Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (4 page)

Déjà Vu All Over Again

H
ere is the truth: one night I got into bed with Daisy, my yellow Labrador retriever, and Malachi, a goofy black Lab who was staying with us for a couple of cramped and restless nights. I had a pint of Ben & Jerry’s chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. I took a spoonful of the dough part for myself, then a spoon of the vanilla for Daisy and Mally. Mally made a mess of my quilt, but it was time to wash it anyway.

Two nights later I bought another pint of ice cream and shared it with my bedmates. After the second lick or so, Mally scraped the ice cream off the spoon with his front teeth.

No more melted ice cream dripping on the quilt.

I hadn’t realized that Daisy ate ice cream by scraping it off the spoon, the way humans do, until our visiting galoot learned to do the same. I ran into Mally’s owner a few days later and told him the story. A lightbulb floated over his head. “So
that’s
why Mally went berserkers last night when I took a spoon out of the drawer!”

There were rules I lived by but couldn’t say out loud. Like any functioning alcoholic or closet baser, I kept my addiction in check. One of my rules was not eating sugar during the day. It makes me drowsy and lazy, and because I walk dogs for a living, I need to be alert. Until I had a dog of my own and then three or four more young Labs to jerk me around, I didn’t know the menace of the streets. There is a bloodthirsty Akita two blocks down, and there are chicken bones in gutters; joggers swing their arms crazily on the Promenade, and there are babies who don’t understand dog kisses everywhere.

Another truth is that by not eating sugar during the day, there was a slight chance I wouldn’t at night. In truth there is hope.

But after arguing with dogs, my hands rough from exposure to four months of winter, my back and hips aching, I spent my nights in the pacifying arms of Entenmann’s, Ben & Jerry’s, Cinnamon Life Cereal, European rice pudding, and the occasional order of Fascati’s chicken Parmesan with garlic bread.

You’d think my awareness that eating makes me drunk and non-reactive, that my dog has learned to eat neatly from a spoon and fork, would be red flags for how indiscriminate my reasoning had become. It wasn’t. Something as quiet and unfunny as a fact—a number—would have to knock me back to the truth of myself.

My résumé is full of facts that dance crazily across a contrary map of truth.

Take, for instance, the fulfillment of my lifelong desire to publish a book. I had no subject for a book until I lost 188 pounds, going from a size 32 to a size 6, after forty-two years of obesity. It was sold and published. Destroying the satisfaction I should have taken from years of my writing apprenticeship took cunning and craft.

But I did it. By the time I sat next to Bob Greene while Oprah grilled Winona Judd on the whys and hows of her rotundity, my upper arms and breasts felt like overstuffed sausage meat in my size 16 red velvet dress. I had terrible gas from the chocolate-covered almonds I’d eaten the night before and was full of resentment because sharing the green room with Bob Greene meant I didn’t dare eat the pastries they provided for guests.

Needless to say, the camera did not turn to me for my thoughts on the matter.

My opinion would have made for terrible viewing.
You can lose weight, Winona
, I would have said,
but you’ll gain it back.

Still, I think that pontificating with Hoba Kotb on the
Weekend Today Show
about how much better my life was with 188 fewer pounds to heave around, then watching my Amazon rating go to twelve that afternoon while eating an entire key lime pie, is guerilla sabotage raised to a high art, don’t you?

Some few weeks after the dogs’ and my ice cream social, as March made its false promises, I house-sat two Italian greyhounds. As I waited for them to pick at their food, I wandered around the apartment looking at knickknacks and art choices and the absence of a bookcase. (I wasn’t snooping, in case you wonder about dog walkers coming into your home. I have enough trouble with the privacies and troubles of my own life to creep into anyone else’s.) There was a scale in the bathroom. While the dogs jetéed merrily around my feet, I decided to step onto the scale.

Foolish, foolish me.

The digital readout settled squarely at 250.

