“How long has this been on?”
“This is week three of season four.”
Her daughter, the television genius. How proud she and Sam should be.
A starting weight of 356 flashed in bright red numbers. Below, in green, the woman’s current weight of 339. The number 17 settled and blinked. Seventeen pounds lost. She flashed a large smile as she stood with her arms to the side, fat forcing them away from her body. She resembled a grade-school drawing.
“How can they go on television like that?”
“They’re helping themselves, Mom. You should admire them.” Audrey tucked her feet under her butt, compressing herself until she resembled a pipe cleaner bent into modern sculpture.
Daphne worried. First, that she had no idea Audrey watched this show, and more so—keeping on top of everything a teenage girl watched was impossible—she’d have sworn that if Audrey followed a show such as Pounded, it would be with irony, texting barbs with her friends. But her daughter thought this display showed courage, which begged a million questions: Did Audrey think Daphne lacked the courage shown by these Pounded women? Did her girl think Daphne fat shamed and laughed at women like this?
Or perhaps she wished that Daphne could display the same courage as these women on the screen.
Her fingers twitched toward the peanuts left in the bowl. She balled her hands into fists.
TIP: Make a fist. Squeeze your fist to resist overeating or choosing wrongly. In a recent study, squeezing muscles at the moment of your purposeful decision to help resist a bad choice seems to help people make healthier food choices.
—Wiki How: Tricks to Increase Willpower & Eat Less
WEIGHT LOST: No idea.
They called Paul to the oversized scale. His mountain-like body was sloped, a triangle of a torso atop large thighs.
“You’re right. They’re courageous.” Daphne smiled at her lovely, empathic girl. Audrey had always been tenderhearted—not counting her recent teenage snarky habits.
“I wish I could be that brave,” Audrey said.
“Honey, that’s crazy. You’re such a wisp I worry about you.”
“I’m a wisp?”
“You’re tiny. There are times I want to force-feed you ice cream.”
Audrey peered at her, seeming confused. “You worry about me?”
Daphne laughed. “Why do you keep repeating what I say?”
Audrey crossed her legs on the couch. “You never say a word to me about my weight. You don’t worry about that. Or talk about it. I feel as though my body’s invisible. When it comes to bodies, all you do is worry about what Grandma will say about yours. You never say a word about me. How I look.”
“Because all I ever wanted was for you to feel good. I know you love Grandma, and she’s wonderful to you, but it was . . . difficult having her as a mother. And I never want to do to you what she did to me.”
“All I’ve ever wanted was for you to tell me I was doing a good job with my weight,” Audrey said. “That I was thin enough.”
“Baby, you do a phenomenal job with everything in your life.”
“Sure, sure. I’m smart and good. You tell me those things endlessly. But you never tell me that I’m beautiful. Or thin.” Tears started to stream down Audrey’s cheeks. “And what do you do all day? You make people pretty.”
Daphne froze. Everything she believed about her mothering tipped as though shown in a funhouse mirror. The tenets formed of how to lead Audrey toward becoming a strong woman now seemed a cyclone of ignorant mistakes.
• • •
Daphne woke on Monday knowing she’d failed her daughter. She’d probably have bombed with Gabe also, but his tender spots didn’t match Daphne’s motherhood deficits as laser perfectly as they did with Audrey.
Or maybe she had done just as awful a job with her son and simply didn’t know.
All that wasted energy Daphne had pulled up, preventing herself from letting a compliment slip out when Audrey skipped around as a sparkly princess, not wanting Audrey to think Daphne loved her for being cute or small. She wanted to raise a rugged and free daughter, but Audrey chose red velvet over overalls every time.
At five, Audrey ran to Daphne, breathless, beautiful. “Don’t I look pretty, Mama?”
“You’re always pretty, honey. But more important, you’re smart and sweet.”
She had declared Audrey brilliant and caring. A genius. A good girl. Daphne believed herself on the path to raising a strong woman; instead, she gave Audrey the message that she, in fact, wasn’t truly a pretty girl. Fighting the world’s values hadn’t worked. What the hell was a mother supposed to do?
