Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (11 page)

I called immediately. Although it was impossible to change Katie’s mind or feelings, she was, as I said, easy to communicate love to.

“What is the name of the emotion you’re feeling over this comment?” I asked.

“Pathetic,” she sniffed. “I think being this big and being abstinent is a very strange experience. I feel good about myself because I have made the choice to live and be abstinent, but in the grand scheme of life I feel pathetic.”

“It’s perfectly okay to feel pathetic,” I said. “Just because it’s a word we throw out in insults doesn’t drain it of its force and honesty when you’re in it.”

I thought for a moment about what she was going through, barely able to get around, using a stool in her shower because she couldn’t stand that long, her public life a series of OA meetings, DBT classes, and therapy. She was going to the hospital to see her gynecologist soon and would have a chance to weigh herself after a couple of weeks of abstinence. She was worried that she hadn’t lost weight, and she was humiliated because she had to go to the loading dock to use the scale. Everything Katie did out of the house was a reminder of how disarranged she was. She had a minimal social life for distraction. One friend was moving away, another had a reputation among Katie’s friends and family as being a histrionic bitch, and she worried about depending too much on her best friend, Ingrid, who had helped hold her together in the last three years.

“You know how they say in the Rooms that we’re only as old as our abstinence?” I asked. The snippets of twelve-step wisdom drove us up a wall, but we spoke the same language from the same context and it provided a shorthand between us.

“You’re three weeks old, according to that line of thinking. A three-week-old baby would be doing a lot of crying and depending on other people to take care of her. Add that to the years of abstinence you’ve had in the past, and you’re just about the age where Mom parks you in front of the TV so she can take a shower or clean the kitchen. You’re parked in front of the TV. You’re on track.”

One of the things I loved about talking to Katie is hearing how wise I am…and then later having to admit that just about everything she’s feeling, I am feeling, too, and, too often, trying not to feel it by eating. In many ways, she was the stronger of us—she at least owned her feelings.

“But Fraaances! It
is
pathetic to be watching a feed at four in the morning and pathetic that it hurts me,” she protested.

“Feeling pathetic doesn’t mean you
are
pathetic,” I said. “This is a cutthroat show, right? They’re all trying to be nice
and
get somebody else kicked off. In effect, they’re hyenas, looking for the weakest member in a herd of gazelles. These are not nice people. You—and a kazillion other viewers—were dissed by a hyena.”

Earlier that spring, in an Amazon discussion of the comments women get for being fat or losing weight, Lindsay observed that “Nobody who gets thin gets rid of their problems, they just trade them in.” The only part she got wrong is that we trade in a few problems (like airplane seats), keep the oldest ones (why we got fat, how being fat has shaped our psyches), and receive a handful of new ones in return.

When Lindsay was at her lowest weight in college and working as a waitress at a local restaurant, she hated the attention she got from her fellow waitstaff for her butt. Someone more daring would have wanted the attention, dressed for it, and used it, but Lindsay found it embarrassing. The butt, after all, is a sexual zone. Many Fat Girls have narrow parameters of how much of their sexual selves they will show. Weight loss unwittingly changes those parameters, and we lose a sense of control over how much of ourselves we show and what it means.

If I wear a piece of clothing I consider risky, I’ll add another item that is deeply conservative. A camisole will thus be topped by a linen jacket, a short skirt with tights and boys’ shoes. It’s a formula I’ve worked out over the years since being thin that still works—one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from regaining weight is that I’m still sexual and still seen sexually by some, not entirely insane, people.

Mimi was a graduate student when she was at her thinnest. Studious by nature and informed by her parents that she had to get a degree that would enable her to support herself, she hadn’t noticed the college party scene when she was an undergraduate at Duke. “I didn’t know how to dress or talk to people,” she remembered of that first, most successful weight loss. “Everybody was pairing off and getting married, and I didn’t even know how to flirt.” Ill-prepared for graduate school comradeship, she slipped back to the company and comfort of food. Is it easier to settle into our new bodies if we’ve closely observed normies—friends or siblings—over the course of adolescence and young adulthood? Mimi didn’t have that growing up and she didn’t know how to adapt to her thinness.

