Half-Assed (16 page)

“Oh,” I eeped.

“It’s a great site. I’m really proud of you.”

“Thanks,” I said.
Had he told anyone else about this?

Our party name was called. Our table was ready. I was rescued from the 212th awkward conversation that month. Only eighty-six or so more to go. I was starting to build up a tolerance.

After the viewing I said bye to my dad. The rest of us returned to my aunt and uncle’s house and congregated around the kitchen table, where cheesecake, cracker boxes, and liquor bottles were piled high like a barrier against the bad feelings. They wouldn’t have to cook for weeks. The day before I had barely snacked on any of the chocolates or cookies, though I did eat a slice of cheese because I didn’t want to be viewed as “the girl on a diet” who wouldn’t eat. That was like being the prudish girl who wouldn’t drink and go dancing. But now I was hungry and tired and had cheesecake clinging to the roof of my mouth. We talked for hours.

Beth leaned back in the wooden kitchen chair and wondered out loud, “Why do we always end up entertaining guests in the kitchen?
We’ve got a huge living room we never use.” I spread some cheese on a cracker, but I didn’t say anything. The kitchen is the heart of the home. Where else would we spend an evening of mourning?

On the way back to Indiana I ate more salads. I was starting to get sick of radicchio and restaurants that were out of fat-free salad dressing packets, but I didn’t want to stray too far from my plan. If I ate one Big Mac, I might regain all 150 pounds right there in the front seat. That could really affect our gas mileage. A piece of cake stolen here and there was fine, but I didn’t want to relearn my bad eating habits. It had been stressful not knowing when or where I would be eating or if there would be any carrots on the buffet table next to the potato salad and fried chicken wings. I was completely out of my routine.

My only good exercise had been walking twenty blocks around Washington DC with an old high school friend. I matched her fast walking pace so well that I kept stepping on her flip flops. I wondered if my concern about food and exercise could be considered an obsession. I didn’t want to break my number one rule: Don’t get crazy. But if I didn’t catch small slips when they happened I was bound to get fat again. I liked my new ass far too much to let that happen.

We arrived back home Saturday night, and I spent Sunday recuperating. I weighed in and was happy to see I was up only half a pound. I tried packing up the last of my stuff for my rescheduled move on Monday, but ended up napping on the couch instead. I was still digesting all the apple spice cake from the wedding, cheesecake from the wake, and too many buttery Bob Evans biscuits from our final dinner stop.

The next morning, I got my mother, Jim, and his muscular friend Wes to load the rental truck as I drove ahead to my new apartment complex to sign the lease. The rental manager showed me my unit for approval. Looking at the closed doors of my new neighbors in the
courtyard, I was happy that no one here would know that I had been morbidly obese. The last time I’d made an identity change like this was when we’d moved to Maryland in the first grade and I’d stopped going by the nickname Jenny. Only the postman might profile me as a fat girl when he stuffed my Lane Bryant catalogs into the mailbox.

I’d requested a unit on the second floor so I could incorporate more incidental exercise into my life when I trampled up and down the stairs carrying groceries or hauled a basket of dirty clothes to the laundry room. The complex was also close to a nature trail that stretched through the city on a former railway line. I wanted to get off my treadmill and run outside. The complex had a small exercise room with an elliptical trainer that I wanted to try too. I was now making decisions about where I would live based on the exercise options the location provided. I wasn’t just brainwashed into a life of fitness, I was brainwashed, rinsed, and dried.

The van containing all my earthly possessions arrived in the parking lot. We bounded up and down the stairs carrying boxes of books and CDs. The last year and a half of running and eating well had all been leading up to this. Some people train for marathons, but if you know anyone who is moving, it would be more practical to train for that. You could fill up cardboard boxes with free weights and walk up and down several flights of stairs. Rearrange all the furniture in your living room. Then move it back. The day after my move I had so many bruises on my forearms from carrying boxes that I looked like I was in a violent relationship.

Someone should start a service in which instead of wasting money on gym memberships, you volunteer to help people move. You’d get a cardio workout, and you’d actually be accomplishing something instead of just wearing down the soles of your running shoes. It would be a blend of community service and exercise. You could start by doing
first-floor moves and then work your way up to sixth-floor apartments with no elevators.

