by Liz Astrof
On this particular day, however, I’d been on my own, watching sitcoms, willing myself into happy lives and madcap scenarios where even the worst of conflicts were resolved in twenty-five minutes or at most teased out into cliffhangers. In that basement, I was no longer the tubby daughter who was the cause of Dad and Cathy’s endless displeasure, expressed full volume and at all hours through closed doors. I was no longer the not-so-anonymous culprit behind the crumbs that made Cathy passively-aggressively Dustbust the kitchen overhead. Downstairs, the “presentable” upstairs receded, leaving me free to move into Jack and Janet and Chrissy’s wicker-chic place, or Felix and Oscar’s bachelor pad, or the Jeffersons’ Deluxe Apartment in the Sky. I could be Julie McCoy or Rhoda Morgenstern, or Laverne DeFazio, mainlining wisecracks as I simultaneously fed off the pile of Cheez Doodles that rested on my stomach.
I don’t remember what I was watching. Nor do I remember what it was that actually got me off the couch. My guess is that I couldn’t get the foil-covered rabbit ears into the right position to get good TV reception—a skill unrecognized by my dad and Cathy. Or maybe the Dustbuster had pierced through the theme songs to the part of me that knew just how much my sloppiness and inability to be motivated by physical movement was letting everyone down.
After all, it had only been a few months earlier on Hanukkah that my father had asked me to go down to the garage fridge and get a cake he said we were having for dessert. I’d run to the garage, where a brand-new 10-speed bike with a giant ribbon and my name on it was blocking the fridge. I’d swiftly moved the bicycle out of the way to get to the cake, only to discover that the only item in the fridge was an orange box of Arm & Hammer baking soda in the door. Left to only wonder what sort of person lied about cake—and on a holiday, no less—I had no recourse but to cry while my dad made me ride the bike around the block, both of us equally baffled by each other.
But today was going to be different than that cold December night, for today I’d ventured outside of my own volition. Standing in the driveway, in my faded, light-blue, baggy Jordache sweatshirt and Smith’s carpenter pants (the very ones that held the Lladro pinky), which squeezed tight at the waist and stretched to capacity around my crotchal area, pulling terribly at my inner thighs, I decided to take a stab at exercising. I got a red, half-deflated kickball from the garage and attempted to bounce, toss, and catch it, exerting as little energy as possible, of course. I wasn’t trying to be a hero.
Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded” blasted from Jeff’s open window. No doubt, I thought, he was parading back and forth in front of his mirror, blowing kisses at his own reflection. And I was glad. As long as he was preening over himself, he couldn’t hurl abuse down on me in the form of pig noises that bounced off the windows of the high school across the street, surrounding me in a wall of echoing oinks.
Gone were the days when Jeff and I, united against our mother, huddled together like penguins against an Antarctic wind. We now pretty much hated each other. This was largely due to old-fashioned sibling rivalry and the fact that we were a teen and a tween and shared a bathroom. But added to that was the fact that Jeff was my father’s favorite child, his golden boy. He could do no wrong. Even when he was teasing me, relentlessly. A mere line into one of Jeff’s cruel—albeit brilliant—limericks about my weight, I would lose my shit, which would send my father into a rage. Against me. It was my father, Cathy, and Jeff against me.
Jeff’s music was loud, but not loud enough to drown out Rubin and Anna, who had moved their fight to the sidewalk, where Rubin asked Anna if she’d like dirt in the steak he was grilling for dinner as Mr. Andretta, our neighbor on the other side, waxed his new red Corvette in his pitted-out undershirt and grease-stained Dickies pants. Finally, after about five hours’ (four minutes’) exertion, my dad’s light-brown Cadillac Seville came up the street and pulled into the driveway, setting off Mr. Andretta’s car alarm. I didn’t realize until that moment that I’d actually been waiting for him to show up and see me, his daughter, exercising by choice.
My father stayed in the car—floored, I suspected, by my activity level. I decided to show off for him a little bit. I tried bouncing the ball extra high, but since it wasn’t fully inflated, it instead just landed with a thump. It didn’t matter; my father, who I assumed was completely bowled over, had still not emerged from the car.
