Fat Chance Read online

Ugh. “What can I do you for?”

  “We’re starting production on a new blockbuster movie called Dangerous Lies. We’re all very excited about it. It’s going to be a very, very big film about a diet doctor in a weight-loss clinic who has to care for women obsessed with becoming thin…”

  “Sorry, I can’t take the lead. I’ve already committed to playing Scarlett in the remake of Gone With the Wind….”

  “Cute…but…the movie’s cast, Maggie. What we’d love to do is hire you as a consultant.”

  “Pourquoi?”

  “To coach our lead actor about the milieu of the overweight world and bring him up to speed on the mind-set of weight-obsessed women…”

  What? No overweight women in Los Angeles? He had to call me? But to be fair, maybe there were some before they were all forced out of the city limits under the cover of darkness by a death squad of diet police.

  “Look, Bob, I’m pretty tied up here with the column and—”

  “Of course, I understand, but this wouldn’t take that much of your time, maybe just a couple of weeks.”

  “Weeks?” I start opening the mail.

  “We pay pretty well…would you just consider it?”

  “Mmmm…I doubt it, but leave me your number.” I grab a Chinese menu and jot it down along the border next to the two-red-chili-peppers rating of the Orange Beef. “I’ll get back at ya.” Tamara walks in, as if on cue.

  “HOLLYWOOD!”

  “Run that past me again,” she says.

  “They want me to fly out to Hollywood. Do you love it?”

  “I hope you told them that I’m free to go as well. How much moola?”

  “Not enough to get me on a plane.”

  Celebrating the Gift of Ampleness

  Like an overprotective parent who lends you the family car with spare tires in the trunk, nature is looking out on your behalf. Natural selection provides a surplus, and the reason is obvious. Just listen to former Yale surgeon Sherwin Nuland.

  “An injured creature is more likely to survive and reproduce if it has a surplus to fall back on.” The human body is made with an abundance of cells, tissues, even organs. “We really do not need two kidneys or such a huge liver, or more than twenty feet of small intestine.”

  While Voltaire might not have been thinking about the fleshy woman when he said, “Le superflu, chose très nécessaire”—the superfluous, that most necessary stuff—his words make biological sense too. The generous female body is the fertile one. Anorexics don’t menstruate, well-fed women do, a fact that tells us that we need sustenance to nourish our children and continue the species; reserves to carry us through periods of disease; and ample stores to sustain us in case of starvation. So bless your flesh. Look at your generous, sensuous, nubile body as a miracle of scientific engineering, a delicate, responsive, harmonious creation designed to perpetuate life and keep the human spirit burning.

  At the very least, your lush human fat cells now come with a newer, higher price. Stem cells, harvested from fat, represent the new frontier for scientists in search of high-tech treatments for disease.

  Why? Because they have the magical ability to turn into a variety of other types of cells. In other words, sometime in the near future, stem cells taken from your glorious globules may be used to replace injured or worn-out cells.

  “It’s not a static spare tire around our waist. It’s really a dynamic tissue, and there are a lot of things in it that could help us fix people with diseases,” said Dr. Marc H. Hedrick, a University of Pittsburgh researcher.

  So next time you look down at the scale, smile, don’t frown.

  two

  To know Tex Ramsey is to love him. I’m perched on the corner of the Metro desk—he’s the big honcho, Metro editor—with my legs crossed coquettishly, chewing a wad of purple bubble gum to get myself noticed, reading People magazine and waiting. You always have to wait for Tex, especially when it’s dinnertime. It’s not that he doesn’t have an appetite. Just the opposite. It’s just that dinnertime is synonymous with deadline, and the phone next to him rings constantly. He glares at it momentarily and then looks back at the computer screen.

  “Don’t we have a secretary around here?”

  “Out sick, Tex.”

  “Sick of what, this joint? Anyone think to call a temp?”

  “Don’t think.”

  Business as usual.

  “T E X, you cut half the story,” the police reporter’s whine fills the room. “I spent three hours with the commissioner and you give me four hundred words?”

  “No space. We’ll do a follow.”

  “Follow? He won’t spit at me after this abortion.”

