“Unusual,” I say, “amazing,” then leave it at that for lack of anything else to say.
“And who’s paying for your shopping?” he says, noticing the yellow-striped Giorgio bag. “Me or Mike Taylor?”
“Got a gift certificate to Giorgio’s with my last purchase of Red.”
“How are you doing out here?” Wharton asks, narrowing his eyes.
“Not bad. It’s a change though, isn’t it?”
“Nice for a week,” he says, then lowers his voice conspiratorially, adding, “but I wouldn’t want to live here, would you?”
“I miss the city,” I say, realizing that I mean it. “We’re different stock, you know?” Are his eyes getting moist?
“Can I give you a lift? I hired a car. It’s right down the street. Or we could stop for some decadent dessert, how about it?”
“Thanks, but I have to get back. I’m parked nearby.”
We stroll down the street, and I stop in front of the car.
“Yours?”
“A loaner.” I have to admit I’m enjoying his incredulity. “Well, I gotta run. See you at work in another week and a half, Bill.”
“Yes, well keep enjoying yourself.” He walks ahead, then suddenly turns and calls out. “Any restaurants you recommend?”
“Morton’s is great, so are Jar and Spago.”
“Spago? I couldn’t get a reservation!”
I watch him amble off. Decadent dessert, indeed. Diet saboteurs come in all guises.
Weight-Loss Saboteurs
Your boyfriend—or father—mother—best friend—or husband—applauds your weight loss one moment, and the next brings you a ten-layer chocolate cake to celebrate your success. What is he or she? A weight-loss saboteur.
Your mother has you over for dinner every Sunday, and even though she knows you’re watching your weight, insists that you take home the leftover lasagna. What is she? A weight-loss saboteur.
You pass that fabulous new Belgian bakery every day on your way home from work. What is the bakery? A weight-loss saboteur.
Your weekend tennis partners always insist that after the game the group has dessert at the charming neighborhood ice-cream parlor. What do you call the shop? A trap.
Saboteurs come in all sizes and shapes—both human and inanimate. What they all have in common is that they work against you, creating tension in your life, anxiety and binge eating. What to do?
* Know the enemy. If a particular person seems to delight in offering you the kinds of foods that you’re trying desperately to avoid, rehearse your strategies in advance. Go over the script. “I know Kevin will ask me out to my favorite French restaurant. This time I’ll decline or tell him where I’d like to go. I’ll be in charge.”
* If the neighborhood bakery is hard to walk past, change your route or put on headphones and a favorite tape and play it loud so that your mind is distracted.
* If your tennis group always hits the pastry shop after the game, leave and wish them well. For me, at least, it’s easier to pass up on dessert altogether than to have just a taste or watch someone else who’s indulging.
The click of the front door sends my heart racing. Does the house come with a defibrillator? Taylor slips the overnight bag off his shoulder, and tosses his leather jacket onto a chair. He’s wearing a white T-shirt and jeans. He walks toward me, flips down on the couch, extending his legs over the arm. He drains my iced tea.
“So how’s my favorite rocket scientist. Spaced out?”
“Cloud nine,” he says, eyes closed. Okay, not very original. “What did I miss?”
“I went to Rodeo Drive and ran into my publisher. I had a great time driving your car, and I even thought about making off with it and heading to New York…you wouldn’t press charges, would you…? Let’s see, what else… I accidentally tripped the alarm when I opened my window. Security came…I was questioned by two gorillas with tattoos…now at least I know how to disengage it so I can get unfiltered air…. Other than that, nothing much.”
“Where’s Jolie?”
“Je ne sais pas. I haven’t seen much of her.”
“Our time’s getting short,” he says, smiling slightly. “How about we go over some of your—”
“There’s a folder on your desk with a year’s worth of my columns and some journal articles. Enjoy your afternoon.”
He hangs his head down off the side of the couch, pretending to be dead. “Can’t I get the Spark notes?”
