Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (12 page)

Her mother turned off the faucet and threw the sponge down. “I have a headache,” she announced. “I’m going to go lie down. You and Ali let yourselves out, won’t you? And don’t disturb Frank.”

Rule # 1 in the Stannert house: Never upset the stepfather.

Rule # 2 in the Stannert house: Never expect anything.

Rule # 3 in the Stannert house: Never say anything important.

Katie liked how Ahmed seemed to absorb her nervousness. She relaxed as he smoked between courses and took his time over the thick coffee he drank; she relaxed more when he had to process a sentence or an event from Turkish to English to American. Whatever it was, he slowed Katie down in a way she hadn’t experienced since eating her last pie. “I was full of jittery nervousness,” she recalls of being thin. It’s a common reaction to the metamorphosis, especially when the former Fat Girl has missed out on normal experiences or been schooled, as Katie had been by her mother, in the dogma that “Nobody is going to hire you if you’re fat. Nobody will want to date you if you’re fat.” She’d gotten thin, and her family still regarded her as a burden. Katie had hoped losing weight would knit her into the family fabric. If she could keep the right job and date a guy who sent yellow roses, would
that
prove to her mom that she was no longer the problem, that she was, in fact, a success? “My disappointment was on the cellular level, and I was like, ‘oh shit, this isn’t the answer either.’”

Nonetheless, she called her mother a couple of weeks later and told her she was getting married in October. She expected a long silence, and she got it.

“You don’t expect us to pay for the wedding, do you?”

“No, Mom, I just want you to come and try to get to know Ahmed. He’s not so bad.”

“‘Not. So. Bad.’” There was another long silence. “Girls in love don’t say their fiancé is not so bad. They say ‘he’s really wonderful when you get to know him.’” Another long silence. “I don’t want to upset Frank with all of this. Stephen could come to your wedding, or your grandma and Aunt Sharon.”

Stephen wouldn’t stop laughing when she called with the news. When she called Michael, her brother in Albuquerque, he sang a little ditty that started, “Marry an A-rab/and you’ll drive a-cab…”

The rest of the family took the news without insulting her. Grandma Monahan and Aunt Sharon were thrilled at the prospect of planning a wedding.

“What about the Swedenborgian Church?” Aunt Sharon suggested immediately. “It’s so intimate and homey.”

“I want Sharon to take pictures of you trying on gowns so I can help you decide,” Grandma said.

Sharon’s husband, Uncle Carl, a detective with the San Francisco Police Department, moaned when Sharon gave him the news. “Get his last name,” he said. “I’ll check him out.”

It hurt Katie’s feelings a little, but at least Carl was on her side. At least he, Sharon, and Grandma were
doing
things for her rather than refusing to face the situation.

“What does this ‘devil and the deep blue sea’ mean?” Ahmed asked.

Katie was stumped for more than a cursory explanation. “I mean, I want my mom and brothers to come but I don’t want a guest list and cocktail napkins with our initials on them.”

“Let’s go to city hall,” he said. “That’s what Yusef and Ruuya did.”

“Grandma and Aunt Sharon would insist on coming, and they’d be all weepy and shaking their heads about not being in a chapel.”

“Then we’ll go away.”

They opted for a sneak-away wedding, with Ingrid as maid of honor, along with Ahmed’s cousin, Ammar, as best man and second witness. Katie bought a white bolero suit and stood in the Bloomingdale’s dressing room crying. The sleeveless dress showed off her legs and arms, of which she was rightly proud, and the jacket, with its white satin loops along the hem and sleeves, was beautiful. It was a size 10. She was getting married to a man who loved her but came from a culture she knew nothing about. Ingrid kept warning her that she thought they should wait. Her brothers wouldn’t be there, and her mother had written her saying she thought it best for the time being that they confine their correspondence to emails and letters. She cried as she walked around the shoe department in her one-hundred-dollar sandals, and she cried as she drove to the small house they had rented in South San Francisco.

The crying jag lasted through the remaining week before the wedding. She was forced to take another couple of days off from work because she couldn’t stop, and when, intermittently, she did stop, her face was as puffy and mottled red as a strawberry.

