Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (6 page)

Our weekends consisted of spaghetti dinners, Blockbuster rentals, and me whining through a trip to the National Gallery as Dad swore up and down how much I’d appreciate thirteenth-century religious art one day. (Still waiting. Any minute now.)

“You sure you’re not too B & L?” he’d ask five hundred times each weekend.

“I
promise
,” I’d reply, well versed in our call-and-response.

“B & L” was our code for “bored and lonely.” Aside from how much sleep I’d gotten and whether or not I knew how much he loved me, Dad’s main concern was my potential boredom-and-loneliness when we were together. After all, I had no friends in Washington, and we never saw anyone except each other. Dad rarely dated; only twice had he cautiously introduced me to a woman he was seeing. Not until I was in college did he settle into a long-term relationship; until then, our world was tiny: two seats at the table and two glasses in the cabinet. I knew that when I left he only used the one, and the thought of his own loneliness tore at me each time I poured a glass of water.

But though I worried about his own boredom and loneliness, I wasn’t B or L during our visits. It was great. It was normal. Parents were supposed to drag their kids through museums, and kids were supposed to roll their eyes and whine about it. Having a dad in another city was the most ordinary thing about my family, and I felt the most like an ordinary kid when I was with him. I got to be irritated with him when he nagged me to floss. I got to gush about my latest book or musical obsession, demanding that we listen to “On My Own” on repeat for the entire car ride, and then moan and drop my head back in despair when he demanded that we listen to the first three seconds of “Just Like a Woman” over and over and over again all the way back home. “Just the first three seconds—do you hear that snare?!”

Then I would have to leave. That part was awful, each airport drop-off so raw and poignant that I stung with the memory of my father’s tearful waving. First came our drive to the airport with a stop by the supermarket where he’d buy me a bag of chocolate-covered raisins from the bulk candy section. This was as much a ritual as the gallery trips, my little treat to sweeten the flight home. In the car, I’d fiddle with the plastic bag in my coat pocket, handling the candies but not yet eating them. Though we never discussed it, it was an unspoken rule that I wouldn’t eat them until after takeoff. I think Dad liked to imagine me, alone in a window seat, gliding along the eastern coastline, savoring this little souvenir of his love.

At the gate he’d pull me in for tight hugs, more and more as boarding time approached.

“Do you know how much your papa loves you?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Do you really, Kels?”

“Yeah, of course. I love you, too.”

“Do you know I’m always thinking about you?”

“I know. I promise.”

Finally, it would be time. Then it would be me rushing into his arms for one last squeeze, knowing it would be the one to break his heart but unable to help it. Discreetly, I’d press my face into his sweatered shoulder, taking in my papa’s smell—Irish Spring bar soap, shaving cream, and Gain detergent, clean and identifiable, every time. I held the scent, consciously making the memory. Then we’d press hard kisses into each other’s cheeks and I’d look away from his tears, the worst, worst part of every weekend. It was a terrible power, to be able to make my father cry.

“I’ll be back for Thanksgiving in five weeks!”

“I know. I just miss you when you’re gone. Remember I love you, always.”

I’d kiss his cheek again, then one last one and then the real last one. Heading for the Jetway, I’d turn to see him waving, blowing a quick kiss. A few more steps, turn back, and there was his hand still in the air, reaching over heads and past backpacks to find me, let me know he was still there. Just before I turned the corner, one last look: my father’s face, now craning to hold me in his gaze. He waved and I waved back, smiling big until the crowd pushed me forward, out of his sight.

At last, takeoff. Chocolate-covered raisins downed in big, tasteless handfuls. Headphones and a paperback to wipe Dad’s tearful smile from my mind. Sitting on the curb at Westchester Airport waiting for someone to pick me up.

More often than not it was Karen who pulled up in the Subaru, with Z100 blasting on the radio, loud enough so we could sing along without hearing our own voices. Karen had been with us since the Sleepy Hollow days, a college student who babysat me frequently. When we moved into Steve’s place, she came with us to look after me and then my siblings. Karen’s room was in the attic, a small nest on top of the house, only accessible by a set of foldout stairs. The little kids couldn’t get there without help, but I climbed up the stairs most nights to watch TV with Karen, hoping she’d let me sleep on the floor next to her bed. She usually said yes if I scratched her back for a while.

