Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (35 page)

“Yeah. I’ll ask Wendy if she’s in…or I’ll just add her name. Lindsay and Mimi have never gotten to know each other, have they?”

“I think Katie’s anger scares her,” Lindsay said. “Katie probably thinks Mimi’s a wuss.”

“More like a mystery,” I answered. “‘What’s behind that smile?’”

“So what kind of flowers should we send?”

“Ummm…wild guess here, but what about…
pink
?”

Lindsay huffed a laugh and changed the subject. “She and Wendy are hooked on
Clean House
. I think they’re in a competition now. Wendy didn’t realize this was gonna mean furniture.”

“You know they’re only a couple of hours away from each other, don’t you?” I asked. “Wendy will be able to hoard
New Yorker
s and take them up to Mimi.”

“And Mimi can load her down with newt-foot candles and romance novels,” she said, and then gave a long sigh. “I
have
to get this dissertation done. Mimi got the job of her dreams. It’s a sign. I’ll get the next job if I finish my dis.”

“I just want to tell stories,” I said with a heavier sigh.

“But whose?”

“Ours.”

I blinked with surprise. Of course I’d intended to use Mimi and Lindsay, Katie and Wendy among the interviews I’d done, but I hadn’t thought of using them almost exclusively.

“Ours?”

“The AFGs’. I can’t stand the thought of writing one of those thesis-case-in-point books. You know: ‘Some people can’t stop eating. Sally was one of those people. She was born blah-blah-blah…’ I think I’ll die of boredom if I have to write like that. I want to write a novel.”

“But, Frances, you didn’t sell a novel.”

“Not a fiction novel. A nonfiction novel.” How many query letters had I tossed immediately upon seeing that stupid phrase when I was an agent? Thousands, I guessed. “Like
In Cold Blood
, only not. About us, the people I know.”

“Can you change a few things?” she asked cautiously. “I mean, we have jobs and parents and…husbands.”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking fast. “I can do that. But we need to meet. We’ve computed and cell phone conferenced and Christmas carded ourselves to smithereens. I need to put faces on words.”

“Hmm. A convention. Interesting.”

Could I pull it off? Could I stay abstinent until they came and stay abstinent while they were here? I’d lived on an iceberg with my dogs and writing and fat: Could I step off it in order to spend sustained time with people? That need to be present was why I ate when I went to see my parents, the prison of boredom that comes from their infirmities and their airless, eventless retirement community, my fear of losing them, my fear that they will suck me dry.

And yet, it was thrilling. I’d found the key to this book through the stories we had assembled in every way but being together. I felt like I finally had fire in my belly, and, as Katie and Mimi and then Wendy said yes, I felt like I finally had sisters.

As if she had read my mind, late in January, two weeks into her glowing new-old abstinence, Katie wrote a blog about what weighing, as she put it, “in excess of four hundred bills” had cost her:

“I notice that a lot of these missing areas of my life involve ‘ability,’” she observed. “That is what this disease has taken from me: ability.”

As I started my own day, wearing fetid down ski pants and a sweater that was more dog hair than wool, I was grateful that I could mostly still
go
. I had miles of walking in a whiplash of windchill that day; I could take a shower or get on a plane without going first class. But I had nothing like Katie’s dreams of the work and fun she so specifically wanted. What was that about? I wondered. I’d always been a dreamer.

I’d had dreams once—to be thin, to write and publish a book, to fall mutually and sanely in love—but I achieved the first two and came to understand the last was out of my control and required enormous effort and strength. Having had the same dreams for the better part of forty-three years, I had never really bulked up the skill of dreaming.

We tell ourselves we must lose weight in order to be there for our kids to grow up, to look good, to find a mate, to get our mothers’ approval, to get a better job. These may be the motivations for wanting to lose weight but I’ve come to think that motivation should be removed from the weight-loss vocabulary. Having a reason is too finite for the task of losing many pounds and maintaining that success. Our kids turn into snotty preteens, and we use food to control our tempers and, a little, to have revenge. We get the job and then get complacent. You’d think we’d get it that losing weight has to be about something bigger than ourselves, and yet I hear it all the time:
I want to be thin for my daughter’s wedding
or
my twentieth reunion is coming up
. The dieter either gives up because she realizes she won’t fit the fantasy evening gown in time or she gets down to her cheerleader uniform size but eats the entire breakfast buffet.

Shame, by contrast, is a more powerful motivation. Every dieter should keep her shame green. After manifold dropouts from Weight Watchers, what Betsy saw when she looked in the mirror propelled her to a surgeon. I disgust myself when I hide my shame by taking my binge boxes to a building where I’m dog-sitting and putting them in their recycling bin. But shame is a running away from rather than a running to, and the latter is the sweetness of what we think about before falling asleep at night.