I give him a withering look.
“I’ll fail the final without them.”
“How could I look Spielberg in the eye again?”
“Well, if I ever finish we can celebrate ’cause there’s a party tonight—the one that was supposed to have been two days ago. Wanna go?”
“If you’d rather just see your friends on your own, I’ll be fine here—”
“The party’s at ten,” he says, jumping up and messing my hair. “You’re going.”
I’m about to start some research for another column when I look up. Taylor is standing there with a pathetic look on his face. What was I thinking? Did I really expect him to start wading through one hundred and fifty-six columns? More likely he’d hand them over to someone at the studio who would boil everything down to three paragraphs.
“Yes?” I say, feigning ignorance.
“Let’s go over some of these,” he says, shaking his head. I welcome the juicy excuse to leave my own work behind and follow him to his office like a compliant puppy. There are two couches, facing each other. Should I sit facing him, or next to him? This isn’t psychotherapy, so I sit next to him, and for the next hour and a half, we go over some of the main points of my work.
I’m pretty proud of what I’ve done, now that I read it all again. There’s a column on portion size with the basic premise “Forget about dieting—if you want to lose weight all you have to do is slash portion size.”
“Look at the palm of your hand,” I tell Taylor. “That’s about the size your steak or chicken breast should be.”
“What?” he says, staring at his hand in disbelief.
“You wouldn’t believe what the rubber food models we used in nutrition class looked like. An appropriate portion of mashed potatoes is smaller than a B-cup bra,” I tell him. That gets his attention.
To give him some historical perspective, I offer these tidbits:
“When McDonald’s started out if you had a burger, fries and a twelve-ounce Coke, it came to 590 calories. Today, if you order an Extra Value Meal, which consists of a Quarter Pounder with cheese, Super Size fries and a Super Size Coke, you’re taking in a whopping 1550 calories, about the total number that the average diet offers in an entire day.”
And another example—“Back in the 1950s, what was considered a family-size bottle of Coke held 26 ounces. Today, a single-serve bottle is 20 ounces.
“America has increased the amount of food that they eat, thanks not only to jumbo restaurant-size portions but also to mass-quantity-size items bought from stores such as Costco and Sam’s Club in order to save money. Except, while you keep your wallet fat, you keep your waistline the same way.”
“So what do you do, order in?”
Spoken like a true movie star. “No, people in small-town America don’t order in. You divide up the three-pound salmon, for example, into four- or six-ounce portions, cook one and freeze the others. In a restaurant, you and a friend share one steak, or ask for an extra plate and cut away half of the portion to take home. Instead of the second half of the twelve-ounce steak, have a large green salad or fruit salad for dessert.”
“Gulag diet,” Taylor says glumly.
“No, just reorienting yourself.”
To offer more evidence of how America has changed, all you have to do is compare the average weights of men and women from the early ’60s to today. Back then, the average man weighed 168 pounds and the average woman 142. Today, the average man weighs almost 180, and the average female 152.
We move on to
a column called “Forget About Fat.” This one talks about being more concerned about the number of calories you’re eating rather than the grams of fat because I’m convinced Americans think that the words low-fat on a package gives them a license to eat all they want.
“So you pig out on regular chocolate chip cookies instead of the low-fat ones?” Taylor says.
“No, you eat the yummy ones, and enjoy every bite. You just limit the number you eat. It’s better than eating twenty low-fat cookies because you’re not saving calories at all, you’re just sacrificing flavor.”
Then I look back at a column that I did on consumer products growing in size in recognition of Americans’ widening waists. Taylor gives me a blank look. He’s oblivious, as are most people who’ve never had a weight problem. We start with the size of seats in Ford’s Lincoln Navigator that were roomy to begin with, but were widened by an inch in the 2003 model. In addition, the area between the driver and steering wheel was opened up as well. The seats also got wider in Ford’s 2003 Focus compact.
