Waisted

by Randy Susan Meyers

  “And now they belong to you. These boots have hard-hitting magic.” She put a finger to her lips, squinted, and then chose a different sweater from a short pile. “Here. Get behind the curtain. When you come out, I expect a Valkyrie to emerge.”

  Daphne drew the curtain closed and pulled on the soft tank. Hanro cotton, smooth as silk, but without the shivery silk sensation that became unsettling in winter. The sweater color was an unusual choice to wear with pink. Deep russet, with flecks of gold and amber mixed in with the dark orange-red.

  She slipped into Ivy’s still warm boots and stood before the mirror. Unbelieving. For years, Daphne chose her clothes using two parameters: that they (1) be roomy, yet (2) come in the smallest possible size.

  Now she saw someone completely different. The crossover top defined her body modestly but not with shame. The soft pink peeking out lifted the spirit of the deep-colored sweater that slouched at the perfect point above her hips.

  Wearing the black corduroys and boots, she appeared defiant.

  She left the mirrored alcove and twirled. “I’m a new woman. You made me who I always wanted to be.”

  “Not true.” Ivy took Daphne’s arm and slipped on a copper bangle. “I only brought out who you could always be. Whatever you weighed.”

  Daphne ignored Ivy’s words. She stared, seeing this woman she might like.

  TIP: Girls of all kinds can be beautiful—from the thin, plus-sized, short, very tall, ebony- to porcelain-skinned; the quirky, clumsy, shy, outgoing and all in between. It’s not easy, though, because many people still put beauty into a confining, narrow box. Think outside of the box . . . Pledge that you will look in the mirror and find the unique beauty in you.

  —Tyra Banks

  TRUTH: What she said.

  Alice must have written quite a press release. A throng mobbed Alchemy’s waiting room. The sizable space, airy and filled with light, became hot and crowded. Cameras flashed as reporters and photographers jostled for the best angle.

  “Okay, folks!” Gabe almost shouted. “We’ll take questions now. Back up so we can get into position.”

  “How long do you think they’ll grill us?” Hania posed the question to Alice, their chosen coordinator.

  “I told Gabe to chase them out in forty-five minutes or less.”

  Daphne doubted he’d stick to that vow. Her son fancied himself a newly hatched muckraking filmmaker.

  “One more shot!” a photographer from People yelled. “Get closer, ladies!”

  People.

  They formed a ragged group, each trying to stand behind the other. Alice, being the tallest, won the prize and had her hips and thighs blocked partially by the others. Daphne remembered the lessons she learned from years of making actors shine. She stood straight. Lifted her neck high into the air, brought her head well above her shoulders, and stuck her chin out, but not up.

  In person, the pose looked ridiculous. In pictures, double chins disappeared.

  “Get to the mikes, ladies,” Gabe instructed.

  Daphne tried not to smile as though her son were a precocious ten-year-old. The first question shot out.

  “Harry Oaks, Boston Globe. When did you realize that the entire program was a sham?”

  Alice took it. “The initial shock of our treatment overwhelmed any thoughts of malfeasance.” She tugged at the cherry-red cardigan she wore over a fitted black dress. The stack-heeled boots seemed to bring Alice to six feet. “When they started feeding us drugs, we understood the danger of our situation.”

  “Was your plan to escape the first thing you thought about when, as you said, it became weird?” The reporter from Channel 7 didn’t offer her name. “Or was your goal to see what was going on and steal the footage?”

  Daphne leaned toward the mike. “At first, our only thought was to find a computer or phone. They took all our electronics the first day. I planned to contact my husband about the pills they gave us. To see if they were safe. He’s a doctor,” she added. “When we saw the footage, it changed everything.”

  “Gretchen Henderson, Boston Herald. Why didn’t you confront them instead of running away?”

  Daphne contemplated how to put across the sheer terror under which they lived. How rapidly humiliation, shame, and having one’s rights and individuality removed led to powerlessness.

