Dietland
Page 5
I’d been going to the restaurant every day for a couple weeks when I had an idea. I’d been secretly thinking of ways to pay for the Baptist Plan and wondered if I could use the restaurant to my advantage. I began to go into the kitchen and watch Chef Elsa prep for dinner, expressing interest, asking questions. As I’d hoped, she allowed me to help out, teaching me to chop and sauté. When I asked Delia for a job she agreed, and so for a couple hours a night I worked in the kitchen, where opera played on the radio.
After nearly a month on the job, with school about to let out for the summer, I had enough money to become a Baptist. When I told my mother, we argued. “It’s too radical,” she said. Behind closed doors, I heard her and Delia discussing it. “Be reasonable, Constance. Life isn’t easy for her,” Delia said. I would have gone even without my mother’s permission. I was seventeen years old and she couldn’t stop me.
There was a branch of Baptist Weight Loss near the restaurant, its windows covered in white curtains so no one could see inside. I had passed two health clubs, plus Nutrisystem and Jenny Craig, on my way there, but I wasn’t interested in any of them. The Baptist approach was the right one for me. On the first day of summer vacation, the money from my job in my wallet, I opened the door to the Baptist clinic and was greeted with a life-size portrait of Eulayla Baptist holding up her enormous jeans. Two chimes rang out as I entered, announcing the start of my new life.
With the other new members I was led to a darkened room, where we watched a documentary about Eulayla called Born Again. There was footage of Eulayla as Miss Georgia 1966 and of her competing in the Miss America pageant. After she married and had a baby she gained a lot of weight, which she couldn’t lose. She tried every diet, and even anorexia, but nothing worked long-term. On her child’s fifth birthday, she weighed more than ever. The former beauty queen became suicidally depressed and begged her husband to pay for stomach stapling surgery, but he refused. A neighbor had died after the same procedure and he wouldn’t let Eulayla risk her life.
Allen Baptist, founder of a thriving evangelical church in suburban Atlanta, which he hadn’t been allowed to name The Baptist Church for legal reasons, was devoted to his wife and desperate to help her. He hired his cousin to move in with the family, to cook for Eulayla and make sure she didn’t eat too much. He decided she needed to be completely removed from the world of food. His cousin prepared all of Eulayla’s meals so she didn’t have to shop for food or go into the kitchen. Allen Baptist even took the drastic step of padlocking the refrigerator shut. He kept Eulayla away from restaurants and she stopped socializing with friends and even attending church. Rumors spread around the neighborhood that Eulayla was dead.
After nine months of hell, with Eulayla eating nothing but hardboiled eggs and lean roast beef and cottage cheese with canned peaches, she lost the 115 pounds that had been ruining her life, likening the process to rebirth. That’s when she felt a calling to help others overcome their appetites and realize their full potential, as she had done.1
With her husband’s reluctant support, Eulayla conceived of an idea to start a diet clinic that would provide its patrons with low-calorie shakes, frozen dinners, and a special exercise program. Baptists wouldn’t cook or grocery shop; they wouldn’t think about food at all, except when it was time to drink or heat up their next meal. The first Baptist Weight Loss clinic opened in Atlanta in 1978. By the late 1990s, when I was ready to join, there were more than a thousand branches worldwide.
When the documentary ended and the lights came back on, we waited for the orientation to begin. Meanwhile, the photo-bursting commercials played on a loop.2 There were only women in the group of new members, and several of them were quite slender. I didn’t understand why they were there, but they were all friendly with me, behaving as if we had something in common.3
Our group leader, Gladys, arrived to introduce herself. She was a black woman with an old-fashioned bouffant-style hairdo. She wore pumps that made a squishing sound as she walked. She smiled nonstop as she handed out the binders and Baptist handbooks and laminated cards printed with the Baptist Oath, which we were supposed to put in our wallets and on our refrigerators:
Baptists must treat their bodies like temples. Successful Baptists must incorporate the Three Tenets into their lives. First Tenet: I will not pollute my body with fattening and unhealthy foods. Second Tenet: I will exercise regularly. Third Tenet: I will spread the Baptist message to others.
