T A B L E__T A L K What books are worth losing precious sleep for ... Thrillers? Classics? Erotica? Table Talk. - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Talking to strangers
Drama Queens
The nanny trial:
Casanovas who kill
Bringing up bébé
- - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
|
My fears of being overweight, which commenced when I was 9 or 10, have always been linked, in my mind, to my mother. She is a glamorous woman with exquisite taste and a sumptuous wardrobe. Physically, I resemble her to an almost uncanny degree; people have been doing double takes at the sight of us for as long as I can remember. Perhaps because she and my father were divorced before I was 3, my sense of my mother and myself as a unit, a pair, an inseparable duo, feels ancient and inviolable. When I was 5, we wore matching two-piece bathing suits. I regarded my future stepfather as an unwelcome interloper in our small, simple world. "He's just coming over for a bite to eat," my mother would assure me, to which I would reply, "OK , one bite. And then make him leave." But they married when I was 4 and moved to San Francisco, taking me far from my father, who was still in Chicago. He, too, remarried, and as both families began having more children, I struggled, alongside much of my generation, in the role of stepchild, so perilous in fairy tales and in life. My unease made me cleave all the more to my mother -- the unit of us two was the only one in my life that still felt intact. I was an average little girl, not skinny, not fat, with white blond hair, an enormous grin and an unrelenting sweet tooth. I remember my mother suggesting at some point that I hold in my stomach when I stood; not only would this look better, she said, but it would strengthen my stomach muscles so that pretty soon, my stomach would stay tucked in of its own accord (I'm still waiting for that part). This missive from the world of adults was something I took quite seriously: I was careful to hold in my stomach. "Something odd happened in the '60s," my mother recalls. "Fashions became very childlike. The models all had these knobby legs and patent leather shoes ... women suddenly wanted to look like prepubescent girls." Considering that many consumers of fashion in the 1960's were women like my mother, bred to inhabit a world that was now in staggering transformation, this yearning to return to puberty -- to start over -- seems deeply reasonable. My mother was fashionable; she subscribed to Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and she followed their leads -- followed, too, the ascension of those skinny, anonymous models from the status of clothes hangers to that of stars. If feminine power in the '50s was measured in overt sexuality, the ability to attract a man (a man who would take care of you for life), in the '60s, a woman's power became vested in her ability to regulate her sexuality -- most obviously with birth control, but also by curbing the womanliness that would land her in the kitchen slinging pork chops, as my mother's had. In the selfishness of childhood, I could not imagine my mother doing anything but serving us, and she never implied that she would have preferred to do otherwise. But I think I sensed her frustration. By the time I was 12, her marriage to my stepfather was stretched tight over fissures that would ultimately bring its collapse. He was gone a lot on business; she cooked dinner for my brother and me every night ("Chicken again?" we were forever whining) and did enough laundry to fill an airplane hangar. Recently I asked my mother what she might have done if she hadn't married so young (she returned to the workplace in her early 40s, and is now a successful art dealer) and she mentioned languages, diplomacy, Europe. I can't blame her. As a child, I felt a deep aversion for my mother's life, and that aversion filled me with guilt -- and fear. I adored my mother. She was all I had. A heightened consciousness of food first seized our household in the early '70s, when my mother read Adele Davis and banished Quisp and Lucky Charms forever from our shelves. Hostess Ho Hos and Ding Dongs yielded to Fruit Rolls and Tiger's Milk Bars. My brother and I were fed spoonfuls of cod liver oil each morning before we left for school; I spit mine onto the garage floor, where it mingled nicely with the oil stains ("It smells like fish in here," my stepfather would muse, bewildered). And this health consciousness was duly followed by a growing awareness of weight. The flat green scale in my parents' bedroom acquired Delphic powers; it revealed whether you had been Good or Bad. My stepfather transformed into a fanatical runner, and when the early antecedents of aerobics came along (before Jane Fonda, who, incidentally, was a college classmate of my mother's), my mother embraced them with a fervor. My parents would marvel at snapshots of themselves from the 60's -- look at that double chin, that flabby stomach -- as if some prior blindness, some naive vulnerability in themselves had now been cast off. I took my Fruit Rolls and Tiger's Milk Bars to school and traded them for Ho Hos and Twinkies, which I wolfed down like a refugee receiving succor during wartime. And then I worried. My love of food, and of sweets in particular, had begun to feel dangerous. I had absorbed