I had learned a rule for life: NO thyself.
Desire, it seemed, could be quelled by a single act of will.
Only one thing matters for the rest of your life. Does what you are about to put in your mouth contain carbohydrates?
Your mind should always be on your diet.
Tell yourself: “This is forever. I will do whatever it takes. I want to be thin more than anything, even food.”
* * *
DIAGNOSTIC PROFILE
NUTRITIONAL HISTORY
Have you ever been on a diet? You’ve got to put away once and for all the naive idea that you can diet for a while until you’ve lost the worst and then go energetically back to digging your grave with your teeth. You’re not weak-willed. You’re not a glutton. But you are sick. Very sick. Getting well must be your first concern. You can never look forward to not being on a diet.
Please list your usual methods of dieting: Whatever it takes
* * *
10
I KNOW I’m not imagining it: my belly is bloated. Where there used to be hollowness, concavity, now it curves out rudely, tight as a rubber tube. Stand tall, glance down. If you see your navel, you need tummy firming. I need tummy firming. I need to firm my will, too, so marshmallowy of late, to stop them from doing this to me—to stop me from letting them. It’s so tempting to be taken care of, to make no decisions, to be responsible for nothing. But without my will, what am I? “NO thyself” the book says; that’s all I know.
“Look at this,” I say to the nurse, pulling my gown tight across my gut. A thick pad of blubber shows clearly against the bones. Close to tears, I’m waiting for her to deny it.
But she doesn’t. “Yes, there’s been some gain, Josie. We’re very pleased. You should be pleased, too, though it’s natural you’ll experience some anxiety as your body changes.”
“But why is it all there, all in one place? I wouldn’t mind a little on my back or my calves.”
“It’ll take a few months to redistribute itself.”
“A few months? And in the meanwhile, I’m going to look like this?”
“Like what? You’re beginning to look a lot healthier: your color is much better, for one thing.”
“Fat,” I respond. “I look fat, fat, disgustingly fat”— pinching hard at a fold of belly flesh, not saying what I really think: pregnant.
There are certain things that, if you swallow them, take root inside you.
In the newspaper today: the story of a boy who fell onto a fence and was impaled on an iron spike, which went through his neck and came out through his mouth. He had to lie there for hours, emitting the silent scream of the spike, until they blowtorched him free of the fence and carried him off, spike and all, to the hospital.
I would like a spike in my mouth, filling it with cold, tasty metal, keeping everything else out with its sharp point.
From the books, I learned what to put in my mouth and what not to. I learned to substitute saccharin for sugar, skimmed milk for whole, cottage cheese for Cheddar, yogurt for cream, diet soda for regular, carrot and celery sticks for sweets, lemon juice for salad dressing, rice cakes for cookies, frozen banana for ice cream (special treat only), clear bouillon for dinner, black coffee for breakfast, shopping for lunch, exercise for tea, air and club soda (but watch that sodium!) for food of any kind.
Keep a food diary. (Dear Diary, today I had a bite of birthday cake. Please forgive me.)
Eat in only one room of the house.
Use smaller plates so your meager portion looks like more.
Use fine table linen and silver to make your half grapefruit and dry toast an occasion: pamper yourself!
Put your fork down and allow a full minute to elapse between bites.
Don’t do anything else while you eat: concentrate entirely on mastication. Few overweight people really know how to enjoy their food. Chew! Chew! Chew!
If all else fails, get dysentery, staple your stomach, wire your jaw; try a spike through the mouth.
Weigh yourself: if you don’t weigh yourself, you may not lose weight.
Two days later, after my morning shower, I unwrapped my towel (several ounces), peed (several more), unpinned my hair, aligned the red needle precisely with zero, took a deep breath, stepped up, and opened my eyes.
111 pounds.
It was working. I could do it.
My resolve redoubled itself.