My own room, all the way downstairs, felt so remote and segregated. During the daytime, I relished the isolation, sealed inside this cozy, windowless womb of books and music and computer games. I checked out books on tape from the local library and spent whole days cocooned in other peoples’ stories while the racket carried on at a comforting distance upstairs. I played computer solitaire while Benny Hogan fell for Jack in 1950s Dublin. I painted my toenails on an unmade bed while Idgie and Ruth served fried green tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, wondering,
Am I supposed to think they’re lesbians? Or does that mean
I’m
a lesbian?

But after dark I lost the ability to escape into a fantasy. Each night was a bottomless stretch of silence, a terribly blank canvas upon which any number of horrors could be written. Carbon monoxide could gently smother us to death; my baby sister could roll over and suffocate in her sleep; Indian Point, looming less than three miles down the road, could melt down at any moment, killing everyone from here to Manhattan in a mushroom cloud of radiation, but me and my family first. They tested the sirens every Saturday afternoon, one long, harmonic bellow, hitting pause on all conversations within a five-mile radius. Each night, I lay awake and at attention, conjuring the sound into reality and knowing that any such warning was futile, and that instant, white-hot death was screaming through the sky, faster than the speed of sound.

Sometimes I managed to stay in bed, begging prayers of protection against each possible natural disaster, and dropping into shallow puddles of sleep. But most nights, I crept upstairs, checking the stove burners, locking our unlocked doors, then unlocking and relocking them, and then just once more. I listened for breathing at bedroom doors, curling up outside my mom and stepdad’s room on a nest of couch cushions and blanket throws until the sky turned gray with dawn and I let go, careening into slumber.

“
Et voilà!
” Karen announced, placing a large soup bowl on the carpet in front of me. It was allegedly filled with ice cream, but the actual substance was buried so deep in whipped cream and chocolate and what must have been a whole jar of sprinkles.

“What’s this?”

“A banana split! It’s a special occasion.” She sat down next to me and turned up the volume on the television. The special occasion was the Gulf War.

It was clear that I was more than just Karen’s charge. I was the one who helped her wrangle my siblings, and watched
Beaches
with her on Saturday nights. After she left college, I was probably the closest thing she had to a friend. And I was the one she ate with.

Like most girls of a certain temperament, I spent early adolescence reading eating-disorder fiction, like
The Best Little Girl in the World
and
Dying to Be Thin
. I could diagnose a sixth-grade bulimic a mile away, but it never once occurred to me that there was anything unusual about Karen’s giant “special-occasion” meals, followed by hours of nausea or parking-lot vomiting. Who wouldn’t get sick after downing five White Castle sliders and a milkshake, plus half of my milkshake? She always felt better after, so what was the problem?

For a long time, Karen was the closest thing I had to a friend, too. When she did the school pickup and found me weepy and embarrassed by some recess humiliation, there was only ever one response.

“Just tell me, smushy-face. It’ll be okay. What did he say?”

On one such occasion, I slid down in the seat and wrapped my arms around my face. There was no way I could say it and actually look at her.

“He just kept singing, ‘Two, four, six, eight, Kelsey likes to masturbate.’” And I howled into my arms, outraged at being forced to utter the word
masturbate
.

She paused—the worst possible silence. For God’s sake, never be silent after a kid says “masturbate.”

“And this was Robbie C.?”

I nodded. Robbie C. was a dickbag. He had braces and the worst BO I have ever encountered, yet somehow managed to be one of the cool kids. I suppose I have to give him some credit for coming up with that song on the spot, but like, let’s be real, Robbie C. I may indeed have discovered the sneaky wonders of late-night Cinemax, but I sincerely doubt that I was outmasturbating your twelve-year-old ass.

“That kid’s a little jerk. He probably just likes you, you know?”

I moaned at her laugh-out-loud ridiculous assessment of the situation. I was fat, my ponytail always had bumps, and even if I put it on straight out of the dryer, the skirt of my uniform was never
not
wrinkled. Thanks to a scholarship, I went to school with girls whose parents had housekeeping staffs and probably dry-cleaned their soccer cleats. They wore Tiffany beans strung around their necks and their dads’ extra Rolexes hanging loosely around their nimble, lightly scented wrists. I was 300 percent sure this wasn’t crush related.

I dropped my arms. The road outside my window wasn’t the usual route home from school.

“Where are we going?” I asked, looking over to see Karen ready with a smile and a side eye.

I have a hard time getting angry at Karen for taking me to the diner that day, drilling deeper in the message that everything could be made better with an order of Belgian waffles à la mode. Because in one way it did make the bad day better. That secret treat reminded me that there was someone in the world who knew it was more important for me to feel loved and looked after than to attend the piano lesson on my schedule. I was worth making up an excuse for.