© Baptist Weight Loss, Inc.
I collected the handouts, cards, and pamphlets and placed them in my shiny new binder, so thrilled to be part of Eulayla’s family. That’s what she called us: a family.
After the meeting was under way, a woman rushed through the door, apologizing for being late and taking a seat next to me in the back row. Janine was tall and bigboned, with cottony blond hair, and her appearance shocked us all, as much as if she’d been naked. She was wearing a radiant dress, floral patterned, with pink tights and boat-size heels on her feet, like Minnie Mouse shoes. None of the other new Baptists were dressed in bright colors, but instead wore the depressing shades of an overcast day. Looking at Janine was like looking directly into the sun.
I wished she hadn’t sat down next to me, since we looked like two Humpty Dumptys seated together. During the part of the meeting where we were supposed to chat with our neighbor, Janine spoke as if the two of us were the same. She even invited me out for coffee after the meeting, but I said I was busy. I had never had a fat friend and I didn’t want one.
Throughout the meeting, Janine spoke up, saying things like, “My whole family is fat and they think dieting is a waste of time.” Gladys shuddered at Janine’s words and continuously corrected her. We learned to say overweight or obese, not fat. We were never to say diet, either, but instead use terms such as the plan, the program, or eating healthily.
Toward the end of the meeting, Gladys handed each of us a booklet with “When I’m Thin . . .™” printed on the cover. There was a photograph of two smiling women carrying shopping bags. Gladys said that we would write in our “When I’m Thin . . .™” journals each week. Inside, at the top of the first page, it said, “When I’m Thin . . .™” and then there were five blank lines underneath with suggested topics such as romance, careers, and fashion. Gladys directed us to close our eyes and imagine ourselves thin. She told us to write down five things that our thin selves would be able to do that our overweight selves couldn’t.
The other women and I began to write, but Janine looked stunned. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said. “I came here to lose a few pounds because of back pain. What kind of sick, self-loathing mindfuck is this?” She was flipping through the booklet, red in the face, breathless from rage.
“Watch your language,” Gladys said. “Baptists do not use vulgarity.”
Janine looked at Gladys, her eyes blazing behind her rhinestone-studded cat glasses. “Are you for real?” She flung her “When I’m Thin™” booklet at Gladys, who seemed terrified, holding up both hands to shield herself. Janine made a door-slamming exit. In her wake there was silence in the room, leaving us to contemplate the departure of the loud, angry woman, disagreeable and huge, what none of us wanted to be.
When it was my turn to meet with Gladys individually, she apologized multiple times for the “unfortunate incident.” “What we’re doing here at the clinic is radical and life affirming,” she said. “We’re taking care of our bodies. People like that woman find this very threatening. She’s like an alcoholic or drug addict, completely in denial. She’ll probably be dead soon.” Gladys seemed to savor the thought.
She gave me a tour of the exercise room, with pink dumbbells bearing the Baptist name scattered on the floor and a woman in a modest leotard leading a group in jumping jacks. In the privacy of her cubicle, Gladys snapped a Polaroid of me and told me to stick it in my binder and bring it to the clinic each week. This was my before picture. She then weighed me and, using a software program developed by Eulayla’s
brother, a computer scientist, calculated that I needed to lose 104 pounds, which would take only nine months on the Baptist Plan. “In nine months, you’ll be looking foxy!” she said, her silver charm bracelet clanking on the keyboard. Gladys made it seem so easy that I wanted to hug her. I would be thin in nine months. Software doesn’t lie. I carried my first week of shakes and frozen dinners home in two shopping bags, puffed up with Gladys’s words of encouragement.
At home, my mother looked on coolly as I put my food away. The six-packs of shakes and the pale pink trays of frozen food filled most of the space in our fridge and freezer. I also had a packet of Baptist Supplements.
“Why do you need these?” My mother examined the pebble-colored tablets.
