Fat Chance Read online

  Susie turns to the audience for reactions, and a teenage girl in tight jeans with short wavy hair stands.

  “I was chubby, as my mom put it, in elementary school and my body made me feel like I was a living sin.” She pauses, taking a breath, then stares into the camera.

  “I’m four-nine and I weigh 142 pounds. I feel suffocated, trapped in a dark hole, hopeless.” She looks out beyond the audience. “At first I isolated myself from everybody and all I did was eat, then at the age of thirteen, everything changed.”

  “What happened?” Susie asks.

  “I became anorexic. I was so paranoid about my unhappiness, I went on for two years being like that. It got to the point where if I had more than thirty calories a day, I would literally hurt myself.” She pushes up the sleeve of a baggy gray sweatshirt to reveal an arm disfigured by the rubbery red scars. “I am a cutter.”

  There is stunned silence in the audience. Susie says nothing, as though participating in a moment of respectful observance.

  “I know that wasn’t easy,” she says finally. “Thank you.” Thunderous applause rings out, then she turns back to me. “At what point did your thinking change?”

  “Staring down at the scale one day. The numbers hadn’t changed and I was ready to smash it to see if that would make it budge. Maybe it was broken. I wanted to pick it up and see, the way you check the phone to see if it’s working when the boy you’re in love with doesn’t call. But then it struck me that there was another option. I could triumph over that meaningless rectangle of steel that I had inveighed with so much of my self-worth by ignoring it and taking back charge of my life. Instead of wallowing in embarrassment and self-hatred, I would take my liability and flaunt it. It was time to fight back against the western world’s prejudice toward a condition that most people couldn’t change. From then on, I refused to dress like a mourner in black to look thinner. I opted for hot pink, chartreuse. I didn’t care if it had horizontal stripes and made my waistline as wide as the equator. I’d go over the top. ‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful,’ as Mae West said. Diets were a sham, biology was destiny, so I ran with it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Aside from shopping sprees in plus-size stores where things actually fit, I turned my attention to my soul. It was time to get in touch with who I really was because everything inside of me that was real and vulnerable had been buried. I started going to Overeaters Anonymous where they began each session by holding hands and saying a prayer: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference.’”

  “The same prayer that AA uses,” Susie says.

  “Yes. And that environment made me realize how much I needed spirituality in my life because I had become so closed off to love and meaning outside of myself. I was turning to a higher power for the love, strength and generosity that I couldn’t find in myself anymore. Until then, I was locked in a one-dimensional life that was consumed with what I weighed and ate, not who I was or could become.”

  There are murmurs of agreement from the audience.

  “I had lost my place in the universe. Everything in my life was out of proportion.” In the eye of the camera, it all comes back to me. The hot TV lights shine down on me like heavenly beacons there to illuminate the truth, and I’m sweating as if I’m arriving at some religious epiphany. The studio is silent.

  “Night after night, I sat in a windowless basement of an East Side church where compulsive eaters shared their stories. One night a withdrawn teenager told of being afraid to fall asleep at night, staying up listening for the sound of her abusive father’s footsteps approaching her room. Strawberry ice-cream sundaes in the kitchen after school were the only thing that made her feel good, and forget his touch, at least for a while.

  “A bearded man, very overweight, spoke of atrocities in Vietnam. He had nightmares of seeing the bullet that ripped through his buddy’s chest, and getting there too late to save him. Eating was his escape from the guilt he had over his own survival. Others described stultifying days filled with nursing aging, bedridden parents; facing job loss; empty existence after retirement; the death of a spouse, all tales offering pinholes of light into their intimate worlds of grief and despair. So many people felt orphaned, split off from a world where everyone else seemed to be living purposeful, fulfilling lives.

  “Eating filled them all with comfort and satisfaction, but like a euphoric drug, once the high wore off, it left them more despondent than when they started. Watching these people reveal themselves helped me. So did the idea of living life one day at a time, and drawing strength from this community.”