For that same reason, I can’t really get mad at my dad about the chocolate-covered raisins. I don’t begrudge my stepdad for taking me to IHOP before the SSATs, telling me to put down the flash cards and order whatever I wanted. I won’t blame my mom for pulling into Friendly’s at 10:30 in the morning for a peanut butter sundae, just after the X-ray confirmed my arm had indeed been broken.

These were moments of kindness and exception to the rule. The rule might be tough and unpredictable, and you might need to hide in the closet with a fistful of chocolate chips just to keep from screaming. But along the way there were times like these where one of my many caregivers reached for something sweet to give me, to let me know that when bad things happen, there is a simple, chocolate-covered solution, even if it’s over as soon as you hit the bottom of the bowl.

Soon enough, I would discover something even better. It was more effective than running from the Food Police and more comforting than bingeing on burgers with Karen. It was my first diet and I believed it would make all my dreams come true.

I was almost right.

I
felt the Buzz for the first time in the fall of sixth grade. I’d been at the same small, private school since kindergarten, a white-washed, tree-speckled campus in Bedford, New York. If you are not familiar with this area of Westchester County, picture the prettiest town you’ve ever been to, then make it rain money for fifty years. Now superimpose Robert Redford’s smile. Thus it is always in Bedford.

It wasn’t the kind of upper-crust private school I sought out in books and movies, lusting after their little wooden half desks and rigid adherence to needless formalities. I would have been thrilled had someone corrected my curtsey or addressed me as Miss Miller. But Riverwood was a school for liberal rich kids. We wore uniforms, sure. But we also tapped for maple syrup in the woods off the lacrosse field. We were given limitless access to Cray-Pas, and we dug around the playground for arrowheads. We sat in a lot of circles.

The thing is, though, kids aren’t liberals. By nature, adolescent society falls somewhere between paranoid totalitarianism and a boobs-based meritocracy. Either way, it’s hard to make your way in the world as a pudgy, unibrowed, not-so-rich kid, even if you do know all the words to the Original Broadway Cast recording of
The Secret Garden
. I’d gotten my period a month into sixth grade and, after the initial rush of Judy Blume-ing, I’d realized what a letdown the menstrual cycle really was. On top of the bulky new pads in my life, I spent mornings jamming chubby-girl breasts into a training bra that looked more like training body armor. I was already a pro at shaving my legs, but there’s no coming-of-age book that covers the wondrous discovery of armpit hair. I was graceless, shiny nosed, and gross. The school was too small for me to be invisible. But at age eleven, my visibility seemed to be a constant annoyance to my classmates. I was somehow trying too hard, just by being there.
Still? Really?
And they weren’t wrong. I radiated wanting.

Most days, before I left for school, I used my younger siblings to determine where I stood on any given day. At three and four years old, they were too little to consider lying and I took full advantage of their innocence, trying on different outfits and asking, “Do I look skinny or fat?” Glancing away from his cartoons, my gangly four-year-old brother would give one of the two answers I allowed. If he deemed me “skinny,” I could leave the house with my head held high(ish), good enough to raise my hand in class or withstand the appraising locker-room side eyes of my classmates. If he said “fat,” I slunk through the day, a bad, disgusting girl, hiding inside the lanky curtain of my hair. Having my siblings was like being a contestant on a reality show whenever I wanted. But I stopped using them as a judging panel the day I asked “skinny or fat” and saw hesitation in their eyes.

Obviously, I wanted to be an actress. There were other girls in my sixth-grade class who fancied themselves starlets, but surely I wanted it the hardest. As a four-year-old, I’d memorized entire scenes from both
Annie
and
Amadeus
, performing them nightly with my cat as the captive audience. Not much had changed since then. If I was good at nothing else, I could at least be the biggest theater geek at school, and no one would try to take that title from me.

The aforementioned OBC recording of
The Secret Garden
was a cassette I’d already repurchased twice after the original ribbons of tape finally succumbed to the incessant rewinding of my Walkman. Whether lying in bed or staring out the car window, I always had my headphones on, mouthing along with Mary’s lyrics and dialogue snippets, as well as those of secondary female characters. I’d seen the musical twice with the original cast when it debuted in 1991, and with each listen I replayed the scenes in my mind, desperately clinging to fading details. Had Mandy Patinkin worn tweed or navy during the curtain call? Had Daisy Eagan cried for real during that second performance, or was she just wobbling her chin? I was openly obsessed with Daisy, who’d won a Tony at the age of eleven for originating the role of Mary—the youngest girl ever to win.

