Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (27 page)

Then we had one of the most draining conversations I’ve had about living in big bodies.

“So why am I still fat?” Mimi asked before saying good-bye. “I don’t get it. We are despised and it’s not like I didn’t know it. Why would anyone choose to be hated?”

Indeed, obese people, and particularly women, are increasingly at risk of becoming Public Enemy Number One. In 1997, former surgeon general C. Everett Koop urged that “…this war on obesity must continue unabated.”
⁶⁸
At the 2003 Obesity Summit, U.S. surgeon general Richard Carmona proclaimed that childhood obesity “…is every bit as threatening to us as is the terrorist threat we face today.”
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Some two-thirds of our fellow Americans consider our fat to be indicative of lack of self-control, laziness, moral deviance, self-indulgence, and incorrigibility,
⁷⁰
while comedians and phobic bloggers have no compunction about telling jokes and calling us names. Any formerly fat person has listened to thin people whisper about why Maura isn’t being promoted or what a shame Chris has let herself go. Most people’s defense is to live in a carefully guarded zone of silence. But it takes little more than a random link on the Yahoo! home page to have the troops from the war on obesity pour into that most tender and fraught of all personal vulnerabilities.

There are, however, others who do not live behind silence in order to avoid another skirmish. The article that caused Mimi’s mini-breakdown, Harriet Baskas’s “Squeezed to Meet You,”
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closely follows the tips that the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance gives for airplane travel: book off-peak hour flights, buy two tickets, fly first class or reserve aisle or window seats, and tell the airline in advance that, if possible, you’d like to be next to an empty seat.
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Baskas goes one better than NAAFA, advising large travelers to be friendly to airline personnel and their neighbors. “You might end up shedding some stereotypes as well.”

Mimi was just back from New Orleans, an amulet of sea salt, mugwort, and allspice under her shirt to attract the empty middle seat. Each March, Mimi works with other solitary Wicca practitioners to prepare for the vernal equinox sabbat of Ostara, the goddess of the dawn and of spring, married at the feast to the sun god. On the night of the Sap Moon, Mimi, in her alter ego as Asterië, and five other women and two men cast a circle in the backyard of her friend Helen’s farmhouse an hour outside of the city, invoking Callisto, a woman changed into a bear, Ursa Major, because of various sexual transgressions in the stories told about her. They turned their faces to the stars and traced the constellation of Virgo, associated with Persephone, whose reemergence from the underworld brings spring to the earth.

March in Louisiana meant Helen’s—or Selene, in the Circle—overgrown yard was abundant with magick from the flowers Philadelphia wouldn’t see for another month or see at all. Azaleas and magnolias, hibiscus, passion flowers, camellias, ginger, and the all-important thorn apple, one of the three witches’ weeds along with mandrake and henbane, vied for primacy in the night. As High Priestess, Selene burned the dried petals of the cornflower and alder twigs, and the circle dipped their hands three times in a basin of water dancing with dandelion leaves and petals, purifying themselves before the four compass points and the virgin stars.

Selene chanted a prayer of thanks for the lengthening days and warming soil, and called upon the offerings placed on the altar to honor creativity, protection, tranquillity, and prosperity—a knot of parsley, the eggs she and Mimi had dyed in vegetables the day before, a bouquet of narcissus and vervain. The men drummed to the Sap Moon and Mimi/Asterië, moved by the rhythms and the occasional call of the mockingbird, found herself dancing, naked, arms outstretched to embrace the bear in the sky. Her knees didn’t bother her and her friends, intoxicated by this inspired abandon, began to sing, tunelessly, their histories and dedications within the art of white magick. Mimi weighed 268 pounds, eight more than she had in June, six months earlier, when we initiated Angry Fat Girlz.

And yet, amid the sky-clad group growing ever closer to her offering of white-white skin, full-nippled heavy breasts, and swinging belly, their hands touching her for the connection she radiated with Terpsichore, she had never felt more comfortable in her own skin. This was the core truth of Mimi. She had a genius for being absorbed in worship and a calling to be one priestess among many. This truth was light-years beyond the facts of the 140-pound twenty-four-year-old wearing her first business suit from Lord & Taylor, the woman who tries so hard to appreciate the feel and look of a fuzzy pink sweater, the woman who runs a prestigious medical library’s website. For a glorious, unself-conscious twenty minutes, she was Asterië rather than the woman who steps on a scale once a week to stare at a different kind of truth.

