The Weight-loss Diaries (29 page)

I didn’t get the scholarship.

Back from exactly nine hours in New York. I have no idea how the interview went, though now I’m not sure I want the job—or
a
job, really, since they still don’t seem clear themselves on what they’re offering.

One of the editors was talking about having me freelance from D.C.

Another spent a half hour complaining about her job.

After I waited two hours to meet the top editor, when I finally got in to see him he didn’t say anything for a full five minutes. Then he looked down at the letter I’d sent with my writing samples and said, “You look like you have a really friendly signature.”

“My sister tells me it’s really easy to forge,” I answered.

He laughed.

Just got off the phone with Mom. Sometimes I feel so stung by how abruptly she ends a conversation. It’s like she can’t wait for me to finish my last sentence so she can say, “OK, Sweetie,” in this tone—and it’s always the same tone. Resigned. Tired. I always wonder: am I boring? Is it the long-distance bills? Is talking to me just another thing to do—like once she’s heard my voice on the other end of the line, it doesn’t matter if the conversation lasts three minutes or thirty, because it’s now an immutable fact that her daughter has called?

Much as I want to prolong the conversation, I know I can’t. I’m starting to wonder how much of what I say she can actually process. Tonight, no more than thirty seconds after I’d told her about all the snow, she asked me how the weather was. And lately she’s taken to commenting that I shouldn’t be talking to her while I’m at work.

“Mom, it’s Sunday,” I always say. Sometimes gently and sometimes not.

She’ll give a little laugh—a no-big-deal laugh—and change the subject to something she thinks will make me happy. She’ll say she’s read my latest story and that Grandma is excited to see it. Lately I’ve stopped asking her what she thought of specific portions of the story, because I’m starting to realize she doesn’t remember what she’s read. She never admits this, of course.

“Such a long article, Court,” she’ll say, usually more than once, with an audible touch of awe. “So many pages. How long did you spend on it?”

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Whenever she does this, I think how much I wish that I couldn’t tell that my mother is hiding something from me. I think of my last glimpse of her before I was wheeled to the operating room to have my tonsils out as a kid.

The slender fingers (“the only part of me that’s thin,” she would always joke) tucking a stray hair into my surgical cap, the whiff of Shalimar perfume as she bent down to kiss me. The final squeeze of the arm telling me that as long as she was around, she would take care of everything. Nothing bad would happen to me.

I didn’t know then—none of us knew then—that she was already sick.

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Month 14 (February)

Ihaven’t gotten on the scale in four weeks, and now I can’t face it.

The first Wednesday—weigh-in day—I overslept and didn’t get to the gym in the morning, and even a casual dieter knows you can’t weigh yourself at night. The second week it was that time of the month—another “legitimate” excuse. At the three-week point I thought,
Well, I ate a lot, and pretty
late last night, so . . .

This morning was four weeks. I lay in bed this morning dreading it—

the whole routine of weighing myself. The inevitable feeling of being starving—even though I’ve eaten my usual breakfast—just because I know I’m getting on a scale when I get to the gym and therefore don’t want to eat even one extra bite. The attempt not to drink anything at all beforehand so as not to push up the scale so much as a quarter of an ounce more. The skulking around the locker room, waiting for the moment when the fewest women seem to be near the scale. The debate about how high to push the indicator.

Start at a number I can’t bear so I can flick it down a bit? But what if I start at a number I already think is horrendous and then have to flick it up?

Then there’s checking to make sure the weight really is at zero—that everything is aligned properly. Then getting on and off the scale to double-check the number the indicator lands at. Should it be best two out of three?

Three out of five? What is the exact point at which the silver balance beam starts to waver but doesn’t quite hit that top bit, thus indicating that I’ve got to move the indicator up at least a quarter of a pound?

Finally, there’s that sinking feeling—even if the number isn’t quite as bad as I feared—that it will only go up. I’ve never once managed to stem the scale’s upward climb when it starts in the middle of a diet—why will now be different?

