Unbearable Lightness

by Portia de Rossi

  Shit! I had forgotten Bean.

  I ran out the door, and down the stairs frantically hoping that I would find her where I left her thirty minutes ago in the garden on the second floor. Bean! My sweet little friend was alone and in danger of being stolen or of getting out onto the busy street and I was the idiot who left her there. God! I hated myself! As I ran down the hallway to the glass door that led to the garden I saw my little Bean. I saw a little white face with big black eyes, scared and shivering from cold and fear, squished onto the glass of the door as if trying to push through it to be in the safety and warmth of the hallway on the other side. I scooped her up and held her close to my chest as I slid down the hallway wall and onto the floor with relief. She was my baby and I had left her. My obsession with weight loss had made me neglectful of the things I cared about. I looked in her big, trusting eyes and stroked her silky white head and said:

  “Beany. I’m so sorry. I’ll never do that again. I love you so much.” I noticed for the first time in weeks that her eye stain had gotten really bad. There were mats in her fur.

  “Come on. Let’s go home.”

  Clutching Bean and with tears streaming down my cheeks, I was again faced with the choice of taking the stairs to my penthouse apartment or the elevator. I found myself in a small crowd of people who were waiting for the elevator, some of whom had acknowledged me by asking, “Are you okay?” I knew the elevator would be more comfortable for Bean and I really should’ve been thinking just about her. She needed to feel calm and safe, not jolted around as I ran up stairs. But it might be quicker to take the stairs and what Bean really needed was to eat and feel safely tucked away in her bed at home, and so I started the journey up the seven flights of stairs. I watched her head bob up and down with each stair and I felt so bad, but it would be over soon.

  As I reached my apartment door, left wide open, I remembered that my purchase from the Beverly Center was still in the trunk of my car. A black exercise mat lay in the trunk of my car. How typical of me to buy exercise equipment and never use it. How typically disorganized of me to forget that I bought it so I could begin my workouts with my trainer at home. She would be here first thing in the morning.

  It was clear I needed an assistant. I was overwhelmed with all the things that needed to be done. I needed an assistant to help me remember Bean, that she needed to be groomed, walked, and taken downstairs so she wouldn’t go to the bathroom on my rug. I needed an assistant to go to the convenience store and to remind me of my workouts. But mainly I needed an assistant to go to the Beverly Center so that this would never happen again.

  21

  THE NOISE of the escalators as they took people to the gym was a strange one. It was dull and barely there, like the hum of a refrigerator. It was a backdrop to the screaming of the coffee grinder coming from within Buzz Coffee and the music that would blurt out of the Virgin Megastore as its glass doors spat out another customer or sucked one in. But the escalators were beckoning me, politely but relentlessly inviting me to the gym as I sat and waited to interview an assistant. Now that my body was thinner, I wondered if I wouldn’t mind the other women in the gym seeing it. Maybe I could ignore their critical looks long enough to work at defining my muscles now that they’re not buried underneath layers of fat? As I waited for her to arrive, I watched the escalators go up and down regardless of whether there are people on them or not. They took people to the gym and then they took nobody to the gym. The movie theater was on the second floor also, and I was trying to spot the people who were going to the midday movie, wondering whether the blackness of the theater would fill the void or exasperate it. I would never see a movie on a Tuesday afternoon. Everyone knows workdays are for working.

  By the time Carolyn arrived I had come up with a few immediate reasons for needing her, although sitting motionless and watching people go to the gym had made me quietly anxious. I had begun to move my legs up and down to get rid of some of that anxiety, but I found that most of it was thrust at Carolyn, as I began telling her what I needed even before she had time to settle into one of the uncomfortable iron chairs that circled the bolted-down outdoor table. She responded immediately by whipping out her notebook and pen and seemingly matched my anxiety by writing hurriedly and responding to every grocery list item with “What else?” I’m not sure we really made eye contact until the frenzied listing and recording of the to dos was over.

  “I need for you to go to a Ralphs to get the yogurt because only Ralphs carries the brand that I eat.” “What else?” “I need you to take Bean to the groomer’s.” “What else?” “I need you to schedule Pilates.” “What else?” “I need you to oversee the renovation of my apartment.” “What else?” “I need you to go hiking with me because I hate being alone.” “What else?”