  A Clairol commercial prevents me from talking about how science writing connected me to the outside world in a more concrete, expansive way, and how the column and my like-minded thinking with Wharton later propelled me, Maggie O’Leary from Brooklyn, New York, to cult celebrity. Back in the eye of the camera I end by telling viewers:

  “Eat to appetite instead of eating to extreme. I’m not saying don’t lose weight if you want to, but I think you should do it without making your life miserable and impossible and unfortunately that’s what very restrictive regimens do. And if you choose to remain at a weight that America deems ‘fat,’ well, that’s okay too if you’re okay with it because in the long run it just might be better than cycling over and over.

  “What I hate to see are people subsisting on diet foods that they hate. Food is a source of pleasure, and we should enjoy it. I’m not saying that many of us don’t have terribly serious food issues—it would be disrespectful to be glib about it. There are suicide eaters out there, and they need therapy, not chocolate Kisses.”

  “And, Maggie, let’s talk about your column,” Susie says. “Isn’t ‘Fat Chance’ really a rallying cry for women all over America? Isn’t it really about a lot more than the issue of fat?” As I nod, she goes on.

  “Isn’t it about accepting yourself no matter what it is in life that you’re at war with? Isn’t it about giving yourself a break and loving yourself no matter what kind of pressures you perceive that society is putting on you to change, even when those changes may be biologically impossible for you?”

  “That’s exactly it, Susie. Fat is something of a metaphor for pain and unhappiness in a world that appears to be filled with people who have it all. The truth is that women everywhere, no matter where they come from, no matter what they do for a living, no matter whether they’re married, or single, rich or poor, famous or utterly anonymous, have issues to deal with and things about themselves that they’d like to change. Ultimately, though, they must come to terms with those issues, because if they can’t or they won’t, they’re destined to be at war with their—”

  “And, Maggie—”

  But I’m fired up now, and I don’t let her break in.

  “And despite liposuction, dieting, exercise, plastic surgery, or what have you, we are a product of our genes and our environments, and the whole business of living the best life that we possibly can means making peace with who we are and overcoming our private saboteurs.”

  The audience bursts into applause, and I feel the color in my face rising.

  “Thank you, Maggie,” Susie says. “Thank you for being with us today. You’ve brought a very sober perspective to the issues that plague all of us.”

  I walk out, surprised with all that I said. A biology teacher of mine once told me that he never really understood his subject until he had to teach it. Now I know what he meant.

  Out of the Running

  The widespread ill will toward the obese leads to discrimination in schools and the workplace, and reduces chances of women going the old-fashioned route and climbing the social ladder through marriage.

  When was the last time a society column pictured a fat woman at a social event? Or sitting on the board of a major corporation?

  Undoubtedly, being overweight sabotages success. Ninety-seven million of us
are overweight, but when it comes to fame, celebrity, recognition and status, we are invisible.

  Over and over again, I hear about discrimination at the office—how women are passed over for promotions. Some are too embarrassed to sue, unable to handle the attention that would put them in the spotlight. Instead, they endure lower-level jobs, less pay and the anger that comes from being victimized and unable or unwilling to fight back.

  But should you have the courage to stand up and fight back, the sad truth is that juries often show the same lack of sympathy toward the overweight that is mirrored in the real world. Out of the entire United States, only Michigan, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Santa Cruz, California, make it illegal to discriminate against the overweight. Every place else, society is largely off the hook. The rationale: If you’re fat, it’s your own fault.

  And here’s the saddest evidence yet of how much society despises overweight. In a national survey done by Dorothy C. Wertz, an ethicist and sociologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, 16 percent of the general adult population said they would abort a child if they found out that it would be untreatably obese. By comparison, the survey found that 17 percent would abort if the child would be mildly retarded.

  three

  I hear my phone ringing before I even turn the corner to my office.

  “It’s Our Lady of Prospect Park,” Tamara calls out when she sees me.

  How could my mother not have seen the show? The TV was background music in the bakery. Always the drone, the predictable barks of laughter, applause. It would be a miracle if I could just get some work done.

