Always Too Much and Never Enough Read online

  Even though I rationalized my weight by saying that my life of abundance—decadent food on a consistent basis, several soy lattes a day, wine each night—was a way to repay myself for the hard work I did, the truth was that I knew I was hurting myself. The even deeper truth was that I was addicted, and rationalization is the oldest tool of the addict. Even when the results from my physical came in and I was told, point-blank, that my weight and cholesterol were issues that I needed to pay attention to, I still rationalized. They weren’t big concerns yet, I said, and I’d deal with them if and when they became issues.

  As I stared down at my spinach pie, I couldn’t help but wonder when exactly that moment would come and I would begin to take responsibility for my health.

  Cassie, true to form, was now animatedly discussing the newest cashew cheese to hit the market. It’s difficult to find more passionate foodies than a group of vegans. My dining mates and I had seen the dark, early days of bad vegan cheese, so we felt we were allowed a little over-the-top excitement on the matter.

  I interrupted. “Hey, you guys?” I said, suddenly self-conscious, yet trying—as always—to seem unflappable. “I think I’ll borrow that movie you mentioned, if that’s cool. The one about being fat and sick?”

  “Yeah, sure!” John beamed. “Pick it up from my office tomorrow.”

  —

  After I picked up the movie and went back to my hotel room and watched it—immediately, on my laptop, with Mariann beside me—everything came to a head. All of it—the lies, the sadness, the rationalization, the heavy heart, the sometimes misdirected anger at the world and at myself—it all culminated in one surprisingly simple, subtle shrug.

  “Let’s do this,” I said.

  In retrospect, I am not sure precisely what I meant by “let’s do this.” It seems to me I was trying to say, “Let’s do a juice fast. Let’s lose weight. Let’s get healthy.”

  But by “doing this,” I wound up committing to a whole lot more than I’d be able to grasp for years to come, and in some ways am still trying to grasp, and maybe always will be. It took losing nearly one hundred pounds for me to start to understand what I was, in fact, “doing.” And perhaps more importantly, what the world was doing to me.

  The world was, I would later find out, interested in my size to a much greater degree than had ever occurred to me. Because it was only when I lost the weight and my body suddenly seemed to suit the narrow definition of “acceptable”—slim, svelte, slight—that I started to experience what it felt like to be propelled upward by the same society that had previously seemed to prefer that I just disappear.

  Prior to that proclamation, “Let’s do this,” I would have told you that I already had a meaningful understanding of the food I ate and the way it affected me and the way it affected the world. I would have theorized that the reason I had always felt as if I was going up the down staircase was because I was offbeat, or because I was an individual thinker, not because I was fat and therefore deemed unworthy by society; not because I was a food addict who was battling shame issues as steadily as I was battling bullies. I ate and lived in a way that was in harmony with my worldview, and I loved that. That had been good enough for me, until suddenly it wasn’t. And when it wasn’t anymore, that was when something permanently shifted. That was when it became abundantly clear to me that simply eating in a way that avoided hurting others was never going to be enough if my eating habits were still hurting me.

  So when I started shedding the weight and reclaiming my health, it was quite a shock to learn that, in order to truly live genuinely, I had to confront how I had been betrayed by a food industry that relied on my willful ignorance and by a society that relied on my undiscerning willingness to buy into its arbitrary notions of self-worth and beauty.

  I see now that it was that dinner with my friends that was the turning point. It was the warm decadence and safe reassurance of the spinach pie—that suddenly didn’t seem so safe. It was John’s persistent vehemence that I just had to watch that documentary. It was Mariann gently squeezing my knee under the table, reminding me that I wasn’t alone, that she was beside me. That this was real. That I was real.

  It was standing in a bathroom stall, unable to turn around because the walls were closing in on me. It was accidentally catching a glimpse of myself in that bathroom mirror, witnessing in real time my own vulnerability, my desperation, my heaviness. It was knowing in that moment that outside of the bathroom of that restaurant in that city was an entire universe—and in that universe, sure, there was suffering, there was betrayal, but there was also the possibility of so much more.