  “I’ll answer that,” Hania said. “They made scared fools of us. They played on every one of our fears, and drummed into us, morning, noon, and night, that we were pathetic. That we had nobody to blame for our bodies but ourselves. That we’d never truly be loved. They worked to convince us that they were our only hope.”

  “So they frightened you?” the Herald reporter followed up.

  “That’s too simplistic an analysis,” Alice said. “They didn’t frighten us because they were strong, and we were weak. They worked it hard. They set out to humiliate us, overwork us, and embarrass us—and make us into creatures. Perhaps using techniques from prisoner of war manuals. Their goal was most decidedly not to help us become thinner or healthier—their purported mission. Or to explore what it means to be overweight for a woman in America. Their objective for this project? Documenting how far women would go to lose weight. How demeaned we’d become before we said stop—or if we ever did.”

  “But didn’t you, in fact, lose weight?” The reporter appeared to have last eaten at Halloween. “So, in fact, didn’t they do what they said?”

  Gabe stepped up to the mike, waving back the women. He took a brochure from his back pocket and unfolded it. “This is the literature that Acrobat sent to every woman applying to participate in its weight loss program and documentary:

  “You, like too many women across America, judge your worth by your dress size, by the numbers you see on the scale, and by the jeans into which you can fit. When was the last time that you based your value on your humanity? Your talents? Your ability to soothe a child’s tears, write a book, or compose a song?

  “When did you last bake a cake for your family without fear or go out for dinner and not worry about every calorie you ingested?

  “Waisted is looking at the ‘why’ in that equation. Can a woman lose weight—for her health, for the fashion statement she chooses to make, without, in fact, losing her dignity and her commitment to herself?

  “Our backers, so committed to this project, will match your monthly salary so that no woman is turned away because she can’t afford to miss a paycheck.

  “Those joining us in the green hills of Vermont will be afforded the unique opportunity to spend an entire month exploring ways to bring themselves into balance.

  “Respect. Health. Mindfulness. We believe by bringing these values to the forefront, women will have the opportunity to choose exactly who they want to be for just the right reason.”

  Gabe nodded at the reporter. “Does that sound like these women were prepared for what would face them? Does it sound like they expected to face ridicule?”

  Hania stepped forward. “If you watch the video, you’ll hear those same words. They are also on our website: www.waistedthevideo.com.”

  Alice and Daphne joined her, and the three held hands. Alice bent her head to the microphone. “Thanks for—”

  “Just one more question. Jules Godfrey, Boston Globe. I’m directing this to you, Ms. Thompson.”

  Alice crossed her arms over her chest. Jules Godfrey reviewed films. “Yes?”

  “Your husband. Clancy Rivera?” He waited for Alice to acknowledge that this was indeed her husband. She remained quiet, waiting for the question.

  “Mr. Rivera, like Mr. Rhyner at Acrobat Films, is a documentary filmmaker. His company, Prior Productions, is well known. How does your husband feel about you attacking Mr. Rhyner—someone in the same field as himself—and his project?”

  CHAPTER 29

  * * *

  ALICE

  Clancy interrogated Alice for weeks following the press conference, throwing around words such as loyalty and rationality. Just when she th
ought he’d calmed down, another explosion came, like this morning when getting Libby to preschool peacefully was all she wanted.

  “Do you realize how this reflects on me?” Clancy paced the kitchen as Alice whisked eggs in a copper bowl.

  “What’s ‘reflect’?” Libby asked. “Like in a mirror?”

  “Yes, very much like that. For instance, reflect means to see one’s image in something else. Like Daddy thinks that what I’m doing makes him—”

  Alice stopped. How bad had her marriage become that she was sending messages through Libby? “Makes him think about his work,” she finished.

  Clancy jumped in. “What Mommy means is that I am thinking about her and my job,” he said. “How they are colliding. Sometimes people have to be careful when things collide.”

  “Careful about what?” Libby wrinkled her nose, wrestling with Alice’s and Clancy’s multiple messages. “Collides how?”

