I walk back to the dorm, eyes brimming with unshed tears, swearing that I’ll stop eating bread, sweets, desserts, anything, to lose ten, no, twenty, no, twenty-five pounds before school starts again. I’ll wake up every morning and run five miles. I’ll find a pair of Fiorucci jeans and an Esprit sweater-vest, and the mean girls like Michelle and Kim who hadn’t invited me to their bat mitzvahs even though we’d been going to Hebrew school together twice a week for five years would be forced to acknowledge, due to the boys’ appreciative glances, that I was one of them.
My resolve lasts until dinner that night: discs of fresh-baked pita, still warm from the oven; bowls of hummus topped with a slick of olive oil; chicken schnitzel, pounded thin and deep-fried. I gain twenty more pounds before I finish high school as one of four graduation speakers: the fat one.
Then I’m eighteen, sitting in the dining hall across from the crew coach. It’s winter break, and everyone else has gone home except the rowers stuck here doing two-a-days, working out in the tanks that smell of chlorine and ancient sweat every morning, lifting and running every afternoon. I’d been a good rower in high school, good enough for Princeton to recruit me, but now I’ve gained the freshman fifteen, plus the fifteen pounds one of my many bulimic classmates should have gained but didn’t. (In the innocent days of 1987, I thought it was perfectly normal for brilliant girls with perfect SAT scores to have blue fingertips and a fine coat of downy blond fur.) “If you want to stay on the team,” the coach tells me gently, “you’re going to have to lose a lot of weight.”
I bow my head in wordless—and now familiar—devastation. No matter that I am strong or that I work hard. I have no off switch. I am bigger than the other girls, and that is what matters; that is all that matters. The coach relegates me to the worst boat and never makes eye contact with me again. The next year, I quit the team and join the school newspaper. I find my place, my calling. On the page, at least back in the glorious pre-Internet era, you’re nothing but words and a byline. On the page, nobody can tell that you’re fat.
I am thirty-three, and after two days of unmedicated labor followed by an emergency C-section, the doctor places my newborn daughter in my arms. I am shaking with exhaustion, weepy with hormones. My midsection feels like it’s been ripped open and scooped out, stitched together with burlap thread and knitting needles. I tuck the tiny bundle against my chest, unwrapping the blanket with trembling hands to sniff the intoxicating scent behind her ears, curled like the buds of flowers, and brush my lips against her cheek. First, I make the traditional new-mother inventory: ten perfect fingers, ten toes like pearls. Then I make a less typical assessment, examining the shape of her body, the width of her baby hips, the creases of her adorably pudgy thighs. At eight pounds, eleven ounces, almost two weeks overdue, she’s one of the biggest babies in the nursery. As I look at her roommates, some plump and adorable as the infants in diaper ads, others scrawny and jaundiced, I’m far too embarrassed to ask my doctor the only thing I want to know: Will she be normal, or will she be like me?
Now, at forty-two, I’ve made as much peace as a plus-size woman can make with her body. I might be big, but I’m plenty strong. I’ve run 5Ks and 10Ks, completed hundred-mile bike rides and triathlons. In my career, my weight has never held me back. I’ve worked for national newspapers, written bestselling novels, had a book turned into a movie, cowritten a TV show that made it on the air. I have a job I love, two smart, funny daughters, a rich, full life with wonderful friends, and a man who loves me . . . but I know that, when the world sees me, they don’t see any of this. They see fat.
My daughter sat on her bed, and I sat beside her. “How would you feel if someone made fun of you for something that wasn’t your fault?” I began.
“She could stop eating so much,” Lucy mumbled, unwittingly mouthing the it’s-just-that-simple advice a thousand doctors and well-meaning friends and relatives and weight-loss profiteers have given overweight women for years.
“It’s not always that easy,” I said. “Everyone’s different in terms of how they treat food. You know how Phoebe is with ice cream? How sometimes she’ll gobble it right up, and sometimes she’ll let it sit there and melt?” Lucy managed a quavery smile, then looked at me, blue eyes wide, waiting for me to go on.
