Choose Somebody Else

by Yvonne Fein

  ‘You’re thinner,’ he remarks.

  ‘Am I?’ I say it as though I wasn’t aware of each microgram I’d lost.

  ‘You’re eating salmon instead of schnitzels, vegies instead of mash.’

  ‘I decided I had to keep healthy for the kids’ sake.’ I twist the knife. ‘They’ve only got me now.’

  Again, he looks like he’s been gut-shot. He thinks I should be losing weight to get him back.

  MONDAY 24TH DECEMBER

  The weight keeps rolling off. My fellow over-eaters say that’s because I’ve got so much to lose. Thanks very much. They don’t know I’ve been around this block before. So it’s running around the racetrack twice a week, augmented by two days at the gym, two days lapping the 50-metre pool in Carnegie. I feel invincible. On the racetrack, Streisand is by my side, at my elbow, on my shoulder. She belts out, ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’, giving me her power. When I’m in the water, it’s Mama Cass standing on the edge of the pool. She tells me I can do it. I want to ask why she never could, but I’m afraid of the answer.

  Jake has asked me to be his plus-1 at a New Year’s Eve awards’ night for work. I say yes and spend serious time wondering how to drop that little nugget into my next conversation with Rafe. Then I spiral into panic. What in the name of all that’s holy will I wear?

  THURSDAY 27TH DECEMBER

  I go shopping. I’m terrified. What will fit me?

  This is the first time I’m buying clothes since I’ve lost weight. Till now I’ve felt safe wearing my old size-20 tracksuits, hating the thought of having to face mirrors and tiny slip-of-a-thing salesgirls.

  I start in Brighton, tensing myself in anticipation of the assistant’s thinly-veiled derision, saved especially for BBGs. But in the very first shop the young woman smiles and disappears out the back. It feels like I’m at the fruiterer’s when he’s gone to get the choicest plums hidden in the cool-room, saved for special customers.

  She comes back out.

  I wince as she shows me lycra leggings and a body stocking that needs to be pulled down past the hips.

  ‘They’ll show every bulge,’ I say, doubtful, angry.

  ‘Trust me,’ she says. ‘Just put them on. And the garment that goes on top. ‘

  I do as she asks and she flashes me a smile of triumph. I raise my eyes to my reflection. A swathe of sheer fabric has been cut on the bias to form this garment which drapes over my body. It falls just below my knees, at a great enough distance from the body stocking and leggings to render them dark shadows that still somehow give a flattering form to my figure. Best of all are its colours—cubist blocks of burnt orange, black and umber.

  THAT NIGHT

  Rafe has agreed to babysit. He’s had a couple of invitations to parties which I’m guessing he feels reluctant to attend alone. He doesn’t ask where I’m going, and I don’t say. I think he thinks it’s some girls’ night out.

  MONDAY 31ST DECEMBER

  Well, that was satisfying.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Rafe asks me when I enter the living room.

  ‘Diet and exercise.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you do it when we were together?’

  ‘I needed space and you’re not so good at giving it.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  The doorbell rings and I usher Jake inside. Rafe’s eyes actually bulge. Jake looks cool (or should that be hot) in white shirt and faded jeans.

  ‘I won’t keep her out late,’ Jake says, as though Rafe’s my father. ‘We’ll be back around one.’

  And then we’re out the door. Jake’s colleagues are polite and sociable. I don’t feel self-conscious because I know I don’t look fat in what I’m wearing.

  Jake whispers in my ear that I look stunning. Couldn’t I just stop at this weight? I ask him if he could stop, with only 4 kilos to go, and he looks at me as though I were a madwoman.

  ‘It’s different for me,’ he says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It just is, and besides, you look fantastic. Why would you need to change?’

  ‘You’re not so bad yourself. I wouldn’t think less of you if you stopped where you were.’

  He shakes his head and ignores me for a while. I nibble at my flounder and fantasise about dessert. Why couldn’t I stop where I was? Why wasn’t this enough? No answer, but I’m surely not ready to risk falling off the food truck just yet. Not for anyone.

