by Faith Salie
Since he’s become a father, my brother David’s really been the one to take up our mother’s baking mantle/apron. He concocts ridiculous Dora the Explorer and My Little Pony cakes for his kids that involve sketches and all-nighters and way more counter space than I can ever hope to have in a Manhattan kitchen. We often call each other when we’re baking to share Mom memories—momeries, if you will. When I texted him the photos of my Curious George monkey face cakes I made for Augustus—I made one vanilla, one Coke, as well as a practice one so that I didn’t fail my two-year-old—David wrote back, “Wow—great job! Did you stick your tongue into the side of your cheek as you were ‘piping’?”
I’ll never bake and decorate as well as my mother, but I sometimes feel her energy in me when I’m bustling in the kitchen and handing off plates of Christmas wreath cookies to the doormen. It’s like what my dad said in his eulogy for Mom: “We can’t be as good as Gail. But we can all try to be good like her.”
I have virtually no regrets in my life. I couldn’t have said this in my thirties. I can say it now, though, because I’ve experienced all these happy endings that are really beginnings. I’ve lost and gained husbands, jobs, babies, expensive sunglasses, weight, eyelashes, and it’s all turned out (more than) okay.
But I do have one specific regret. I didn’t go with my mom to the Basilica di San Marco for Mass on the only Sunday morning we would ever share in Venice. I didn’t go because it was raining that morning, and I couldn’t go for a run outside. So I stayed in our small hotel room, because I wanted to work out in it, alone. I didn’t know then that it was the last trip my mother and I would ever take. What I did know was that I just had to work out.
Mom didn’t mind. I didn’t mind either, until years later, after she was gone. I returned to San Marco and wished I’d held her hand there during the Lord’s Prayer in Italian, under its golden domes, instead of getting my forty-five minutes of cardio.
It seems that every memoiry, essayish book from a woman today includes at least a chapter about the author’s body. This chapter usually contains ample self-deprecation (without which no woman can publish stories about herself), possibly a Spanx reference, and probably an apologetic anecdote about the one time she got relatively skinny. Descriptions of being chilly and cranky flesh out the tale. The reader may be served an intimate glimpse of the author’s food diary. It concludes with some wearily empowering denouement about self-acceptance at any size. Everyone feels good about that kind of chapter.
This is not that kind of chapter. Because that is not my story.
If you’ve never stood backward on a scale and implored a nurse not to tell you what it says; if you’ve never considered rice cakes a sensible dinner or gone five years without getting your period and relished every minute of it; if you’ve never woken up at 4 a.m. so you could work out in the dark in a cabin in the Central American rain forest that has no power but has 90 percent humidity; if you’ve never cried alone in front of a dance studio mirror doing some kind of nonsurgical liposuction by pulling your thighs back with your hands; if you’ve never traveled around Europe as a student on Eurail lugging a scale wrapped in your college sweatshirt, then you may not understand this, or it may be boring or even offensive. If that’s the case, I apologize. But there’s absolutely no way to share honestly my quest for approbation without some of the details of my tortured crusade to be thin. It’s a First World Upper-Middle-Class White Girl preoccupation to be sure, but I’ve not been enlightened enough to accept that who I am is way more than how much I weigh.*1
So what shape does my chapter take? Should it be bloated with tales of control and despair, from how I ran laps around a Zimbabwe airport after an overnight flight to how I’d spend nights driving around Los Angeles the year after my mother died, buying cakes and muffins to eat in my car? Do I describe how I’ve been asked at the gym, more than once, whether I’m a stuntwoman*2 and, after my initial flush of pleasure, I wonder what that person is implicitly saying about my face? Or should this be a lean, bare-bones story that simply confesses that, although I weigh significantly more than I did at my nadir/zenith, I’m not at peace with my body, even if I’m grateful for it? The only advice I have to offer is eat just the crusts of breadlike fare, take the stairs, and try not to hate yourself too much.
