Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (8 page)

Did I set out to gain weight? Most days, I am one of those women who want to be thin and want to eat. Although I’ve used laxatives at intervals, I found them more punishing than my disappointed hopes of getting abstinent. I am a failed bulimic.

On the other hand, perhaps I did want to get fat, to brutalize myself beyond the abasement of gobbling and gorging, the hangovers of sugar, the depression and waking shame of being fired and out of control. I may have needed the full monte, food
and
distorting my body, to finish getting rid of the self I had fixed cosmetically but not, adequately, metaphysically. In interfering with my precarious self, Alix and others had done a laughably inadequate job.
I
would show them how it should be done. In this, I am supremely competent.

Two years of working in dangerous unpredictability and being fired, bookended a month before with breaking up with a man I loved and a month after with a man I was terribly fond of, were the triggers of my relapse, but they are neither the causes nor the reasons for it.

The cause of my relapse is most probably written into my DNA. It’s certainly grooved into my behavior, and I had arrived at a place in which the stories I’d told myself since childhood, and the stories about myself that I was told, converged so tightly that the sinkholes in my psyche gave way and the only thing I had to fill those caverns with was food.

My dissociation from complex feelings and my difficulty in staking my boundaries make me easy quarry for emotional hyenas, people who thrive on creating uncertainty in those they perceive as weak, throwing off ambiguous directions and changing tactics until their object is dizzy with fear, confusion, or dependence before going in for the kill.

Even well-meaning people confuse me. It’s apropos that my insecurities have given rise to a lot of canine references over the years.

“You sound like you were adopted from a pound,” my therapist, the Good Doctor Miller, said at least once a month when I moaned about my disbelief that any enterprise would succeed or how difficult it was to foist myself out of the Bat Cave to see a movie.

One of the well-known diet and fitness writers who had blurbed
Passing for Thin
, Pam Peeke, demanded a meeting with me a few months before the book was published. “I loved your book,” she said as she expertly gauged my weight. “But I knew you’d gain weight. You’re a bit of a lost puppy.”

They’re right, although the statements, uttered by professionals, codify my infantilism too categorically. I’m susceptible to becoming whatever someone I respect says I am.

Woof.

“Do you want to find your birth mother?” the Good Doctor Miller will go on to ask, just as everyone who finds out I’m adopted asks. “She gave you up, what, forty-some years ago. Isn’t it time to go on?”

I shake my head no.

“The people who changed my diapers and got up in the middle of the night because I had nightmares are my parents,” I say.

But there is more. The thought of finding the right words to apologize to my birth mother, and the betrayal to the mother and father I have cleaved so fiercely to, make me feel like a sheet of paper torn raggedly in half and then in quarters.

The story I was told was that my parents got a call one night that a baby was available for adoption. They jumped at the chance, scrambling to find bottles from the attic and borrow a crib, reopening Christmas cards to add my name, which they’d picked out years earlier.

It’s a lovely story and a true one, as is the story my brother Jim, who was nearly seven years old when I was born, tells of going downstairs to warm the bottle when I woke in the night, relieving Mom of the necessity of getting up.

But of course to the woman who gave birth to me, I was a mistake. Is there an adopted kid who doesn’t know this about him/herself? Whether she wanted me or not is moot. I’d put the poor woman through nine months of fear, discomfort, and, possibly, grief.

I took this pain to confession when I was in graduate school. The priest soothed me by telling me that while
she
, unmarried, was in sin, I, her bastard, was not.
²⁰
This did not assuage my guilt, and I went away more strongly convinced that I had put her through months (and oh, what if it is years?) of misery. It is my oldest guilt, soon followed by my fat. I learned guilt early. I was six years old when I first entered the dark box with my small list of misdemeanors and recited the Confiteor:

This, too, is part of the story I told myself in whatever formless way a very young child has.

I was a kid with a gothic imagination. I dressed my Barbies up as inmates of the state orphanage in St. Ignatius and, in second grade, after reading a
Reader’s Digest
article about throat cancer, was afraid to go to sleep at night because I was sure my parents planned to give me a tracheotomy. Don’t even ask what I, age seven, went through after seeing
The Diary of Anne Frank
on a Saturday night when my oldest brother, Dick, was supposed to be babysitting me, or how both my brothers Jim and Dick, seven and nine years older than I, used to hold me down and keep my eyelids open as the Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Toto tried to enter the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West.