One of my blog readers and fellow bloggers, Lia, suggested that her obesity was an escape from sex. A beautiful former model, Lia was in her forties, happily married, happily employed. She also had an advanced degree in psychotherapy, so her context was Freudian. “Sex becomes significant around the Oedipal stage, at five or six. If you’re traumatized at that age, the impulse toward sex is a giant threat and you’ll do anything you can to block it. When I was eleven, I went from 80 pounds to 120 pounds in six months. My parents said, ‘No man will ever want you.’ That was great news to me: they just gave me the key to keeping men off me. But the truth is, fat doesn’t prevent you from being the object of sexual interest, it only makes you think you’re excluded.”

Fat as a chastity belt is a possibility that pertains to us all, and to Katie’s second relapse in particular. “I had problems dressing vixen-like,” she said. “I seemed to go for very middle-of-the-road clothes, with a hint of style. I somehow feel embarrassed to look sexy or to even feel sexy. It’s almost like I don’t have a right to have sex, be sexy, want sex, or look sexy. This feeling is deep in the caverns of my being. It began long ago.”

Identifying with stories told by men in OA or thinking she could save them from their pain, imagining scenes of voluminous salad making with
The Big Chill
soundtrack in the background, she had crushes on guys in recovery, which was a horrible idea. It’s easier for men to lose and maintain weight, which can result in competitiveness or inferiority: you’re always watching what the other person is ingesting and, newly liberated from their own prisons, the issues around fat, food, and eating are complicated by two sets of neuroses.

Katie’s first relapse, in 1993, which resulted in a gain of 270 pounds, had its seeds in a housewarming on her twenty-fifth birthday. Her friend Ingrid raved about the house they were going to, a mansion on Russian Hill owned by the chief of psychiatry at the hospital where Ingrid had her therapy practice. Katie had badly not wanted to spend her birthday alone, and although she wouldn’t know anyone but Ingrid at the party, it was better than a night alone in front of the television.

Their host was welcoming, and the two women saw immediately that he’d gone to great lengths to create a stylish affair—the food, music, and décor reflected his Turkish heritage. “I’m so glad Ingrid brought such a lovely friend,” he gushed. “My husband and I are delighted to have you celebrate our new home.”

There was live music played on strange instruments—a long-necked guitarlike thing, a violin that looked like a fence picket. The food was plentiful and “clean”—that is, on Katie’s food plan. She had an Urfa kebob, garlicky and spicy with peppers she had never seen before, and onion salad, and a yogurt drink lightened by cucumber juice. As the raki flowed, the Turkish guests began to dance, inviting their hosts and other males into the circle, and then the younger women.

That is how Katie met Ahmed, the man gripping her right shoulder and laughing as she tried to get the hop-kick step and kicked him in the shin instead. When the dance was over, he disappeared, and Katie looked for Ingrid, who had been given a big red napkin to wave at the end of the chorus line. She ended up on the floor, laughing herself silly and still waving the napkin. As she told Katie what had happened, Katie’s dance partner appeared with a glass of club soda with lime and a plate of baklava.

“I am Ahmed. You must eat this. You will be famished from all the dancing we are going to do.”

Katie didn’t have the baklava, but she danced with Ahmed and Ingrid again and again, some dances involving clenched hands and heavy elbow choreography, some where people hopped and kicked their way in and out of a circle.

“That dance,” Ahmed told her, “is usually danced by couples. Some of these dances are for men only. But it’s a party!” He smiled, and his face lit up, his warm eyes glittering like the Bay Bridge they could see from the second-floor deck. The trio of musicians had packed up for the night and were having dinner and Dar, Ingrid’s boss, had put on the old romantic songs Katie loved.

If Ella Fitzgerald singing “Do I Love You?” hadn’t segued into Frank Sinatra’s “All the Things You Are,” Katie might not have accepted Ahmed’s offer of coffee. Blame it on a lyric. Frankie wasn’t enumerating anything Katie could use against herself. Anyone could be springtime or the quiet of sunset.

They went to a Starbucks and talked about her work for the DA and the flatlands of Sacramento, where she grew up. He described his roommates, newlyweds who had just emigrated, and where he had grown up, in the hills above the Gulf of Antalya. He asked her to dinner the next night, and she said yes, driving home still burbling with laughter at such an odd night.

