Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (13 page)

The night that Steve called, I paced the bedroom for hours in silence while Jenna slept, certain beyond a doubt that Mom was dead. She’d driven off the Bear Mountain Bridge, drunk or simply crazy. She’d tipped over the edge and into the madness, and I wasn’t there. It wasn’t exactly my fault. Deep down, I knew I had no power to make her better. But if I had been there I could at least have hidden her car keys.

At 5 a.m. the next morning, I took the first train back to New York. By the time I arrived in Croton, she had called home again. She was alive. But she wasn’t coming home. She needed to not be home for a while. Two days later, Steve brought her back, all smiles, and my siblings and I clambered to get our arms around her. They were the other reasons I was guilty. They were only nine and ten years old, and who knew what they’d been through, while I’d been up in Boston eating canned tomatoes? There would be more to go through, for all of us. This was the beginning of a tenuous era in our lives. There would be hospitals and hope and more gut-punching phone calls. But never again would it feel quite like this. Her smoking and drinking that summer; her eyes that looked everywhere but straight ahead. It was the gun on the wall in our house. What a terrible relief when it finally fired.

Two months later, back at school, I woke up and rolled over in bed, checking the light outside my window. It wasn’t quite dawn, even earlier than the yoga class I might attend if I were still going to yoga in the morning. I pulled the phone out from under my pillow, where I’d held it in my hand all night like a tiny, plastic security blanket.
Thank you, God, no messages.

Once, I’d dreaded that silent phone, each unreturned call adding to my litany of worst-case scenarios. At last, one of them had come so absolutely true, and I knew I had been right to worry and pray and keep vigil at her bedroom door all those years ago.

Now I kept the phone just as close, but willed it not to ring.

I shuffled to the bathroom, allowing myself only a brief, sidelong glance in the mirror. I’d slept in the XXL
Sex and the City
baseball tee, though it no longer fit like a nightgown so much as a slightly too-big shirt. No weigh-in today, but I would start again tomorrow, definitely. I would go to the supermarket and stock up on all my safe foods, then hit a yoga class tonight and go straight to sleep with a Benadryl to knock me out. I would claw my way back into the zone, and lose the remaining forty pounds, starting tomorrow.

By spring semester, I’d gained twenty.

I
beg you to do this, Kelsey.”

Four years later, Judy looked exactly the same. I’d come crawling back to her scenic office, three months after graduating early from BU with a film degree and not much else. By my final year, I had finally made three friends, but my social skills had never really developed past the point of leaving my room, and I could count the number of parties I’d attended on half a hand. There had been no romances with well-meaning, doofy guys, and though I’d learned to drink, I mainly did that alone, with a movie playing on my TV for company. For the most part, I was good at classes. I just wasn’t good at college.

My last summer internship led to my first real job, an assistant position at an independent film company. The pay was minimal and the hours were nuts, but such was the life of these, the coolest of the cool kids.
Sex and the City
was for high school. I was a postgrad now. I’d taken courses on Jim Jarmusch and watched the entire Kiéslowski canon in a month. I had new icons to emulate: Sofia Coppola, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and whoever had the weirdest, most naked performance at Sundance that year. I had the right taste and knowledge, and I knew what names to drop. But there was still one thing I needed to join that crowd—or around a hundred things I needed to lose.

“What happened?” Judy tilted her head, dismayed.

“I don’t know. College.”

Judy whipped out her legal pad and once again begged me to follow the food plan and lose the weight, once and for all,
please
. I looked down at my hands and remembered what she’d told me years ago: It would only get harder as I got older. Already, I knew she was right. I’d resisted this appointment for weeks. But Judy’s plan had gotten me as close to thin as I’d ever been, and I needed to get back in her zone and stay there. She tore the paper off her pad, scribbled with food rules identical to the ones I’d broken back in college, and handed it to me with a grim smile.

“Just do this—don’t think about it too hard. Just do it so you can get on with your life.”

I nodded. I knew, at last, what life I wanted and who I wanted to be in it: my boss.

Cal was a young director, already famous in certain circles and associated with people who were famous in all circles. She and her friends were part of the particular subset of socialites who had nice apartments and thousand-dollar handbags, but never any cash on hand. They always had tickets to Fashion Week, but sat in the second row. Then they went to dinner with the people who sat in the front row. I know, because I made the reservations.

“Wine time!”

Cal and I met in her Tribeca loft most afternoons to work out her schedule and go over my to-do lists (buy more mustard bath powder, book facial, drop shoes at the shoe guy). While working at the production company, I’d assisted her on a film, and when shooting was over, I simply refused to stop assisting her. Working on a set is bonding, and I’d bonded to her like an orphaned baby monkey. She was the older, savvier, funnier, famous-er version of the self I hoped to become. And she liked me just enough that I would have done anything to make her like me more.