But she did not get an empty middle seat on the trip home. Her back and neck, despite ritual, despite parsley and mugwort, ached for a week after.

Mimi describes herself as being thoughtful, creative, and smart, and it showed in her writing and blog page layouts, her interest in web design, and her work as an herbalist and candle maker. She’s the AFG who calls to listen when one of us is in a tough patch, and we lean on her. On the other hand, she lists the “worst things about [her]self” as being self-critical, lazy, and fat.

Can one’s
self
be fat? As defined by the Encarta Dictionary, no, not really. It defines self as “somebody’s personality or an aspect of it, especially as perceived by others.” Or do others see our fat and ladle on the associated faults until we forget that fat is a physical adjective, applicable to clouds and bodies alike? Is fat shorthand for a long list of things we don’t like or have come to believe?

I brought this up with Lindsay one morning. “It’s the ‘I
am
’ that gets me,” I said as I pulled on heavy socks. The weird weather had turned frigid, and dressing had turned into a long ordeal. “I am funny. I am smart. I am talented…” I trickled off. It sounded dumb to sit there telling myself I’m good with dogs or a good cook.

“I know what you mean. It sounds so…self-justifying.”

“Yeah,” I said, “and, like, you’re saying it in advance of someone denying it, and then if they do, like, say, ‘You’re not smart. Gore Vidal is smart,’ then you have to take that affirmation off your list.”

“
Am,
” Lindsay reminded me, is a weak verb. “That’s the second week of freshman comp.”

“I think I like the verb
have
better,’” I said. “‘I have intelligence. I have talent.’ Even I have fat.’”

“It’s like your best qualities are on reserve at the bank,” Lindsay answered. “Like, you might not be able to write today, but you have talent to draw on tomorrow.”

“Yes!” I said, stamping my feet into my snow boots. “
Am
is subject to opinion.
Have
is more personal, more of a claim to your self. ‘I have fat…but I also have a nun doll collection. I have fat…but I have a plan to get rid of it.’”

“To have” is to say this or that is mine
, I thought as I leashed Daisy and headed out into the windchill. It’s a word of responsibility and specificity. “I am loving” is very different from “I have love.” “I have love” can mean one has love to give or one has love coming in, like a hiker whose canteen might or might not be empty. You might have to extend the sentence to get it right, but in doing so, you are forced to consider the alternative: “I have love to give. I have love in my life,” asks you to acknowledge the sources.

The words that go well with “I am” don’t go well with “to have”: funny, smart, generous, a good mother/daughter/aunt. You’re forced to reword, and the rewording is a claim of reciprocity. To say “I have a daughter” is also to say that your daughter has a mother. If you’re gunning for more specificity, “to have” forces you to act on it—use it, do it. “I have good parenting skills” provokes an assessment of whether you use them or not. “I have love for my daughter” asks if you’ve shown it lately.

“‘To have’ is a tool,” I told Lindsay the next morning.

“Then ‘to be’ is multiple personality.” She laughed. “It switches from being a good friend to being a good mother and back to smart.”

She rang off because she was going into the library, leaving me to rumble this around some more.

“To have,” I decided, is a marriage to one’s self, that arsenal of merits and faults that makes us viable, liable, and human.

It could be about time to get down on my knees in front of a mirror and propose to myself.

If the second word in defining ourselves is
fat
, are we using it instead of lazy, gluttonousness, self-indulgent, dirty, smelly, out of control, diseased, stupid, voluminous, a drain on society? And if that’s true, how could Mimi carry around 340 pounds on her tiny frame, serving on the board of the national medical librarians’ association, earning promotions, tending a garden, putting together Ikea furniture (she was a whiz with a drill), traveling to Spain, Switzerland, Scotland?

It’s
hard work
simply to live with fifty or 250 extra pounds. To do it and stand up to address one’s peers or get out of bed and go to work for eight hours is anything but lazy, self-indulgent, stupid, out of control, or sick.

