Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (28 page)

I puzzled over this business of
being
for weeks. One evening, walking Daisy and her extroverted, eighty-pound pal, Henry, I remembered a sister-in-law telling me that when she met me, I was bouncing from one piece of furniture to another in the living room, singing “I am pretty/Oh so pretty/I am pretty and witty and—
fat!
” I was in seventh grade when I danced and chanted this ditty, and sixteen when she told me her memory of it. I cramped with compassion for that girl, four years younger than I then was, performing her absolutely true feelings in equal measures of gaiety and self-mockery.

I was surprised when I looked the lyrics up. It is not “I
am
pretty” but “I
feel
pretty.” I was devoted to Broadway musicals but had turned one of my all-time favorites into self-definition.

As a 240-pound high schooler who felt condemned to living in a stasis of desperately wanting and being locked out of getting, I should have envied the kid leaping around in her plaid uniform. That kid may have undermined pretty and witty, but she hadn’t lost possession of them.

Relapsers punish and ghettoize themselves more than those who don’t or rarely diet, or those who have been in relapse a long time. It is a different way of being fat and not a kind one. My therapist forbid me to take the bags I’d bought binge food in the night before and pick up litter with them, my self-punishment that further degraded me but was nice for the street I live on. As B.J., a friend of mine who had regained a lot of weight in a few months, prepared for her engagement party, I asked her if she’d found a cute outfit.

“Fff’t,” she exhaled. “Like I’m gonna spend money when I look like this?”

I was perplexed. She’d fallen sanely and mutually in love. He had known and loved her fat and thin and had asked her to marry him when she was at seventy-five pounds into her regain.

“So?” I asked. “You still ought to dress up.”

“Fff’t.”

I’m a clothes whore and would never pass up a chance to get dressed up—if only I hadn’t developed a panic disorder that, when it came to the afternoon of B.J.’s party, erupted in a full-blown meltdown of hyperventilation and hysteria because I hadn’t taken a Klonopin. One of the costs of B.J.’s weight gain was pretty party clothes. One of my costs was parties.

Fat acceptance adherents and fat dieters are equally at odds with a world we don’t fit and a public that claims the right to judge us. One afternoon just after my birthday celebration with Mimi, I was walking nonagenarian Zeke, a pony-sized Lab/Great Dane mix with the spirit and wisdom of Lao-tzu. As we paused to consider which way to go, an aging Indian woman, hurrying to the subway, stopped to look at us. She said something I didn’t understand but took to refer to the arthritic gentle giant at my side. I wrinkled my eyebrows trying to pick apart her rush of words and shook my head in confusion.

“U-ee-mow-ves-yo-sck-gaw-dn?” she repeated.

I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

She smiled and continued on her way to the Seventh Avenue train. I looked at Zeke trying to make out what she had said about him. It hit me, then: “You eat more vegetables, your stomach will go down.”

The woman wasn’t exactly skinny—she was kind of plump, as far as I could tell. It was frosty and she was wearing a heavy jacket. She had given her advice with a sweetness that wasn’t, almost, offensive.

We don’t wear badges proclaiming our weight loss or our plans; few people know that we’re “doing something about it” and that we want to be granted some immunity from well-meaning strangers and the self-righteous. We are still objects of assumptions, still looking for something fabulous to wear to the Christmas office party, still having to use our fat bodies to run a library or do the laundry or take a swim class. But because we have a different future body in mind, we dieters of size live in a netherworld. We are fat, but we aren’t Fat.

To be Fat is to think about fat in the broadest terms at all times. Fat becomes an asset, an example, and an achievement. “Now that I weigh 270 pounds and have friends twice my size, I realize that this numbers game is no different from the flat-world theory,” Marilyn Wann crows in
Fat! So?
⁷⁶

To celebrate one’s fat as the “essence” of one’s self, couched in terms of achievement, is as exclusionary as Mimi thinking of her fat as a character fault. NAAFA’s glorying in pulchritude is fat-minded, fat-oriented, fat-informed, fat-defensive, fat-social, fat-professional. Ultimately, it can become a dogma and a cult.

