And then your mom came in wearing booty shorts and the shirt she wears to wash the dishes, flanked on either side by your aunt Judy and your recently retired fifth-grade teacher. Her sewing circle showed up next, as did her crochet buddies, and all the ladies from book club, with the exception of Kathy, whose son had strep so she decided to stay home with him. There’s the woman who cuts your mom’s hair, and Diane, who works part-time at Eileen Fisher in the mall. The schoolboard ladies, the PTA, and the hockey moms came running in, too, clad in biker shorts and racerback tanks with their hair pulled up in banana clips and scrunchies. I don’t know what I had been so worried about.
“I thought this was for attractive young people?” I wondered aloud to no one in particular.
A lady down the way looked me up and down. “Yeah,” she said, eyeing my flabby triceps and pulling a protein bar from her fanny pack. “ME, TOO.”
The music started, and our teacher, a boisterous woman who was wearing a sports bra and a noisy coin skirt whose constant jangling set my molars on fire, started shouting and dancing and pointing out people who sucked as we tried desperately to follow along. I was winded after the first song, and twenty minutes in I told the woman struggling next to me to call me an ambulance. I was sweating in the grossest possible way, sweat dripping from my hair into my eyelashes before rolling down my nose. Your mom is pretty good at Zumba, but thank goodness she ain’t got no rhythm. The only thing that kept me from looking like a complete moron was my blackness, which kicked in right when I needed it most. I might not have gotten every single step, but at least I wasn’t clapping on the one and the three.
Despite the fact that I really did almost keel over and die, I was hooked. It is physically impossible for me to smile while skipping and jumping and fist pumping, but I loved it. Thumping, loud music at nine thirty on a Sunday morning in a room full of WASPs who are coming down off a chardonnay bender? More, please! These ladies yelled and whooped and screamed for an hour, then they toweled off and hopped in their Lexus SUVs to congregate over skinny lattes at the Starbucks two streets over. The minute that first class was finished, I vomited my right lung onto the locker room floor, then went downstairs and signed over half my paycheck to become an official member of the gym. It was “fun,” my heart rate was high enough to make me feel like an actual sentient human being, and, for your information, Ricky Martin made a lot of good dance music, so bite your hateful tongue. And it’s lame knowing that I need the withering gaze of your hot-flashed, perimenopausal mother to get me to samba my way to maybe living past the age of thirty-nine, but admitting defeat is the first step, right? I live in fear of the day I go flying off a moving treadmill, but pretending I can bachata to Gloria Estefan for an hour is something I can do. Plus your mom said she would bake me gluten-free cookies and give me the number to her masseuse next week. And that girl has a tight ass. I’ve been noticing.
I texted THE RUSSIAN a couple of weeks ago to rub my newfound dedication to working out in her skinny face.
ME: I’m into Zumba now. It’s super fun.
THE RUSSIAN: What is that? Some new thing you eat?
ME: …
THE RUSSIAN: Sounds fattening, whatever it is.
ME: I hate you.
“Maybe I Can Just Eat Plants?”
I am a sucker for a headline screaming “How I lost the weight and kept it off!” or “200 pounds down and counting!” from the cover of a magazine in the checkout line at Walgreens. But then I buy the magazine, only to find out the big secret was SlimFast or bypass surgery and that is totally fine, for real, but who ever got full off a “shake,” and United HealthCare is like YEAH RIGHT, TUBBY, so I guess I’m stuck throwing these deck chairs off the Titanic one at a goddamn time. Right now I am sporadically trying to be vegan, because I love animals and being a good steward of the environment. LOL JK. I have inflammatory bowel disease and nothing is more inflammatory than meat and milk, but wow oh wow, I’ve never tried anything so difficult in my life and I was homeless before.
Eating with any sort of intention is terrible, especially when you (1) work hard all week, and (2) have trouble with plebeian tasks like grocery shopping and basic caring for yourself. Mavis is a health person, but she lives two-plus hours away. And that’s good for, say, not wanting her to know how much Family Feud I actually cry tears of joy while watching? But bad for wanting to holler “Let me get one of them wheatgrass spirulina drinks you’re making!” from the comfort of my bed while burning one calorie distractedly scratching at a patch of dandruff.
