The Weight-loss Diaries (30 page)

During breaks from the singing—yowling is probably more accurate—

Rock-It plays dance music. I was relieved not to be the one friend not dancing with a guy (and therefore having to spend the evening pretending to get drinks/go to the bathroom/look for someone) but not drunk enough not to feel self-conscious dancing. The (drunk) guy who had pulled me out on the floor went on and on about how he hadn’t had a girlfriend in a while, and did I have a boyfriend? (Yes, idiot. That’s why I’m dancing with you.) He had that, “I’m going to kiss you if you look directly at me” expression, so instead I looked over his shoulder at Mary and made faces.

After we finished singing “You’re the One That I Want” from
Grease
, a girl—a
Shape
reader—came up to me. Often readers who come up and talk

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to me don’t say anything besides that they like the column, but this girl wanted to discuss—what else?—diet tips. On a Saturday night past midnight in a karaoke bar.

I didn’t want to be rude, but I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do less, with the possible exception of kiss the drunk guy. She wanted to know whether I thought potatoes were OK and what I thought of Weight Watchers versus Lean Cuisine and whether, since we obviously live somewhere near each other, I wanted to work out sometime. She was so sweet and full of compliments, but I wanted to yell at her:
Look at me—look at how much weight
I’ve gained! Do I look like I have all the answers?

Diane—a
Washingtonian
editor I’m close to—called me into her office to chat yesterday: enough of the stalling, she said. When am I going to write the eating disorders story? Which issue of the magazine? She wanted me to be specific.

I’ve been putting it off for a few months, doing preliminary research and claiming that a thousand other little projects are keeping me from focusing on it. The story originally was my idea—I’m so obsessed with food and exercise that they’re almost all I can think of to write about. I didn’t say anything about myself in the pitch—just mentioned a few tales of friends from my days in the sorority house in college.

Diane had suggested I actually use some of what I saw in college in the story, and I’ve been halfheartedly writing it up whenever I have a free moment. I know it’s missing something.

Today—with a just-set deadline of mid-March, about three weeks

away—I had to confront what was missing. Me.

I sat in the office until 10:00 p.m., frozen. Then I began writing furiously, pouring out stories: sneaking food. Lying. Starving. Steeling myself to climb into a bath so hot I burned myself in a desperate attempt to steam off some weight. (I’d read the idea somewhere.) Sitting around in sweatpants, eating all weekend, and being afraid that nothing would fit on Monday. Reading the Sweet Valley High series and wondering if I was the only reader who envied that the Wakefield twins were “a perfect size 6” (a phrase every book in the series included)—even though they seemed to eat pizza after school every day at their high school hangout.

I wrote until 4:30 a.m. I didn’t stop to eat or surf the Web or change the CD I was playing. I couldn’t stop to think, because I knew if I did, I’d stop writing.

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I went home and slept a deep, dreamless sleep. I woke up at noon,

exhausted, and stumbled into the office.

“Let’s hear about the wild party last night,” an editor teased me. Writing about nightlife has its benefits: no one ever raises an eyebrow when I show up at work late.

If he only knew. I thought of the file sitting on my computer. Even if I edit the hell out of it before turning it in, how will I ever be able to face my coworkers again?

“I’ve never read
Vanity Fair
. Should I?” said the guy sitting next to me at the coffee bar, tapping my magazine. It was yet another one of those gray days of February—holidays long gone, spring seeming impossibly far away—when it feels like nothing exciting will ever happen again.

He was cute, studying a GMAT prep book, and listening to Bruce Springsteen, who I love. We chatted for about twenty minutes. David was a nice Jewish government lawyer setting up a nonprofit.
Who says nobody ever meets
anybody normal in bars?
I thought smugly. I also thought,
I’ve gotten no sleep
this week because I’ve been on deadline, I don’t think I even washed my face this
morning (much less put on cover-up), and I’ve been sitting here raking my fingers through my hair as I read. I look like hell.

