Traveling Mercies

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An appeal from the author Why you should become a Salon member. By Anne Lamott

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T A B L E_T A L K

Getting straight with those two humans who made you. Discuss your parents in the Mothers Who Think section of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

We believe you, Juanita (we think)
Susan Faludi, Susan Brownmiller, Katie Roiphe, Gloria Allred and others respond to Juanita Broaddrick's explosive charges
(03/03/99)

The road to hell was paved with handbags
By Susan McCarthy
An innocuous response to the key-stowage dilemma, or the first step on the slippery slope of obsessiveness? Carry a purse and find out
(03/02/99)

In the tub with Leadbelly
By Sarah Seager
An ex-punk rocker turned mother contemplates her latest passion, children's folk music
(03/01/99)

Mother Time
By Jennifer Bingham Hull
We have lots of some kinds of time, little of others -- which is why people who live outside this zone, including many politicians, don't understand our lives
(02/26/99)

Amnesia
By Sallie Tisdale
It's easy to pretend that we are not who we once were, to treat our painful condition as an echo of someone else's mistakes. Reading my teenage journals forced me to stop pretending
(02/25/99)

BROWSE THE WORD BY WORD ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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Salon Columnists

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_[_W O R D__B Y__W O R D_]
BY ANNE LAMOTT | I used to go to parties quite often, for the company and maybe a few free shots of the fermented mare's milk. When my father was still alive, I used to go with him to parties peopled by writers and musicians, and I'd feel honored to be there since I was underage and unpublished. And besides, when I was with my dad, it was like being the daughter of the king. But after he died, I mostly stopped going to parties at all. I would rather be home, all alone and feeling sorry for myself. (Alcoholics are the only people who want to be held and comforted when they're isolating.)

But I have gone to three parties recently. (I felt I had to go to all three, for reasons I won't go into here.) At two of these parties, I spent the entire time thinking about how much I hated everyone on earth and wondering what kind of nightmarish roommates one gets in heaven if one thinks such ugly thoughts: survivalists, jazzercise instructors, the GOP House managers and their ilky ilk. But at the third of these parties, with a good friend on either side, I realized once again that there is only one person any of us really hates. It's the gift our parents gave us that just keeps on giving. It's the potted plant of self-loathing they asked us to hold for a moment -- like one of those old "Candid Camera" setups where the innocent bystander is asked to hold a plant, or a cat, for a troubled but friendly stranger who then never shows up again. And so the nice person like me stands there holding the damn cat, wanting to do the right thing.

So, it was a birthday party that moved outdoors when the winter sun surprised us all one afternoon, and I plopped down on a rough wooden bench between these two old friends. Both are women in their 50s who had come alone. Both are brilliant, and a little fat.

One of them has always been zaftig from the waist down: Her granddaughter says to her with enthusiasm and admiration, "You have a great big butt!" But the second woman has always been thin and beautiful and ambitious, in a distinctly soft and soulful way. She has been considered a player in Hollywood, an actress turned director of art-house movies. Then she got cancer. She had surgery and chemo; then she went to convalesce at a nearby Zen center.

I had not seen her since then, but when I walked into this party, I saw that she had gained a lot of weight. Some of us old bulimics are like people at carnivals who can guess weights within two pounds. So I'm guessing 25 or 26 new pounds. I kept noticing her hands resting on the swell of her belly under a simple stylish black linen dress and I was secretly shocked. I know this does not make me look very spiritually evolved, but here goes anyway: It was like seeing Kate Moss with fat arms.

"You look so wonderful," I said. And that is true -- she looked stunning -- but what I wanted to say was, "Oh my God! You got fat!"

She has the most exquisite eyes: soft heathery green, stormy sea green.

"I'm used to you being so skinny," I said. "You look so much better." She really did; she looked softer, rounder, this big soft sweet pillow of tummy rising out of her dress. But I wanted to ask, "Would you mind coming into the bathroom with me and hopping up on the scales?"

It's a very complicated dynamic for me. In the last year, I have joined the big comfy underpants set, and it has taken me a year to stop thinking of myself as morbidly obese. People tell me I look normal now, but what I hear is that they think I look like Marlon Brando.

It's so automatic in me: I recently saw a beautiful woman I knew when I was still drinking, who betrayed one of my best friends. She used to be one of those shapely sylph types, and now -- this may sound harsh -- she looked like a really pretty manatee. And I thought, Hah hah!

So there I was at the party, with all my usual feelings of shyness and dread and social retardation, talking to these two women I've known forever and adore. And for a while I comforted myself by thinking, Well, at least my butt is not half as fat as HERS, and my stomach is not as fat as HERS. But then I'd feel misery, hold my little potted plant of shame.

N E X T_ P A G E: The eat-no-evil monkey