Unbearable Lightness

by Portia de Rossi

  “So. How was the L’Oréal shoot?”

  “Great . . . really fun, actually. I think it’ll be a pretty good commercial. I had to do that classic ‘hair shot.’ You know, where they fan out your hair? I felt pretty stupid doing that, but it should turn out okay.” I took a sip of my wine. I wanted to tell her that I fit into my clothes and that most of them were even too big, but I couldn’t. Usually, that would be the kind of thing we’d talk about, but after her rant about my being too thin, I had to keep quiet about the one thing that made me really happy. I wanted to tell her that they kept testing me by telling a PA to ask me if I wanted to eat or drink anything, like lunch or coffee, and I passed the test. I didn’t eat all day and everyone was really impressed because they kept talking about it and asking me over and over again if I wanted food. I wanted to tell her that I got back at that bitch of a stylist for announcing to the L’Oréal executives that I was a size 8, by being too thin for her precious clothes. I wanted to describe the tailor’s facial expression when she had to rush to take in the skirts that she once said didn’t have “enough in the seam” to take out. But I couldn’t. So I told her that I had fun and everyone was really nice. It was the kind of answer I’d give in an interview.

  Just as I began to feel sorry for myself for having to lie to everyone, including my best friend, I remembered something that I thought she’d find funny.

  “Well, there was one thing that was pretty funny. At one point the makeup guy and his assistant started talking about whether I could do makeup as well as the hair products—if I had good enough facial features . . .”

  “That’s great,” she interrupted. “L’Oréal wants you to sell makeup as well?”

  “No. No. They don’t. My God, Ann—it was hilarious. They went through every part of my face—in front of me—tearing each feature apart like, ‘What about lips?’ And then the assistant would say, ‘Well, she has lovely lips, but her teeth are a little crooked and not that white.’ And then they got to my eyes. They almost agreed on mascara because I have really thick eyelashes until one of them mentioned that my eyes were too small.”

  I already knew that I had small eyes. Us Weekly told me. Thank God for that because before the article I thought my eyes were fairly normal and I treated them as such. Without their proper diagnosis, I couldn’t apply the correct antidote to disguise this flaw. It was a piece on beauty and how the reader, if she identified with a particular flaw that could be seen on a celebrity, could deemphasize the problem. I had, “small, close-together eyes.” I took their advice and have since applied dark swooping upward lines at the corners to lessen the appearance of the smallness and roundness of my close-together, beady little eyes.

  “Anyway. It was pretty funny.”

  “That doesn’t sound funny to me.”

  By the furrow in her brow, I could tell that unless I left the room I would be listening to another lecture—this time about how the L’Oréal executives aren’t the experts and how I’m perfect the way I am. I would have had to nod my head and pretend to agree with her even though we both knew that I wasn’t perfect and that L’Oréal clearly are the experts.

  “I’m so sorry, AC, but I gotta go to bed because I have to get up early. You got everything you need? You good?”

  “Yeah. I’ll go to bed in a minute. And I won’t see you before I leave, I guess, but I’m here if you want to talk. Call me anytime, okay?”

  “Okay. Good night.” I bent down and hugged her. I adored AC. She had only ever wanted the best for me. Unfortunately, she didn’t understand that what was best for me before getting the show and what was best for me now were two different things.

  I glanced at the treadmill as I passed the guest bedroom door on my way to the bathroom. Get on the treadmill. I couldn’t even imagine how many calories were in those three glasses of wine. The voice in my head told me that I was lazy, that I didn’t deserve a day off, but there was nothing I could do about it and so I brushed my teeth and slipped into bed.

