Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (14 page)

While Dean Longhetti was a coconspirator with his wife, Wendy’s stories about her mother would make one think she was the dominant force in the family. However, it was her father who ruled with an iron fist. Joe was a hard-drinking redneck who could lash out when spoken to, let alone spoken
back
to. What affected Wendy more than his angry drinking were his fears for his only child. Up to second grade, she wasn’t allowed to go farther than two houses in either direction. When she wanted to learn to swim, he thundered that she might drown; when it was time to take the training wheels off her bicycle, he replaced it with a huge tricycle that Wendy rode only in the basement. What kid, whose peers are riding cruiser bikes with their banana seats covered in stickers, is going to race around the hilly Virginia countryside on a trike?

Ida went along with most of Joe’s pronouncements although she won the argument against his belief that vegetables would choke little Wendy. She, too, was monumentally afraid for her daughter although she recognized, and was slightly jealous of, Wendy’s academic intelligence. Ida was also, in many ways, Joe’s creation. When Joe got work as a drywaller, the house was flush with treats, a post-Depression way of saying the family was doing financially well. At other times the Wickses spent weekends selling odds and ends at flea markets. A capitulation to clutter is another habit all three Wickses share. To make a narrow income go further, Ida took in ironing at a dollar an hour. She was a mastermind of the cuisine of the poor: pot pies which were five for a dollar, boxed macaroni and cheese, noodles over toast—and her famous gravy. Wendy’s spending money as she got older came from the fair prizes she won (once for ten cakes) from 4-H.

Wendy’s original myths of being ever fat and lazy were fleshed out by the shame of not doing what her friends did, of being tethered to home, of being taught fear, and by the isolation these strictures imposed. Add to that her hearing loss and the bookishness that separated her from her hillbilly family, and the young woman who went away to college in Farmville had abilities and ironies but little ambition. “I had decided to be a journalist and never considered anything else, but I lacked the desire and fire to do extracurricular things to make my career happen, and I graduated during the worst recession, 1981.”

She met Leo Hostenburg when she moved to Williamsburg after college and took a secretarial job in the law school at William and Mary. The courtship was dull but steady, and he never mentioned her weight or winced at her shopping habits that rapidly built up her credit card debt. He was getting his master’s degree in social work, and Wendy trusted that he would never belittle her or rage at her. How could she have foreseen the self-blame she would heap on herself over his benign neglect?

Hiding one’s light under the bushel of fat can be harder labor than the shame and discomfort of obesity. Wendy is always apologizing. She takes people—friends, her parents, men—too personally, becoming unctuous and ingratiating. This behavior drives her friends and potential lovers to distraction—and sometimes away. There’s an old joke about how many Jewish mothers it takes to change a lightbulb that ends in “Never mind. I’ll just sit here in the dark, all by myself…” and Wendy, when she doesn’t feel she’s getting enough attention or approval, is known to display that feint. She stalks her ex-boyfriends on the Internet only to dissolve into her innate belief that no one can love her for herself. What Wendy’s “self” is remains buried in a tangle of ideas she hasn’t acted on or in the tangle of magazines, CDs, videos, and books on her coffee table that haven’t quite coalesced into a talking point. The closest she’s come to that inner place that makes contentment possible is her diet and her devotion to the gym.

Wendy’s lapses of self-awareness are the mark of someone who was not fostered in an atmosphere of encouraged exploration. With so many rules, she didn’t learn to believe in herself and was criticized or punished for apparently arbitrary reasons, such as being grounded when she was eighteen because she got sunburned at her senior class picnic. Wendy got the better of that one by displaying long strips of peeling skin until Ida’s disgust overcame her anger.

But anger over exactly what?