To be fair, dieters aren’t immune from this corporeal gestalt. If we were, we wouldn’t be part of a thriving blogging world in which we share stories, progress, backsliding, confusions, and philosophies. Points, calories, ounces, pounds lost and pounds to lose, threshold weights, days of abstinence, clothing sizes, minutes on the rowing machine, miles biked, keychains, magnets, coins: it is difficult not to obsess.

Further, with the publication of my first book, I found myself expected to be professionally thin. Identifying myself by my clothing size, writing and talking about it, and having my publisher, agent, and publicists hoping that I would approach the star value of Oprah, Kirstie Alley, the Duchess of Windsor, Al Roker, Carnie Wilson, Lynn Redgrave, and Valerie Bertinelli is one of the aspects of going back to the planet of girls that I do not want to live again.

Unlike the stars, I don’t tout a weight-loss method, nor does anyone in the diet blogging world the Angry Fat Girls inhabit, even though each us has a plan and an allegiance that works, or that we want to work, for us. Fat people are welcome, whether they are dieting or not. Fat acceptance proponents are welcome. Their insights and experiences are invaluable because every woman has a fat girl inside her.

If an active NAAFA or HAES member would speak frankly with me, I would want to know if she has lived Katie’s, Wendy’s, Mimi’s, and my experiences of obesity. Has she ever been so big that she had to use an instrument with which to wipe her ass? Has she had to place a stool in her shower? Has she had to sleep sitting up? Has she developed arthritis from the weight she’s carried? Has she ever been on disability because she could no longer hoist her body from bed to work?

Does she accept these conditions with serenity?

I would want to know if the spokesperson I was speaking to could bend over to tie her shoes, if she missed having an enveloping hug. I’d want to know what her level of fear or dread was of going to get a haircut and sitting in the foot-pumped chair, of going to the doctor, of receiving a necklace as a gift, of a ninety-degree day when the humidity was so high that the horizon was the color of weak milky tea.

Because I consider these to be voluntary roadblocks, rather than immutable facts. And they get in the way of living in a certain kind of freedom.

Thankfully, not all fat acceptance writers are at complete peace with their decision to stop dieting. When I asked Maureen Wood, who writes the Large & Lovely Site for BellaOnline, how she has learned to accept and embrace being fat, she responded, “I don’t think I am at ‘peace’ with my body. Sometimes I feel like a fraud telling women and young girls they have a right to be who they are and feel good about themselves when I’m constantly battling my own demons, but I honestly want them to believe it because that’s the way it should be. I come from the frame of reference [that] if you keep telling yourself (and everyone else) it’s so, then one day it will be so.”

After reading Wendy Shanker’s
The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life
and Lara Frater’s
Fat Chicks Rule!
, I was relieved when each reported days on which they look in the mirror and shudder at their size, and that size acceptance is a process rather than a decision like turning on a lamp. Both women, who are in the thirties, come from backgrounds of iron-woman dieting and they understand the desire to be thin. “People have free will.” Lara says. “They feel they can lose weight. But please don’t lecture me on weight, and don’t pitch your diet to me.” They have settled at stable weights in what the medical world calls Obesity Class 1, and they have maintained their weights for a number of years. They eat correctly, they exercise, their vital statistics are normal. Frater and Shanker are evidence that support NAAFA’s citations of the thirty-year-old works of William Bennet, MD, and Paul Ernsberger, PhD. The new millennium has at last brought another voice, Paul Campos, PhD, to the discussion of whether obesity is overrated as a health problem in the United States and whether fitness is more important than body mass.

Stable and healthy as writers like Frater may be, fat acceptance and HAES mouthpieces break down in defensiveness and resentment. Anger and blame (on fashion designers, the media, the scientific and medical community, loved ones, the diet industry, the thin, family, the past) are rife in the fat-positive world:

It would seem that, in choosing between trying to lose weight or working toward acceptance of one’s fat, one has to decide, among other things, whether she wants to be pissed off at herself or pissed off at the world.

