I knew I was average. I had learned this fact on my first day of Geelong Grammar School. In Grovedale, the suburb of Geelong where I grew up, we had the biggest and most beautiful house in the neighborhood—a brand-new two-story AV Jennings home with a swimming pool. My father was a well-respected community organizer, the founder of the Grovedale Rotary Club, and there was talk of him running for mayor. But on my first day at my new school, when I saw one kid being dropped off in a helicopter and others arriving in BMWs and Jaguars, it became obvious to me that I was not like them. They owned things my family couldn’t afford. And while I had felt jealousy before, seeing that boy get out of a helicopter elicited a brand-new, uncomfortable feeling. Jealousy for me had been rooted in the belief that what I was jealous of was attainable, but this was different. I felt intimidated. I felt less than, not equal, and on a completely different, un-relatable level. Throughout the day I heard stories from the students of summer vacations spent yachting around the Caribbean while I had spent my summer pretending to be an Olympic gymnast in the cul-de-sac. I was embarrassed to think that I had been strutting around town like a spoiled little rich girl when I wasn’t rich at all.
“Why didn’t you tell me we were poor?” I fired at my mother with uncharacteristic anger when I got into the car. (I have since learned that anger is my first response to embarrassment.) My mother was clearly hurt by my question, and as we drove home in her Mazda 626, she stared at the road between her hands clenched at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel, and explained to me with tears in her eyes that she’d tried very hard to make sure our lives continued as if dad were still alive.
“But we’ve always been poor!” She couldn’t possibly know how poor we were. She probably didn’t even know what a yacht was.
When I saw my brother later that night, I attacked him. I was especially angry with my brother, since he had attended the school for two years prior to my arrival. Surely he could’ve told me the truth.
“We’re not poor, stupid. We’re average.”
Average. It was the worst, most disgusting word in the English language. Nothing meaningful or worthwhile ever came from that word. In my twelve-year-old mind, there was no point in living if you were average. An average person doesn’t cure cancer, win Olympic medals, or become a movie star. What kind of a boring, uninspired life was I going to live if I was thought of as “average” in any category? My brother could not have levied a greater insult than calling me average with the exception of “normal,” “ordinary,” and “mediocre.” These were words that I hated just as much as the word “average,” and I knew they were lined up right around the corner ready to attach themselves to me like a name badge unless I did something exceptional and gave myself a better label, starting with my unexceptional, common-sounding name. My name was average. I knew this because I wasn’t the only one who had it. When I was eight, I was a track and field star. My race was the 200 meters. At the regional track and field meet, there was a girl in my heat with the same name—Amanda Rogers—who was my only real competition. I simply couldn’t see the point of running the race. Where’s the glory in beating the girl with the same name? Why make a name for myself when somebody else already had it? Amanda Rogers in first, followed by Amanda Rogers in second?
I needed to give myself a better label. Model. Law student. Actress. No one was average at my new school. They were rich. I needed to be exceptional just to fit in.
The thought of being in the middle of the pack had always worried me. From my first awareness of competition—that someone could win and another person could lose—the pressure to excel in everything I attempted was immense. I had to win, get an A, and take home the prize. Even when I took first prize, topped the class, won the race, I never really won anything. I was merely avoiding the embarrassment of losing. When ability is matched by expectations, then anything less that an exceptional result was laziness. And laziness in my opinion was shameful.
But I wasn’t naturally inclined to excel in all the tasks I was given as a child. For example, I was never good at math. Even basic addition eluded me. I learned my multiplication table at school because we used to have “heads up” competitions in front of the class. The teacher would invite two students to come to the blackboard and would then proceed to ask them various multiplication questions such as “six times seven” or “five times three.” I drilled the answers into my brain. All day long this little eight-year-old would be silently playing the game of teacher and student; the teacher firing questions with machine-gun rapidity, the student, armed with preparation, deftly deflecting every bullet. I made it through the third grade undefeated. But I wasn’t a math champion for long. By age fourteen I was bawling over my physics homework.
