Unbearable Lightness

by Portia de Rossi

  “I need to lose twenty pounds—at least! Seriously, will you tell me how you did it? Like, what do you eat? What’s, like, your average day?”

  She admired me. She really looked as though she was a little in awe. She thought I could teach her how to be disciplined, which was ridiculous. You can’t teach someone self-control any more than you can teach them common sense.

  “I’d love to, but it’s really tailor-made to what my body responds best to. I really don’t think it would work for you.”

  I wouldn’t have ever told her my secrets. This was mine. I was successful at the one thing almost everyone wants to be good at, dieting. Besides, I couldn’t tell anyone what I ate. I could just imagine her face when I told her that if she wanted to achieve this level of success then she’d have to eat two-thirds of an oatmeal sachet for breakfast, tuna with butter spray for lunch, a spoonful of ground turkey with butter spray for dinner, and for a treat, Jell-O mixed with butter spray.

  “Okay then, Skinny Minnie. Fine. You’re done losing weight now though, right? ’Cause you look perfect—but any more and you’ll be too thin.”

  “Yep. Hard part’s over. It’s all about maintaining it now.”

  I wasn’t done losing weight. Although I thought I looked good, I knew I could look even better. When I turned sideways to a mirror, I could see that the front of my thighs were shaped like a banana from my knee to my hips. At 105 pounds, my goal weight, they would look straight. I still had six more pounds to go.

  “Gotta go to work. They need me on set. See you tomorrow.” I left the wardrobe rooms feeling elated. I didn’t even need to smoke a cigarette. As I walked to the set, I felt calm and in control.

  “Morning, Portia.” Peter greeted me as I walked into the unisex bathroom set where my one half-page scene would take place. I didn’t have any dialogue. I seemed to be used less and less, which was annoying because I’d never looked more camera-ready. I’d never looked more like an actress should look.

  “Hi. Good morning. How’s it going here?”

  “You know. Same old stuff. I’m in court again this episode.” He rolled his eyes. He was always in court.

  “Better you than me.” I said it, but I didn’t mean it. I was extremely jealous that David Kelley gave Peter his clever cross-examinations, his brilliant closing arguments. I thought that I had proven my chops as an attorney the previous season, and yet I was relegated to the odd scene in the background of the law office. I had even lost my status as the sexy, untouchable love interest that had me revealing myself in my underwear. It seemed ironic that since I had spent hours a day sculpting my body, preparing myself for scenes that I used to be unprepared for, I no longer had the scenes.

  Although I was acting in the scene with him, it felt like I was watching Peter perform, just as the crew was watching him perform. He walked into the unisex bathroom, saw me in the character of Nelle, yelped, and walked back out. In every take he was hilarious. I did nothing. I just had to stand still and in a very specific spot so the mirrors in the unisex set didn’t reflect my face into the lens. I was told that if the camera saw me, I would ruin the joke.

  After I finished my one scene that morning, I met my brother for lunch at Koo Koo Roo. I usually ate lunch alone, preferring to eat my canned tuna and butter spray in the privacy of my dressing room. I had made a makeshift kitchen in the shower of my bathroom where I stocked spices and bottles of Bragg Liquid Aminos, canned tuna, and Jell-O. I also kept all the tools I needed—a can opener, chopsticks, and bowls. One bowl, however, I had to take back and forth with me because I used it to help me measure portions. It was a cheap Chinese-looking footed bowl with fake pottery wheel rings on the inside, and the first ring served as a marker to show me how much tuna I should eat. If for some reason, when I was mixing my portion of tuna with the seasoning and butter spray it went over the first ring, I tended to throw it away and start over. Usually, if it went over the first ring when I was mixing it meant I was too anxious to eat and I was hurrying out of sheer greed. As I ate approximately a third of a can of tuna per meal, there were three chances to get it right.

  I didn’t like to eat out or with other people, but I hadn’t seen my brother in a while and so I made an exception. He had been asking me to celebrate with him for some time as he had quit working for the biomedical product company and started his own helicopter company, Los Angeles Helicopters. I chose the venue. Koo Koo Roo was the only restaurant I would go to, as they seemed to use very little oil or fat. When I walked in, my brother was already sitting down, a plate full of food in front of him.

