Unbearable Lightness

by Portia de Rossi

  The aging stewardess came back, eyes cast downward at her notepad while surfing the tide of turbulence like a pro.

  “Can I take your lunch order?”

  Something happened to me when flying. I felt that either the calories were impossible to quantify and so that meant that the food had no energy or matter so I could eat everything, or because the calories were impossible to quantify, I could eat nothing at all. Another factor was time. If y equaled 300 calories consumed over a 24-hour period, then what was x if I left Los Angeles at 10:00 p.m. and after fourteen hours of travel I arrived in Melbourne at 6:00 a.m. two days later? How many calories and how many days should I account for? Eating nothing was really my only option.

  “I’m not eating lunch today. I had a big meal already.”

  Why I had to tell her about having a big meal I don’t know. I hate it when I do things like that.

  When the stewardess came around to deliver the meals, she asked again if I wanted anything, perhaps thinking that the smell of hot beef would send me into a frenzy of regret that it wasn’t going to be plopped down in front of me. I reassured her that no, I really didn’t want anything. I could resist dead rotting cow on a plastic plate.

  After lunch the stewardess rolled a silver tray of cookies and ice cream down the isle.

  “Dessert, sir? Would you like some dessert today, ma’am? Dessert, sir?”

  She made her way through the seated strangers up the aisle to where I was sitting. She stood in front of me with her cart full of sugar and lard and instead of simply asking me if I would like dessert, she decided to inject some personality into it.

  “I’m sure you don’t, but . . .” Her sentence trailed off. She had an apologetic look on her face like she was sorry for me that I didn’t get to partake in this joyous activity, that being an actress precluded me from all the fun that cookies and ice cream bring. Her droopy eyes seemed to say, “I’m sorry you can’t have this. Actresses don’t eat cookies.” Maybe she was sure I didn’t want a cookie just because I’d not eaten any lunch. Then again, what if I had skipped lunch just so I could eat the cookie? How could she have known what I wanted?

  By the time dinner came around, I was asleep. Actually, I pretended to be asleep. I didn’t want anyone to know that I didn’t eat anything during the fourteen-hour flight. Something like that could leak into a tabloid. And while I enjoyed the speculation that I was too thin, I didn’t want them thinking I was sick. I wanted people to admire my tenacity and self-control, not to feel sorry for me for starving myself into the shape of an actress.

  The long, sleepless night of listening to the drone of the engines was punctuated by the stewardess asking if I’d like to have anything to eat with a cute smile and a “How about now?” in half-hour intervals, which finally trickled down to a raised eyebrow and a quick glance every two or three hours. As breakfast was being served and I asked for black coffee, she could no longer contain herself. I could see that she was gearing up to say something and I thought it would be along the lines of how in her twenty-year career as a mile-high waitress, she’d never before seen a person refuse food. I had clearly made an impression on her and that was something I really didn’t want to do. I didn’t want her telling anyone that the Australian actress on Ally McBeal, the “thin one” (I could just hear it now, “No, not Calista, the other one!”) didn’t eat and is therefore sick. But to my surprise, her expression changed as she leaned in slightly to speak to me. Her face went from a tired, concerned expression to a hint of a smile. Her droopy eyes became animated.

  “You’re being so good!”

  Yes, lady. I’m always this good.

  “Oh! No. I’d love to eat, believe me, but I have this slight stomach virus and you know how awkward that could get on a plane!”

  She laughed. Why does everyone think toilets and what goes on in them are funny?

  “Well, I hope you feel better.” She refilled my coffee cup and I wondered if someone with stomach flu would drink black coffee. I wondered if I’d blown my cover. I pulled out my diary and wrote an entry. I told it that I had eaten nothing and if I weighed more than 100 pounds in Australia it was because of water retention. That’s what happens with plane travel. It was good to write it down to remind myself, and the explanation could come in handy if I found myself in a panic in my mother’s bathroom on her old pink and black scale.

  To say that I hit the ground running isn’t an overstatement. When I got off the plane, I began a slow, steady jog through the terminal. There was nothing wrong with that, I thought, as I could just as easily be running to make a connecting flight as exercising my body, limp from sitting for fourteen exercise-less hours. I ran to the airport bathroom to begin my ritual of trying to look fabulous for my mother. I always tried to make a good impression with my hair, makeup, and wardrobe for my mother, as I knew that seeing me looking great always made her happy. But this time was even more special because this time I was skinny. I had the thinnest body I’d ever had to show off to her and so I didn’t feel as though I needed the extra-special hair and makeup to counteract my ordinary, girl-next-door body. The package had to say “star” and now my body was helping me deliver that message. After I changed out of my loose clothing and into my skinny jeans and a tight tank, I headed home.

  “Mama!” I got out of the cab and ran into my mother’s arms, leaving my luggage in the trunk for the cab driver to deal with.

  “Bubbles!” My mother dubbed me that when I was a little kid. She still calls me that sometimes. I really like it.

  “Darling.” She pulled away from the hug and looked me up and down. “You’re too thin!” She blurted it out in a way that seemed uncontrolled yet premeditated, like her nervousness had built with hours of rehearsal and had culminated in an explosive delivery.