The main trouble with this chapter—which really could be a book, but I have no stomach for the topic at that length, so ubiquitous has it been in my life—is that it has a beginning but no end. It opens in the halls of Woodland Elementary when a second-grade boy squeezed my fourth-grade breasts and ran away giggling. I felt shocked and ashamed. I already knew about my breasts; they were big enough to demand a bra, after all. But right then and there I started hating my body for being something that was growing without my permission. My body was supposed to be me, but instead it was happening to me. Parts of it stuck out so far into the world that it became other people’s business. Nine years old is early to start hating your body. Eleven years old is early to put yourself on a diet and be too scared to get up from your desk, because you can feel that your period has escaped the cushiony frontiers of the maxipad you’re sitting on, but you don’t want to tie your Polo windbreaker around your waist because you might get blood on it.
In eighth grade, I was at some audition, and the casting director asked for everyone’s measurements. I had no idea about mine, so the stage mother next to me whipped out her tape measure. I remember her consternation when she looked at the tape wrapped around my hips—she murmured, “That can’t be right,” and measured again. She reported my numbers with a southern compliment: “I never would have thought you were that big.” In my children’s theater travels, surrounded by perky sprites and their mothers, I felt Brobdingnagian.
And so, spoiler alert: I proudly manifested an eating disorder. Took me long enough—I didn’t get there until the beginning of my senior year of high school. I guess all the soccer and dancing and stirrup leggings helped stave off this inevitability.
My mother was complicit in all this.
First of all, this was a woman who’d pray the rosary while doing abdominal crunches. She didn’t do this publicly, but I “caught” her once, and it was a lesson in time management. I’m pretty sure she did Kegels during confession, too. Second of all, more than anyone else, my mom witnessed firsthand the anguish I’d feel when clothes didn’t fit, the tears in dressing rooms when I was ten, and she’d assure me I wasn’t fat, I was just “developing.” So she supported all my weight-loss efforts. But she never criticized my body. She monitored me only once in my life when it came to eating: when I was pushing the limits of my Guess jeans, and she saw me eating peanut butter by the spoonful out of a jar, she said gently, “Honey, that has a lot of calories, you know.” She herself ate very healthfully but really enjoyed food. She played tennis every chance she got, and I never heard her disparage her body. Why would she? She had a sick body.
When I decided to lose weight, she started walking with me, an hour a day, sometimes twice a day—always the same route in our hilly suburbs. We walked through rain and 1,000 percent humidity and snowstorms. We were like the US postal workers of low-impact exercise—nothing could keep us from the swift completion of our appointed rounds. While we walked, we talked about everything that ever happened, from her first boyfriend to sex to my dreams for the future. Once, as I was huffing my way up the steepest hill with my hands on the back of my waist and my elbows pointed behind me as if they were triangular propellers, she said, “I can’t wait to see you walk like that when you’re cute and pregnant.” Getting pregnant was the furthest thing from my mind, but so was losing my walking partner.
It was on one of our walks that she doubled over in pain, and we learned hours later at the hospital that she had terminal cancer. Her body was now sick in a horrible way. We still walked during those last months until she couldn’t walk anymore. Not for exercise but for resilience, as if clinging to this ritual could extend her finish line. I knew she’d die soon
when she leaned on me for support. She’d always been my support.
I excelled at being anorexic. I navigated the borderline between skinny and skeletal. I didn’t want to be hospitalized and taken away from my beloved musical theater gigs and AP English. I ate just enough (exactly eight hundred calories a day) to supply me with the energy to make it through two daily workouts, seven days a week. I lost ten pounds a month for five months and thrived on the feeling of hunger. Hunger was my high. Hunger tasted like triumph. I was finally in charge of my body. My body was my bitch. “Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels” used to ring so true. But I have found that when you’re alone for the first time all day, standing in your kitchen at 8 p.m., watching the baby monitor like it’s a reality show, it’s arguable that candy-corn-flavored M&M’s taste as good as thin feels.