Devastation was my usual reaction to things I couldn’t comprehend. It would start with mild anxiety if the answer wasn’t at the ready, and would progress to full-blown terror, physically manifesting in sweating, yelling, crying, hitting myself on the head, and chanting, “I don’t understand” until I was exhausted and on the verge of collapse. In order to prepare myself for a less than perfect result, I would occasionally give myself the opposite of a pep talk by writing hundreds of times in a journal, “I will not get honors,” as I awaited the results of a ballet exam, for example. I’m not sure if this ritual actually helped me to accept the less than perfect grade I was preparing myself for, because I always did get honors. Dancing six days a week for two hours a day, plus hours of practice at home will get anyone honors, much less a nine-year-old whose only competition had just learned to point her toe. The ballet school I attended was a small side business of a onetime professional dancer who rented out a church hall to teach young kids the basics of dance in a suburb of a mid-sized town. Nobody took it seriously. I treated it like it was the Australian Ballet.
I don’t know where this pressure came from. I can’t blame my parents because it has always felt internal. Like any other parent, my mother celebrated the A grades and the less-than-A grades she felt there was no need tell anybody about. But not acknowledging the effort that ended in a less than perfect result impacted me as a child. If I didn’t win, then we wouldn’t tell anyone that I had even competed to save us the embarrassment of acknowledging that someone else was better. Keeping the secret made me think that losing was something to be ashamed of, and that unless I was sure I was going to be the champion, there was no point in trying. And there was certainly no point to just having fun.
FISH
Can I have your attention please? Everybody. I really have splendid news. I would like to introduce to you all, Nelle Porter. As of today she’ll be joining us as a new attorney. She is going to be an outstanding addition, and I trust that you’ll all help make her feel as welcome as I know she is. Nelle Porter.
NELLE
Thank you. Thank you. It’s a tough decision to change jobs, but I’m excited. I’m grateful to Richard and to Paul for the offer and also Ally . . . my brief chat with her . . . well, I knew coming here it would be fun.
6
I COULDN’T LIGHT a cigarette fast enough. In fact, even though I was scared that someone would catch me, I greedily inhaled a lungful of smoke before my car had driven off the lot. My first day had definitely been challenging, and not having a hiding place in which to smoke made it even worse. I hadn’t eaten all day either. But my need for food wasn’t from hunger as much as it was the need to fill a hole in my gut. Since I didn’t have to go to work the next couple of days, my brother Michael and I decided to meet at our favorite restaurant to celebrate my first day. When my husband left me, my brother moved in to my place. I loved that he lived with me. The living arrangement was to keep both of us company after my husband ran off with his wife. My husband ran off with his wife, so we kept each other company and we liked to go out for margaritas and Mexican food to commiserate. Or to celebrate. And after the day I’d had, I wasn’t sure which of those things I would be doing tonight. Naturally, he’d think we were celebrating and I wouldn’t let him t
hink otherwise. He already thought I was a bit of a drama queen as it was.
“How did it go, Sissy?” He called me Sissy when he was happy to see me and the feeling was reciprocated. If I’d had a cute way of turning “brother” into something to express my love, I would’ve done it then, too. I just called him “brother.” Since moving to LA, he’d had to deal with a lot. He had married his longtime girlfriend, Renee, just before leaving Australia and the two newlyweds moved into an apartment in the same Melrose Place–style complex that was home to me and Mel. In the evenings, the four of us were inseparable, but during the day, when my brother and I were at work, Renee and Mel formed partnerships. They were professional partners in my husband’s cappuccino business and in his carpentry business. The fact that Renee would wear skimpy, lacy underwear clearly visible underneath her oversized, gaping overalls should have indicated to my brother and me that a personal partnership was also forming, but when Mel left me and Renee suddenly sabotaged her marriage to my brother to be with Mel, Brother and I were left idiotically scratching our heads in disbelief.