These rather picayune anecdotes have several things in common. I was impressionable. Left to myself, I was of a melancholic humor. I was left to myself a lot and swallowed my aloneness with large doses of food and paranoia.

Why would I think my parents would cut a hole in my throat?

Because out of the witches’ brew of being a mistake, I had transmuted to being not only unwanted but unwantable.

“You know no one can stand you, don’t you?”

We were downstairs. Dick was racking up the pool balls while I pedaled slowly on the stationary bicycle. He took his opening break shot, and the balls scattered with a loud
tock
followed by a heavy roll. The sound felt a lot like my heart.

“Don’t you?” He looked at me over the top of his glasses. “I mean, look at you, Chunky. You’re fat. You’re ugly. You have no friends. Mom works so much because she can’t stand being around you. You’re disgusting.”

I pedaled a little slower. One of the bright balls cracked in a carom, and Dick swore under his breath.

“That’s another thing,” he went on. “You have a foul mouth and terrible breath. Do you ever brush your teeth? Shit, I don’t think you bathe, you stink so much. It’s a wonder anyone can stand you.”

I started pedaling backwards on the bike. This was forbidden but I did it anyway. Dick held his pool cue at his side like a scepter, watching me.

“You know this, don’t you? Don’t you?”

He could pierce steel with those eyes. I was thirteen years old. My mother was rarely around because she was working seventy hours a week bringing the Catholic Church into the 1970s. I sniffed back a gob of snot, hoping to hold back the tears.

“
Don’t you?
”

“I…” What could I say? I had friends because St. Anthony’s was a small school, and I’d known my classmates since kindergarten. But they didn’t come over much and everyone seemed to have paired off with a best friend. Terry and Sandy; Wendy and Shannon; Mary Kay and Karen; Patty and Stacy. They were talking about eighth grade and cheerleading, about boys they liked, about the clothes they were amassing for high school, and about the Girl Scout bicycle trip to Minnesota I would not be making.

“I have friends,” I said shakily.

“Right,” he snorted. He jawed a ball, and I watched it ricochet back and forth as though it were a hypnotist’s pocket watch. “Your faggy friend, Jerry. He’s not a friend; he’s a freak. You can’t afford to hang out with freaks.”

“Jerry’s not a freak,” I said in as stout a voice as I could manage.

“He’s a freak and so are you. He doesn’t love you either, you know. He just likes this big house. Admit it, France. No one can stand you, and no one loves you.” I got off the bicycle looking toward my old playroom in the scary, unfinished half of the basement, but I was rooted to the spot. “I’ll make a deal with you, okay?” Again with the cold blue eyes, bugging out, it seemed, over his beaky sunburned nose.

“Okay,” I said in a tiny voice.

“I will love you.”

This was my dream come true! All I’d ever wanted was for Daddy, Dick, and Jerry to love me. Of course I loved many people, but that secret, most painful chamber in my heart didn’t include my mother or my brother Jim. They were around so little and had so little interest in me that they were extraneous to this trio of men I would be glad to die for. Daddy, Dick, and Jerry could never love me as fiercely as I loved them, but oh!—if only they loved me a little!

“Okay.” My voice was stronger now.

“But here’s the deal. You love who I say you love.”

I cocked my head. “Huh?”

“You only love who I say you can love.”

“You mean, like I ask if it’s okay to love Daddy?”

“Right. And you can love Dad.” Even Dick, twenty years old with a wife and baby, was too scared of Dad to not love him.

“And Mom?”

“No. Mom is a whore. She’s in love with Father Gallagher.”

“Liz and Lisa?” His wife and baby daughter.

“Yes. But not Jerry.”

I sucked my lips in and bit down. I loved Jerry. I was in love with Jerry. Dick could no more stop that than he could stop daylight from fading to dusk. I had one exception that I kept to myself when I accepted his offer.

