“Humiliated in national publication?” he read out loud. “What happened?”
“Ugh,” I said. “You don’t want to know.”
“No, really. I do. I think that’s the most unusual answer anyone’s ever given.”
“Well, my boyfriend…” I winced. “Ex-boyfriend. Excuse me. He’s writing this column for Moxie ”
“Good in Bed?” asked the doctor.
“Why, yes, I like to think so.”
The doctor blushed. “No… I mean…”
“Yeah, that’s the column Bruce writes. Don’t tell me you read it,” I said, thinking, if some fortysomething diet doctor had seen it, I could pretty much assume that everyone else in my life had, too.
“I actually clipped it out,” he told me. “I thought our patients might enjoy it.”
“What? Why?”
“Well, it was actually a fairly sensitive appreciation of… of…”
“A fat lady?” The doctor smiled. “He never called you that.”
“Just everything but.”
“So you’re in here because of the article?”
“Partly.”
The doctor looked at me.
“Okay, mostly. It’s just, I don’t… I never thought of myself… that way. As a larger woman. I mean, I know I am… larger… and I know I should lose weight. I mean, it’s not like I’m blind, or oblivious to the culture, and how Americans expect women to look…”
So you’re here because of America’s expectations?”
“I want to be thin.” He looked at me, waiting. “Well, thinner, anyhow.”
He flipped through my forms. “Your parents are overweight,” he said.
“Well… kind of. My mom’s a little heavy. My father, I haven’t seen in years. He had kind of a belly when he left, but…” I paused. The truth was, I didn’t know where my father was living, and it was always awkward when it came up. “I have no idea what he looks like now.”
The doctor looked up. “You don’t see him?”
“No.”
He scribbled a note. “How about your siblings?”
“Both skinny.” I sighed. “I’m the only one who got hit with the fat stick.”
The doctor laughed. “Hit with the fat stick. I’ve never heard it put quite that way.”
“Yeah, well, I got a million more of ‘em.”
He flipped some more. “You’re a reporter?”
I nodded. He flipped back. “Candace Shapiro… I’ve seen your byline.”
“Really?” This was a surprise. Most civilians skipped right over the bylines.
“You write about television sometimes.” I nodded. “You’re very funny. Do you like your job?”
“I love my job,” I said, and meant it. When I wasn’t obsessing over the high-pressure, in-the-public-eye nature of being a reporter, or scrapping for good assignments with territorial coworkers, and entertaining dreams of the muffin shop, I managed to have a good time. “It’s really fun. Interesting, challenging… all those things.”
He wrote something down in the folder. “And do you feel like your weight affects your job performance… how much money you make, how far you’ve advanced?”
I thought for a minute. “Not really. I mean, sometimes, some of the people I interview… you know, they’re thin, I’m not, I get a little jealous, maybe, or wonder if they think I’m lazy or whatever, and then I have to be careful when I write the articles, not to let the way I’m feeling affect what I say about them. But I’m good at my job. People respect me. Some of them even fear me. And it’s a union paper, so financially I’m okay.”
He laughed, and kept flipping, slowing at the psychology page.
“You were in therapy last year?”
“For about eight weeks,” I said.
“May I ask what for?”
I thought for a minute. There is no easy way to say to someone you’d just met that your mother had announced, at fifty-six, that she was gay. Especially not to someone who sounded like a thin, white James Earl Jones, and would probably be so tickled he’d repeat it out loud. Possibly even more than once.
“Family things,” I finally said.
He just looked at me.
“My mother was… in a new relationship, that was moving very quickly, and it kind of freaked me out.”
“And did the therapy help?”
I thought of the woman my HMO assigned me to, a mousy woman with Little Orphan Annie curls who wore her glasses chained around her neck and seemed a little bit afraid of me. Maybe hearing about the newly lesbian mother and my absent father within the first five minutes of taking my history was more than she’d planned on. She always had this vaguely cringing look, as if she feared that at any moment I would charge across her desk, knock her box of Kleenex to the floor, and try to throttle her.
“I guess so. The therapist’s main point was that I can’t change things other people in my family do, but I can change how I react to them.”
He scratched something in my folder. I tried to do a subtle lean so I could make some of it out, but he had the page tilted at a difficult angle. “Was that good advice?”
I shuddered inwardly, remembering how Tanya moved in six weeks after she and my mother had started dating, and her first act of residence was to move all of the furniture out of what had been my bedroom and replace it with her rainbow-striped sun catchers and self-help books, plus her two-ton loom. By way of saying thanks, she wove Nifkin a small striped sweater. Nifkin wore it once, then ate it.
“I guess so. I mean, the situation’s not perfect, but I’m sort of getting used to it.”
“Well, good,” he said, and flipped my folder closed. “Here’s the thing, Candace.”
“Cannie,” I said. “They only call me Candace when I’m in trouble.”
“Cannie, then,” he said. “We’re running a year-long study of a drug called sibutramin, which works somewhat the way phen-fen did. Did you ever take phen-fen?”
“No,” I said, “but there’s a lady in the lobby who misses it sorely.”
He smiled again. He had, I noticed, a dimple in his left cheek. “I consider myself warned,” he said. “Now, sibutramin’s a lot milder than phen-fen, but it does the same thing, which is basically to fool your brain into thinking that you’re full longer. The good news is, it doesn’t have the same health risks and potential complications that have been associated with phen-fen. We’re looking for women who are at least thirty percent above their ideal weight…”
“… and you’re delighted to inform me that I qualify,” I said sourly.
He smiled. “Now, the studies that have been done already show patients losing between five and ten percent of their body weight in a year’s time.”
