Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (29 page)

The real name of the owner of 1 Enoch was Morris Johns but he went by Sleight to everyone but his bank and the IRS. Three weeks later, when he invited Mimi into the circle cast in celebration of the reunion of Persephone and Demeter, he was Samyaza, the angel who led two hundred angels to copulate with the daughters of man.

Mimi asked to be apprenticed to his coven. He agreed gladly and was only a little less hesitant when she asked to be his apprentice. “I need to be led,” she told him.

“You need to be taught,” he countered. “You don’t know enough of the Ways to know I am your teacher.”

“I know you,” she answered, and he agreed to tutor her in the spells and rituals of the coven known as the Watchers—those angels who left heaven to create a race of giants on earth.

“There was so much that was good there,” Mimi says of her four years, “but Sleight was one of those priests who’s in it for superstardom. It was all about being the biggest group with the most specialties and the most public celebrations. We regularly met up at Rittenhouse Square or Longwood Gardens to chant and dance and hand out leaflets for 1 Enoch and neo-paganism. Sleight had a dozen apprentices and none of us went through the three lunar cycles of training and the year-and-a-day initiation that is customary for apprentices to go through. We were in and anything we learned beyond the basics, like casting a circle and calling the quarters, we learned on our own or from someone else.”

Among the basics that Sleight used in his pamphlets and introductory remarks were the two official laws of Wicca. The first two of these rules come from the Rede, the governing code for all practitioners of white magick: “An’ ye harm none, do what ye will” and the Threefold Law, “All good that a person does to another returns threefold in this life; harm is also returned threefold.”

Sleight’s third rule is from the turn-of-the-century
Gospel of the Witches
. It is a subject of much discussion among Wiccans and his employment of it bore his twist on the craft:

And as the sign that ye are truly free

Ye shall be naked in your rites, both men

And women also…

Sleight’s rules for Mimi were that she serve and obey him, and that she fall in love with him.

That had already happened, when he offered her the alternative cookbook, three weeks before the vernal equinox and the rites of Ostara and its promises of new beginnings with the advent of spring.

Mimi redesigned the Watchers’ website and monitored their active posts, editing out anything that might displease Sleight. He praised her work, praised her prettiness, and urged her to explore her goddess connection. She had her hair colored, took makeup lessons, and bought more striking clothes. And she got interested in herbs, turning to Jolene, a.k.a. Sky Gull, a former apprentice to Sleight. Jolene didn’t show up often for gatherings, and never for public ones. She hinted at things about herbs and spices, waxes and colors, that Sleight didn’t know, that could protect their user from harm close at hand. Mimi thought of Sleight’s long hands and said no one could know everything and asked about the uses of lemon peel.

When you are mesmerized—by a man or a project, a successful diet or research or friend—time flows in too-quick starts and relentless stops. In March of 2002, confident that Sleight would mystically guide her through the weight-loss process, Mimi left Weight Watchers. She paid little attention to what she was snacking on through the day and at night, curled up in her La-Z-Boy while she read and wrote in the leather grimoire she bought at 1 Enoch. It came as a shock when she had to spend a night in the Penn Sleep Center for a radical adjustment of her CPAP machine and saw that she had drifted up to 340 pounds in the two years since she met Sleight.

“Is it because of my weight?” she asked the pulmonologist after he explained that she’d gone from twenty to twenty-five breathing pauses per hour to thirty to forty.

“I can’t say whether it is or it isn’t,” he answered. “Thin people have sleep apnea, too. What I can say is that the obese are far more prone to the condition, and your events absolutely wouldn’t get worse if you lose weight, while they very might get worse if you gain more.”

It was back to Weight Watchers again—and it was back to discussing her food and eating with a man as her spiritual advisor. In the next two years she lost more than 104 pounds, the only time she has crossed the 211-pound barrier.

Sex with a priest can be very inspiring, especially one who has the psychic power to lend strength of will to a beloved.