My one-hundred-pound gain cracked the air. Smoke curled from my toes where they framed the infamous number. The once-adoring greyhounds turned into creatures from Hieronymus Bosch swarmed up my legs like hungry accusing succubae. I’d ignored tsking mirrors and grouching body aches, but the scale spoke the fact.

One hundred pounds in three years. Before that, four years of dieting and maintaining, an adventure that commenced on March 9, 1998. That morning on the borrowed scale was March 11, 2006.

I had lost my body. In getting so big again, I had shrunk to planning the next binge. I stepped off the scale not as Frances Kuffel but as One Hundred Pounds in Three Years Kuffel.

I had only one option: I was going to have to rescramble the facts and lose this weight and, somehow, get my self back into living color.

I’d gotten thin through the confederacy of a twelve-step program I fondly call the “Stepfords.” My original sponsors, Katie and Bridget, had moved away from New York, so when I saw the numbers on the scale, I called one of the last old-timers from the meetings, known by twelve-step members as the “Rooms,” I habituated. Twenty years earlier, Patty had stopped fifteen years of vicious bulimia with the help of the Stepfords. She had the longest recovery of anyone left in the meetings I attended, although her largest size had been a mere eighteen.

Early in April, as I was beginning to interview women for this book, I dug up my Stepford phone list and called her. “You have to sponsor me.”

“I don’t really have time for more sponsees,”
⁵
she said. “I can take your food until you find a sponsor, though.”
⁶

“You don’t understand. You are my sponsor now. You don’t have a choice. You’re the only person I know with the recovery and”—here my voice broke—“the kindness I need.” I had gained weight by eating sugar and flour. I was, therefore, bad—immoral, in a state of mortal sin, as corrupt as the last four presidents combined—and I needed not only forgiveness but benevolence in order to mend my evil ways.

“Okay,” she said, her voice softening, “can you call me at five fifteen tomorrow morning?”

In three minutes I was back in Program.
⁷

Twelve-step thinking tends to be black-and-white—you’re clean
⁸
or you’re not, and “clean” doesn’t have much credibility until you have ninety days. The home meeting
⁹
I attended had changed. My posse had largely disbanded, and there wasn’t much talk of weight loss. I’d been taught to keep my mouth shut for the first ninety days of abstinence, to listen rather than speak in meetings, where foods are never specified
¹⁰
and the emphasis is on “hope, strength, and experience.” I had plenty of the latter but very little hope or strength.

A week into working with Patty, she told me to write a history of my relapse. I did so on my Amazon blog. It was a rambling thing but people responded, and those readers gave me the company and support that I’d been missing in my current life of windchills, dogs, sugar, and wobbling abstinence. Blogging also made me more real to myself.

Katie was deliberating on the practical matter of her suicide.

She had already chosen the date—May 29, six weeks away, both sensible and sensitive: her brothers and mother wouldn’t have to remember separate dates for her fortieth birthday and her death.

That was easy
, she thought as she slipped her fingers along the edges of a box of carrot cake. The top lifted at a forty-five-degree angle. She took a forkful of frosting from the edge of the cardboard platter and allowed her attention to wander to the subject of packaging. Was it possible that Entenmann’s intended these fragile lids to dent like this so that consumers had no choice but to finish off the box in one go? “I wouldn’t put it past them,” she said to the living room wall, and kicked back in her La-Z-Boy. She stabbed into the cake and returned to the business of her death. Where she would do it was dictated by how, and how continued to dizzy her with possibilities.

She’d tried pills, and she certainly didn’t want a repetition of the scenes with her family, the hospital, and shrinks that method had caused three years earlier. A gun would pretty much wipe out the good intentions of May 29, as would razor blades. In any case, neither had ever been serious options.

There was nothing cleaner than pulling a James Mason/Spalding Gray—should she take a drive over to Half Moon Bay? But such a dignified death was reserved for those who would
sink
. Katie would bob in with the tide and find it as hard to get off the shoreline as the proverbial beached whale. Hanging was also the province of the thin—she had visions of bringing down rafters and scaffolding. Throwing herself off some rooftop would flatten anyone or thing she fell on. She didn’t have a garage, so carbon monoxide was a non-option.