  MONDAY 16TH JANUARY

  Two weeks have passed. OA took a break for the holiday season. I hop on the scales. Another 2 kilos bite the dust. That makes 13. Jake has 2 kilos left to go. We go to a bar to celebrate. I settle for a mineral water. Jake hands me an envelope.

  ‘Don’t open it till you’re home alone.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  So, I’m home alone and I rip it open.

  Size matters, or it doesn’t. Whichever way you see it, your beauty is an ache all over my body. I think I’ve loved you from our first encounter. I thought, why is she here? I thought you were perfect. I thought, don’t change anything. But you’re stubborn and I watched as you began to shrink. I watched as you became less morose. I watched from a distance I knew I had to bridge. It’s not too late for you to stop where you are. Your face glows as though the moon has shifted from the sky to dwell within you. Your limbs are straight and flawless. Don’t change a thing. See yourself through my eyes. I want you by me. I want you as you are.

  TUESDAY 17TH JANUARY

  It’s prose. No, it’s poetry disguised as prose. Pretty good for a scientist. It makes me laugh with joy; it makes me cry with frustration. Rafe likes me thin; Jake likes me fat and I admit I’m on the side of the thin faction but no longer because I want to woo Rafe back to me.

  Mama Cass, was there ever anyone who tried to impose their standards on you? I can’t imagine you would ever have allowed that. But as much as I always found you beautiful, it doesn’t mean I want my size to mirror yours. I really am the living embodiment of the adage: Imprisoned in every fat woman is a thin one wildly signalling to be let out. Let me out, oh dear God, please let me out.

  SUNDAY 22ND JANUARY

  I go to Tents of Jacob again. My mood is buoyant. I wear the outfit I bought for Jake’s award night. I feel glamorous and sylphlike. Instead of the old Yiddish favourites, I decide on Israeli hits, past and present. Yiddish songs have regret, grief and death woven tightly into so many of their melodies. Singing them is a train ride to hell. Yet, masochistic as it sounds, there is also something seductive, no, irresistible, about the memories they evoke, before everything devolved into the nightmare.

  So, I dive into those Israeli melodies. I whirl around the stage, holding my cordless microphone like an ice-cream. I sweat more than I ever do at gym, and feel the endorphins releasing into my bloodstream. The lyrics are fast, free and buoyant but my audience doesn’t share my mood

  They want to be reminded of how home looked before the cataclysm. I know it and it makes me want to weep even when I especially do not want to weep. So, of course, I revert to the Yiddish favourites for them. It isn’t about what I like. It’s about giving them what they like. Which sounds awfully close to just about every relationship in my life.

  Before I can leave, Ina again corners me against the wall with her walker. If I try to push past her, she’ll fall over. There is no escape.

  ‘Darlink Sweetheart,’ she says, ‘what are you doink to yourself? You’re wastink away to nothink.’

  ‘I’ve lost a bit of weight,’ I concede, biting my tongue to prevent myself from telling her how much. She wouldn’t listen and I’d end up feeling betrayed for sharing a part of my life with someone who cared about nothing but her own predicament.

  ‘I have to say,’ Ina continued, ‘your voice doesn’t sound the same comink from a skinny body. You’ve lost your—how do y
ou say it? Your…?’

  She looks at me, expecting me to assist in my own denunciation. Which of course I do.

  ‘Spirit?’ I ask.

  She nods. ‘Without kilos there can be no spirit. Trust me, I know.’

  LATER THAT NIGHT

  My mother-in-law doesn’t eat, therefore she is.

  Part of her is always in Auschwitz and I think she keeps herself blade-thin as some sort of grim penance. Now, in the midst of all this Australian plenty, to over-indulge in food would be a deep mark of disrespect to those who died of starvation. Once, in a rare moment of gin-fuelled confidence, she told me about the line-ups. ‘Naked and shivering you stood before the camp officers and if your breasts drooped or there were scabs on your body, or even if you just didn’t stand up straight enough, you were sent to the gas chambers.’

  After that, I often wondered whether she was always so immaculately groomed, so erect in her posture and just, just the right side of anorexia to avoid being on the wrong side of an eternal line-up.

