Unbearable Lightness

by Portia de Rossi

  Although there were several more days before I had to return to LA, it felt like the holiday was over. The excitement of seeing my family after many months and the thrill of showing off my new body was over. My cousins, my uncles, and my aunts all saw my body. They were all seemingly unimpressed. No one mentioned that I had lost weight or that I looked good or that I was thin. It was baffling to me that they didn’t say anything. I didn’t even try to hide my arms anymore. I took my sleeves off, put my gym clothes on, and called Sacha. She would be impressed. She would understand the work it had taken to achieve this body. I called her and convinced her to take me to her gym. I told her that she and I were going to work off our indulgences over the holidays. I couldn’t wait to see her, to make sure I still had my best friend after what I’d put her through in St. Barths.

  I walked past my brother in my gym clothes, my bag slung over my shoulder.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m meeting Sacha at her gym in Prahran.”

  He looked simultaneously disappointed and determined as he said, “I’ll drive you.”

  I knew I couldn’t argue with him. Not when his face looked like that.

  My brother pulled into the parking lot at the gym but instead of leaving to go do whatever he’d come into town to do, he parked and shut the engine down.

  “Aren’t you going to run errands or something?”

  “No. I thought I might come in with you.”

  “To the gym?”

  “Yeah.”

  Shit. I’d told Sacha to meet me at noon. It was only ten. I wanted to give myself a good solid two-hour workout before she arrived.

  “Why do you want to go to the gym? I thought you were just dropping me off. You know what me and Sacha are like, we’ll be goofing around for hours.” Goofing around? Geez.

  Now it looked like it was his turn scan his brain for a reason in the form of a rational-sounding lie. But why? What was he doing?

  “I thought I might like to see Sacha. I haven’t seen her in ages.”

  Bullshit. Jesus. I wished I’d taken the tram. I didn’t know how to get around the fact that Sacha wasn’t going to be at the gym for two more hours. As I walked into the almost empty gym with my brother trailing behind me, I decided to cover the lie by acting annoyed at Sacha’s lateness. That would do.

  “What are you going to do in here? Stand around like a pervert?” He was wearing jeans and boots. He looked like a total weirdo.

  “I’m just gonna check it out. Don’t worry about me. Do your thing.”

  I took his direction and stopped worrying about him. I didn’t care about the whole Sacha lie either. Once I checked in to the gym I got to work. I did what I came to do. I got on the treadmill and started sprinting for twenty minutes. Then I got on the elliptical. I did twenty minutes and burned 137 calories on that, which I counted as 100. In my mind, twenty minutes on any cardio machine gave me a 100-calorie burn even if the red digital digits said otherwise. I couldn’t trust machines. They were all different. By the time I was done with cardio (I felt okay about only doing forty minutes because I’d run for over an hour that morning) and moved to the mats on the floor to begin the glorified sit-ups they call Pilates, I noticed my brother still standing in the corner. I had forgotten him completely.

  “Why are you still here?” I had to speak loudly over the whirr of the machines and the yelling of the sports commentators on the TVs.

  “Oh. Ahh . . . I dunno. Just do your thing. I’ll wait for you.” He was acting strangely. He had his head down and was avoiding eye contact, which was so unlike him. He was a helicopter pilot. He loved eye contact. He’d have laughed if he could have seen himself like I did. He really looked creepy standing around in the darkest corner of the gym in jeans and boots. I hoped all the women in there didn’t know he was with me.

  I did my thing. I finished my forty-minute mat workout (so many reps to be effective!) and moved to the weights. I occasionally did weights to tone my arms and back, and I figured that since I wasn’t doing a photo shoot or appearing on camera for a couple of weeks, the muscles would have time to deflate if by accident I somehow pumped them up. I would’ve hated to look fat because I’d worked out too hard and my muscles added the inches I’d painstakingly taken away.

