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She waited for a few minutes to see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about this; “for it might end, you know,” said Alice to herself, “in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?” —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
The medication took away my sadness and replaced it with something else—not happiness, but more like a low dull hum, a weak radio frequency of feeling that couldn’t be turned up or down.
In my real life I would have more friends, and dinner parties and overnight guests, but my life wasn’t real yet.
When I was around women who had grown-up lives, the kind of life I thought I should have, I felt suspended in time, like an animal floating in a jar of formaldehyde.
Change was inevitable now. The real me, the woman I was supposed to be, was within my reach. I had caught her like a fish on a hook and was about to reel her in. She wasn’t going to get away this time.
When I set my laptop bag down I felt the tension release from my shoulder as I rid myself of the computer and its endless cries for help. Surrounding me in the kitchen were flour and butter and eggs, the stuff of life; there wasn’t a line of text in sight. I breathed in the sugared air and savored it, then felt a twinge of hunger.
My Waist Watchers granola bar (90), like sawdust mixed with glue, hadn’t provided much sustenance.
After a while I started to feel dizzy and sick, as I had in Kitty’s office, so I went to the ladies’ room, winding my way through the corridors lined with the huge magazine covers—the models, with their glazed-over looks, like the heads hanging on a hunter’s wall. I stared at the carpet until I made it to the bathroom, where there were several girls standing at the mirrors and sinks. I locked myself into one of the salmon-colored stalls at the end and breathed in and out slowly. The nausea was increasing and I felt something churning inside, tumbling like a lone sock in the dryer. I began to
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Her actual hair was short and dark blond, teased and sprayed into place, stiff like whipped meringue.
She spoke with faux folksy charm, the camera lens in front of her a peephole to America that she peered through from her desk in New York as if to say, I can see you, I’m one of you.
She explained that from the 1920s through the 1970s, the townhouse had been owned by a Catholic charity that used it as a home for unwed pregnant teenagers. The girls had either run away or been cast out by their families. With nowhere else to go, they moved into the house for the duration of their pregnancies. When their babies were born, the infants were adopted by religious families and the girls never saw them
again. The young baby-less mothers left the house on Thirteenth Street and reentered the world as if nothing had happened to them—nothing they could talk about, anyway.
“The weight-loss industry is the most profitable failed industry in history, did you know that?”
“The Austen Tower is there ascending into the sky, filled with magazines and TV shows that tell women how they can avoid looking like me. I’m every American woman’s worst nightmare. It’s what they spend their lives fighting against, it’s why they diet and exercise and have plastic surgery—because they don’t want to look like me.” “Keep going.” “Kitty doesn’t want me working in her office. I’m the embodiment of everything she hates.” It hurt to say it, but it felt good, too.
I was at a conference recently and an acclaimed psychotherapist said that women become fat because fat protects them from unwanted male attention, like a suit of armor.”
“What kind of places do you avoid? Be specific.” “Parties, clubs, bars, beaches, amusement parks, airplanes.”
“Breakfast at the hotel was bread smeared with chocolate. Did you know that’s actually a thing in Italy? I went for gelato at Giolitti’s, sampled pasta dishes at two different trattorias, ate pizza rustica while walking around the market at Campo de’ Fiori and then I took a picnic to the Villa Borghese gardens, where I ate olives and cheese and drank wine while sitting under a tree. That was Day One.”
“Fat women are not controlled. They are defiant, so they are unfuckable.”
If I let go of my pain, there would be a hole inside me that was so vast I would cease to exist. I would be the balloon floating into the sky, not the other way around. There would be nothing pulling me down, nothing keeping my feet on the ground. My pain was my gravity. “Without my pain, I wouldn’t be me anymore.”
“You’ve always been angry, Plum. I just want you to direct that anger where it belongs, not at yourself.”
We’re different in a way that everyone can see. We can’t hide it or fake it. We’ll never fit society’s idea for how women should look and behave, but why is that a tragedy? We’re free to live how we want. It’s liberating, if you choose to see it that way.”
Whatever it was called, that’s what I’d wanted—to be hot, to elicit desire in
men and envy in women. But I realized I didn’t want that anymore. That required living in Dietland, which meant control, constriction—paralysis, even—but above all it meant obedience. I was tired of being obedient.
During my first visit to Calliope House, Verena had told me about the Catholic charity that had owned the house. In my bedroom closet, one of the teenage mothers had scratched a message into the paint: calliope was born in this room / january 1973.
They didn’t view their fatness as a permanent state, no matter how long they’d been fat. They were just passing through Fat Town on their way to Slim City. I knew how they thought. I had been one of them.
think it’s a response to terrorism. From the time we’re little girls, we’re taught to fear the bad man who might get us. We’re terrified of being raped, abused, even killed by the bad man, but the problem is, you can’t tell the good ones from the bad ones, so you have to be wary of them all. We’re told not to go out by ourselves late at night, not to dress a certain way, not to talk to male strangers, not to lead men on. We take self-defense classes, keep our doors locked, carry pepper spray and rape whistles. The fear of men is ingrained in us from girlhood. Isn’t that a form of terrorism?”
“Yeah, look at me,” I said, popping the last ladyfinger into my mouth and brushing the crumbs from my hands. “Aren’t I fabulous?”
“Virginia Woolf once wrote that it’s more difficult to kill a phantom than a reality,” she said. And so it was, but at last my phantom was gone.
The Virginia Woolf line “It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality” appears in her essay “Professions for Women.”
