Enter Clara—an out lesbian and passionate feminist who took an interest in me when our paths crossed at Pace. It was as though she saw me as a fragmented puzzle that needed a visionary, someone to help put together the pieces a little, or at least find the corners. And she was on to something—I did need a bit of putting together, not to mention someone as unapologetic and proud as Clara to put some things in perspective and shake things up. I found her fascinating—a five-foot-one bundle of electricity, with wisdom well beyond her nineteen years.
Clara headed up the LGBT group at school and organized a trip to see a major production of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues at Madison Square Garden. With its multiple monologues based on multiple feminine experiences—including everything from puberty to orgasm to rape to genital mutilation—the play spoke to me deeply. At one point that evening, one of the presenters addressed the audience of thousands with this simple request: “If you’ve been raped, stand up. Stand up, women. Let’s not remain silent any longer. If you’ve been raped, please stand up and be seen. Be seen!”
I thought of what rape meant. I had always assumed it meant being thrown against your will into a dark alley and attacked by a large, menacing man wearing a hood. Or something like what happened to Jodie Foster’s character in The Accused (which was based on a true story)—being gang-raped at a bar. I did not think of rape as a foolish and lost nineteen-year-old winding up, of her own volition, in the bedroom of a thirty-five-year-old homophobic man. In truth, I did not know if I had the right to stand up.
Clara knew what had happened to me. I had previously confided in her why I’d left the University of the Arts and what the subsequent months had looked like. So when we were told to “stand up,” Clara gently took and squeezed my hand. I looked at her—this brown-eyed, curly-haired petite beauty with a heart of gold—and I knew what I had to do.
The thing was, I didn’t like being seen—truly seen. I know that’s an ironic thing for an actor to say, since I craved being onstage as unrelentingly as I craved an extra-large pizza—and when I was onstage, I was most certainly at my best. I was, in fact, somewhat of a natural there—and at Pace, I was given the hefty roles to prove it (Queen Elizabeth being my favorite).
But, in life I was guarded, because to be not guarded meant to show people the egg on my face—quite literally. I had seen the unmistakable look of horror when Regan walked in the room after I’d inhaled my breakfast, and I knew that was precisely the reaction people would have to me if they knew how fiercely I needed food, how bumpy and lumpy my naked body was, and how deeply I loathed myself. I hid behind my characters and I hid behind what I ate. I basked in the safety of manifesting other people’s stories while my own personal truth lurked in the dark shadows that no one noticed.
All around me, women stood. The number of women who stood was staggering. How was it possible that this many people in one space had been the victims of sexual violence?
I thought of the night with Richard. I remembered the sound of the rain falling as I said “no,” and as he held my arms back and hovered over me. I remembered, too, Richard’s repeated proclamations that I could have been a model, that my body was beautiful and supple, that I was perfect. These two thoughts collided like thunder in my head—how could someone who purported to love my body so much violate it so completely?
My body was not his. For better or worse, it was mine, and I did not want to let him—or anyone else—take ownership of me.
Standing up that night was, in some ways, just a tiny gesture. But I had Clara’s hand in mine, and that gave me the strength I needed to take this important step in recognizing not only that I did not belong to Richard, but that I did not belong to that memory. So I stood up, with thousands of women standing up around me—with them by my side and me by theirs.
—
Since I had taken a semester off when I left the University of the Arts, I graduated a semester late, which means I graduated in December 2001, which means I was a student during the attack on September 11. My school was just a few blocks from the World Trade Center, and the view from my window at the St. George across the river was a perfect one for watching the towers fall down. I screamed as bits of debris flew over the water toward Brooklyn and sirens filled the air. I was running a few minutes late that day, so Jennifer had gone ahead without me, taking the subway five minutes to the stop downtown—and was already inside the building at Pace when the first plane hit, so very close to home. Late that night, she returned to our room with tiny shavings of glass on her face and a haunting, new vacantness in her eyes.
Timmy had slept over the night before, waking up early to take the PATH train to his job as a waiter in Jersey City. The train that Timmy took had left from the basement of the towers, a thought that paralyzed me until he finally was able to reach me on the phone—reporting that he had passed through the World Trade Center and arrived safely in New Jersey not even a half hour before the first plane had hit.
Because of its proximity, my school was turned into a triage unit, and we were allowed back into the neighborhood only if we wore masks. The whole city and the whole world seemed to shut down. I was traumatized, like all New Yorkers, and even today I cannot linger for too long on my memory of the buildings collapsing right in front of my eyes, or I touch the spot in myself where that trauma still resides, and keenly realize how painful it still is. Obviously I’m far, far from alone in that.
Chances are, you have an image in your mind’s eye right now, thinking of that day. You remember the news broadcasts, the American flags popping up in random places, the unending and heartbreaking profiles of the fallen heroes.
But what’s absolutely impossible to capture in a sound bite or a news story is the feeling of the aftermath of 9/11 in New York City. For one thing, the city smelled like death—quite literally like rotting, burned bodies—which is also impossible to convey on TV.
