflected thin smugness for the out-of-control fatty: “Put down the fork, get your duff off the couch and start moving…and exercise a little discipline too,” read one, and the responders went on to meaner polemics: “Not only are our airline seats being taken over by ripples of pudge, but our tax dollars are going to be spent on the healthcare for people that just can’t put down the butterfinger [sic].”