Dreams were one of the missing weapons in Lindsay’s, Mimi’s, Wendy’s, and my year of trying to lose weight. Lindsay wanted to finish her dissertation and get a teaching job, and Mimi was pleased and proud of her new position at John Hopkins, but these were desires, like thirst. They were finite and accomplishable within a wide weight range. Wendy wrote on her original questionnaire that her dream was to be a writer, but I think her capacity for independent balls-to-the-wind action was robbed by a silent, fuzzy childhood controlled by a controlling and violent father and a pessimistic, belittling mother. Imprisonment is her default setting.

Mimi’s original questionnaire says that her dream is to be a web designer, but this is as finite and removed from weight as her new job. Had her ability to dream big been squelched by parents who supported her through an excellent education that came with the understanding that her degrees had to lead to supporting herself? A husband, art, vagabondism were implicitly negated in that contract.

My own dream mechanisms were broken. Three years earlier, when I put on my favorite size 6 suit and handed in the final draft of
Passing for Thin
, I didn’t know that I didn’t know how to replace the Weird Sisters that had evaded me for so long and left me spinning when their prophecies came true. Now the question was how could I kick my imagination into giving me the infinite horizon I needed in order to re-lose eighty pounds and build a life I loved? I had no answers except to mumble,
If only I wasn’t so depressed, I could figure it out. If only I wasn’t so cold. If only I wasn’t so fat
.

Of all of us, Katie was the only one who lived in the clouds. Perhaps that’s the one great legacy her gambler father left her. I never brushed her off as too fantastical. Indeed, I urged her to find classes to study comedy. Her dreams could save her if she found the path to a healthy, mobile weight.

And I needed to sound my heart plumb for the impossibilities from which I could next reinvent myself.

Maybe by writing a nonfiction novel.

The Angry Fat Girls

A
s the brutality of the winter of 2006 continued into March, as our plans to meet morphed and codified, facts and truths began to merge.

Some of the facts were uncomfortable. It was a sign of Wendy’s relative mental health and certainly her unending generosity that, early in the Amazon blog days, she had reached out to Katie with support and offers of clothes she’d shrunk out of. Katie didn’t reciprocate beyond polite thanks. Katie prefers to discover friends rather than be found, a quirk of many parts. She doesn’t believe she’s worth being picked out of a crowd, for one. And by being the chooser, she unconsciously looks for people as much and as unhealthily in need of an obsessive friendship as she is. Remember: Katie chose me by volunteering to be interviewed. Our friendship was a healthy one because I knew the facts and the truth about her and her ailments.

The AFGs always asked about Katie, in phone calls and email, and Katie asked about them. They were mutually curious and already had fixed ideas about each other with very little contact except through each other’s personal blogs. Mimi found Katie’s anger frightening, and Katie laughed cruelly at Mimi’s Wiccan convictions. Wendy was a little hurt by Katie’s rebuff, and Katie thought Wendy was a silly little girl. Lindsay gave the least thought to Katie, and vice versa. They were worlds apart in where they were in their own lives.

But Katie was important to me and the story I had gone back and begun to reassemble. Instead of eating, we’d spend hours on the phone whittling away Saturday nights in chat, gossip, confessions, twelve-step talk, and stories. She was thrilled with her Christmas presents and cried when she realized the Anne Taintor dish cloth she got in the mail a day or two after moving into her new apartment was a housewarming token from me. “No one’s ever done anything like that for me,” she emailed.

To the AFGs’ consternation, I invited Katie. She considered what it would be like to come and her requirements weren’t easy.

“I would love to go see a show, but I’m afraid I might have trouble with the seats,” Katie said. “It would take coordination to get me handicapped seating. I can’t do a ton of walking with you all, which is why I’m skeptical if I should come.” She had broken into the three hunskies—the three C-notes, Benjamins, yards—and was feeling physically better at 396. She could buy groceries, take them to the car, unload them, and put them away without having to stop and sit down. But New York is a city of stairs, sidewalks, and waiting in lines, and she’d have to negotiate luggage, Oakland International, and JFK first. Wistfully, Katie decided not to come. With equal wistfulness, I wondered if I could get out to San Francisco. She was ambivalent: I’d have to be abstinent, we couldn’t do much, it would cost a lot of money. We tabled the conversation for another time, which never came.

One of the rhythms of the AFGs is the academic calendar and mid-March was spring break for everyone else. I was boarding out with Italian greyhounds for ten days, which meant the Bat Cave, which can sleep two, was free. I found a couch with friends and suddenly we had dates and free rooming.