“Gladys said I have to take one each day.” She’d been emphatic.4
At breakfast and lunch, I drank a foamy peach shake from a can. At dinner, I microwaved my designated meal, then peeled back the silver plastic to reveal beef stew, its chunks of meat and peas floating in a lukewarm bath of brown gravy, or a turkey meatball, like a crusty planet surrounded by red rings of pasta. The meals were small, merely a scoop or two of food, and they seemed to lack a connection to actual foodstuffs; I thought it was possible the “food” was constructed of other elements, like paper and Styrofoam, but I didn’t care, as long as eating it led to thinness.5
My first week as a Baptist, I was filled with energy and motivation. I’d been instructed to avoid people who were eating, those unruly mobs with their knives and forks, but given my job at the restaurant this was impossible. It didn’t matter. I was experiencing transcendence from the grotesque world of mastication and grazing. The sight of people eating made me sick.
Before my shift at the restaurant, I would stop by the Baptist clinic to do aerobics. At work I moved faster than ever. One night I chopped twenty-five onions in record time, leaving Chef Elsa to marvel at my speed. Red peppers, celery, and garlic lay in colorful heaps on my chopping boards. I’d finish early and take on extra projects, such as reorganizing the grain cupboard and alphabetizing the spices.
When I returned home from work one night I was greeted by ten Italian pilgrims sitting in our yard, lighting candles and playing the guitar. I opened the curtains in my bedroom to listen to them sing. They waved and smiled, and I didn’t mind that they were looking at me. Nothing could dampen my mood. I was a jailed girl about to be released from a long sentence.
By the end of the week, I was twelve pounds lighter. Gladys and the other women clucked around me, admiring my shrinking figure.6
In nine months, you’ll be looking foxy!
Like most highs, mine was not to last; as I entered week two, I crashed. If school had been in session, I wouldn’t have made it. I skipped aerobics class and had to force myself to leave the house to go to the restaurant, which I had to do to pay for the Baptist Plan. In Chef Elsa’s kitchen, I became prone to staring off into space without blinking. “Are you sick?” she asked me. The week before I’d been a wind-up toy spinning around furiously; now I had fallen over, silent and still.
I called Gladys. “What’s wrong with me?” I whispered into the phone, too weak to even speak.
“It’s sugar withdrawal. You’re an addict, honey. That poison is leaving your system.”
“But I’m so hungry.”
“I know, sweetie,” said Gladys. Sugar. Honey. Sweetie. Gladys wasn’t helping.
I kept waiting for the horrible feeling to go away, but it didn’t. At night I dreamed about éclairs. Hunger pangs woke me, traveling through my body like the reverberations of a bell. I held my hands over my ears and rolled back and forth in bed, hoping the sensations would go away.
Between meals, I dealt with my hunger by dipping lettuce leaves into mustard (a tip from Gladys), which was practically a zero-calorie snack, about as effective as eating air. Still, it gave me something to chew and swallow. Gladys’s other tips for fighting hunger included doing jumping jacks, even in public places, drinking liters of water, and writing in my food journal:
1. After eating, I feel: Very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, hungry, or starving: starving
2. My mood right now is: Positive, neutral, discouraged, or irritable: positive
3. Today I am thinking about food: Only at mealtimes, occasionally, or constantly: constantly
On the Baptist Plan, I nearly passed out from hunger. Once in the kitchen, I was slicing a bell pepper, but then there were two on my cutting board, then three. They were multiplying. I set down my knife and stumbled backwards, bumping the handle of a skillet on the stove, sending hot oil and scallops crashing to the floor. Elsa insisted I go home, but I went back to my peppers, trying to chop while my hands shook.7
I wanted to stuff myself with the food that surrounded me in the restaurant, but in my mind I pleaded with my hungry self to be sensible. Nicolette’s mother, a Waist Watchers obsessive and borderline anorexic, had a bumper sticker on her car that read NOTHING TASTES AS GOOD AS SKINNY FEELS. I didn’t know how it felt to be skinny, but if I ate the pink trays of food and the packaged snacks and nothing more, I would find out in only nine months. The fact that my misery had an end date, a parole date, kept me going. Once or twice I thought about jumping off the roof of the restaurant, but I kept these fantasies to myself.