“Mattress sizes are growing, too,” I say. “Simmons increased the size of the box springs under its queen-size mattresses to 66 inches. The wider mattress is dubbed the Olympic Queen.”
“Sounds like a cruise ship,” Taylor says, smirking.
I ignore that.
“Chairs are getting wider and selling better because of it,” I say, giving him some background. There’s even a 500-pound lift recliner that lifts and tilts forward to help an obese person get out of the chair. He groans, and I begin telling him about clothing. “Many of the major retailers are now catering to plus-size women. JCPenney began a new division in 1999 catering to full-figured women, and Kmart not only increased the area devoted to plus-size clothes by 25 percent but also introduced a junior-plus-size department in 400 of its stores. So has Hot Topic. They have a chain called Torrid aimed at plus-size teenagers. According to one estimate I read, plus-size clothing sales are a $17-billion-a-year business, outperforming the rest of the garment industry. Overweight women can now buy better-quality underwear, lingerie and wedding gowns. And the best news is that now there are even online dating sites so that heavier women don’t have to compete with model types for men.”
“Wow,” Taylor says. “I had no idea.”
“Most people don’t, and you just don’t see it in California,” I tell him, “and you don’t see it in New York City. But travel around the country, and you see the problem of obesity when you walk down the street. According to some statistics, half of all American women today wear a size 14 or larger. In 1985, the average size was 8.”
I don’t even go into the medical field, where obese patients have special needs, including larger wheelchairs, beds, special air-circulation mattresses to prevent bedsores, and on and on, or in the travel field where an obese person has to buy two airline tickets.
We segue into more familiar ground: food tricks instead of diets. I start with the obvious: having fresh fruit instead of juice because it has more fiber and higher satiety value. We talk about heating V8 and sipping it slowly as a soup, instead of downing a chilled glass of it in a second. For whatever reason, when it’s hot—and you can add some cut-up vegetables—it seems to be more filling and satisfying. The same goes for pureeing vegetables into a soup instead of eating them cooked or raw. Another trick is to buy plastic ice pop containers and make your own ice pops using plain old water, or diet soda instead of sugary juice.
“Water pops?” Taylor find this funny.
“Believe it or not, it helps to just have something in your mouth,” I say, and then, oh God, start to blush. He turns toward me and smiles. Now we’re talking about something that Taylor can relate to. He leans over and kisses me so softly that I’m not even sure that he did, and for some reason, the sweetness of it, especially in the middle of the late afternoon with the warm sun bathing the office in sunlight, turns me on more than anything else he could have done.
“Something in your mouth, huh?” he says softly. I lean back and nod, very slightly. And then, as if on cue, the mood is broken as the phone rings. He doesn’t answer it, but a moment later, there’s a voice on the answering machine—the head of production at his studio—saying that he needs to talk to him, right away. Taylor exhales and gets up, looking down at me on the couch, with my head resting back on the cushion. He smiles and shrugs his shoulders, helplessly, then walks to his desk to make the call.
fifteen
Later on that evening, we’re off to the party. It’s in a beach house that’s within swallowing distance of a giant tsunami, and once in the door the walls feel like sausage casing squeezing all of Hollywood together. All intimate friends, all familiar to Taylor. Very. Was his mouth sore from hello-kissing so many pumped-up lips? My guess is that most of the group is from TV, but I watch so little that I can’t tell a soap opera vixen from a surgeon on ER.
This is Taylor’s extended family. Women are flashed his full throttle smile, hugged, smooched, whispered to. This is no place for the insecure at heart. Wondrous cleavages abound. So do pert asses, great legs, perfect cheekbones and twenty-thousand-dollar smiles. Taylor introduces me around, but after the polite smiles, I fade into the crowd like an extra. Everyone wants a part of Taylor. Women and gay men want to sleep with him, and the straights want to meet him for golf. If he minds being a body pillow, he hides it well. My leading man is a born party animal.