  Clearly, she had been lying in wait for me. She was ready for me, armed with evidence. A month ago, Suzanne had called her and tipped her off to my weight loss. According to my mother, Suzanne said my weight loss was extreme and that due to her lack of being qualified in the field of eating disorders, she was racked with guilt and feeling responsible that she had helped cause me to have one. I told my mother that if Suzanne admitted that she was not qualified in the field of eating disorders, how could she possibly diagnose them? It was my mother’s lack of common sense that irritated me at that moment standing before her in the driveway, because I knew that she couldn’t possibly be concerned by how I looked, only by what she’d heard. Even if I convinced her that Suzanne was wrong, then she would eat up those goddamn tabloid stories about how I was starving myself. She was just waiting for me to arrive so she could levy the insult after a cursory up-and-down glance, a feel of my back when she hugged me, a quick confirmation that the tabloid journalists had once again got it right. This was not the reaction I was hoping for. I wanted her to hug me and look me up and down and tell me that I looked great. I wanted her to tell me that it was obvious that I was working hard, that I had finally got it together after all the years of hell my weight had put the two of us through. Instead she looked horrified.

  “Miss?” The cab driver was waiting for me to collect my luggage or pay him or something.

  “Sorry. Here.” My mother put a bright yellow plastic, Australian fifty-dollar bill in his hand and waved her thank-you at him as he pulled away. She turned to face me as a tram rattled down the busy main road just past the iron gate of our driveway. Several cars sped past in both directions, and the noise and speed of the background made my mother’s stillness and silence in the foreground quite surreal. She became aware that she was looking at me strangely and for too long and so she averted her gaze; she wanted to look at me and yet she knew that she shouldn’t, as if she were passing a roadside accident. She stood there in silence looking like a little child, her arms dangling limply by her side.

  It was clear to me then that she was very worried. I was no longer irritated or angry or disappointed. I was shocked. Did I look emaciated? There had been times when I looked
in the mirror and thought I was too thin, but most times all I could see were the inches I still had to lose. If I still had fat on my thighs and hips, surely there was nothing to be concerned about. But her reaction did make me wonder because worry was something that I had rarely felt from her. While I was sure she had a lot of it while raising two kids as a single parent, she never wanted my brother and me to see it. When our dad died and left us in chaos, she rebuilt order with a stiff upper lip. She told me that I was smart and that she had nothing to worry about with me. I made sure I didn’t do anything to make her worry. When I was a teenager and all my friends were smoking pot and sneaking out of their bedroom windows to go to nightclubs, I told her that I tried pot, hated it, and in which club she could find me. I was never the kid that gave her trouble. I was the mature and independent one who aced the test and won the race. I was the entertainer, the one who made things exciting with my modeling jobs and my acting and my overseas adventures.

  Now, at twenty-five years old, I had made her worry. I took a deep breath, and my eyes welled up with tears. I hated seeing her so uncomfortable, not knowing where to look or what to say, and yet simultaneously, it felt good. I had traveled thousands of miles in search of the opposite reaction, yet I suddenly felt myself preferring the one I’d received. Her concern felt warm, comforting. It seemed as though she was afraid of losing something very precious, and that something was me. Because I’d always been so strong and independent, her concern about me prior to this moment mainly seemed to be about the things I could produce, like a modeling job or a beauty contract. I felt so happy I wondered if I had deliberately lost this much weight in search of that reaction. All of a sudden, I felt worthy of care. I was the one to worry about. Caring for a weak, sick child required a different kind of love. And in that moment in the driveway, I discovered that that was the kind of love I preferred.

  I love you too, Mom.

  I didn’t say that. I really wanted to, but it was too abstract, too heavy and emotional.

  Sometimes it’s better to keep things happy and superficial.

  She obviously thought the same thing because she straightened up and put a smile back on her face as if the incident had never happened.

  “Bubbles, you’re home!” She’d been looking forward to my return for weeks, getting her petunias in the garden ready for the holiday. Christmas was a special time for her since my brother and I moved to LA. She wanted to dismiss her worry so she could enjoy her daughter’s homecoming.

  “Let’s go inside and see Gran. She’s been looking forward to seeing you for weeks.” I walked up the back steps and into the house, putting my bags down on the checkered green linoleum floor of the kitchen. I ran over to the rocking chair in the living room to hug my Gran.

  “Now, then.” My mother glanced at me and then walked away, as if attempting to downplay the importance of whatever she was about to tell me. Not one for confrontation, she chose an upbeat, clipped voice and delivered her message in a tone that enabled me to choose whether to dismiss it or take it seriously.

  “What’s all this silly business with being skinny? Stop all this silly rot, all this carrying on and eat normally like everyone else, girl!”

  A surge of anger bitter like acid flooded my empty body.

  Silly? She calls your hard work “silly?” She doesn’t care about you. She thinks you did it for attention. You’re exhausting to her. You’re pathetic for trying to get sympathy. She’s not concerned about you, she’s sick of you.

  “I’m going for a run.”