While Wendy’s father may have been overbearing and controlling, at least he was around. Katie’s father was a compulsive gambler who left his wife and three kids when Katie was seven. Until he left, everything the family owned, needed, or did was at risk, putting Katie, the oldest child, on what she calls “catastrophe patrol.” There was the time her younger brother had severe bronchitis and their father drove all three kids and their mother to the doctor. “Pick us up in a half hour,” Sarah Monahan said. He never showed up. The four Monahans waited, Stephen coughing and in need of the antibiotics they would have headed off to get, until it was plain Mike Monahan had stopped off at the track and wouldn’t be coming to get them anytime soon. Twenty-four years old, raising three kids mostly, and soon absolutely, on her own, Sarah Monahan carried Stephen while Katie and Michael hung off her other arm for the two-mile walk home.

When Stephen and Michael went into their punk-rocker phase and were shipped off to Los Angeles to live with their dad, Mike had hit it big at the track and was living in a posh house with a pretty young wife. Sarah remarried, to a man the kids loathed for his prissiness, and whom Katie doubts Sarah was in love with, either. The boys, who were in trouble with the law, got the better end of the deal while Katie, who was fat but reliable, ping-ponged between sharing apartments with strangers and the stifling coldness of her mother and stepfather.

Reminiscent of John le Carré’s accounts of his conman father, Mike Monahan was a charmer, without a bad word for anyone. “He’s the only one who didn’t mention my weight,” Katie says, “and he always mentioned that he didn’t mention my weight. He didn’t love me enough, and he didn’t love me often enough. He was good with sound bites and so am I, but while everyone loved him, I am such a loser. My depression is too much for people.”

Too much
.
Not enough
. Four words that resonate throughout our days and on our blogs, tickling the urge to eat, to recede to the small dark place that resides between the determination to seek our destiny and the deprivation-induced dream that provides the road map for it. When an Australian aborigine reaches adolescence, he undertakes a walkabout, a journey that retraces his ancestors’ most significant events. In looking at the dynamics of our parents and families, we, too, undertake such a quest. Sometimes we have to go back another generation to understand what happened in that place where we are first taught what love is.

Mimi’s mother lost her own mother at age eleven, and Mimi wonders if part of her mother’s exactitude came from not having been shown how to be a mother. When Wendy looks back another generation, she has to consider the effect of parents who come from two different Southern social strata of what she calls “good country folk.” Her paternal grandparents were tenant farmers who moved around a lot and didn’t have indoor plumbing until the end of their lives. Her father didn’t have much of a parenting example to follow, and her mother, one or two social steps up from her husband, has a sense of superiority in small things (her yard versus the yard across the street, a bargain she found that a friend didn’t) that contributes to her meanness and judgments. Wendy reflects on the thin ice of tempers that she grew up among, and I know the next thing she’ll say, in a voice that was bested long ago, is, “But what can you do?”

Of course our families push our buttons. They’re the ones who installed them. Those first reasons for overeating, seen in a context of rebellion against, or adjustment to, our families, provide names for the buttons or triggers. We spend much of our adulthood trying to understand the reasons, triggers, and buttons of our compulsions. We turn to therapy, twelve-step programs, journaling, gyms, yoga, meditation, New Age gurus, church, Wicca, and the world of blogs, safe places for the ancient pain of our original myths and the selves we have made from them.

In the end, though, we eat. Food is companionship and a stand-in for love. We overeat to fill the not-enoughs. Thus, in part, fat becomes a rebellion against what is expected us of us, and a wall of excuses. The chemicals of sugar and fat subdue pains and fears.

As Lia, my Freudian Amazon reader wrote one day, “My inner fat woman is someone who uses my body to communicate with the world. She uses my fat body to silently scream: ‘Help! Something’s wrong with my life! I don’t know what it is, but I am unhappy!’ She is frequently the beacon of my discontent, arriving there years before my feeble mind can catch up. I wish she would learn to use her voice instead of my body to express herself. I honor my inner fat woman for the attempts she has made to manage emotional pain she knew no other way to assuage and for her attempts to have someone pay attention to her real experience.

“She is not my enemy. She is my clue.”

Do our histories
make
us fat?

