Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (38 page)

There is fact—the ninety-four pounds out of five hundred the Angry Fat Girls had collectively tried to lose in a year.

And there is truth—the artifacts we had made of our attempts that made our hearts bigger. We would never stop trying, but each of our bigger hearts now had room for ourselves as well as our friends. The act of solace teaches solace. We were learning to forgive ourselves because someone else had listened, understood, comforted, offered a new start whenever we were ready.

We were big with clemency as well as fat.

Lindsay posted a photo album of the loot we’d bought or exchanged and our hands fresh from manicures on Angry Fat Girlz. Lindsay’s were bright pink, Mimi’s fire-engine red, Wendy’s a pearly pink. Because my hands take a beating walking dogs, I went for a cleanup job and clear polish.

Two years later, I look at the photo and am surprised that Wendy’s hand, although a little ungracefully sprawled, is so sensitive looking. Lindsay’s is posed demurely and her wedding ring is prominent. My hand looks like a peasant’s, and Mimi’s is small, as fine as a dinner roll, her fingers a little stubby.

Lindsay wrote a lighthearted description of our days together.

In retrospect, I see in the thirteen responses to the small post the importance the blog had and how we got a kick out of it but didn’t “own” the contribution we were making. One respondent gushed:

But I shrugged it and the other hands in the air voting for a larger meeting off:

We all had work to do as the ice melted and the crocuses bloomed. We left it to Wendy to tell the story of her fall and long convalescence. Mimi had responsibilities to teach and hand off. Lindsay was close to finishing her dissertation and planned to defend it in June.

And I had this book to write, the truth of my love and evolving admiration for Katie, Lindsay, Mimi, and Wendy, based on facts.

I have presented myself to you in facts only. If I’m very lucky, I am, perhaps, evolving toward a life in which the truth of me outweighs the facts.

O
n March 1, 2009, Lindsay, Mimi, Wendy, and I finally made the decision to cease the Angry Fat Girlz blog. Our personal lives had taken over, and we wanted to blog about our individual concerns.

Lindsay got her PhD and found a teaching job that required a move. Her time was limited, and she said in our closing statement, “The fact that I wasted so much energy agonizing over 20-ish pounds and spent so little time actually doing much about it is embarrassing. I’ve learned to be grateful for my body and the things I can do. I have learned that no one, besides me, gives much thought to the size of my ass.”

Mimi enjoys Baltimore and her new job, but she coped with the disruption and newness by eating. She gave up Weight Watchers for a painful while, frustrated at seeing herself gain weight even as the need for knee replacement surgery grew imperative. As Asterië, she found a certain peace that she no longer found on Angry Fat Girlz, and she wanted to explore Wicca and other topics on a new blog. “We’ve become more balanced—and it’s been a good change,” she said in her adieus. Unfortunately, part of Mimi’s finding balance has been an interruption (I hope it’s just an interruption) in our friendship. It was too hard for her to be in communication with me while I got my abstinence together and began to lose—and blog about—serious weight.

Wendy got back together with Cal, and they are planning to move in together. Her Talbots clothes no longer fit, and with Cal in her life, she doesn’t often call, although she faithfully sends me every dog cartoon that comes her way. “[Angry Fat Girlz and our readers] helped me see that we’re not alone and there’s more to life than a number on a scale,” she concluded our nearly three years of probing so many weight-related topics and issues. On a daily basis, Wendy continues to writhe over the same things she did in this book: Cal isn’t behaving the way she wants or her mother is being a pest, her boss is the Devil in Banana Republic or she’s having problems with Mexican food. In the larger scheme, however, I think she’s happier than she was in the year I wrote about.

Katie lost over a hundred pounds in her work with Diane, but a personal crisis dissolved her commitment to the Rooms, her food plan, and her sponsor. She gained most of it back and is currently enrolled in a medically supervised liquid fasting diet. “I had to take food out of the equation,” she said. It’s an extreme measure, but Katie is extreme. The doctor she sees weekly for testing has a transition program from liquid fasting to eating, and she is determined to stick to his program until she can move safely to OA or gastric bypass or a combination thereof? She hasn’t committed to what will come after this course of treatment.

Last Saturday, I picked up a kelly green coin for ninety days of abstinence. It’s the longest abstinence I’ve had in five years.

I crawled and bawled my way into the Rooms on February fifteenth after I’d blogged about how certain I was I’d be abstinent on Valentine’s Day. Ah, pride. Very late on Valentine’s Day, annoyed by a series of phone calls from a dog owner, I ripped my nightgown off and walked through a sleet storm to buy Sweet Cream and Cookies ice cream and a box of Oreo Cakesters. I woke the next morning in my clothes, my nightgown inside out on the bathroom floor.

“I’m so fucked up,” I sobbed into Vicky’s neck when she stood in the middle of the meeting and hugged me. “We’re always here for you, Frances,” she whispered, and pulled up a chair next to hers. A few minutes later, Patty dashed in, saw me, and beckoned me into her arms. “I’m in big trouble,” I cried, and I bent down to hug her. She squeezed me hard, stepped back, and cocked her thumb and little finger in an octave, her dumb show for, “You and me. We’re back together, right?” I nodded.

