The Weight-loss Diaries (4 page)

If I took the Metro, I tried to beat my time running up all 137 steps of the escalator at my stop. (I’d count them as I ran.) When I got home to the studio apartment I was sharing with my (size 10) sister, I’d try on her clothes obsessively, seeing how much closer they were to fitting. I’d fall asleep with my fist pressed into my stomach, feeling—and being inordinately pleased with—how hungry I was.

Come September, I was two sizes smaller than I had been at graduation.

I’d lost about forty pounds in just over three months. That’s when it all fell apart. I decided to eat half of an Au Bon Pain oatmeal-raisin cookie at an office birthday party, and it was as if a fire alarm went off in my head—loud, insistent, and a little frightening. I ate the other half. And then another one.

And then another. When the cookies were gone, I couldn’t think about anything except how I was going to get something else to eat. I couldn’t turn off the alarm. I couldn’t stop eating.

I began making myself pay for a day of bingeing with a day of starving (four peaches and sometimes, if I couldn’t concentrate because I was too hungry, a soft pretzel). Except pretty soon I gave up the starving part and just binged.

Those were the days when even seeing the words
all you can eat
terrified me, because I knew I could probably eat a buffet seven times over, and sometimes felt as though I had. I’d start out allowing myself to eat whatever I

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craved, but I’d grow frustrated trying to choose among all the things I wanted.

So I’d get it all—or as much of it as I dared to order—going from bakery to restaurant, ready to snap the head off a cashier who so much as fumbled with my change. I wanted it all, and I wanted it that instant.

When I was done, my skin would feel so tight I’d give anything to rip it off. Several times, I tried to throw up, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. I’d lie in bed, my sense of disgust and failure complete. I couldn’t even succeed at being bulimic.

I’ll never forget what those binges felt like. That “I can’t do this/I have to do this/I’m going to hate myself/I do hate myself ” tidal wave. That fear that I was a size 10 today but could be a size 16 tomorrow. That struggle to finish whatever I was eating, no matter how full I was, because I wasn’t going to eat any of these things again.
I’m absolutely, positively never going to do this
again, because I’m starting a diet tomorrow
, I would think. I even thought the diet would be easy, because I was so sure that I’d never again want to feel as horrible as I did at that very moment.

But somehow that was never incentive enough. And there I was again, so full and more disgusted with myself than the last time—a level of disgust I never thought possible.

This time has to be different. I’m tired. And annoyed. And angry. And sad.

I think about how much time and energy I’ve wasted adding up calories, measuring, exercising, berating myself for missing a workout, and generally feeling that I can’t leave the house because I hate the way I look.

I’m thinking about how many things I missed—one trip to San Fran-

cisco, in particular, where almost all I can remember is how much time I spent worrying about how I was going to exercise and what I might eat if we went to such-and-such restaurant. And finally, I’m thinking about the lies I told, ridiculous ones, to go off and binge or exercise or not eat—whatever my craze was at the moment.

Why can’t I just overeat like a normal person? Why does one cookie suddenly have to become six? And why must I torture myself mercilessly after I eat these things? Why can’t I just pick up and get on with it? These are the things I know have to change if this weight loss is to be any different from all the other (failed) attempts.

Toxic relationships. I don’t want to call my grandmother toxic, exactly, but she does stress me out about my weight, which she never fails to ask about (on the phone) or comment upon (in person). Call her the typical Jewish grand-

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mother: she nags me about weight and at the same time pushes food at me.

In a single dinner, she’ll tell me I shouldn’t eat bread, then insist I have to eat some of her meal because she can’t possibly finish it all.

My sister is probably my most difficult relationship. Diana constantly talks about food and weight and what she’s craving and is forever talking about how fat she is, which of course she isn’t. I know some of that is normal girl—and normal sibling—behavior, but it goes beyond that.