I went blotto OCD. I needed washcloths to match my towels. The temperature dials of my stove could only be cleaned with Q-tips. My pillows needed dry cleaning. How was I going to pull off playing tour guide? Personalities emerged as real things to contend with instead of hang up on. Wendy emailed me on the QT to say she’d like some alone time or possibly to stay longer in order to go to the Met and to the Neue Galerie. There was a whiff of the invidious in addressing me privately, an implication that no one else would be highbrow enough to want to look at Klimts. She’d been to New York once and considered herself an old hand. Her suggestions for Lindsay, the neophyte, were bizarrely similar to those of Katie’s boyfriend who wanted to have his picture taken with the cardboard cutout of George Costanza.

“She’s so political,” she reasoned. “Don’t you think she’d get a kick out of the NBC Store?” I was silently amused. The NBC Store was one of the places she’d hit on her one one-day trip to New York.

Wendy got it half-right. Lindsay’s politics could be fostered in the city. “I kind of want to see
The Daily Show
, but I’m not married to the idea,” she emailed me as I fretted and scrubbed dishes with S.O.S. pads. I have place settings for at least eight people; however, all but one had turned yellow with disuse. “I’m coming to meet you guys. Whatever we do is fine.”

Whatever we do is fine
: I hate those words. It’s a fat thing: I
need
people I’m traveling with or entertaining to have a good time so that they’ll a) forget what I look like, b) forget the weakness and slothfulness that I am, and c) be in debt to me, a fat person’s approximation of love. To make it all worse, I, a fat woman, was in charge of three fat women. The Fat Code would be in complete effect. No one would voice an opinion, a desire, a dislike, an objection. We’d look like a collection of bobble-head dolls, always deferring, always listening for the subtle code of disagreement: “If that’s what you want to do…” “Whatever you say…” “I’m just along for the ride…”

If I were a generous person, I’d say that’s why Wendy was so confidential about extra time for fine art—she couldn’t stand the guilt of imposition on the rest of us.

My actual generosity teamed up with my love of eBay, and I went shopping for welcome presents.

A flying pig pin in pink sparkles for Mimi. She could wear it with anything, and it would be a part of her collection and the never-say-never hopes she had never articulated to me.

Celtic wolf head earrings for Lindsay, who explained her choice of totem as “No special reason…I think my personality is sort of doglike—open and friendly but with a mean twist if I’m threatened. I’m also very protective of people I care about. And my Chinese astrology sign is the dog.”

A polar bear wearing a cat bracelet for Wendy. She loved the rolypoly playfulness of polar bears and the antics of her cats, Miss Bucket (“That’s ‘
Bouquet
’”) and Iago, that were often the sole answer to “What did I enjoy today that had nothing to do with me?”

An Indian elephant pendant for Katie, whom I wanted to include as much as I could. Her identification with elephants was as much about their loyalty and capacity for sadness as it was about their size.

These are their self-chosen totem animals. I decided to go Mimi one better in the realm of ceremonies and gods, and make some aspects of the meeting ritualistic. Our animal allies would protect us.

I didn’t buy a new totem for myself, a grizzly bear or penguin something, any more than I would have bought a present for myself when shopping for someone’s birthday. The colony of penguins living in the Bat Cave is reminiscent of my grade school nuns, although they failed to inspire me to mate, dress well, eat more fish, or take the occasional water slide. The grizzly is the state animal of Montana. I have a pair of grizzly paw earrings that I wear when I’m not in the mood to take any shit and intend that things are going to go my way. How gracious would that attitude be?

There were two things I announced we would do: go to the Met to figure out what it means to be Rubenesque and hold a burning ceremony, a twelve-step thing, in which we would write down the flaws and obsessions we are ready to let go of and then burn them. I asked my sponsor, Patty, to be our witness and the AFGs agreed she was probably the perfect and only outsider we could invite for such a weird moment.

Whatever else they wanted to do, I was…um…happy to go along for the ride.

I had placed highly in the Christmas weight gain lottery, but our plans invigorated my resolve and by early March I had a six-week run of abstinence going when I met Pam Peeke for dinner at a swank hotel on the East Side. Pam scares the shit out of me: she’s a force of nature, a Valkyrie played by Annie Lennox. Without pausing for breath, she enumerated the people she’d met with in New York in the last twenty-four hours and then switched to firing off questions to me.

“So. What are you up to these days?”

“Oh…writing. Walking dogs.” I had exactly two notes to my scale.

“How’s the dog thing?”

I smiled. “They’re fabulous. They keep me laughing.”

She narrowed her eyes speculatively. “How much do you think you’d weigh without the dogs?”

Now there was a poser I’d rather not have had to think about.

“Three hundred pounds,” I said off the top of my head. “It’s not so much the exercise as not being able to eat sugar during the day. I’m too dopey for four big hostile dogs if I eat sugar.”

She nodded as though I’d confirmed a detail in a draft of a National Institute of Health article she was writing.

“How’s the book going? How’s it going to end?” She dug into her salmon.

“The women the book is about are coming to visit in a couple of weeks,” I answered. “I won’t know until they give me the ending.”