“Kate,” Ingrid said as she watched her friend throw things into the overnight bag she was taking to Lake Tahoe. Katie snatched a flannel nightgown and three pairs of underwear and stuffed them in. There was hair conditioner waiting to be packed but no shampoo, all the makeup, Ingrid suspected, Katie had ever owned, red shorts, and an “I
Vegas” T-shirt. “Kate. You can
not
take a flannel nightgown that you wore when you weighed three hundred pounds on your honeymoon. You need sneakers and shampoo. What you really need is to cancel this thing until you’re sorted out.”

“No,” Katie said, pulling out the nightgown, and with it all the clothes tangled in it. She sniffed and clenched her hands, but tears rolled down her face anyway. “I said yes. I do what I say I’ll do. But I want my mother,” she wailed. “It doesn’t feel right that Mom, Stephen, and Michael have refused to come. They haven’t even sent cards!”

“Ahmed would understand if you said you wanted to wait until your family is more accepting.”

“No, he wouldn’t. He asks me every day if I love him, if I’ll be his wife. He’d be…” She couldn’t think of the right word. Heartbroken? Devastated? Somewhere between devastated and very disappointed. “He’d think I’m the sort of person to go back on my word.”

Ingrid poured about a quart of foundation and a half pound of powder on Katie, caked on some blush, fluffed her red hair, and drove her from the hotel to the courthouse. If it wasn’t for her cadaverish face, Katie would have looked stunning.

Ingrid was dismayed to see that no one brought flowers. When it came time to exchange rings, Katie was ready with a gold band for Ahmed, but he didn’t have one for Katie. He laughed in embarrassment, and Ingrid slid her amethyst pinkie ring off and palmed it over. The I-dos were said, everyone signed the register and walked out into the late afternoon sunlight of a resort town between tourist seasons.

“I am taking Ingrid back to San Francisco, correct?” Ammar asked. Everyone nodded. “I have to work tomorrow and would like to get going.”

Ingrid leaned over and kissed Katie. “You’re a beautiful bride. Remember: we’re married now.”

Katie hugged her back, as hard as she could. She could feel sobs rising in her chest, and the deep swallows of tears in her throat. “Thank you,” she whispered. “I love you
so
much.”

Katie and Ahmed went out for a fancy dinner. She ate more steak than she normally would have but left enough to warrant a doggie bag that came back in tinfoil the waiter had curled into a swan. The swan was the most weddinglike thing about the whole day.

“I want to call my parents,” Ahmed said, looking at his watch. It would be seven in the morning in the little town not far from Akseki, which he pointed out on a map. “And my brother. They’re waiting to hear that we’re married.”

Katie felt a pang at that, but also a shadow of what Uncle Carl had warned her of when his investigations didn’t turn up heroin trafficking or a criminal record back in Turkey. “These guys—not well-educated, no profession, not here to go to school and better themselves in ways that will contribute to society—these guys often look for vulnerable women to marry in order to get their green card, Katie-Kat. Are you sure he loves you?”

Was he calling for congratulations on finding the woman of his dreams or for his dreams of becoming an American?

“I think I’ll take a walk,” she said.

“Good idea,” Ahmed answered. “This might take a while. And get us something for breakfast while you’re out.”

The pillow on his side of the bed was rumpled when she came back. The light was on in the bathroom, and she could hear him humming some pop song—was it “Unbreak My Heart”?—through the bubbly muffling of brushing his teeth. She had just finished putting away the groceries when the lights went out, and he stepped up behind her. “Sweet Katie,” he said softly. “You have made me a proud man today. Thank you.”

Katie waited until he was sound asleep before she slid out of bed and tiptoed to the closet, where she had stashed the dozen bagels she’d bought. They were on sale, she had told herself, and she would freeze them for Ahmed when they got home. The closet was the farthest away she could get from—
God, help me
, she started to cry—her husband. The first bite of what happened to be an everything bagel—salt, garlic, onion—was better than having that king-sized bed to herself. The second bite, which she tore off before swallowing the first, was better than being as deeply asleep as he was. She tore and chewed and swallowed whole gobs of the dozen bagels in fifteen minutes, the violence a match for the violence of her mother hanging up on her in the phone booth on Paradise Avenue, Ahmed’s murmurs that she didn’t understand as they made love, the pretty little ring Ingrid had bought for herself, and her own bare left ring finger as she held a cinnamon raisin bagel to her mouth and ate so brutally that the stiff dough made the corners of her mouth bleed.