The summer I went to diet camp, she wrote me letters detailing what she’d eaten for dinner or where she’d gone for ice cream. Later, whenever I’d talk about starting a diet, she’d drag me out for cupcakes at a grocery store whose buttercream icing we both loved. The summer I came home from college after losing forty pounds, my mother suggested I try on Diana’s clothes, since I didn’t have anything to wear. They fit—and I don’t think my sister spoke to me for the rest of the evening.

That whole summer Diana kept nagging me: “You’re not eating enough.

You go to the gym too often. Just this once isn’t going to hurt you.” When we were home over Thanksgiving this past fall, we shared a car, so I told her not to go to the gym in the morning without me. She went without me anyway. And these days, if we go out to dinner and I order a salad or otherwise don’t eat a lot, she snaps at me not to be such a martyr and asks pointedly if I’m starving myself.

Besides looking like my idealized version of myself, Diana is the voice that says aloud every negative thing I’ve ever privately thought about myself. I can’t just ignore her—as more than one person has counseled me to do—because what she says are my deepest fears realized: Fat
is
the first thing people notice about me; I really
can’t
leave the house looking like that; it
is
a fluke I have done as well as I have in school or work; I
am
boring; I
am
bitchy; I
am
rude.

And so on. No matter how much outside confirmation I might get to the contrary, Diana can negate it in an instant. I hate that I allow her this power, but I do it because I can’t help thinking that she’s known me my entire life.

Maybe it’s just taking everyone else I know a while to catch on.

Stress milestone: my mother. For years when I was growing up, no one could figure out what was wrong with her. The battery of doctors she went to always ended up ascribing her fatigue, listlessness, and inability to do much—

get out of bed, take a shower, finish a conversation—to Epstein-Barr virus, otherwise known as chronic fatigue syndrome. I was often angry with her.

Why didn’t she pay any attention to me? Why didn’t she seem to care about herself or the house or us or anything? Why did she call my sister and me into

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her room only to ask us to fetch her something from the table at the foot of her bed? I remember half crying, half screaming at her one afternoon that she wouldn’t care if I never came home again, since she never seemed even to speak to me. She gestured limply toward a spot on the bed, as if telling me to have a seat; then she fell asleep.

My sister and I date the beginning of the worst of it to the spring of 1987, just after our bat mitzvah, when we were twelve years old. I couldn’t understand how anyone could be so tired from planning a party—the excuse Mom gave—but she took to her bed, seeming to have given up even pretending she cared about anything at all. On the rare times I’d hug her, I’d hold my breath, not wanting to smell her unwashed odor. My father, a doctor and professor of medicine, worked long hours at a hospital. He refused to believe Diana and me—or maybe couldn’t let himself believe us—when we told him how bad she was. In English class at age fourteen, for a teacher I’d also had the year before and therefore trusted, I wrote essays about Mom where the emotion was so raw that a few times Ms. Clark said there was no way she could put a grade on them. I wrote about leaving Mom’s room one afternoon and standing in the bathroom, listening to the plip-plop of my tears as they fell into the sink: “I force the sharp corners of the counter into my palms, as if hoping for a pain that hurts more than Mom, but a pain I can at least stop when I want.”

In the fall of 1990, when I was fifteen, Mom went for an MRI as a last resort. No one was expecting much—at that point it was just another test to cross off the list.

“See anything?” my father asked the technician casually as my mother lay in the tunnel of the machine, fighting claustrophobia.

Yes. A brain tumor. Two of them, in fact. One of them so big that her surgeon later said if it had gone untreated any longer, at some point in the not-too-distant future, my sister and I would have come home from school and found Mom dead.

She had two daylong surgeries, though doctors couldn’t remove all of the especially offending tumor because it was too close to the hypothalamus and the optic nerve, which meant a millimeter slip of the knife could blind her—

or kill her. I remember going to visit her in the neurosurgery intensive-care unit, where the condition of each patient got worse and worse as you got closer to the nurses’ station. Mom was directly in front of their desk.

The whole rest of the year—my junior year of high school—was dis-

jointed, time expanding and contracting at painful intervals. Time at the hospital lasted hours. So did conversations with my father—awkward ones

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where he tried to catch up on what was going on in my life while he’d been working late the past ten years. “Haven’t seen Susie much these days,” he’d say, unaware that my friend Susie had moved to Wisconsin two years before.

