Cookies by My Face

There’s a photo of me in fourth grade, sweetly plump and clearly feeling pretty, holding my skirt out like I’m about to twirl. By sixth grade, my new height hasn’t kept up with my new weight. By eighth grade I’m undeniably fat. In high school, only one of the 1200 kids in Jefferson High School is obese. I’m that kid.

I Was Walrus

You know those children’s worksheets? Apple, pear, banana, walrus. . . which one doesn’t belong? I was walrus. Back then, girls wore belted shirtwaists or pencil skirts with tucked in blouses, but in all of Lafayette, Indiana, there were none of those in my size. All I had was a local store’s “Women’s Department,” really just an unattended rack back by the fire stairs, with dresses like refrigerator boxes. 

Jefferson High had a tradition of “senior cords”—bright yellow corduroy pants for the boys and pencil skirts for the girls, a status symbol second only to a car. Every August, those cords filled the stores, but not in my size. On the first day of school, every senior—every single one except me!—would be wearing them. 

“Well, what did you expect?” said my mother.

Not a Prom-Queen Kind of Daughter

My grandmother Julia immediately sized up the situation. She tracked down the right yellow corduroy and had a dressmaker make me a skirt that perfectly matched the ready-mades. Wearing it, I felt like all the other girls, not seeing the reality of my size-twenty ass in tight, bright yellow. 

My mother, however, was clear eyed. She was a knockout, slim and shapely, and it made her crazy that I wasn’t a prom-queen kind of daughter. I watched helplessly as she scouted new diets to put me on. The buttermilk diet, Special K diet, grapefruit diet, and, most hateful, the Metrecal diet: no food, just four daily cans of chalky liquid, 225 calories each, for a total of 900 calories a day. 

A Six-Month Sentence

According to Metrecal, I’d lose around three pounds a week on this regimen, which I calculated meant a six-month sentence. To speed things up, I decided to drink only two cans a day instead of four, and I hid the extras with the out-of-season clothes in the storage closet. After three days of this, I was frantically hungry, so hungry that I bought two eclairs on my way home from school and ate them both before reaching the next corner. 

At dinner that night, I pushed away the Metrecal, got a plate, and served myself the potato-chip tuna casserole everyone else was eating. My mother screamed, “I hope you have a daughter just like you, so you’ll know what you put me through!” and took to her room. In the flush of triumph, I forgot about the cans I’d hidden, which, of course, she discovered when winter came. Emphatically, righteously, I insisted I had no idea how they got there, and I stuck to my story.

It was a hollow victory. I was still fat. Still prey to the dinner hosts who announced, “There’s no sugar in these” when I hadn’t asked. Still the target of those who incessantly asked, “How’s the diet going?” How was the diet going? I’d started college at 200 pounds and weighed 235 when I left, that’s how. 

I couldn’t win. I never lost. I only gained.

One morning, about a year out of college, I woke up with a new thought: that only I could solve my weight problem and I’d better get to it. There’d been no final straw, no health scare or split seam. Just the clear understanding that this was on me. I’d learned early on that there were people in this world who felt a calling to watch everything I ate. They took note, intoned food facts, and were almost energized by my diet failures. I wanted these weight-kibitzers gone but didn’t know how to tell them. I wanted to lose weight but had never before succeeded and couldn’t face another public failure. I saw only one possibility: a secret diet.

Obsessed with Secrecy

At first, I spread food around my plate to hide the fact that I was leaving some over. Soon, though, I discovered that almost everyone left some over. In all my years of see-a-pretzel-eat-a-pretzel, I hadn’t noticed. I was a teacher by then, in an elementary school where colleagues regularly brought in cookies for the staff lounge. If I didn’t take one, I knew I’d hear “Watching your waistline?” So I’d grab one, break it in two, put half down on my napkin, and hold the other half up near my face when I spoke. No one realized it never reached my mouth.

As I started losing weight for the first time, I became obsessed with secrecy and convinced that if anyone caught on, the magic spell would break and the pounds rush back in and reinflate me. I kept wearing my same clothes, camouflaging with bulky sweaters as they got loose. I skipped a reunion dinner with college friends by inventing a houseguest and a cousin’s graduation by pretending to be sick.

 I was about forty pounds down, when a group of construction workers sitting on the sidewalk whistled and catcalled as I walked past, an iconic indignity that women suffer all the time. For me, it was the first time, and I’m ashamed to admit I loved it. I might have smiled at them. I think I swung my hips a little. 

I Feared “Showing”

Through a jaw-dropping policy, my school system required teachers to notify their principals and resign the day they knew they were pregnant. Many held off confessing as long as they could get away with it, and I felt I understood their anxiety. Like them, I feared “showing.”

Of course, the subterfuge stopped working. One lunchtime, Brenda, a colleague and avid collector of other people’s dramas, jumped up from her seat when I walked into the faculty lounge, pointed both hands at me like pistols, and shrieked, “You shrank!” Everyone turned and looked at me, and the room filled with “You look terrific!” and “How did we miss it!”

I panicked, expecting my body to inflate, my feet to run for the cookies. But nothing like that happened. Suddenly, I was laughing and enjoying the pats on my back, completely finished with wizardry.

I lost six sizes, four that year and two the next. Of course, it wasn’t magic. It was me. Yes, that belief in magic was odd, but I’m not embarrassed by it. Perhaps I needed more shoring up than most, but magical thinking kept me going while my fledgling self-agency developed, and then, like the weight, it exited when its time was up.