  MONDAY 23RD JANUARY

  Jake has reached his goal weight. The group celebrates with dipless crudités, apples and mineral water. I look at the platters and my mind screams caaaaaaaake. It’s been a week where I haven’t lost anything. I know that can happen, but my irrational side howls: what more do I have to do? I’ve even taken to pulling the skin off roast chicken. The confectionary aisle at the supermarket is closed to me. I will not be tempted even though I know, without looking, exactly what exists on each shelf. As we leave, the group leader tells me I should be grateful that I haven’t gained weight. Grateful to whom, to what? I want to snarl. Jake whisks me away to the coffee shop before I embarrass myself.

  ‘You haven’t said a word about what I wrote,’ he says, after the waitress has served us.

  ‘What would you like me to say?’ I ask.

  ‘This isn’t about me, it’s about you,’ he says.

  ‘It’s actually about you. It’s all about how you see me, what you want of me, how you think I should conduct myself.’

  ‘I want you to be a part of my life. Why would you look a gift horse in the mouth?’

  ‘Because you’re not bringing gifts. You’re simply the obverse side of the Rafe coin. He likes me just so and you like me just so. The only difference between you both lies in how you define “just so”. I don’t want to be vast for you and I don’t want to be slight for him.’

  He rises. ‘I need to sleep on that, if it’s all right with you,’ he says and actually leaves me there on my own.

  It’s all too much. I go home to bed to eat a carrot and watch the slender, lovely people on repeats of The Good Wife.

  WEDNESDAY 25TH JANUARY

  It looks as though I’ve scared Jake off. I absolutely refuse to eat my way out of this one.

  Apple. That ought to do it.

  THURSDAY 26TH JANUARY

  Somehow another 3 kilos have dropped off. I do a little dance around the kitchen.

  ‘Mummy,’ asks Amy, ‘are you shrinking?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’

  ‘Is it scary? Will you shrink down to nothing and disappear?’ I hug her and reassure her it’s all good. She doesn’t look convinced.

  I take out my phone to check messages and see Rafe has sent me an email. I wait until the kids are in bed to read it.

  Forgive me for doing the email thing but I didn’t think I could say this while looking into your eyes. Almost from the day I left I wanted to come back, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to be an enabler.

  But something happened, and I think I wouldn’t be too far off the mark if I said that it happened because of the stand I took. You started behaving responsibly. Every time I saw you I could see the kilos were dropping off you. I could see you were too proud to tell me but that you wanted me to notice. I’m excited to think we’re turning back the clock to the day we met. I know you’re doing this out of your love for me, but trust me when I say you’ll be far better off yourself for going down this road. I won’t come back just yet. I don’t want to spoil things. If I came back now and you went slip-sliding away, down, or rather up, to your old weight, I’d never forgive myself.

  If you don’t feel you can respond to this email, don’t worry. I know it’s a lot to absorb. I will take silence as consent to all the things I have proposed. I do love you, Rachael, and I know you can beat this thing, if not for your sake then for mine.

  SATURDAY 28TH JANUARY

  I decide to sleep on it. I don’t want to detonate the bomb that’s ticking inside me, but I don’t ever remember feeling this angry.

  Still, instead of sleeping I’m kept awake by his words, tossing my sheets into knots of discomfiture. I keep replaying the whole nonsensical screed until my brain blurs into a slurry of outrage and resentment. Eventually, I crawl out of bed and put on a tracksuit. It hangs loosely on me. I creep out of the house, not wanting to wake the kids. I’m heading for Coles and know exactly what I’ll buy: a cream-and-jam-filled sponge topped liberally with pink icing and rainbow sprinkles. Children’s birthday-party food.

  Arriving home with the cake, I take a fork and a litre of milk back up to my bed and eat it all in one mighty session while watching NCIS and Bones. Now I want to vomit. I don’t want to keep all this junk inside myself. I imagine sticking fingers down my throat; that would be a truly disgusting first. But why the hell not?

  SUNDAY 29TH JANUARY

  Oh, excellent. Spectacular. In one night I’ve achieved a weight gain of 2 kilos. The bulimic response could not and did not protect me. In one binge I’ve undone close to a month’s worth of clawing back the poundage. No more. Please, please no more. Who am I begging? Which god? Just me. Just me. There’s no one else to plead with.