“Your mother,” my aunt Jane repeated, “doesn’t know what love is. If she did, she’d put you on a diet, and she’d stay home and take care of your dad. She doesn’t deserve your father.”

I was in eighth grade, and my parents were in Hawaii. I was staying with my aunt and uncle and four cousins. Aunt Jane had come into my room, closed the door, and started talking at me. I was sitting on the floor between the bed and the wall, crying.

Sister Theresa had said pretty much the same thing when she pulled me aside to tell me to tell my mother to buy me a slip, that my blouse gapped and my brassiere showed. My Scout leaders also had things to say about my mother’s absence and my appearance and sullenness, only they said them when they thought I was asleep. My grandparents and Aunt Mildred were more circumspect in their criticism, but it was there. Mom herself told me that my aunt Claire took her to task for letting me get so fat. One of the most humiliating moments was when Mary Rose Bremmer came up to me at recess and told me I needed to use deodorant. Mary Rose Bremmer! Her family was so poor that the white in the plaid of her uniform was gray, and she brought her peanut butter sandwich and apple lunch in a used paper sack.

But she didn’t stink and I did.

It was as though the earth had twisted on its axis. I grew fatter. I had messy periods that required underwear with plastic crotches. I wore my father’s shirts with the uniform my mother now made for me with bitter sighing as she hemmed its eight thousand pleats. My old friends spoke a foreign language of pierced ears and wore velvet chokers. I smelled of sweat, and I farted grossly because I went weeks without a bowel movement. My teachers, aunts, grandmother, and classmates confirmed what Dick had spelled out to me. I was as unlovable as I was unwantable.

Or was that the other way around?

It didn’t matter. My mother was away from home, and my father lacked the skills for raising a daughter; without my parents’ involvement and coaching at the vulnerable age of first loves and first periods, I was ill-prepared for adolescence. That story I’d told myself about being given up, given
away
, was graphically illustrated in my mother’s schedule and my helplessness to be like other people.

I stuck to Dick’s pact, except for my unrequited love for Jerry, until I was nineteen when, on New Year’s Day, Dick skied off to Canada with his preschool-age daughters, disappearing for three months. The spell broke when he broke so many hearts. When he was found, a family council was convened to talk to him about what he had done and not done with his life. I remember that Jim got down on his knees and begged Dick to see the terror and grief he’d caused by abducting Lisa and Jennifer. Dick sat in the swivel easy chair next to the living room doors and stared at Jim like he was a specimen from a freak show, much as he’d pinned me to my inadequate self seven years earlier.

I broke the pact over this, but the spell waned slowly as I learned some grown-up facts. For one thing, Dick was a compulsive liar. He belittled and hit his wives. He would, he told me, “fuck any woman except Mom.”

My aunt Jane would die of ammonia on the brain, an alcoholic’s disease. Sister Theresa would one day apologize for the way she treated me. “I hated being a nun,” she explained, “until my mother died and I could decide for myself if I wanted to be one or not. It turns out I did.” Later, too, I would realize that my aunt Claire loved talking to me and was proud of her niece who had gone off to graduate school and a literary career in the East. So, too, I have friends, including Jerry, from St. Anthony’s and have forged a close and loving relationship with my parents, who, I’ve come to understand, have a genius for children under the age of three and over the age of eighteen.

I still obsess over whether my buttons gape.

In college, I found absorption in my studies, and later, in teaching, in publishing, and in writing, for my work. Mom’s church friends would become my friends. I would read about sociopathy.

When I graduated from high school, my parents asked me what I wanted. “A car and a shrink,” I told them. My first therapist described my parents as having dropped me at his doorstep with a note: “We tried to raise her. You do the rest.” We accomplished some big things in our years together. He made me feel my talents were real, and I felt he appreciated me. He downsized my fantasies but didn’t suffer me letting go of my dreams of writing. What neither Dr. Michael nor I understood was that as long as I was eating I couldn’t grow up. Certainly we recognized that I responded to life by eating—a bad habit or a lack of willpower that resulted in an enormous body that my family and friends could blame my intense moods and lack of boyfriends on.