The Weight-loss Diaries (19 page)

I remember last year, when Mom and Dad moved to New Jersey. Since

Dad had already started the job and was living in corporate housing, Diana flew down to help Mom drive her car up to the new house—Mom’s driving was becoming scarier and scarier, though no one seemed to want to broach the topic of taking her license away. When Diana got back to D.C. after the drive, she told me Mom had complained about the move the entire three-day trip. Mom didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to leave Grandma—her

mother—who had just turned eighty and whom she’d lived near her

entire life.

Diana asked Mom the question I don’t know if I would have: why, then, was Mom going?

“You go where your husband goes,” Mom told her.

When Diana and I talked about the divorce yesterday, Diana told me something she’d left out of that story.

100

The Weight-Loss Diaries

Diana had told Dad how bitter and upset Mom was on the drive up, and Dad said, “I told her she didn’t have to come.” He wasn’t joking.

I haven’t binged. I haven’t even eaten extra. I feel drained, but I haven’t used that as an excuse not to go to the gym. I’ve clung to my diet as the one thing that I can make go right when everything else is going wrong. I’ve clung to it like it’s the only thing in the world that’s going to save me.

Month 7 (July)

From the be-careful-what-you-wish-for files: the other night at a party, the most attractive guy I could ever hope would pay attention to me actually paid attention to me. It’s “the other night” and not “last night” because it’s taken me a few days to force myself to write about it. I haven’t wanted to think about it, much less relive it.

I first met Larry briefly a couple of weeks ago at my friend Karen’s apartment. Smart, cute, funny, and built—he must have the body fat of a Diet Coke, I remember thinking. No way could I be his type.

But he showed up with a couple of friends at Karen’s party the other night, glanced around the room, and walked right up to me.

We started chatting about my job, his upcoming move to Chicago, and a couple of people we both knew. When the conversation passed the fifteen-minute mark, I stopped hearing what he was saying—stopped being aware of almost anything except that we were at a party and a cute guy was actually having a conversation with me. I was giddy.

I vaguely remembered something a law school classmate of his had said the first night I met him: “He doesn’t go out with anyone who isn’t at least an eight.”

At the time I thought that made him sound like a jerk—so superficial and probably the sort of guy who was out-and-out rude to not-exactly-an-eight women like me. But, like knowing you shouldn’t participate in catty office gossip but being unable to resist, there I was flirting with him.

I had to keep bringing my attention back to Larry’s words. There were two conversations—the one I was having with him and the one going on in my head:
Why is he still here? When is he going to leave?
I was flattered and nervous—my voice a few shades too loud, my laugh overeager.

101

Copyright © 2004 by Courtney Rubin. Click here for terms of use.

102

The Weight-Loss Diaries

I loved my outfit that night—a pair of fitted light gray Tahari pants and a white tank top with a lavender cardigan to hide my still-icky arms. I thought the pants made me look thinner than I ever had. My skin was clear, my hair wasn’t frizzy (despite the humidity), and earlier that day Mary and I had made a bunch of plans for the upcoming weeks. Life was good. I didn’t feel like having my mood dampened by the blow-off from him I was sure was inevitable.

So I left to go to the bathroom. When I came back, he was still there. I got myself a drink. I went to chat with another friend. When I stopped talking to her, there he was again. Larry and I talked some more, and I think I even made a joke about him leaving when I went to the bathroom—the sort of stupid thing I blurt out when I’m really nervous, when I feel, as I did then, like some guy is talking to me only on a dare and I want him to know that I, too, am in on the joke.

I don’t remember what he said, but I know he reached out and squeezed my arm.

Larry briefly had dated a friend of a friend and had a few choice comments about her desperation to get married. His willingness to bad-mouth people he knew that I knew should have been a red flag, but it wasn’t. His talk about what a catch he was going to be in Chicago should also have been a red flag.
Ick
, I remember thinking. But the novelty of someone—especially someone as attractive as he was—paying attention to me was too strong to walk away from. I looked around the room and caught a friend’s eye. She winked. I focused on Larry again. Once, just once, I wanted to have something of my own to pick over and giggle about with my friends on Sunday morning.

