Devil in the Details (10 page)

It’s the pets who got raised in different faith. The dog got to
be Jewish, because he always vomited pork. The cat was christened a
Catholic when she refused to work on Sundays. They kept their
distance from each other, but when it came right down to it, they
got along fine.

∨
Devil in the Details
∧

M
y sister couldn’t
understand why I was screaming at her. Until I collapsed on the
floor in histrionics, we’d been having a perfectly nice day. We had
spent the morning working on our tans and the afternoon watching
soap operas in the quiet air-conditioned house. And now I was
rolling around on the yellow linoleum in my bathing suit, howling
inconsolably.

“You just can’t do that to a person,” I wailed. “It’s not
right.” Vicky had instructed me to open my mouth and shut my eyes.
I don’t know why I’d complied. For my sister, the lines between
food, not-food, and potential biohazard were hazy and blurred. What
other people wouldn’t handle without gloves and tongs, she would
happily put in her mouth or yours. As a young child she’d been fond
of found candy, thirdhand chewing gum, and commercial adhesives. I
had seen her spit out well-chewed bananas and then eat the
masticated wad. On more than one occasion she’d dipped my
toothbrush in the toilet and breaded it with cat litter. Now she
was older and much more decorous, but when she got bored there was
no telling. I knew better than to trust her, but this time she had
seemed earnest.

It was a frozen grape. Vicky had just figured out that if you
stuck grapes in the freezer, you ended up with tiny, green,
grape-flavored Popsicles. It was a treat, a surprise, just for
me.

Here was the problem: the grape had four calories, and I hadn’t
budgeted for that. I had, in fact, indulged in a stick of
sugar-free gum (three calories) because I thought I was going to
come in under my calorie quota for the day. So now I was screaming,
and my sister was backing away and scowling, and my whole life was
ruined because now I was going to be fat.

Sure, I spit it out, but still. I’d probably absorbed some of
the calories.

“Jeez.” Vicky rolled her eyes. “It’s just a grape.” She
retrieved it from the fluffy bramble of dust it had landed on and
blew off the lint and cat hair. Glaring, she popped it into her
mouth and stomped off to watch the rest of
General Hospital
,
I continued writhing on the floor until I’d calmed down enough to
consult a back issue of
Glamour
to see how many calories you
could burn by flailing.

“Ith delithuth,” Vicky shouted from the living room. “You don’t
know what you’re mithing.”

That’s where she was wrong. I knew exactly what I was mithing.
That was the part I enjoyed. Missing things, doing without,
documenting everything I did and didn’t eat – these were my new
hobbies. This had started four months earlier, at the end of sixth
grade. I’d gone on a diet, and it had quickly mutated from healthy
positive lifestyle change into crazy obsessive freak show.

At first it had seemed like a great idea. I certainly had weight
to lose. I had always been a pudgy kid, allergic to physical
exertion of any kind, drawn to eclectic foodstuffs like cake mix
and brown sugar eaten straight from the box. I was not big on
restraint. I had realized early on that I was the Rhoda, not the
Mary. I was never going to be the belle of the ball, so I might as
well dump the whole bowl of chips in my lap and have a nice
snack.

Every once in a while I would catch a glimpse of myself and
decide I had to do something. My class picture would show a
plurality of chins, or my pants wouldn’t button, and I would embark
on a diet. These were always tremendously unsuccessful. What were
you supposed to eat when you were on a diet? I didn’t know. Health
food, maybe? This was the 70
s
, and health food was
big. Because saturated fats and tropical oils hadn’t become
bogeymen yet, it was still pretty tasty. Yogurt was still full-fat,
granola still loaded with hydrogenated oils and corn syrup. I could
do without all the carob and wheat germ, but the rest of it suited
me just fine.

It did not, however, help me lose weight, but that was fine,
too. Losing weight wasn’t the point. I was really only dieting for
the material. I loved discussing food and weight loss with my
mother’s friends. It gave me an opportunity to talk like Erma
Bombeck, whom I very much admired. “Tell me about it.” I nodded
knowingly, age nine. “I even
look
at a Danish, I bloat up
like Shelley Winters.”

By the time I was eleven I was what department stores delicately
term ‘Pretty Plus’ and what my sister called “Fatty, fatty,
two-by-four.” She couldn’t help herself. She tried out several
nicknames before settling on Sister Infinity Fats. I don’t know if
this was an oblique reference to my burgeoning interest in religion
or to my burgeoning obliques, but it stuck.

I didn’t get it. It didn’t even make sense. How was it funny?
Even my parents thought it was hysterical. They told Vicky to lay
off, but they were too amused to ban its use outright. I would
occasionally catch them muttering the phrase under their breath and
laughing. Sister Infinity Fats, hoo wee, that’s rich.

In any case, it was true. I was chunky. I was wearing my hair
long and straight at the time, and with my berets, I looked
remarkably like Sam Kinison. Because I’d gotten too big for almost
all my clothes, I was dressing like him, too. By sixth grade the
only pants that fit were a pair of pleated gabardine slacks a
teenage babysitter had handed down. I wore them every day, rolled
up because I would not permit my mother to hem them, as I perceived
this as some sort of defeat. Fat was one thing, but short and fat
was too much.

After a few weeks of this my mother took me shopping for some
Pretty Plus honest-to-goodness fat-girl clothes. That bothered me,
of course, but not enough to give up my daily snack of butter.

Then, several months later, I started losing weight. It wasn’t
as if I planned it. I think I’d caught a late-spring flu. I hadn’t
been able to eat much for a few days, and when it was over, I was
surprised to find that my pleated gabardine pants were looser. Huh.
I’d lost a couple pounds. Goodness knows I’ll never be able to get
off to a start like this again, I thought; might as well keep
going.