  “Bring me a hankie.”

  A general assignment reporter shows up next, a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism graduate, with no obvious pathology, who in two short years at the paper has developed a tic. He’s smacking a copy of the newspaper against his hand in fury and grousing about a typo in his story about a hero cop. He closes his eyes, dropping his head in despair.

  “We said he’s been with the department for ONE HUNDRED years.”

  “Only an extra zero,” Tex says, waving it away with his hand. “Look at the bright side. Now the department thinks they owe him 90 years of back pay, the guy’s rich, and he’s eligible for immediate retirement.”

  He winks at me, then fogs his glasses, wiping them on the sleeve of his shirt, before turning back to the lead story on his screen about a supposed affair between the mayor and his press secretary. At the press briefing, they decided, uncharacteristically, to take the high road and play it down, hiding it deep inside. The mayor already hated the press. They had alienated him sufficiently with their in-depth probe right before the election. But now that every gossipmonger in the city had weighed in, it would be the cover.

  Tex stretches his legs up over the desk, crossing his scuffed Tony Lamas. “Here’s our head: CITY HALL HOTBED. What the hell—it would sell papers. If the megalomaniac mayor couldn’t stand the…”

  “I’m starving….” I sing out sweetly. “Ribs encrusted with honey and teriyaki glaze.” I dangle the thought before him. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to start filing my nails. Bingo. He looks out at the copy desk.

  “Okay, bro’s, put it to bed. I’ll be at Virgil’s if you need me.”

  “You and Maggie eatin’ Pritikin again, eh?”

  Tex snorts. “Not likely. No spinach salads and Diet Sprites for her,” he says, punching my arm. “She’s the only girl I ever met who knows how to eat.” That’s a compliment, I think. He grabs his coat and we hail a cab. I can’t wait to tell him about California.

  I gnaw off all of the red caramelized beef on the baby back ribs and then soak up the remaining droplets of amber glaze on my plate with a slab of doughy bread. The oval platter between us that had been heaped with crisp golden brown shoestring fries is now bare except for a sprinkling of burned crumbs and flakes of coarse salt.

  I lean back on the thick wine velvet banquette and sigh. “So then the phone rings, and guess who called yours truly?”

  “The papal nuncio?”

  “Negative.”

  “Temptation Island?”

  “No, and I’ll spare you your remaining eighteen questions. A hotshot from L.A. who wants me to fly out there and help with a movie they’re making.”

  Tex closes his eyes and looks down. “You’re such a pushover. It was Alan Barsky.”

  “It was not Alan Barsky.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Alan Barsky would have said he was Steven Spielberg.”

  “Hmmm…I see your point…so what did you say?”

  “I said I’d drop everything and be there in a heartbeat.”

  Tex guffaws. “They sending a Lear?”

  “No, a Peter Pan Bus ticket.”

  He shrugs. “Hell…you’re on a roll, why not? You’ve got the media eating out of your hand, go for it. It could beef up your career even more. Celebrit
y fat columnist reaches to the stars. Definitely a sound career move.”

  I’m suspicious now. “Why are you so gung ho?” I can’t help but think of Tex as, well, my protector. Maybe it’s his build. Former star tackle—the kind of guy who’d smile as he was hauling your couch up a flight of stairs. He hoists his beer bottle and drains it. That’s the sum total of his daily exercise, not counting the jaw work of the job.

  “You’ll be the next IT girl and I can say I knew you when.”

  “Naw, it’s not me…. I’ll just forget the whole thing,” I say, flicking bread crumbs into a miniature replica of the pyramid at Giza. “I mean, even though it probably means mega bucks—you know how these movie companies pay consultant fees when they want help—I despise L.A. anyway. I mean who doesn’t?”

  “Remember that Woody Allen movie?” He works at keeping a straight face, but his own stories always set him off. He leans back into the seat to get more comfortable before he starts spinning the yarn.

  “You know where he’s in the car with Tony Roberts who’s got on this space-age, silver Mylar jumpsuit? Roberts zips up the hood that just about engulfs his entire head, like he’s going to be launched to Mars, and Woody turns to him, deadpan, and asks, ‘Are we driving through plutonium?’” Tex almost doubles over with his loud, roaring laughter. I give him a small tolerant smile.