“The usual?” I asked.

“Yep.”

The usual. I loved that we had a usual. The usual was a bottle of Côtes du Rhône, whatever they had around fifteen dollars. I’d call the wine store to deliver two bottles, then take a cigarette out of Cal’s pack.

“Do you want a snack?”

She pulled a bowl of grapes out of the fridge. Just a nice little ceramic bowl filled with already washed grapes. Like everything else she did, it seemed impossibly elegant. I could barely be bothered to take grapes out of the bag, let alone rinse them and put them in a bowl. If I ate grapes, that is.

“I’m not allowed to eat those.”

She looked at the bowl then raised a threaded, auburn eyebrow.

“Aren’t we about to drink wine?”

“Well. I guess, yeah.”

“Made of grapes, you realize.”

“It’s fine.”

It was fine because I didn’t plan on eating anything else that day. Once Cal called “wine time,” the workday was done and we’d spend the next few hours drinking Côtes du Rhône out of the mismatched gold-leaf cups she’d picked up in Marrakech.

“I don’t want to live here anymore,” she declared, looking around the apartment. “Do you want to live here?”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I mean, I’m in Paris half the time anyway. You could just sublet in case I ever want to come back.”

My stomach clenched at the thought of Cal moving away permanently, but the thought of living in her perfumed home, walking barefoot across her splintery hardwood floors to pull a bowl of freshly washed grapes out of her fridge, thrilled me. Future Me would be able to eat grapes. She would be able to eat everything, but not be bothered to eat much of anything. She’d subsist on nine-dollar yogurts and sparkling rosé. She’d sweat out a hangover with a spin class, then meet a friend for coffee but order a tea. She’d be Cal, but with dark blonde hair instead of dark red. (Unless, maybe, dark red would look good on me.)

Like most nights, 8 p.m. marked the end of wine time, and Cal and I polished off our final glasses while she put together an outfit for the evening. Cal had a chic little wardrobe made up of gifts and friend-discounted clothes. My own was greatly supplemented by a bounty of her castoffs: battered Marc Jacobs totes, a chartreuse scarf that flattered no one’s skin tone but that cost more at retail than my rent, and a pair of platform heels that almost fit. They would fit, surely, when I was sixty pounds lighter. Perhaps losing weight didn’t take your feet from a size 9 to a size 6.5, but I kept the shoes neatly perched in the front of my closet, just in case.

I hung around while Cal groomed herself for her night out, keeping up a chatter of tales from my little life, or what small part of it didn’t involve her. I’d recently moved into an apartment in Williamsburg which I was sharing with Sydney and her boyfriend, Jeff, both freshly graduated from acting school and not quite employed. My phone buzzed in my hand, and I looked down to see a text from my friend Debbie:
Dinner tonight?
I ignored it, not wanting to get distracted by a text conversation while I was hanging out with Cal.

“Are there any more cigarettes in there?” Cal nodded to the pack of American Spirits on her dresser, which I knew to be empty because I’d taken the last one.

“I can run out for more.”

“Did you finish them?”

“I’m sorry.”

She smirked at me in the mirror.

“You know smoking doesn’t actually make you thin, right?”

I laughed. I laughed whenever I felt caught, and it was often. Once, she’d let me tag along to a fancy friend’s Christmas party and caught me ogling the Oscar in the corner (“Do you want me to take your picture with it?”). Another time, I’d made a dumb, new-kid joke about cocaine in the gift bags at Sundance, and she turned to her boyfriend and said, “Kelsey’s perfect, did you know?”

I watched Cal finish the final stages of her routine. She never brushed her hair, only flipped it around in a mist of soft-scented serum, and her face was bare, save for a red-velvet mouth, but when she was done she looked like a character who’d stepped out of Joan Didion’s Corvette: rangy and tall and an hour late for the party, but who checks the time? My phone hummed again and I pushed it quietly into my pocket.

“I like that dress.” I liked all the dresses. This one was black, tight in the middle and drapey on the top.

“Yeah? I was going to donate it.”

“No way, I’ll take it!” Cal eyebrowed me again and I rolled my eyes, laughing extra hard. “Come on! For inspiration.”

“Lady, there’s no greater wardrobe than just being thin. I know we’re not supposed to say that, but it’s just the truth. You don’t need this dress. When you’re skinny you’ll be able to wear track pants and look amazing.”

“I know, right?”

“You’ll get there, I can tell. You already have half the ass you used to.” She turned around and squirted my head with her perfume. “You’ll go full-blown Nicole Richie, and then we’ll have to reverse you!”