  I’m gay and I need you to be okay with that. What else? I need you to make me okay with that. What else? I need you to keep all my secrets and not tell anyone that I’m a phony.

  “That all?”

  She signed a confidentiality agreement drafted by my business manager, who knew of no real reason why I should need one, and became my assistant.

  “I like to work out. Do you?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  When Carolyn and I finally sat back and breathed each other in, we were already committed. I noticed a few striking things about her. Carolyn was colorless. She had depth to her hair because it wasn’t white, yet it had no color. She had a pale, colorless face. She had thin, bony hands that were also colorless except for a thin blue vein that meandered its way from the end of her wrist across the back of her hand to the start of her little finger. Her bony hands matched her thin, bony frame. Among all the round people on the escalators and at Buzz Coffee, Carolyn struck me as straight. I wasn’t envious of Carolyn’s weight, but instead appreciated it. I appreciated that someone other than me cared about weight loss, and as I instinctively knew that weight loss wasn’t a new thing to her, I appreciated that she cared about weight-loss maintenance. And so from that moment on, Carolyn and I would be united in our goal to maintain. With her help, I would maintain my hair color, my nail length, my dog’s whiteness, and my car’s cleanliness. I would maintain my clothes and my friendships by politely remembering to send apology notes to Kali or Erik explaining how my work schedule conflicted with their dinner parties. And because Carolyn would bring me food and schedule my workouts with my trainers, I would easily maintain my weight.

  I returned home after my meeting with Carolyn and was immediately struck by the cold that had crept into my apartment through a crack in the window. I usually left the window slightly open because I liked the idea of fresh air. Actually, it was more than just the air I was wanting. It was the sounds of traffic on Sunset Boulevard, the noise of the industrial air conditioner on top of the Sunset 5. I could sit in my dining room to face another meal alone and yet feel connected to the world around me. I could imagine the actresses rushing to auditions reciting their lines as they waited for the light to turn green at the intersection of Sunset and Crescent Heights. Thinking about actresses driving around to auditions prompted me remember my favorite quote from Mae West when she was asked if she had any advice to give young actresses in Hollywood. “Take Fountain,” she said exhaling the smoke from her cigarette. There was so much traffic outside my apartment on Sunset, I wished more actresses took her advice.

  I walked into the kitchen to prepare my meal. I would eat 50 calories of egg whites. I found that alternating the egg whites and the tuna for lunch helped with weight loss, as egg whites would cut my lunchtime calorie intake in half. I had been eating egg whites instead of tuna a lot more lately for this reason. Plus, I liked to cook. I never really enjoyed it before, but it was very satisfying preparing a meal, cooking and eating it. I felt quite obsessed with food. It was all I ever really thought about. I was worried that my passion for it would lead to my failure to abstain from overindulging, but I took comfort in the knowledge that people who love to cook are quite often obsess
ed with food. Cooking was a hobby, an artistic expression, and for me, the ultimate control of what I put in my body. I washed the small mustard plate with the black swirl pattern that I used for egg whites. I washed all the dishes before I ate from them to make sure they were clean. Occasionally the dishes felt greasy when I took them out of the dishwasher and I wanted to ensure that I wasn’t ingesting any residual grease or oil that might be on them.

  Dishes and utensils were very important. I couldn’t just eat from any dish. Each dish had meaning. Each dish helped me in my quest to achieve the perfect body. If I felt anxious about eating, my anxiety was always instantly allayed when I saw my little white bowl with the green flowers, as it had a faint hairline crack that helped me to figure out portions. I had to see the crack at the bottom of the bowl at all times, plus the crack is particularly helpful when I didn’t want foods to touch. I also ate every meal with my second favorite tool—chopsticks. Chopsticks were useful for obvious reasons. I’m not Asian, nor am I coordinated. They were unnatural and awkward for me and as a result, the food fell through the little obtuse triangles making me eat slower. If I ate slowly, I didn’t eat as much.