  After I’d worked my bi’s, tri’s and deltoids, I saw that my brother had found a friend. It was Sacha. My desire to run to her was curbed by the seriousness of the conversation she was having with my policeman of a brother, creepily brooding in the dark corner. I wondered what the hell they could be talking about. Could they be talking about my having come out to him? It seemed unlikely, as I doubted that either of them would betray my confidence. Surely it couldn’t be my weight. I knew I was a little thin in places, but not enough to have a serious conversation about it. I started to worry, like perhaps their somber mood had nothing to do with me, and so I went over to them in a hurry. As I approached, I realized they were talking about me because Sacha’s mood immediately changed when she realized I was within earshot.

  “Peeeee!” She squealed my name and hugged me all at once, leaving me deaf in my right ear. But my brother didn’t smile. He stayed the same. He looked at me, this time in the eyes.

  “Porshe, can I see you outside?” He turned away from me and walked out of the gym.

  The seriousness of his tone made me follow him, leaving Sacha alone, but I got the feeling that she was fine with me following him, too. It was exciting almost. It was so different. My brother had never pulled me away to talk to me seriously about anything before. I couldn’t help but be excited because it was so different. I could tell that he wasn’t angry, but I couldn’t quite figure out what he was feeling and why his feelings were so important that he would pull me away from my best friend whom I hadn’t seen for months.

  We got all the way to the car before we stopped. The longer we walked, the more concerned I became. By the time he spoke, my stomach was in knots. He leaned on the hood of the car with both hands, his broad back to me, blocking his face from mine. I couldn’t see where this was going. I started to get really scared.

  “Porshe.” When he turned around, I could see that he was crying. I was shocked. He bent over now, his hands on his bent knees, his elbows locked. He was looking at the ground. I was shocked and I couldn’t speak. I just had to wait.

  He started talking and standing upright at the same time, deliberately but with difficulty.

  “I’m just really worried about you. I just can’t believe how thin you are.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I knew I was thin but not nearly thin enough for this reaction. If I’d worked out in a sweater so he didn’t see my arms he wouldn’t be reacting like this, but I felt that now wasn’t the time to explain that to him. Besides, I’d never been so upset, seeing him cry. I’d never been so upset.

  He got himself together a little, enough to look at my face. I was speechless, still, but I could see he wasn’t asking me to speak.

  I watched as his face started breaking again. His face crumbled into creases. It went red. Tears were falling down his cheeks. He looked at me imploringly although he still wasn’t asking anything of me. It confused me.

  “Porshe . . .” He cried harder. As he inhaled to say what he was leading up to say, his breath caught, making short staccato sounds. “You’re gonna die.”

  My brother had left shortly after I’d pleaded my case. I told him that I knew what I was doing. When that didn’t work, I told him that I would eat, that I would gain weight and stop obsessively working out. He seemed pleased to hear all that so he left me to hang out with Sacha, who, after pointing out a very thin girl in the gym, dropped me home. She didn’t say anything about my weight, she just pointed to that girl on the treadmill, exclaiming that she was anorexic and how sad it was, and then she dropped me home.

  I had cried a lot with my brother. The tears weren’t for me. They came because of him, because I hated seeing him cry like that. The only other time I
’d seen him cry was when our dad died and to be honest, I didn’t know why my weight made him so sad. And I didn’t know why Sacha pointed out the so-called anorexic girl. I knew that I was thinner than usual. I knew that I was underweight, but anorexia was never something that I thought I could have. The girl at the gym didn’t have it. Not just anyone could have anorexia. It was a disorder of the highly accomplished, cultured, beautiful. It belonged to models, singers, and Princess Diana.

  I had always been secretly in awe of anorexics with their superhuman self-restraint. There is a neatness to it, a perfection. Apart from the fact that I could never be thin enough to be anorexic, I didn’t want to be anorexic anyway. I just wanted to excel at dieting.

  When I arrived home, my mother intercepted me on my way to take a shower and asked me to come to her room. At a glance it was clear to me that my brother had been talking to her about the episode at the gym and it was clear that her nonchalant attitude had been replaced by a very serious one.