  “Yeah, the clothes, the cars, you can’t walk anywhere,” I say, “except for the treadmill in your home gym. And then there’s the Freeway. What an oxymoron. The Freeway, where you sit in traffic, looking at the guy in the next lane. How did he get that car? What does he have that you don’t? The car and the phone, the phone and the car, that’s their whole shtick. I think they all have phones jammed up their asses, I swear. What a disgusting way of life!”

  “Maybe you’ll get into it, who knows?”

  I look at Tex and wonder. What if he got a call from, say, someone like Gwyneth Paltrow or Kim Basinger asking him, in a breathy voice, if he could tutor her for an upcoming role as a newspaper editor? Would he go? I can only imagine his reply. “Let ’em try.”

  “So,” he says, slapping his hand on the table, “how about we go to that Italian bakery on Third Avenue for tiramisu?”

  We walk across town and up Madison Avenue. The trees in front of the Giorgio Armani shop are laced with tiny sapphire Christmas lights, arboretum couture, while window-lit mannequins wear strapless gowns and tuxedos of tissue-thin silks and crepes, and high-heeled sling-backs encrusted with ruby crystals. We pass candlelit restaurants where dark-haired men with romantic eyes face blondes in white wool suits with minks draped over the backs of their chairs, while just outside on frosty street corners open to the sharp wind lie vagrants with unkempt hair under cardboard shelters offering bent paper cups for spare change. The fragmented New York mosaic.

  For all its opulence, and all its shortcomings, the city tapestry seduces me. Why would I want to leave it for L.A.? Who wants to spend half a day flying out to a place where nobody thought about anything but competing for parts and coveting awards for pretending that you were someone you weren’t? They were all bent out of shape, pretentious. The whole damn place was pretentious.

  We walk to Third Avenue, passing the Tower East movie theater and a Victoria’s Secret. The long expanse of windows is devoted to sherbet-colored Miracle Bras that can incrementally ratchet up your cleavage, a “have it your way” for bras instead of burgers. They’re paired with matching thongs as sheer as snowflakes. I’m watching Tex.

  “So what was the name of the movie anyway?” he says, raking a hand through his dark, curly hair as he finally turns from a blond mannequin in a sea-green thong.

  “What movie?”

  He shakes his head in disbelief. “The one they asked you to help on, darlin’.”

  “Oh…. I forgot…. Hmmm…dangerous, dangerous something…oh…I think Dangerous Ways, Dangerous Lies. That was it.”

  “Gossip’s doing an item on it tomorrow,” he says offhandedly, and snorts. “The sleazy jerk who’s starring in it has this global fan club that issues daily reports on ‘sightings,’” he says. “Get this. Never mind that he was busted once for drunk driving, and likes coke, Hollywood doesn’t hold that against him. They paid him twenty mil for his last movie. And you know what he tells Cindy?”

  I shake my head.

  “‘Money doesn’t mean that much to me. It doesn’t buy spiritual fulfillment. It’s something that you barter with. It has no intrinsic worth.’” He laughs out loud. “I’m going to use that on my landlord when he asks for the rent,” he says, deadpan. “‘It has no intrinsic worth.’”

  For some reason my skin is starting to prickle. “Exactly who are you talking about?”

  “The guy from that TV show…that hustler astronaut from The High Life.”

  I slow my pace. “What?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Gelled hair, what’s his name?”

  “Mike Taylor?”

  “Yeah.”

  I’ve fallen out of step with him now, dragging my feet. “Would you mind if I took a rain check on dessert?”

  “You okay? You’re lookin’ a little pale.”

  “I’m fine…it’s just been a really long day, and suddenly it’s all hitting me.”