Not only had she been blind, she’d blithely patted her own back for being caring and wise, even as she screwed up. How could she not be surprised at Audrey’s wounds? Audrey had grown up with a mother changing people through cosmetics, one aunt molding and medicating faces into acceptability, and another who designed jewelry to drape around their necks. Her grandparents owned the exclusive Illuminate jewelry stores.
And Daphne expected her daughter to be satisfied that she was a good girl? A smart girl?
The white digital scale leered from under the double sink. Sam insisted on having one, but he kept it out of sight. He weighed himself with the constancy of a jockey staying in his class, but after each weigh-in kicked the offensive object back into hiding, vigilant, knowing Daphne’s history with the machines.
Her mother’s thinning campaign had hit hysterical heights during Daphne’s adolescence, demonstrated when Sunny placed a wafer-thin bronze scale—it matched the dramatic backsplash behind the sink—square in the entry to the kitchen.
The family faced two choices: be weighed or leap over it.
Daphne and her father leaped. She soared, she flew, and she bounded—but she never stepped on the bronze monster.
Now Daphne contemplated Sam’s scale. Her last weigh-in had come via psychological force. After that battle, she had refused all attempts to get her back on it, generating arguments, frustration, and causing more than one medical assistant to mutter, “Who gives a damn?” as they prepared Daphne for the doctor’s entrance.
“My body; my decision,” she’d say each time she visited the gynecologist, knowing she sounded ridiculous—as though she were fighting a guerrilla war with her doctor—and yet continuing to draw the line in the medical sand.
“Not knowing something doesn’t make it not true,” Dr. McLeod would say each time she visited. “What is, is.”
And Daphne, each time, thanked Dr. McLeod for her Zen master wisdom, counting the minutes until the woman shut her mouth and stuck in the speculum.
Daphne worked hard for her ignorance, winning all battles against nearing a scale until five years ago when having her tubes tied. She’d been at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s outpatient surgery center, in her paper gown, feet in skid-free socks, face-to-face with the giant iron medical monster.
“Step on.” The nurse’s bunny-covered scrub top straining against her breasts.
“No, that’s fine. I’m antiscale.” Daphne gave what she hoped was a sisterhood-is-strong smile, without hinting that Nurse Bunny was also overweight.
The nurse kept her flat expression. Daphne had expected more sympathy from a bunny-wearing member of the medical world. “No scale, no surgery.”
“I’m just getting my tubes tied. Under local.”
“No matter. We need it for titration factoring.” Nurse Bunny gestured toward the weighing platform.
Daphne got on the scale backward. “Don’t tell me what it says.”
Amazingly, the nurse obeyed.
The last time Daphne had heard and faced a number had been six weeks postpartum, after Audrey, when she hit 212. Burned into her skull were her hateful (now-former) doctor’s stinging words. The wretchedly thin man had studied the number on her chart with the eyes of a general in the war on fat.
“You’re five foot four, Daphne. Even with the largest frame”—he measu
red her wrist with his fingers—“which you don’t have, the heaviest you should be, again, if you were large framed would be a hundred thirty-four to one fifty-one.”
“One thirty-eight is the very most you should weigh,” he continued. “So, take a hundred thirty-eight as your outer figure and aim toward a hundred twenty-four. Got it? Next time I see you, you’d best be well on your way to losing fifty pounds. More. No more nipping at leftovers.”
Daphne was sitting on the edge of the examining table, her paper gown rustling when she crossed her arms. She nodded like a marionette.
“Now be a good girl, scoot down, and put your bottom at the end of the table.”
Sixteen years later, tile ground into Daphne’s knees as she nudged the scale from under the sink in her bathroom. She stood. She pressed hard on the towel wrapping her hair, sopping up as much water as possible, calculating the remaining wetness as a half-pound.
Which she knew was bullshit.
