Unbearable Lightness

by Portia de Rossi

  I wore the knitted sleeves in an effort retreat from the front line, to surrender from the battle, to silently apologize to her for exploding out of the house in anger. I wanted her to feel proud of me as we shopped together, and she wouldn’t have been proud if the other grocery shoppers and shopkeepers had seen my arms. I didn’t have to hear that from her, I just knew it. She had bragged about me to everyone in the neighborhood and now I had to live up to the image of me she’d been presenting. Everyone wants to see effortless beauty, ease, and confidence. Every script I read described the female leads as “beautiful yet doesn’t know it” or “naturally thin and muscular and doesn’t have to work at it.” Effortlessness is an attractive thing. And it takes a lot of effort to achieve it. “Never let ’em see you sweat” was a principle I’d adopted, and so actual effort was yet another thing for me to hide from the people I was trying to impress. The list of unacceptable things about me that I had to cover up was getting longer. My arms had just made that list.

  When I saw my mother she was taking a jar of peanut butter off a shelf in the condiment aisle. She looked so small from where I was standing that I suddenly didn’t want her to see me. I felt like a giant. I felt like I was taller and wider than all the people in there and the grocery aisles themselves. I was a big, fat, gluttonous American in comparison to the petite Australians. The shopping carts were small. The boxes of food on the shelves looked like they belonged to a children’s tea set. The jam jars were the size of shot glasses, the “family-sized” bags of chips looked like they contained a single serving. When she saw me standing at the end of the aisle, she smiled and waved me over. She had forgotten about her worry, my reaction, her reaction, and my thinness. It’s amazing what sleeves can do.

  “Hi, Bubbles! I thought we could get some food for you. I don’t know what you like to eat now.”

  As we walked up and down the aisles, she made food suggestions like, “How about I make you a Ki Si Ming? You used to love that.” Or, “Should I get some Tim Tams? You always loved Tim Tams.” Tim Tams were the chocolate-covered cookies that she’d had to hide from me if she wanted any for the rest of the family.

  “Ma. Just let me do my own thing, okay? I eat differently now.”

  I had finally understood that I couldn’t eat normally like everyone else if I wanted to be an actress. Couldn’t she see that? Couldn’t she see that I’d finally figured out that I had to sacrifice Tim Tams and casseroles and happy family dinners so I could give her something to brag about? As a child model I learned that success and money came when I refused the casseroles and the Tim Tams, and as an adult actress, the rules were still the same. Why would she suggest I eat all the foods that would make me fat?

  I did briefly think about eating the Ki Si Ming because I loved it. But I quickly dismissed the thought. I wouldn’t deviate from my regular routine. I wouldn’t dare. If I ate the curried rice and stir-fry vegetable dish, I worried that I would gain weight. More than gaining a pound I worried that I would keep gaining pound after pound after that; that if I stopped for a moment, got off the train, maybe I couldn’t get back on. If I suspended the belief that dieting was the only way for me to be a success in all aspects of life, then in that small window of time it took to eat Ki Si Ming, my desire not to diet would overtake me again. If I ate the Ki Si Ming, I would have to start over, and I knew how much harder it was to start something than to maintain it. Maybe I just had enough willpower to start it one time and if I stopped I would become very fat? I worried that this time the bingeing to make up for all the things I denied myself would never end.

  All I ever thought about was the food that I couldn’t eat. Sometimes I even dreamt about it. Dieting is hard. That’s why everyone admires someone who is successful at it. I had thought my mother would be proud of my precision and my calculations, my self-control, but I had the sense that she thought I was out of control. As I sat down to a tablespoon of dry turkey and watched my mother and grandmother eat the dish they had always made to welcome me home, I wondered if her thoughts were correct. I wondered if I was out of control. If I couldn’t eat a scoop of stir-fry because I was terrified of getting fat, then who was in control?

  23

  What did you eat last night?

