Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (7 page)

What to do, who to be? In those long days around the summer solstice, I was bereft of what slender sense of identity I’d had, stricken by the confirmation that I was, first, last, always fireable.

“Hi, Frances, how are you?”

“Fireable, thank you, and you?”

“What color are your eyes?”

“Fireable.”

I was a marked woman. I might as well have been wearing a T-shirt with a scarlet
F
across my chest.

Alas, I am not as noble as Hester Prynne.

“The idea of you interviewing me is very sexy.”

I found his voice very sexy.

“Would you boss me around?”

“You start to sit down across from my desk. I tell you to remain standing.”

“Mmm,” he said, his voice smooth as ghee. “What are you wearing?”

“A suit. A long skirt with a slit to the back of my knees.”

“You have very sexy knees.”

“This is
my
interview. We’re here to find out if
you
have sexy knees.”

“Tell me what to do.”

I give great phone, my voice deep and a little rasty, as we say back in my native Montana, from smoking. It charmed authors and editors. Now I used it to charm boys with fantasies of older women knocking their thirtysomething egos around. If they wanted me, these younger men, then maybe fireable would recede. Maybe I’d have reason not to punish myself with food.

Slut Boys disappear quickly, back to being real—students or boyfriends or professors or potters. It was a double abandonment, of me and of my trial-sized identity as slut.

I looped-de-looped with food. “Why shouldn’t I have a blackberry pie?” I asked a friend one morning. “How often is blackberry pie available? I’ll get it out of my system, and it’ll be over.”

And so a blackberry pie and a pint of Häagen-Dazs would disappear in one sitting, and I’d take three Sominex to sleep through meals, fasting twenty-four hours, waking to something else I needed to eat or seduce out of my system.

One May weekend, when the wisteria was thick and the air sweet with roses, I slept with a man I wasn’t sure I liked. In the middle of fucking me, he asked, breathlessly, “Will you agent my next book?”

“Will you blurb mine?” I asked back. He smiled sweetly, but his eyes said no and silence hung between us, hot and overused as the air in my apartment. Over lunch I learned he was married, a boundary I’d sworn not to cross. The day went from bad to worse, ending with him staying overnight when he hadn’t intended to.

He fell heavily asleep as I lay awake, hating the invasion of my small space, debating who I disliked more, him or me. I listened to him snore, trapped under his arm and unable to turn over in bed. Finally, I got up, dressed, and went to an all-night deli on Clark Street. I bought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Limited Edition Oatmeal Cookie Dough Ice Cream—hey, limited edition, right? It would soon be unavailable, and anyway, I’d be abstinent in a day or two.

I sat down on a stoop to eat it, but it was frozen too hard for the flimsy spoon the clerk had thoughtfully provided. I went home, slid a real spoon from the kitchen cupboard, shut myself in the bathroom, and sat down on the laundry bag in the dark. It was as close to an orgasm as I was going to get that day.

My Amazon blog turned this sour day into a thing too many of us had shared not to laugh at in retrospect. “Eating while hiding in the bathroom sucks. Eating while hiding in your OWN bathroom sucks even more,” I wrote and M. added, “I’ve been there, hiding in the bathroom, and yes, it’s creepy. It goes to show to what lengths this addiction will take us.”

I was hanging on to one new dream. My parents had returned to Montana after their winter in Arizona and my mother was reading the classified ads for litters of Labrador retrievers that would be available when I went home that August. She raised Labs when I was little and would pick out a winner for me, help me housebreak it, and get me started on the great adventure of finally having a dog.

Unfortunately, Montana is the birthplace of my compulsive eating and the last place on earth I could regain my abstinence. The yellow peasant loaf–sized baby we picked out turned out to be a stubborn, human-flesh-eating brat. I couldn’t leave Daisy with my elderly parents, and I couldn’t take her to the beach before she even knew her own name, let alone liked me enough to learn to come when called. Suddenly I was imprisoned with this adorable monster that hated being held (
crash!
there went one dream) and had actual tantrums.

Two scenes stand out in my mind from that summer. One is of scooping Daisy up in my arms and running to the bathroom with the liquid bowels of half a box of laxatives, holding the puppy as I shit so that she wouldn’t take her own dump on the carpet.