My friend Alexy showed up—we had planned to meet—providing a

convenient “Let’s continue this at another time” opening. He took it—and my number.

After more than two months of e-mails to try to set a date, Abby, Mary, and I finally had dinner with Stacy and Dagny, our marathon running buddies.

We all barely recognized one another with makeup on and in normal

clothes—we were used to seeing one another only at the crack of dawn, in running outfits and wearing water-bottle belts and wary, how-bad-is-this-going-to-be expressions. Dagny was talking about signing up again and working on her finishing time. I remembered my private vow in October to do the same, but I can’t imagine it now. Even when I do run, I never get the “I’m flying” feeling—not even for a second—that I’d occasionally get during workouts. Instead, my body feels like I’m wearing a wet sweatsuit—literally weighed down by what I’ve gained.

If there are indeed people who meet normal people in bars, I’m not one of them.

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Drinks with David, the Jewish lawyer I met at Xando. Yes, that omission of the word
nice
before
Jewish
this time was deliberate.

The first thing he said when I arrived at the bar was that he can’t drink alcohol and that drinking is expensive anyway.

So I ordered a Diet Coke. He ordered quesadillas and a Perrier and lurched into an excruciatingly detailed account of a long-term illness he’s had.

“If I hadn’t had to miss so much school, I could have gone Ivy League and then to an Ivy League law school,” he said. Instead he was stuck at a D.C.

law school with people he considered “intellectually inferior.”

Oh.

He couldn’t tell me enough about himself. He said he planned to redeem himself by going to an Ivy League business school and then to Harvard Divinity School—the last because so many U.S. presidents had gone there.

He wanted to run for public office, and everything he’d done—from high school up to and including the nonprofit—had been for appearances.

I needed a drink.

“Where would you run for office?” I asked, taking a huge swallow of Diet Coke.

“Well, I don’t really have any roots, so what I want to do is get married and run for office wherever she’s from.”

Mayday! Mayday!

Suddenly he began rhapsodizing about how stunning the women in South Carolina are.

I was tempted to tell him I had the solution to his problems: move to Charleston and find your wife there. Instead, I said I had to get going.

The check came, and he mentioned—again—how much debt he was in.

He made no move to get the check, so I handed over a $5 bill—for one Diet Coke. He didn’t offer change.

“Thanks!” he said brightly as I stumbled over my chair in my haste to leave. “We should do this again.”

Just what D.C. needs—another steakhouse. But I went to the opening of this one because the cast of “The West Wing” was making an appearance, and I knew my pop-culture-vulture friend Alexy would love it.

Bumped into a college acquaintance, and we talked about another person we both know—a funny guy named Mike with whom I used to com-

miserate over our history theses senior year.

“Odd duck,” Frank said affectionately of Mike—not words you’d expect to precede what came next: “He’s had some bad luck. He had to drop out of

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law school because he’s got brain cancer.” A one-inch-by-one-inch inopera-ble lesion.

I thought briefly about Mike and getting in touch with him but didn’t think I knew him well enough to say anything. Thoughts about the mini steak sandwiches and the crab cakes being passed fell away, and I thought about the relativity of unfairness. Unfair is not having a weight problem, as I do.

Unfair is having brain cancer at age twenty-four.

I know this, and still I rage that food and weight are problems I have to deal with. It seems such a ridiculous thing when I put it down on paper: that I sit there in a restaurant thinking about the bread basket like it’s
Attack of
the Killer Rolls
. Or that when someone asks me if I’m hungry, I panic and think,
Well, is it OK to be hungry now?

A guy I went to high school with saw me in
Shape
—he’s a personal trainer now—and tracked me down. Talking to him was like attempting to put in an old retainer: it fit once, but it’s almost painful now. He yanked me back at least ten years, to my awkward, unsure tenth-grade self. However dissatisfied I sometimes am with my life now, I’m a lot happier with it than I was in high school, and for at least a few minutes I felt grateful.

Signed up for the marathon again. Maybe that will give me the kick I need.

