Fat Tuesday

I don’t deserve my body / it may not be perfect but it works for me / and I can walk and I can see the sky
—Lori McKenna, “The Deserving Song”


I haven’t been in a locker room in decades—since I first realized my two feet could connect with trail, concrete, or asphalt in a healthy way for the price of a pair of running shoes. But this morning, at the gym where I do therapy for my back, I went back to scary high school phys ed class. The snaps in my yellow uniform always gaped at the bust. The bloomers left crinkled imprints in my thighs.

I have never been proud of my body, never celebrated its accomplishments or its appearance, except for a few lean months at ages 34 and 40 and one nine-mile run. At 46, it’s not even on the same planet as perfect, and it does not work for me just yet. I can’t pick up my underwear when it falls on the floor. I have to sit to get dressed. I can’t lift more than a gallon of milk or walk a quarter of a mile. And forget touching a trail; uneven footing makes me feel as though I am walking en pointe.

Movement is hard enough. Now add an extra dozen pounds, brought on by an antidepressant (one that’s supposed to decrease appetite, naturally) to my unexercised, flabby, nonworking body, and—you can see where this is going. Last night, because it was the very last minute I could wait, I tried on last summer’s swimsuit—or tentini, as my sister likes to call hers. I looked in the mirror long enough to be sure private parts stayed private but not long enough for the image to burn my retina. When I recovered, I took a bath. My daughter came in to brush her teeth, and I asked her to close the shower curtain. For the first time in months, I couldn't fall asleep, too ashamed of how I looked—no slack granted for four months worth of lying around with back pain.

This morning, before my Healthy Back class at the gym uptown, I hobble into the women’s locker room and hang up my coat. Though I stare intently at the row of coats and the plentiful hangers (the kind with full-circle holders, so they can’t be stolen off the rack), I can still see naked women from every corner of my eyes. A woman my age is in a half slip and stockings at the sink. Another strolls from the shower to her locker. Still another stands at the bench arranging her clothes, her gigantic dark nipples like dinner plates dangling from her chest. Young and old, fat and thin—mostly thinner than I—all these women are moseying around in various states of undress, not one of them hurrying or hiding behind a towel. Not one of them seems to possess a modicum of self-consciousness, as if walking about without clothing in a large room with other naked women were not a deranged thing to do.

I am both modest and modest about my modesty, shamed into folding my clothes neatly and carefully, so I don’t look like I’m as embarrassed as I am by the way I look, in a race to hide myself. But I don’t want, even for one second, to be a flash of puckered thigh in someone else’s peripheral vision.

Poor body image and depression can accompany one another down that dark road and keep you from doing the very things that would improve your body and lift your spirits. It’s not so easy to get over yourself. And I didn't at first. When I am introduced to the instructor, I break down—partly with fear and partly with relief at finally doing something about my circumstances. I’m going to have to suck it up and suck it in as best I can and not let my brain spoil this for my body.

In a class of five, I am likely the youngest and the least fit. But once I make that mental note, it dissolves in the 92-degree water. For one liquid golden hour, I stand in neutral spine, walk, hang in traction, and perform exercises called “square box” and “dead bug,” And when I get out of the pool, I don’t feel the usual crunch of my spine bearing down on my tailbone as full gravity returns.

The locker room, to my chagrin, has magically refilled with new naked nipples and bare bottoms, and it’s time to face my scary semi-public nudity. But while I sit to take off my suit and put on dry clothes, I see, out of the corner of my eye, one of my classmates. She is not naked but is instead carrying her clothing into one of the small private shower rooms, where she changes.

Each fat Tuesday and Thursday, that’s where you’ll find me.

scale stories

My daughter weighed herself at 8:30 p.m. I tried to stop her; everyone knows it’s bad to weigh at night, and this night was even worse than most. She’d eaten dinner late because of soccer practice and also wolfed down half a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream—some ridiculous fudgy flavor of the usual exceeding deliciousness.

Though she had spent three hours of the day swimming and another hour and a half running around the field and kicking a ball, she’d also consumed a post-breakfast black-bottom muffin, grilled cheese for lunch, and an afternoon snack of popcorn and several mini-cupcakes.

She left the room sulking and got in the shower, where she spent a long time. I pulled back the curtain, and she was crying. “You have to help me,” she said, pathetic as I am when I beg my husband to keep Aunt Margaret’s chocolate cake in the truck or hide it well beneath all the camping gear in the basement.