No. Our histories only provide some of the reasons to eat. Our fat is the billboard of those reasons, and our relapses are statements of the irresolution of those reasons. The great question, then, is what comes first, settling the score between the rivals of love and hate that rage in our hearts or, somehow, muffling the pulsing, yawning
want
of the next bite, the next hit that will take us to that fetal overfull place in which we are alive without living. Is our primary responsibility to our pasts or to the abstention and discipline in the moment? In the Angry Fat Girls’ year of eating dangerously, everything we put in our mouths was an answer to those questions, even when we wanted, badly, to live up to the moment.

Writing the Body

M
imi had a revelation, she wrote me in IM that August. “It’s my decision whether to be happy or unhappy,” she announced. The day before, her boss had asked her if she was happy. She was taken aback by the question, partly because he didn’t frame it in reference to her job. “I don’t usually think of myself as happy or unhappy, mostly busy or tired or fat or whatever—but not happy. If I can look beyond the cookie I shouldn’t eat or what I didn’t get done at the office, maybe I can start to get a life.”

When did the phrase “get a life” come into currency? It’s a concept I struggle with, too. I want my days to be as thick as the air the day Mimi and I bumped into each other online, a hot afternoon before storms rolled in. I envision days of joyful writing, a bed of basil and tomatoes to tend, time to read the
Times
and listen to NPR, going swimming and lifting weights at the gym, studying guidebooks for a trip to Prague, taking my dog down to the pond an hour before sunset, and discussing Almodóvar with close friends in the evening as the candles sputter in their own wax.

“We,” I IM’d back, meaning the Angry Fat Girls, “all need a life.” I thought a moment and added, “Except Lindsay. Lindsay has a life.”

“Lindsay is whole,” Mimi wrote back.

Whole
, I mused as I headed out to the kitchen to make the salad that would be my second abstinent meal of the day. Intact. Entire. Boundaried. Separate but holding the possibility of being part of. Distinct parts tossed together to make a new thing.

Mimi and I were right. Lindsay is whole, and she has a life.

Lindsay worked hard to claim and expand her life and herself. I knew that because, starting in late July, I was part of it each morning in an eight thirty phone call she made while walking to campus. We had decided to commit each day’s writing the way I committed my food to my sponsor. It gave us a chance to talk about the knots we’d encountered in our work, what we planned to do after we put in our time at the computer, what we were reading, and what the other AFGs were up to. I heard about her campus job in information technology and friends from women’s studies, the yoga class she was taking, and what her plans were for the weekend.

I always had a lot to say about my writing and the dogs and the girls, but it wasn’t a very broad spectrum of subjects.

Spectrum, I decided, is part of wholeness.

The morning after my IM talk with Mimi, I stepped on the scale and it settled at 220 pounds. “Well,” I said out loud. “At least I have twenty pounds of safety.”

Wha—? I was surprised at my automatic reaction to the number. I had seventy pounds to go before I would fit into my thinnest clothes, a long way and a long time, but my safety would, at two hundred pounds, diminish exponentially at every decade.

Every dieter has some size or number that means slipping into Hazmat. I’d be on the other side of “very fat.” When I got thinner, people would take me more seriously and so I would also have to take myself more seriously. Which was scarier?

In the slow simmer of the library, Mimi was able to bring her lunch and walk over to the biopond to eat amid the butterflies that thrived in the Joe Pye weed. She had lost eight pounds since the March Weight Watchers weigh-in, and she was feeling good about how baggy some of her tunics were and how much improved her spirits were. Her Angry Fat Girlz posts were about “having just one” or “just a taste,” about eating consciously, the way she did in the Penn gardens. On her own blog, she often posted recipes handed out by her Weight Watchers leader. That summer she was in love with what I called “puddurt,” a mixture of thirty-two ounces of yogurt and a package of whatever flavor of sugar-free instant pudding she was in the mood for.

With a bum knee, Mimi was not able to exercise, but she was gunning to be the poster girl for Weight Watchers.

August in Virginia is beyond anything Philadelphia’s notoriously vile weather can dream up. Wendy was taking the thick heat as a personal insult to add to the injuries of dating.