  This was the game changer. This was my story, about to begin. Let’s do this.

  TWO

  a private affair

  Long before I digested just how deeply food had betrayed me (and, chances are, betrayed you), I considered it a friend. And not just a friend—but a soul companion, a trusted confidant. It wooed me, then saved me. (Or so I told myself.)

  But then food ruined me. I began to obsessively lust after it, following it, against my better judgment, into dark alleyways and seedy corners. It was the stuff horror movies were made of: the unsuspecting, hungry dame (me) and the ill-intentioned, charming villain (my lunch).

  Food was my guru, my lover, my sage. It seduced and defined me. And, ultimately, it deceived me.

  There was a time, however, when it simply fed me.

  —

  I was completely ordinary, for the first and final time, when I was a little tiny kid living in the circle-shaped condo development known as Pumptown Corners, nestled in a small Anytown, U.S.A., called Edison, New Jersey. What I wore, who I loved, and what I ate were about as normal as blueberry pie.

  Every activity in which I partook, every hobby I embraced, every passion I fostered, and every Slurpee I slurped was exactly what you’d imagine a middle-class suburban girl in the 1980s would spend her time obsessing about. On the weekends, I would wake up to the sweet smell of not-so-homemade Bisquick pancakes—my favorite—with margarine and without the gooey syrup I couldn’t stand. I’d carefully cut my two perfectly circular and lightly browned pancakes into small, soft triangles, and, as I dangled my bare feet beneath me and hummed the theme to General Hospital, I’d take a few satisfying bites, then quickly throw on my tutu just in time to rush to the ballet class I took at the nearby university. My mother, a stunningly beautiful, svelte artist with a fervent love of fashion and a talent for preparing prepackaged food that had me thinking she was the next Chef Boyardee, would drop me off for my little kid lessons in how to plié.

  My brother, Jeremy—four years my senior—was obsessed with the New York Mets (the eighties was a good time for that), and everything in his bedroom was blue and orange. We argued incessantly, eighties-style: I wanted to watch My Little Pony and he wanted to watch Knight Rider. I wanted to play Candy Land and he wanted to play Connect Four. I wanted elbow macaroni with margarine for dinner and he wanted pastina with cheese. Still, despite our sibling rivalry, Jeremy and I bonded over Twix bars, Nok Hockey, self-recorded radio shows, and watching the brand-new TV station known to the rad kids as MTV. Much of the music played on it was too old for me, but I longed for my brother’s maturity and the “big kid” attention it got him, so I sat beside him while he sang all the words to videos like Tom Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” I was fascinated by the giant, life-sized Alice in Wonderland cake memorialized in the video and often dreamed of Mom making one for a special occasion. Surely there was a cake mix for that. I wholeheartedly believed in Mom’s mixing skills.

  The place we hung our Mets hats was forty-five minutes and a whole world away from New York, home to big fat pretzels with thick pebbles of salt just waiting to be licked off; we always picked these up first thing whenever we’d drive in to see a Broadway show, the absolute highlight of my rather idyllic existence.

  In Pumptown, my best friend, Tamik
a, lived only a short bike ride away. When I stayed over at her house, her much older and wiser sister let us stay up to watch Saturday Night Live. The humor of it went completely above our heads, but we felt so cool being awake at eleven thirty that it didn’t matter. We designated her parents’ walk-in closet as our “clubhouse,” and we’d hold important meetings that consisted solely of eating entire rows of crunchy Chips Ahoy.

  Everything was charmingly normal. I was a freckle-faced brunette with crooked bangs and a side ponytail that sat sloppily atop my head. Punky Brewster was my style icon (admittedly, she might still be . . .) and my self-chosen wardrobe consisted of what were to me thoroughly fashion-forward outfits ranging from a well-worn Strawberry Shortcake dress that Mom scored at a garage sale to bright fluorescent, purposefully paint-splattered T-shirts paired with shiny, hot pink spandex leggings.