“You are not fat!” I tried to make her feel better by comparing my stomach to hers.

“At least your boobs stick out further than your stomach!” she said.

I saw her in her swimsuit the day before, and she looked positively gorgeous. “You have a great body!” I told her. “Your stomach looked nice and tight at the pool yesterday.”

“I was sucking it in!” she said.

“The whole time?”

“The whole time!” She cried again and tried to hug me, the shower water soaking my clothes. I made a snuggle date with her after her shower.



Like mother like daughter. I sucked my stomach in from the time I was eleven until the time I was 35 and pregnant. You’d think those muscles would get strong in 24 years of sucking, but it only gives you a stomachache. Eventually, I got too fat to suck it in anymore.

In ninth grade, Miss Brown lined up all the girls. We wore snap-down, short, piss-yellow gym dresses with bulbous matching bloomers, which had the same skinny elastic at the waist and legs. The only thing that harmed your self-esteem more than catching a glimpse of yourself in your gym uniform was being weighed by Miss Brown.

I don’t remember whether she shouted out our numbers to a girl with a pad or whether she let us suffer a private humiliation, but I cried when I heard my number. 132. I was more than ten pounds heavier than my mother when she got married, and I wasn’t even in high school yet. One of the coolest girls in the whole school, Dawn, came over to me and consoled me by telling me that she weighed 138 pounds, and that it was OK because we looked good. (She and I got our periods together in sixth grade; I think we were the only ones that year.) Dawn was an athlete. She was about three inches taller and had long, slender legs.

We hardly ever talked before or after that moment, but I never forgot her. It was easily the kindest thing anyone had ever said to me in all of my years of grade school.

What I wouldn’t give to weigh 130 pounds now! I’ve probably tried to get there 130 times in my life. I’ve made it within a few pounds several times, even as recently as my 40th birthday. I looked and felt great—my back didn’t hurt, I could run faster, I didn’t get heartburn or migraines. But whatever skinny friend I had at the time always told me I looked sick. Because the job of the skinny friend is to be the skinny friend. If you take that away, you take away everything.



Mothers don’t want their children to grow up with our neuroses, especially about our bodies. We’re a country drowning in high-fructose corn syrup and diabetes, and we’re collectively too stupid to see the connection. Our kids see the donut we had to have (hell, they share in that need), and then they see us fret over having had it. Just a couple of days ago, I asked my daughter whether I looked too heavy in something I was wearing. She rolled her eyes. You’re not fat, she said. Then she pinched her own half-inch.

I’m told that most girls go through this phase at some point or another, especially when a crush is involved—even if, I’m told, they come from thin mothers. Maybe that’s true. So what do thin mothers tell their girls to do about pudge? I know what I do. I whip out all those Weight Watchers tools.

“I’m hungry all the time,” my daughter told me the next morning, as I showed her, in a small glass, the amount of orange juice equal to a serving. I gave her the rundown. Sometimes you think you’re hungry when you’re really thirsty; drink water. Eat a piece of fruit. Wait twenty minutes after a meal so that you can feel full. Find an activity that keeps your hands occupied. “And stop drinking tall glasses of that fancy orange-tangerine-cranberry juice you and your skinny dad concocted.”



It’s been about a week since that episode in the bathroom. She’s gone easier on the juice, and she’s feeling a little better about her tummy. I didn’t stop her from stepping on the scale this morning, and she saw a 3.5 pound difference.

When she left, I took a turn on the evil hate machine, and I’m down a few myself.

My mom and I used to joke about our inability to lose weight, saying we wish we could have anorexia for just a couple of weeks. When someone has that virus and spends ten days vomiting, losing ten pounds in the process, we stand a little closer to her. (But we know, of course, that we’d find a way to squeeze the calories in through retching episodes.) I even took diet pills for awhile, but I got used to them instantly and started eating more calories. I even thought I was onto something when I invented “Tapeworm in a Jar.”

Or I could give up my 6:00 Red Hook ESB; the one at 4:00 should suffice.



We all have a scale story—one that we will remember forever, like the day in Miss Brown’s ninth grade gym class. I think of it every time I see a doctor’s scale or a locker room in a spa or health club. I am thankful that my story had a Dawn in it. Without her, it would have been just another painful memory of my ever-expanding waist.

I hope everybody’s kid either has a Dawn or is a Dawn. And I hope none of our daughters grows up to be or have the skinny friend.



* * *