Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (9 page)

But I wasn’t simply eating instead of living, I learned when I went into the Rooms twenty years later. I was drugging myself so heavily that I couldn’t process the typical growing-up stuff of breakups, broken friendships, bad grades, sundry failures, and crushes, learn from it, or move on. In that chemically induced emotional stagnation, I couldn’t outgrow being unwanted, unwantable, unloved, unlovable, and on most days, as long as I had food, I didn’t really have to recognize those feelings. Nor did I inhabit a body that gave me the confidence, ability, or attractiveness to go through the usual age-appropriate experiences.

My childhood was not
Bleak House
, and this portrait of it doesn’t include how my mother made reservations at the English Inn in Victoria so that I could sleep in a canopied bed and booked us for tea at the Empress Hotel, or how my father woke me at midnight to show me the aurora borealis flickering over Flathead Lake. I don’t have time to describe Dick driving through snowstorms all night from Seattle to be home for Christmas or Jim dancing a four-year-old me around the ice rink. These are also part of the story, and while I give them miserably short shrift here, they may be precisely what allow me to believe in a grace bestowed on me as much as on any other recovering addict.

Kyrie eleison.

I Believed in the Dream

I
began doing interviews for the book in earnest in June. One of the first people to volunteer was Katie, a lurker rather than participator, on my Amazon blog. Her three-time achievement of breaking four hundred pounds and accomplishing two two-hundred-pound losses made me pounce. We talked a few days after she had gone back into OA and gotten abstinent, when she was full of the amazement that comes with getting off the cruise control of bingeing. Getting on a food plan and sticking to it was crucial to her insurance company’s requirements for gastric bypass surgery, which she badly wanted to have. She was exhausted from the fight to lose and maintain great amounts of weight, exhausted from eating, exhausted from the limitations of her life.

Saturday became our time to talk that summer and long into the humid limpid nights of Brooklyn I answered her questions about being fat and being thin that were a form of comparing notes. We had a bond in our experiences with twelve-step programs that went a little further than my seedling friendships with the Angry Fat Girls. Lindsay had never weighed as much as Katie and I did, and neither Mimi nor Wendy had ever gotten as thin as we had. I felt as though Katie’s need to talk about fat and thin was a sanity check, while her need to tell stories was an
in
sanity check. I could verify the former but not the latter: I’d done too many stupid things in my thinnitude, and her tales were often too hilarious or too gut-wrenching to certify the teller of them as a candidate for electroconvulsive therapy.

Sometimes I felt she wanted to be that crazy. She would at least be taken care of, with no decisions to worry her.

“New York is magical at Christmas,” Phillip kept telling Katie in the two weeks they had known each other. “You’ve
got
to come with me: I booked this room three months ago.”

“That should have been my first clue,” she told me during one of our Saturday night conversations. Her voice switched from his salesman technique to a lower octave of sarcasm. “I mean, it was two friggin’ weeks before New Year’s Eve, and the cluck-head didn’t have someone to take to New York? I was such a jerk.”

Or naïve. It was 1992 and at twenty-six, Katie was thin for the first time in her life. What experience did she have that would warn her about Phillip?

When they checked into their hotel, she became fascinated by the fact that the only colors in the room were the raffia insets of the closet doors and the oversized print of
Woman in Blue Reading a Letter
. At first Katie felt like a total hipster sitting on the white cotton chair, facing the white bed with the big Vermeer adding another cool touch to the cold starkness of the room. When she and Phillip came back from dinner or looking at the windows of Saks and Lord & Taylor in their Christmas glory, she sat at the desk and studied the painting. She didn’t know what irritated her more, Phillip or the
Woman in Blue
.

What was it about the painting that so saddened her? She posited that the woman’s obvious pregnancy came first. She wore a long shirt over her skirt, the way Katie wore tunic things for years. The letter didn’t make the lady happy, and her pensiveness worried Katie. Was it news that her husband was lost at sea? Katie scratched her head, trying to retrieve what she knew about Holland. Had the woman’s mother died of consumption in faraway Emmenthaler, or had her brother’s tulip business gone bankrupt in Heinken? Was the baby not her husband’s and would he beat her for her infidelity? Was she even married? Was the letter from Hans who had decided to ship off to the New World rather than marry the woman he’d knocked up?