My brother’s first year in Los Angeles was tough. Apart from his wife falling in love with my husband, he had a great deal of drama in his new job as a manager of a biomedical engineering company. We had both come to the United States to pursue our dreams of a bigger, more challenging life. Either that or we were both really influenced by our father’s love of America after he came back from a business trip with stories of wide freeways and snowy mountains, fancy cars and Disneyland. In any case, the fact we both ended up here together was a blessing.
“It was great, Brother. The scene went well, the place is great, and the people are really nice.”
“That’s great. Table for two on the patio, please.”
“Certainly, sir, right this way.”
The Mexican restaurant was a dark, seedy place with greasy food and an outdoor patio where I could smoke. I started smoking when I was fourteen for two very good reasons: to win over the cool girl at school with the shaved head and to suppress my appetite—a tip taught to me by my modeling colleagues. While I never really became friends with the cool girl, I did learn that the more I smoked, the less I’d eat, which is particularly important when you sit down to dinner at a Mexican restaurant. So despite its average food, the fact that this restaurant was the closest one to our house with an outdoor patio made it my favorite.
As I smoked and talked and allowed the tension of my day to melt into my margarita, I made the decision to eat nachos. The blend of cheese and sour cream with the crispiness of the corn chips and creaminess of guacamole will always turn a sour mood into a happy one. A peace came over me when I ate food like that. Like life had no other purpose than pure enjoyment. I had nowhere to go and nothing to accomplish. For that moment, I could put life on hold and believe I was perfect the way I was. I was focused in the present—in the moment—and the moment was bliss on a corn chip.
I hadn’t eaten any bad food since the day at Banana Republic when I decided to get professional, and I really felt like I needed to reward myself for all the hard work that went into getting into that size 6 suit. Besides, I’d made too much of a big deal out of it, anyway. The suits were very conservative and would easily hide a pound or two. I didn’t need to be rail thin to wear them. So I didn’t feel bad when I ordered an additional meal of enchiladas. I simply wouldn’t eat the following day.
“So that idiot in lab went over my head today and told Chris . . .” As he talked about his lab geeks and his psychotic boss, I wondered how he’d take the news that I was gay. I hadn’t told him yet because it was too soon after my marriage to Mel and I was afraid he wouldn’t believe me. Of the few people I’d told, most didn’t believe me for some reason. Some thought it was a phase, some thought I was just saying it to be different, to get attention. It’s a particularly bad reaction because sharing that deep secret with someone takes a lot of courage, and disbelief feels like ridicule. Like two little girls together is something silly not to be taken seriously. I simply couldn’t risk my brother reacting that way. He was all I had.
I kept ordering margaritas and eating enchiladas, and when I was done with mine, I got to work on his. After the main course was over, I went back to the appetizers we’d been served at the beginning of the evening and ate the last of the corn chips with the puddle of salsa that was left in the stone bowl. I was amused at the thought that an appetizer was supposed to stimulate appetite and I silently congratulated ours for doing its job.
As my brother and I finished up our conversation, our watered-down drinks, the last drag of a cigarette, I knew I’d done some damage. There was a dull ache in my gut and a layer of fat on the roof of my mouth that proved it. It’s a weird sensation knowing that you’ve just altered your course. In a fleeting moment of arrogance, in one self-congratulatory thought, I decided I was good enough, that I could stop right there. My quest for perfection, for discipline, for greatness, was over. I’d reached my goal. I had nothing more to do. I’d completed one day of work, worn the suit with the character in it, and done a good job, and that was enough. As I got up from the table, I looked down at the wreckage. I saw the ugly plastic checkered tablecloth and the flimsy utensils for the first time that night. I saw the cigarette ash on the table, pools of water dripped from the glasses that were cloudy with greasy fingers, lipstick-tipped butts in an overflowing ashtray that wasn’t clean to begin with. And then there was the food. Food looks so ugly when it’s half-eaten and torn apart. The refried beans smeared on the plate looked like feces, and the browning guacamole and clumps of rice looked like vomit. What disgusted me the most in this grotesque tableau was that the cheese from the enchiladas had a wide greasy ring around it that separated it from the plate. Like a beach separated land from the ocean. I had ingested a beach of grease. I grabbed my keys from underneath a few grains of rice that had spilled over the edge of my plate during this mindless, repetitious act of filling my mouth with food and headed out to the car.