“I don’t know how to say no,” Katie told me once. “Things have to blow up for me figure things out.” Throughout her life, it has been her body that she blew up so that she would have the tedious bumping back down the scale to reflect on her mistakes. She was working on how to say no in DBT and therapy that June. Her fear of loss was larger than her fear of whether she was the right person for someone else’s purposes. As she described her discomfort in the humid heat of San Bruno’s summer fogs, it occurred to me that she had yet to learn to fear whether that someone would be right for hers.

Walkabouts, Totems, and Dream Fasts

I
t was July when Mimi told me the story of her YMCA Hi-Y group’s D.C. trip.

The January winds of Philadelphia are not kind, but for once, Mimi didn’t care. Her plaid skirt whipped under her camel-hair coat as she almost danced to the station wagon and her waiting mother. Her Hi-Y leader, Mrs. Kraus, had announced that the group was going to Washington, D.C., for the Cherry Blossom Festival. The Y had chartered a bus, and the leaders had made arrangements to stay at a Y that was blocks from the White House. Then Mrs. Kraus passed out mimeographs of what there was to do and see besides the trees along the Tidal Basin. All the monuments were on the list and all the museums, as were tours they could arrange and even concerts at the National Cathedral. The kids got to decide what to see in the thirty-six hours they’d have in the city. There hadn’t been a lot of time to discuss it after Mrs. Kraus handed out the permission forms and lists of rules and what to bring and what not, but Mimi already planned to advocate for the display of First Ladies’ inauguration gowns.

“And the cherry trees will be beautiful,” she said as her mother turned onto the West Chester Pike. Dirty slush flared from each car on the entrance ramp. “Remember those pictures in
Life
?”

When her mom didn’t answer right away, Mimi looked up at her. “Remember?”

“Yes,” she said slowly. With her little finger, she smoothed her pink lipstick at the corner of her mouth. Mimi had inherited her mother’s fine skin and blonde hair and she ardently wished for the day when she would have her own grown-up gestures like that. She adored her mother. She was so elegant, even in her pink ski jacket and navy blue double knit pants. “You’re really excited about this trip, aren’t you?”

“The whole Hi-Y’s going, and we get to pick what we want to do. It’s almost like going alone.” She scrunched her eyes up so that the blue disappeared. “And when is the group going?”

The group
? Mimi could read her mother like a map. She pulled her seat belt away from her stomach to take a deep breath. “April eighth, ninth, and tenth.” She was too scared to say “we’re going.”

“That’s three months away,” her mother said, and lapsed into silence. “A Taste of Honey” was playing on the radio, and Mimi tried to concentrate on the music as she stared straight ahead.

When the song ended and the announcer started reading headlines, her mother reached out and snapped off the radio. “Don’t you think it would be a good idea to
earn
this trip?” Mimi’s mom asked. Mimi looked at her, considering. She did a lot of chores at home and then some. Last Saturday she’d dusted the baseboards, for instance, simply because she knew Mom would like it. What could she do to earn the seventy-five dollars for the trip?

As if reading her mind, her mother went on, “You could lose ten pounds. Ten pounds in three months is very doable.”

It was Mimi’s turn to say nothing.

“That would get you within thirty pounds of what Dr. Keske said you should weigh. You’d almost be thin by the time you start eighth grade. Wouldn’t that be nice?” Her mom smiled at her without taking her eyes from the road.

“Sure,” Mimi said. “It’d be great.”

Her mother cleared a shelf in the cupboard for Mimi. Rye Krisp. Sugarless cookies that tasted like sawdust. Cans of tuna. Her own bottle of Sweeta. Metracal in chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. She stocked the refrigerator with skim milk and 1 percent cottage cheese, and Mimi got her own “special” dinner each night, skinnless chicken breasts or broiled halibut with a lemon wedge, salad with another lemon wedge instead of dressing, a quarter cup of rice, which her mother leveled off with a knife. When Mimi reached for a banana to slice onto her Special K, Mom informed her that a small apple had almost fifteen fewer calories and was a lot more filling. Mimi ate the apple, and when she was starving as she diagrammed sentences at ten thirty, she told herself she’d have been just as hungry if she’d had the banana.

But she groaned when she opened her lunch box and found a container of tuna and pickle, no mayo, three Rye Krisps, and another apple. There would be an apple for a snack after school and an apple for dessert while her father and brother had ice cream. She thought of the talking tree in
The Wizard of Oz,
hurling apples in rage at being picked at.