Until, that is, the beloved finds out she is
one
of the beloved, one of the
old
beloved, and in fact, has been led to be regarded by the
new
circle of women around Sleight as a pain in the ass.

Mimi was so much a pain in the ass—showing up for gatherings, going to Sleight’s scarily barren apartment when he called in the middle of the night, running the website—that Sleight sent Jenny (a.k.a. Brighid) to her office with a letter saying she was banned from the coven and was never to contact Samyaza again.

How much do eight million tears weigh?

The story of Sleight was an open-ended denouement because she had a friend in Jolene who could confirm Sleight’s habit of picking up and dropping women, and who encouraged her to practice her Craft on her own and to make contact with other solitary practitioners. Still, Mimi has bumped around the scale more than any of the rest of us, and each high she reaches before getting into another serious course of Weight Watchers has a history of grief.

Mimi finished telling me the cautionary tale of Sleight as we waited for her train back to Philadelphia. We lucked out and found two seats, and were surrounded by bags that included jokey Christmas gifts for Katie, Lindsay, and Wendy. We’d found the perfect booth in Union Square that had a variety of grow-your-own fill-in-the-blank items. A boyfriend for Wendy, a personal trainer for Lindsay, a shrink for Katie. I had learned a lot about Mimi that day that I loved—her delight in taking pictures, which I share, her perfect window-shopping sensibility, the source of her compassion for Wendy, and a peek into her iconography (Green Man images, tasteful fat ladies, fat smiling suns, and flying pigs, which were another thing we liked in common).

“So why do you put yourself through it all?” I asked. “You’re at Penn School of Medicine, for Christ’s sake. Look at the new findings on all the obesity scare stories. You’re pretty, funny, so smart, kind, talented, professional—being thin isn’t going to enhance that, and it’s not going to cure your arthritis. You’ve joined water aerobics to get more fit, which is so cool. Why not…give up?”

“Because,” she snapped, “I will never give my body ‘up’ again. Not to a man, not to a group, not to food. I may not be in charge yet, but I’m working on it.
I
get to be the boss of me, and I want the strength and discipline I get from losing weight to help do all that bossing.”

So there it was. Mimi wanted sovereignty over her body in order to own her life, whether it meant obeying or rebelling against a food plan. Her train was announced, and we gathered our stuff and walked to the train. Hours earlier, I’d sneaked back to the seller of handblown Polish ornaments to buy her a Louis Comfort Tiffany ball that I gave her at the gate.

She smiled lovingly at the delicate blue, green, and yellow reproduction of the dragonflies and folded the box back up before hugging me. “Good-bye, Francie,” she said. “Thank you for asking me to spend this day with you.”

“And thank you for coming. I love you, Meems.”

“I love you, too,” she said, and hugged me again.

She’d found my family nickname intuitively, and I knew that, this time, the return “I love you” was sincere.

Unfun Facts to Know and Tell

W
herever the Angry Fat Girls were on New Year’s Day of 2007, it was unnaturally warm. “There’s snowdrops on campus,” Wendy told me when she called me in Arizona to see how I was faring after I posted a desperate description on my personal blog. One of Wendy’s MOs is to offer a story or newspaper article as consolation for an entirely different crisis. Mimi also called but asked more direct questions as I lay on my parents’ couch with the Christmas tree for company and sobbed about cookies and old age and boredom and Scott and pie.

“Can you go to bed without eating tonight?” she asked.

“Maybe,” I sniveled.

“Can you drink eight glasses of water a day until you get back? Just do one thing from your food plan, okay, sweetie?”

“Better,” I said as I carried the phone and another pile of cookies into my bedroom, grateful that my father was blind and my mother slept more and more as her heart weakened. “How are you?” It was best to move away from my slightly gray lie to whatever had poked Wendy to dial my parents’ house.

“Ah’m all right, Ah guess…Ah’m lookin’ at all the women on Match.com to see what they say about themselves. Ah just don’ think Ah can claim bein’ outdoorsy, do you?”