There’s a big difference between eating and what I had just done. What I’d done was an act of defiance.
I pulled away from the curb and lined up behind my brother’s car that was barely visible through the curtain of exhaust smoke that separated us. The bright red stoplight reflected off the black road and as I sat there on the cold leather seat, I wondered who I was being defiant toward. You’re only hurting yourself, was the phrase I kept thinking, and while I knew that was true, why did my bingeing feel like someone else was going to be pissed off and hurting, too? Was anyone else really invested in my weight and how I treated my body? All I thought about when I continued to eat after the initial rush of the food wore off, after the taste became familiar, and after my stomach was full was HA HA! You can’t stop me! But who was I saying that to? As I drove down the road toward home, now separated from my brother by several cars and a lane or two, I wondered if my little act of rebellion was over for now or if it would continue with a stop at 7-Eleven.
I stopped at 7-Eleven on the way home for food. I barely felt any anxiety as I pulled into the parking lot because I think I’d subconsciously planned this stop from my first bite of nachos. As I’d already blown the diet, I figured I might as well keep going—I might as well eat all the things I’d denied myself for the last few weeks. And I had to get it all done in one sitting because if I allowed myself to do this again—to eat all this food—I’d get fat. If this reckless eating continued into the following day, I’d get fat and I’d end up in TV purgatory, kept on the show due to an unbreakable contract, yet disappearing, making only the occasional background cross as my character’s life with all the promise of great story lines faded into the blank page from whence it came. Of course, I’d have to throw up after, but that was okay. I would’ve had to throw up anyway just from the Mexican food. I didn’t have work for the next two days so I had time to get rid of the dots above my eyes that were caused by my blood vessels bursting from all the pressure and strain of purging. With that m
uch pressure, something had to burst.
I could either force myself to throw up the food or gain weight from it. Of the two options, I figured that it was better concealing a few red dots on my eyelids than showing up to my second day of work two pounds heavier with my skirt stretching across my thighs. And if I had to throw up anyway, I might as well eat all I could. I might as well eat everything.
Throwing up was something I had taught myself as a child. I learned from the more experienced models I worked with that it was something you could do if you had to eat in front of people, including the clients that book you. Apparently, it was more desirable to look as though your body was naturally stick thin than trying hard to get it that way, so models ate pizza before a fashion show, then threw it up quietly before showtime. That would take a lot of practice, since you’d have to be neat and clean about it. No matter how much I practiced, I was never good at it. Apart from the red dots above my eyes, my eyes and nose watered badly from the heaving efforts. Plus I was so loud. The gagging sounded like really loud coughing and would serve as an alarm to let everyone in the public restroom know what I was doing.
Unlike the other girls, I didn’t throw up because I had to eat to impress the client but because I wanted to eat. Nothing was better after a modeling job than food. It was the only thing that took all the bad feelings away. Like an eraser, it allowed me start over, to forget the feelings of insecurity and awkwardness I’d experienced that day. But the comforting ritual of rewarding myself with food started to backfire as the jobs started being booked back to back. Instead of having a week of starving to counteract the weight gained from eating fries, ice cream, and candy, I was given a day or two to get back on track, to be the 34–24–35 model that they’d booked off my card. The client was expecting an image of me that wasn’t who I really was. They wanted a self-confident young woman who was naturally thin, beautiful, comfortable in her skin. Who I really was, was an average-looking child staving off puberty with its acne and weight gain just waiting to expose me for the phony I was. So I’d throw up.
Unbearable Lightness Page 4