The other is of standing at the kitchen sink, looking into the old apple tree heavy with fruit and bowed to the deck, while shoving a package of molasses cookies, one whole cookie after another, down my throat.
I am sorry to say—
gulp—
your services will no longer
—gulp—
be needed.
Those cookies set a precedent. That voice, the way Alix chewed the inside of her lip as she waited for me to justify this or that thing I hadn’t known she wanted, her giggle when she wanted to impress a client or important editor—scenes real or pulled from possibility continue to haunt my dreams when my food is out of control.

Six weeks later, I returned to Brooklyn with Daisy and forty pounds I didn’t have when I boarded the plane in Newark. What being fired hadn’t taken from me, food had reclaimed. Thoroughly in its thrall, I have been a whore for it, a thief, a liar, a magician, a juggler, a soldier, and a spy. Each of these roles had a different relationship with food, the world of things, and the world of people. If this story seems like so much navel-gazing, consider the analysis I’m forced to go through in sorting it out. Jesus, with which self do I start?

This compulsion has been my best friend, whipping post, lover, and god since the age of three or four. It has ruined my ability to be automatically generous with others. My sense of my own worth, my health, my confidence, my discipline (clouded as it was by the fixation on and/or the sleepiness of food), my market value have been mown down by it even as food promised one more night of comfort against all those shortcomings. I was no longer an agent, no longer thin, no longer attractive as a slut, my German Slut Boy informed me. I was the owner of an energetic dog, in possession of a diagnosis of clinical depression and anxiety attacks when I had to leave the Bat Cave (what I called my small, dark apartment), and, if not a writer, an author.

There were grand moments and terrible ones in the next three years, variations on these themes of being fireable, inept, a liar when speaking about weight loss. My body bobbed up and down between 190 and 220 pounds, and my moods bobbed in tandem despite big doses of Zoloft, Wellbutrin, and when I developed problems breathing when I had to leave my house, Klonopin.

It was noon on a Saturday in January 2006, in a colorless church basement. It was a popular meeting, so the circle of Stepfords was large and not everyone would get his or her three minutes to talk about eating and life. For now, it was Rachel’s turn.

“I haven’t lost any weight in a long time,” she said. I slid down in my chair, pulling my down coat closer. The big room was cold but the Michelin design of my outfit might confound anyone comparing me to her. We were about the same size.

“I don’t think this program is doing me any good anymore,” she went on. I looked at her from the corners of my eyes. “Whether I come or not, I follow my nutritionist’s plan. I stay the same size; nothing is happening to my weight. In the meanwhile, I’m initiating a lawsuit against a boss and I need other fellowships to get through it.”

When she smiled, Rachel was pretty, with unsuspected dimples and a bit of glee in her eyes. That Saturday she looked pale and drawn. Her skin showed old acne pits, and the scar of her harelip was a vivid childhood remnant of family troubles running deep and frightening through her nights.

“I’m sorry to hear you’re having legal troubles,” I said walking over to her after the Serenity Prayer. “Aren’t you working on your own now?”

“Yeah,” she said, “this is my ex-boss. I took a lot of verbal abuse from him.”

I sat down at that.

“Really? Are you suing him or the company?”

“He is the company.”

“Can you tell me a little about suing a boss? My ex-boss used to hit me in public, and it got to the point that I was scared to do anything in that office. Is that suable?”

“When did it happen?” she asked wearily.

I had the horrible feeling I was doing a Hey-Doc, a family joke about parties at which people would come up to my father and say, “Hey, Doc, I got this pain in my shoulder. What do you think it is?”
I’ll make it up to you
, I thought.
I’ll read your first novel. I’ll buy you lunch.

“I was fired three years ago.”

“That’s still in the statute of limitations. You could sue her.”

Rachel turned toward Pierrepont Street, and I headed to Gristedes for a carrot cake and ice cream. The fury of my Mastiff Geyser eruption with Alix turned into the continuous simmering of a fuma-role. The next three months were hazed by sugar and walking dogs in the heavy-skied days of winter. It felt like every bag of shit I scooped up was talking to me. Not only was I a patsy and a bad agent, I was willfully helpless.