By the beginning of June it was an all-out diet. Summer vacation
had begun, and I had lots of time to transform my little lark into
a full-blown clinical disorder, a consuming obsession, ha ha. Soon
my entire day revolved around eating. There was nothing but food,
waiting for food, reading and writing and thinking about food. I
spent hours planning my meals, leafing through magazines and
calorie counters to come up with new dietetic treats. Why have
toast (170 calories) when you could enjoy a toasted rice cake (40
calories)? Why drink a fattening milkshake (300 calories) when
there was diet Dr Pepper, skim milk, and crushed ice (30 calories)?
Why not subsist on raw zucchini sticks and mustard? Why not have
gum for breakfast?

It was extraordinarily boring, this new hobby. I spent the
better part of my day draped faceup over the Eames ottoman,
counting the minutes until my next scheduled feeding, spinning in
the hopes that nausea would make me less hungry. When mealtime
finally arrived I stretched it out as long as possible, consuming
my grapefruit and egg whites nibble by nibble, chewing each bite
twenty times. Afterward I documented what I’d eaten, tabulating the
damage with the aid of a calorie counter. Then it was time to start
planning for the next meal, and the process began all over again.
If I had any free time, I spent it reading cookbooks, drooling over
the porny full-color photos of Lady Baltimore cakes and snicker
doodles.

Somehow I managed to squeeze an exercise regime into this
jam-packed fun-filled schedule. Once or twice a day, I speed walked
at a nearby park with my mother and her friends. Speed walking has
never been a cool activity, but at the time it was entirely
foreign. It was still an exhibition sport, and we were very much on
exhibit. Cars slowed to stare at us as we whipped around the track,
arms pumping, gluteals so rigid it looked as though we were using
them to hold our house keys.

No one knew what to make of it, but everyone felt compelled to
comment. “Hey,” the neighborhood kids kept telling me. “Saw you,
uh,
walking
in the park with your
mom
. Looking good
there.”

Yes. It was lame. Had I spent the summer eating my own psoriatic
skin flakes, I wouldn’t have been less cool. I didn’t care. I liked
spending time with my mother and her two walking partners, a perky
nurse and a feisty German GI bride who gave great diet advice in a
heavy accent. “You know vat you shoot make?” she confided. “De zoup
vit de tomato juice und de cabbage. You veel loff it, I’m tellink
you. Und it kips you regular. It fills you up, und den it blasts
right out! You vill lose de veight like crazy. Just make sure you
stay close to de potty, and don’t vear vhite shorts.”

And thus my twelfth summer ticked by, lap by lap, calorie by
calorie, minute by minute. So this was adolescence. Judy Blume
books had led me to expect a whirl of babysitting engagements and
light petting with long-lashed boys, not calorie counting and
constipation, but who cared. It worked. By the end of July I was
thin. I was scrawny.

I didn’t recognize myself. It was strange, the hollows and
points that revealed themselves as the weight came off. I was
fascinated by my hip bones, my clavicle, the knobs in my wrists and
knees. Suddenly there were all these body parts I hadn’t noticed
before. It was exciting. I went to bed wondering what feature would
surface next. Perhaps cheekbones or some useful new appendage, like
a tiny third arm I could use as a coat hook.

Other changes were more troubling. I was disappointed to
discover I had an itty-bitty head. My birthday picture that year
shows me with my skin stretched tight across my face, my head no
larger than the scoop of light ice cream (90 calories) on my
fat-free angel food cake (100 calories).

Still, it was better than a fat ass. After all, I was about to
start junior high, about to be dumped into a cruel and lawless
society. Worse, the television was suddenly inundated with ads for
a new diet center whose owner had a name remarkably similar to
mine.

I have never been called anything but Jenny, and my life had
been just great until 1982. Suddenly this near-namesake was
everywhere, urging America to shed its excess flab. I could picture
the next six years of my life, and they looked like this:

“Jenny Traig, you need to call Jenny
Craig
.”

There was no way I’d survive. I was going to school with one
girl named Christy Buttsick and another named Karen Vaginos, but I
knew I’d have a harder time than either of them. My choices were to
lose weight or to start studying for my GED.

So this sudden weight loss was a blessing. By the time Jenny
Craig had saturated the junior high consciousness, I was already
painfully thin. Classmates tried to make Jenny Craig jokes once or
twice, but it didn’t really work. I’d done away with the punch
line. The gag would peter out: “Uhh…Jenny Craig…looks like you’ve
already been there…uh, yeah.” Besides, there were plenty of other
things to tease me about. My tiny head, for one.

I’d been hoping for a swelled one. A few of my mother’s friends
had lost a lot of weight and afterward they’d beamed with pride. “I
just feel fantastic,” they said. “It’s like I’ve stepped out of a
cocoon. A cocoon of fat. Now I’m a beautiful butterfly. And I know
I’ll never be fat again, because nothing tastes as good as being
thin feels.”

I didn’t think it felt so hot. It was frightening, being this
small. Before, I’d been big enough to take on anyone. Now that I
was going to school with hulking ninth-graders, with kids whose
beards were so heavy they had to shave between classes, I was too
small to protect myself.

I was also freezing. Without the extra layer of fat I was cold
all the time. My parents kept the thermostat set to a balmy 60
degrees. Years later, when my parents dropped several sizes on a
stint in Weight Watchers, they would issue a formal apology for
keeping it so cold. “We had no idea,” they swore. “It’s a wonder
you didn’t use your bedroom furniture for kindling.”

It was turning into a miserable year. I was cold and unhappy and
obsessed with food. At this point I didn’t particularly want to
lose any more weight, but I couldn’t stop. I had learned to take
satisfaction in lack, in the spaces between my ribs, in the things
I denied myself. Why would I stop? I was so good at it. We could
have charged admission.