Can’t help thinking that size-wise I’m the same—maybe even worse—than I was at this time a year ago. Tonight I could barely fit into the size 14 jeans and red sweater I remember buying so proudly to go to a party friends had early last March—the party where everyone told me how good I looked.

I’m too depressed to go and try to pin down the exact date of the party.

I don’t want to think about how much energy and effort I’ve expended this year only to end up, weight-wise, in the same place.

Last night I called Diana after nearly a month of not speaking over the New Year’s Eve money. I ran into her at 2:30 a.m. as we were both walking into the building. After chatting for a couple of minutes, she asked about the money. I tried calmly to explain my side, but she said she didn’t want to talk to me until I gave her the money. She followed me upstairs and tried to force her way into my apartment, keeping me from closing the door. When she got back to her apartment, she left a message on my machine. It ended: “You’re a big fat liar, emphasis on the
fat
.”

I listened to that bit twice just to believe it.

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I wasn’t enraged—just really, really hurt and sort of exhausted. So today, before I left for the gym, I wrote her a check and left it under her door with a note: “It’s going to take me a very long time to forget that message on my machine, and I don’t want to speak to you until I do.” I thought about explaining how it wasn’t her bullying that had worked this time—that I just didn’t want there to be
any
reason for us to have to speak. But I didn’t want to get into it.

Bought a ridiculously expensive new guitar, which I had absolutely no business doing. You know you’re getting into seriously pathetic justification when you’re thinking,
Well, if I’m playing my new guitar, I won’t be able to put anything in my mouth.

Breakthrough! I had been craving chocolate literally for two days and decided I’d better just give in and get some before it sent me off to do something even worse. Normally, trying to decide what I really want—considering the options—can set me off on a binge, but today it was like: don’t want anything cakey, just want chocolate. So I got a Dove bar, had one square, and put the rest in my desk drawer. Where it sat all day, not really tempting me at all.

Occasionally I’d open the drawer to check that it was still there and to mar-vel at the feeling that there it was and I didn’t care.

Now, of course, I just need to figure out how I did that.

Gave in to the guilt that I’m a crummy sister and the nagging feeling that I was the one who had done something wrong: I called Diana. It’s almost scary how easy it was to let a few weeks slide by without speaking.

I hadn’t really actively not been calling her, if that makes sense. The first two weeks sped by—I was busy. I occasionally thought about calling her this week, mostly because I’d been worried about how she’d behave when we did start speaking—how angry she might be and how much she’d yell at me for being so wrapped up in myself.

Part of the reason I decided to call her was that I spoke to Mom last night and decided Diana and I shouldn’t add another rift to the family pile.

After talking with Mom about the whole idea of family holidays that would include Mom and Dad—which the two of them keep talking about—

I desperately wanted to talk to Diana. I wanted to know if the idea drives her as crazy as it drives me. One of the divorce’s fringe benefits—at least from my

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standpoint—is that we’ll get to give up the charade, even if it’s just a couple of days a year, that we’re a happy family.

“You’re in the middle of a divorce!” I want to scream. “We don’t have to pretend anymore!”

I know if we ask them why they’re doing these joint holidays, they’ll say it’s for us, so we don’t have to choose. I don’t think that’s it—I think both of them aren’t sure how to navigate the upcoming year and are looking for at least one or two familiar days, even if the familiar is uncomfortable. Or perhaps they want to remind themselves that the route they’ve chosen is the right one?

Diana wasn’t home. I left a message.

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Month 15 (March)

I haven’t looked at myself in weeks. Even when I’m in the bathroom at work—where there are mirrors everywhere—I keep my eyes trained to

either the sink or the floor. I know if I catch sight of my reflection, I’m not going to want to go out and face the world again. Even though in my mind I’m huge—cue the exploding Violet from
Willy Wonka
paired with circus-freak music—I was still shocked when I saw myself in the pictures from Abby’s birthday last month.

“As big as a house,” I can hear my grandmother saying.