I scooped up the ball with a flourish, tripping over the leg of my pants, but recovering and even breaking a sweat. I pushed up the sleeve of my sweatshirt and pulled my pants away from my thighs. I was Joanie with her baton, Greg on his surfboard (before the wipeout). I was the shit—as my father, still inside his car, was clearly witnessing.
He finally got out of the car. He’d been in Manhattan, where he’d gone to get his fancier toupee tended to. I pretended to be too focused on the bouncing sport I was doing to notice him standing in the driveway. In his fitted maroon velour-collared shirt and slacks, his good rug permed tight, the same sandy blond color as his pants, he was as hip and trim as he would ever get.
Barely glancing at me, his briefcase in one hand, a small white box containing his spare toupee in the other, he waved to Mr. Andretta, who was struggling to stop his car alarm, before entering the house.
I was now exhausted and smelled surreally like outside. Ready to call it a day and go back down to the couch, I heard the music in my brother’s room stop. Turning toward the house to see if Jeff was going to start teasing me after all, I saw that my dad was back outside, standing on the stoop. I decided to go for a quick, spur-of-the-moment ball toss and was exhilarated when I actually caught it.
“Elizabeth, please come inside,” my father said.
Elizabeth was my name when I was in trouble. How could I be in trouble? I was outside. With a ball.
I dropped the now officially flat kickball and nervously headed past him and inside. Without looking at me, my father told me to go into the kitchen, where Jeff sat at the head of our new butcher block kitchen table, wearing his favorite T-shirt—black with a neon green frog saying, “I’m so Happy, I Could Just Shit.” Cathy hovered nearby, Dustbuster still in hand—I swear she wanted to vacuum me right up so she’d never have to deal with my crumbs again.
They said nothing. Jeff fiddled with his braces, looking kind of nervous. He didn’t make fun of me at all, not one oink or moo regarding my outside exertions, which he’d no doubt seen. Cathy, clad in the Long Island trophy wife uniform—metallic electric-blue Sergio Tacchini warm-up suit with splashes of raspberry pink on the collar, white tennis sneakers, diamond tennis bracelet, and fuchsia acrylic nails—focused her attention on putting the Dustbuster back in its cradle on the wall, which seemed trickier than usual.
My father walked in.
“Go stand in the corner and smile,” he said to me, picking up a Polaroid camera.
I obediently went and stood, my back against the black-and-white-flowered wallpaper.
“Smile!” he said brightly, and for a moment I almost recognized him as his old self, the balding man in loose sweatpants and wrinkled T-shirts stretched over a big belly. The man he had been before Aruba, where he’d eloped with Cathy and, as legend had it, killed a fly between his stomach rolls. He’d set about losing sixty pounds after that and succeeded by eating only one big salad a night and by jogging or, in the winter, running in place against the resistance of a bungie cord attached to my brother’s doorknob. As the pounds melted away, he became less and less recognizable as the man who once loved me enough to rescue me from my mother, morphing into the man who hated that I was turning into a younger version of his first wife.
But now he was taking my picture, seeing me not as hatred incarnate, but as me—and maybe even a little as him or even better, as Cathy.
I smiled as he took the picture and asked what the occasion was, though I could pretty much guess. I’d gone outside. I had done a sport. I secretly began to suspect this photo op would be followed by a pizza and ice cream celebration.
My father pulle
d the wet photo out of the bottom of the camera. “We wanted something to remember you by,” he said.
“Why do you have to remember me?” I asked.
“We’re sending you away,” my father said, looking at me at last. “You aren’t going to live here. You’re fat, and we can’t look at you anymore.” He shook the picture and set it on the counter to dry.
I wasn’t expecting that. I wasn’t prepared to be kicked out of my house for being fat. This wasn’t the sort of thing that happened in sitcoms. Not even the “very special” episodes.