I had justified my passivity in the job by thinking I was on a cliff. Three years later I got it: I wasn’t on a cliff; I was against a wall, a solid one built out of the law.

Alix owned the company. What could I do?

Instead of being a puerile asshole, I could have sued her ass, that’s what.

I could not live with that piece of myself. So I didn’t. I ate and I raged.

“I suggested you sue her when you were working for her,” my therapist, the Good Doctor Miller, said.

“You did?” I was shamed further by this. Not only was I willfully ignorant and helpless, I didn’t listen to plausible solutions, either.

“You can still sue her,” she went on.

I studied the orange tulips on her credenza. If there were tulips to be found on the Upper East Side, she had them. The fresh flowers made her tiny office less of a prison cell of neuroses. “I’m not litigious,” I answered at last. “It’s another doctor’s family thing.” This was a point of contention between us.

“Call me if you need me,” she would say, and I’d remember Mary, one my father’s patients, who’d get liquored up and keep him on the phone for what seemed like hours. I’ve put up with running out of antidepressants, bad fevers, bronchitis, and getting admitted to the hospital because I didn’t want to pull a Mary.

“I’m sorry that I didn’t understand how shaken you were by being fired,” the Good Doctor Miller repeated. She’d known all along that it was the best thing that could happen to me, a belief I shared intellectually. “But did it ever occur to you that it wasn’t because you were so passive, that you never stood up for yourself, that she fired you? Because you did. She pushed you and pushed you, and you finally pushed back. That’s how I interpret it. If you’d kept your mouth shut, you’d have had another two or three years there.”

Two or three more years? I could feel my toes turning cold.

It could be, of course, that she was right. Alix didn’t want a peer in the office. She wanted to be the reigning diva, and brag and storm to a waiting frisson of envy and fear.

When it came to standing up for myself, I was a sentry asleep at the gate.

“All you probably need to do is send her a letter,” Doctor Miller said. “She’s a bully, Frances. Most bullies will back down when faced with another bully. Wouldn’t you enjoy scaring her?” She clapped one hand over her mouth and shook her head. “I didn’t say that, did I?”

I like my fluffy-haired, plump shrink best when she is being mildly vindictive.

I didn’t sue. I went on eating and raging.

Right up to March 9, when I stepped on the scale and was bitch-slapped with the hundred pounds I’d gained.

In 2002, when I put on my first pair of size 8 trousers, I did not think that I had “graduated,” although I described reaching goal weight as the first project I’d ever finished. The problem was, I hadn’t come close to finishing myself. Perhaps “initiating” is the better word choice for the blob of self I was left with in the Ann Taylor dressing room.

The problem of the unfinished or unstarted self is that what we once used to compensate for its gaps—food and weight, and then the focused expectation of dieting—is gone, with an unfamiliar body left to absorb the nicks and dings of being alive. That unpadded body and our confusions about it and the new possibilities open to us can, in themselves, cause some of those dings.

“I’m not paying you to shop for clothes!” Alix raged at me one day for a reason I don’t remember. Another day she hustled into my office, shut the door behind her, and rushed up to me, stripping off her jacket. “Look at these arms!” she demanded. “Look at them! Do they look like the arms of a fifty-seven-year-old woman?”

Such comments preyed upon the vulnerability I felt in my new body. She would not have said them to me if I weighed 220 pounds or had weighed 150 pounds for a long time. She wouldn’t have said them if I hadn’t been so vocal about my physical insecurities. Nor would she have said them if I’d told her to cut it the fuck out.

From 1999 to 2003, I’d lived in a normal-sized body, much of that time devoted to learning how to walk and run and dress, reviving my writing life, practicing smiling and speaking less stridently and more quietly. These are all necessary, but I had not acquired the certainty of that ineffable Frances who does not depend on other people’s opinions of her to create a self. Both the process of losing weight and the Stepfords teach one to wait, a good skill in many ways but sometimes a stance that delays necessary actions. Nor had I come into adulthood with a sense of safety or future.