Each evening after school, I’d unplug my radio-cassette alarm clock and place it on top of the toilet, filling the bath while the overture played. Then I’d lie down in the water until everything was submerged—all but the top of my soft, round belly, which crested above the surface. Next, I’d press the soles of my feet hard against the end of the tub, straightening my back into a plank and pulling my stomach down, finally invisible. It wasn’t a relaxing soak, but it was not intended as such. Like this, in the bath, my unmanageable body was gone. It wasn’t the weightlessness of water—I’ve heard other fat folk speak of this phenomenon, an insta-happiness of floating. For me, that buoyancy just highlighted all the bouncy blubber I lived inside. No, the bath was about hiding my body from myself, revealing only the parts I wanted to see (my nice legs, my neutral forearms, end of list), and hiding the rest under water.

I’d hold the foot-pressing plank pose until my soles tingled, then I’d release and plant them hard against the floor, another belly-hiding move. Finally, I’d give up and turn over. I could tolerate my butt sticking out of the water, for it posed no threat. No matter how round my belly got, my backside stayed flat as a crew cut. The main thing was to keep my stomach underneath and out of sight. That was where I was roundest, right from the start. Tight sleeves around my upper arms could be hidden by a jacket or a loose-fitting cardigan, but the buttons of every button-down strained across my gut all day, screaming with obviousness. A polo could be even worse; the juniors-section top bound tight across my chest, loosened at my rib cage, then sat snug and restless, riding up over my little lower belly. I’d spend the whole day yanking it down and actively trying to hunch over in order to help the fabric cover me up. It was exhausting, wearing clothes.

At night, in the tub, my stomach finally out of the way, I’d soak front-down until the water turned tepid, singing along to my musical in full voice until Karen knocked on the door because she had to pee or simply could not hear that overture again, not tonight, please, please, thank you.

I wasn’t Daisy Eagan for many reasons. For starters, I didn’t have stage parents or even the kind of parents I could badger into stage-parenting me a little.

“If you’re old enough to find these auditions, you’re old enough to go on them yourself,” my mom told me, writing out directions from Grand Central to the casting agent’s office in Hell’s Kitchen. In that moment I prayed for a kidnapper or subway car-pusher to come along and turn me into a tragic
New York Post
cover. At least they could have used my head shot. But to be fair, she did come on some auditions with me, especially the more serious ones. And every weekend and summer day she drove (or got someone to drive) me to the Yorktown Regional Theater Company or the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, where I attended workshops and courses with other theater kids. At the end of the course, my dad would drive up from Washington, DC, to see one performance, and my mom would come to another. Both agreed I was great. But neither was going to give up his or her life and yank me out of school to exploit and hone my fledgling talent so as to live vicariously through me before inevitably destroying my childhood and ability to grow into a functional adult. And that was all I ever wanted. Instead I had to do my best to exploit myself.

Sam Fairchild, on the other hand, had a stage mom. “Sam” was short for Samantha, but on each first day of school when our new homeroom teacher called that name in roll, she’d give a laugh so light, so half-assed, that said teacher would blush and look around as if trying to catch on to the inside joke. “Sam,” corrected Sam. And that was the whole explanation. Sam wasn’t Daisy Eagan, either—she was the only thing better in my mind, because as her classmate, I could be jealous of her in the flesh. She was a daily example of what I wanted to be and have. She was the one who reminded me that I wasn’t and didn’t.

Like most of the kids in our class, we’d known each other since the Democratic Republic of Kindergarten, but as we’d split off into the factions of early adolescence, Sam had quickly bloomed into the angel of our grade. First of all: blonde. Not dirty blonde, or swimming-pool blonde, but a casual, who-cares kind of blonde. She’d even come back to school that September to start sixth grade with gently gilded streaks around her face, apparently being the only human on earth for whom Sun-In actually worked as advertised. The highlights suited her tomboy-empress vibe, as she was the kind of girl who captained the field hockey team, played electric guitar, and, I’m 80 percent sure, started the pastel nail-polish craze of the mid-’90s. She shopped in the city, at Cheap Jack’s and Antique Boutique. (Here, I’d like to remind you that we were
eleven
. I could barely handle the technicalities of ordering a monogrammed L.L.Bean backpack over the phone.) Our school uniform was a plain, navy blue skirt, but we were allowed to swap it out for navy corduroys, and so she started turning up in vintage navy blue bell-bottom hip huggers, which could not
technically
be considered a dress-code violation. Without even mentioning it, she’d started shaving her legs months before the rest of us. When conversation inevitably turned to the pros and cons of the Gillette Sensor razor versus Schick Silk Effects, and all eyes turned to Sam for the last word, she shrugged and told us she just used a regular men’s Bic.