Mimi was pissed off when she moved back to Philadelphia in 1990. She planned her move carefully, the way Mimi does everything. This time it included joining Nutrisystem and losing seventy pounds in the eight months before she settled into her office in the Johnson Pavilion. She weighed 220 pounds—a haunting number—but in her growing fury over what happened in North Carolina, she didn’t really care. After seeing a small ad in a neighborhood newspaper, she consulted a therapist who specialized in treating women who have been sexually abused by men in power. Within fifteen minutes of listening to Mimi’s story, Lena Nord told her that Michael Clark was not only a textbook abuser, but probably a serial one at that.

Under Lena’s tutelage, Mimi went to her local diocese and initiated the process of seeking redress. “I couldn’t watch my weight and go through all of that,” she says. “I had to write out exactly what happened and it took forty-five pages. Then I reduced it to a summary of two pages. I didn’t say a word to my bishop when I met with him. I just handed him the document and waited for him to read it.

“I should have learned not to trust men,” she says of the saga. She weighed 270 pounds when she left therapy. Waiting around for the new life that settling the past and talk therapy had promised took two years and added another forty pounds.

That’s when she was lured into 1 Enoch, a West Philadelphia bookstore, in search of inspiration.

The store had a large plate-glass window framed in rainbow-painting prisms. Prominently displayed was a plump iron pot brimming with daffodils. There were books on gardening, cooking, and meditation. Ropes of whole spices hung in the background; she recognized cinnamon sticks and nutmeg and star anise, and her nose twitched at what the shop must smell like. Forming an arc around the flowers were cracked quartzes in rose and yellow and minty green. Mimi felt her shoulder blades flex and relax as she studied the window. Her breath slowed and deepened. She badly wanted to hold the pale green quartz against her cheek.

It smelled of licorice inside. A tea urn sent up a thin steam of it. She helped herself to a cup and held it in both hands, loving the heat after the windy March evening. She studied the books and lingered over the shelves of spices and herbs—many of which she’d never heard of, rows of candles in primary colors, a collection of sand dollars, jars of salt and sand, and piles of delicious velvet swatches and silk cords.

As she leafed through a Moosewood cookbook that made her shake her head in dismay at all the cheese and carbohydrates it called for, she felt an arm slide along her shoulder. Another book appeared in front of her, glossy with leafy greens and a proclamation in red that it would teach its user to “eat for life.” A dark, long-fingered hand held it.

“You might like this,” a baritone Jamaican voice said.

Mimi turned and faced a tall, thin man, so dark that his face glinted blue under the natural sunlamps spaced over the bookshelves. His hair was in dreadlocks that reached his butt, tied back with a long white cord. He smiled and his face lit like dawn.

“You’re a Cancer, aren’t you? I can always tell by the way you find the designs in the seashells and then end up at the cookbooks. I’m Sleight,” he added.

Mimi looked perplexed.

He laughed. “Not slight as in small. That would be you.” He beamed down from his great height. “Sleight as in magic. Sleight as in”—he took the Moosewood cookbook from her and restocked it on the shelf—“deft of hand.”

She was enchanted.

“I’m Mimi,” she answered, and marveled at how calm her voice was.

“Of course. Let me pour you another cup of tea, and we can get to know each other.” He nodded to two worn, comfy-looking purple velvet club chairs angled at a coffee table covered in magazines and pamphlets. “Anise is purifying and increases your psychic power. We can talk more about that.”

If she thought getting free of Michael Clark was hard, she was about to go through four years of “apprenticeship” to a man she gave her destiny to, a man who took it and, too soon, forgot he had it.

The clues to her future were everywhere.

Enoch is a book excluded from the Old Testament by everyone except for the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The number 1 refers to the only complete copy, which is written in Ethiopic, and the book, a cross between the fall of the Titans and the Book of Revelation, is a vision of end times given by God to Enoch, the grandfather of Noah, about the angels who dared mate with human women and the violence and necromancy they wreaked upon the earth.