Around midnight—after I’d been bantering with Larry for at least an hour—everyone decided to hit another party a few blocks away. Larry and I walked together through the darkened streets. I got the feeling that if I turned my head and looked at him he would kiss me. So I looked straight ahead, talking loud, fast, and nonstop.

“You’re really tense,” he kept saying, reaching over to massage my shoulders.

This made me more tense. I had the feeling of standing at the edge of a precipice, about to fall. I was sure there were rules and codes of behavior for this type of thing that everyone had learned back in junior high or high school—or at least college—but I had not. I had always dated men I was already friends with—and had drunkenly kissed a few others—but I’d never dealt with anyone like Larry, who seemed so out of my league, and who came

Month 7 (July)

103

on so strong. I wasn’t sure what I wanted. Occasionally when I had too much to drink at parties I’d flirt a bit, but I always felt as safe as if I were flirting with a gay male friend. I was fat. Nothing was ever going to happen.

At the second party, Mary and I took one of those joint trips to the bathroom that men love to joke about. I wanted to ask her what to do. But I couldn’t. I was giddy, and it was so much fun to giggle about what was going on. Besides, I wasn’t quite ready to admit to anyone—especially myself—that I had only a vague idea of what I was getting into.

Larry invited me back to his apartment for a drink, but he lived in north-ern Virginia—a good twenty-minute cab ride from where I lived, just a few blocks away from the party. I was too scared to go home with him, anyway.

“No, I can’t,” I said.

So he walked me home. Standing outside the front door, under the watchful eye of the security guard at my building’s front desk, he asked to come in.

“My apartment’s a mess,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. My apartment looked the way it almost always does, like a hurricane had hit a bookstore: books, newspapers, magazines, and CDs everywhere. Whenever I went on dates, my friend Alexy would nag me to clean it so I couldn’t use the mess as an excuse not to let a guy in (something I did once two years ago, but she still likes to tease me about it). But of course it had never occurred to me to clean it before going out to this party—who besides me would see it?

“I don’t care,” Larry said.

“I do,” I answered.

“I really don’t care,” he said, following me in as I opened the door to the building. Once he was in the elevator with me, I couldn’t—didn’t know how to—make him leave. It didn’t occur to me that I could just say, “I’m not comfortable having you here,” or just “No.” It was a similar dissociation to the bingeing—that resigned feeling that I can’t stop, that someone else is in control and I just have to surrender.

“What a mess,” he said—and not in a nice way—when he walked in. I

didn’t say anything. I don’t know if I thought it consciously then, but I know now that I didn’t think I deserved to be treated better.

I didn’t have any liquor in my apartment, which I remember annoyed him. This was, I think, when he stopped seeming sarcastic—a trait I usually enjoy—and crossed the line to almost cruel.

We sat on my futon, kissing. He tried to pull me into his lap, which I wouldn’t do—I was pretty sure I would crush him. He kept trying to take my shirt off, but I wouldn’t cooperate. Instead, I tried to wriggle a bit out of

104

The Weight-Loss Diaries

his reach. He said something about not playing hard to get. Finally I muttered something about hating my arms, then wanted to kick myself for saying anything that lame. Besides, after what he’d said about my apartment, there was no way I wanted to hear what he might have to say about my body.

I wanted him to leave, but I was frozen—unable to do anything to stop this. He gave up on my top and started complaining about how the futon was too small and we really should switch to the bed, which, in my studio apartment, was just a few feet away. I didn’t say anything. He began running a finger along the inside of the waistband of my gray pants. Instinctively, I sucked in my stomach. The pants were fitted, and I waited to hear something about the roll of fat above them.

He looked for the zipper, which he couldn’t figure out was in the back.

I didn’t clue him in. I knew if that happened, I was pretty sure even I could tell what would happen next.

“We are
not
having sex,” someone said—
I
said. I don’t know where that came from. I thought he would leave then, but still he didn’t.

“Oh, all right,” he said, sounding disgusted. “You’re going to have to get me off somehow, then.”