Survival instincts kicking in, I asked them where I was going to live, suddenly hopeful that I’d get to live with Rachel and her family, where I slept over as often as I could. I loved their house, even though it was half the size of mine and smelled like guinea pigs (and they didn’t have guinea pigs). They may have had one bathroom instead of three like we did, but they didn’t find me hard to look at, and Rachel could eat junk food and drink soda out in the open, in broad daylight, instead of late at night after everyone else went to bed, like me. It was at Rachel Schein’s house where I’d had my first bucket of fried chicken.
The Scheins had fun with each other. They made each other laugh. And they made grilled cheese in a frying pan with butter, instead of . . . dry in a toaster oven on wheat bread—nothing “grilled” about it. Rachel looked just like her mother, too, but it was okay. It was great actually. “You guys should be a sitcom,” I would say to them—the highest compliment I could bestow. The Scheins lived in a Good Times world, and if I lived there, I would be their J.J. It was going to be dy-no-mite, seven days a week. What’s more, they were one of the other four Jewish families in our town, so I would even know all the holidays they celebrated . . .
“You’re going to live with your mother,” my father said, unable to look me in the eye because he knew that was the worst answer he could give.
The most important, influential person in my life, the man who rescued me from Philadelphia, was now sending me back. It was the ultimate punishment for the ultimate crime—looking the way I did.
You’re fat and we can’t look at you anymore. I made him sick. I made them all sick. I was unsafe, disgusting, too fat to live with normal people.
I skipped the beginning part of crying and went straight to the part where you can’t breathe. I slid down the wall and sat on the floor, sobbing. In between heaves, I asked when my mother was coming to get me.
My father said he had to call her to make all the arrangements.
“But she lives five hours away,” I cried. “What about my friends?” Unpopular as I was in my home, I was popular at school. Being “blessed” with an awareness of my weight from the time I was four—my mother made sure of it before she took off—I’d learned early that if I could make people laugh, entering a room on a joke, like the characters in my favorite sitcoms, they wouldn’t notice my body so quickly. And if I could also exit a room on a joke, they’d be left thinking, “she’s funny” and not “she’s fat.” For the most part, my strategy worked. By eleven, I was never the girl the boys liked, and I was always picked last for kickball at recess, but I was funny, so I was popular. The thought of leaving behind all the hard work I’d done to distract and amuse my classmates was a tragedy of cliffhanger proportions.
My father simply repeated what he’d said before—I couldn’t stay where I was. They didn’t want me anymore.
I crawled to the counter where my father had left the Polaroid. My image from five minutes before was now clear, smiling brightly, proudly, thinking a whole other kind of night was in store. “But I was just outside . . .” I said.
My protest seemed to set my father off.
“Outside—in a sweatshirt in June!” he bellowed. “You don’t even fit into shorts! Look at you!”
I didn’t want to look at me anymore. I didn’t want to be me anymore.
Cathy, who had been standing behind my father watching, finally intervened. “Liz . . .” she said, “calm down. Come on. It’s enough.”
I wondered suddenly if she had found my candy stash, or Cheez Doodle stash, or Twinkie stash. I wondered if I was being sent away because I ate the last of her Pecan Sandies and hadn’t buried the empty box in the bottom of the bathroom garbage well enough. Whether a simple paper towel on top of the trash could have saved me from the fate that now awaited me: my mother.
Frantic, I started begging them to let me stay. I couldn’t live with my mother. The weeks I’d spent there when I was six had left me with a deluxe set of scars. In full crisis mode, I promised to diet, to eat only chicken breast with no skin even though the skin was the best part. To run every day. To run to running. Anything. Please don’t make me live with my mother. Please let me stay with you, you terrible people.
My father stood his ground. “We’ve tried everything,” he said. “You’re out of control. You don’t want to change.”
“I do!” I shout-cried.
“All the other girls have adorable figures,” he said, which, even then, was creepy. “You can’t be happy looking like this.”
And I had to admit, he was right—I was anything but happy. I would have loved to have stopped eating and been like all the adorable girls. But food was my drug. It numbed me. Food released me from having to make sense of why my parents beat the shit out of each other and why my mother had the energy to steal stuff from our neighbors but couldn’t get out of bed to take care of me and my brother. I was a bottomless pit of memories buried under the Cheez Doodles that kept me calm but made my father hate me.