  Lying in bed was always the worst time of the day. If I hadn’t done all that I could do to help myself, I imagined what the insides of my body were doing. As I lay motionless and waiting for sleep, I stared at the ceiling and imagined molecular energy like the scientific renditions I’d seen in science class as a kid, shaped like hectagons and forming blocks of fat in my body—honeycomb parasites attaching to my thighs. Or I’d see fat in a cooling frying pan and imagined the once vital liquid energy slowly coagulating into cold, white fat, coating the red walls in my body like a virus. The unused calories in my body caused me anxiety because I was just lying there, passively allowing the fat to happen, just as I had passively allowed myself to keep ballooning to 130 pounds. But did I have the energy to get out of bed and do sit-ups? The wine had made me lazy. I had the anxiety, but I was too lethargic to relieve myself of it by working out. I could’ve thrown up. But if I threw up the wine, Ann might have heard and then she’d never get off my case. If I threw up, then she’d feel validated and I’d feel stupid because that’s not what I did anymore. I was healthy now. I had the willpower not to crash diet and then binge and purge. I had solved that problem.

  I got out of bed and onto the floor to start my sit-ups. I couldn’t think that I had solved the problem of my weight fluctuating if I just lay in bed allowing the sugar in the wine to turn into fat. As I began my crunches, I heard Ann getting ready for bed. I could hear her checking her messages on her cell phone and I could vaguely make out a man’s voice on the other end. As she turned out the light and got into the bed that I’d moved against the wall to make way for the treadmill, I couldn’t help but wish I were her. I wished I were a student living in New York, dating and going to parties. I wished I could travel to another city and stay over at a friend’s house without worrying about what I was going to eat. I wished I could just eat because I was hungry. I wished my life wasn’t about how I looked especially because how I looked was my least favorite part of myself. I wished I had a life where I could meet someone I could marry.

  18

  What did you eat last night?

  I awoke to this question in a room that was still slightly unfamiliar even though I had lived in the new apartment for over a month. As I calmed myself by running through the list of foods I’d eaten the day before, I noticed a crack on the bedroom ceiling where it met the wall and was beginning to run toward the window that faced the yellow desert that was the wall of the Sunset 5. Not only was the bedroom still slightly unfamiliar to me, but the whole downstairs level also, as I only ate and slept on the first floor, spending most of my waking hours upstairs in the attic. My treadmill was upstairs in the attic and it was beckoning me as it always did after I had completed my mental calculations of calories in and out. The treadmill was really the only thing up there and was perfectly centered in the attic, between the wall of windows that showcased the industrial city that was the roof of the Sunset 5 and the east windows through which I could see all the way downtown. The wall opposite the smokestacks acted as a bulletin board where I had taped pieces of paper. Because the walls would soon be replastered and repainted, they were not precious; they had no value other than as a place to put my thoughts. Mostly the pieces of paper were exaggerated to-do lists. I say “exaggerated” because they said things that were more like goals that I wanted to achieve than things that needed to be done. The largest piece of paper with the boldest writing stated, I WILL BE 105 POUNDS BY CHRISTMAS. Another stated, I WILL STAR IN A BIG-BUDGET MOVIE NEXT SUMMER.

  Starring in a movie had only recently become important to me, as Lucy Liu had just gotten Charlie’s Angels. Suddenly being a cast member on Ally McBeal didn’t seem to be enough anymore. Everyone at work was reading movie scripts and going on auditions. I often recited my audition lines while I was on the treadmill. I recited them out loud, loudly, over the noisy whirring and the thud of my footfall as I jogged at a 5.5/1 incline. I also put a TV up there with a VCR so I could run and watch movies, which was so much better t
han sitting to watch them. I had discovered that I could do a lot on the treadmill. I could read books and scripts and knit on the treadmill.

  As I began my morning workout, I looked over at the cards on the left of the to-do list which ran down the length of the wall.

  111

  110

  109

  108

  107

  106

  105

  I was 111 pounds. Each time I lost a pound I took the card off the wall. It helped keep me focused and it helped me to remember that once I’d achieved the new lower weight and the card stating my previous weight was gone, that I could never weigh that much again; that the old weight was gone. It was no longer who I was. It was getting more difficult to lose weight as I got thinner, so I needed all the incentive and motivation I could muster. Putting my weight on the wall was a clever thing to do as it always needed to be in the forefront of my mind, otherwise I might’ve forgotten and walked on the treadmill instead of run, sat instead of paced. I once saw a loft where a famous writer lived, and all over the wall was his research for the novel he was writing. He described the book to me as his life’s work, his magnum opus. I felt like controlling my weight was my magnum opus, the most important product of my brain and was worthy of devoting a wall to its success.

