Through Thick and Thin (23 page)

It was a full three weeks later that she decided to go to the Weight Watchers meeting. Three weeks in which Aubrey seemed to be doing his best not to be a lying, disappointing pill popper, three weeks in which she had slowly started to think that she should consider going back on a diet, mostly because there was always something in them that she found hopeful. That none of them had worked so far seemed beside the point. It wasn’t so much the diet as it was the distant promise, the small chance out there, somewhere, a pinpoint on the horizon, that it would work. And she could use that right now, even if it was just a promise, even it was just a distant one. And she could also use to feel less like a beluga whale. She saw a beluga whale once, in fifth grade, it was visiting the National Aquarium, and she drew a drawing of it that she doesn’t have anymore but wishes she still did. It was a beautiful drawing and a beautiful beluga whale, though less so now that she feels she so closely resembles it.

She leaves Ivy with Jenna, the nanny, the sitter, depending on your choice of phrase, and drives to the Ridgewood Elks Lodge on North Maple Avenue, the site of the Thursday at 5:30 Weight Watchers meeting. The concept of Stephanie leaving Ivy alone with Jenna is new. Very new. She left her once last week, too. It went okay, and so she’s decided to try it again. She doesn’t plan to do it constantly, not as a routine or anything—definitely not that. But just on occasion, just every now and then. She walks into the large main room of the Elks Lodge and it reminds her of a gym, and that makes her think of Aubrey. She wonders how many things will always remind her of him, no matter what happens. There are folded chairs lined up in rows. At the front of the room there is an easel with paper on it, like for Pictionary, she thinks, though most likely not as entertaining. There are women, women of all shapes and sizes, filing into the rows and taking their seats. There are more women forming a line in front of two makeshift tables set up along the far wall. She thinks she’s supposed to get in the line. She does, and as she slowly makes her way forward, there are so many things to buy. An electronic scale. A cookbook. A cookbook just about pizza. Pizza? Who would have thought? There are different brightly colored packages of snack bars called Two Points Bars, and other smaller ones called Mini Bars. A soup ladle. A
Complete Food Companion.
Stephanie picks up boxes and puts them back down as she goes. She backtracks, picking up the things she thinks have the highest likelihood of helping—the electronic scale, the Mini Bars, the
Complete Food Companion
—and carrying them with her.

By the time she reaches the front of the line, almost everyone is in one of the folding chairs, the lines and lines of folding chairs. She feels late. A woman has taken her place in front of the Pictionary easel and is writing across a page with black marker.
You Bite It, You Write It,
she writes, and underlines it with a thick, long line. Underneath the line, in all caps, big block letters stretching across the length of the page, she prints,
ACCOUNTABILITY.
Stephanie looks at the words written there, mostly at the last one. She takes off her shoes. She takes off her jacket, too, and sets it on the floor next to her shoes. She wonders what else she could take off, if the removal of socks, even lightweight spring wardrobe socks, would make a difference. Earrings? She thinks probably not, but she does take her sunglasses from the top of her head and places them neatly on top of her jacket. She reaches the front of the line, and a woman with a name tag,
Maureen,
smiles at her, and indicates with a sweeping gesture a small square scale set on the floor, right in front of the table. She steps on the scale, a scale without any display or numbers—really it’s more of a platform. Maureen has a computer and on it must be Stephanie’s weight, flashing in digital numbers for all the world to see, or at least for Maureen to see.

Maureen takes Stephanie’s other, less soul-destroying information, name and credit card, and types it all in. She hands Stephanie a booklet, it’s called a
Membership Booklet
and up at the top, there, written in ink, is her weight. It’s about four pounds higher than it was at home this morning. That could just be her clothes, or that could just be that it’s the end of the day instead of the beginning. She means that literally, not figuratively, even in light of everything that’s going on.