She was Atlas carrying the heavens, not on her shoulders but in her belly.

Only in its usage as part of the vocabulary of immunology does
self
refer to the body, how our corporeal selves recognize tissues and organs as their own.

Since Mimi’s experiences with Michael Clark, she would regain weight when she approached 211 pounds. She’s gotten down to 222, 220, 215, but she regained whenever 211 was in sight. It was a psychological threshold and the only time she crossed it was fifteen years later, in 2001, when she let another man she thought she could trust guide her. But when Mimi gained, she didn’t stop when 211 was safely off the scale’s radar. Was she “immune,” in a metaphorical sense, to weight loss? Did her body not recognize itself when she lost fat?

Was Mimi one of the people who should stop torturing herself with points, weekly weigh-ins, and using Weight Watchers tips such as asking for ten french fries instead of the full order?

From the get-go, dieters have at best a 10 percent chance of maintaining weight loss. Fat women have to ask themselves why they put themselves through the tedium, stress, labor, and loss of liberty that a diet induces. Increasingly, the evidence is that, as long as we eat nutritiously and exercise regularly, only the severely obese will suffer weight-related health consequences.

What, then, would it take for Mimi—Katie, Lindsay, Wendy, or me—to live at peace, even lovingly, with our big bodies? There are a number of organizations for people who achieved such a truce, preeminently NAAFA and HAES (Health at Every Size).
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Twelve-step parlance calls fat acceptance “Fat Serenity.” I haven’t found much evidence of serenity, and acceptance into the fat club has been elusive in my efforts to unlock the secret of the body truce.

The fat acceptance community is as shy as morning glories at midnight. Keeping in mind the vicious responses to “Squeezed to Meet You,” I can understand their reluctance. But so antithetical is the notion of weight loss to fat acceptance proponents that it’s as though I had said nothing besides “I’m losing weight” in my requests to discuss either NAAFA’s work or individual women’s journeys toward coming to love their fat bodies.

My words were matches thrown into deep wells of fossilized anger. “I won’t talk to you,” one woman told me straight out after she had given me her phone number. “You don’t understand the feminist political aspects of my work. You’re one of the enemy.”

I was adhering to my food plan and losing weight, but I weighed 232 pounds that day. How can I
not
support many of the fat acceptance philosophies?

An editor at BellaOnline passed my interest in speaking with women living in fat acceptance to an online group called Don’t Tell Me What Size I Must Be. The referral prompted more anger at my supposed duplicity. How, I was asked, could I accept myself as a fat person
and
diet? By sharing their stories with me, they risked endorsing my double standard. Didn’t I know dieting doesn’t work? Look what had happened to me and look at the blog—Angry Fat Girlz—I was associated with. And finally, how could I only devote one chapter to the question of whether to diet or not?

Obviously, I had not shared the entire outline of my book, so there was no way that they could know that the question of the viability of dieting runs throughout our five stories. And I had asked for information, not a club card or validation; beyond that, while the seed for this book was my failure, my failure was partial. I did not, as that vaunted 90 percent do, gain all of my weight back. Nor do I think my twelve-step program and food plan failed.
I
failed. When the crisis came, I had not grown out of my fat history enough to stand up for myself.

Maybe Mimi is right: we
can
have fat personalities.

Certainly, the public figures within the fat acceptance movement, authors and/or popular bloggers have defined themselves as fat. “Fat,” Lara Frater writes breathlessly, is “not something abnormal that must be eliminated at all costs, but the very essence of who I am!”
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As an author who has written the Baedeker’s guide to the planet of fat girls, finding a social life in the fat acceptance movement and a husband among Fat Admirers,
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it is possible to see why she claims her size as her identity. Lara was more forthcoming about the chimerical process from body hatred to body embracement. “You know how they say there’s a thin person inside every fat person?” she said in a slightly raspy voice that has definite charm and sex appeal. “Well, there’s a fat person living inside me, and that’s all there is. It’s a thing I had to take upon myself, to accept. I am fat. That’s not going to change, and that’s who I am. When I was trying to lose weight, I hated my body and myself. I
had
to love my body.”