the notion of Good and Bad with regard to eating, and knew that I was Bad. And perversely, the more entangled food became with virtue, or my lack thereof, the more tenuous its connection to satisfying hunger, so that rather than quelling my desire to eat, these ruminations made me crave food always, whether I was hungry or not. By 13, I was eating a lot and it was starting to show. Now, mingled with the general wretchedness of adolescence was the specter of fatness, which loomed before me terrifyingly, compounding my sense of powerlessness and unease in the world. I began to soothe myself with fantasies, visions in which I became popular, irresistible, strong, like the models in my mother's fashion magazines (which I devoured), visions in which, above all, I was searingly, mightily, unstoppably thin. The article on anorexia, intended as a warning, functioned for me as a how-to manual. I remember the euphoria of finding myself lighter on the bathroom scale, my sense of joyous and secret achievement when the waistbands of my pants hung loose and my ribs became distinct as fingers and people asked my favorite of all questions, "Have you lost weight?" I felt as if I were finally coming into focus, hard and sharp and light, released from the muffled padding of my sadness. My sudden 14-year-old weight loss made my stepfather apoplectic, but my mother wasn't nearly as troubled by it -- not as troubled as she would have been, say, had I gained weight. Fat meant sloppy, out of control, but thin meant sleek and powerful. She joined my stepfather's bullying efforts to make me eat, but on a tacit, subterranean level, I believed that I sensed her approval, and luxuriated in it. Because my mother herself was thin, and dieted, I felt a kinship with her, as if losing weight were an organic feature of the adult world she inhabited. At the same time, in craving strength and power, I sought to leave behind the life my mother stood for -- to enter the arena of the worldly, rather than the chicken basting and laundry folding. And I felt, in some buried way, that my mother wanted that for me, too. It is in the body of a true anorexic that the irony of equating thinness with power becomes grotesquely obvious: shriveled, weak, married to a project of self-erasure that often ends in death. But for those of us who struggled with an undue consciousness of food and weight without destroying ourselves, those of us for whom time and experience and whole sections of our lives were measured in fatness and thinness, in Good and Bad, for us, too, there are ironies. And the main one is this: Our route to worldly power involved shrinking the world to match the dimensions of our own small (but never small enough) bodies, and then dominating those. A conspirator against us could not have planned it better. How did it happen? For myself, I have an idea: As much as I longed to triumph, to have adventures, to succeed in ways my mother had not, a separate part of me was terrified to betray her. Without my mother, whom did I have? What would I be? By mistaking my physical self for the world and exerting my power over that, I could experience the sensations of triumph while remaining essentially harmless: preoccupied, physically weak, inhabiting a world more narrowly circumscribed, in these ways, than my mother's had been. When I think on those years, the waste of time is what I most regret; all that thought and worry, those physical trials. I could have learned Greek or Latin with that time. I could have built a boat and sailed around the world. But these regrets are subsumed, finally, by sheer relief at having been released from that tiny box of thought, subtly, almost without my noticing, somewhere around the time I published a novel. That was my first, tentative brush with the world beyond myself, and it led me to imagine what real power might feel like. An eating disorder is partly a disease of consciousness, of
perspective -- hence its insidiousness, and also its contagion. Attitudes
toward food are taught and learned, but once food becomes entangled with
notions of good and evil, it can be nearly impossible to extricate. Nor
can one give it up altogether. Eating disorders have become part of our
culture, and they'll multiply and reproduce with lives of their own. We
can't take them back. But unlike our mothers, who were as blindsided by
their arrival as we, I and my generation know exactly what they are. I
don't have children yet, but when Marcia spelled out D-I-E-T, I made myself
a promise: If I ever have a daughter, I'll keep the cult of food
consciousness outside her range of vision for as long as I can, so that
when it finds her some other way, as it surely will, she won't see me as
its silent advocate. And then I can help her fight it. I made that
promise as I watched Marcia's little girl finish eating in peace. Jennifer Egan is the author of " The Invisible Circus," a novel, and "Emerald City," a collection of short stories. She lives in New York. Is it possible for parents to keep their own food issues from affecting their children? Share your thoughts in Table Talk. |
Arts & Entertainment | Books | Comics | Life | News | People
Politics | Sex | Tech & Business | Audio
The Free Software Project | The Movie Page
Letters | Columnists | Salon Plus
Copyright © 2000 Salon.com All rights reserved.