  I sat down at the dining table to my mustard-colored plate of egg whites. Then I got up and closed the window. The wind had kicked up making it colder, and now the sounds of Sunset Boulevard, once soothing and connecting me to the world at large, were intrusive and grating on my nerves. Horns blasting and muscle cars accelerating reminded me of all the impatience, pretension, and aggression in society that lay beneath my penthouse loft apartment. I was very safe in there with my scale and my schedule. I closed the window, but I turned the air conditioner down to sixty degrees. I hadn’t really proven my theory, but it just made sense that if you were shivering and trying to stay warm, your body was burning excess calories. It had to. As I hadn’t yet begun to eat the egg whites, it occurred to me that maybe my body was burning fat, not calories, as I probably used up the 100 calories from breakfast on my morning Pilates workout. I liked that thought. Although I didn’t have to lose more weight, I definitely had a little more fat to burn. My thighs were still big. My stomach still had about an inch of fat on it and, as it was summer during Christmas in Australia, I wanted my stomach to be flat and perfect when I went home. If it wasn’t flat, then all that effort would’ve been in vain. When I went to Australia for Christmas, I wanted my mother to see a determined girl, a girl in control of her life, and a fat stomach doesn’t exactly convey that message. A fat stomach said that no matter how hard I tried, it got the better of me. I failed. I couldn’t finish the job.

  I decided not to eat the egg whites. I didn’t need them. As they slid off the plate and into the trash, I felt a surge of adrenaline. I felt invincible, powerful. Not eating them was incredibly difficult and by not eating them I had just proven to myself that I was stronger than my basic instincts, that I could deny them. I wouldn’t give in to the desire to eat, because after all, isn’t that what fat people do? They give in to desire? They know they shouldn’t eat the brownie, but they just can’t help themselves. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was helping myself. Although I didn’t want to lose any more weight, I certainly couldn’t gain any back, especially before Christmas. I wanted to go back to Australia, the hero my mother wanted me to be. I wanted to show my mom that I’d finally conquered the demon. I’d wrestled the beast that threatened our sanity, our relationship, and our self-worth, and I conquered it. We would no longer go to a photo shoot with a sick, sinking feeling in our guts hoping that I was good enough to pass; pass as thin, pass as pretty, pass as a model, pass as a TV actress, pass as worthy of getting attention. Now when I got attention, I knew I deserved it. I’d worked very hard for it.

  The kind of attention I had been getting from the press was widespread—from high-end fashion magazines to supermarket rags. I was almost always included in big, splashy tabloid stories about “stars in their dieting hell!” Paparazzi were everywhere I went all of a sudden and I knew the only reason for that was because I was thin. They had been including me in these cover stories about thin actresses and almost every week was another story. Society is obsessed with being thin and a handful of actresses, me included, were showing them that with hard work, it was an achievable goal.

  Some of them said that I was anorexic. It wasn’t true. At 100 pounds I was way too heavy to be anorexic.

  I’d achieved 100 two days earlier. It was a crazy feeling of elation. I wanted to take pictures of my naked body to document it but decided against it just in case I hadn’t reached my lowest weight. I didn’t want to look at pictures in the future knowing that the image I saw in them wasn’t how I’d really looked. I didn’t want to have to remind myself that I was actually thinner than the picture showed.

  I wanted to document my success because I secretly knew that I couldn’t keep this up forever. I knew that one day I’d be looking at those pictures talking about my thinness in the past tense. I just knew that the fat, lazy, overeating piece of shit with her period and her sweat glands and her body odor lurked under the surface of this clean, pristine machine of a girl that I was currently.

  With the three hours between lunch and my snack of Jell-O, I had planned to check out a local ballet class in a little courtyard off Sunset. I had seen the studio the previous week when I walked into the courtyard to smoke a cigarette where the Sunset Boulevard traffic couldn’t see me. Through the window, I could see that the instructor was an old Russian man with a cane that he banged on the floor in time with the music. I could see his mouth opening wide and his neck straining as he instructed his students: fat, sloppy, middle-aged women in full makeup and tights. I could see an old woman in black on the piano belting out the music, keeping time, playing a two-handed chord to accompany a tondue and a plié. I wanted to go talk to him about joining the class. It would be a good way to exercise and socialize. But mainly I wanted to join it because it would remind me of a time when I was happy, when life was simple and uncomplicated. I could be eight years old again: a skinny, happy girl in a leotard, joking with her best friend behind the instructor’s back, our friendship pure and untarnished by sexual desire. It would remind me of a time when I was the best. And I would definitely be the best—and the thinnest.