  I WOKE UP at 5:00 a.m. to a quiet, dark house and rummaged through my suitcase for my gym shorts and sneakers. It was time to go running. I wanted to get my workout out of the way so I could see Sacha and my old friend Bill and spend some time with my brother, who was coming home later that morning. I ran down the same roads as I did the day before and thought about how proud Sacha would be when she saw me. The last time we’d seen each other was in St. Barths when I was fat and struggling—at first with her rejection of my advances toward her, but my struggle with my weight closely followed. Of the two issues, my weight problem was the more painful. Her rejection of me didn’t hurt my feelings; rather, it clarified my feelings toward her. I was never in love with her. I was merely in love with the idea of being in a relationship with a woman. Over piña coladas, she’d helped me arrive at the conclusion that my future girlfriend would have to be a gay woman, not a straight one. I knew that once I had made enough money where I no longer had to worry about losing my career, I would find a girlfriend. I needed a lot of money, however, because I had an apartment to renovate. But after that, I would find someone to love.

  I ran with money in my shoe this time. I wasn’t going to be caught again. Besides, I thought it would be nice to eat breakfast at my favorite outdoor café. As well as money, I brought cigarettes so I could run and look forward to ending my workout with a cup of hot coffee and a cigarette. The workout gear I wore for the run made me invisible. It worked as a kind of disguise. No one looked at a girl running in spandex shorts and tennis shoes even if she was running up and down a busy shopping street. Unlike the day before, I could run past the bookstore and McDonald’s without turning a head. It is strange that clothes can make that much of a difference.

  I stood at the counter of the café and waited to get the attention of the owner. When he finally saw me, I didn’t know whether to acknowledge him with a warm smile that suggested we knew each other or just skip the smile and get my coffee. I decided on the latter as it’s always very embarrassing when people don’t smile back because they are too busy wondering who you are. I used to go there a lot, and although we’d never officially met, he seemed to recognize me when I was with my mother. She’s the friendly one in the family.

  “Black coffee, please.”

  “Coming right up.” He turned his back to me to pour the coffee, but when he turned around again with a big smile on his face it was clear that he had remembered me.

  “Back from America, are ya?”

  “Yep. Back home for Christmas.”

  “Geez!” He blatantly looked me up and down. “Don’t they feed ya in Hollywood?”

  I couldn’t think of a joke. I didn’t know what to say.

  “How much is that?”

  “For you, love, it’s free.”

  I thanked him and took my coffee outside. I found a spot in a cluster of iron tables and chairs separated from the parking lot by a potted boxwood hedge. A couple was sitting at the next table very close to mine, and as I took out the cigarette to light it, I wondered if I should be polite and ask for their approval or just do it and hope I could get a few drags in before they complained. Doing what I wanted without permission and then dealing with the fallout was the method I’d always used with my brother. If I wanted to wear his favorite sweater, the one that he’d never let me borrow in a million years, I’d just take it and deal with the consequences. I liked to think I had grown up a lot since then, but it occurred to me my lighting that cigarette was the same principle. As it turned out, the couple next to me didn’t mind the smoke and so I sat there, inhaling smoke and nicotine and feeling quite elated that I was home in Australia with its easygoing people and its trees and its birds with their raucous singing. I would see Sacha later in the day and .
. .

  “I thought you might like a good Aussie breakfast! Here’s some eggs, love. Put a little meat on your bones!”