  Most weekends, Grandma and Grandpa would come over—an event I looked forward to with a monomaniacal intensity that surpassed even my deep fascination with Dr. Brown’s celery soda, Grandma’s go-to soft drink. I was certain that the highlight of Grandma and Grandpa’s week was seeing me, too, because when they walked in the door (six-pack of celery soda in hand), their eyes lit up, and they were instantly dying to know everything new about our worlds. I felt it was my duty not to leave any detail unreported, so I would sit on Grandpa’s lap or cuddle in Grandma’s warm, soft arms, and update them on what had happened that week on Family Ties, or the latest knock-knock joke I had learned from my ever-growing collection of joke books. They listened intently, asking the right questions, nodding at the right moments, and laughing with the perfect pitch of enthusiasm.

  Grandma and I, in particular, had a deep connection that convinced me that soul mates are not reserved solely for romance. My very first memory is with Grandma—just sitting with her on a sunny day, on the back porch—and the overarching theme of that memory, and of all my memories with her, is that of safety. Her warm arms were safe. Her pastel house was safe. Talking to her was safe, free of judgment and mental clutter. Her love was dependable. It remained that way until the very end, and somehow—even though she died when I was thirty-four, leaving a gaping hole in my heart and my life—her love still gives me a sense of sanctuary. I clung to that as a child, when the whole world felt broken and upside down, and I still cling to it.

  Grandpa, always the jolly, soft-spoken do-gooder, briefly had a volunteer job taking low-income people who didn’t drive to their jobs, and so he had access to this enormous van—the perfect vehicle to take my entire family out for ice cream sundaes in style. I’d get chocolate everything—chocolate ice cream, chocolate sprinkles, chocolate syrup—always in a cup, never a messy, breakable, undependable cone. I’d savor tiny bites and imagine that this was probably how Duran Duran felt all the time as I gazed out the window at my impressive wheels—and then I’d glance at my vanilla-mouthed grandpa, the chauffeur, who knew exactly how to make a four-year-old feel like the most special girl in the world.

  —

  My mother and father had gotten divorced, after being married for seven grueling years, when I was a year old and Jeremy was five. Their divorce was ugly and complicated, and now, thirty-five years later, it still is. My father was a charismatic and emotional man—a talented musician who insisted on being the center of attention whether he was at a small family get-together or a large-scale party. With him, everything was black or white, one extreme or the other, including people’s opinions of him.

  Though my parents’ divorce was hostile, and tension from it ran like a low-lying electrical current throughout my childhood, even as a kid I knew that I was somehow lucky not to remember what it was like when they were a couple, as my brother did. We were often thrust into the middle of ongoing battles that my parents should have worked out in private, but the stories that circulated in my family about their screaming fights were haunting. I am sure that my brother’s firsthand recollections of them, as a young child, were scarring, and quite possibly the reason why he went through school with frequent suspensions and detentions. He was always getting into trouble.

  —

  I, on the other hand, at least in those early, idyllic years, was a well-behaved, easygoing child. After the divorce, we lived with Grandma and Grandpa for a while until my mother met Brock, my first stepfather. Brock represented everything that Dad did not: patience, even-temperedness, and gentleness. Brock—a divorced man himself, with a daughter just older than Jeremy—was an English professor, banjo player, and train trivia expert. Mom and Brock had only been dating briefly when they decided to get married—an impulsive decision Mom probably made in hopes that Brock would provide the emotional stability that my father didn’t, and that my and Jeremy’s childhood frequently lacked.

  That is when we moved to Pumptown—my flailing mother in search of consistency, my Mets-obsessed brother in search of home base, and me innocently in search of red Skittles. For a very brief time, we all found what we needed. Pumptown was normal; our life was easy. Mom promptly commemorated our new beginning by painting an enormous wall that ran beside our split-level stairs with a colorful and bold sunrise.

  Brock was a caring and fun-loving stepfather. My early childhood memories of him are all tender and sweet. He and Mom had a nightly ritual of interlocking their hands, chairlike, and carrying me to my room, where they’d swing me onto my bed as I giggled uncontrollably and begged them to do it again. In Pumptown, my ballet lessons kept me busy, my Bisquick kept me fed, and my family kept me happy.