Fail to plan, plan to fail: I know, I know. And I am the queen of excuses, so let’s just run through a few of them so I can prove to those of you who doubt me that there’s really no possible way for me to be good at this:
1. I get up too early in the morning.
My alarm goes off at 5:50 a.m. First thing I do is check to make sure I’m not dead. If I am, in fact, still alive, I usually sob uncontrollably until there’s nothing left in my tear ducts but salt dust, then grope blindly through my apartment to the bathroom, where I say a little prayer for a hole to open beneath my building and swallow us all. I can hardly muster the strength to take a bird bath and pull on my yoga pants that have never seen the inside of a gym, let alone cook steel-cut oats and make a kale smoothie.
2. I work with people who eat their feelings, too.
This sisterhood understands that the solution to a dreary morning/a shitty interaction with a petulant dog mom/gloopy, crampy menstruation/a disappointing season finale you stayed up late to watch is a delicious, overpriced lunch delivered by a young bicycle messenger with a hot beard and muscular calves. I never want to spend fifteen dollars on a meal I will eat on the toilet because there’s no place else to get some peace and quiet, but I always do, because I am a stunted adolescent who was never taught constructive ways to deal with her emotions. I wish, more than a person has ever wished for anything, that a piece of rye melba toast with a smear of almond butter provided the temporary happiness found at the bottom of a carton of massaman curry, but, alas, it simply does not.
3. My joints still hurt.
After much half-hearted consumption of every legume, sprouted grain, cheese made from nuts, and root vegetable snatched from the loving clutches of the earth, I know that the degenerative disease currently snacking on my sacroiliac joint will maybe hold off for an hour so I could stand in front of the stage and get sweated on by Drake, but I’M SO SAD and THIS IS AMERICA so I WANT MY BONES TO STOP HURTING while I EAT CHEESE. I have an $800 tiny robot computer that can tell me the weather in Tokyo and knows to suggest “hoe” when I finish typing the phrase “yeah right,” but science can’t figure out a way for me to have a little yogurt without my having to rely on a walker the next day?! Pffft.
4. Staying committed to things is hard.
I have seven different body washes lining the edge of my bathtub right now.
5. The list of trash foods you can apparently still eat while trying to be vegan:
• spicy sweet chili Doritos
• Nutter Butters
• Swedish Fish
• Fritos
• Goya flan
• unfrosted Pop-Tarts
• Snyder’s of Hanover jalapeño pretzels
• Pringles
• Oreos
I’m not sure if these are all really real, but that kind of seems beside the point considering that I’m attempting to whittle a third-grader off my backside. If I have to try to wipe the memory of the sharp, sweet sting of Italian salami from the taste buds in my mind, then I’m not going to ruin whatever progress I make by shoveling fistfuls of Pop-Tarts in my mouth every day.
This is what I’m like: I don’t ever buy juice, because I’ve got so many fitness articles and printouts from the nutritionist burned into my brain about empty calories and mindless sugar consumption that I don’t even go near it. My eyes don’t even wander over to the juice section. And that sounds so good and so health-conscious but the real gag is
that I don’t want to waste a thousand calories on apple juice, a cheap and unsatisfying provisional solution to my despair, when I could invest those same calories in something that will really dull the sharp edge of life’s blade, like a slice of the birthday cake that was half-price because little Timmy’s parents never picked it up. So yeah, there’s never going to be a twelve-pack of beer in my fridge (empty calories) but you might find a chocolate gift basket I sent to myself and signed someone else’s name for (empty calories that stave off sadness for approximately twenty minutes).