I laughed. “How were
your
parents over Christmas?”

“I bought my mom a blouse for two dollars, which she loved and tried to give back to me.” She gave one of her cackling laughs that cats save for going into heat. I held the phone away from my ear until she finished. “Now I’m about ready to drive down to Hillsville and yell at my mother ’cause she’s callin’ me and sayin’ stupid shit like, ‘I hope you’re not depressed’ ’cause Ah’m not with Leo and Ah don’ have a boyfriend for new year. It’s almost like she’s not happy unless I cry and say, ‘I wish I were dead.’”

Where did I read that banging your head against a wall burns 150 calories an hour?

“Got any resolutions?” I asked as I fed a piece of peanut butter cookie to Daisy.

“Ah’m thinkin’ about takin’ tennis lessons. I wonder what the other girls are plannin’?”

Mimi emailed me an answer to that question the next day. She’d been in upstate New York, at a reading of
The Golden Bough
. She was hoping
this
would be the year she got to a comfortable weight. In San Bruno, California, Katie emailed about which futility she should settle on—lose weight? stop overreacting to life? stay out of her family’s quarrels?—as she tried to teach Apple and Orange, her kittens, not to climb the curtains, where they would be seen by her pet-phobic landlords. I avoid New Year’s resolutions, but that was the year I was forced to finally concede that Scott hurt me more than he comforted or supported me.

New Year’s Day meant a gathering of the Longhetti clan at Lindsay’s uncle Ted’s house in Barberton, just south of Akron. Lindsay adored Uncle Ted, a retired battalion chief of the Akron Fire Department. He was her father’s identical twin, and the two men finished each other’s jokes, swore in the same language at the stupidity of the Browns quarterbacks, and had worked together to build extensions and swimming pools at each other’s home and the cabin in Upper Sandusky, tinkering at whatever engines came their way. Her parents and sisters would be there and so would her cousins Jilly and Terri. That was the good news. The bad news was that this was also Aunt Carol’s house. The Aunt Carol who always had a dig at her weight and her sisters’ and cousins’ lack thereof.

“Please don’t just stand there when Aunt Carol asks what kind of goodies I ate at Christmas,” she asked Jalen as she left the interstate for Wooster Road. “If she mentions that Jilly had to take all her Christmas presents back because they were too big—”

Her sentence hung. What could Jalen do? Smack Carol? Wonder aloud if Jilly had an eating disorder? Ask Aunt Carol where her daughter got the thin genes?

“—ask where Jilly got her thin genetics or something, okay?” Aunt Carol looked a lot like Aunt Bea in
The Andy Griffith Show
and Uncle Ted, like her dad, had a belly that made summer swim parties a hoot because it kept popping out of his trunks. But whereas Dean Longhetti fought his gut fat, Uncle Ted laughed along with them at it and only shrugged when he’d been diagnosed with diabetes a couple of years ago.

And so, the moment she saw Uncle Ted barefoot at the door, she was furious at herself for wearing clogs without socks.

She nudged Jalen and nodded at his feet.

“What did the doctor tell you about going barefoot? Where’s your cane?” Lindsay asked.

“And happy New Year to you, too, Linny,” he said.

“Unc,” Lindsay said with a note of warning in her voice.

“I’m in the house, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “My shoe feels funny.”

Back in September, Lindsay had heard on the Longhetti grapevine how Ted stepped on a piece of glass when he was winterizing the pool. It wasn’t until Aunt Carol saw brown spots on her white carpet that evening that he noticed the cut. Despite a thorough cleaning and daily changes of dressings, Lindsay’s mom told her, the cut turned nastier by Halloween. Lindsay drove over to check Uncle Ted out for herself. She heard the uneven footsteps of someone limping in pain before he answered the door.

“I’m hearing rumors,” she said with both hands on her hips. “I want to see the cut.”