When I returned to the house on Harper Lane after work, I ate my dinner quickly and crawled into bed, since being awake was torturous. In the morning I would try to soothe myself with a hot shower, but I grew increasingly worried as the drain filled with clumps of my hair.
At the Baptist clinic, Gladys would say, “You must have been good this week!”8 She and the other women were interested in my progress, pulling up my shirt to get a better look at my hips and tummy. The weigh-in was the highlight of my week. I was good for a whole month and lost twenty-nine pounds.
When July came, my father sent my yearly airline ticket, Los Angeles to Boise, but I told him I couldn’t visit. There was no way for me to transport my Baptist frozen meals, and I couldn’t eat normal food. “You’re not coming to visit me because of a diet?”
“I can’t, Daddy. You’ll be proud of me when this is finished, I promise.” I was his only child. He had married again, but his new wife couldn’t have children, so I was his only hope for grandkids. If I was fat, no one would want to marry me. I wanted to tell him this, to explain that this wasn’t just a diet, that everything in my future and his depended on it, but I couldn’t say the words.
With my summer cleared of all obligations except for my job at the restaurant, I spent most of my time alone at home. When I went out, I didn’t have the energy to care if people took photographs of me. Nicolette invited me to the mall and to movies, but I couldn’t be surrounded by such fattening food. Every evening at the restaurant I was exposed to non-Baptist food, and those were the worst two hours of my day.
In our weekly meetings, Gladys expressed her worries about my job. “You need to separate yourself from temptation, Miss Kettle.”
“If I don’t work at the restaurant I can’t afford to be a Baptist.”
“Well, we don’t want that,” Gladys said. There was a newspaper on her desk and she began to look through the classifieds to help me find a job that didn’t involve food. “Here’s an ad for a dog walker.”
“I don’t have the energy to walk.”
“Babysitting?”
I imagined being passed out from hunger on the kitchen floor and a toddler with a phone, trying to dial 911.
“No, I’m better off at the restaurant. I can handle it.”
Except that I couldn’t. One evening I had to stir a massive pot of macaroni and cheese, then serve it up on plates for thirty-four children celebrating a birthday. There must have been thousands of pasta tubes in the pot, glistening in the gluey cheese. The intoxicating smell filled my nose and my mouth, even penetrating my brain and wrapping its orange tentacles around every conscious thought. Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, that’s what I told myself. I wondered how m
any calories were in the pot. A hundred thousand? A million? The thought was repulsive.
When the plates came back to the kitchen, a few of them were scraped clean, but there were many with lumps of macaroni and cheese stuck to them. A few of the plates looked as if they hadn’t been touched. The dishes were lined on the counter, waiting for Luis to clean them, but he had gone out back for a smoke.
I paced in front of the plates, looking around to see if anyone was watching me. With my fingers I scooped up some of the pasta tubes and placed them on my tongue. It was the first real food I’d had in more than a month. The texture was different, like cashmere instead of a scratchy polyester.
After the initial moments of bliss, the gravity of what I was doing began to spread over me in a feverish heat. I ran to the bathroom and spit the glob of food into the toilet, my eyes filling with tears. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Gladys had given me pamphlets on every eventuality: Dieting After the Death of a Loved One and The Dangers of Carnivals, Circuses, and Fairs. I had piles of these pamphlets, but they hadn’t been powerful enough to restrain me against the siren song of pasta and melted cheese. In the face of that, I decided I’d done well. I hadn’t even swallowed.
I started wanting to call in sick to work. I was sick, or at least I felt that way practically every moment of the day, but I couldn’t admit it. That would have given my mother a sense of satisfaction. If I told her how I felt she would try to ban me from Baptist Weight Loss. I began to worry about what would happen when school started and whether my grades would suffer, but I decided that I wouldn’t think that far ahead.
At work I continued to pick scraps off plates, delighting in the taste and then spitting the food out in the toilet or into a paper towel. Sometimes, though, when Luis was in the alley, I’d eat a few french fries off dirty plates, chewing and then swallowing. Just a few in my belly eased the pain in my head.