  The owner of the café shoved a white porcelain plate on the metal table in front of me, interrupting my thoughts. Then he dropped a knife and fork wrapped in a napkin next to the plate. On the plate were two eggs, two big orange eyeballs of yolk staring up at me confrontationally, as if looking for a fight. I was too shocked and speechless to send them back immediately and so I was left looking at the eggs as they looked back at me, challenging me to make them disappear. I looked at the planter box filled with the boxwood hedge and wondered if eggs would somehow dissolve into the soil, or if the dirt was loose enough that I could cover up the evidence, but upon feeling the soil I found that it was too tightly packed and almost to the top of the planter. Besides, even if I could cut them up into millions of pieces, how could I get them in there without people seeing me? The café owner came back out to the patio again to deliver food to another table. He winked at me. “On the house,” he said quietly so the other customers couldn’t hear. For a brief moment I considered eating them just to save him from hurt feelings as he clearly liked his self-appointed role of a nurturing café owner who derived pleasure from seeing people enjoy his food. But that thought was ridiculous. I wasn’t going to break my diet for a man who, only moments before, I’d been scared to acknowledge with a nod for fear he wouldn’t remember me. I wasn’t going to break my diet for that guy.

  Disposing of the eggs into the planter wasn’t an option and there was no trash can on the patio, so I was left with either cutting the eggs up into tiny pieces and moving the pieces around on the plate to make it look like I’d eaten some or leaving them whole and coming up with a reason for not wanting them, other than the obvious one, which was that I didn’t order them. The longer I was confronted with this unsolicited situation, his so-called generosity, the angrier I became. It was quite disrespectful of him, actually, to feed me like this, as if I were a child. I was an adult capable of making my own decisions about what went into my body. I decided that I wasn’t even going to attempt to please him. I was going to leave the eggs exactly as they were delivered to me. Now he could deal with not knowing what to do with the two monstrous, confrontational eyelike yolks. My only dilemma was how to appear normal, and as normal people are greedy and love receiving free things, how would I spin this? Who wouldn’t want free food? Who wouldn’t want free deliciously fresh eggs with their coffee? I found the perfect answer to this riddle just as he came out to check on me.

  “Thank you so much for the eggs, but I’m vegan. I don’t eat any animal products.”

  “Vegan.” He said the word like he was hearing it for the first time, repeating it as if to get it right. He shook his head. “God, you Hollywood people are a bunch of weirdos.”

  I laughed at what I assumed was a joke and got up from the table to end this awkward interaction where I was force-fed and called a skinny weirdo. All I had wanted was to sit peacefully and bask in the joy of being home and instead I was ambushed by this Australian weirdo who thought he knew better than I did about what I needed. I jogged home and arrived just as a cab delivered my brother from the airport to the house where we had spent our teenage years ignoring each other.

  “Hey!” I hugged my brother as he was collecting his luggage. “God, you stink.”

  “So do you.”

  No I don’t. I don’t stink anymore. I don’t get my period. My hair hardly ever gets greasy and I don’t sweat, either.

  He looked me up and down. “You look awful, Porshe.”

  “Yeah, well, so do you.”

  “I’m not joking. You look like a skeleton.”

  Usually any comment about my thinness made me happy, but being called a skeleton hurt my feelings. My brother and I were always so jokingly sarcastic with each other, sometimes we took it too far. Usually I would’ve told him that he was being rude, but I didn’t want to bring attention to it. I needed to make the conversation casual so that he would let it go. I had to appease everyone lately.

  “It’s just ’cause I’m in my running clothes.”

  “You’ve been running already? It’s so early. Why don’t you take a break from it? I think you’re thin enough, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  It was strange that all of a sudden it seemed like I had to lie constantly just to be left alone.

  “I know I’m too thin. I’m gaining weight. And I wouldn’t have gone running if I weren’t this jet-lagged. I was going crazy lying there—although your bed is really comfortable.”

  “What?”

  “First come, first served, Brother.”

  I walked into the house through the back door and found my mother in the kitchen.

  “Good morning, Bubbles. Do you want some breakfast?”

  Jesus.

  “No. That man at the café we go to all the time gave me eggs this morning.”

  That wasn’t a lie.

  “Michael’s here.”

  My mother ran to the kitchen door and hugged him.

  “Mike’s home! Look, Gran,” she yelled, “it’s Mike!”

  “Hi, Ma.”

  As I slipped through the kitchen and down the hall I heard him say, “Hey, you didn’t give her my room, did you?”