But on the third day, late in the afternoon, after nothing but black coffee for breakfast and Tab for lunch, a frantic, shaky ravenousness overcame me. Almost before I knew what I was doing—part of me was trying to take advantage of this attack before the rest caught up—I found myself feeding a vending machine in the school basement and wolfing down the Mars bar that it whelped. It tasted sickening and wouldn’t fill my mouth, melting before I could sink my teeth into it. Cram as I might, it filled me only with disgust. So I immediately ate another.
Sugary bile rose in my throat, bringing tears to my eyes.
I was hopeless: I’d never have the slightest control.
There was only one thing to do: start again, tomorrow, this time forever.
Whose body was this, anyway?
In the shower, with the nurse waiting outside, I squeeze and pinch my belly in panic: this has to go. I lift my leg and shake, watching the flaccid flesh quiver on the femur. This has to go. My whole body has to become frugal again, minimal, without a hint of excess (every fat cell the visible deposit of desire).
In the body, as in art, perfection is attained not when there’s nothing left to add, but when there’s nothing left to take away.
If I had a full-length mirror, I could go through my posing routine: naked except for underpants (I won’t stare at that scar, shaven or not), I bend over to touch my toes, seeing, in profile, the scalloped vertebraic crest. Then, facing the mirror, I reach upwards to examine my arms, as streamlined and schematic as the elastic-jointed wooden figures that artists use. I can see every fiber of the small, perfectly defined deltoid, below which the upper arm reverts to bone. Traveling up and down like an elevator on its cable is the mobile, compact biceps—a muscle I’m proud of, responsive, nervous, ready to flinch like a small mouse, its namesake.
The parts I like best are the shoulders, sharp as wings, and the collarbone, which I can wrap my hand around. Their names, scapula, clavicles, are poetry to me. Across my chest, the body’s infrastructure is most obvious, and I even like the ugly violet maze of veins which traverses it: like the Visible Woman (that lurid kit I couldn’t bear to look at in the toy store), I’m approaching transparency.
But today, if I continued my routine (inhaling, counting the ribs, clasping my hands around my waist until the fingertips touched), all I would feel would be thick, rubbery fat. No wonder they won’t give me a mirror: I’d kill myself.
As the diet book says: Death means the body no longer has the energy to deal with its situation.
Starvation is fulfilling—at first, anyway. That is why, I suppose, mystics go in for it. Colors become clearer, sounds sharper, as if some kind of fuzz had been scraped off perception, as if more of the body were available to attend. For the first few weeks, I was in a state of sustained exhilaration: speedy, powerful, unstoppable.
The clinical term, I imagine, is manic. Mania has its uses; it gets things done.
At first, I didn’t tell anyone at school about my diet. (It wasn’t a diet, anyway, it was a life plan. What becomes really important is maintaining your state of perfection and the freedom that accompanies it.) When we’d gather at lunchtime on the landscaped lawn and open up our offerings from home—some in humble waxed paper, some in aluminum foil, and others in bright plastic containers—we’d show an open, envious interest in each other’s food. Since I’d already thrown most of mine away, I took to saying I had eaten it during the morning: “I couldn’t wait.”
After a week or so of this, my father dropped me late one morning at school (he seemed slower, more lethargic, every day), and
I hadn’t had time to void my lunch bag. So I opened it in front of everyone and headed straight for the garbage can: “I’m on a diet,” I announced, dumping everything except a container of strawberry yogurt (210 calories). This caused an immediate buzz.
“A diet?” said Carol. “Which one?”
“Well, not any one in particular—just a kind of adaptation of my own.”
“What can you eat on it?” asked Nicola Talcott, through a mouthful of cake; she was effortlessly lean and horsey, with an appetite to match. (Sometimes, out of sheer distractibility, she would forget what she was eating and leave it, picked apart, to be gathered carelessly and tossed out on the way back to class: I noted this because it was an attitude I was trying to cultivate.)
“Well, I just have black coffee for breakfast.” To me, this sounded like the height of sophistication.
“And then?”
“Maybe a yogurt or an apple for lunch, if I feel like it. And some vegetables for dinner, because my mother makes me.”
“Vegetables are fattening,” pronounced Sarah Rosen, who fitted snugly into her pleated skirt already and was really going to have to watch those hips.