  I liked doing my morning workout in the attic even though I lived next to a Crunch gym. When I first moved into the apartment I went to Crunch often, but I discovered that I didn’t like showing my body to the other patrons who were no doubt looking at me as critically as I was looking at them. I hated the thought of them recognizing me and telling their friends that Nelle Porter had a round stomach or that when I walked on the treadmill the tops of my thighs bulged out from side to side. What I hated most about going next door to Crunch was the possibility of paparazzi finding me on the way home after a workout, when I looked bloated and my sweatpants were clinging to my thighs. So instead of subjecting myself to the worry of being seen by people and cameras, I preferred to use my treadmill in the attic or to run up and down the stairs next to the elevator for exercise. Sometimes, if I felt particularly energetic, I would time myself as I ran the six flights that connected all the floors of my apartment building. I would run up and down, all the way from the penthouse to the ground floor and back. I could do this mostly unseen by the other tenants, as most of them were lazy and only ever took the elevator.

  As I ran on the treadmill in my attic, however, I occasionally felt paranoid. Although it wasn’t very likely, I sometimes felt that it was possible that a photographer was taking pictures of me from the industrial roof, that through the smoke he could get clear shots of Portia running on the treadmill in a big empty room. Or he would take video of me lunging from one side of the room to the other, as I had decided I would lunge instead of walk, since lunging would maximize the number of calories I could burn and help tone my legs at the same time. What made the possibility of paparazzi finding me in my loft even more frightening was that I wore only my underwear when I was at home because I liked to stay as cold as possible to burn calories and because, since I was always running when I was home, if I wore workout gear I’d just have more laundry to do. It terrified me to think of that tabloid picture: Portia in just her underwear, running and lunging, a wall of numbers and weight loss goals behind her.

  My paranoid thoughts were interrupted by the shrill sound of Bean’s bark. Although I would’ve loved to ignore her and finish my workout, I knew she needed to be taken out. I had only been running for forty-five minutes and I had to leave for work very soon. Reluctantly, I got off the treadmill and went back downstairs to clothe myself and collect her. Having to travel between floors in my underwear using the exterior public staircase was interesting. I had planned on renovating shortly after owning the apartment, connecting the floors and making it more my taste, but I couldn’t find the time to search for the perfect architect and designer in between working and working out. I kind of liked it separated, too. I liked that I was hard to find in this secret room that no one, not even a housekeeper, knew existed. I could hide in the attic. And while I didn’t like the beige carpet and the previous owner’s bed frame and cheap dining table on the first floor, I couldn’t be judged for my apartment’s decor since it wasn’t mine, it wasn’t my taste. It was liberating, actually, to live in a space that I owned yet it didn’t announce my personality. I could still be anything I liked. I didn’t have to live with my previous conclusions of who I was reflected all around me in furnishings and paintings, fabric and stainless steel appliances. I lived in a blank canvas, albeit an old and sullied blank canvas, upon which one day I could create a tasteful masterpiece. While I waited to create my space, however, I had barely any furniture. I had no chairs and no sofa, no coffee table. The only indication that someone lived there was my large collection of antique mannequins that were propped up around the living room. While I had always enjoyed them as an expression of the female form, the mannequins became useful as sometimes I measured them and compared my body measurements. I had just started measuring my body parts as a more accurate indication of my weight loss. Mannequins represented the ideal form. By comparing myself to the mannequins, I could take an honest look at how I measured up to that ideal. But mostly I just liked to look at their thin, hard limbs.