The San Mateo Bridge was good—but would she be found?

That was a bad thought. Only crumbs and a scant rime of frosting were left of her cake.
Who will find me? Ingrid?
As if Ingrid didn’t do enough listening as a psychotherapist, the poor woman had listened to her troubles for three years, listened to Katie at 140 pounds larding up to her most recent weigh-in, on a meat-packing scale, of 427. She couldn’t do that to Ingrid, and because Katie had been fired from her Searles sales rep job the month before, it wasn’t like anyone expected her to show up anywhere, except maybe her DBT classes.
¹¹
What would her teacher have to say of her student who gave in to her emotional mind over the supposed reasoning of her wise mind?

Probably that Katie had left an emotional corpse, but that the HMO had been wise for putting her in therapy and was therefore finished with a job well done.

That left dying at home in San Bruno and sending a letter to her mother in Sacramento, which made timing tricky. She’d have to do it before her mother could prevent it but not so early that her mother would find her all smelly and puddly.

Katie shuddered and opened a box of hot cross buns, appropriate for Lent and the fact that she was mourning for two, herself and Christianity.

More than anything, Katie wanted to have choices, and in a year in which her most favorite thing of all, theme cakes (there was nothing like a
bûche de Noël
or red velvet Valentine’s Day cake with which to acknowledge a holiday going on outside her apartment), seemed to be on strike, carrot versus banana crunch cake was not a choice. There were no circles on the calendar Katie had not bothered to hang. A calendar meant dates to remember, a future to plan, choices to make between movies or job interviews. Carrot cake, German chocolate cake, coconut cake: they had chosen her, and one would follow upon the other as inevitably as breathing. Instinct would not stop her from eating or inhaling, and in pulling the curtains across the affable warmth of April, she had decided to decide what she could.

“She claimed her own life,” Katie rehearsed for her hometown newspaper, grimly acknowledging the irony of her words. Death was an action, a choice, a future. She wanted those things more than she wanted a white sheet cake with green coconut frosting and hard sugar shamrocks. She wanted to own her death. She wanted to leave a corpse, and she wanted her family to know she’d done it while trying to protect their feelings. She wanted dignity, and the most dignified suicide she could think of was Ben Kingsley in his general’s uniform, duct-taping a plastic bag around his neck with deft determination at the end of
House of Sand and Fog
.

If only she knew what kind of bag he’d used.

At that, she started to cry some more.

Mimi’s knee was killing her. The coed on the Weight Watchers scale was asking a lot of questions about losing more quickly, and Mimi would gladly have smacked her if she could keep her place in the line. Surely the girl would know what was coming if she saw Mimi, stocky as a mushroom in black leggings and a red T-shirt, hobbling out of line and aiming straight for her.
Isn’t being here torture enough?
she wanted to ask the twentysomething married-with-toddler suburbanite behind her.
I have a fifty-hour-a-week job, and you’re raising a kid. Why does trying to lose weight have to be a second career?

Mimi had skipped breakfast and water, and forgone her warm chenille tunic for this weigh-in on a Saturday morning when she could be preparing for the holidays coming up. That year, April was busier than Christmas, what with the full Pink Moon Esbat just before Easter, and Beltane Sabbat two weeks later. She could be sharing that divine coffee cake and chorizo omelet at the Union with Lilith, showing her one of the dogwood candles she had molded in the sand and pebbles of White Clay Creek. Lilith and her husband had invited Mimi to celebrate the dogwood by casting a circle of fertility, followed by a ritual hot tub, and Mimi needed fresh whole spices for cookies. With a yawn, she had thought about sleeping in. Her doctor had broached the possibility of supplementing her CPAP machine with sleep apnea medication, although she was kind enough to compliment Mimi on keeping her weight within twenty pounds for the last couple of years. Not so her orthopedist. He had no compunction about informing her that she needed orthoscopy on her right knee this summer with the other to follow within two or three years if she didn’t do something about her weight.