As a fifteen-year-old girl, I found it an awkward time to be left with just my father. One of many cringe-worthy episodes: my sister and I explaining in fits and starts that we had to buy more tampons—that the supply of pantylin-ers in the closet would not do, because no, you could
not
just use two of them stuck together.

My father’s own mother had died of breast cancer when he was sixteen, and in his effort not to keep us in the dark about Mom’s condition, as his father had, he explained everything in the sort of excruciating detail that only a professor of medicine could. He told us how the surgery worked and what she might be like afterward and all of the possible complications. I didn’t want to hear any of it. I’d sit there concentrating on not crying or otherwise doing anything that might prolong the conversation. I’d nod at him while my mind skipped over his words as if they were a foreign language, my thoughts drifting to the way I’d behaved toward my mother over the past few years—how angry I’d been. When she’d call to ask me to fetch her something, I’d often sigh loudly and stomp across the house. If it wasn’t a drink, sometimes I’d throw it at her. Once I snapped that she needed a servant, not a daughter.

I tried not to think about the situation at all. I must have had twenty lines of extracurricular activities next to my picture in the yearbook that year. I stayed late to work on the school newspaper and ran away to debate tournaments on the weekends. I was working at the
Miami Herald
after school twice a week, and I never missed a day. I focused on school and all the things that would, I thought, eventually get me away to college and as far away from my family as possible.

And of course, I ate. Who was going to say anything to me about my weight at a time like that?

At night, I lay awake worrying about my mother—and about myself. I am, as everyone has always said, a carbon copy of her. Pictures of me look so much like my mother that visitors to my grandmother’s apartment, upon seeing a picture of my mother as a child, often ask: “Why do you have a picture of Courtney and not of Diana?” I wondered:
What if what my mother
has is lying in wait for me?

I remember when Mom finally came home from rehabilitation in Janu-

ary 1991, her head shaved and a blank, almost mean expression on her face.

Diana and I avoided her. We were afraid of her—afraid, I think, of finding

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out what the next few months might be like. She was alive, and she was home, and for that we should have been grateful. But it was easier to be grateful the less contact we had with her, because we could prolong our ignorance of how different she was. Until she came home from the hospital, the focus had been first on her not dying and then on her slowly regaining basic functions: breathing on her own, brushing her teeth, walking—specific tasks where it was easy to measure her progress and pretend things were returning to normal. But with each interaction—each question she had no idea how to answer, each situation that required an emotion she didn’t seem capable of feeling anymore—we felt more acutely that things would never be the same.

And each week, my sister—a better, more confident driver than I was, though we both had only learner’s permits—drove my mother an hour each way to her radiation treatments, sometimes in awkward silence.

To doctors, my mother was a miracle patient, eventually driving, talking with friends, volunteering with a Jewish women’s organization, helping my sister and me pack for college. But I couldn’t help focusing on what was missing. Small things, like writing a check, often required what seemed like enormous concentration. She didn’t seem to have any emotions besides anger—she never cried or was ecstatic, something my father attributed to the location of one of the tumors affecting the parts of the brain that deal with mood and personality. I could tell at times she was unsure of herself, looking around for cues to the appropriate response to what someone had just said.

“Love you,” I said to her one night before going to bed.

She paused. “OK,” she finally answered.

I wanted to be grateful for what I had, but I couldn’t. I felt as though she’d been gone for so much of my life—lying in bed, listless—and I hated that she still didn’t look and act like other people’s mothers. She still didn’t shower very often. Her clothes were disheveled. Diana and I desperately wished she’d wear her wig, but she complained it was too hot. When her hair grew back, she often didn’t comb it, and she still nodded off in the middle of dinners and movies and conversations. Why, I wondered, couldn’t I have a mother who got her hair done every week and asked me if I’d done my homework and remembered which of my friends was dating whom?