Cal and I walked down the narrow steps of her building and into the thick evening air breezing in, sluggish and mineral, off the Hudson. She looked down the block for a taxi. I waited. Some nights she invited me along on whatever plans she had. I’d come home hours later wondering:
Should I tell my friends about spilling a drink on Kirsten Dunst’s shoes while crawling around on the floor of the Mercer Hotel looking for the tube of lip balm that somebody threw across the table to make a point about tipping? Or was that the kind of thing where you had to be there?

“Where are you headed?” I asked, fishing for my invite.

“Just an opening thing.”

“Nice!” I couldn’t contain my exclamation points around her.

“You have plans?”

I thought about Debbie’s text floating in my phone. “Dinner with friends at this new pizza place,” I decided, thinking of the restaurant we kept talking about going to. “They make their own mozzarella.”

“Ooh, glad you steered clear of those grapes!”

I laughed like the idiot idiot
idiot
I was. A cab pulled up beside us and Cal squeezed me tight. Her late-’80s implants crushed my chest but I’d never be the one to stop hugging first.

“’Night, sweetie.” She blew a quick
mwah
into the air and hopped in the cab. “Enjoy your weekend.”

Softly drunk, I walked toward the L train reviewing the evening in my mind. Had I said anything extra stupid? How was her mood when we said good-bye? Had I pushed the boundaries of our weird professional friendship and become an annoyance yet? Or was I still in?

I took out my phone to answer Debbie’s text at last:
Sorry, just saw this! Crazy day, I’m so beat. Dinner tomorrow?

I popped into Tasti D-Lite before getting on the subway, ordering a medium vanilla which was really a
huge
vanilla, and covering it in raspberry sauce. None of this was on Judy’s list, but at least it had
lite
in the name. And raspberries were fruit. Anyway, I’d been good so far that day, eating a plain old chicken breast with Brussels sprouts for lunch. I ordered it the same as Cal—no sauce, and just a splash of vinegar on the greens. True, I was filled with grape-based wine, but wasn’t it better, then, to eat something so I could get up early, not too hung over, and hit the gym? Or maybe I’d just work out tonight? I wasn’t that drunk.

I sat on the train making promises to myself, while spooning cool gobs of the soft-serve into my mouth and listening to an audiobook of
The Sheltering Sky
, a title Cal had explained was mandatory reading. Exiting the train at Graham Avenue, I stopped at the deli and bought a bag of sweet potato chips, crunching through them on the five-minute walk home, then dumping the empty bag into a trash can before heading into my building.

The living room smelled like Mexican takeout as I passed through, calling a hello to Sydney and Jeff through their closed door. I kicked my shoes off and into my bedroom, then toe-heeled into the kitchen. In the refrigerator was a pot of leftover tomato-y chicken and rice, which I’d made the Saturday before, when the three of us had stayed in the apartment all day watching a
Law & Order: SVU
marathon. It was cold and tasted like the fridge, but I wasn’t going to eat an entire serving anyway. I leaned back on the counter, listening to the laugh track from Sydney and Jeff’s television. Most nights they caught the reruns of
Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
, and sometimes I stood in the doorway, watching with them. Not tonight, though.

I picked cold hunks of chicken off the bone and nibbled lightly until the pot was mostly empty, but not so empty that I couldn’t cover it with a lid and put it back in the fridge. I washed the cold greasiness off my hands, then scrubbed my face hard with a grainy, peach-scented soap.

In bed, I turned on the television and chose a
Sex and the City
episode at random from HBO On Demand (I only ever watched reruns), then curled up sideways on my unmade bed, finally, absolutely full. I was more than full, in fact. I was nauseated and growing more so by the minute. Ten minutes into the show, the discomfort became impossible to ignore.
I won’t be able to sleep
, I thought.
Then tomorrow I’ll be too tired for the gym and too dazed to work on my screenplay. And forget having dinner with Debbie.
The day would be shot. Then there was the scarier thought beneath my worries, too sick and jittery to really think: All day, I would have to bear the burden of that soft-serve-potato-chip-cold-chicken incident.

I hadn’t intended any of it. It had been a series of accidental slips, little inklings I’d have consciously ignored had I been fully conscious. But I was tipsy and afraid, caught up in what a mess I’d made of myself. I was almost twenty-four years old and no thinner, no wiser, no closer to a single goal, than I had been in high school. I hadn’t grown at all, but got fatter by the minute. And here I was, eating my way out of the best diet I’d ever been on. I saw Judy’s face and Mom’s face. I saw my father’s sad, earnest eyes, watching me step out of the Jetway during our visit last year as I tried to hide my belly with my overnight bag.