She tapped the cold metal with her toe. Numbers tumbled like a slot machine.
192.08.
She moved the scale to a flatter surface.
192.08.
Only twenty pounds less than her heaviest recorded weight—and that was immediately following childbirth. And though she wanted to call it 192, she could round off numbers—actually, it was 193. So really, nineteen pounds less.
She kicked away the scale. Then she reached for some expensive hair goop and applied it. Her energy and money always slid in that direction. Always. Pricey hair products. Makeup made to order for Alchemy. Stunning jewelry, of course. Daughter of Illuminate, her jewelry box contained a tangle of rubies to match her lips and emeralds to complement her hair. Aquamarines for her eyes. Diamonds sparkled at her neck. Gold and silver wrapped around her neck and wrists, accompanied by the black made-to-hide fabric draping her body. Or, as her mother called her work wardrobe, “those black rags you wear.”
Daphne’s body ruined relationships. She hated people she should love, ignored people she did love, and, for the life of her, she didn’t know how to stop eating.
• • •
Daphne hurried up the stairs to the Alchemy studios. She was late for her Monday morning meeting. “Sorry,” she said to Ivy, her business partner, sitting in their shared office and turning the pages of Vogue. “Had to work out something for Sam’s mother. She needs a root canal and gets terrified at the thought. No matter how much pain she’s in she won’t make an appointment.”
“No problem. Single women never have anything to do but wait for their married sisters.”
Ivy’s constant jokes about marriage could lead one to imagine her desperate for male company, when in fact, she was so drop-dead gorgeous it could be called a disability. Daphne wondered if Ivy thought it made her feel better, leveling the field by pretending she panted for a wedding ring.
Ivy’s hair was butterscotch, her eyes spearmint, and her skin crème fraîche—her friend was three confections men wanted to eat with or without a spoon.
They both attended Emerson as theater majors. Ivy’s beauty had won her small parts in soap operas, but the slice of industry willing to accept her based solely on her gorgeousness bored her. Her killer ambition turned to fashion and image consulting with Alchemy.
“We don’t have long. I have a nine o’clock with someone important enough to make you hate me.”
“I have a page of reasons to hate you already, so don’t bother telling me who it is.” Daphne sorted through the mail without looking up. “Who is it?”
“You’ll have to wait and see. I want you to die when he walks in.”
“How soon before you sleep with him?” Sleeping with her famous male clients made Ivy more comfortable with them.
“He’s awfully famous.” Ivy looked at her watch. “I suppose by eight tonight?”
“Makes sense.” Daphne opened the folder Ivy left for her. “How do the numbers seem?”
“Less pro bono would make them lots better.”
“If we have a problem, we’ll take it from my side.”
Ivy peered at Daphne over her reading glasses. “Repetitive conversation 101? Just saying we should decide together how many billable hours we devote to—”
“To burn victims?”
Ivy’s blind spot rose each time she examined the receipts. Ivy was correct: free services made up a quarter of Daphne’s clientele, but she could afford it. Between Sam’s salary and her stakeholding share in Illuminate, supporting herself had never been a problem. Her parents had blessed her with that lack of worry since birth, so she offered to remunerate Alchemy every month. Blood and love made up the pact between Daphne and Bianca; they understood bowing under judgment. Folks might help poor and homeless families with housing and food, but nobody thought about kids walking around wearing their poverty on their faces: eruptions and craters of acne visible to the world and ruining their lives, burns bisecting their faces.
“Ah, forget it,” Ivy said, as always. “Both of us will enter heaven through the good works you perform in the name of Alchemy.”
“I weighed myself today.” Daphne kept her eyes on her chipped fingernails.
Ivy put down her pen. “What brought that on?”
“Pounded. Watching it with Audrey.”
“Why? Why, of everything . . . ?”
Ivy ripped bits from her breakfast bagel as Daphne ran through the weekend from the wedding to that morning.
