The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir (11 page)

“I wish I looked like you,” I said.

“Elna,” a voice interrupted. I jumped. It was my father. He was standing a few feet behind me. “We’re leaving,” he said. My face turned red. I didn’t know how long he’d been there. I’m pretty sure it was only for a second, but either way it’s not the sort of thing you want to get caught doing—wishing on your thin reflection.

“I’ll be right there,” I said.

When I looked at him I noticed a sadness in his eyes that wasn’t usually there. “See you outside,” he said.

Alone, I turned back to the mirror and took one more look at myself—long legs, a waist, a neck, a thin face. I lifted my right hand and touched the glass. My fingers rested on the cold, flat surface. I examined them. On one side of the mirror they were thick and pudgy; on the other, the same fingers were longer, thinner—better.

Later that night I found the list of what I wanted for the year.
I can’t control getting a job,
I thought,
and I can’t control finding a boyfriend. But I can control my weight.

I crossed out the old goals and wrote a new one:
I want to lose 80 pounds.

Every time I’d lost an eyelash or caught a willow floating through the air I’d wish for the same exact thing:
I wish that I could lose weight.
When you wish for something over and over again and it doesn’t come true, something else happens; not only do you give up, but you resent your wish and you resent wishing.

I didn’t know how to lose weight. So I did what I always do when I need advice. I flipped open my scriptures and read the first verse I saw:

“. . . I give unto men weakness,” I began reading, “that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.”

The word
grace
stuck out. I was only really fa miliar with it because of the song “Amazing Grace.” I didn’t know what it meant exactly, and so I looked it up. According to the Bible, grace is an enabling power given to men to help them accomplish things that, if left to their own devices, they would never be able to do.

Grace was my answer. I knelt down next to my bed and prayed. I told God I’d given up on me, that there was no way I could do this alone, and that I needed His grace to take over and go on a diet for me.

When I finished this prayer a vivid memory popped into my head, a wall covered in “Before” and “After” Polaroids. And okay, so I never told anyone about this, but I’d actually considered going on a diet three years earlier. My sophomore year in college, my friend Kim went to a doctor in Philadelphia and he helped her lose forty pounds. I asked her a lot of questions about it: “What do you eat? Are there pills? How much does it cost?” Kim got so sick of answering my questions that she offered to bring me to the clinic so I could see it for myself.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. We pulled up to a town house in a run-down part of Philadelphia. A small plaque read PHILADELPHIA WEIGHT MANAGEMENT CENTER, HARVEY LEVIN, M.D. Kim opened the door and led the way.

The walls of the office immediately struck me. Every inch of free space was covered with before-and-after pictures, like a giant messy collage. I stared at all of the people, the women with perms and the men in sweatpants. They didn’t look like the before-and-after people I was used to seeing in subway advertisements: Whale of a woman becomes gorgeous blonde with phenomenal breasts (clearly two different people). Instead, the “Before” Polaroids were of men and women who you’d expect to see working at FedEx or State Farm Insurance—real people—and the “After” Polaroids showed the same exact FedEx and State Farm employees, except they’d lost some weight. It gave me hope.
Anyone can do this
, I thought.

Later that night I took the train back to New York, my mind buzzing.
I can start immediately. I’ ll enroll, I’ ll commute to Philadelphia, I’ll change!
The following morning I woke up to my life and my routine, and laughed at the naïve idea that I’d ever be anyone different than me.

Three years went by and there I was, New Year’s Day, with the same desire to change. I went into the computer room and looked up the Philadelphia Weight Management Center on the Internet. It was still there. I made an appointment, January 14, 2004.