  Later on, I sit back and go over my phone messages. Shortly after I started the column, my phone started ringing with offers to do TV. Initially, I ducked them. How would it feel to be in front of the TV camera? I had this frightening scenario in my head: I was in an electronics store and everywhere I looked I saw my full face on all the screens of the demo models. Twenty different Maggies, starting with a ten-inch screen, graduating up to one the size of the eight-story Sony Imax screen, all in different gradations of harsh, artificial color. A too-red me, a pink-and-fuchsia me, a yellow-green me, a harsh black-and-white version, all color leached out. A flat-screened Maggie, a fat-screened Maggie. A United Nations of Maggie O’Learys. A fun-house house of horror come to life. Halloween. The vision makes me cringe.

  Then there’s the business of speaking my mind without the safety net of print. Would I start to stutter and stammer? Could happen. There was no delete key on a live TV show, and I wasn’t used to expressing myself in sound bites. It was safe to work behind a computer screen. But ultimately, what it came down to was that I was never one to retreat in the face of a challenge…so…

  First stop on the AM with Susie show is makeup. They redden my cheeks, add more lipstick to return the color that the lights wash out, then dust me with a giant powder brush to cut the shine. I’m ushered into the studio, and seated in front of the audience. The camera rolls up, the eyes of America are on me, and I feel as though the spotlight will imbue my words with greater meaning. I envision viewers alone in their kitchens or bedrooms, sipping coffee and eating coffee cake. They stop in the middle of paying bills or maybe cleaning the sink, hoping to come away with some moral or inspiration that will elevate them from the state of feeling disembodied, alienated, in perpetual despair about their weight and their lot in life. The effect I can have on TV dwarfs anything I can offer in print.

  Susie cross-examines me. In a nice way.

  “As America’s antidieting guru, Maggie, tell us a little about your own struggle. Was being overweight an issue for you all your life?”

  “Well, I got my workouts in the family bakery in Prospect Park, instead of the playground, as a child,” I say, evoking sympathetic smiles from the audience. “I blame my weight problems as a kid on after-school snacks of hot cross buns, crullers and scones instead of carrot sticks and celery. And then, rather than climbing monkey bars and getting real exercise, I rolled dough in my parents’ bakery. Arts and crafts was decorating cookies with colored frosting and rainbow sprinkles, then gobbling up my jewels.”

  “Didn’t your parents see what was happening?”

  “In those days, feeding your kids was a way of showing you could love and provide.”

  “So they were blind to what food had become t
o you?”

  I weigh that for a moment. “Let’s say their gift was disproportionate. When you take a vitamin in the recommended dose, it keeps you healthy. Overdose, and it can be lethal.”

  The discussion opens up to the audience, with no time to describe how I continued to overeat as I grew up. In my teens, I got my just desserts—Saturday nights in my room staring at rock-star posters on the walls, and listening to a blaring boom box while entwined in marathon confessional conversations on my pink princess telephone with desperate girlfriends. The secondhand stationary bike that my parents bought me soon became invisible, slipcovered with rejected clothes. If only abandoned exercise equipment could speak.

  I was incarcerated in my room under self-imposed house arrest. Everyone else was out on the weekends, at movies, parties or concerts, and I was a prisoner of both my body and the four walls. One night, after going to a dance with my best friend Rhoda, wearing too much makeup and high platform shoes, we ended up in a back booth of Tony’s Pizza parlor at eleven o’clock. There sat Rhoda, black eyeliner melting, sipping Diet Coke and reaching for a third slice of pepperoni pizza. She smirked.

  “At least it doesn’t walk away from you.”

  It didn’t. Food was the gift that kept on giving.

  To make things worse, my parents lightly brushed aside my preoccupation with my weight like crumbs on the counter, seemingly unaware of the pain and disappointment of growing up invisible to boys.

  “Just use a little willpower,” my mother would say. “Learn to control yourself.”

  Not my sister Kelly’s problem. Like our father, she could eat anything she wanted, and never gain. But I took after my mother. Our bodies followed some Manifest Destiny theory, expanding beyond appropriate borders and nothing could be done about it. Once the fat cells developed during early childhood, the number stayed constant for life. All that diet could do was shrink them down.

  “Have you always been at war with your body?” Susie asks after a commercial.

  “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t wending my way through cycles of gorging, deprivation, self-punishment, anger, resentment and rebellion, all of it siphoning off feelings of self-worth.”