“Why is it that first dates never happen on weekend nights,” she lamented to me as she drove home from work. Come Friday, she found herself at loose ends. Her best friend, Susan, a fellow secretary from the days Wendy worked at the library, was married, and it had come as something of a shock in the last two years when Wendy realized she really didn’t have any other friends in town. She began going to the gym around seven p.m. on weekends. Like Mimi’s library, the college gym was drowsier with the absence of a full student body. Ten minutes on the treadmill would show up as an “at least” clause in her blog when she recounted having twelve tortilla chips, four ounces of cheese, and a can of non-fat refried beans for supper. The next day, she would undereat and soon turn up with a loss and news of a pair of size 18 trousers.

“That’s
not
Weight Watchers,” Mimi said when we talked about Wendy’s progress.

“I wonder which credit card had room for the pants?” I said to Lindsay as we drank coffee in our separate states.

Katie was drifting. Her weight loss was slow on her new plan—under thirty pounds in two months.
²⁵
She was supposed to meet weekly with her sponsor to do step work, but she didn’t like the way her sponsor’s house smelled. Confusing matters more, she was reading a new diet book and becoming convinced that there was nothing wrong with a single piece of dark chocolate every day. I worried at the folly in this thinking but was glad to hear some good news from her: an ex-boss had called to ask if she would consider joining his franchising company, Pet Luv, and despite her freaking out about going to the interview at over four hundred pounds, he’d offered her a contract and she’d begun making sales within the week.

By August, Lindsay showed steady progress in a nifty bar graph on her personal blog, I Hate Carrot Sticks. At 168 pounds, she was shrinking out of her clothes while maintaining a continuum of activities. She showed up online at night less often because she was working on her dissertation about women in Texas politics. Her blog recounted weekly lunches with a friend and taking her father to the Spiritualist Church where she was learning to trust her hunches. In the spirit of wanting to share more of herself than her blog contributions, Lindsay posted photos on our Flickr site of her walk to campus, through woodsy fields and along streets of apartments. We got to see her yellow deep-porched two-story house surrounded by purple pansies and the sleepy willows along the Cuyahoga River where she walked with Jalen in the evening. Mimi,, Wendy, and I had mental pictures of her daily life and it inspired us to do the same thing.

The rest of us didn’t have this steady stream of quiet activities moving through our weeks. Being married helped, as did living a half hour from her parents. But it was more than that. Lindsay was regular in her habits, and she enjoyed them—loved the gossip in the IT office where she worked, the accomplishment of sweat, her dad’s corny jokes as they sat by the pool. It made me wonder, is she whole because she has a life, or does she have a life because she’s whole?

And what does
whole
mean? I emailed Lindsay about Mimi’s comments on her wholeness and asked what she thought about it. “It works, I guess,” she wrote. “But my own issues—and working on them—is part of living authentically, too.”

Her answer was a perfect Lindsayism: physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, political, and snark. I laughed out loud when I read it.

Of course Lindsay had read Simone de Beauvoir’s
Pyrrhus and Cinéas
, she had studied the questions of the individual’s right to be what she desires to be, how to live passionately, and how people can live in mutual freedom. She knew that in the realm beyond Dr. Phil (“…all of the things that are uniquely yours and need expression, rather than what you believe you are supposed to be and do”)
²⁶
authenticity is as political as it is personal. The “authentic life” comes from recognizing and acting on one’s needs and heart fires while recognizing other’s right do the same. Rather than pretzeling oneself to conform to social or family standards, one is a renegade. Lindsay worked hard at authenticity and had made great strides. The lady politicians of Texas who were her dissertation topic would approve entirely.

Of course, authentic does not mean unassailable. When authentic is stressed to its breaking point, you can fall back on having a life of routine. Or you can fall back on Long Island Iced Teas, the StairMaster, shopping, reality TV, therapy, antidepressants, or self-help bibles.

Or you can fall back on food.