  “Sorry, Sissy.” He gestured to his food. “I have a meeting at two o’clock.” He reached into my bag where he knew he’d find a silky white head to pet. “Hi, Beany.” He whispered his hello to my dog who illegally went everywhere with me in that bag.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “Clearly Mr. Bigshot Pilot is too important to wait for his sister.”

  My brother is a pilot and I am an actress, I thought. Two kids from Australia and here we are in LA, both living our dreams.

  “I’ll go order.”

  I was secretly very relieved that he had gotten his lunch before me. Ordering the four-ounce turkey dinner at Koo Koo Roo in Manhattan Beach could be tricky. Only the one in Hancock Park near my old apartment weighed my turkey under the four-ounce portion because they knew I liked it that way. At other locations, like this one, the people behind the counters argued that I would have to pay the same price for the full four ounces so I might as well have the full four ounces. It was a tiring argument for me and a confusing one for them as they thought I was presenting them with some kind of riddle. I liked the restaurant chain, but because the one closest to my home was difficult for me to frequent, I tended to eat there less. I couldn’t go to the Koo Koo Roo on Santa Monica near my home because it was in the middle of boys’ town, the gay part of town, and I was terrified that if I were seen there, people would know I was gay. Although sometimes I thought that was ridiculous, mostly I thought staying away was the right thing to do. After all, everyone in there was gay, so why wouldn’t I also be gay? Would I be the only heterosexual in the whole place looking for turkey? Would the customers look at me with surprise and concern, having had a rare sighting of a heterosexual who has clearly lost her way, and offer to give me directions to get back to the straight side of town? Or would they quietly snigger and congratulate themselves for having a finely tuned gaydar, for knowing that I was gay all along, as they stood in line to place their orders?

  I sat down with my plate of turkey—all four ounces of it despite asking for three—and immediately began feeding Bean from the plate. She loved turkey and she helped keep my portions down. She loved Koo Koo Roo as much as I did. I was so busy feeding Bean, it wasn’t until my brother spoke that I realized that he had been watching me in silence for quite some time.

  “You gonna eat any of that yourself?” I looked up at my brother and was surprised to see that he looked almost angry. His arms were folded tightly across his chest. His lips looked thinner than usual and his eyes seemed shallow, like he’d put an invisible shield behind them that blocked out the kindness in his soul that he’d shown me only moments before.

  “You’re giving your lunch to your dog, Porshe.” Now my brother sounded angry. He never called me anything but Sissy unless he was pissed.

  “Chill out, would ya? What’s wrong with you?” Now I was getting pissed. “I don’t eat all four ounces of it because it has too many calories, okay?”

  “And how many calories do you eat?”

  “Fourteen hundred a day, like everyone else.” I hated lying. I found myself doing so much of it lately. I couldn’t tell anyone the truth anymore.

  “Bullshit. You can’t be eating that much. You look really thin.”

  It was all I could do not to smile. What with Vera calling me Skinny Minnie and now this, I had had a really great day.

  “That’s not a compliment, idiot.”

&nbs
p; Damn. I must have smirked.

  “I know.” I knew he didn’t mean it as a compliment because of the tone of his voice, but how could anyone ever take “you look really thin” as anything but a compliment?

  “Okay—I’ll gain a little weight. Jesus.” When attacked, defend by lying. “It’s not deliberate. I’ve just been working too hard lately.” I was watching him become more relieved, but there was obviously something more that he needed to hear.

  “I know I’m too skinny.”

  That did it. He looked happier, his lips fuller, his eyes not so cold. His arms fell to his side.

  “Don’t you have a meeting?” I asked him.

  He nodded.

  “Okay then. Bugger off.” I kissed his cheek and smiled.

  He reached into my bag to pet Bean. He started to leave but then turned back toward me.

  “Just because you work with someone who’s skinny, doesn’t mean you have to be skinny, too.”