Anorexia was my affliction and my vice—I didn’t drink; I’ve never done drugs (not even pot—gives you the munchies); I wasn’t having sex. I wasn’t throwing up—that seemed so uncivilized. I was merely incredibly skinny with an insanely low resting heart rate. You could count my ribs, but you could also count on my GPA being irreproachable. As good as my grades were, my mind was unhealthy. Once I screamed at a navel orange for being too big. My parents had gone to visit one of my brothers in college, and they completely trusted me to take care of myself for a weekend, knowing full well I wasn’t going to drink on my diet. Risky business for me would have been staying up too late to do a Jane Fonda workout on VHS. I discovered my father had left me with jumbo oranges. This unhinged me. I hurled one across the kitchen screaming “GOD DAMMIT!” at the oranges for being so swollen with extra calories and at my father for undermining the mission.
I liked hearing teachers whisper their worries to my parents. No one had ever been concerned about me, and it felt cozy to inspire anxiety about, say, the fact that my hands had turned orange due to my beta-carotene consumption. One night, during the spring of my senior year of high school, my father held me by the shoulders in our kitchen. Or maybe he just rested his fingertips in the well of my clavicle. We were standing next to the refrigerator. Tears choked his voice as he asked, “Why? Have I not told you enough that I think you’re beautiful?” It felt like some small, weird victory, eliciting that kind of emotion from him.
My eating disorder gave me the edge. My college transfer application asked me to describe a book that had a meaningful impact on my life. I composed an essay about the LeGette’s Calorie Encyclopedia that I’d kept in my bathroom for years and would pore over like it was a cliff-hanging classic. Harvard accepted me.
If it sounds like I’m romanticizing an eating disorder, I’m not. I wouldn’t wish that sickness on anyone—it eats away at joy and swallows spontaneity. It camps out in your soul, taking up space that could be used to dream or love or rest. I do miss being able to wear anything, and I miss the clarity of purpose and the efficacy of effort. It was rigorous, but it was simple. Of course, what I’ve gained besides pounds is the bigger, more complicated life that I talked about during all those walks with my mom. My life used to be lean. Rigidity is necessarily part of my past, both in body and spirit.
Sometime in my midtwenties, my period returned like a benign stalker. The pounds had crept back on—not that many, but when you’ve weighed in the double digits for years, you feel fat when you hit the triple digits. But I’d lost my enjoyment of the feeling of hunger. I needed the energy of calories to deal with things. My mother died. My marriage died. I eat when I’m unhappy; I don’t eat when I fall in love. I was more unhappy than in love for a long time. My extreme willpower waned. In the same way that, after I left grad school, my reading was a steady magazine diet of Self and In Touch because I needed a break from Important Literature, I also spent a decade eating a lot of crap, like a re-tox from my previously clean diet. And so began years of loving myself for loathing food and other years of loathing myself for loving food.
Moving to New York, filling my brain with healthful fare, having to push myself through wind and sleet and snow, falling in love a few times with the Manhattan skyline as a backdrop, no longer possessing a car to serve as a mobile binge unit—all these things helped me think less about my body or think of it/myself (because they are interchangeable) with a hint of appreciation. But it was being pregnant that was the game changer.