I typically prided myself on being a big strong woman who could carry her own groceries and squash her own bugs, but I did have limits. I let the men shift the heavy piece of machinery known as my treadmill up the stairs. I bought them a case of beer in payment.

By the end of the day, I’d thanked my family and sent them away. I shoved a bowl of cat food under the bed where my kitty was cowering from posttraumatic stress and realized I’d barely eaten all day myself. When I kept my mind busy, I didn’t notice when I was hungry. I’d had a sandwich for breakfast, a chocolate-chip cookie dough milk shake for lunch, and a salad for dinner. I didn’t have much of an appetite. I’d forced myself to chew the last piece of tomato in yet another salad only because I didn’t want to become someone who tried to subsist on eight hundred calories a day and collapsed because all her muscle had been metabolized. How would I carry my lamps up the stairs then?

My new refrigerator was as cold and barren as the Siberian tundra. It contained only three cups of yogurt, two cheese sticks, half a two-liter of Diet Dr. Pepper, and an unused packet of Italian dressing. By the end of the night I was wishing I’d packed that bottle of rum my mom had offered from the cupboard. I’d turned it down because alcohol contains so many empty calories, but it sounded pretty good right about now. My cooking skills were momentarily useless because I didn’t own a microwave and wouldn’t let myself buy one until I unearthed my 20-percent-off coupon, which was buried in one of the boxes that created a geodesic garden in my living room. Cardboard was high in fiber, right? I could eat and unpack at the same time.

I ventured to the closest grocery store to stock my fridge and was frustrated that I’d have to learn a new store layout. I’d finally figured out where every item I liked was located at my old store, and now I
was playing dodge-the-salami. It didn’t even carry my favorite brand of fudgsicles. I had to stock my entire kitchen, so I bought more food than I’d ever bought in my life, filling my cart to capacity.

When I finally dug the scale out from one of my boxes, I was not surprised to learn I’d lost five pounds, probably because of dehydration and the near toxic levels of stress I’d been under the past week. I weighed my cat a couple of weeks later and discovered he’d lost a pound too, mainly because of the hide-under-the-bed diet. That might work for me too, but it would freak out my friends and relatives.

A big part of my life had been dedicated to weight loss lately. I considered it to be my hobby, but no matter how much I wanted to focus on dropping more weight, life insisted on carrying on around me. People would always be getting married, dying, and moving—though I hoped they’d stop doing it all in the same month. I had sometimes thought it would be nice to lock myself away on a fat farm where all my food and exercise could be controlled, but I preferred living in the real world, even if that involved tempting platters of chocolate-chip cheesecake served with a very good excuse to eat it. I’d indulged in some sweets, but I hadn’t gorged myself under the pressure, and I’d eaten as best I could under the circumstances. I soon returned to my exercise routine with barely a hiccup. I’d survived a stressful month without seeking comfort in food.

I returned to work on Tuesday and sat at my desk with my eyes unfocused, as if I were gazing through the screen trying to see a magic 3-D photo print. I’d just had six days off from work.

I needed a vacation.

Trail Mix

“E
xcuse me, are you walking your cat?”

The man I’d asked this question of looked up from the foliage on the side of the paved trail. A tan tabby cat was walking four yards ahead of him, sniffing flowers and stomping on bugs. His owner meandered slowly behind, no leash in hand.

“Yes, I am,” he replied, hands in his pockets, completely unfazed by my question.

“That’s
awesome,
” I told him as I let the chain-link gate close. I walked back to my apartment complex.

I was madly in love with the long path and its red line running down the middle. It was part of the new life in my new apartment, a life in which people walked cats instead of dogs. I might have to start eating out of the dumpster to afford the rent, but banana peels were high in fiber. The day after my move, I glimpsed runners, bikers, and in-line skaters whizzing along as I drove home from work. I imagined they were calling out to me, “Come with us! Frolic among the trees and flowers like pixies while elevating your heart rate for long intervals at a time!” I drove on instead, telling myself I really needed to buy a
microwave before the store closed at nine. This was true, but I was also putting off my inaugural run because I’d never exercised in front of other people. I’d used the treadmill in the privacy of my own home because I didn’t want to be the gross obese girl at the gym. As a fat person I probably had more of a right to the gym than anyone else. I obviously needed it more. Unfortunately, that argument never got me to the Stairmaster.