“He’s persistent, isn’t he?” Ingrid asked a week later. Katie had been to dinner with Ahmed on four out of the last seven nights. They’d taken a Saturday drive to Big Sur, and he’d shown her the insider’s version of the Tenderloin. That morning, he had sent her a dozen of the tallest yellow roses she’d ever seen, which is when she called Ingrid.

“He’s interesting,” Katie said. “It’s like we’re tourists in each other’s world.”

“Yellow roses, huh? I wonder what
that
means in Turkish…”

Katie liked Ahmed. His English was good enough that they could go to the movies and watch TV, his tutorials in the vernacular. Katie is fanatical about pop culture. He cracked her up when she took his hand as they walked down the street, and he said, “Hallelujah, I’ve died and gone to Kentucky!” or when she told him she liked her steaks rare, “You are alive when they start to eat you. Try to show a little respect.”

She felt like she’d been through a meat grinder after spending an evening trying to explain that Maggie Simpson had yet to speak more than one word. It ended with Ahmed shaking his head and saying, “Tell me again, is Bart really a boy?” She buried her head in her hands and moaned until he wrapped her in a big bear hug and whispered into her ear, “I did the whistling belly-button trick at the high school talent show.”

Katie’s loneliness and tendency to overreact were calmed by Ahmed. In large part, it was due to his limited grasp of English and the trouble he sometimes had communicating. When it comes to her emotional issues, Katie has trouble communicating, too. Ask Katie what she is ashamed of and she will maunder a bit about her high state of emotions and how she gets blamed when her family starts another feud. She will quickly dribble out of reasons. “I dunno. It’s all fucked up.” Ahmed reacted to her tears by holding her and soothing her, but he didn’t often probe into why she was crying.

She felt, with him, that she had escaped living under a microscope.

Three months after they met, Katie moved in with him.

Did she believe he was “Mr. Right”?

No. But it was thrilling to be told she was beautiful, sexy, a wonderful lover. It’s thrilling to be able to make someone laugh. It’s also another Fat Thing: this man likes me. I have to keep him because no one is ever going to like me this way again.

Soon after she moved in, they made a trip to Bakersfield to introduce him to her family. They stopped for sodas along the way and, as they stretched their legs a bit in a McDonald’s parking lot, she said, “My parents and my brother are going to wonder what’s up. I don’t introduce them to friends very often.”

“You can tell them I love you very much,” he said firmly.

“
That’s
going to lead to a
lot
more questions.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, are you thinking of getting married?”

“Are we?”

Katie put her Diet Coke on the trunk of her car and crossed her arms. “Are we?”

“I love you very much,” he said. He smiled slyly. “I want Cowboy George. I don’t want no English glitter prince.”

Her stepfather and brother froze when Ahmed walked into the living room behind Katie. Ahmed told them he worked in his cousin’s luggage shop on Fisherman’s Wharf, and Frank Stannert, her step-father, got up from his easy chair and left the room, shutting the door of his study without saying a word. Her brother Stephen had to put his hand to his mouth to wipe away the sardonic grin that threatened.

“Good money in, uh, suitcases?” Stephen asked.

“We sell souvenirs, too,” Ahmed answered. “And all kinds of bags. Pocketbooks, backpacks, wallets—you name it.” His voice was defensive, and his black eyes were a piercing stare. “And yes, I have employment authorization. I am legal.”

“This is another phase of yours, isn’t it?” her mother asked as they did the dishes. “I suppose you’re going to convert to Moslem and take Arabic classes. Then you’ll be on to—what? Dating a black man? Deciding to move to…oh,” she grunted more in anger than frustration, “Iceland?”

“First of all, that’s not very nice,” Katie said. “Second, ‘Moslem’ is a person who practices Islam. Ahmed is actually a Methodist.”

Her mother sighed. “Every time we see you, you’re someone new or something different.”

Yeah
, Katie thought.
Almost two hundred pounds different.
At first everyone was supportive of her weight loss, but when she told them about OA, they rolled their eyes and chalked it up to what she thought of as the family’s “Katie Bulletin Board,” where they kept track and kept score of her mistakes, moods, tangents, and U-turns. She walked away as she dried the pots and pans, not wanting her mother to see her crying.