“Nah,” said Carol.
“No they aren’t,” Nicola drawled, at the same time, while I listened, stricken. What if I had been mistaken, misinformed?
“They are,” Sarah insisted. “Potatoes, cauliflower, rice, squash—they’re all starchy, I read it in a magazine.”
“Rice is not a vegetable,” Nicola said.
“Of course it is,” scoffed Sarah. “If it’s not a vegetable, what is it?”
None of us could answer, so we had to cede the point.
To show that, despite the vegetable blunder, I was serious, I ate my yogurt very slowly, in half spoonfuls, licking the spoon clean after every taste. Long after the others had stuffed down their sandwiches and moved on to the next stage—pelting each other with balls of foil—I was still working on my yogurt. Finally, someone noticed.
“Is that really all you’re having?” Carol asked.
“Yes, I’m stuffed,” I said, putting down the container, which was still about a quarter full.
“Well, I don’t have the willpower,” Sarah said, sucking her ripe lower lip and looking around for something else to eat.
I did, it seemed. It became my claim to fame.
“I won’t,” I say.
The “art therapist” is back, with her ball of clay. How much longer do I have to put up with this? She has the yellowish brown eyes and hangdog smile of the family pet; like that dim creature, always bounding hopefully back with the stick, she refuses to take offense at anything I say.
I say: “Take that crap away.”
I say: “I’m too old to make mud pies.”
I say: “For Christ’s sake, leave me in peace. If you’re so keen on playing with dirt, go play with it yourself. Go play with yourself, for all I care.”
None of this seems to work. She just sits across from me on the bed, with the tray full of variously sized clay lumps, fingering them suggestively. I close my eyes and throw my arm petulantly over my face, but when, bored, I open them again, she’s still there. Is this what they teach them in art therapy school?
I sit up against the pillows and look around for something to read, so I can block her out, but they’ve taken away all my books this week, as “punishment”: turns out rereading Pritikin is a sign of “backsliding.” (“But it’s not a diet book,” I explained to the nurse. “It’s about nutrition.” “Nutrition, my foot,” she said to me. What’s that supposed to mean?)
For want of anything better to do, I pick up one of the clay lumps—clammy, resilient—from the tray. A powerful urge to cram the whole thing into my mouth seizes me: what it most reminds me of is cookie dough. (And suddenly, a scent of long-ago afternoons: wan winter light outside, fragrant and warm within, the kitchen windows beginning to fog.)
Cookies, cake, chocolate, and other sweets—avoid them like Satan!
Using the edge of my hand like a rolling pin, I flatten out the dough on the tray and then mark out four small circles with my forefinger. She’s watching me proudly now: what a good girl. With my fingernail, I pare each clay disc loose and line them all up, painstakingly indenting their surfaces until they’re rough and irregular.
“What are those?” she asks me.
“Can’t you see?” I respond. “You’re supposed to be the artiste.”
“Buttons?”
“Buttons? Are you out of your mind? These are cookies.”
“But why so tiny?”
Why do you think?
I’d forgotten that we ever baked cookies together. (Or maybe we didn’t and I’m just making it up, to create a plausible past for myself: the present is such a high, lonely place to be beached, with such thin air.) Other girls, I’ve noticed, do things with their mothers. Maybe I did, too.
All I really remember is going shopping. Shopping was my mother’s main pastime, an end in itself, something she did to kill a morning or afternoon—as if the time wouldn’t be killed, wouldn’t kill her, soon enough. Often she took me along, in a prim frock and shiny shoes: she believed that you had to dress up for the salesladies (thin, frighteningly made-up middle-aged women in navy blue), otherwise they would treat you with contempt. They did anyway. That was part of the thrill of shopping, to feel you were unworthy of the merchandise.