I convinced myself to tie up my running shoes after I repeated an old saying: You wouldn’t care about what other people think of you if you knew how infrequently they do. In other words, “Everyone else is a self-centered bastard too.” It was easy for me to assume anyone in visual range of my arms was thinking, “If she flaps her elbows hard enough she could fly away.” It was more likely that they pedaled by thinking, “My panties are really bunching up in these shorts.” Even if they did spare a moment to think disparaging thoughts about me, it was just a passing blip between gear changes.

I waited for a week before I put on my sweatpants, sports bra, and T-shirt to go for a walk. I checked that my apartment key was in my pocket and pulled the door closed behind me. I turned and ran smack into a pack of thin girls leaving the apartment two doors down. Given the choice between running into a pack of thin girls and a pack of wolves, I hesitated a bit longer than any rational human being should. How big were the wolves? Had they eaten recently? How about the thin girls?

I had been feeling so good about myself lately that I imagined a groovy theme song playing in the background as I strode confidently down the street. But if I encountered a pack of thinner, prettier girls, my theme song came to a screeching halt.
Don’t be intimidated,
I told myself.
They are not better than you just because they have 15 percent body fat and skin as smooth as goat’s milk. Yak’s milk is what it’s all about this year.

I waved hello to them as I rushed down the stairs, chiding myself for being ridiculous. The pack consisted of friends of the neighbor who had been the nicest to me. She’d said hello every time I’d seen her and offered to help me carry empty boxes to the dumpster. The only person she was competing with in the Nice Neighbor Pageant was Bill from downstairs. I didn’t see him often, which was probably for the best since he would have been killed if he’d walked out his door when my two-liter of Sprite Zero rolled off the balcony. Everyone else in the complex had been aloof. If I was still morbidly obese, I would have attributed it to fat discrimination. Now I just knew they were rude.

I had no reason to fear this girl or her friends. So what if they liked to lie around the pool and display their gorgeous bodies for the whole complex? I wondered if female rivalry were hard-coded into our genes as a way for us to get the best mates. It was the early Darwin alert system, “Warning! Rival, rival! Endangering chances of procreation!” I hoped it was genetics because I hated to think I was a shallow, jealous person. Blaming the inescapable forces of nature was better than acknowledging possible character flaws.

I had lots of reasons to lose weight. One of them was to become more attractive to men, but I also wanted to stop feeling inferior around other women. Men weren’t as picky as they pretended to be. My mom’s bridal store sold dresses all the way up to size 26, so fat girls were definitely getting married and getting laid, even if they were harder to carry over the threshold. Being thin was often a competition between women in which the losers were awarded the parting gifts of envy and an inferiority complex. I had a couple of thin, hot female friends who were on the receiving end of this type of jealousy and I knew they didn’t deserve it. Just because you could post a picture of yourself on your blog and get thirty “OMG, u r so hot!” comments in an hour didn’t mean you weren’t also intelligent and thoughtful. You
could have big boobs and a big brain. Fat or thin, pretty or homely, was there ever a winning team?

After escaping the thin girls, I made it to the gate leading to the trail. I took three steps across the gravel and landed on the path. It was the middle of summer, so the trail was as crowded as an electronics store on Black Friday. I chose a direction and started walking.

“On your left!” someone called out behind me. I turned around and nearly underwent a rhinoplasty when a man in Lycra bike shorts and a sports jersey whizzed past me hunched over a bicycle. “On your left” must be secret trail talk for “Move your ass to the right, slowpoke!” I was glad I had stuck emergency contact information in my pocket along with my key. It was rush hour out here. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had found a body on the side of the trail with a skid mark up its back. A girl in jean shorts and a tank top skated past me, keys held out like a weapon in one hand while she gabbed on the cell phone in her other. I hoped she wouldn’t collide with the father pushing a stroller and puncture her lung on her keys. At least they’d be able to call 911 right away.