And four pounds, in the scheme of things, relative to the pounds that need to be lost, doesn’t really mean a lot. She studies her
Membership Booklet
a moment longer and she thinks the same thing she thinks whenever she gets on the scale, whenever she looks in the mirror, whenever she thinks about a lot of things these days:
Will it ever get back to where it was before?
And even though she’s here and that’s something, and even though Aubrey goes to see a therapist every week and says he doesn’t take pills and that’s something, too, she’d have to say that a lot of the time lately, she’s started to think the answer might be,
Maybe not.

“Okay, Stephanie Cunningham,” Maureen says, reading from the screen. “First of all, welcome,” and the way she says it, it’s so friendly and warm that Stephanie does feel welcome, “and second of all, what we need to do is set a goal weight for you.”

“A goal weight?”

Maureen smiles reassuringly and nods. She lowers her voice conspiratorially, “Here’s a trick: set your goal weight a little higher than you’d like it to be, and then you can just lose the last four or five pounds once you’re on Maintenance.”

That doesn’t make a lot of sense to Stephanie and she imagines she’s far away from maintenance. She thinks of her scale, at home, at the beginning of the day as opposed to the end, and she takes Maureen’s advice and sets her goal weight four pounds higher than she would, ideally, like it to be.

“No wait,” she says right as Maureen is about to type it in, and she changes it to five pounds higher than she’d like it to be.

Maureen keys it all in and prints out a sticker, pastes it into Stephanie’s
Membership Booklet
, and gives it to her along with a
Welcome Book
, a slide rule called a
Pointsfinder
, and a small booklet called a
QuikTrak
daily planner. The
Welcome Book
has rainbow colors across the bottom and says
Join
in large white letters with
Welcome
, in smaller blue block letters, printed over it. There is a picture of eleven hands, all joining together in the center and resting on top of each other, like the game played in childhood, or a team rallying together before a game. Stephanie stares for a bit longer at that image, letting herself remember all the good memories it brings to mind.

Maureen points with her pen to the
QuikTrak
book. “Now, the most important thing,” she intones, “is to write everything down. They’ll be talking about it more in the meeting today, and your group leader will be able to answer any questions you might have, but just be sure to figure out what everything is worth and to keep track of it all.”

“Be sure to figure out what everything is worth and keep track of it all,” Stephanie says back to her, out loud, without actually intending to.

Maureen smiles warmly at her, and Stephanie notices that Maureen is wearing a necklace on which there is a large, round, gold pendant. It stands out against her white T-shirt, and Stephanie sees that across the pendant the word
Faith
is written in black letters. It looks familiar, and she thinks she’s seen a variation on Caryn, a silver one, though maybe hers said
Hope,
and not
Faith.
She can’t remember. She hadn’t exactly admired it on Caryn, hadn’t really felt like she could be a fan of inspirational word as fashion statement, but in this context it seems okay; in this context she doesn’t dislike it nearly as much.

“Okay,” Stephanie says, “And, thanks.”

“Have a great first week!” Maureen answers and smiles broadly, encouragingly, a smile that says, very clearly, without mistake,
You can do it!

Stephanie gathers her white plastic Weight Watchers-logo bag with all her purchases, her jacket, her shoes, and her sunglasses and takes a seat toward the back in an empty folding chair. The woman seated in the next chair doesn’t look like she needs to lose that much weight, and Stephanie wonders if she’s been coming to meetings and counting her points for a long time, or if she just loses weight really easily, counts points really quickly.

Someone has just received a gold star, a sticker, for making her first goal. Five pounds. The leader explains that everyone gets a gold star with their first five pounds, because even though it may not sound like the biggest number, it counts for a lot. Stephanie watches the woman for whom now everyone is clapping smile as she pastes her gold star onto the back of her
Membership Book
.

Stephanie looks down at her
QuikTrak
diary, sees that there is a page for each day of the week, lines for each food’s description, and columns for points used and subtracted. She notices the boxes to be checked off for water, fruits, and vegetables. On the last page of the book, there is a section, across the top it says,
This Week I Commit To
, and underneath there are lines and lines of empty space to fill in.