  “It’s my fault that you’re fat?”

  “I wasn’t blaming you, Mother.” Oh, here goes. “It was the lifestyle—”

  “You never learned self-control, it’s—”

  “Mother, it’s a little more complicated!”

  “What did you ever want that we didn’t give you?”

  “That’s just it,” I say, pounding my fist silently on the desk. “I have to go, Ma, I’m on deadline. I’ll call you.”

  Several hours later, I look up to see a messenger at my door, bearing a large golden shopping bag imprinted with one of the most welcome names on earth: Godiva. The bag is filled with the signature gilded boxes with samples as opulent as Fabergé eggs. But these ovoid wonders are edible: Godiva’s new truffle collection. I lift the first. Outside is a domed shell of black-brown bittersweet chocolate, a confectionary canvas covered with Jackson Pollock–style café-au-lait drippings. I bite. My tongue is having a party for my mouth as it is washed with cappuccino cream. I take another, milk chocolate with a hint of hazelnut. The third is bittersweet mocha chocolate filled with cherry cream.

  “I’ve found religion. Tamara, you have to try these.” No answer. “Tamara?” The phone rings again. Is Godiva publicly held? I lick my fingers and lift the receiver. Does that count as exercise?

  “Maggie O’Leary? I have Robert Redford on the line from Sundance…”

  I bite into another—“Mmm mmm mmm”—then swallow. “I know Bob, and I’m on deadline, mon cher, bad timing.” I slam down the phone. It rings again, but this time I lift it up and then drop it into the garbage pail.

  “Do you know how low you are Barsky? You’re in the bottom of the garbage pail, you swine.” I hear his signature nasal laugh as I fish the receiver out of the garbage.

  The morning a pail of bulls’ balls was delivered from a Ninth Avenue bodega, just after I got the column, I filled Tamara in. “He’s been at the paper forever, and pulling this stuff keeps him awake between stories.”

  “You could ignore him.”

  “But then he’d stop.”

  I consider returning fire using a foreign identity. German? Dietrich? No, I can do better. Later. Now I have to apply ass to seat and get to work.

  “SHIT.” The phone’s ringing again. “Tamara! Tamara! Tell Barsky to cool it.” I wait, but my phantom assistant is gone. I snatch up the phone.

  “Enough, asshole. I have work to do. This is a newspaper, remember?”

  There is silence on the line.

  “Alan! Don’t ignore me and don’t start that sick breathing thing again. You don’t sound sexy, you sound like you’re having an asthma attack.”

  There’s a silence, and just as I’m about to hang up I hear the voice.

  “Maggie? I’m sorry, I hope this isn’t a bad time…. I’m, this is Mike Taylor, I’m an actor in Los Angeles. I don’t know if someone from the studio ever reached you or not, but I’m about to start working on a new movie here, and that’s why I’m calling. I need your help.”

  My eyes open wide, then wider. An alarm goes off deep inside my head. Not Alan Barsky. Not Alan Barsky. He wasn’t that good. It was… My skin starts to prickle. It did sound like him. Oh God, I am such a complete moron.

  “Sorry…SO-ORRY…just fooling around here….” I clear my throat. “I…I know who you are…” I say, trying to conceal a certain shakiness that’s starting to spread over me like a violent onset of the flu. Who could ever forget his rippled abs on that Calvin Klein underwear billboard in Times Square!

  “Oh, okay, well, I thought I’d try you myself because…anyway…I’m going to be starring in a new movie about a diet doctor, and I’m so out of my element with this. I wondered if there was any way that you could help me out.”

  The Mother Teresa of journalism to the rescue…. Oh…whatEVER you need. But I say nothing, half out of fear of saying the wrong thing, the other half because I’m afraid that if I hear my own voice, I’ll wake up and the dream will be over.

  “Maggie? You there?”

  “Yes…I… Sorry, I’m in…I got distracted for a minute—”

  “Oh, well, anyway, I wondered if there was any way you might be able to come out to L.A. for a couple of weeks?”

