Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (7 page)

At last, the staring contest ended.

“Look, we’d like to consider representing Kelsey. Ideally, we’d put her under contract for a year and see how it goes,” Maureen explained. “But she could be a girlfriend type or a best-friend type, and that’s a nice flexibility.”

“A girlfriend type?” Mom asked. “She’s eleven, you know.”

Maureen leaned in just a hair. “But she’s developing. She’s at least a B cup, right? Obviously, she can still be cast as a daughter, but we’re past the point of ‘cute’ here.” She looked at me at last. A smile. “You don’t want to be the daughter, anyway.”

Dave jumped in: “We think she’s just great, super funny and talented. Lovely face, of course.” He turned to Mom. “But obviously, in this business, there are certain unavoidable realities.”

Mom tilted her head and drew in her breath just slightly. I nodded hard, businesslike.

“No one’s saying there’s anything wrong with her, but it would make things so much easier if we lost a little weight.” Maureen folded her hands and sat back, news delivered.

“Not a lot. Maybe ten pounds would make all the difference,” Dave concluded. He raised an eyebrow at me. “I mean, you want the leads here, right?”

At this point I realized I was nodding along with their every word and made a conscious effort to stop bobbing my head. But I couldn’t. I wanted them to know that I got it. If I hadn’t seen this coming now, I’d known it would eventually happen, for in my fantasies I was thin like Daisy and Sam. That was part of the deal with being a famous actress, and I was thrilled to have someone tell me so directly just to do it—just be skinny and everything will be fine. At the same time, I was awash with an unspeakable shame. Maureen and Dave had called me out as a fat girl, unsightly and unlikable, and they’d done so in front of the person I most desperately wanted to like me: my mother. But maybe I needed that. Maybe this was the eleven-year-old, chubby-girl version of hitting bottom. And they’d given me the greatest incentive to get up and do the work. Lose ten pounds and I’d get a professional acting career? I’d be “the girlfriend”? Sold.

“No problem!” I jumped in. “I can do that.”

My mom looked over at me, a tight smile I couldn’t read. But Maureen turned to me at last.

“Great. So, come back and see us in two weeks.”

Ten pounds in two weeks. No problem at all.

When I look back at photos of myself from that period, I realize that losing ten pounds would have taken me from plump to flat. I didn’t have a weight problem; I was just this side of pudgy—the kind of adolescent who went soft and round versus tall and gangly. Losing that weight would have simply deflated me slightly. In my mind, of course, I was sincerely obese, a jiggling mass, unworthy of being anyone’s girlfriend, best friend, or daughter. I’d known it in my heart for years; Rainbow Management had made it official. Then they’d given me the solution.

The diet was simple. I already had a well-honed sense of Good and Bad foods by this point, so I simply eliminated all but the Goodest of the Good. For two weeks I ate nothing but raw green beans, cucumber wedges, skinless chicken breasts, and low-fat lemon yogurt. Mom and I were in on it together, finally on the same team. Every day, I came home from school to find the fridge stocked with Tupperware containers of my fresh green snacks. I poured huge, pink glasses of Crystal Light and chomped away at whole pounds of raw green beans until my stomach bloated with a bubbly kind of fullness. At night, my chicken breasts were shoveled down in minutes. Dinner was now a perfunctory task just to get me to bed so I could get to tomorrow, which was another day closer to the next meeting with Rainbow.

Despite now recognizing this as an undeniable crash diet (and such a ’90s one, with the yogurt and the cucumber) I was never hungry during this time. If I was, it was entirely muted by the New Diet Buzz. Others might describe this feeling as being in the zone. But “the zone” implies something you can get back into, and, in my experience, you get only one shot with a diet. During those early days of that first diet—and every diet after it—I was high on the easy initial weight loss and the newness of it all. My system shocked, I dropped five pounds almost overnight, and the morning weigh-in became a delight I daydreamed about in school. I was dead set on a goal that was both magical and within my grasp, and every day that I adhered to the meal plan I woke up closer to it: clothes looser, cheekbones sharper, belly sinking lower in the tub. It wasn’t an illusion, either. I was doing it. I was eleven years old and eating
nothing
—of course I was doing it.

I suddenly had a laserlike focus unlike any I’d ever experienced. I willfully kept blinders on, knowing on some primal level that there was no room for distraction or temptation. Other people’s food didn’t interest me at all, but why risk it by being around other people? Amy and my other few close friends knew about the possible contract, a secret I’d been able to sit on for all of twenty minutes. But I didn’t tell them about the weight I’d been asked to lose, nor the diet that occupied my every waking thought. Why bother? I’d soon be thin, famous, and an entirely new person.

Instead of ten pounds, I lost thirty. Such a dramatic loss can only be chalked up to the fact that I was a child, and the carrot on the end of my stick was stardom. My body was more pliable than it would ever be again, and my mind, I’d soon discover, was hardwired for obsession. But this is the assessment of the adult looking back on the kid, five billion therapy sessions later. Back then? Honest to God, there are no good enough words for the kind of joy I felt.

Felt
isn’t even the right word. I was composed from head to toe of sheer, maniacal success and happiness. I had done it, times three, A+++. I was sincerely skinny for the first time in conscious memory. In the bathtub, I gawked at my previously slender legs, which were now even thinner and gapped at the thigh. Lying in bed, I ran my hand back and forth in the new well between my hipbones and the even deeper one between my rib cage. I didn’t have to pray or bang my knees against the floor. Instead, I pressed my inner wrists against these thrilling bones until it hurt, a new nightly ritual that lasted for hours, the excitement too great for me to sleep.

