Big Brother (23 page)
I
more than anyone appreciated that Edison’s weight loss was gradual, since together we faced the sentinel beside the picture window every morning at nine a.m.—recording the verdicts with a fine black roller-ball on a monthly calendar hanging alongside. The reduction wasn’t, oddly, systematic; he would stall for a couple of days in dismay, only to drop three pounds at once. Yet the process was gruelingly sluggish, and as my brother came off the steep slope of his first few weeks his progress slowed further. After losing thirty-nine pounds the first month, Edison couldn’t help but have calculated that he would therefore drop all 223 pounds in half a year. Wrong. Fat itself requires calories to maintain, so you burn less energy as you get thinner. “It’s an algorithm,” I’d explained. But Edison had never been good at math.
Despite the paint-drying languor of the exercise, my experience of finally recognizing the brother I grew up with was bizarrely sudden.
One late Saturday afternoon in March, I’d made another trip to Hy-Vee for toilet paper and tea. Edison had stayed behind to play the piano, at which he was seated when I walked in. Cutting a warmer, springier slant through the blinds, sun shafted across Edison’s head, flashing on cheeks whose high bones were once the defining structure of his face. In concert with the wild, irradiated hair, those hillocks rising over concave hollows had helped to explain why so many of my junior high girlfriends were eager to drop by our house in Tujunga Hills—in the hopes that my loping, too-cool-for-school older brother with his low-slung jeans and collar open to the sternum would nod hello in the hall.
Ever since this imposter of a brother had hulked into Cedar Rapids Airport, Edison’s cheekbones had been buried like stones in plums. While I had of course taught myself to recognize my own sibling again, in truth I had not been recognizing the brother I knew in childhood. I had instead trained myself to recognize a completely different person who by sheer coincidence went by the same offbeat name.
Yet in that moment, lusty spring sunlight unearthed his cheekbones like the treasures of an archaeological dig. The flesh below them sank in shadow, while the curdle of concentration in my brother’s forehead finally formed sharp creases rather than rippled blobs. And I saw him. I saw Edison, the Edison I remembered. It was as if the man with whom I had in reality cohabited for months now had only just been restored to me after many years of having gone to ground. Unable to contain myself, I exclaimed nonsensically, “It’s you, I see you!”
Edison looked up quizzically from a chord in one of Cody’s favorites, the Roches’ “Quitting Time.” “Cool,” he said uncertainly. “Glad I’m still three-dimensional.”
I came up behind him and hugged. Firmer shoulders stirred earlier memories of being carted on his back, swung easily to the couch. Never had I dreamed that the brother I grew up with would get fat. I’d persistently failed to get my head around why that seemed so important. I’d tried to latch on to the health implications of obesity, but I knew better; I hadn’t embarked on this project purely to ward off diabetes. I wanted my big brother back.
“I’m so proud of you,” I said.
“Least I can be famous for something. Though from the shows I seen on TV, babe, I got wicked competition even in the I-used-to-be-a-load game.”
“You are now in the top tier of what has become the national sport.”
“Not through to the finals yet.” Any suggestion that it was smooth sailing from here on in, that he could coast, or even cheat a bit, was anathema. Every day was hard; there was no such thing as “only” having to lose 124 more pounds.
“You’ve read the literature,” I ventured. “So you know they strongly recommend that you come off the diet after three months—”
“No.”
“Just for a week. Eating very carefully and healthfully—”
“NO.”
“But then you can go right back to it!”
“What part of ‘no’ did you not understand?”
“That’s become an awful cliché.”
“Imagine my giving a shit.”
Having myself labeled his tendencies “extreme,” I’d delayed raising the issue of the prescribed breather until two weeks past the deadline, because I knew what he’d say. Unclear on the risks of violating the program’s rules, I’d not bothered to research them because I was certain to face a brick wall regardless. If Edison had an “addictive personality,” he was now addicted to Upchuck.