  Alice waited for his answer as she stirred the pancake batter. Good angel syrup and bad angel syrup waited on the counter. The chemically sweetened nonsugar Mrs. Butterworth’s smirked at her, all holier than thou, while the sugar-packed Vermont Maid winked with a come-hither smile.

  “Daddy means that he and I have different times our work needs to be done, and our schedules don’t always match.”

  “What does that mean?” Libby’s exasperated tone might have been lifted straight from Alice’s voice box. “I don’t understand. Why do your works need to match?”

  Sometimes small-crafted avoidances ended up strangling one’s intentions, so, in the interest of the greater good—Alice convinced herself—one reached deep for a big fat lie. “To be sure that you and your schedule are number one. Who picks you up and drops you off?”

  “Do you want blueberry or banana pancakes?” Clancy shared Bebe’s tendency to ensure something healthy went into every dish served. Once Alice resented the habit, but now she imagined the fruit pushing out the flour and sugar. Go, produce!

  Libby, sensing her parents’ desire to nudge her off the topic, pushed her advantage. “No fruit. Chocolate chips! Like Uncle Macon uses.”

  Clancy’s brain clicked—thoughts showing on his face—weighing Libby’s future obesity against a fast way out of his stupidity in communicating with Alice through Libby. “I have an idea,” he said. “I’ll make a raisin-and-nut face on the first pancake.”

  “Grandma and Zayde say raisins are fruit with the freshness taken out and the sugar left in.”

  Her family was insane. Libby’s fate glowed from the future: circus-lady fat or nail thin. Alice grabbed a step stool and reached to the very top shelf of the cabinet, where she hid everything tasty—from herself—and brought down a dull-brown tin decorated with wreaths.

  “Chocolate chips.” She pried open the lid and poured a ridiculous amount into the entire bowl of batter. Clancy would hate them, and Alice found such cloying sweetness sickening, but they’d manage to choke down the pancakes. Sometimes the idea of sweet meant more than the reality.

  Clancy’s expression told her everything she needed to know. The moment he returned to the car after dropping off Libby, tamped-down rage from breakfast bubbled from his eyes, the set of his mouth, and, somehow, even the way he jammed the keys into the ignition.

  “You need to kill that article in People. You can’t talk to them.”

  “Don’t you mean, ‘Thank goodness you’re shining the light on Acrobat’s evil empire?’ What happened to your rants against them? You’re the one who said that they turned documentary filmmaking into crass ‘gotcha’ movies. Have you changed your mind?”

  There’s something you should know. About the People interview. That’s what she should have said.

  Steam puffed from Clancy’s mouth. His clouds of breath in the January temperature looked like fury drawn in cartoon shape. “Stop insulting me. How do you think it looks that my wife, my damn wife, is the one who uncovers Marcus’s ugliness? Making it seem like either I sent you to do it, or that I twiddled my thumbs while you walked into the belly of the beast.”

  She threw back her head against the headrest, disassociating as she waited for her husband to leave the car and head to the train station.

  • • •

  The Cobb’s main floor was quiet and empty except for a senior exercise program. The Tuesday Ladies in Their Eighties bumped their hips to an old Chaka Khan song, with one particularly perky woman shaking extra hard, winking at the two old men sitting in the stands. Did it never end?

  She slipped into her office and pulled up the email she’d sent to the People reporter in response to her questions. The past two weeks, she’d used magical thinking and counted on the unlikeliness that the magazine would use all the information sent by her, Hania, and Daphne. This morning, she faced the truth. Squeezing her eyes shut against the oncoming train wreck was hardly a plan to save her marriage.

  Now, rereading what she had written, the anger in the response blazed from the computer.

  Dear Karen,

  Here are the answers to your (so thoughtful) questions.

  She squirmed reading how she sucked up to the reporter. Did everyone get so googly-eyed at the idea of appearing in People? Perhaps even murderers stood straighter at the thought. Probably particularly murderers.

  She scrolled through her blah-blah-blah about self-image, and so forth. At least she hadn’t written about her marriage. Some wisdom or vanity kept her from telling the entire world that her husband slept with her less, so she ran away to a weight loss farm.