  “Weeks? A couple of weeks?” What the hell is happening to me, echolalia?

  “I know you’re working, but we could get you a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. There are amazing restaurants here—you could take lots of time for yourself and—”

  “I don’t think I could just—”

  “Well, we could make some other arrangement if you don’t like it there… L’Hermitage or… I mean, you could even stay here if you’d be more comfortable. I have a pretty big place—you could have your own wing—there’s an office…and I have a great kitchen. You could make my place home base, and just give me some coaching—you know, background stuff—on the way overweight women think, and how they’d react to me. I usually spend a couple of months preparing for a role, and it would be a tremendous favor if—”

  “I…I don’t know—”

  “I realize that it’s not easy to just get up and leave—”

  “No, but—”

  “Don’t answer now, just think about it.”

  “Well—”

  “We would pay all your expenses, and a consulting fee. The studio is usually pretty generous, I’m sure we could work something out so that at least financially it would be worth your while. Just consider it, okay?”

  “Maybe, maybe, Mike,” I say, coiling a strand of hair around my finger like a tourniquet. “Can I get back to you?”

  “Sure, sure, Maggie. This is great. I’m thrilled that you’ll even think of helping me.” Then his rich voice turns softer, intime. Caressing. And by God, it’s working wonders.

  “Honestly, people out here really look up to you, you know? This is a crazy town, everybody’s into some diet routine or other, nobody’s happy with themselves the way they are. That’s why it would be so helpful if I could hear your take on it all.”

  There are other experts—I can rattle off a dozen names off the top of my head. Bloated, academic types, but they knew the stuff, they could fill him in. Or he could read my clips. The column was easy to call up, why did he need the flesh-and-blood me? On the other hand, SHUT UP. Did it matter WHY he called me? He called me. ME. He wanted ME. Needed ME. Maggie O’Leary.

 
; We say goodbye, but I’m still holding the phone. Finally I place it in the cradle, gently. Mike Taylor. Mike Taylor.

  I lean back in my chair, pressing my fingers over my eyes, seeing shapes and colors collide like shooting stars. How often does someone get offered her fantasy on a silver platter, there for the taking? Lotto Jackpot. And the winner is… I’m nervous now, uneasy. Is my breath getting short? My panic circuitry is supercharged, as though my insides are a pinball machine and Mike Taylor the little steel ball that has been spring-loaded into my body and is ricocheting around, slamming the buttons and bumpers, setting off ringers and bells and arcades of pulsating lights.

  I tear open the suffocating top button of my blouse, grab for my fan and open the bottom desk drawer where I stash the omnipresent reserve sack of Rainbow Chips Ahoy. I reach in and pull out a handful of cookies, admiring the gems of green, red and yellow chocolate that stud their rough surface. I lift one toward my lips. I can already taste it. My mouth knows cookies the way the fingertips of the blind know braille. Each pillow of chocolate…its dense, creamy center oozing satisfaction out along my tongue…washed down with a tall glass of chilled milk…comfort, fulfillment. I bite down and chew it slowly, as if mesmerized. Then another. But as quickly as I raise the third cookie to my lips, I pull it away.

  Suddenly it becomes a grenade and I’m considering suicide. I hold it, just hold it, and wait. A moment later I put it on the edge of the desk, and, like a kid shooting bottle caps, use my thumb and pointer finger to flick it into the garbage where it lands with a resounding ping on the empty metal base. I shoot another and another until I’m out of cookies and the bag is empty. Bingo. I smooth out the bag and pin it to the bulletin board. It’s flat now, thin, and it weighs next to nothing.

  Breaking the Mold

  “Don’t change your body, change the rules.” Those aren’t my words, they’re Jennifer Portnick’s. Jennifer who? A girl after our own hearts. Jennifer, who weighs 240 pounds, and is 5' 8", is an aerobics teacher who reached a settlement with Jazzercise Inc. after being rejected as a Jazzercise franchisee because of her weight—she then proceeded to file a complaint with the Human Rights Commission.