 

I remember being incredibly nervous the night before my appointment. I couldn’t decide what to wear for my “Before” Polaroid. I laid my final choice out on the floor in the shape of a body, just as I had done every year on the first day of school: jeans, a polka-dot black-and-white blouse, a red cardigan, and red flats. When I stood up to look at it, I noticed that my clothes looked so much bigger than me, but if you hold your clothes out in front of you, they always look bigger. (Which is why I’ve never bought into those Weight Watchers commercials—you know, people holding their old jeans, indicating how much weight they lost. All jeans look huge if you hold them a few feet away from your body, weight loss or not.)

The next morning I took a train to Philadelphia. Michelle, a friend of my mother, picked me up at the station. It was embarrassing. In order to go on the diet, I had to tell everyone—my parents because I needed help paying for it, my friends because I needed their support, and near strangers like Michelle, because I needed a ride.

She dropped me off in front of the clinic. As I climbed the steps I repeated my father’s advice: “You’re either going out of your way to fail, or you’re going out of your way to succeed. Either way, we still love you.”

When I opened the front door and saw the Polaroid-covered walls, relief swept over me. Sometimes when you let an opportunity pass you by, you worry that you’ve closed that door forever. But here it was, a second chance. I took a deep breath and walked up to the front desk where a blond girl sat reading
People
magazine.

“Just sign your name on the clipboard,” she said. I wrote down my name.

An older nurse with dyed-brown hair and cat’s-eye glasses poked her head out from a doorway down the hall. “Ms. Baker? Right this way,” she said.

I took an even deeper breath.
There’s no turning back; it’s now or never.

“You’re the patient coming in from New York, right?” the older nurse asked as I approached.

“Yes.”

“Doctor Levin doesn’t take out-of-state patients, so you’ll have to talk to him before we authorize anything.”

“They mentioned that over the phone.” I tried smiling, in hopes that’d help my cause.

“Step up onto this scale,” a nurse said abruptly.

I looked at the high-tech scale in between us. It had a diagram identifying height on one side, weight on the other. In different shades of red were the words
underweight
,
normal
,
overweight
, and
obese
.
Obese
was written in the darkest color, almost a blood red.

“I should take my shoes off,” I said, kicking off my flats, “and my belt.”

The nurse tapped her chart with a pencil and let out an impatient sigh. Apparently she’d been through this post-9/11-airport-security-ritual before.

I stepped onto the scale. Two horizontal red lines flashed in a quick sequence. And then the numbers 2-3-5 appeared. I hadn’t weighed myself in years. It was better than I thought—at one point I weighed 260 pounds. I matched my weight and height (5’ 10”) with the chart and I fell into the bloodred category.
Obese
, I read.
Okay, so it’s still not great.

The nurse scribbled, closed the file with a neat slap, and then opened the door.

“You’re just in time for the New Patient Orientation.” She gestured to a room at the end of the hall. I walked forward tentatively and peeked through the door. Seven overweight women were sitting on folding chairs in a plain room.

When I didn’t immediately enter, the nurse nudged me. “Go on,” she said. “They won’t bite.”

A different nurse—thin, young, dark hair—was conducting the orientation. She handed me a laminated packet.

“Take a seat,” she said.

I looked at the circle. The chairs were set up without consideration for the incoming guests—they were set so tightly I noticed one woman’s leg was practically glued to her neighbor’s. I squeezed into an opening.

“Welcome,” the nurse began cheerfully. None of us looked that cheerful.

“Before each of you meets with Doctor Levin, I’m going to explain the diet.”

She reviewed the laminated packet, a list of all the foods we could eat: veggies, protein, and more veggies. Then she stressed the importance of drinking water, and of exercise. As she spoke, my mind wandered; I found myself looking at the bodies of the other women in the circle. Next to me, across from me, diagonally: the pouches, the elastic-band jeans, watery full faces, somehow softer, somehow kind. I considered my position in relation to them.
We are the same
, I thought.
We’re the big girls.

And yet, I’d always made it a point not to hang out with other fat people. Not because I have a prejudice against them per se. I guess I was just secretly worried that if someone were to see me with another overweight person, then it’d suddenly occur to them that I was fat, too. Guilty by association.