I hadn’t cried so much or so hard in a meeting since Scott faded away from me in 2003.

A few days later, I stepped on my scale. The light in my kitchen is dim. The scale was mechanical and measured in two-pound increments. The needle went over the top weight, which I assumed to be 250 pounds but a few weeks later learned was 260. This morning I estimated I’ve lost thirty-nine pounds, which is also the largest weight loss I’ve had in five years.

Sometimes it’s about the weight, but most of the time it’s about what I eat. I wake each and every morning in the self-hatred of having eaten wrongly the day before. It takes a few minutes to realize I didn’t. A wave of gratitude and self-respect washes over me. Because it’s too hard to do it alone, abstinence means that I stay in touch with Patty. I pray to whatever God is out there.

No matter how many things may have gone wrong in the day, if I’m abstinent, I feel that I’ve done my job. I can be in a bear of a mood, overwhelmed with work and the idiots on the street who make my work harder, and at some point, the thought will staple itself to my brain that the next day will be better. Abstinence means I have a chance of a better day. It also puts my money in order—it costs nearly ten bucks to go out and get binge stuff. I’ll be booking a trip to Prague soon from those savings. I’m more sensitive to when I’m tired; I’m more focused on my dogs, on my writing, on the DVD I’m watching, on talking to friends. I fidget and I fuss more, needing tasks like routing out dog hair or cleaning my stove.

I suffer from chronic, low-grade depression whether I’m abstinent or not, but in conjunction with drugs, when I’m abstinent, I know I can hunker down in a good book and wait it out.

Most of all, abstinence gives me hope, and hope, I learned this winter, is what operates my dreams.

In September 2008, I got an email from a college friend I had adored and looked for on all the websites she might belong to. She and a friend had recently been talking about driving up to Mount Lolo at four in the morning to see a solar eclipse at daybreak. They had invited me along and stopped to pick me up. I declined to go but gave them half a chocolate cake. The memory stirred her to look for me on Google, and she found my email address on my website. I wrote back immediately, with my phone number and a plea to give me a call.

It was as if we had spoken the day before. She giggled as she told the story of the Mount Lolo trip, and I felt ill with holding back tears she wouldn’t understand. She had encapsulated me: saying no to experience because it might not fit or it might make me sweat, but handing out cake to those who went on to live while I went back to bed. We talked for most of a day and that feeling stayed with me. She had done things; I had survived things.

I stumbled around in shock from the conversation for days, hating myself. Then it occurred to me that I remembered the years we knew each other in detail and had said things like, “Oh, that was because your parents had such a great marriage.” In a weird way, being sidelined had taught me to interpret what I observed. In that way, I was as necessary to her as she was to me.

Within a week of talking to her I had decided that I would, in a couple of years, move to Seattle, where she and a great many other friends and extended family live. I miss the mountains, I realized. I want Daisy to have mountains and lakes and beaches. I miss my family. I want to grow tulips and bearded iris and delphiniums, and I want a black Lab which I’ll name Dahlia. I want to give a dinner party on the Spode my mother gave me when they moved to Arizona.

My dreaming mechanism awoke. There would be a million hikes in the Cascades. I would have a Christmas tree of my own. I could take sailing lessons if I wanted.

Grace boded a cycle of such reunions. On Facebook, I began to hear from people I didn’t positively hate in high school and found I liked them now. And I got in touch with someone who had worked for Alix.

That was another conversation that shook me deeply. I learned how far her antics had taken her—and how low. I heard from longtime insider in the agenting world that I was a good agent, an innovator. I learned I had kept certain orders of business in the office running and that they fell apart when I was fired.

That night, Patty asked me what I felt about Alix after the conversation. “Pity,” I said. I was surprised into pausing a moment. “She’s self-destructive. So am I. What else can I feel if I want to get over her?”

My agent is in China at the moment. She told me she had downloaded onto Kindle the Jane Austen novel that I’m basing my own novel on. I think that means she takes me seriously and that I won’t get to bask in finishing this book.

My brother Jim responded to a blog I wrote about the dream diet that he had a secret dream of his own: he wants to relay swim the English Channel in 2010. “Can I wave you off in Dover?” I emailed. My response, he said, made him cry. He went on to say no, he’d rather I welcomed him ashore in France. “In that case,” I wrote back, “we’ll have to rent a car and go see the battlefields in Normandy.” The next day I made arrangements to start conversational French lessons.

After so many years, my capacity to dream has unstuck itself. It’s abstinence that makes me able to act on my dreams.

Certain people and sugar don’t mix. The measure of whether I’m one of them is whether I love sugar more than my body and my capacity to experience. The answer is obvious. Abstention gives me the chance to make the acquaintance of my body and the world. It is a rare day today. Mourning doves mew in the garden, and the sun is buttery in between the shadows of the plane trees. Cabbage roses are in perfume, and I overheard a classical violinist practicing as I walked Daisy this morning. I need lunch and a shower. Those are my facts. The truth of them is that abstinence will help me remember this day so that I can share it with you.

My desire, now, is to be neither fat nor angry anymore, and to be the girl I imagine in risky, quiet moments. I hope that anger leaves us all and that we each find our own light.

May 21, 2009

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