That October, on a blue-and-gold afternoon, I had Indian food with Lanie, a friend visiting from my hometown, Missoula, Montana. I described how depressed I was by my weight gain until she preempted me. "You've been very fat, Frances, and you've been very thin. Welcome to where the rest of us live."
I twiddled my fork in my plate of saag panir. I think of Lanie as being very tall and very thin, but a few months earlier I'd helped her pick out a dress. Her dress size was similar to what I was wearing that day. The event we shopped for had been a gathering of Montana writers, many of them old friends, all middle-aged. One had a rounder face than I remembered; another wore layers of a truly terrible print in the style that catalogs and store clerks describe as "flattering." Someone else was still very thin but looked drawn and brittle as age caught up with her bone structure.
These were women I'd long envied for their pretty thinness, and yet I'd been less like them when I was a size 8 than I was now.
At size 8, I had to admit, I was so self-conscious (and secretly, overweeningly proud of it) that often that was all I was. I could have programmed my answering machine to announce, "Hi, you've reached a size 8. Please leave a message and either the size 8 or Frances will get back to you."
None of the women at that party, or Lanie savoring her lamb kurma across from me, claimed their identities from their weights that night. They wanted to gossip, compare stories of their kids and discuss what they were writing, tell old jokes more cleverly than they had at the last party, and sample the desserts weighing down the potluck buffet.
I was not unlike them. Smaller by a size than Lanie, larger by a size than Laura, a little fresher looking than Diane. Of the Americans who lose weight, 95 percent gain it back within five years. I had gained a third of it back. Not all of it. To some extent, I had beaten the odds. I was stronger than the echoes of the boyfriend and boss allowed me to hear.
I was determined not to repeat the mistake of being, rather than having, a thin body. I'd lived through my size all of my life, so acutely aware and ashamed of my obesity that the likable things about me—my sense of humor, my intelligence, talent, friendliness, kindness—were as illusory to me as a magician's stacked card deck. As long as I defined myself by my body size, I would not experience those qualities for myself.
As fall turned to a snowy winter, I picked through the spiral of relationships that had unglued me the year before. I didn't blame the boyfriend or my boss for my relapse. I had been half of the problem; healthier self-esteem would not have collapsed under their judgments of me. In obesity, I had clamped my arms to my sides to keep them from swinging as I walked. I craned my body over armrests in theaters and airplanes, stood in the back of group photos to minimize the space I took up. I got thin and I continued to hide. Whatever reasons the boyfriend had come up with for not seeing me, I met with amicability and sympathy. Had I reacted honestly, even to myself, I might have ended the relationship. Instead, I'd gambled all my sweetness only to find out I was disposable. Likewise, I had not pressed my boss for an agenda of responsibilities from the start, nor had I clarified with her that her work and recreation styles frustrated and frightened me.
Slowly, I began to find toeholds in the avalanche of food and doubt. I worried about how fat I looked to potential readers and what I could possibly wear to flatter or disguise the 40 pounds I'd gained.
At the same time, however, I had become the canvas of makeup artists, stylists, photographers and publicists. They weren't looking at my stomach. "Give me a hundred-watt smile," commanded a photographer whose censure I thought I'd seen when I walked in. I licked my teeth and flashed a grin only somewhat longer than her camera flare.
"Wow." She straightened up at the tripod. "That really is a hundred watts. These are gonna be great."
When I saw myself in the magazine, my smile was, in fact, the focal point. When I began dating, at the age of 45, my smile was an attribute men commented on, but I hadn't really seen it until it was emblazoned on glossy paper. It was bigger, it seemed, than my face itself. I'd been a size 8 in my author photo, taken as my food plan was wobbling but not yet in smithereens, in June 2003. I was surprised to see I still looked like myself, apparently.
The power of my smile fueled me through more publicity, giving me a sense of authentic attractiveness that allowed me to enjoy the process. When I had a couple of days in Santa Monica between readings, I had a chance to assess and absorb at my own pace. Walking along the Palisades, I admired the sea-twisted pines and pearly mist funneling out of Malibu Canyon. I felt as lucky as I had once felt by being hired, by being loved, and I felt worthy of my luck because I appreciated the prettiness of the place, the serendipity that brought me there and my particular grateful awareness that knitted the moment together. I'd tried to rob myself of that by punishing myself for the boss and the boyfriend. You should not have treated me that way, I thought. The emphasis was on "me," and just then I knew who that was.
I looked around carefully. There was a family reunion going on, or so I assumed until I got closer and realized it was a cookout hosted for the park's lost and unfound citizens. I smiled to myself. How California. No gritty, iron-shuttered Salvation Army outposts here, no soup and Jell-O punishment for being a bum. No siree Bob. In California, the homeless are just one more variant on the Beach Boys.
I laughed out loud. I'm here, I gloated. I like my own company.
Tags:
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impossible thing,
king size bed,
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restaurant booths,
snowstorm,
vehemence,
velvet dress,
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