  My brother’s arrival diverted mom’s attention away from my breakfast, thank God, and I escaped into my bedroom where I had lived my teenage years listening to records loudly and smoking cigarettes, believing that neither noise nor smoke could penetrate my bedroom door. It continued to act as a magic shield from the demands of my family, for when I emerged from my room, dressed in long sleeves and a full, long skirt, breakfast was over and I was greeted with easy smiles. No one seemed to care if I was running or eating. I was wearing a lot of makeup, too, and I think that helped.

  “Porshe, you wanna go shopping?”

  “Seriously?” I said incredulously. “Again?”

  My brother had an enviable ability to dismiss any thoughts of Christmas gifts for the family until Christmas Eve, and I was always dragged along to help shop for them. Strangely enough, though, he never needed my help. He had an uncanny knack for finding the perfect thing, the most thoughtful gift at the last possible second. I loathed him for it and admired him for it. Most times, I secretly enjoyed the ritual, too, because it ended with a trip to our favorite pub. The ritual had a rhythm to it: I had to start out with being pissed off and pretend to have my own plans. He’d beg me to help him although he didn’t need it, and I’d grudgingly agree, telling him he owed me a beer. Then it’d end with him asking me to wrap the gifts, which really did piss me off. That was the way it always went. But to my surprise, today I actually was agitated. I was anxiously wondering how and when I was going to eat. I had been waiting for the moment my mother left the house to weigh and eat my turkey, as I wanted to avoid any possible comments that weighing out a portion of turkey might elicit. Then, after that, I thought I could cook and eat egg whites before going to the Hyatt hotel. I had decided to book the presidential suite of the Hyatt and spend Christmas Eve there with my brother to decorate the Christmas tree and to ready the room for our family Christmas dinner the following day. Getting the hotel suite was a gift that I was giving my family, since cooking Christmas dinner in the small kitchen of my mother’s house always seemed to be challenging. But leaving my mother’s house for the hotel earlier than I’d planned was worrying. Traveling and dieting was hard enough, but without access to my mother’s kitchen all day, I began to fret, wondering when I would next eat.

  “Why can’t you get your shit together like everyone else? I have plans, too, you know. I wanted to see Sacha today.”

  “I’m not going to carry a whole bunch of crap from LA in a suitcase. Come on, it’ll take an hour.”

  “No it won’t.” I grabbed my bag, got in the car, and shrugged off my irritation enough to continue the banter. “You owe me a beer.” It sounded fun to say it, but I had no intention of
holding him to it. I would never drink my entire day’s calories in a beer, even if it is Victoria Bitter.

  “Hey, what do you think of this?”

  Michael was standing in front of a full-length mirror in Myer, Melbourne’s largest department store, wearing a purse.

  “Who for?” I barely even looked at it. I really didn’t care at that point. I hated shopping—especially department store shopping, and I’d been with him in that store for hours. He’d bought about ten gifts so I’d thought we were done.

  “It’s for me. I need something to carry my work stuff in.”

  That made me look. My brother, as serious as I’d ever seen him, was checking himself out in the mirror, a thin strap over his right shoulder that connected to a shiny black leather rectangular pouch that was at waist height due to the shortness of the strap. I stared at him, expressionless.

  “Guys have bags now! I saw it in In Flight magazine on the plane.” He turned to me and modeled it a little and by his swagger it was obvious that he thought he looked pretty good.

  The ground floor of this department store where we were standing sold shoes and accessories. There was a side that sold men’s accessories and a side that sold women’s. The two departments were separated with an aisle. While he was certainly standing near a couple of large satchel-type man-bags, he had picked up a bag from the wrong side of the aisle. I waited for him to realize his mistake. After staring at my expressionless face for many moments, he gestured for me to hurry up with my opinion.

  “It’s a purse.”

  A look of panic flooded his face as he spun back to face the mirror. He looked at himself and regained his composure, the purse still over his shoulder. He calmly read the tag attached to it.