None of my clothes fit. Mom took me to the Jefferson Valley Mall for a few new outfits, plus a special one to wear to my next meeting with Maureen and Dave. Handing me Small after Small, she grinned with real pride, unable to take her eyes off me.

“You did it.”

But I’d needed her help to do it. And though I wanted that contract more than anything, nothing could have felt better than her smiling eyes on me. After the food policing and the failure, we’d finally done it, together. She’d washed and chopped my cucumbers into wedges, and I’d eaten them and only them each afternoon. I’d been good and now I was Good, just like those cucumbers. So, here we were shopping like a real mother and daughter. Like Sam and her mom. I was crystallized with joy, Buzzing like I never would again in my life.

There was a slightly delayed reaction at school. My classmates had looked past me every day for years, but once I turned up in my newly cinched uniform and belly-grazing tops, rumblings began as to whether my status as Officially Gross should be reconsidered. With just days approaching my next appointment with Rainbow, I began to let the news leak to a wider audience (for example: everyone I spoke to over the course of a day). This, combined with my new not-fatness, meant that I was someone to talk to, someone to pick for your dodgeball team. Overnight, I’d become a girl instead of a sexless beach ball in a skirt. Literally, every single thing was better now that I was thin.

“So, I’m actually going to sign with a manager,” I told Sam one day in Science. I spoke
to
Sam Fairchild; that’s how high I was on skinny.

“Cool. Which?”

“Rainbow Management?” She looked up into the middle distance for a second, then back down at her Trapper Keeper.

“Huh. I don’t know them. That’s great, though.”

“Yeah. They do mostly TV and film stuff, but also Broadway.”

She shifted an inch in her seat to half-face me, because I’d insisted on making this a conversation. “I’d like to do Broadway, I think. But movies too, of course,” I added.

She shrugged. “Broadway’s not my thing.”

“Are you doing anything now? I mean, what are you doing right now?”

“Um, just some callbacks. And I have this Noxzema campaign coming up.”

She talked as if booking a national skin-care campaign at the age of eleven wasn’t a particularly thrilling achievement. This Noxzema thing, it was a B+.

“Is that Frigid?” She pointed her chin at my hand where I’d painted my fingernails in silvery blue the night before.

“Yeah, I just got it.”

Frigid was the unrivaled star of my Hard Candy nail polish collection. The pastel polish trend was so universally identified with Sam that anyone with baby blue nails would immediately be pegged as a follower. Still desperately covetous of the look, I had opted to buy a set of Hard Candy pastel
metallic
shades, dropping all my remaining Christmas cash on six twelve-dollar bottles. The outrageous price was partially justified by the gummy rubber ring that came wrapped around every bottle cap. My fingers had always been too pudgy to comfortably wear them, and though every other part of me was now whittled down to an acceptable size, they remained the last bastion of my chubby past. Nevertheless, I jammed the rubber bauble down my right ring finger daily, and now stared in tingly awe at our nearly matching hands: Sam’s painted in neat, matte Sky, and mine in three sloppy coats of shiny, light blue Frigid. She reached over and grabbed my fingers for examination.

“God, you get right up there to the cuticle edge.”

To this day, I don’t know if this was a compliment or a dig, but I think of it every time I paint my nails.

At recess that day, as I regaled another group of sudden friends with the details of my upcoming Broadway career, Sam bopped over and yanked me up by the wrist.

“We need another player.”

The game was something to do with bouncing a ball in the right chalk square, and though I’d seen kids play it hundreds of times while I sat folding origami cranes or reading on the grass, I had no idea how. I never ended up learning, either. This was the only time I’d play, and I was too distracted by the rest of the group looking at me with uncertainty as Sam walked me through each step. Still, I laughed with nerves and real happiness, even as I lost. Emboldened by attention, I pulled out the retro novelty camera I’d gotten for Christmas and asked one of Sam’s inner-circle friends to take a picture of us. Sam instinctively put herself back-to-back with me and elbowed me in the side.

“Show him your nails.”

We put our arms out, tilted our chins down, and I looked right into the camera. The kid snapped four photos in a row, and halfway through the second a fifth-grade girl ran through the shot, drawing Sam’s gaze up and away in irritation. But my head never moved and my smile never wavered. Those were the only pictures ever taken with that camera. I just never felt like using it again. I keep the photos pressed inside my sixth-grade yearbook, the only pictures in the whole book that document my brief time as small, pretty, and a member of the team.

“
Much
better.”

I was twirling. When Mom and I arrived at the Rainbow Management office days later, I’d wondered how the big reveal would go. The entire point of this meeting was my physical inspection, and so why bother sitting down and hiding my legs under a table? They buzzed us in, said hello, and I just stuck my arms out and started to twirl.

“
So
much better!” Dave echoed. “High five, girl!”

After sufficient staring (“sufficient” being relative; I could have let them stare all day), we settled at the big, round table, littered with head shots and overcopied contracts.

“So, she looks great,” Maureen told my mother. “You did a great job, honey. No question.”

The conversation continued like this for whole minutes, Maureen and Dave commending my slender face and athletic legs and “that tiny little tummy.” My heart thudded with each compliment, pushing bright pulses of panic out through every vein. Had I been more clear-headed, I might have realized that no one had handed me a paper to sign. Only when they finally ran out of niceties did I recognize the silence in the room as awkward.