I could hear my father tallying off a list of my crimes, starting with how Jeff couldn’t put a cheeseburger in the refrigerator for later without me eating it. He was right. I couldn’t resist bait like that—always starting with a bite, which would lead to another to “even it out” until the best option was to destroy the evidence altogether. He laid into me about the indignity Cathy had suffered in taking me to women’s departments to buy clothes, the trauma she’d endured watching me and my third-grade teacher Mrs. Galvin in our underwear trying on the same pants in the open dressing room at May’s department store.
With every indictment, his rage grew. He accused me of living on the basement couch, and there was no point reminding him that I’d just been outside. It was too little, too late for that. The skinny man I didn’t recognize as my dad was getting angrier and angrier.
“You’re sloppy and lazy and—”
Here it comes, I thought.
“—just like your mother!”
Cathy told my father to calm down. She had to open the back door to let the dog outside, and the whole neighborhood didn’t need to hear what was going on. We had to be “presentable.” Which I was not.
My father calmed down. Cathy opened the door, and the smell of summer cooking wafted inside. Hamburgers, it smelled like. It dawned on me that other people were going about their evenings making dinner, like everything was normal. Nothing like the shit show that was going on here. I wanted to be them. All the other families with their “adorable” daughters were eating dinner and getting along and not kicking their child out for being fat and just like her mother.
“Okay . . .” my father said at last. I wasn’t sure who he was talking to. “Okay. There’s one way you can stay . . .” He was pulling something out of the junk drawer.
I couldn’t believe his words. A leftover sob left me like the last breath of a corpse.
“What are you crying about?” He was exasperated. “I said you might be able to stay.” He handed me a glossy brochure. “It’s a weight-loss camp. If you go there, and you lose weight, you don’t have to go live with your mother.”
On the cover was a collage of fat kids engaging in all kinds of sports. Most shots taken from behind so you couldn’t see their miserable, suffering faces.
“Camp Shame?” I asked.
“Camp Shane,” my father corrected me.
The inside of the brochure was a picture of the camp owners—Selma and her son,
David. Of course, they were smiling—they didn’t have to do any of this shit.
“The Camp Shane Experience” offered registered dietitians, exercise programs, restricted calorie intakes, and FUN. Plus off-site day trips. To illustrate this, there was a photo of a morbidly obese boy, stuffed into an inner tube floating down a river, having anything but fun. I wonder what torture he endured. What hell. What horror. What . . . FUN.
I was staring down the barrel of a summer in a Twinkie-and-TV-deprived prison.
But better than staring down the barrel of my mother.
“I’ll go to Camp Shame,” I said, and just like that my father swept me into his arms.
“You know we love you,” he said as he hugged me.
I did not know that.
The tension now broken, Jeff made nine or ten requisite fat jokes about the kids in the brochure, and Cathy, in a show of major emotion, awkwardly hugged me. I worried absently that she’d feel the sweat on my back and tell my dad to decide I should go live with my mother after all. I was on thin ice. I could be sent to my mother at any time. One false move, and I was out.
But in that moment, I was relieved. Sickeningly relieved.
The weeks leading up to my departure were a blur, with my devouring every morsel of food I could lay my hands on. If they didn’t have an overweight child in that Polaroid, they certainly had a child that had increased a size by The Night Before Fat Camp, when they took me to Friendly’s for my last meal, complete with not one but two Fribbles and a Reese’s Pieces sundae.
The next day I was in a parking lot, being all but cavity-searched for food of any kind by a masculine woman named Terri who introduced herself as “your worst nightmare for the next nine weeks” before getting on the bus for Camp Sha(m)e.
Boarding the prison bus, I heard my father calling my name. I turned and scanned the sea of mostly overweight parents waving to their poor, sad, scared kids. My heart leapt—maybe this had all been a trick, maybe my father was testing me to find out the lengths I’d go to to avoid living with the woman we both hated, and he was now calling for me to get off the bus. That all was forgiven. Please, let him be that fucked up, let this be a scared-straight situation, I remember praying. Please let us stop at McDonald’s on the way home.