O
liver Allbless was my tech guru. When my computer spat error messages or I needed to password my router, I called Oliver. I’d first hired him to help with prep early in the Breadbasket days, when he’d needed some extra cash while earning his engineering degree at the University of Iowa. Somewhere in there we went out for about six months, and when I concluded that my feelings for him were a little too round, too muffled—too mild and edgeless, without some crucial sharpness, tension, or resistance that I later found in surplus with Fletcher—he accepted the rejection with the same natural equanimity that had probably fostered my edgeless feelings in the first place. We’d been friends ever since. As the technological demands of modern life continued to accelerate, for a while I’d started to feel guilty that I called him too often just to sort out yet another crisis with my printer. I didn’t want him to feel used, even if Oliver liked being of practical value. When I put him on retainer at Baby Monotonous, at least he got something out of being on call, though he’d protested that he’d have advised me on updating pull-string doll technology for nothing. If Oliver was still sweet on me—the gangling, endearingly awkward telecom employee had never married—I was accustomed to it, and so was he. It was remotely possible that I was the love of his life, though for his sake I hoped not.
When Baby Monotonous took off, Oliver was far more excited than I was. Regarding my subsequent project, my best friend was still reserved. Obliging about being used himself, he was sensitive to any suggestion that Edison might be taking advantage of my good nature. After I’d explained the parameters of our regimen, Oliver had spent hours researching Big Presents in Small Packages, making sure there were no horror stories lurking online. I was married, firmly so, and I’d planted no reasonable expectation that this would change, so his assumption of the role of guardian angel in my life sprang from a selflessness so pure that it passed my understanding. The sole concern he’d allowed himself to express once I assumed residence in Prague Porches was that the arrangement might alienate Fletcher.
We were having trouble with string retraction in a batch of digital mechanisms—we’d had a few returns, which was a first—and I’d asked Oliver to stop by to diagnose the problem. As he took a malfunctioning doll apart, he kept peering up at me, and his screwdriver would freeze for a second. Before he left he asked, “Got time for a drink, or whatever you call an excuse to talk on that kooky diet?”
“Maybe, but let me check with Edison.”
“You have to get permission from your
brother
?”
“We usually ride home together,” I said coolly. Now that the weather had warmed, I’d had Cody bring my bicycle by, and I’d bought a mountain bike so Edison and I could commute in tandem.
“No prob,” said my brother as he completed the stitching on a miniature Macintosh. “I’ll hold off on ‘dinner’ till you get home.”
I wheeled the bike beside Oliver to a nearby diner, where I reflexively ordered a soda water with lime. Though he’d avoided eating around me for coming up on four months, this time Oliver ordered a triple-decker BLT with fries. “Here,” he offered, holding out a quarter of his sandwich. “Have some.”
I recoiled. “You know I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I never cheat. It’s been quite a discovery—that it’s easier to be perfect than only a little bad. I’m starting to see the attraction of monasteries. It’s less of a strain to be a full-fledged saint than a small-fry sinner.”
“Eating isn’t a sin. It’s what mammals do to survive.”
“Apparently it’s unnecessary,” I said lightly. “Another discovery.”
Oliver put down the sandwich gravely. “What do you weigh?”
I busied myself pouring artificial sweetener into my soda water. The ceaseless nickel flavor leaking from my gums got on my nerves, and I’d try anything to mask it. “You’re never supposed to ask women that.”
“All right, let’s start with this: How much did you weigh to begin with?”
“To my horror, I’d hit one-sixty-eight, and that was after four days of starvation. Hilariously, I’m still keeping it secret from Fletcher how bad it had gotten, when it wouldn’t have been a secret at all because he could
see
it—”
“And how much have you lost?” he cut me off.
Oliver’s impatience surprised me. Teasing out the finer dynamics of my marriage was a mainstay of our friendship. “That’s a trick question,” I said. But he knew I wouldn’t be able to resist the opportunity to brag. “Fifty-two pounds, if you must know. Closer to fifty-four, with what I dropped before I marshaled the nerve to—”
“When was the last time you weighed this little?”
I said quietly, “When I was fifteen.”
“This has
got
to
stop
.”