  19

  I SAT ON Suzanne’s couch. Seeing Suzanne had become a pretty exciting ritual for me as I got to show her how well this little student was doing with her homework. I had certainly lost weight on her program, even though I had to lie about how many calories I was eating. I never went back to 1,400 calories a day because I didn’t need to. After Ann’s visit, I actually never went back to 1,000. There was no point in increasing my daily calorie intake when 600 to 700 was working so well for me. My weight loss had slowed down slightly since going under 110 pounds, and that was even more reason to stick with the lower calorie consumption.

  “How many calories are you eating, Portia?”

  “Fourteen hundred.” I answered her with a slightly incredulous tone in my voice, hoping that the tone would convince her that I was telling the truth.

  “Can I see your diary?”

  I reached into my bag for the journal, careful to pull out the right one. There were two journals in my bag at all times, the real one and the one for Suzanne. Not only did the real one show my actual calorie consumption, it had notes and messages in it as incentive for me to stay on track. I used the same motivating techniques in my diary as I did when I was a kid striving for high honors in my ballet exams, but whereas I wrote, “You will not get honors” on a sheet of paper for the ballet exams, now I wrote “You are nothing,” on every page of my diary. I don’t know why, but that statement filled me with fear and then the desire to be “something.” I always used the thoughts of being nothing and going nowhere to help me achieve goals. When I was a teenager studying to get into law school, I would repeatedly listen to a Sonic Youth song called “Song for Karen” about Karen Carpenter, who died from anorexia. In the song, the phrase that Kim Gordon repeats, “You aren’t never going anywhere. I ain’t never going anywhere” was like a mantra for me and pushed me to study longer, to try harder.

  But I knew my motivating techniques weren’t conventional and I couldn’t share them with Suzanne. Especially because in my diary I referred to my homosexuality, which was something she didn’t know about. I could imagine how horrified Suzanne would be if by accident I pulled out the real diary and she saw YOU ARE A FAT UGLY DYKE written all over it. She probably thought she’d never even met a lesbian. It made me smile just thinking about the expression on her face if she’d known there was one in her living room.

  I handed her the fake journal. It was very time-consuming having to make up the “proper” amount of food with its weight and calories. Thank God for the calorie counter. But the most annoying thing was putting variation in my pretend diet. I had to pretend to be interested in a wide variety of foods, which I wasn’t. Most people aren’t. My mother ate practically the same thing every day. In fact, I only ate seven things: turkey, lettuce, tuna, oatmeal, blueberries, egg whites, and yogurt; eight if you included Jell-O. She looked over it as I sat opposite her feeling like a schoolkid who cheated on a test. Only when she handed it back to me was I aware that I had been holding my breath.

  “What does your exercise program look like, Portia?”

  “You didn’t tell me to write it down.” Even though I had wanted to brag to her about the amount of exercise I did, I didn’t write it down. At least not in the fake diary I made especially for her.

  “No. I’m just curious. What kind of exercise do you do?”

  “I run, mainly. Pilates, sometimes. But running, I guess.” I told her about the amount of time I spent on the treadmill and that I’d found a way to run on it for my entire lunch break at work without ruining my makeup. I told her about my long drive to work and how I liked to break it up with a run. I knew she’d be proud of me. It must be heartbreaking for a nutritionist if her clients are too lazy to increase their exercise to help her do her job. I bet they’d blame her, too, if they didn’t lose weight.

  “I found this nice, tree-lined block just south of Wilshire where I can run because sitting for too long kills me.”

  “What do you think will happen if you sit for too long?”

  “I’ll get fat, Suzanne! Diet is only half of it, you know.”

  She looked concerned. The look didn’t surprise me because she always looked concerned when I spoke. I had decided that that was just how she looked all the time. I learned to ignore it.

  “Portia, can I ask, do you get your period regularly?” She looked slightly embarrassed at having to ask the question.

  “Sure, I guess.” I’d never really thought about it. Because I wasn’t scared of getting pregnant, I didn’t really pay attention to it. I thought back over the last couple of months and realized that I couldn’t remember having it.

  “No, actually. Now I think about it, I can’t remember the last time I had it.”