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I lie in bed, debating, plotting,
weighing
. Choices. Deal now and spend the day with the inevitable depression I know will result? Well, I do have a lot to do today, and it would be nice not to have the fat thing weighing on me even more than usual. Would one more week off the scale hurt? If I’m saintly for a week, maybe that will make a big difference. . . .

I don’t really
need
to weigh myself, I rationalize. Isn’t Peeke always saying that I should worry more about the clothes-o-meter than actual numbers?

Numbers don’t lie, but nor do they tell the whole truth.

I know I’ve gained weight. Do I need the scale to thumb it in my face?

At the same time, I know that not weighing myself means another week of drifting. Of pretending to myself that it really is OK to have a chocolate-chip cookie instead of yogurt for a snack. Of pretending that my jeans shrank in the dryer or that I’m bloated or—biggest lie of all—that today I’m going to put a stop to all this eating.

The questions about what to do—from the scale to
Shape
to this frightening bingeing—get bigger and bigger until finally, in a split second, I push them out of my head and decide to go running outside. The perfect solution.

Won’t have to face the scale but will still have exercised. No one can say I’m being self-destructive there.

But I am. I know I am. I’m not dealing.

Today I had to deal. I had a
Shape
photo shoot this morning. I wanted to wear a tent and a paper bag, but I wasn’t even being allowed to hide myself in all black. Bright colors, said
Shape
. Fitted clothes.

“We want to see your body,” the photo editor chirped on the phone

yesterday.

Trust me, you don’t.

Peeke, who knows I’m struggling, had suggested a close-up of me lifting weights. My face and my arm doing a biceps curl—“vim, vigor, and vitality,”

she wrote, and “that beautiful face of yours.” I laughed every time I thought about that. My face and an arm levitating with a dumbbell is what I pictured.

I could just hear the questions from people I knew if there were a picture like that:
Is that
your
arm? Is that the weight you usually lift?

But alas, no shots of me lifting weights. They decided on a “lifestyle”

shot—ideas for possible pix: me reading a book in a café, me walking down a street, me ordering a smoothie—and Molly, the photographer, thought Adams Morgan would be a good, colorful place to shoot. Thankfully, nobody I know works there. I wore a French-blue shirt—the first time I’ve worn

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something besides black or gray in several weeks—and control-top hose beneath my black pants.

Today makes two weeks that Diana and I haven’t been speaking. We’ve gone this long before without actually talking to each other—the semester I spent in England, for one, and weeks we’ve been busy, for another—but never because we were angry, which we are now. It’s a fight about money I owe from the New Year’s Eve trip I didn’t end up taking. The trip involved a cabin in Lake Tahoe to be split among a bunch of people. Because the size of the group was in flux until the last minute and because I was a last-minute addition who would have just made everyone’s bill cheaper—and, OK, because I already had to eat a $600 plane ticket—I contended that perhaps I didn’t owe my entire share. Diana didn’t agree. We couldn’t even discuss the subject rationally. It seemed to be a touchstone for every other problem we’d ever had with each other. I was the selfish bitch who was concerned only with myself, and Diana was the martyr.

I’m starting to dread speaking with her. I’m sure she’s going to be furious when I finally talk to her again, because she calls at least two or three times a day and hangs up on my machine. (How do I know this? Thank you, caller ID.) But she hasn’t left a message, so I haven’t felt obligated to call back.

Mary and I call it friend-dating: getting coffee or a drink with a woman you’ve met to see if you might want to hang out again. I haven’t done much of it in the past year or so—Mary and I have joked that the bar has been set very high for new friends, because we love the friends we have and there already isn’t enough time for them. But lately I’ve been friend-dating Victoria, a Capitol Hill staffer I met in November. We were at three of the same events in a week—and having a good time making fun of all three—and decided we should get a drink. And then actually followed up.

Part of my decision to expand my circle was a postmarathon freeze

episode with Mary. Nothing was ever really said, but I knew Mary had been getting annoyed with me in the last few weeks of training because I’d gotten so competitive at the expense of fun—and friends. I wanted to run faster, and I didn’t stop to think about whether Mary’s bad knee could weather it or about how my friends felt.