Which is, for some of us, pretty much the end of living any kind of life at all. All five of us have spent vast amounts of time in that place, helpless to break out. It is a lonely state, the fat woman and the food and her groaning, aching, widening body. Lindsay had been in that mute place of pain three times, between college graduation and graduate school, and twice when she found herself not so much a wife and lover as a mother, worrying about her husband’s self-destructive behavior as though he were fifteen, and a diagnostician, frantically matching up symptoms to diseases. Expanding herself (her abilities, interests, ambitions, spirituality, friendships) as she defined the boundaries of self (where those moments of living most contentedly and in the most awareness bumped up against the bigger world of money, husband, academia, and family) was her ticket out of continuing to gain weight. Perhaps it’s one of the great literary paradigms of the chubby heroine.

“I had continued to grow,” Victoria Ransom, the narrator of Carol Dawson’s
Body of Knowledge
says of being the last of a dynasty whittled away over the course of a three-generation vendetta.

Victoria has been fed not only by her excellent cook, but also by the servants’ gossip, of the family saga of couplings, births, killings, and maimings that had filled fifty years, while being stuffed by her scholar-grandfather with history, literature, and philosophy. As the last living Ransom, Victoria undertakes the assembly of the family history that her ancestors couldn’t admit and confront. “They had left me here alone, abandoned, to serve as their monument.” Her size—blamed on her malfunctioning hypothalamus and requiring the installation of a freight elevator to carry her from the ground to the second floor—is the human equivalent of a ducal family’s coat of arms.

It is when Victoria learns that facts are not necessarily truth that her body unconsciously reinvents itself as she pines for unrealized connection in the gamuts of love, grief, intimacy, and desire that had not been included in her grandfather and nurse’s stories.

The ending of
Body of Knowledge
is inconclusive. Does Victoria emerge from her mausoleum into the world? Does she marry the man who unsettled her beliefs? Does she go on to write another book in keeping with her 180-degree-turn with food, called, perhaps,
Ghost of Ignorance
? We are told only that she is on the brink of venturing past the gate once the sun has set and that she needs new clothes.

I call miracle cures such as Victoria’s weight loss the “Ordinary People Method”: there will be an ah-ha! moment when some channel in the brain switches direction. Depression will turn to joy, cravings to satisfaction, chronic exhaustion to energy, aches to limberness.

This is what popular culture, which is where most of us live, sells us. In a culture led on a long leash held by the Me Generation, if we only understand
ourselves
, our lives will become painless masterpieces. Alas, in real life, the spontaneous remission that comes with understanding who/what to blame for our overeating and weight is dangerous because it promises that weight loss is synonymous with self-understanding, and it’s backed up by shelves of books about emotional eating, intuitive eating, Freudian eating, and fat serenity.

Lindsay started to relax after Jalen laughed at her joke about Carp Lake. “Look, honey,” she said, pointing at the exit sign off I-75. “I wonder what the honeymoon suite is like? It sounds perfect for us. We could argue over the one Diet Coke in the vending machine and the one pillow all night long!”

It had not been a pleasant drive. Jalen started out in the passenger seat, planning a run of the circumference of Mackinac Island after they checked into their hotel. His announcement made Lindsay step on the accelerator. They were on their way to Janice’s wedding, Lindsay’s “twin” in the Longhetti family lore, and the rehearsal was at six thirty. It was a five-hour drive with Toledo and Detroit traffic yet to endure. Jalen gasped at the car’s surge; she sighed dramatically and from then on they bickered about everything.

She suggested changing drivers in Bridgeport but he insisted on Monroe. He wanted to picnic along Saginaw Bay but she nixed it. “We’ll be lucky to get to the island by two,” she said. “And an eight-mile run is going to do me in.”

“Did I say
we’d
run the island?” he snapped back. If he hadn’t been conspicuously not looking at her, he’d have seen her gawping like a drawbridge. She zoomed the loop around Toledo. The sign for Temperance made her retreat into a long, brooding silence.