He winced as he turned toward the living room, then covered the intake with a laugh. “It’s Halloween, Linny-girl. It’s my God-given costume.”

“Just because you’ve been Santa for the toy drive every year since Jesus was born doesn’t mean you get to maim yourself for every holiday,” she retorted. She knelt down and pulled off his sock, then unwound the gauze. She felt faint from the strong smell of fermenting yeast. The flesh was peeling and a palm-sized area around the joint of the big toe was hot to the touch. Lindsay pulled out her cell phone and called her dad to come take Uncle Ted to the doctor. He ended up in the hospital for a night of intravenous antibiotics before the doc would debride the widening hole between the toe and foot.

Aunt Carol was a guilty wreck that she hadn’t taken it more seriously, so Lindsay’s dad was there when they got to speak to the physician. The news was bad. The infection was eating into the tendon. Uncle Ted went back every week to have the wound cleaned and inspected. He was warned at the end of every treatment about using his cane and wearing shoes. The swelling had burst blood vessels, and his foot and ankle turned a spidery purple and black. Worse, Uncle Ted’s moods, which had been dependably serious or jolly all of Lindsay’s life, alternated between defensiveness and whining within the same sentence, which was what scared her most. She wanted her uncle, the muscled, gregarious guy who could install a swimming pool, change the oil on her Mazda, and then round up the Longhettis for touch football after dinner.

“Aunt Carol said she got you size-fourteen sneakers for Christmas,” Lindsay lectured.

“It’s like walking on skis,” he said. “Give an old man a break, Linny. It doesn’t matter anyway.”

She bit her tongue to keep from saying it most certainly
did
matter. The dressing slid around when he walked barefoot. Without feeling in his feet, he was frightened of slipping in socks, and he resisted leaving the house because of the ugly swelling and bizarre footwear. His complexion was pasty, and he looked soft from lack of activity.

Lindsay poked Jalen. “I want you to show Uncs some things he can do with hand weights and a resistance tube. You need to get him moving.”

Jalen nodded. Exercise is both Jalen’s and Lindsay’s answer to everything—exercise and following her orders. Ted had already had a battery of cardiologists, endocrinologists, and orthopedists giving him clear instructions about how to manage his heart, diabetes, and infection, but it was Jalen who could help him get some strength back.

Her cousin Terri was sitting at the table tearing salad greens as her mother and Aunt Carol peeled potatoes. “I’m worried sick,” Carol was saying, “but I can’t watch him all the time. He’s sixty years old, not a toddler.”

Lindsay kissed everyone hello and took a wineglass from the dozen on the counter. “You guys talking about Unc not wearing shoes?”

The silence made Lindsay look at Aunt Carol closely. Her mouth was trembling, and Terri started slashing the salad spinner as though mustering troops to battle.

“What’s going on?” she asked. Aunt Carol looked at Terri.

“There’s been a…complication,” she said.

“What complication? With Uncle Ted’s foot? His heart? What?” Lindsay asked.

“His foot. Dr. Stetts says it’s wet gangrene. The infection is eating into the bone.”

Lindsay sat down, hard, on the nearest chair. “When did you find this out?”

“Yesterday. I could see the color had changed to yellow, and I called Terri and your dad. We took him to the emergency room, and Dr. Stetts had him stay overnight. They debrided more but…they’re going to have to take his foot off.”

“Why didn’t you call us?” Lindsay looked from her aunt to her mother, who shook her head in defeat. “I would have come up. I would have talked to Dr. Stetts. There have to be other therapies.”

“He’s had double-bypass surgery, so his circulation is not all that good. There wasn’t anything you could have done to keep this from happening.”

Lindsay returned her glare to her mother. “There has to be something we can do.”