I cringed. Without being invited, he climbed into my bed, and finally I did, too. I felt like I owed him this—that it was I who had done something wrong, and that somehow I had to set things right. When it was over, I lay awake all night, still fully clothed, feeling like I was trapped in a bad after-school special, wishing I’d never let him in—and wishing my bed were bigger. He was well muscled, so it was like being in bed next to a heater.

Finally I got up and lay on the futon, wanting to scream, wanting to call Mary, wanting him to leave.
Where had it all gone so horribly wrong?
I kept thinking.

In the morning he made no move to go.

“You’re a journalist—where’s your Sunday
Times
?” he snapped.

“Downstairs at the front desk,” I mumbled.

“Aren’t you going to get it?” he asked.

I did.

“Don’t you have any food?” He seemed to be enjoying this.

I didn’t. I didn’t want to suggest we go out and get some because (a) I didn’t want to go anywhere with him, (b) I was scared he might say something nasty about my not needing any more food, and (c) I couldn’t think of anything I’d want to eat in front of him.

Month 7 (July)

105

He sat around for hours reading the paper, which for some reason made me feel even more violated than anything else he’d done or said. He barely said anything to me, except to tell me I’d never be Maureen Dowd.

Finally he left.

He gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Don’t miss me too much,” he said, then paused in the doorway and took a last look. “Oh—and clean up this place.”

When he left, I took a shower, feeling like even if I stood under the hot water for a thousand years I’d still be able to feel his hands on me.

Then I called Mary.

She guessed instantly that our circle’s standard teasing of friends who “got some” the night before was not the best idea here.

I told her the story in fits and spurts, pausing often, testing the waters to see if I could say any more without her being disgusted with me and hanging up and never speaking to me again. Mary knew quite a bit about my family and its problems, but other than that she mostly knew only my “normal”

side—the healthy, exercising, funny/sarcastic, got-a-problem-and-here’s-howI’m-going-to-solve-it side. Sure, she saw some of the insecurity—I was constantly asking her if my jeans were too tight—but I wasn’t sure I was ready to let her in on how totally
not
together I was on the inside.

“He’s a jerk,” she said. “He’s not even that cute—his personality sort of covers up any cuteness.”

I felt a little better, but not much. I had told her most of the story, but my excuse for what seemed, in the light of morning, completely idiotic and naive behavior on my part was the excuse that’s almost always acceptable at our age: hey, I was drunk. The truth was I wasn’t—in fact, at times the night before I’d wished desperately for a drink to soften the edges of the horrible, sharp self-consciousness.

She repeated several times that he was a jerk, occasionally substituting
ass-hole
and
psycho
and
loser
and my favorite Mary-ism,
dookie-head
.

“And be careful if you’ve been drinking,” she admonished me. I felt crappy for lying—but I felt like I had to. Admitting that I really was that clue-less about the Larry situation meant, I was sure, having to admit a whole pile of things about myself I didn’t want to have to think about, much less tell anyone else. It was easier—safer—just to lie.

Near the end of the conversation she told me Larry wasn’t going to be the only guy who ever flirted with me.

“Get used to it,” she said.

106

The Weight-Loss Diaries

I wanted desperately to ask her what I should say if something like the night before ever happened again—to ask for a script to write down, the way I do with interview subjects that scare me—but I couldn’t.

“He’s not the only guy you’re ever going to meet,” she said. “Remember that.”

Didn’t lose any weight this week. And I’ve eaten nothing but what I’m supposed to. People say that eating appropriately is supposed to be its own reward—don’t I feel good that I’m taking care of myself ?—but frankly, it’s not enough. I feel like I’m hungry all the time, so the unbudging scale makes me want to pig out in frustration.

I’m trying to take it one day at a time. The marathon training is actually helping. My weigh-in day is Wednesday, and I know that if I binge because I’m disgusted with my plodding progress, I’ll have to stop by Thursday afternoon, because it takes my body at least twenty-four hours to recover, and I don’t want to feel like throwing up while trying to run on Saturday morning. (Actually, the runs are so early Saturday morning—5:00 a.m. because of the punishing heat and humidity—that I probably should consider them Friday night.) And if I can make it to Saturday . . . well, usually the run puts me in a good mood.