Mimi wasn’t angry, though. Not really. She wanted the diet to work. She had her heart set on a bright red miniskirt and go-go boots for the first day of eighth grade. Even ten pounds might mean the popular kids in Hi-Y would talk to her on the bus.

It was with high expectations and a stomach gurgling with hunger that she brought the bathroom scale downstairs on Saturday morning for her mother to see her progress.

“I don’t understand,” Mom said as the red line settled firmly on 140, right where it had been for months.

“Her system has to kick in,” her father said, and chucked her under the chin. “Mimi’s a good girl. I know she’s trying hard.”

Mimi was trying hard. She skipped her afternoon apple, and she asked her mother to pack Metracal for lunch. Chalky and warm, it was vile and she was embarrassed to drink it while everyone else was trading bologna for peanut butter sandwiches, but Mimi was sure that on Tuesday, her next inspected weigh-in, she would have lost many pounds. Already her waistbands felt looser and her knees seemed more defined. How cool would it be if she lost more than ten pounds by April?

The scale boinged and quieted with the red line firmly on 140.

Her mother sighed but said nothing. Mimi stepped off the scale, her throat too tight to speak, picked up the wretched thing, and lugged it back to the upstairs bathroom. She went straight to bed and dreamed of Hydrox cookies and Nestlé’s chocolate milk; she woke singing “There’ll be change in the weather, there’ll be a change in me” until she realized it was the Metracal jingle and switched to, of all things, “Goober Peas.” That’s another thing she might do if—no,
when
—she got thin: write Dave Guard from the Kingston Trio a fan letter.

But
when
? On Saturday, her mother knelt on the kitchen floor to better see the black lines that signified two pounds each. “It’s definitely between lines,” she said. “You’ve lost a pound, Margaret. You should be proud of yourself.”

After two and a half weeks of starving in order to lose one pound, how could she feel proud?

Mimi stumbled on the last stair and dropped the scale with a thud on the hall carpet. The red marker shifted below the zero. Or had it? What if the scale was below zero when she got on it a few minutes ago for her mother’s inspection?

The next morning, the red needle lined up with zero and, yes, she breathed a sigh of relief, she was definitely between 140 and 138 pounds.

Her weight didn’t shift in the following week, by which time Mimi, hungry and tired of the bland fake food she was eating, indulged in two brownies at Hi-Y and had bought a couple of Milky Way candy bars to eat on the way home from school.

How could something that weighed two-point-five
ounces
injure her diet?

“You’re really staying with it,” her mom said when she refused the after-school tangerine.

The Washington, D.C., trip was in eight weeks. She had nine pounds to lose.

“Maybe it’s hormones,” her mother said. “Are you having your period?”

Mimi’s pale face turned scarlet. “No,” she choked.

That night she heard her father say that they should let her go on the trip as a reward for dieting, but her mother was adamant. “I’ll let her go if she loses seven,” she conceded, “but I don’t want to tell her that. She’s forty pounds overweight, John. She can’t go to high school
fat
. It’s a matter of sticking with it. That’s what I’ve done all these years—”

Here, Mimi mouthed the words with her mother. “I’m the same weight as I was on my wedding day.”

A few weeks before the trip, as Mrs. Kraus was getting ready to call her parents about the missing permission form, Mimi had lost three pounds. When she came home from school on Friday with an A+ on her essay about the caste system in India, her mother said, “I wish you did as well on your diet as you do in school. You know what hard work is, Mimi. Why don’t you apply yourself to
this
?”

“I do!” Mimi shouted.

Her mother turned from the stove in surprise. She studied her daughter, her short, plump, blonde, blue-eyed girl who had such a pretty face.

Mimi studied her mother back. She knew Mom was shocked into silence because Mimi didn’t shout. Mimi didn’t complain. Mimi didn’t whine. Mimi got good grades, sang in the school and church choirs, did her chores, and went along with plans.
Except for my weight
, she thought at her mother, like the lasers they used on
Star Trek
,
I’m perfect. Except for
one
thing.

The scale, the scale, the scale!
Mimi thought as she made her bed the next morning. If only it would surrender two more pounds she was pretty sure Mom would sign the YMCA permission in the belief that Mimi would lose another couple of pounds. The last snow was melting, she’d be able to go for bike rides soon. Exercise would help.
Please
,
dearest Lord
, she prayed, pressing her elbows into the baby blue gingham bedspread.
Just two pounds
.