As the Longhettis ate their New Year’s dinner of ham, scalloped potatoes, steamed green beans, salad, dinner rolls and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, hot fruit salad, and vanilla ice cream, seven metabolisms launched into the same chain of events. The masticated green beans entered the stomach, the temporary holding area for food, which shrinks to hold a quarter of a cup of liquid when empty and can swell to about eight and a half pints after a heavy meal. The stomach produces and secretes gastric acids and digestive enzymes that break down the ham from large molecules into the small ones that can be passed into the small intestine, a process that takes forty minutes to a few hours.

Most of the nutrients from the New Year’s Day meal the Longhettis shared were extracted in the duodenum, the first section of the twenty-foot tube of the small intestine. The presence of proteins and fats in the duodenum prompts the secretions of hormones that alert the pancreas to release the pancreatic juice that will help to neutralize acids along with a number of enzymes that break down fats into lipids, proteins into amino acids, and starch into glucose, the body’s main source of cellular fuel. These secretions are half of the pancreas’s job.

I doubt that Lindsay’s family would have found this fitting conversation as they ate a tense dinner while not mentioning Ted’s upcoming amputation. But to understand, or reinterpret, the establishment hype about obesity, diabetes type 2, dietary and exercise requirements, bariatric surgery, hormone experiments, and other matters fat people have to consider on a daily basis, it’s essential to have a course in Metabolism 101.

The second job the pancreas performs is in the production of insulin. Insulin is a hormone (that is, a messenger cell) that, after Ted Longhetti finished his salad, tells and allows the liver, muscles, and fat to absorb glucose in order to keep the blood glucose level.

The Longhettis’ new army of insulin had another, overlooked effect on their metabolisms: it coalesces fatty acids into triglycerides, which, as clumps of fatty acids, couldn’t enter the body’s cells, which were feasting on glucose. Those triglycerides retreated into the adipose tissue that is Ted’s potbelly. Increased insulin makes us store fat. In
Good Calories, Bad Calories
, Gary Taubes directly confronts the ongoing orthodoxy of counting calories while following a low-fat diet. “It is important also to know that the fat cells of adipose tissue are ‘exquisitely sensitive’ to insulin…Elevating insulin even slightly will increase the accumulation of fat in the cells. The longer insulin remains elevated, the longer the fat cells will accumulate fat, and the longer they’ll go without releasing it.”
⁷⁸

As Uncle Ted shuffled off with his brother and sons-in-law to catch the kickoff, too many of his blood cells did not recognize the insulin that was trying to open doors for the new glucose to be stored for later use. Lindsay’s push to get her uncle exercising was correct: by getting his muscles in shape, he would be able to break down his glucose better. Without medication, careful diet, and exercise, his blood can overload with glucose, which can eventually lead to diseased blood vessels—diabetic angiopathy.

Ted Longhetti has type 2 diabetes mellitus and is insulin resistant. While he produces enough insulin for a nondiabetic, his body is desensitized, inhibiting his muscle cells from absorbing the glucose they need. At the same time, his liver goes into overdrive to produce yet more glucose, thus glutting his blood with more glucose than it can use and effectively starving his body. Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of diabetes, affecting about 2,780,000 Americans, or just over one-sixth of the population.
⁷⁹
More than one-tenth of men who are twenty years and older—10.9 million—have type 2 diabetes mellitus, while nearly one-ninth or 9.7 million women in the same age group suffer from the disease. Another 54 million people are prediabetic, a condition in which blood glucose is higher than normal.

New diagnoses peak in the forty to fifty-nine age group. Diabetes (and its complications) is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, and its annual costs are $92 billion in medical care and another $40 billion in premature death, disability, and job losses. Consider that from 1995 to 2005, the Department of Agriculture spent $51.3 billion in corn subsidies (which kept a low ceiling on the cost of high fructose corn syrup, a suspicious substance in the story of type 2 diabetes). The drain on diabetics’ (and insurers’ and taxpayers’) wallets is something like a national emergency.

In 2003, Lindsay’s uncle was diagnosed as having been diabetic for a number of years. He’d been complaining of being thirsty and having prickly feet. The family’s confusion stemmed from the fact that he didn’t look like someone who is diabetic.