I’ll skip all the clichés about how pregnancy teaches you how strong and amazing your body is—clichés because they’re true. I didn’t get swollen ankles or varicose veins or stretch marks probably because I exercised every day of my pregnancies and probably also because I was very lucky. What being pregnant really taught me was to stop navel-gazing. I mean, I was totally navel-gazing, because I actually loved sitting in the bath watching my belly button slowly poke out of the water, while the rest of me stayed submerged, over the course of months. But I wasn’t thinking about myself. For the first time in my life, my body belonged to someone else and that someone else had needs that were way more important than mine. Sometimes those needs were very explicit, such as an immediate demand for fried pickles. I ate lunch every day for the first time in decades. Before, lunch had been something to avoid, and my reward for skipping lunch was some dinner. Breakfast was something to eschew if I had to have a business lunch. Cheese was always to be shunned, as was fare like burgers, pizza, and fries and putting real sugar in decaf coffee. I gave up artificial sweeteners, prioritized protein and fat that sometimes appeared in the form of cheese, and allowed myself on occasion to eat fries since they were the ideal delivery system for ketchup, which became my primary food group. The big revelation was that none of it made me fat. Eating like a normal person was fun, even healthful.
I let my dear friend Sharon take pregnancy pictures of me, something I swore I’d never do. I love those pictures. I love my body in them, which is something I dare to say without feeling like I’m bragging, because my pregnancy body isn’t my real body. They weren’t taken so long ago, but I look at them now and think that woman in them was so innocent and young, even though she was forty-one. She looks so well rested.
Sometimes I try to imagine myself as an old lady—one of those tiny women with a tiny appetite. Birdlike, but without osteoporosis. Will there be a day when I can skip a workout without feeling guilty? Will there be a day when I just don’t want to eat that much? Will I be young enough to enjoy it?
Not long before my mother died—after her last chemotherapy but before hospice—we went to a sunset dessert buffet overlooking the ocean. We’d always shared a sweet tooth, and we always sought to keep it in check. She was wasting away, my mom, and, as we sampled a dozen cakes, she sadly said to me, about all the calories we were consuming, “It doesn’t matter anymore.” I wonder when I will say, “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
This chapter isn’t really about my body or my diet. It’s about me. It’s about how far I still have to go (How far? Six miles in under an hour? Two hundred floors on the StepMill?) when it comes to embodying gentleness. If a workout isn’t in some way punishing, I don’t feel I’ve done enough. Every so often, I should probably take a day to stretch gently, in more ways than one. That will be a day I allow myself to be rather than push myself to become something more.
As I was finishing this book, I unearthed some old photos at my father’s house. I found a few of me in which I’m so bony that I’m hardly there. My husband glanced at them and told me he was too disturbed to look again. I stared, mesmerized but not disgusted. I remember that girl, but she seems so far away. And then there’s one of my mother, a decade after having her third child, standing on the beach in a bikini. Her smile is wide; her strong, tan body is ridiculous. Curves where they should be, concave where you want it. I recall people often admiring her figure, but I never appreciated it through the eyes of the mother I am now. I don’t own a bikini or a tan, but maybe I should find the rosary she left me and get crunching.
On this same visit to my dad’s, I put my daughter in her first bathing suit. It’s a hot pink number
with a massive kind of Valentino knockoff rosette that draws attention to her huge belly. She was tramping around like an agile Sumo wrestler in Crocs, and I just wanted to tackle her to squeeze her pudgy, sturdy legs. I’m already sad that there will soon be a day when she loses the scrumptious cellulite on her butt and then there will be a day after that when the cellulite will likely return and she’ll likely hate it.
I hope she is healthy, and I hope she is happy, and I hope she lets herself have more than the crust.
* * *
*1 I’ve sworn off scales for the past twenty years. I used to know approximately what I weighed by how a pair of pants from the year 2000 fit me. Fifteen years later, those pants were in a suitcase that was stolen from a rental car in San Francisco while I was interviewing a heavy metal quilter, and it was like I lost my metabolic North Star.
*2 Not recently. No, not recently.
If you’re wondering how my brother taught me how to give the best hand job ever, it all began in his Stanford Law torts class. I will render your worst fears flaccid by telling you now that no penises were involved. It was the year after Mom died, and David and I made it a point to visit each other once a month, since we were both in California. It was such a comfort to have my brother in my time zone and an hour flight away during those days. So I’d flown up on a Friday and gone with him to his lecture. I brought along some light reading on heavy petting.