As quick as quick, a thought came to her, surely divinely sent. All she had to do was bump the scale. She could be on it and weighed without Mom being any wiser, and she could say she’d hadn’t noticed if Mom found out.

“Five pounds!” Mom exclaimed. “Halfway there even though I doubt you’ll make it in three weeks.”

“How much more do you think I can lose before they go?” Mimi asked, careful to sound excited at the loss but without expecting a reward.

“You’re such a smarty,” her mother said, and swatted her lightly on the butt. “You do the math.”

Mimi stared at the dial. “One and a half pounds. Or two. I’ll be able to ride my bike really soon.”

“When do the permissions have to be handed in?”

“This Tuesday,” she said sadly.

“Well,” her mom drawled, “considering that A+ in history and how well you do fractions
and
your idea to start riding your bicycle, I think my good girl should go to Washington, don’t you?”

“Really?” Mimi exclaimed. “I can go? Oh, Mom, you’ll see: I’ll ride my bike for at least an hour a day, and my grades will be high and—and—” She sprang off the scale with a backwards skip, searching her mind for all the things she’d do to squeak onto that bus and make up the unlost pounds.

Which, as any fat girl who is older than thirteen would know, is the moment one’s mother looks down and sees the red needle below zero.

“Margaret.”

Mimi’s stuttered to a halt. “Huh?”

“‘Huh’? Is that what you have to say for yourself?”

She could feel the color climbing up her neck. “What’s the matter?”

“You set the scale back two pounds.”

“What?”

“I see what you did. You set the scale back. Oh, Mimi, I’m so ashamed of you.”

“I didn’t set it back,” she protested. “I’d never do something like that.” She bit her lip. “Do you think it’s because I dropped it?”

“I think you want to go to Washington very badly.”

“I do”—she could be completely honest about that—“but—but—I didn’t—I tried—I stuck—it slipped…”

“That you’d set the scale back is bad, but that you’d
lie
about it—oh, Mimi.” Her mom looked genuinely sad, which is what made Mimi start crying.

“I dropped it, Mom. I didn’t notice the number, honest. Reweigh me, or send me to my room without breakfast. Please, you have to believe me. I’m not a liar.”

“I’m sorry, Mimi. I’m sorry you had to do this and I’m sorry that you can’t admit what you did and I’m sorry you can’t apologize for it. I expect more from you. This was such an ugly thing to do to me.”

“I’m sorry, Mama, I am. I’m sorry I dropped it. I’m sorry I can’t lose weight. I’m trying. I’ll keep on trying—you’ll see. I know I’m not a good weight loser, but I’m not a liar, Mom. I’m good, really I am.”

My mother only ever made one diet bargain with me. I was about four years old, and she told me if I lost weight—I don’t know if there was a number attached—she would buy me the
Mr. Ed
record I coveted. She didn’t tell me how to lose weight, but somehow I associated apples with diet food. I remember standing on our clunky gray scale, eating an apple, and watching for the number to go down. It didn’t, my mother gave up and bought me the record anyway, and I was bored with it in about a day.

I usually laugh when I tell this story, but I couldn’t when Mimi told me she lost three pounds in the next three weeks but stopped going to Hi-Y meetings for the rest of the school year because everyone was doing projects related to the trip.

“It was searing,” she added. “I was trying. I was a
kid
. I weighed about 140 pounds—I was heavy for junior high. But I wasn’t ugly, not the way I thought I was. I can remember like it was yesterday getting on that scale. My word was no good after what I did to the scale.”

Mimi’s story is a bastard child of what I have come to call “original myths”: stories we told ourselves or that were, in tragic circumstances, told to us, about our selves when we were too young to counter the myths with soothing Stuart Smalleyisms—“I deserve good things. I am entitled to my share of happiness.” Original myths are not the cause of why we overeat, but they are the primal emotional reasons for overeating, the triggers attached to biological circuitry.

The shortest kid in her classes, weighing nearly one and a half times more than her ideal weight is Mimi’s myth of a Good but Fat, Ugly Girl, and she’s been struggling to get out from under the myth since it settled on her shoulders at the age of seven. It’s a heavy burden to live with because even though she was fat, she also got straight A’s; while she was made fun of and later left out of the prom-cheerleader-boyfriend loop, she went to one of the best universities in the country; while she is a physical disappointment to her mother, she has been a consistently thoughtful, loving daughter.