Or did her feeling of unease have nothing to do with the painting? It could have been the “Hello, Jerry” T-shirt complemented by the denim
Seinfeld
baseball cap that Phillip hoovered up in the NBC Store and hadn’t changed out of since. Did he
have
to get the cap in denim, for God’s sake? Did he have to wear a T-shirt with a fat man on it? Why did he insist on dinner at Tavern on the Green that night? For less money, they could have a better meal at Strip House and she could go shoe shopping before.

The reservations at Tavern on the Green, he informed her, had been made in the same round of phone calls that nailed down the hotel room back in September.

Katie groaned when she heard that and gave a great roll of her eyes. That he didn’t notice the expression on her face was another sign because whatever Katie feels is right out there for the world to read.

“You have to understaaand, Fraaances,” she said with the elongated flattened vowels of a kid who is inserting an idea of what she wants into her mother’s mind rather than coaxing, asking, or arguing for it. “All my friends warned me that traveling with a guy I’d been on four dates with was a baad idea. What did
I
know? He was, like, the second or third guy I’d ever been out with. I mean, I was twenty-six years old! I’d lost 177 pounds and knew as much about dating as a six-year-old. Or a
three
-year-old. By six, kids are counting who goes to whose birthday parties. I was already so chubby in first grade that I wasn’t being asked to all the parties.”

“So what about Phillip-Hel
lo-Jer
ry and New York?” I asked, trying to get her back on topic.

On the morning of the thirtieth, Katie rebelled. He could stand in line to go up to the top of the Empire State Building, but she was taking her 160-pound self up Madison Avenue.

That night, after disappointing him by refusing champagne and taking pictures of him drunkenly posing with topiaries, Katie returned to contemplating the contents of the letter in the painting. Phillip droned on from brochures from lobbies and theater-district restaurants. He had ideas. “Baaad ideas,” she inserts. His ideas made them stick out like tourists. They might as well have been wearing those foam Statue of Liberty crowns. Katie hated looking like a tourist. She
hated
it! This getaway that was supposed to be a classic romantic gesture had turned into Phillip’s manic search for New York clichés, set off by the sadness of the five-foot painting behind the bed.

He nudged her awake at six on Saturday morning. “Kate, we gotta get moving.”

“Wha—?” she mumbled.

“It’s New Year’s Eve. The
Today
show is definitely gonna have some big star playing. And I wanna take pictures of Times Square.”

Katie hauled herself to the bathroom for a quick wash while Phillip made coffee. She pulled on her jeans and the black cashmere sweater she had bought at DKNY the day before, admiring how now that she was thin, she could pull on clothes that were so plain but so gorgeous and she didn’t have to say a word about herself. She could run a brush through her ear-length red hair, pinch some color into her cheeks, watch her eyes grow greener under her freshly waxed eyebrows, and look better than when she’d spent an hour getting dressed back in the fat days. She gulped coffee while Phillip got dressed. He would press forward in the crowds outside the NBC studios, wearing his Seinfeld hat, cheering for Mariah Carey or Kris Kross or some damned pop star, as if he cared about that junk back in San Francisco. The woman in blue went on reading with palpable thoughtfulness. Katie decided the woman’s mother hadn’t died yet but had taken a turn for the worse. She would pack a small trunk and catch a coach bound inland to tend her mother. The baby would be born in the house she had been born in, but the woman in blue would succumb to childbed fever.

“You go ahead,” she told Phillip when they got to the excited crowd south of Rockefeller. “I want to look at the Met Store windows.”

As soon as he threaded his way in, she walked to the comparative quiet of the angel-lined mezzanine and pulled out her cell phone. It was seven fifteen. She needed two hours. “United?” she said. “I want a flight out of New York to San Francisco as soon after ten this morning as you can book me. I don’t have bags to check.”

Katie Monahan had a hundred of these tales from her thin days. Her trip with Phillip to New York City for New Year’s Eve was my favorite. When Katie was abstinent, as she was that weekend in 1992, she zotted off in every direction at once—dating, making friends, being the life of the party, bringing in good sales, traveling at the drop of her American Express card. Wherever she was, she was dying to belong, and belong at the level of the insider. When she felt outside a group or a city or a family, she felt it in her muscles and nerves

She was, her therapist said, “fluid.” At an early holiday party, Phillip laughed until he cried at her stories of the proctologists with whom she visited to talk up her line sulfasalazine and 5-ASA drugs, then came on like gangbusters with invitations for drinks and movies and, finally, the suggestion they go to New York. She went along with it because…well, he seemed to like her and she’d never had a real boyfriend and her mother had harped on her throughout her adolescence that she’d never get a husband if she were fat. With Phillip, she didn’t have to do anything. He took care of where they went on their dates, where they ate, drank, and made out. The phone calls and invitations were exciting, as was dressing up for dates and planning what to take and what to do in New York. It was easy to go with the flow.