  She nodded her head repeatedly, but the movement was so small it was almost imperceptible. If I hadn’t have been looking directly at her, I wouldn’t have seen it. But her silence commanded my attention. I found myself breathlessly waiting for her next word, yet I didn’t know why.

  “Portia, have you ever seen anyone . . . like . . . a counselor . . . who could help you deal with your weight issues?”

  I was confused. Wasn’t she helping me deal with my weight issues?

  “You mean, in the past?”

  “Yes. Did your mother have you see anyone when you were a teenager?”

  I went to Jenny Craig and Gloria Marshall. I guessed I could tell her about that.

  “When I was fifteen—the year off school to model—I went to a couple of weight-loss centers.”

  I told her that after the Fen-phen-type drug didn’t work, my mother and I decided to consult the dieting professionals. Jenny Craig was first, with its eating plan and meals in cans purchasable at the counter after each group session with fat women in chairs sitting in a circle. I didn’t lose weight. I gained it. I stopped eating the canned food and became too busy with homework to attend the scheduled meetings. But my mother and I discovered Gloria Marshall, with its flexible schedule and gymlike atmosphere and so I joined that as well.

  The Gloria Marshall center closest to my house was two train stops and a short walk away and I could go there any time I liked. I would pack loose-fitting clothing into my bag and stop by on my way home from a modeling go-see. I would change, weigh in, and get to work, kneeling on one knee while placing the length of my thigh on a wooden trundle machine that looked more like a wheel used for spinning wool than workout equipment. While my thigh was being pummeled by the wooden spinning wheel, the radio would play “A Horse with No Name.” Always. There was no exception. The song made me very depressed that the man was a nomad with no attachment, no home. I didn’t think he was free and had chosen to forgo all the other ways humans make themselves feel falsely purposeful and safe. I thought he was lost. And that his survival depended on the horse and that he could care for the horse but not have attachment to it scared me and made me feel empty. But I’ve always read too much into songs. When I was eight years old, the song that would play to call us in from the playground at the end of afternoon rece
ss was, “Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end,” and every day I became instantly nostalgic for the moment that had just ended, knowing that I’d never be eight again, that I’d soon be burdened with knowing more than I did at that moment when I had two loving parents and no responsibility.

  I was received by the patrons of Gloria Marshall in a similar way to those at Jenny Craig, with disdain, only the Gloria Marshall counselor used me as an example of how effective their program was so the ladies regarded me with hope and a little awe. They didn’t know that 128 pounds, the “target” weight to which most of them were aspiring, was my starting weight. When I became the model Gloria Marshall client, I hadn’t even started the program.

  It was clear by the look on Suzanne’s face that what she was hearing wasn’t normal to her. I had never before thought of myself as abnormal in my approach to food and weight. As a young teenager I was surrounded by models who would drink only watermelon juice for two days before a shoot, or eat a big dinner, do cocaine, and go wild on the dance floor of a nightclub to burn the calories from the food. But I didn’t need to be a model to surround myself with diet-obsessed unhealthy people. School was full of them. Suzanne’s shock made me think she lived in another world, an unrealistic world where teenage girls were happy with their bodies just the way God made them and nourished them with the home-cooked meals their mothers made so they could grow up to pursue a career knowing that what a girl accomplished was of far greater importance than how she looked. And maybe that world did exist, although I have never even briefly visited, much less lived in it. There was a moment in the session with Suzanne when I thought about law school, how everyone seemed to place value only on grades, not looks, and how I had carried over from high school the idea that somehow my personality would help my grades. That if I mooted with sarcasm and wit, I would win the mock trial by being the most entertaining. I also thought that hair, makeup, and wardrobe would win quite a few points. I thought that if I rolled into a lecture on Rollerblades flush from a modeling job, I could be the teacher’s pet, that I’d get more attention, more private tutoring. None of that happened for me. Instead I felt vacuous, frivolous, a dumb blonde who didn’t belong. There was nothing cute about an obnoxious girl flitting around from modeling jobs to lectures on Rollerblades. I became deeply ashamed just thinking about it.