  As I pulled out of the parking garage of my apartment, I checked the time. It was 9:02. It took a long time to drive to work from anywhere in Los Angeles, since Manhattan Beach was far from the city. I didn’t get to finish my workout, as Bean took an inordinately long time to go to the bathroom on the lawn of the garden terrace on the second floor. While I could have left her there on her own and come back to collect her on my way down to the parking garage, I decided to wait with her, however impatiently. Although the garden was walled and looked quite safe, I couldn’t risk losing her. She was my best friend.

  I seemed to catch every traffic light on Crescent Heights Boulevard. As I sat and waited, staring at the big red light that was preventing me from moving, I began to feel lightheaded. My palms were sweaty. I was feeling nervous and anxious and yet I couldn’t attribute these feelings to being late for work—I’d given myself plenty of time for the long drive. I realized that I felt anxious solely because I wasn’t moving. When the light finally turned green, my stomach continued to feel fluttery, my palms still slipping slightly on the steering wheel, my sweaty hands unable to grip it firmly. Sitting behind the steering wheel, pinned to the seat with a tight strap, I felt as though the cabin were closing in on me; the faux-suede roof was barely tall enough for the loose knot of thick hair that was held on top of my head by a chopstick. As I turned my head to the right to check on Bean who had jumped from the passenger seat and into the back, the chopstick scraped against the window; a sound that shot through my nerves, filling my mouth with saliva that tasted like metal. I tried to shake it off. I shook my hands and pumped my arms. I made circles with the foot on my left leg. I lit a cigarette to counteract the metallic taste and to calm my nerves, but the wisps of blue smoke curling up into the windshield looked poisonous, which cigarette smoke sometimes did to me when I was in confined spaces and forced to look at what I was actually inhaling. It looked very blue trapped between steering wheel and the windshield before turning white and making its way through the front, turning clear as it reached Bean in the back. I painstakingly extinguished the cigarette, careful to be sure that it was completely out, and I wondered when I was going to use up the calories I’d eaten for breakfast as I hadn’t had time to do my full one-hour run. As I followed the last wisp of smoke from the ashtray as it meandered upward and collided with the passenger window, I saw a beautiful tree-lined street on my right named Commodore Sloat. The name struck me as being very odd as it sounded more like a street name you’d come across in London than where I was, south of Wilshire in Los Angeles. I checked the time: 9:20. It occurred to me in a flash of excitement that I had time to get out of the car and away from this anxious feeling of being trapped, s
tale, and inactive. I would take a quick run up and down that street.

  “Good morning, Portia.” Vera smiled as I walked into the fitting room. She smiled and shook her head. “Could you get any thinner? Look at you! Every time I see you, you just keep looking better and better. I hate you!” Vera laughed and wheeled in a rack of clothing. I started to undress in front of her and stood proudly in only a G-string and platform shoes. I felt liberated. I felt free because I no longer had to worry about how I looked, or whether the clothes would fit, or if I deserved to be on a hit TV show. I didn’t have to worry what people were saying about me. Anyone who looked at me could see that I was professional.

  The first suit was too big, as were the second and the third. My mind didn’t wander to a happier time and place like it usually did during a fitting. I simply couldn’t have been happier than I was in the present moment.

  “Can you get twos and fours for the Skinny Minnie from now on,” Vera called out to her assistant. “And maybe get her some shorter skirts. Let’s show off those long legs of hers.”

  Skinny Minnie. As stupid as that name was, I felt delighted that someone would attach it to me. She handed me sweaters rather than jackets because, as she explained, the jackets she pulled for me would all be too big. To my amazement and delight, everything was too big. We set a time for another fitting the following day.

  She shook her head again. “I wish I had a tenth of your discipline.”

  “Well, I had help. I have a great nutritionist.” I looked at Vera’s body. She was chubby. I’d never noticed before. “You don’t need to lose weight. You look great.”

  Conversations about weight are practically scripted. There are only a couple of things to say in response to a woman complaining about her weight, and the response I just gave Vera was probably the most popular.