  “Come in here for a minute, okay? I would really like to talk to you.”

  I followed her through the living room and into her bedroom. I passed by Gran, who for twenty years had sat in the chair in the corner of the living room, alternating her attention between the TV and her family’s lives, all played out in front of her as a source of entertainment. But my grandmother didn’t appear disconnected or uncaring, she just seemed like she already knew the end to all the stories. She’d seen all the reruns on TV and in life. She’d seen it all before. We were an episode of The Golden Girls in a rerun. Blanche, whose self-worth is based on her looks, has something on her mind but can’t communicate it in any way other than by acting out and has been called in to talk to problem-solving Dorothy, who had been given a tip by Rose as she stumbled across the truth, but it was something that Sophia had known all along. Gran gave me a look as I passed her that said, “Oh, yeah! I remember this one. This is the one where you confront your mother about her lack of acceptance of you for being gay and she finally accepts you for who you are. Oh yeah! This is a good one . . .” She couldn’t really have known that, of course. My mother and I had decided not to tell her about my sexuality. We had decided that she was too old and knowing that truth about me would be a terrible shock. Something like that could kill her. That the words “I’m gay” might just stop her heart, and she’d topple onto the floor, dead from shock.

  My mother stood backlit against the window of her dark bedroom. I could just make out her pink scalp underneath her wisps of gray-blond hair and I wondered for how long gray hair could be dyed. Maybe it became so porous that color would just not take to it anymore. Maybe that’s why really old people have gray hair. Until this point I had thought it was because people in their eighties and nineties couldn’t be bothered because superficial things like looks didn’t matter anymore, but what if the desire to hold on to blond or brown hair was still there but the ability to do it was gone? I wondered if that’s what aging felt like. That desire and reality were dueling until the day you die, that nobody ever got to a place of peace. I had always wanted to get old so I didn’t have to care anymore, but I began to think that it would be best just to skip the getting older part and just die.

  “You’re so thin, darling. It’s awful.”

  Yes. I’m thin. I’m exactly what you wanted me to be.

  “Well, I guess I can get my Swatch watch now.”

  The Swatch watch was a carrot my mother used to dangle when I was a teenager if I reached 119 pounds, the magical eight and a half stone. As I had always fluctuated between nine and nine and a half, that number was always just a fantasy, a magical land where perfection lived and all the people who were special enough to get there were covered in Swatch watches. As I struggled to get to that number on the scale, the Swatch watches I wanted were going out of style one by one. First it was the clear one I wanted but was too fat to have, then a yellow one with blue hands, then the black one that passed me by without my earning the right to own it. I really did want my plastic Swatch watch. Even though they didn’t make them anymore.

  “If you don’t eat something, you’re going to die!”

  My mother squatted down with her hand on the corner of the bed. Her other hand was covering her face as she quietly sobbed. I stood over her, looking down. To my surprise I stood there waiting for something to happen. Where was the rush of emotion that had overtaken me when I saw my brother similarly bent over, sobbing and in pain? Where was that panic I felt that made me search for something soothing to say? Where was the deep regret for making my mother so upset? To my horror, a smirk involuntarily stretched over my face. My mother was crying and I was smiling. I loved my mother very much. Why was I being so cold?

  The answer came to me with certainty and clarity.

  I can be gay now. I can be who I am without pretending anymore. I’m forcing her to accept me just the way I am.

  I bent down and picked my mother up off the floor. I put my arm around her shoulders and we sat like that on the edge of her bed until she stopped crying. I was waiting for her to stop so I could start in on her. As my mother quietly cried, I planned my attack. I would tell her that I was angry that she didn’t accept me for being gay, I was angry that she seemed to care more about how I looked than how I felt or who I was. I was going to tell her to change or she would risk losing me. My comments would hurt her, but it was better for her in the long run. I was going to show her the same tough love she’d shown me.