But I am like them,
I thought.

“You need to record everything that you eat in this Food Journal,” the nurse continued. “Don’t hide what you eat,” she said. “Admit everything.” Everyone nodded.

You hide it, too?
As far back as I can remember I’d sneak chocolate chips from my mother’s pantry. I’d fill my pockets with them, and then go to the bathroom and eat them, a handful at a time. Inevitably, I’d forget a chip or two, and end up with dark brown stains in the pockets of my clothing—something that was hard to explain.

“It’s time to love your bodies,” the dainty nurse emphasized. I felt us all collectively roll our eyes. It was church all over again:
God sent you to earth, and God gave you the greatest gift, your body
.

I looked down at my body, surveying the outfit I’d set out on the floor the night before. It did not look big on me. It fit.
I hide behind my clothes
, it occurred to me.
But what do I look like naked?
I searched my brain for an image of my body—not the one I saw in pictures, my real body. Nothing. My mind was blank.

Oh, come on, Elna. You must remember something.
Nope, nothing.
Oh, wait.
I vaguely remembered a bath I took once, after I got really heavy. I immersed myself in the water, but the tub wasn’t deep enough. That’s when I realized that no matter how high I filled it, I wouldn’t be able to completely cover myself. I tried to compensate by pushing my back against the ceramic bottom of the tub. It almost worked; the soapy water hid most of me, but there was a portion of my stomach that was still visible. It floated above the water like a soft white hill. I looked at it and decided it was not part of me.

I called it an island.

 

After orientation I met with Dr. Levin, a kind man with glasses and white hair who reminded me of someone else’s favorite grandpa.

“What’s your goal weight?” he began.

“Eighty pounds.”

He looked up, startled.

“I want to lose eighty pounds,” I rephrased “not weigh eighty pounds, although that’d be nice.”

Apparently anorexia jokes aren’t big at weight-loss facilities; he didn’t even laugh. Instead, he reached into his desk and began removing different bottles of pills.

“Your diet will be aided by medicine,” he advised. “Potassium, serotonin, dopamine, a multivitamin, and phentermine, which will help suppress your appetite.”

I looked down at the little circles of color.
Skittles
, I thought,
only the opposite.

“Sometimes patients react negatively to the medication,” he continued. “If I do take you on, I need you to come in once a week so that I can monitor your heart.”

“Absolutely . . .”

“And like I told you before, I don’t normally have patients who live out-of-state.”

“I understand.” I was about to make a case for myself, when he continued.

“But you have a certain look about you. Determination. So I will make an exception if you agree to do one thing for me—”

“Do everything I ask you to do, word for word, and this diet will be a success.”

I sat there for a moment and pondered his request. It was the same thing I’d always struggled with, only at church:
How do you do everything someone else asks you to do word for word? I mean, can you ever really trust that someone besides you has your best interests at heart? (Especially if their guidance could result in coronary thrombosis.) Or can you only ever trust yourself? But then again, I’ve trusted myself and screwed up over and over again and where has that gotten me? To the bloodred section on the scale.

I took a deep breath. “I will do everything that you ask me to do. Word for word.” I stuck my hand out, in an effort to be official.

The doctor smiled, took my hand in his, a firm grip, a shake, and the deal was sealed.

“Now stand against that wall and let me take your photograph,” he said, pointing to the only blank wall in his office. I stood in the center of the empty space awkwardly, my hands placed unevenly at my sides.
This is it,
I thought.
My “Before.”

He clicked the camera and then handed me the Polaroid. “Do you mind shaking it for me while I put this away?” he asked.

“Of course.”

I like watching Polaroids develop. The way they go from murky gray to a ghost version of you to a solid you is so cool; it’s like watching your own resurrection.

As the solid Elna came into form, I was surprisingly pleased. I looked really cute. My outfit was an excellent choice; I looked like Betty Boop.