The room gets smoky, close, and I need air. I ease away from him, averting my eyes from the buffet table, cognizant of the fact that neither the giant pyramid of bite-size quiches nor the mound of golden crab cakes has been touched—what else did you have to know about this group? Do you know how wild I am about crab cakes, especially when they’re made with chopped red pepper and lots of dill? And what better to go with them than the nearby pot of golden lemon mayonnaise!
I snag one and walk out to the beach, glancing back at the party through the picture window. Planet Hollywood. Faces that I have no interest in meeting, or talking to. I mostly avoid parties, uncomfortable with keeping up the forced banter, steering oneself from one group to another, chatting with one eye fixed on the door to monitor flow. Another future column—the pain of being out and on display?
Maybe it all brings me back to grade school proms, hugging the side of the room near the windows and sitting in a folding chair for the entire junior high school prom when my mother convinced me to go even though I didn’t have a date. How clearly I recall crossing the great room with all the couples dancing when I had to go to the bathroom. One of the greatest things in life for me is knowing that now that school is over, I never again have to wonder if someone is going to ask me to the prom.
Through the window I see a curvaceous blonde howling with laughter. Well, this was nirvana for any celluloid wannabe—producers, directors, cameramen, studio heads, stars. But for an ink-stained wretch from the Big Apple? And talk about accepting fat? It was a nonissue at this party, if you didn’t count the kind that’s taken from your rear and injected into your face.
Tex would know the feeling. If he were here we’d be exchanging glances, and I’d see it in his glazed look. Oceanic boredom. I feel as though I’m looking at him through a giant zoom lens. Where was he now, with Sharon having feijoada with black beans at Casa Brazil? Scarfing down a three-pound lobster at The Palm? Maybe he was just home watching the news. If I was with him, we’d be twittering about a breaking story, bad-mouthing some government official, laughing over a correction. Or a correction of a correction. He’d be on the phone with the office, opening his eyes to me in exasperation. Life seemed more sharply focused at home. Edited of excess. At the moment, it seemed like a warm bathrobe, instead of a snug, scratchy, organza dress.
I reach for my cell phone and almost automatically start dialing the New York area code, 212. I’m not even certain if I want the call to go through, but when I hear it ring, I reason that fate has ruled me.
“Metro.”
It’s Larry, and in a heartbe
at I’ve got to decide whether to ask for Tex or just hang up.
“Hey, Lar, it’s Maggie. How’s it going?”
“Fair to middlin’, et tu?”
“Good, good,” I say, hastily.
“Hold on, the Texan’s on the horn.”
I’m walking deeper into the ocean and wallowing in the thought of my solitary existence here, knee-deep in the ocean under a moonlit sky, while on the other side of the country, my colleagues are sitting in a neon-lit newsroom trying to shoehorn copy into too little space.
“How’s the California dreamer?” Tex says.
“Oh, you know, working hard. It’s a rotten job, but someone’s got to do it.”
“So where are you now?” he says.
“In the ocean.”
“Watch out for Jaws.”
“The killer sharks out here don’t swim in the sea, they work in the studios.”
“I wouldn’t know about things like that,” Tex says. “I’m a country boy, remember?”
“So ya starving to death without me?”
“Well, let’s put it this way,” Tex says. “I had lunch with Justine yesterday, and she left over half of her food.”
“Sounds like the perfect lunch partner. You paid for one lunch and got two for the price.”
“But then she dragged me to a fashion show. Wanted a man’s perspective on a new collection.”
Hmmm, that gave me pause for thought. “So did you trade in your football jerseys for black silk shirts?”
“Nah, just a black opera cape and a white silk aviator’s scarf, why?”
“I’m on the next plane home.”
“So you’ve come to your senses.”
“Don’t bet on that.”
“So what are you cookin’ up out there?” Tex says.
I’m not sure how to handle that question. “Oh, you know, just spreading the overweight gospel to the uninitiated.”
Fat Chance Page 14