  But I didn’t do that. Instead, I burst into tears.

  “I’m so sorry that I’m gay, Mama. I’m sorry I’m not what you wanted.”

  I cried for her disappointment, and for mine. I wasn’t the daughter she was proud of, I was the daughter that made her ashamed. And no amount of fame could take take shame away.

  “Why are you sorry, darling? You are who you are.”

  “I know! But you’re ashamed of me! You won’t even tell our family and they’re the people who love me!”

  “I just thought that your being gay was nobody’s business. It was private.”

  “Michael’s relationships weren’t private? You had no problem talking about those! You tell everyone the private things you’re proud of!”

  My mother swiveled toward me, put her hands on my shoulders, and turned me to face her.

  “Listen. I’m a stupid old fool. Alright?” She was looking directly at me. It was like she was seeing me for the first time. “I was scared, okay? I didn’t want you to lose everything you’d worked so hard for. But I was wrong. And I was stupid.” She folded me into her arms. “I love you so much.”

  “I love you, too, Mama.”

  I felt the weight fall away from me. I lost the weight that I’d been carrying around since I was a teenager. Shame weighs a lot more than flesh and bone.

  Within moments we were laughing, talking about how crazy I was to take the weight loss too far. We were saying that all of it was really unnecessary, that I was great just the way I was. We decided that it was time to start dating and “to hell with it.” Happiness was everything. “And health,” she chimed in. “Without them, what’s the point?” We laughed and hugged and agreed that the most important things in life are health and happiness and that they were the only things I had to worry about now. That’s all she cared about.

  My health and happiness were the only things my mom cared about.

  We walked directly to the kitchen arm in arm and we made lunch together. We made fried rice with peas and a teaspoon of oil. We were laughing and talking, we ate it together, and my grandmother watched from the corner of the room in her chair, smiling as the credits rolled. The End.

  26

  I WAS STILL 89 pounds. I liked being 89 pounds. Although the image of my brother crying and my mother breaking down was burned into my memory and I had made promises to them that I would gain weight, January was not a good time to gain weight. I had agreed to shoot the cover of Angeleno magazine, a big, glossy fashion/lifestyle rag. I had committed to a
ttending the Australia Day Ball, an annual event held in LA that honored Australians in the film and TV industry. I just couldn’t gain any weight until all that was done. What would be the point in sliding backward to the middle of the pack when it was just as easy to take the pictures of me at the finish line, alone in my triumph? My ego wouldn’t let me gain any weight. I didn’t see the point to it until after the cameras were no longer pointed at me.

  As the maintenance took up a lot of time, I barely had time for anything else. Even with Carolyn doing the supermarket rounds to find the brands with the least amount of sodium or the lowest fat content, working out took up most of my day. I decided, however, that I needed a social outlet and I joined that ballet class with the yelling Russian and the fat women in makeup and tights. I figured at 89 pounds I was thin enough to wear a leotard and développé my leg into the air. Besides, ballet was a kind of workout, too, if you weren’t lazy about it. I met a girl there who liked to count calories and to work out. Melody was thinner than me with a better turnout and a higher extension. She was called on by the yelling Russian to demonstrate good développés. I tried to befriend her as we had a lot in common, but what we shared in common made it difficult to be friends. We were both recluses with rituals. Besides, being gay I didn’t feel comfortable making new friends. It didn’t seem fair after months of presenting myself as a relatable heterosexual to suddenly surprise them with the news that a lesbian had been lurking underneath the whole time, had been in their homes, talking about their sex lives, hugging them and telling them they had good leg extensions in ballet class. I stopped going to ballet class anyway. I didn’t have the thinnest thighs nor was I the best dancer in the class. It didn’t remind me of a time when I was good at something, it made me aware of the sad reality that if I was good as an eight-year-old, then I had gotten worse. I had peaked at age eight. What was the point in continuing? The old yelling Russian told me that I was too thin and that I needed to gain weight. What was the point?