Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (20 page)

It was full. Not rotund, thank God, but even when I sucked in a bit, I couldn’t carve out that valley between my ribs. It was flat and even, filled with the dinner I’d just finished—fat fool that I was.

Right there is where it happened; I went rogue. My mind went running scared down an old, familiar rabbit hole, and I chased it all the way.

I knew weight loss was not,
could
not be my goal. But wasn’t it? Really? At some point, eventually? Eventually slash soon??

Yah
, John2John chimed in.
Yr lookn pretty fat n stuppid.

But I’m trying something new. No shortcuts. Long-term. Mindfulness and stuff.

Whtvr, looser. C u at Wendys!

The next few days didn’t look all that different. With my brain off and running without me, I wasn’t able to see that something had changed. For three months my eating had been filled with variety: braised cabbage one day and a BLT the next. I’d been knee-deep in food exploration, relearning my own preferences, and everything was allowed—encouraged, even. But, while I’d made those choices with curiosity and excitement, I now made them with a sense of simmering anxiety. Didn’t I
crave
this fat-free spinach salad for lunch? Probably. It would make me feel good and calm. Didn’t
that
count as eating intuitively, too? I probably didn’t need that bread on the side, but somehow I was eating it. Why? (
Becuz you an idiot. U nevr new how to eat right n u still dont. Only differnce now is everyones watchin u.
) It didn’t feel like I was back on a diet. It felt like I was cheating on a diet, every day.

The holidays began to creep up. First laundry, now national holidays? I could not catch a
break
. Once, I’d been a Christmas fanatic who lightly salted batches of homemade toffee and blasted Mariah Carey so loudly that my cat would hide under the bed. Now I was one of those people upon whom the holidays “crept up.” And there was one reason. Odds are, it’s your reason, too. Mom.

It had been almost a full year since I had seen or heard from her. We’d had brief stretches of silence before. When I was in boarding school, some tense little telephone argument might keep me up all night for a week, stewing and refusing to be the one to call her and make up. Inevitably, I was, often sobbing for forgiveness while Mom had already forgotten the whole thing. I’d been waiting by the phone like a loser, in awe of her ability to not talk to me, and knowing I had no such stamina. In fact, she just hadn’t called because she hadn’t had a reason to call me.

But the fight we’d had last February was different.

Ever since that day on the porch when I’d told her about William, the truth had lurked silently beneath us like a tenuous fault line. It had taken months, but eventually she’d acknowledged the conversation. She’d even come to my therapist’s office once, all apologies and woeful regret, refusing my forgiveness before I’d even offered. But the apology didn’t stick. Weeks after that therapy session, she’d combusted with rage at my mention of William’s name: “You just
love
to throw that in my face. Don’t worry, I already hate myself even more than you hate me. Oh yes, you do.”

Talking about it openly with my friends had eased the sting of her response. But I had to be cautious. There was an unspoken condition between Mom and me; I could talk about it, but never so loudly that it got back to her. My rule was no family, and none of her friends—no one who might call up and throw it in her face, too. Then, I broke the rule. One night, I’d had dinner with an old family friend, and it just came out. In the moment it was a great relief, but I woke the next morning to the sound of a ticking time bomb. I didn’t have to wait long for the boom. Shortly thereafter, my mother called, screaming.

Her anger hit a tenor I’d never seen before. I was a vindictive monster bent on destroying her. I was selfish beyond measure, blabbing all over town. Who else had I told? Her parents? My siblings? Who else was I going to hurt by spreading my little sob story of “abuse”? Finally, she said, I was a liar. I’d invented the whole thing in some sort of recovered-memory therapy scenario.

It still stuns me, that terrible accusation. I believe that she believed that. Though, of course, I’d never “recovered” anything. I’d read stories about recovered-memory therapy, an early-’90s fad that was largely debunked and no longer practiced. In my own therapy, I’d never been pushed into naming “the William stuff” nor had any words been put in my mouth. That’s why it took me so long to spit the truth out. Yet, my own mother was so unwilling to admit that this had happened that she’d crafted her own side of my story, in which it simply hadn’t. No wonder she was furious. In her version, I really was a monster.

“My life has been blown up because of your mouth,” she said, and hung up.

I gave up. There was no winning when I was fighting a genuine delusion. The best I could do was retreat and defend. I blocked her number and set up filters on my e-mail. She could keep me as the monster in her mind, but I wouldn’t be waiting by the phone this time in case she changed her mind.