The leader goes to her Pictionary easel and reads, out loud, “You bite it, you write it.” She smiles and adds, “You nibble it, you scribble it. You snack it, you track it.” Everyone claps. The leader goes on to stress the importance of taking responsibility, of acknowledging everything and not sweeping things under the rug.

“In the end,” she says, “if you do that you’ll only be hurting yourself.” Stephanie wonders if she should be taking notes. She looks around; nobody else is. And then, slowly, one by one, hands are raised, and people are called upon.

A woman sitting close to the front, in a gray tracksuit raises her hand. “I wrote everything down this week. Everything. If I had a bite of a cracker, I gave it a half a point, or a quarter of a point if it was a small bite. I was really conscious of everything, of every nibble, every snack, much more so than I had been before. And I lost two point eight pounds.” Everyone claps, and the leader gives the woman a gold star.

“I lost point eight this week,” someone else says, to which there is a small smattering of applause. “I was disappointed, but since I went out to eat four times and drank three of those times, I guess it’s okay.”

“It
is
okay,” says the leader. “And what’s most important is that you’re being honest with yourself about your actions. What’s most important is that you’re being honest.” She nods wisely, right after the second time she says
honest
and hands out a gold star.

“And,” someone else says, “point eight pounds is almost one pound. If I could lose a pound going out to dinner four nights, I’d be really happy.”

“Going out to dinner is really hard,” another woman says, and Stephanie tries hard not to hear that, or at least not to think too much about it, and that’s easy enough because someone else has raised her hand and the leader has called on her.

“I took a water pill and lost four pounds.” She doesn’t get a star.

“You know how we talked last week about the Laughing Cow cheese and tomato on the multigrain English muffin?” asks another one from the front row. The talkers are always up in the front. “I added alfalfa sprouts to it, and it really added some substance. It’s an excellent two-point lunch.”

“I gained,” someone else confesses, “and I was very frustrated because I felt like I was doing everything right. But now I see a lot of it could be that I wasn’t being as honest with myself as I could be.”

The leader nods at her sympathetically and says very seriously, “It’s very hard. But it really, truly, is never too late to stop believing the little lies we tell ourselves. Like how that cookie doesn’t really count when it does, or that eating an entire tub of fat-free Cool Whip isn’t any points. You just have to learn to recognize the lies.”

“It’s never too late to start being honest, to start telling the truth!” Maureen of the Scale calls up from her post at the back of the room.

Stephanie looks around the room at everyone. She’s sure that this meeting, that Weight Watchers, must mean different things to different people, but in this very instant, to her it’s like group therapy and AA and dieting all rolled into one. To her, for a moment, it’s like a special Elk Lodge gathering for people who might have lied, who maybe fell short of being honest with themselves and with a few other people, too.

She looks at her
QuikTrak
book and thinks how she will write down every single thing. She feels very strongly that “Kumbaya, My Love” is going to start playing through some hidden speaker at any moment. She feels very strongly that she will lose the weight, that she will follow this plan, that Weight Watchers could in fact be the answer to the question she has been, for almost nine months now, asking. And she feels something else, too. She hasn’t felt this way in forever. She looks around the room again, at all the people who have to do what she has to do, at all these people. She feels like she’s home.

Sundays are different now. Sundays used to be drinking coffee at her desk, as opposed to the table by the kitchen. Sundays used to be reading everyone else’s magazine, everyone else’s restaurant reviews and as much of the
New York Times
Sunday edition as she could muster before she (a) felt brain dead, (b) felt that any second the onslaught of world events would send her over the edge, or (c) got the needling, unpleasant feeling that she was endeavoring to read every article in the Sunday edition because Josh had told her once that she could spend more time reading the newspaper. Whichever came first. Sundays used to be for planning out the meals she would have, and for sometimes taking the train to Ridgewood to see Stephanie. And Meredith thinks that whoever said, “The more things change, the more things stay the same,” should reconsider.