  In answer to your question “What next?” and how the experience impacted my future, here you go:

  My husband’s next film follows Brazilian street children. He’s doing a spectacular job. I’m in awe of the footage I’ve seen.

  So far, no problem.

  However . . .

  And here it came.

  However, I was disappointed by one massive gap in his research.

  She had to say massive, right? Why not just leave gap be?

  Sex slavery. While there is an incredible dive into the economic conditions that lead to the problem of homelessness, poverty, violence, substance abuse—even the soul-sucking definition of the nomenclature “street children”—Prior Productions is brilliant here—I felt as though I stared down a maw of missing information when I looked at the early footage.

  And yes, in answer to your unasked question, I did address this with him. He broke my heart with his answer: “That is a different movie, Alice.” As though one could ever separate sexual assault, misogyny, and domestic violence from the root causes of why children end up living on the street.

  This led me

  Oh, there she went, diving straight into self-righteousness. Thanks, Mom.

  This led to my own work in the Cobb Community Center. What was I missing? How did the growing war on women impact the girls in my care?

  Thus was born my next project: helping young girls, from the earliest of ages, learn to define themselves in the face of misogyny and with empowerment.

  Three things became apparent upon reading this. 1. She liked the program she proposed. 2. If People published her words, her marriage was over. 3. She’d been cruel to Clancy.

  Everything she’d written would drive Clancy to the edge.

  But why fight for a marriage where her ideas—even ideas that walked out of his work—enraged her husband?

  Bullshit. What kind of woman berated her husband through a national magazine?

  But where was his marital loyalty when he denied the trauma of Waisted?

  The strands one needed to separate when contemplating the end of a marriage resembled untangling fine gold chains. One moment you had your hand flattening out and holding down a dozen reasons why you should leave:

  How being appreciated or condemned made or broke your day.

  The secret eating you did to stay married.

  The bingeing.

  The fear that both will return.

  The idea of living your entir
e life clutching your reality close enough to hide.

  Raising a daughter in an atmosphere where beauty is translated as love.

  Having joy squeezed from your life.

  Being trapped in cold steel.

  Feeling you had to earn every hug.

  Envying your parents’ relationship.

  Turning your passion from your husband to your work and daughter.

  Weighing every decision in life against Clancy’s lips pursing or smiling.

  And then, like last Sunday, all reasons to leave disappeared. Sometimes all it took to slap her to the other side was an ice-skating session on the Frog Pond. Seven of them rode the train to Boston Common, holding hands, laughing, and ignoring the usual double takes, stares, and concerted efforts folks made to seem extra-approving that accompanied their public outings as a mixed family: her and Clancy; her parents; Macon and his girlfriend, whose red curls rivaled Daphne’s; and Libby, a blend of every corner of the world.

  When they rented skates, Clancy took charge, writing sizes on his ever-present reporter’s pad, paying the most serious of attention to outfitting the family. As Macon and Red skated away with Libby between them, Clancy, the best skater in the group, reached his hand out for Bebe’s.

  Bebe, known for her clumsiness as well as her stubbornness, frightened them whenever she stood on ladders, held tools in her hands, and, most certainly when she walked, much less skated, near icy areas. Still, she insisted that her childhood skating in Manhattan’s Wollman Rink prepared her for moves worthy of Nancy Kwan.

  Knowing Bebe’s treacherous tendencies to charge ahead, Clancy always chose her as his skating partner. He locked her in a tight hold, and then spun her out and back. In a miracle of Clancy’s physical and creative strength, Bebe appeared to be floating on air as though she was once again the girl from Brooklyn fighting against her limits. Whether she believed that her talents added in any way to their smooth trips around the frozen Frog Pond, Alice didn’t know, but the pairing worked.

  Love for Clancy rushed back. Anger had driven joyful memories underground and brushed away present goodness when it appeared. At that moment, reasons to stay overcame thoughts of separation. She questioned her reality and wondered if she trusted any decisions. She had been the one to stick her finger down her throat. Weakness and gluttony had been her choice, right?