She fixed me with her gimlet stare. Pam wouldn’t need a scalpel to perform surgery. She could just
stare
a tumor out of a patient. “Bullshit.”

“What do you mean? They’re the story.”

“
You’re
the story.” She took me in: the dinner I’d ordered (baked chicken), what I was wearing (black wool trousers and blazer), the size of me. “You’re the brand, kiddo. You owe your readers a happy ending.”

I was suddenly very glad I had not shared her crab quesadilla starter, and I was pretty sure I’d be stopping for ice cream when I walked Daisy later. Whatever my story was going to be that night, I wanted it to be a quick private escape.

It was a fine early spring Tuesday when I met Mimi’s train at Penn Station. She was the first to arrive. Hero, one of the Labs that often hung out in the Bat Cave during the day, hovered shyly around the fuss but Daisy was ecstatic at her new auntie. She ran to the love seat and whapped her tail and scraped the air with her right paw, inviting Mimi to come and sit, then promptly collapsed on her and twisted over for a belly rub, her amber eyes confident.

“Oh, come let us adore me,” I sang to the tune of “O Come All Ye Faithful.” “I’m Dai-sy the Dog.” Mimi laughed. Two hours later, when Lindsay turned up, she taught the song to her.

Well after the visit, Lindsay shared her impressions of the three of us, my apartment, Brooklyn Heights, the city, and my [ha ha] leadership. Certain things stood out as comfortable and right, and others as uncomfortable and confusing.

No one believes that I—tell-all memoirist, sweat-free on the set of the
Saturday Today Show
, lecturing two hundred vegans on the evils of sugar—am intensely shy. I looked unapproachable when I was actually worrying about what Lindsay would think of me and my apartment, whether she liked dogs in person or liked them as an idea. As she hugged Mimi hello and Daisy introduced herself, I had a chance to take her in as she took my tiny sanctuary in. I hadn’t noticed that she needed orthodontia for her pigeon-toed front teeth, and she could have benefited from a good haircut. She was thin but not skinny, and not as pretty as I’d built her up to be.

At that, I relaxed a fraction and announced that I had to collect Boomer and walk Hero home. I invited them to come along—I’d take the dogs down to the Promenade and Lindsay would get her first sight of how unfathomable the glass citadel of Lower Manhattan is.

I’m sure Lindsay was relieved when we hit the sunny sidewalk on our way to Boomer’s house, glad to be out of the tiny, crowded cubby that is my home.

Mimi admitted that she was tired after strolling the twenty-two blocks that brought us, Daisy, and Boomer back to my front door. I suggested they take some time to unpack and unwind while I took Boomer home and went off to feed Daisy and the Mighty Mites, the greyhounds Daisy and I were staying with. I lay on the couch and worried about where to take Mimi and Lindsay for dinner, what we should do that night. I had three days to introduce Lindsay to New York and Mimi’s bad knees to factor in.

Times Square
, I thought, despite how much I hate the crowds and how suddenly tired I felt. This meant two sets of stairs, plus an elevator and escalator on the Seventh Avenue subway. Mimi could do it, and Times Square was one of those things you had to see in order to understand how three New Yorks function at once: the neighborhoods, the capital of commerce, and touristy fun town.

How many of the thousands of people there that night found irony in the triangulation of an M&M fanning his arms in a “ta-da: the show ends here,” and Mr. Peanut tipping his hat at the mega-lighted pile of Twizzlers, Mounds and Heath Bars, Reese’s cups and York Peppermint Patties on top of the Hershey’s store? If we bought one of each snack shining against the night and shared it, we’d have eaten more than a thousand calories.

When Daisy and I came home from Chez Mighty Mites the next morning, I saw that Lindsay had twisted the light on the desk to read. The shade on my bedside lamp had disintegrated and all that was left was a spindly old stand and a bare sixty-watt bulb. “I wanted to read a little to unwind. The glare was awful,” she explained.

I wondered if it was as awful as I felt for having overlooked another piece of my crappy house.

Mimi tucked her CPAP machine in its bag and looked around at the little boxes and photos, books and dolls, and the dogs’ plush toys. “I could never live here. I need much more space than this.”

Lindsay added, “Bat Cave Rule Number One: Don’t put anything down. You’ll never find it.”

“Okay.” I laughed. “Is there anything you
like
about my house?” They giggled. “It’s
very
New York,” Lindsay said. “It never really gets dark, even in the Cave, where it’s dark in the daytime. And I was startled by the sound coming up from the floor. Then I realized it was the subway. I like the feeling of so much life, going on all around us. All I had to do was hope I didn’t dream about nuns and M&M’s all night.” “Lindsay was threatening to turn on all the lights and count your nuns,” Mimi said. “How many do you have, anyway? They’re even in the kitchen.”