I don’t know that I’m always happy in this big body. Or what there is that I can actually do about it. I was not born to delicate people; my mom was six feet tall and my dad was short and broad with oversize hands that he gifted me along with my life. This rotting meat corpse they created is riddled with inexplicable disease and is as wide as it is tall. I was never destined to be a waif, or to have a less-than-terrible relationship with food. I grew up poor, anxious, and unhappy, with cheap carbohydrates the only affordable substitute for joy. If I had a depressed kid right now, I’d drag him to a doctor and ask for some Wellbutrin, but that was never an option for tiny me. Even as a kid, when I did all the fantasizing that little kids do, I never pictured a tall, strapping man hoisting me into his tuxedo-clad arms, the itchy netting of my veil rustling against his beard as we descend the steps of a church of his choosing as a crowd of our loved ones throws confetti over our heads. I had an incredibly realistic imagination, and I knew that no husband of mine would ever be picking me up. After exchanging legal vows and a chaste kiss in front of the judge, my future husband and I would walk with grim determination from the courthouse, hand in hand and Velcroed into our most sensible shoes, get into our roomy midsize sedan, then eat the Tuesday afternoon lunch special at IHOP. We’d toast with overcooked sausage links because IHOP doesn’t serve booze, then drive to our unpretentious ranch-style house to make love one time and never again until we died.
So I bought a bunch of vegan cookbooks. I soaked the overnight oats; I made the fake cheese out of cashews and an onion and a carrot and a potato; I resisted the temptation of milk chocolate even though dark chocolate tastes like ants. And it felt fine. I felt fine. I made this amazing chickpea masala in my own kitchen that tasted almost as good as takeout.
Pretty sure the first time I faltered was at the movie theater. I love, love, love going to the movies, and when I do I like, like, like to have popcorn. And a fountain Coke, because I live for the burning snap of a freshly carbonated beverage. I went to see The Hateful Eight alone on a Saturday afternoon after work. I bought my ticket and willed myself to go straight to the theater, to not even glance at the concession stand, but I could not resist the siren call of the self-serve soda machine. I changed my inner mantra from “you don’t need anything” to “fine, just get a drink,” but as soon as I rounded the corner and heard the kernels popping their glorious staccato I jumped into the popcorn line and promised to make Cuban black beans and rice for the next three days. I was able to control myself enough to get both a small popcorn and a root beer (curveball! this girl is full of surprises!), but the minute the first buttered bite hit my tongue I was like, “Lord, I’ve made a dire mistake.” (The vegan thing, not the popcorn, just so we’re clear.)
The next day, as I was chopping tomatoes and red peppers for gazpacho, I decided that although I would continue to try my best to steer clear of meat and cheese, going forward I would never again publicly refer to myself as vegan. Then, if I decided to eat some carnitas or have an eggnog at Christmas, no one I know from the Internet could look down his judgmental nose at my choices. Carnivore in the streets, person-who-has-eaten-a-carrot-masquerading-as-a-hot-dog in the sheets.
Million-Dollar Mermaid
A solid 75 percent of the time I am awake, I am in pain akin to that of childbirth. Sometimes you can read the excruciating discomfort on my face, but I’ve gotten really good at masking it so that it just looks like I’m stifling an unpleasant bit of gas. People are always asking me what Crohn’s feels like, and my answer is this: it’s like a compact car is trying to drive through my small intestines, all the time. Seriously, and it doesn’t matter if I eat or don’t eat or whatever. Oh, here’s something fun—I don’t care what diet you’re on or what herbal supplements you take. If they work for you, I’m happy. I don’t know if it’s something about me, or if people walk around just dispensing unfounded medical advice to everyone they’ve ever met with a health issue, but more often than I’m comfortable with, some asshole with a high school diploma wants to sit me down and talk at me about how they can cure my wretched-gut disease. There’s always some bag of dicks with a beer in his hand, a triple cheeseburger on his plate, and a cigarette in his mouth trying to talk to me about healthy eating. And with zero trace of irony! I appreciate the effort, I really do, but this shit is autoimmune and I have a gastroenterologist. If all I had to do was put down this taco and take those herbs your grandma swears by, I’d already be cured. Thanks, though.