“Well, I realize that pretty soon—”
“Stop
now
. I read that Big Presents website. It’s been four months, and you were supposed to come off the envelopes for at least a week after three. Did you?”
“I couldn’t get Edison to take a break. He’s afraid—”
“Even Edison has to return to the land of the eating eventually, and then he’s got to learn how to have normal-size portions and quit. You said being ‘perfect’ is easier than sinning. But that’s one disturbed version of perfection you’ve got, Pandora. Perfect is eating what you need, no more, and no
less
, either.”
“That’s easy for you to say. Not everybody has your metabolism.” Oliver was one of those rarities who ate whatever he felt like, yet whose elongated dimensions hadn’t varied noticeably since he was eighteen. The only thing the even keel cost him was any comprehension of everyone else.
“Your concentration sucks. When I tried to explain what was going wrong with the retraction mechanisms, I could tell you weren’t taking anything in. I doubt you could recapitulate what I told you if your life depended on it.”
Declining to take his little test, I wrapped my coat more tightly around me. The gesture was defensive, though I was also cold.
“That’s another thing.” He pointed at the down jacket that I would usually have retired with the advent of spring. “I’m sure you don’t realize it, but it’s
hot
in here. Overheated—just like Baby Monotonous. You’ve jacked up the thermostat. It’s in the forties outside, and your employees are coming to work in short sleeves.”
“Big deal, I get chilly.”
“You look small in every sense. Timid as well as skinny. Your hair is flat and dry. Your clothes hang off you as if they’re hooked on a hat rack. Your face looks older by five years. Your skin is gray—you have the complexion of a sidewalk. And you’re weak. Just going up the few steps to this diner, you had to grip the railing and pull.”
The way he described me didn’t jibe with my experience of my newly buoyant, featherweight body in the slightest. I felt as if any day now I’d be able to fly. He wasn’t being fair, and he was trying to take something from me. To rob me of something priceless and private and mine.
Oliver threw up his hands. “You’ve always been so levelheaded! Now you’ve turned into a nut! It’s this starvation thing. You’re not thinking straight anymore. And
because
you’re not thinking straight, you don’t
know
you’re not thinking straight. You told me at the outset that, of course, of course, you’d have to return to real food way before your brother did. Now you’ve forgotten all about that. You just said you’ve discovered eating is ‘unnecessary,’ and maybe you said that as a joke, but it’s not a joke. You believe it.”
“I was planning to come off the envelopes when Edison and I were both supposed to eat solid food at the three-month mark.” I tried to sound moderate and self-possessed, although these were qualities that in the past I’d never needed to feign. “But when he refused . . . the natural juncture was lost.”
“When you miss the turnoff for New Holland on the interstate, you reverse direction at the next exit; you don’t keep driving until you reach California. You’ve turned into, I don’t know, a junkie. You actually look strung out.”
“Edison’s the junkie,” I said quickly. “I’m not the type.”
“All right, prove it, then.” He snagged our passing waitress. “Miss! My friend would like . . . a bowl of soup. Tomato soup.”
“Don’t!” I panicked. “I can’t!”
“Bring the soup,” he contradicted brutally, and this pushiness was wildly unlike him. Oliver was a retiring, genial, smart man whom I enjoyed bouncing ideas off of because he always agreed with me. “Now,
why
can’t you?”
“I’m not ready,” I stalled.
“You’re past ready. You’ve gone off the goddamned deep end.”
I was powerfully resistant to this depiction. Edison had the “addictive personality.” Edison was the one with the problems. I was plain: white rice. Surely my very dullness inoculated me against getting too weird or doing anything dumb. I didn’t have the flair for an eating disorder.
The soup arrived. The waitress looked between us and, not wanting to get involved, placed it mid-table. Oliver shoved it before me. The smell made me giddy. I was accustomed to swooning at aromas, but not to this proximity of contraband, which triggered such anxiety that my heart raced. I looked down. The pinkish soup was canned, and probably full of sugar. It was appetizing and disgusting at the same time. I poked the croutons to the sides with my spoon, like sending ships to port. Even sitting in front of this muck seemed like perfidy.