But what was truly remarkable were the little ways that complete strangers banded together, in sometimes silent but sometimes overt ways, in the days and weeks to follow. In and of themselves, these instances were infinitesimal—nothing extraordinary. But, the thing is, they were constant, like an ongoing ripple on a stream. New Yorkers like me clung to these moments as though our lives and our souls depended on it.
Shortly after 9/11, when politicians, celebrities, and neighbors all encouraged each other to go on as best we could with our lives, I remember clumsily taking the wrong subway to an audition and popping out on the complete other end of town, then sharing a cab with two strangers who had also wound up in the wrong place (that kind of thing never, ever happens in New York). That seems tiny—and it is—but it is also illustrative of how readily we each had each other’s backs. I remember the new slowness of the city—the way we all trudged through the train stations and the streets with a unified sadness, but stopped more readily than before to hold the door for the person behind us, offering a simple, knowing smile: We are in this together.
It seemed that as a city we were allowing ourselves to be seen. We were standing up and being counted. We were refusing to let anybody take away the heart of us. We were remembering our innate kindness and unabashedly touching others with it. We were starting the slow but necessary process of healing. We were rebuilding.
—
That unobstructed, focused kindness motivated and moved me. I would shortly graduate from Pace with my degree in theater, and I would go on to work for NiteStar—an AIDS-awareness theater company that worked with inner-city kids to educate them, with theater as the medium, about safer sex, effective communication, sexuality awareness, and combatting domestic abuse. NiteStar was the theater company I had been auditioning for right after 9/11 when I had taken the wrong train—I had gotten the part. And not only was it my first real job, but the actors and directors became my extended family. We worked together and slept together. We partied together and fought together. And at the end of the
day, we tried to change the world together.
Being seen was the name of the game—you couldn’t put yourself out there as a mentor to kids without being completely present in yourself. And so I showed up. I was thrust into a community of largely African American and Hispanic coworkers—communities that are generally much more accepting, even celebrating, of a fuller figure than I had previously experienced. The people around me could honestly not have cared less that I was larger than they were. And so, in the safety of their arms, I started my life as a grown-up, with my eyes wide open and my heart ready to begin to heal. If New York could rebuild, I most certainly could.
There was only one thing getting in my way, and it was heavy.
SEVEN
for someone her size
It wasn’t as though I hadn’t tried to lose weight before. I was a master at attempting to shed pounds. Perhaps it’s a genetic trait, because my TM—always a size four—was adept at it, too.
Some people inherit their mother’s dynamic ability to paint (I did not). Some people inherit their mother’s petite waistline (not me). Some people inherit their mother’s preoccupation with physical beauty, or her unending search for achieving the absolutely perfect body. (Ding ding!)
The ironic part is, of course, that my TM in fact had the “perfect” body. Not that she saw it that way. Standing at five foot six and with her weight always hovering at around 120 pounds, Mom was the classic definition of svelte and beautiful. As a kid, I would hobble down to the kitchen in the early mornings—my hair sloppy, my pajamas still wrinkled and creased and still clinging to my body with as much determination as the sleep in my eyes, neither of which would let go of me. And yet there was Mom—fully dressed in the season’s most fashionable garb, her face covered in perfectly applied makeup (down to the precise lip liner). Even her chunky heels or strappy espadrilles would be in place. She was a sight to behold.
And yet she never truly recognized her own loveliness. My memories of her were not that she celebrated being a woman and being beautiful, but that she used her high standards as a means to focus solely on what she deemed to be the imperfections—and to her that was pretty much everything. Her thighs were lumpy, her stomach not flat enough, her knees sagging, her butt too prominent.
Not that this kind of insecurity is by any means rare. Other than maybe a few Buddhist nuns, almost everyone can probably relate to this. It’s certainly not a secret that our culture of overabundance and overconsumption rotates around the ludicrous and self-serving notion that in order to be whole and worthy, we need to be ever more beautiful. Even people without any pounds to lose fall victim to this unattainable goal, always striving for something—eventually unsure of what it is they wanted in the first place.
Still, there are differences between the thin and beautiful (like Mom) and the rest of us. While stereotypically beautiful women may constantly and vocally battle with the last few pounds, or the tiny wrinkles around their eyes, or the one scraggly gray hair that defiantly popped through their perfect dye job, it doesn’t seem possible that they’re completely blind to the status their looks award to them. I would venture to guess that even my beauty-obsessed TM was very well aware, at least on some level, that she was always the most put together person in the room—and so her obsession was to maintain, rather than achieve, that ideal.
I wonder if women who look really good, but harp on the negative anyway, simply have a different frame of reference from the rest of us. Maybe they really do think they look bad—or maybe there’s more going on there. This isn’t to say that they’re faking it, or that focusing on the self-perceived “negative” is simply an affectation—but maybe they think that doing so reduces how threatening they may appear to the vast majority of us who are remarkably and genuinely imperfect. (It doesn’t.) And, of course, being the “most put together in the room” (or the thinnest, prettiest, smartest . . .) probably becomes wrapped up in their identity—if they don’t accomplish that, then who are they?