This arthritis and I decided that feeling like garbage all the time is for the birds and that we were going to have to do something about it, and that something probably needed to be swimming. EXCEPT. Aside from the fact that I seriously do not possess the kind of body I am comfortable displaying in a bathing suit, and how I adore and admire those girls who do, scrolling through their gorgeous round tummies and dimpled bottoms proudly sticking out of their fatkinis on Tumblr. But I’m not there yet, and I really am not trying get my bikini area waxed. Or shave my armpits. Or risk being in a pool full of sexy, young hairless aliens looking like my real self. In my imagination the local YMCA is a shining beacon full of healthy, tan, chlorine-scented muscles gleaming beneath the fluorescent lights overhead, a happy place full of health-conscious singles mingling over protein shakes and energy bars, goggles and towels draped gently around their necks as they flirt and laugh about the number of calories they’ve burned on that complicated-looking stair machine. And those mental images are precisely why I decided to take senior aqua aerobics. I need to be around some pancake arms and spider veins and National Geographic titties, for real.
But first: a bathing suit. Typically, I’d wear a thong and a couple of small halved coconuts for this sort of endeavor, but I thought it would serve me best to be modest—for the first class, at least. After I’d barricaded myself in a corner at Lane Bryant, shivering and cowering like a child in a horror movie, handfuls of jewel-toned polyester clutched to my chest, a saleswoman approached me and hesitantly asked if I required some assistance.
“I’d like to see your most opaque turtleneckini,” I declared, “and your finest ankle-length swim bloomers.” Her eyes widened with concern as she tried to determine whether I was insane. Were you guys aware that those things don’t exist?! I was shocked, too! Anyway, a friend told me I should get a two-piece in case I needed to go to the bathroom and didn’t want to do so while completely naked (why didn’t I think of something as practical as that?), so I pointed to the wall of mix-and-matchables and snatched a black tank top with a built-in full coverage underwire bra and some sort of panty-skort-culotte type of contraption for my bottom half. Literally the closest I could come to being fully clothed yet appropriately dressed for water calisthenics.
I got up early on the following Monday and put on my bathing suit under my clothes, because while I don’t care about your grandma comparing my stretch marks to hers, I didn’t want to make my introductions while trying to secure my breasts in those stupid cups. Helen Keller was rolling her eyes, muttering, “Not even going to trim the sides, eh?” under her fishy breath while I was figuring out how to step into that silly bottom piece. I threw a shoe at her head, just barely missing her horns.
After I paid—it costs eight dollars to participate in the aerobics—I staked out the quietest row of the locker room where I could sit and listen in relative peace to Shirley and Elaine squawking about Medicare and using double coupons to shop at Kohl’s, until it was time t
o get into the heated baby pool.
I was immediately transported back to my days as the poor kid at summer camp whose mom sent along the previous night’s meat loaf and an off-brand thermos full of milk for lunch instead of peanut butter and jelly with a Hi-C like everyone else. Every day, I would plead with her: “No one else brings Tuna Helper or liver and onions. Please stop ruining my young life.” I was that kid with the stinky home lunch that had to be heated up, while everyone else brought delicious shelf-stable potato chips and pudding cups. No wonder I got pushed to the ground so often. Quit playing like you don’t know what I mean—everybody knows that one kid who brought the metal fork from home. AND THAT POOR, SAD BASTARD WAS ME. Anyway, all of these milkshakes had brightly colored beach towels with them, and I flushed with shame as I pulled my house towel out of my bag. Stop laughing. I have pretty decent towels, but they are plain white and boring beige and don’t wrap all the way around my body. These ladies brought towels in swirling purples and pinks and blues and greens made specifically for fun times at the local pool. They obviously have mothers who actually love them.
I took a cue from the other ladies and wore my cover-up out of the locker room (what is that thing called, a beach robe? pooljamas?), grabbed my goggles and tube and hand buoys, then tried not to slip and crack my skull open on the deck. One glance at my feet and I thought, “A pedicure should have happened yesterday,” then slipped into the pool before anyone noticed my bruised-looking toes. When I was a baby, poor people sent their kids to the YWCA for day care, and as a result I learned to swim before I could even speak full sentences. They for real just throw you in the swimming pool the minute you get there, pull you out twice a day to poop and eat a couple of graham crackers, then toss you right back in. You go home on the bus and sleep straight through dinner until breakfast the next morning. It’s a dream. Being in the water doesn’t scare me, but explaining my horrifying scarlet birthmark to strangers does, so I avoided the crowd in the center of the pool and hung back near the ladder.
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Page 14