I opened my mouth, then closed it. How do I walk the line between the cold truth and helpful fiction, between the way the world is and the way I wish it was? Should I tell her that, in insulting a woman’s weight, she’s joined the long, proud tradition of critics who go after any woman with whom they disagree by starting with “you’re ugly” and ending with “no man would want you and there must be something wrong with any man who does”? Do I tell her I didn’t cry when Gawker posted my picture and someone commented underneath it, “I’m sorry, but aren’t chick-lit authors supposed to be pretty”?
Does she need to know now that life isn’t fair, or can she have a few more years of thinking that it might be that way? I feel her eyes on me, waiting for an answer I don’t have. Words are my tools. Stories are my job. It’s possible she’ll remember what I say forever, and I have no idea what to say.
So I tell her the only thing I can come up with that is unequivocally true. I say to my daughter, “I love you, and there is nothing you could ever do to make me not love you. But I’m disappointed in you right now. There are plenty of reasons for not liking someone. What she looks like isn’t one of them.”
Lucy nods solemnly, tears on her cheeks, the look of the Big Bad still on her face. “I won’t say that again,” she tells me, her voice shaky, and I pull her close, pressing my nose against the part in her hair, inhaling the scent that is hers alone.
We’re both quiet, and I don’t know if I said the right thing; I may never know. So as we sit there together, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, I pray for her to be smart. I pray for her to be strong. I pray for her to find friends, work she loves, a partner who adores her, and for the world not to beat out of her the things that make her who she is, for her life to be easy, and for her to have the strength to handle it when it’s not. And still, always, I pray that she will never struggle as I’ve struggled, that weight will never be her cross to bear. She may not be able to use the word in our home, but I can use it in my head. I pray that she will never get fat.
“Some Say a Parent Should Teach a Child to Swim”
Imagine the happiest person you know—the one who’s never down, never sad, never irritated, the one who’s just preternaturally pleased all the time.
Then give that person brain surgery so that he or she is physically incapable of experiencing unhappiness.
Voilà. You’ve got my mother.
I always knew that Fran was good-natured to the point of being oblivious, but that truth was hammered home one summer afternoon a few years ago on Cape Cod. Fran, who is now retired, spends the summers with me and my husband and daughters in our house in Truro that overlooks Cape Cod Bay. She and Molly and I were on the beach. I was flipping through O magazine and it had one of those quizzes that magazines in general and O in particular seem to feature every month: “What’s Your Happiness IQ?” “How Happy Are You?” “Could You Be Happier?” “Probably, You Could Be Happier: Let’s Find Out, Shall We?”
“Hey, Fran,” I called to my mom, who was as usual planted in a folding camp chair with a pink terry cloth visor propped cockeyed on top of her head, wearing a skirted floral-print swimsuit at least thirty years old (“Vintage!” she’s been known to protest when Molly and I point out that her swimsuits are older than her kids, or that her toaster dates back to the days when she was still into men). “Want to take a quiz?”
“Sure,” said my ever-obliging mother.
So we began.
“When you think about people in your life, do you focus on the ones who’ve disappointed or hurt you?”
Fran waved her hand dismissively. “I don’t even remember people like that.”
“In most ways, my life is close to ideal. Agree or disagr
ee?”
Fran beamed, indicating the sand, the water, her grandkids. “Sure!”
“Are you ever irritated when people cut you off in traffic?”
A shrug. “Who notices?”
“Do you get angry when, for example, the shopper in front of you in line at the supermarket pulls out a pile of coupons?”
Another shrug. “I’m not in a hurry. I’d just read my book!”
At some point, I started making up questions. “If you checked into a hotel and thieves broke into your room and sedated you and removed one of your kidneys and left you in a bathtub filled with ice cubes, what would you do?”
My mom considered. “You can get along fine with one kidney, right?”
“If someone carjacked you and took your clothes and money and left you stranded naked on the street, on a scale of one to ten, how angry would you be?”
Fran thought it over. “Things happen.”
Finally, we were finished. Fran went back to her New Yorker and I tallied up her score. People who scored lower than forty were instructed to seek professional help. Forty to fifty meant that you were getting there, but that your “pleasure center” could use a reboot. Fifty or above meant that you were reasonably content. Sixty or higher was a solid happy. Seventy or above meant you had achieved a state of Buddha-like self-actualization and bliss. Above eighty meant you might have taken the quiz while intoxicated.