Since that last call in February, I tried to adjust to the idea that I might never see my mother again. On tough nights, I Googled “celebrities with estranged parents” and sent needy texts to my friends just so they knew I loved them and also please never move away. They knew what had happened, and they knew I didn’t want to talk about it. Anyway, most days, I was totally fine. Most days, I was great! My biggest critic now was John2John, and I could handle that weenie. But no way could I handle Christmas.

It would be the first one I’d ever spent without her—and that meant without my grandparents, aunt, uncle, cousins, and siblings, too. Every year on Christmas Day, we’d meet at the Harvard Club in Midtown Manhattan, where my grandfather had made lunch reservations four months in advance. That place had a kind of ancient New York magic in the walls. We were still our slightly awkward selves—my mom sneaking out for cigarettes and my brother refusing to take his headphones off (“The music’s off,
God
!”). But the charm of that enormous yet cozy hall, lit up with fireplaces and fragrant with popovers, trumped any lingering grump, if only for an hour. If you ran out of things to talk about, you just discussed which elephant heads on the wall Teddy Roosevelt had shot. It was like having Christmas in Edith Wharton’s dollhouse, and this year I’d miss it. Rubbed raw by that silence between Mom and me, I’d never been so happy to avail myself of the divorce kid’s prerogative: I booked a flight to my dad’s.

Feeling my feelings felt even worse in the weeks leading up to the holiday, as I slogged through a lifetime’s worth of all the emotions I’d covered with pizza and frozen yogurt. The stressful work e-mails were a welcome respite from the anxious grit that churned constantly in my gut. While I didn’t reach for a snack at every flare-up, my meal choices spoke loud and clear: mashed potatoes with a side of soup; thick-bread sandwiches and fries; egg salad on a roll, no lettuce or tomato, and do you carry Pepto-Bismol? I’d spend nights in, curled up with stomachaches, watching
South Park
and Jane Austen adaptations—my recipe for TV comfort food. I lay there, remembering how in elementary school, every bad day had sent me right to the nurse’s office, convinced it was appendicitis. “Let her ride it out a bit,” my mother would explain to her over the phone. “Kelsey feels everything with her stomach.”

Work was a respite, but only in the way that being picked on at school is a respite for the kid getting picked on at home. As the year’s end approached, a wave of tension flooded my big, white, be-tinseled office. If you put your ear to the lobby door you’d hear the growing hum of whispers wondering about raises and promotions, titles and bonuses, punctuated with the occasional secret-hallway-crying break. Maybe every office felt like
Lord of the Flies
during bonus season. Or, maybe it was just me.

“So, no one cries at your office?”

“No,” Harry the liar replied. “Do you want a cocktail, or are we doing wine?”

“Wine, and you’re wrong.”

“Kels, no one cries at my office, either. Not unless they just got engaged or something.” Jon handed me the wine list and scooted his chair in to let Debbie pass behind him as she squeezed out of the tiny bathroom in the back of Motorino. The tiny East Village pizza place was the default when none of us could agree on a restaurant.

“I don’t think office crying really happens after the age of, like, twenty-five.” Jon turned to Harry for confirmation. They both nodded, agreeing that yes, I was a total weirdo.

I looked to Debbie, whose office was a consultation room at a psychiatric hospital, hoping for some validation.

She shrugged. “You don’t do it
all
the time, right?”

No, not all the time. Just every time I thought about my family, my job, or my body. Oh, and my friends! They didn’t know it but I was mad at them most of the time, too. Every day I didn’t hear about a promotion or get a letter from my mom or look physically transformed, I picked a little fight with one of them in my head. Why hadn’t Jon initiated plans with me in months? Why did
I
always have to reach out? Why was Chrissy texting me so much today? Does she not know I have a life and other texts to answer, too? If I have to hear about Debbie’s sinus infection one more time I’m actually going to call 911 and send an ambulance to her apartment, because that’s the only thing that will satisfy her. Little things that could be remedied with a phone call spun out into opera in my head. Because I didn’t want to remedy them.

Occupied with their own lives, my friends somehow did not pick up on the brain waves I wordlessly directed at them:
I am having a hard time right now. I feel like a fucking motherless bastard, and my job is in limbo, and, to top it all off, I am eating and praying and loving in front of the entire world.
Well, the entire Internet, at least. I wanted them to suddenly realize the error of their ways and feel like the jerks they were. I wanted to fester. And, I wanted so, so much attention. No, never mind, don’t look at me.