So, whatever the inner demons that drove her, off Mom went to Weight Watchers, making the company richer and making me crazier with frustration. I often wondered how the other women there reacted when my mother—a slender, gorgeous woman with no apparent ability to see herself—walked in the door and said, “Hi! I’m here because I want to lose some weight.”
Mom would regularly swing by the grocery store to pick up enough Weight Watchers brand microwavable meals and desserts to fill our entire enormous second freezer, which sat like a lone soldier in our messy garage. She fed those Weight Watchers meals to me, too—such as a baked potato (why not just microwave an actual potato?) with low-calorie melted cheese, or a single-serving lasagna that became rubbery and hard around the edges when it was nuked (yet always stayed somewhat frozen in the middle). We ate these meals straight from their little, white, thin cardboard packages. For dessert, I would opt for the microwavable chocolate cake—but then a half hour after dinner, I would sneak down to the “diet freezer” and grab a couple more, popping them into the microwave and hoping that Mom didn’t hear the telltale beep beep beep when it was sufficiently thawed.
Mom was always extremely busy, so even despite her preoccupation with Weight Watchers and her obsession with both of us shedding pounds, it made sense that she didn’t have time for elaborate, health-conscious meals. She worked as an elementary school art teacher and also taught in both the afterschool program and, frequently, the summer program (or a nearby day camp). These are tiring jobs that start in the very early morning hours, and my hat goes off to her and to all teachers for their fortitude. My stepfather, Wayne—also a busy, working person—was no help in the food preparation department, having no idea whatsoever how to navigate around the kitchen (except for the sink area—Mom ran a tight ship, and Wayne’s job, which he did with diligence, was the dishes).
The microwave must have seemed like a godsend when it appeared on the food preparation horizon. But, assuming there even is a way to prepare frozen food in the microwave that makes it palatable, no one in my family ever managed to master it. I was recently sharing a breakfast with my brother in Brooklyn, and he and I were reminiscing on the foods we ate growing up. “They were never properly cooked,” he recollected, specifically pointing to his memories of large bowls of reheated pasta with sauce, which inevitably wound up with that delicate balance of blackened and icy. Jeremy told me that when he first went off to college, during freshman orientation, the upperclassmen observed that the food in the cafeteria was decent, but “nothing like a home-cooked meal,” and Jeremy remembered being confused, wondering how it could possibly be worse. The food at college wound up being the best he’d ever had.
But the microwave was not the only culprit in our own personal food desert. Our kitchen counter was where Mom kept her Weight Watchers reading material and journals, in which she scribbled down what she ate and when. In our house, eating became seen as an activity for how to lose weight, not an activity for how to find nourishment or—heaven forbid!—satisfaction. I would venture to guess that, busyness aside, had Mom not been obsessed with losing weight, our meals would have been a whole lot tastier and, ironically, more nutritious. Perhaps my outlook would have been healthier, too, because living as a chubby kid in the shadow of a stunning and skinny mother who refused to realize how attractive she was is the stuff future therapy sessions are made of.
Don’t get me wrong—Mom never, ever put me down because of my looks. It was much more complicated than that. On the contrary, she always called me beautiful, and I have absolutely no doubt she thought of me that way, and continues to think it. She truly saw me through the rose-colored glasses that every mother is issued at birth, but which, from what I’ve heard, many take off along the way. She never took them off when it came to me. But given her complete preoccupation with losing weight, it was, to say the least, perplexing to me how she could truly feel I was indeed beautiful, given my size and her obsession with thinness.
> And even if Mom did, in fact, think of me as beautiful, she never hesitated to tell me how fat she thought she was, and how much weight she absolutely needed to lose. And lest you think that this was her gentle way of sending me a message, forget it. Her preoccupation with her size was real. It was all about her, not me. The hubbub was all about her self-perceived “flawed” body. Interestingly, on the flip side, when she would lose a couple of pounds (or, for that matter, a couple of ounces), she would come home from her meeting and immediately report to me her success, beaming ear to ear the whole way, as I ate a tiny Weight Watchers cake for the fourth time that day.
If I’m making it sound like it was all Weight Watchers all the time, I’m making it sound way too rigid. There were many times when she bounced over to Jenny Craig, or even to Nutrisystem, just to lose those dastardly “final” two pounds that Weight Watchers could never rid her of. Once she was, yet again, at her “goal weight,” she would hustle back to Weight Watchers for the “maintenance” plan, only to gain back the weight and start the cycle all over again. There were other deviations as well. At times she would venture into support groups for people who wanted to lose weight, and she was always quick to buy the latest weight loss shake on the market. The weight loss industry had a devotee in Mom. She was their dream consumer.
To me, weight loss was a way of life, albeit one I had not learned to negotiate. Up until I was a young teenager, I had simply observed it—I had never actively participated. But I always had the suspicion—or more accurately, the hope—that one day my turn would come. Simply by being Mom’s daughter and by residing in our yellow house on Anna Lane, this constant cycle was something I became wrapped into. How could I not?
—
It started innocently enough. “Do you want to go out for pizza with me tonight?” Mom asked, a glimmer of rebellion in her brown eyes.
Always Too Much and Never Enough Page 9