Big Summer(35)
“Why?”
“To show that the food doesn’t have power over you. That you’re in charge, not your appetite.”
I’d never thought of my appetite as something separate from me, something that needed to be tamed. “How do I be in charge?” I asked.
Nana led me through a push-away and smiled the way she did everything else: thinly. Her lips pressed into an almost invisible line. “Get used to being hungry,” she said. “It won’t kill you, I promise.” She smoothed her pants against her narrow hips. “If you feel hungry, that means you’re winning.”
That night, when I went to bed with my belly a small, aching ball, I told myself, That means I’m winning. It wasn’t much comfort. On the nights that followed, I would lie under the quilt my mother had made me, imagining the foods I’d once enjoyed: My father’s pancakes, fresh out of the pan, dolloped with butter and crisscrossed with syrup. A hot dog from Sabrett’s that would snap when I bit it and fill my mouth with savory, garlicky juice. Carrot cake studded with walnuts and raisins, topped with dense cream-cheese frosting, or the apple crisp my mom would bake after she and my dad took me apple-picking in October at an orchard in New Jersey.
For five days, I endured spartan meals, doll-size portions, the swimming and the walking and the push-aways. On Saturday morning, Nana and I took the bus uptown, to what turned out to be a Weight Watchers meeting being held in a church basement. “I’m a lifetime member,” Nana told me proudly, handing a white envelope-size folder to a woman behind a desk and holding her head high as she stepped into a curtained cubicle and onto the scale. We found seats on folding metal chairs, and I looked around. The room was full of women, maybe fifty or sixty of them, with three men. Some of the women were white, some were black, and some were brown. Some were just a little heavy, and some were so big that they had to perch awkwardly on the chairs, which creaked and teetered underneath them, and some didn’t look heavy at all, which gave me the worst feeling, as I wondered if even thin women still struggled with their appetites, and had to come to a place like this to get help.
The woman next to me gave me a whispered “Sorry,” as she readjusted herself on her seat. I wondered why whoever was in charge hadn’t gotten larger, more comfortable chairs, or at least spaced them out a little instead of cramming them up against one another. Then I thought that maybe the discomfort and the shame were the point, and that the women were meant to be embarrassed, and that their embarrassment would keep them from eating. The woman next to me was black, with medium-brown skin and shoulder-length braids, and the two women behind us were murmuring quietly in Spanish. Even though Nana didn’t seem comfortable around people who weren’t white when she encountered them at the pool or in our neighborhood, she seemed perfectly at ease here
The meeting leader was an older black woman named Valerie, with freckled, reddish skin and short, curly hair that was longer on one side of her head than the other (after a few weeks of regular attendance, I heard Nana whispering to another member about Valerie’s wig, which was when I realized that those curls weren’t her own). Valerie’s eyebrows were skinny, plucked arches, her body was tall and lean and long-waisted. She had a long, scrawny neck with a soft wobble of a chin underneath it, the only part of her that was still fleshy and soft. Valerie’s voice was a marvel. It could go from a soft whisper to a confiding murmur to an exhorting shout, and hold the crowd spellbound, bringing them to silence with just a whisper. She reminded me of the Reverend C. L. Franklin, whom I’d heard on my parents’ Aretha Franklin CDs. She spoke in the same kind of preacherly cadences, encouraging the weak, congratulating the strong, welcoming backsliders back into the fold, and celebrating with the women who’d hit their goal weights.
Valerie would begin each meeting by showing a poster-size picture of herself. In a blue satin dress with her hair in a short, black bob and bright red lipstick on her lips, she didn’t even look like the same person. Her breasts and belly bulged, her hips were so wide they seemed to strain the seams of her dress. She had a wide smile on her face, a paper plate of food in her hands. There was only Valerie in the picture, but, if you looked closely, you could see a man’s arm at the edge of the frame. Sometimes, I would let my mind wander while Valerie talked, and wonder if the hand belonged to a father or a brother or a husband or a boyfriend, someone who’d loved Valerie when she’d been that big.
“That was me,” she would begin, her voice serious and quiet. “Oh yes! Oh yes it was!” she’d say, as if someone had voiced their doubt out loud. “I was twenty-six years old.” Her voice would get louder and louder as she went through her litany. “I weighed three hundred pounds. I was morbidly obese. Borderline diabetic. I had sleep apnea. I couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs without needing to catch my breath.” By then, women would be nodding along with her, all of them listening raptly, even the ones who’d heard the very same litany the week before and the week before that. Valerie would lower her voice. “I’d tried it all. Grapefruit. Cabbage soup. Slim-Fast. Did I call 1-800-Jenny? You know that I did. And then…” She would pause, hand uplifted, looking over the room, making eye contact with different members. “Then I found this program. And this program…” Another pause. Valerie would put her hand on her heart and say, “This program gave me back my life.”