In that Christmas week, the four-hundred-year-old image of a sad woman and Phillip’s making her look at every picture he took of the topiary at Tavern on the Green brought on a fit of melancholy that demanded some kind of big action. Clearly, Phillip was a loser. So she dumped him without so much as leaving a note in their hotel room.

And anyway, the sex was…odd. Or she was odd while having sex. She kept thinking of Annie Hall getting out of bed to sketch while she and Alvy made love. Part of her was sitting in that white chair, considering the painting, studying
Zagat
and
New York Magazine
for what would provide the best stories back home.

Katie loves Christmas, but it has never been kind to her.

Katie had read my Amazon blog about my relapse when she wrote me in May, volunteering to be interviewed for this book. I was intrigued by her history. At the age of twenty-six, she weighed 160 pounds after losing 177 pounds. She maintained that weight for a year. A decade later, she went from 400 pounds to 140 pounds for a year, then topped 400 pounds. I was impressed that she could gain 287 pounds in four years. Clearly, this was a woman of grit and determination.

We needed few preliminaries. The first thing we agreed upon was that the first ingredient of relapse is the cold-water shock of success. The second thing we understood about our relapses was that the Rooms where we got thin contributed to them.

Katie and I had had similar, but not identical, food plans. The general difference was that she had fewer whole carbohydrates than I, but we both, when we were in the Rooms, weighed and measured our food and we abstained from sugar and flour. Her first weight loss, at twenty-six, occurred under the aegis of Overeaters Anonymous, and her second, ten years later, happened while she was in FA, Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous.
²¹

FA is a very strict program in which everyone follows the same food plan and works the steps in closed groups with a checklist of behaviors one cannot engage in. They are the Jets in the gangland of eating disorder groups. Organized, insular, perhaps rightfully bragging about what they do, FAers tend to socialize among themselves. “They were the cool ones,” Katie, the perpetual wannabe insider, said. “I felt like I really belonged when I was in FA.”

She got really thin in FA. The pictures of her at 140 pounds showed a woman with many angles—collarbones and shoulder blades, high cheekbones and the thin woman’s smile that peels back the flesh around the mouth more than the fat woman’s smile. And her smile was brilliant.

For all that Katie felt like one of the Heathers in FA, she was never good enough for its rules. One of those rules was to reach the MetLife weight goal. Katie is five feet five inches tall and was expected to lose another fifteen pounds. “At 140, I was sickly and cold and miserable and hungry all the time. I asked for my food plan to be adjusted but it was another case of ‘You just want more food because you don’t have any willingness.’”

Willingness
is one of the key words in twelve-step programs. Be willing to go to a meeting. Be willing to read
Voices of Recovery
or work on your fourth step. Be willing to put a behavior down for one day or a half hour. Be willing to take direction.

Direction was one of Katie’s stumbling blocks. Sponsors insisted on synchronizing watches and calling (at five a.m. in her case) on the dot. Call a minute late, and she’d hear she was “taking her will back,” which is the opposite of willingness.

In the end, she said, “It’s a fucking cult. I couldn’t join the step studies because I smoked and drank Diet Coke. You can’t take antidepressants, and I was never thin enough for them. You’re either with them or not, and no matter how much weight I lost, there was always something wrong about me.”

After two years of FA, in 2002, the gang mentality had stripped Katie of her fragile sense that she was good enough to belong, pushing her into another of her notorious depressions. She went back to her beloved cakes, feeling bleak and without faith, “like sitting in a dark room with a lead jacket—the one they put on you at the dentist for X-rays—and the room just keeps getting smaller and I just keep getting bigger.”

Worsening her depression were the teachings of the Rooms, which can throw a lot of blame on the addict. Her FA group was intolerant of relapse—consider the browbeating being a minute late for a phone call engendered, and you’ll have an idea of how backs turn for breaking abstinence. I had an acquaintance in FAA, another very strict recover group, who lost her day count over using a tablespoon of the wrong soy sauce.
²²