  And with that I exploded out the door. I ran down the busy main street of Camberwell, narrowly avoiding cars as they were pulling out of their driveways. I picked up my pace and charged up the hill, past the old people’s home and the church and held my stomach tight and twisted from side to side as I ran down the hill toward the shops at Camberwell junction. If my Pilates instructor likened this movement to wringing water out of a towel, then I was wringing out all the acidic anger from my organs that became flooded with it when my mother dismissively called my hard work silly. I waited for the walk signal at the busy intersection and jogged in place to keep my muscles warm, to keep my brain from thinking I was done with my workout or done with the anger that fueled it, since I could use the anger to propel me forward. I sprinted up the busy shopping street, past people walking in and out of the bakery, past the sidewalk café, dodging dogs tied to outdoor tables. I ran past my favorite bookstore, past deathly still people who were standing and reading blurbs of books that promised to help them, entertain them, teach them who they were. It seemed that all the people shopping on that street turned to look at the fool who was sprinting in jeans and platform heels. But I didn’t let their obvious disapproval of my running slow me down. I ran fast, right by all of them. I ran until I couldn’t run anymore.

  I stopped at the train station opposite the doctor’s office where my mother used to work. I stood at the corner of Stanhope Grove and watched the trains as they exploded into the station and heaved their way back out once they’d stopped to deliver people and receive people. I watched a green tram putter up the hill. I watched teenagers walk in and out of McDonald’s. I was watching my memories. I sat down on the wooden bench next to the taxicab rank and imagined myself in a navy blue school uniform with permed hair, walking out of the train station and across the street to my mother’s work, where I would wait for her to take me home. I smiled at that thought. Why I would wait for an hour for my mother to take me home when home was only one more train stop away was something my adult brain couldn’t fathom. Maybe it was because I could use the time to sneak off to McDonald’s and eat fries and a vanilla milk shake, pretending I was waiting for someone to disguise my embarrassment of being in there alone when all the other tables were full of kids from other schools. I was a model and so I could never go to McDonald’s with my friends. I couldn’t go with anyone, not only because I thought models shouldn’t eat McDonald’s but also because I constantly complained about being overweight. I could never eat in front of anyone because it would be evidence. It would confirm suspicions that I wasn’t helping myself and was unworthy of their sympathy. Only a crazy person would console someone for being distressed about her weight and then take her out for McDonald’s fries to cheer her up.

  As I sat on the wooden bench I became aware of how much pain I was feeling. I pushed down onto the palms of my hands that had been limply resting on either side of my seated legs, elevating my seat bones away from the bench. That immediately alleviated the pain that was caused by my full weight resting on the hard wooden bench. I briefly wondered if it hurt because I was too heavy, that my seat bones couldn’t support the weight of my upper body, but quickly dismissed the thought as crazy. Fat people sit on hard things all the time. The pain of being seated and the exhaustion it took to keep me slightly off the bench made me stand. I needed to stand anyway. Standing burns more calories than sitting, and I had forgotten that rule while I had temporarily lost my mind to nostalgia. But standing there, I found myself stuck. I had run quite far and was a long way from home. If I’d had money I could have taken the train or the tram, but since I left the house without any, walking was my only option. After the long flight with no food at all, running back home was out of the question. I should never have stopped. I was not angry anymore and without any motivation I could now only walk. Losing weight really wasn’t enough motivation either. My mother’s reaction was confusing and it made me wonder whether I had taken this whole thing too far. As I started the long journey home, I wished I could just walk across the street to find my mother behind the desk in the doctor’s waiting room, waiting for me. Then she could take me home.

  By the time I arrived back at the house, I had completely forgiven Mom. I had thought about her dismissive attitude toward my weight loss and understood it from many different angles. She grew up in the Marilyn Monroe era and liked women to have curves, so she simply didn’t appreciate how I looked. She called my efforts “skinny busi
ness and rot” because she no doubt realized that she’d completely overreacted. But even if she incorrectly thought that I was emaciated and sick, I understood why she downplayed her feelings about it, because it was her worry that she was dismissing, not the supposed sickness. My mother often tried to make light of heavy things. When I was a little girl with a gash on my knee, she’d tell me it was just a scratch. If I felt too sick to go to school, she’d tell me that it was in my head, that I just needed a change of scenery. She’d tell me to go to school and if I still felt sick, I could come home. She was usually right; once I got to school I forgot about being sick. She was usually right to ignore it because ignoring it often did make it go away.

  When I returned, my gran told me that Mom had gone to the supermarket to get groceries. She yelled this information out to me as she was quite deaf and since she had to yell to hear herself, she assumed she needed to yell to be heard.

  “Marg said you could meet her there if you wanted anything!”

  “Thanks, Gran!” I yelled back at her.

  I grabbed a knitted shrug and headed out to the supermarket to find my mother. The sleeves covered up my skinny arms, and with them the evidence that achieving a nice all-over body was an effort. My arms were the only giveaway that my weight should have been something other than it was. If you just saw my waist and my legs, you’d have thought I was in terrific shape. You’d have thought that I was just naturally thin. Besides, my legs weren’t even skinny. They were very average in size. I had to be extreme just to achieve average-size thighs.