  Sadly for me, their marriage, lackluster and passionless, lasted less than two years. From my point of view, their marriage couldn’t have been better: Brock made an excellent stepfather. I was comfortable around him and often found solace simply sharing space in the room with him while we each busied ourselves with our own activities. He would sit cross-legged on the armchair and read the paper and I would sprawl nearby on the floor and play with my My Little Pony collection, my Legos, or my M&M’s. It was a six-year-old’s dream.

  We were both at the kitchen table—me propped up a little by the phone book booster seat and Brock beside me—when I taught myself how to multiply by strategically placing my M&M’s in rows. “Brock, is three times three nine?” I asked, wide-eyed, as I stared at my multicolored chocolate-shelled masterpiece. Brock was wildly impressed by my findings, and his exuberant validation resulted in an ear-to-ear smile that I could not shake for days. (I always knew that M&M’s were magical.)

  When Mom and Brock decided to call it a day, Mom couldn’t stomach the task of breaking my heart, and so it was Brock who was saddled with the thankless job of telling me that their marriage had fallen apart. He sat me down on the big brown corduroy armchair in their bedroom—a resilient chair that later followed me to each of my many Manhattan apartments throughout my twenties.

  He knelt down and I could see the big hairless circle on top of his head. “Your mom and I are splitting up, Jazz,” he whisper-said, and I remember feeling like I was kicked in the stomach, then promptly reminding myself that breaking up is just what adults do. I didn’t protest; I simply hung my head in defeat and stared down at my lap, bit my lower lip, clutched at the material of my Strawberry Shortcake dress, and let sadness and confusion dull my fluorescence. Turned out that corduroy chair was more resilient than I was.

  Just like that, Brock was gone, and Mom was single again. Pumptown Corners lost some of its sparkle, and a new emptiness seeped its way into my days.

  —

  Still, despite the rockiness of her relationships with men, my mother’s love for Jeremy and me was consistent and all encompassing. Though it was my grandmother who provided me with steadiness, taught me about unconditional adoration in the very special way that only grandmas can perfect, and allowed me to eat all the chocolate-covered jelly rings I could manage, Mom was a solid force. She did not always have it easy—and yet she constantly put us ahead of everything else. Perhaps she did so t
o a flawed degree, but she was wild about us and always made sure to provide us with support and compassion.

  When she was newly divorced from Brock, Mom took Jeremy and me on vacation. In my memory, we were living it up in the lap of luxury—playing board games, going hiking, eating American cheese sandwiches on soft bread, acting out funny characters that Mom constantly created in order to keep us entertained. I was an adult before I found out Mom’s version of that trip: that the only thing she could afford was to take us to stay at a rustic cabin at a Boy Scout camp, off-season, and the whole place was filthy, bug infested, and nonfunctional. She later told me about how she carried me on her back up the barn ladder that led to the sleeping area, then draped clean blankets all over the muddy, splintery floor. I didn’t remember any of that—I only remembered being absolutely ecstatic about having my mom and brother all to myself, in this mystical place that was apparently falling to pieces around me without me noticing.

  Perhaps there’s validity to my memory of this trip being better than it actually was—I had my family to myself, which was all that mattered to me at the time—while my struggling mother remembers it as much worse. Someplace in the middle of those two memories is the truth, suspended somewhere in the mid-1980s like Punky Brewster’s messy pigtails, never to be untangled.

  When we returned from our luxury vacation, I felt the absence of Brock, and of life-as-I-knew-it. In school, I longed for my moody second-grade teacher, Mrs. Poppet, to take notice and ask me what was wrong. I certainly wouldn’t have known how to answer, but I craved the question. Moodiness aside, she was, after all, a mother herself, so didn’t that make her a parental figure by default? I wanted an adult, maternal or not, to simply acknowledge my reality, that things had shifted for me in a big way.