  Look at that inch of fat.

  I changed my mind about going to the ballet school when I changed my clothes. When I was naked I could see fat on my stomach and I couldn’t imagine showing it to people through a leotard. I knew that I was thinner than the ladies in the class—I was thinner than most people—but also had imperfections, and I just didn’t want to reveal them to the other women. It was so bizarre to me to think that these women were extending their big fat legs in the air and prancing around half naked when most of them wouldn’t be caught dead in a bathing suit at their next-door neighbor’s pool. Or maybe they didn’t care. Maybe I was the only one who cared. In any case, going to ballet class would be something I could do when I no longer had to worry about feeling the fat fold over at the junction of where my hips met my thighs in an arabesque. I’d go when I knew that if hypercritical paparazzi found me in the little glass box of a studio, I would be prepared. I would know that they couldn’t get a shot of the fat that sat just above my hip bones. I’d go when I knew that the worst the press could say was that I was too thin.

  As I lunged my way across the floor to my treadmill to run down the time to my next meal, I wondered if you could really ever be thin enough to be too thin. Even if the tabloid headlines pretended to be disapproving of a girl who was supposedly “too thin,” I could always detect envy in the text—that in the tone of the article, there was always the underlying element of awe. And I knew the readers were reading it jealously, wishing that they could be just like us—determined, controlled, not needing anything or anyone to feel special or successful; we’d created our own ultimate success. We had won the battle that the whole world was fighting.

  22

  “WOULD YOU like anything to drink,
Ms. de Rossi?”

  The airline stewardess spoke softly as if to conserve energy, no doubt gearing up for the ensuing fourteen-hour flight to Melbourne. She already looked tired and we hadn’t even taken off yet. She looked old, too. And fat.

  “Water, please.” I was extremely proud of myself that I was no longer a gross, disgusting pig of a bulimic, downing Baileys Irish Cream and throwing it up in an airplane toilet. I was so glad that I wasn’t doing that.

  I waved away the mixed nuts that accompanied the water (I asked for water, and yet they assumed I meant water and nuts?), leaned back in my chair, and took out my food journal. There would be no tears on the plane today. I would return home to Melbourne in triumph. I opened the journal and wrote the date, December 19, 1999, and underneath, in big curly writing I wrote something that impressed even me—and I was the one who accomplished it.

  95

  On December 19, I hit 95 pounds. It was poetic, really, that the day I returned home was the exact day I accomplished this amazing feat. Ninety-five pounds gave me the cushion that I needed to go home for Christmas and eat and drink with my family. Ninety-five pounds would impress them. It might also slightly concern some of them, no doubt, as I had recently become aware that there are certain body parts that looked a little strange. I was okay with that, though. They needed to know that my life wasn’t a never-ending Hollywood party; that my money wasn’t just given to me, that I had to work hard for all of it. I had been worried that my friends and family might feel jealous of my success. As long as I worked really hard and made sacrifices that were obvious to other people, I wouldn’t feel guilty that I made more money than my brother or had a more exciting life than my Australian friends could ever dream of having. Mostly though, they seemed to be more interested in Hollywood at large than they were in my success. I was tired of telling stories about the celebrities I’d met. I’d started to feel like my mother had sent me out as a spy or an undercover reporter to mingle with the special people and bring back the news of what it was that made them special when all I really wanted was for her to think that I was special. Sometimes, if I found a celebrity to be abrasive or rude, she’d disagree with me, citing a tabloid story about the kind acts they did or the fact that other people seemed to like them. She’d always laugh and agree when I told her how ridiculous it was that because of a tabloid she thought she knew better than I did, but her comments came with a subliminal warning: the written word is a powerful thing. The perception of who you are is more important than who are. You are what other people think of you.