“I’m in shock at the number.” Daphne refused to state the actual number. “Shock without any baseline of knowledge. I don’t know what I should weigh. Last night, watching those men and women being weighed like heifers at market, I wanted to cry. And yet I was jealous.”
“Jealous of their humiliation?”
“Jealous of them getting unstuck. See this?” Daphne circled her arms around her body. “I’m so sick of me. I want something other than the size of my stomach to be my first thought in the morning.”
“You know you’re a crazy woman, right? Your mother made you into a lunatic. You look fine.”
“Fine? Fine is my zenith?”
“What do you want me to say, Daphne? That you’re Angelina Jolie? You are fine. You’re fine, and you’re smart and good. You have a great husband and wonderful kids. Maybe your family bent you like a pretzel, but Jesus, be grateful for what you have.”
“How much do you weigh?”
“What?”
“It’s a simple question to which I’m certain you have an answer. How many times have you gone on and on to your clients about how important it is to weigh yourself every day, same time, no exception? I hear you.”
“Important for me, not for you. My brand of crazy comes out in my overwhelming need to zip up a size two. That doesn’t make it right or even—”
“Stop talking like a sanctimonious prig. What if I want that brand? Who said you get to own it? Weight and height, please.”
“I’m five feet five inches—maybe a scooch more. I weigh a hundred and six.”
Daphne came from around her desk, stood, and pointed at herself. “Me? Per Sam’s no doubt very accurate scale, 192.08. I’m five foot four. No scooch. I’m one inch shorter than you and weigh eighty-seven pounds more.”
“Who cares, Daph?”
“My daughter. My mother. Both my sisters. Me. Do you know what 86.08 pounds adds up to? The average weight of a twelve-year-old. I’m carrying a twelve-year-old more than you. Picture that. Spreading that all over you.”
“I didn’t realize how consuming this is for you.”
“How are you supposed to understand?” Forbidden words started to escape her mouth: “That I think about my body every minute? That I worry about my thighs more than about the state of the world? That my sex life sucks because I can’t stand baring myself to Sam?”
Despite her decades-long friendship with Ivy, to whom she revealed everything from motherhood worries to the results of her mammogram, this—this, she never talked about.
“I gotta do somethin
g,” Daphne said. “I think about every bite I put in my mouth. If there are cookies hidden in the deepest recesses of the freezer, they scream until I eat them. Something must change. Whatever it takes. I can’t stand feeling guilty for being me. Not anymore.”
CHAPTER 10
* * *
ALICE
After climbing the wide white stairs to the porch surrounding the mansion, Alice ducked under the sign, WELCOME TO PRIVATION, despite its hanging well above her head. An expressionless housekeeper, her uniform starched sharp, held open the oversized door. Alice and the others filed in as the housekeeper nodded at each of them, pointing to where they should stand in the oversized entry hall.
“Find yourselves,” she said after the last woman entered.
Paper signs with their names written in thick black marker, first name and last initial, lined one wall. Alice found her way to “Alice T.” The redhead who’d introduced herself before the enforced silence stood to her left. Alice topped the woman by many inches. Being short made carrying weight harder—not that being tall helped Alice much. Here she was.
Daphne S. and Alice, side by side, were last in a line of seven women on the spectrum of synonyms: fat, stout, full figured, corpulent, fleshy, plump, portly, chubby, rotund, paunchy, potbellied, flabby, well upholstered, broad in the beam—though none was in the category of grossly or morbidly obese. Alice wondered if the seven had been chosen by the Acrobat Film staff for landing in the middle of the fat bell curve.
Being inducted into an assemblage willing to bare their pain for a documentary, in exchange for learning control, induced in them all an overwhelming desire to bolt. After all, nobody would label Alice a sharing kind of woman. Even in college, when girls tripped over themselves joining groups where they could stick together their experiences like Velcro—from film appreciation to being mixed race—Alice avoided easy ramps to instant friendship.
Everyone was frowning, faces tense. Nobody acted as though she wanted to be there. Including Alice. Who wanted to fit into a group of misfits bound by a desire to be thin?
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