  THAT AFTERNOON

  Once more into the breach. For my sins, here I am again at Tents of Jacob. This time I bring my guitar, channelling Karen Carpenter, even though I know she only played the electric bass. Like Mama Cass, she was thirty-two when she died. Like Mama Cass her heart gave out. For both of them, it was food that did it. Too much and not enough.

  I ignore requests and play some moody Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot. There are times when only the Canadians will do. I don’t know why, but my audience doesn’t object. They settle into an unusual state of tranquillity.

  When it’s time for me to go, Ina approaches. I tense.

  ‘That Cohen fellow,’ she says, ‘he knew a thing or two’.

  I must have shown my surprise at her mellow cadences, because she said, ‘You think because I come from a little Polish village, I can’t know about such things? Or that one of Hitler’s children—(I shuddered. I’d never heard them call themselves that before)—could have no time or taste for the poetry and music of such a man?’

  Who was this stranger? Why was she not haranguing me about my weight in an accent so thick that only survivor offspring could understand it? Where was that accent? She smiled at me slyly.

  ‘It’s a carapace,’ she said, and I nearly fell over. ‘To be conspicuous was to invite death so we learned to hide, somehow to mask ourselves. A number of us—not enough, but a number—did it for the whole six years. And when it was over, it had become habit. We did not know how to come out from behind it.’

  We were both silent for a while.

  ‘For almost as long as I’ve known you, Rachael, you have done the same thing. Stayed hidden. But I don’t understand why you would think it’s necessary to do that—to hide inside our place, our pain, not yours. You weren’t there. It’s not your fault. It’s time for you to come out now. And this time to stay out.’

  MONDAY 30TH JANUARY

  Hi Rafe,

  I was touched to learn that you wanted to return almost as soon as you’d left. But when you walked out on me I understood pretty quickly that I was an embarrassment to you and that you didn’t want to be seen
in public with me. For quite a while after you left, I ate myself into a stupor every night because thinking about that reality was simply too painful. Something I do know now, that I didn’t know for sure before, was that you fell in love with my exterior and when that changed, you fell out of love. If one day I got sick, and ugly with it, would you walk out on me then, too?

  WEDNESDAY 8TH FEBRUARY

  Strange sense of peace. Might come from having written exactly what I’ve been thinking. Every so often Rafe texts me but I ignore him. Soon I’ll have to respond because he’ll want to see the kids, but right now his urgent chirpings only make me tired. Jake hasn’t communicated at all.

  FRIDAY 10TH FEBRUARY

  I’m back to my pre-sponge-cake weight. At least another 25 kilos to go. No Jake to keep me company now. If I tell myself that it’s a good thing, I can almost believe it.

  I often think of Mama Cass and am still finding her beautiful, but I think she’d be beautiful whatever her girth.

  Would I?

  Sometimes I wonder if it’s really so important, this much-vaunted thinness. Who’s to say I’ll even achieve it this time? I don’t know if I have the strength to go the distance. Right now, I have a stitch in my gut that moves to my head, then back to my gut in agonising slow motion. I’m still suffering from withdrawal. I know that a packet of Smarties (300g) or a family-sized bag of Fantales would bring relief, especially if I ate them one at a time in front of the TV. What an unglamorous, embarrassing addiction sugar is. They talk about heroin chic, never Tim Tam chic. Maybe because heroin would never make you fat.

  At OA they tell you that one (cake, lolly, chocolate) is one too many and a thousand not enough. I think that’s an AA thing. Undoubtedly true but not helpful. They tell you to confront cravings with a glass of water, your eyes closed, imagining healthy food. Seriously? If that was all it bloody took nobody would ever be fat.

  I have to deal with this constant struggle: no sugar, no salt, no fat, no starch. In the supermarket, the kitchen, the bedroom—the world—I say it like a mantra to stop myself from buying contraband. But it’s not working tonight. The urge is grabbing me by the hair, whirling me around like a bath towel caught in a spin cycle.