“You know I don’t even get to eat in my dreams?” I said meekly. “I dream about food all the time. But it’s always taken away, or I look at it with my lips pressed. In fact, I have a recurrent nightmare in which I’m sitting at a table and I put a bite of something in my mouth and start to chew. In the dream, I’ve simply forgotten, been absentminded, let my guard down. I always catch myself before I swallow and spit it out.”
“What you’re describing is mentally ill. Now put some soup on the spoon.”
I folded my arms. “After we’ve talked about it so much, I’m surprised you don’t appreciate the profundity of the pledge between me and Edison. Eating behind his back would be treachery. Of the worst order.”
“Destroying your health is betraying yourself. For now, Edison doesn’t have to know.”
“But—there’s no ceremony!” For I had dwelt on such a moment for months. I knew there were rules about how to come off a liquid diet—rules that, as Oliver knew, this soup adhered to—but within those limits I had contrived a variety of sumptuous dishes with which I might finally break my fast, like a cool vichyssoise spiked with mint and a squeeze of lemon. A thimbleful of sprightly white wine, poured in an elegant glass purchased for the occasion. I didn’t even
like
canned tomato soup.
“We’re not in church,” said Oliver. “Ever since we sat down you’ve been listing back and forth as if you’re about to black out. What you’re doing is medically dangerous. If you don’t finish that soup, I swear I will haul you to the hospital.”
I pooled the puree in the spoon, lifted it to eye level, and stared it down like hemlock. Those nightmares rushed into my head, the ones from which I had often woken in a cold sweat, lest I swallow even a phantom of
solid food
. This single mouthful frightened me. And maybe that’s what did the trick.
It frightened me that it frightened me.
I finished the soup.
O
n return to Prague Porches that night, I prattled when all I really wanted to do was dive for the bathroom to brush my teeth. I feared Edison would hear the scrubbing sound, and I wouldn’t usually wash up before our nightly Upchucks. So I bolted mine in the kitchen, hopeful that the malt flavoring would mask the soup. Since I hadn’t been able to resist the pleasingly half-soggy, half-crisp croutons bobbing on the edge of my bowl, I had officially crossed the line and imbibed solid food.
I didn’t only feel traitorous. I felt exiled, ejected from Eden, an eternally pristine garden where Eve is forever unsullied by eating the apple because she doesn’t eat anything. From the first book of the Bible, food correlates with evil, and I felt contaminated. Demoted to one more schlub who has to decide whether to have a second cookie, I wasn’t special anymore, and here I was the one who’d chided Edison for his dependence on feeling elect. I had destroyed a perfect record, and were I ever again to exceed my personal best in starvation I’d be obliged to start back on Day One—reliving that first awful, gnawing twenty-four hours of choosing furniture when all I’d really wanted to buy was a sandwich.
Desolate, I begged off Scrabble and went to bed early, claiming I was tired, though in truth I was battling nausea. Once I lay down, I scrutinized a sensation I’d not felt for so long that at first I hadn’t recognized it. I wasn’t about to throw up. I was hungry.
W
hat I remember most about return to solids was disappointment. I’d built up proper meals into such bliss that once I started eating again I found food bewilderingly commonplace. Lo, I’d been eating all my life, and I knew what it was like. I’d been looking forward to it the way you were meant to look forward to falling in love or having your first child. But a chicken breast was a chicken breast. It didn’t take long to polish off, and whether it was dressed up with a little pesto or Thai curry sauce was neither here nor there. No meal no matter how nicely prepared would resolve what to do with your life on either side of chow.
More shockingly still, this ho-hum experience extended to being thin, which I had elevated to the rebirth and transformation that all the Jesus people in Iowa promoted through prayer. Oh, once my energy returned I relished the lightness, being able to sprint for the car before the meter ran out and not get out of breath. And, sure, at first it had been exciting to watch the lumps that had attached to me like bloodsucking parasites gradually loosen their grip and melt away to whatever cave they’d crawled from. But during the years I’d put on weight I’d trained myself to turn a blind eye to these expansions; only when I lost the weight had I truly noticed it in the first place.