Fran’s score was ninety-eight, which more or less corresponded to “lobotomy.”
I’m exaggerating—but not by much. Of course my mother worries—about money, about her children and her grandchildren and her partner and the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency. Occasionally she will get angry or frustrated or fed up. But, for the most part, my mother is cheerful. Even in the throes of the divorce, even in the ten years after, when she devoted what little free time and money she had to taking my father to court and trying to get him to pay the tens of thousands of dollars in child support that he owed her, Fran was happy.
These days, she and her partner of thirteen years will bicker, sometimes in a manner that hints that Fran sees Clair as her fifth child, just as in need of her guidance and expertise as the rest of us . . . but, for the most part, my mother goes where she wants, does what she wants, lives the way she wants, riding her bike or playing bridge, and is supremely content.
Sometimes I wonder whether growing up with my Nanna’s expectations, with a stern mother who just wanted her to behave and be a good girl, with equal emphasis on “good” and “girl,” somehow froze my mom, emotionally, at ten years old, where your settings are Happy and Not My Problem; where emotions like sorrow or frustration or anger are far off on the horizon, where bad moods blow over, where it’s always easier to avoid a conflict, to smile and pretend—or in her case, believe—that everything’s fine. Sometimes I wish she could get over her distaste for confrontation long enough to stand up for us—for me. If, to use a random example, a wedding guest who was explicitly, repeatedly informed that a wedding was adults-only shows up with a squalling toddler, there are mothers who will march right up, say, “Absolutely not,” and make arrangements for the toddler and, probably, the guest to be whisked away before the bride even notices. Then there are mothers who will, literally, throw their hands in the air and say, “I can’t do anything about it,” and “I don’t want to upset Nanna” (even though the toddler’s presence ended up upsetting my new in-laws and their relatives, who had considerately obeyed our requests and left their children at home).
But I also believe that, just as there are people inclined toward melancholy and depression, there are those more outfitted for pleasure and joy—people who look at most conflicts or arguments or differences of opinion and decide not worth it. My mom is one of those people. If the self-help section has it right and happiness is a choice, my mother chooses it, every day, over and over again. She is so chill that she’s practically frozen; unsinkably optimistic, astonishingly serene. She’s kind of a miracle.
No matter what’s happened with the four of us, how far we’ve come or how much we’ve achieved, Fran keeps it real. She remains unimpressed with our accomplishments, unfazed by our achievements, barely willing to make any kind of concession that suggests that we’re no longer twelve. Whenever I visit the new house she shares with Clair, I sleep on the pullout couch, unless one of my siblings has claimed it first. I spent my fortieth birthday on an air mattress on the floor of her bonus room while my daughters slept in the bed. My sister took me out to see Hot Tub Time Machine. Fran brought me a Carvel ice cream cake. It was awesome.
• • •
One of the greatest joys of my career is going on book tours.
I know that most writers hate it—the city-a-day pace, the grind of the early-morning flights and nighttime readings and hours spent in between in airports or in cars, en route to bookstores to sign stock. They hate the shifting time zones, the homesickness, not to mention the public speaking.
Lucky me—my anxieties do not include talking to crowds. I like to travel, even in our post-9/11 atmosphere, where it’s gotten less and less thrilling and increasingly degrading.
For me, the best part of a book tour—in fact, the best part of being a published author in the first place—has been taking my family along for the ride. Which meant that, on my first tour, I got to answer the question: What happens when you take the cheapest woman in the world and bring her on an all-expense-paid ten-day book tour with cars and drivers and four-star hotels?
“Look at her,” Molly whispered as Fran wandered, wide-eyed and bewildered, through the lobby of the Regent Beverly Wilshire—the Pretty Woman hotel, where I still couldn’t believe my publisher was putting me up. “She looks like she’s been clubbed.”
We observed as Fran inspected the elaborate floral arrangements, taking a tentative sniff, then as she turned to stare at a trio of well-dressed women swanning by, heels clicking briskly on the marble floor.