We’d meet Miriam for coffee in a department store’s pink and beige lounge, as padded and pouffy as the inside of a chocolate box, a place for ladies to indulge in genteel gluttony. While Mother and Miriam dithered coyly over the pastry cart, I ordered a Coke and toasted cheese sandwich because I liked the way it was served: a quartet of crisp triangles, ranked upright on shredded lettuce. After a cream puff or two, Mother and Miriam—in concert—would dab their lips, take out their compacts, frown into them, crayon their mouths back on, snap their purses shut, and rise, stuffed and wanting.
The department store was a magical space, a perfumed maze with no EXIT signs, through which shoppers swam hypnotized in the aquarium light. Time was suspended there, and an overwhelming appetite possessed you: not to buy but to become, to become as perfect, as immaculate, as the objects displayed jewel-like in their glass cases.
We could spend the entire day shopping, coming home befuddled with little bags: a new lipstick, a pair of earrings, pantyhose in whatever the saleslady assured Mother was the season’s latest color (mulberry, almond, peach). Often she folded them away and never took them out again. “They looked different in the store,” she’d explain.
For me, there’d be a new hair ribbon or an outfit for Barbie, a pair of socks or a pen that wrote in five different colors. There’d be gingerbread men from the bakery for tea.
It was so easy to buy things then. So easy to believe you were entitled to anything you wanted.
“This is getting ridiculous,” she exploded, gesturing toward my dinner plate: a tablespoon of rice, twenty peas, and a large pile of diced carrots that I was trying, without success, to dice smaller.
“What is?” I asked, primly.
“This . . . this stupid diet you’re on.”
“It’s not a diet” (my habitual response). “And anyway,” I added self-righteously, “I’m just eating the way most people on this planet do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, miss?”
“It means that I’m just eating the way most people on this planet do. It’s not my fault if everyone around here is always stuffing themselves.” This always made her angry, which is why I said it. But it was clear to me that she—occupying so much space already, gobbling up so much more than her share, so crassly exceeding bounds—did not have the right to eat; nor did I, as long as a single fat cell remained.
The waistband on my school uniform skirt had definitely become looser: if I sucked in my stomach, I could slide my hand, flat-palmed, beneath it. On the outside of my wrists, a small bump began to emerge. Gradually, too, a faint bony hollow appear
ed at the base of my throat, scaring me at first (I thought it might be a goiter). But the most gratifying change was to my face. From a formless, pudding-like mass, I thought I could see a chin, and perhaps even cheekbones, struggling to assert themselves. Buried in this blubbery disguise was my true form, the sharp but delicate articulation of a self.
I had lost three more pounds.
I was transformed.
My wrists look thick and puffy; I hardly recognize these hands as mine. When I touch them, especially where the thumb folds on, little dents remain. My feet too: “Elevate them,” says the nurse. My chin feels as if it’s developing a little pad, right under the point, though she says I’m imagining it. But I can feel it, I can even see it, so familiar from its former residence on my mother’s face. On the outside of each thigh, a pinchable piece has pushed out (bruised rotten from my pinching it, hard, all day). No amount of leg-lifting—dog-at-the-hydrant-style—seems to help, though I have flapped both limbs till they seized. What’s happening is that my true nature is re-emerging, inscribed in fat for all to see: corrupt, slothful, insatiable.
I lie on the bed and turn to the wall. I can’t deal with any of this anymore: this room, this gross body, these fat cells silently swelling, the nurse, the food, the talk, the effort to impersonate a human being. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. I curl up as tightly as I can, a loud, silent wail ricocheting inside me.
In the bad days, the out-of-control days, I knew how to induce coma: eating, cramming, stuffing, ramming it in desperately until, sickened by sweetness, bloated beyond recognition, moribund with self-loathing, I could flop onto the bed and invite extinction. But why resume consciousness at all, when inhabiting a body is such hard work?
A person who had died and been given proper mourning might then be butchered in much the same way as a pig, or else buried and left until the flesh decomposed. In either case, the corpse was ordinarily dismembered by kin, who first removed its hands and feet, then cut open the arms and legs to strip out the muscles. The torso would be opened to remove the viscera, and finally the head was cut off and the skull fractured to extract the brain. Little was wasted.
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