Second: Her parents were cool. Sam’s dad was some kind of music industry guy. What kind I never discovered, but it wasn’t the same kind as my dad. Sam’s enormous house was filled with guitars and casual snapshots of her father with Mick Jagger, in which he wasn’t even bothering to look at the camera. That kind of music industry guy.

Her mom was a former model but neither outrageously young nor so obviously mismatched as to be her father’s trophy wife. Officially registered as a not-cool kid, I didn’t spend a lot of time at Sam’s house, but her folks spent enough afternoons participating in school functions for me to become familiar and obsessed with them. Sam’s parents loved each other and liked each other. And their kids liked them. Sam played music gigs with her dad, and Sam’s mom, to my most ardent envy, picked her up early from school nearly every day to drive her to acting jobs. Real ones.

Sam was thin and rich, quite beautiful and funny, but it was her burgeoning acting career that absolutely paralyzed me with jealousy. She was already famous to us; the whole school, students and faculty alike, simply could not keep its shit together when it came to Sam. And now that she was popping up in commercials, it wouldn’t be long before she was for-real famous.

I’d spent the summer before sixth grade in yet another youth workshop with the Yorktown Regional Theater Company. As in each previous workshop, we’d taken acting, voice, and speech classes, then learned monologues, and finally, scenes and songs to perform in a showcase (read: parent performance). Technically, it was a musical theater revue, but Charlie D. Karvil, the theater’s director, had a ceaseless obsession with
Mame
, and so watching each showcase was like watching some kids perform two-thirds of
Mame
, inexplicably intercut with a handful of scenes from
A Chorus Line
and
Evita
. The Actor’s Studio it was not, but this was the little pond in which I’d become a medium-large fish. So when, at the end of this summer session, Charlie D. Karvil announced he’d be taking the eldest of us into Manhattan to perform our monologues and songs in a
real
showcase in front of talent agents and managers, I felt white-hot with anticipation and destiny.
Destiny
—a word I probably haven’t used in a decade. It’s a word so glittery and ridiculous that only an eleven-year-old can truly embrace it without irony. In that moment I was filled to the brim with it.

Weeks later, I sat in a black box theater in Midtown, waiting to perform. My whole body hummed with nerves, and yet I was absolutely sure of the future: fame. Daisy Eagan would be my best friend. Sam Fairchild and I would carpool to auditions together. Every single thing would be different, new, and better. When my name was called, I sang sixteen bars of “Hold On” from
The Secret Garden
. I performed a piece from a kids’ monologue book about a girl who learns a lesson about confidence and not stuffing your bra.

Two days later, the phone rang.

Mom came with me to the offices of Rainbow Management, a small, beige-carpeted office in the East Thirties. I’d been to a few casting sessions before and wasn’t put off by the unimpressive waiting area, the shabby sofa, and the dusty water cooler in the corner. On TV shows, talent agencies looked palatial and overly air-conditioned, but in reality (New York reality, at least) someone makes your dreams come true in a cramped converted apartment. But they had head shots on the wall, and I recognized some of those heads, which was all that mattered.

“We think she’s just a breath of fresh air.”

Maureen spoke to my mother first. We were seated across a large, circular table in what would have been a dining nook. Maureen and her partner, Dave, constituted the bulk of this small management company, handling around fifty child and teenage performers (“Mainly film and television but a few on Broadway, too. And we heard that voice, Kelsey, don’t worry!” Dave said with a wink, becoming my favorite person ever, in the world). Mom smiled at Maureen then at me, suddenly put in the hot seat.

“Well. Yes! She’s always been a performer.”

“I bet she has.” Maureen gave me a small smile and looked back to Mom.

“When she was little and couldn’t sleep, she’d stand on top of her bed and sing
Annie
. In the middle of the night, I mean.”

Dave guffawed with laughter, and I swore further allegiance to him. Maureen held the same smile-nod, trained on my mother, and held her silence for a moment as if waiting for Mom to deliver some stage-parent code word. Or, maybe she just hated me. Did she hate me? Was there any way I could try to die, right that second?