I couldn’t admit it then, but I was clinging to the marathon as the one thing in my life that I was still doing perfectly. I was bingeing again, I had

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screwed up the diet, I felt as if I hadn’t written a story worth reading in months, but damn it, I hadn’t missed a marathon training session yet! So I wanted it to be perfect. I wanted it to make up for everything else that was going poorly. I didn’t just want to finish—if I did finish, I wanted a decent time, too.

Mary was a little frosty after the marathon, but I didn’t say anything. I figured everything would be OK by the time I got back from London. It’s against my nature to deal. Eating is how I deal—or how I have dealt. I avoid.

That’s part of why I eat in the first place. Because I
can’t
deal.

As I’d expected, after I got back from London things were fine. Not as good as they had been over the summer, but OK enough that I could avoid saying anything about my behavior. I didn’t want to hear what Mary might say if I brought it up. She might not know exactly why I had been behaving as I was—obsessively, hypercompetitively—but she knew enough about me that she’d probably ask enough of the right questions. Pointed ones. After all, she’s a lawyer. Her questions, I was sure, eventually would lead to talk about bingeing and why I did it and how I needed help.

I wasn’t ready to think about the answers.

So—in a sort of unspoken way—Mary and I haven’t been avoiding each other, but we haven’t spent nearly as much time together as we usually do. So Victoria and I have gone out at least twice every week—to drinks before some event we’re both attending, to movies, to dinner at restaurants we’ve been wanting to try. We always order dessert. Victoria doesn’t worry about her weight. She doesn’t seem to have to.

In a way, the whole Mary thing is defiance and self-destructiveness on my part. She hasn’t said anything about my weight or otherwise indicated that she’s noticed I’m not following my diet as closely as I once was, but I’m sure she’s noticed—and not just sure she’s noticed in that paranoid, everyone’s-looking-at-me kind of way. I’m sure she’s noticed because she notices things like that, and though she would never say anything, that makes me feel caught. Guilty as charged—guilty of eating too much.

Victoria doesn’t know about the diet or
Shape
or my mother or anything.

I don’t think she would care. She’s not callous, but I know all she wants is a good time: Let’s have a few drinks and a laugh and not let anything heavy ruin it. I’m happy to go along. I want to be the way she is: I don’t want to think about anything heavy, either.

Elizabeth on the phone. Neither of us mentioned the fact that I had planned to move to London on March 1, which is only a few weeks away, and clearly

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I haven’t made much of an effort to do so. I got off the phone feeling empty.

Yet another thing I’ve publicly announced plans to do and failed at.

Saw Diana at a launch party for a politics website—the first time our lines of work have brought us to the same event. She looked right through me.

Everything is a mess: my apartment, my office, my life. I feel if I could make progress on just one tiny thing, I’d be inspired to keep going. I decided to get my bills in order, to make little piles all over my rug, and then realized I had no file folders and the stationery store was closed because of a snow day. Frustration. It makes me want to shred all the bills and throw them around my apartment—a paper snowstorm. Not like my apartment could possibly look any worse.

As part of my I-am-not-moving-to-London-so-must-make-some-other-

change-that-seems-like-progress mode, I decided I would work on my fiction for a half hour every day.

All I could think about was Mom and Dad’s last night in the house in New Jersey before they went their separate ways. It seemed like a good scenario to set a story in motion: two people with a long history and just one more evening to get through. How do you spend those last eight hours?

What do you
talk
about? Who gets the wedding album—or wants it? If there’s an odd number of spoons, who gets the extra?

I didn’t end up writing anything.

Saturday night at Rock-It Grill, this dive of a karaoke bar in Alexandria, Virginia—the sort of place where people know the words to the most obscure country songs. It was Abby’s birthday, and we planned to order revolting shots (flaming Dr. Pepper, anyone?) and make complete fools of ourselves in relative anonymity—we’ve never seen anyone we know there.