“She’s saying something,” Molly whispered.
We edged in close enough to hear my mother murmuring, “It’s too much.”
Molly and I decided we would make a Wild Kingdom–style documentary entitled Fran in the Wild . . . except, of course, her “wild” was luxury. From Atlanta to Dallas to San Francisco to L.A., Molly and I followed Fran around hotels and in and out of Town Cars, delivering a Marlin Perkins–esque voice-over, just loud enough for Fran to hear. “At first, the animal is wary of its new surroundings,” I said as Fran wheeled her suitcase into a hotel suite, having waved off the offer of assistance with her luggage. “Let’s watch as it attempts to acclimate to a strange environment.”
Fran touched the bedspread, flicked on a lamp, flipped open the room service menu, and hissed as if she’d been scalded.
“Twelve dollars for a cup of chicken-noodle soup?!?”
I drifted after her, in the direction of the bathroom, as Fran squirted L’Occitane lemon verbena lotion into her hand, sniffed it, rubbed some on her arms, pocketed the little bottle, then examined the selection of soaps and shampoos.
“My assistant will now attempt to provoke the wild Fran,” I announced as Molly sidled up to the minibar. Fran’s head snapped around.
“DON’T YOU TOUCH THAT!” she shouted.
Molly paused, her hand halfway to a Diet Coke. “What?”
“DO. NOT. TOUCH THAT. Do you have any idea how much that costs? I can get you a six-pack of soda at the Rite Aid down the block for the cost of one Diet Coke!”
“The animal is angry,” I murmured as Molly flipped the tab of her soda. “Watch as the predator continues to taunt it.”
“Jenny, I can hear you! Put those Oreos down. CUT THAT OUT! Oh, you two are going to drive me crazy!”
Eventually we’d leave the fancy hotel and go to a bookstore for a reading. Fran, being Fran, would prowl the stacks, occasionally chatting with other customers before the reading began . . . and if my mother is insecure amid the chandeliered ceilings and elaborate floral displa
ys of a Ritz-Carlton lobby, she is completely confident about her take on modern fiction.
“I just read the most amazing novel!” I once heard her say. It was my first book tour, and I was busy signing a stack of Good in Bed. Here it comes, I thought, swelling with satisfaction.
“It had everything,” Fran continued. “Great characters, drama, heartbreak, humor . . .”
I preened expectantly. “What is it?” the shopper asked.
“Empire Falls!” said Fran. “By Richard Russo! Do you know his books?”
At which point, I pulled her aside and explained that, unless I received confirmed reports that Mrs. Russo was somewhere in the wilds of Maine, pimping my books to unsuspecting shoppers, she was not to promote his work on my tour.
• • •
It’s no accident that my siblings and I all ended up somewhere in the entertainment industry, with jobs that revolve around some version of storytelling. I write; Molly works as an actress and body double. (“Watch CSI tonight,” she’ll sometimes text. “When they find the waitress’s body in the dumpster, those are my legs!”) Jake produces movies, and Joe Weiner, Fran’s baby, is an entertainment attorney, whose job involves hunting down possible reality-TV fodder. (Recent assignment—a trip to Texas to meet with a man who runs a tire repair shop along with his five beautiful daughters. “Did you meet the daughters?” I asked. Joe shook his head, looking dejected. “Their dad says they’re only around when the cameras come out.”)
As enthusiastic and constant a reader as she’s been all her life, my mom is an even more devoted swimmer. It’s her exercise and her mental health; self-care translated into an hour of laps in the Olympic-size swimming pool at the West Hartford JCC, where a tiled quotation from the Talmud over the deep end reads, “Some say a parent should teach a child to swim.”
My whole life, I’ve watched my mom do her laps, either at the indoor pool or at the pool in the backyard of our house on Harvest Hill Road. Her stroke is the crawl, her pace is slow and deliberate. She’ll lift one curving arm out of the water, hand extended, scoop-like, and she’ll bring the arm down, her feet churning steadily behind her and the skirt of her swimsuit trailing in her wake.
Hungry Heart Page 26