I did some quick calculations. Losing ten percent of my body weight was still not going to put me anywhere near the weight I wanted to be.
“Does that disappoint you?”
Was he kidding? It was so frustrating! We had the technology to replace hearts, to put septuagenarians on the moon, to give old geezers erections, and the best modern science could do for me was a lousy ten percent?
“I guess it’s better than nothing,” I said.
“Ten percent is a lot better than nothing,” he said seriously. “Studies show that even losing as little as eight pounds can have a dramatic effect on blood pressure and cholesterol.”
“I’m twenty-eight years old. My blood pressure and cholesterol are fine. I’m not worried about my health.” I heard my voice rising. “I want to be thin. I need to be thin.”
“Candace… Cannie…”
I took a deep breath and rested my forehead in my hands. “I’m sorry.”
He put his hand on my arm. It felt nice. It was probably something they’d taught him to do in medical school: If patient becomes hysterical at prospect of relatively minute weight loss, place one hand gently on forearm I moved my arm away.
“Look,” he said. “Realistically, given your heredity, and your frame, it may be that you were just never meant to be a thin person. And that’s not the worst thing in the world.”
I didn’t lift my head. “Oh, no?”
“You’re not sick. You’re not in any pain”
I bit my lip. He had no idea. I remember when I was fourteen or so, on summer vacation somewhere by the beach, walking down a sidewalk with my sister, my slender sister, Lucy. We were wearing baseball caps and shorts and bathing suits and flip-flops. We were eating ice-cream cones. I could close my eyes and see the way my tanned legs looked against my white shorts, the sensation of the ice cream melting on my tongue. A kindly-looking white-haired lady had approached us with a smile. I thought she’d say something like how we reminded her of her granddaughters, or made her miss her own sister and the fun they’d had together. Instead, she nodded at my sister, walked up to me, and pointed at the ice cream cone. “You don’t need that, dearie,” she’d said. “You should be on a diet.” I remembered things like that. A lifetime’s accretion of unkindnesses, all of those little lingering hurts that I carried around like stones sewn into my pockets. The price you paid for being a Larger Woman. You don’t need that. Not in pain, he’d said. What a joke.
The doctor cleared his throat. “Let’s talk about motivation for a minute.”
“Oh, I’m very motivated.” I lifted my head, managed a small, crooked smile. “Can’t you tell?”
He smiled back. “We’re also looking for people who have the right kind of motivation.” He shut my folder and crossed his hands over his nonexistent belly. “You probably know this already, but people who have the best long-term success with weight management decide to lose weight for themselves. Not for their spouses, or their parents, or because their high-school reunion’s coming up, or they’re embarrassed over something that somebody wrote.”
We stared at each other silently.
“I’d like to see,” he said, “if you can come up with some reasons to lose weight, other than the fact that you’re angry and upset right now.”
“I’m not angry,” I said angrily.
He didn’t smile. “Can you think of other reasons?”
“I’m miserable,” I blurted. “I’m lonely. Nobody’s going to date me looking like this. I’m going to die alone, and my dog’s going to eat my face, and no one will find us until the smell seeps out under the door.”
“I find that highly unlikely,” he said with a smile.
“You don’t know my dog,” I said. “So am I in? Do I get drugs? Can I have some now?”
He smiled at me. “We’ll be in touch.” I stood up. He pulled a stethoscope around his neck and patted the examining table. “They’ll draw some blood on your way out. I just need to listen to your heart for a minute. Hop up here for me, please.”
I sat up straight on the crinkly white paper on top of the table and closed my eyes as his hands moved against my back. The first time a man had touched me with any regard or kindness since Bruce. The thought made my eyes fill. Don’t do it, I thought fiercely, don’t cry now.
“Breathe in,” Dr. K. said calmly. If he had any idea what was going on, he didn’t let on. “Nice deep breath… and hold it… and let it out.”
“Is it still there?” I asked, staring at his head, bent over, as he wedged the stethoscope beneath my left breast. And then, before I could stop myself, “Does it sound broken?”
He straightened up, smiling. “Still there. Not broken. In fact, it sounds like you have a strong and healthy heart.” He offered his hand. “I think you’re going to be fine,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.”
Out in the lobby, Lily the daisy-shirt woman was still wedged into her chair, half of a plain bagel balanced on one knee. “So?” she asked.
“They’re going to let me know,” I said. There was a piece of paper in her hand. I was unsurprised to see that it was a Xeroxed copy of “Loving a Larger Woman” by Bruce Guberman. “You seen this?” she asked me.
I nodded.
“This is great,” she said. “This guy really gets it.” She shifted as much as her seat would allow her and looked me right in the eye. “Can you imagine the idiot who’d let someone like this get away?”
FOUR
I think every person who is single should have a dog. I think the government should step in and intervene: If you’re not married or coupled up, whether you’ve been dumped or divorced or widowed or whatever, they should require you to proceed immediately to the pound nearest you and select an animal companion.
Dogs give your days a rhythm and a purpose. You can’t sleep ridiculously late, or stay out all day and all night, when there’s a dog depending on you.
Every morning, no matter what I’d drunk, what I’d done, or whether or not my heart had been broken, Nifkin woke me up by gently applying his nose to my eyelids. He is a remarkably understanding little dog, willing to sit patiently on the couch with his paws crossed gracefully in front of him while I sang along to My Fair Lady or clipped recipes from Family Circle, which I subscribed to even though, as I liked to joke, I had neither family nor circle.
Nifkin is a small and neatly made rat terrier, white with black spots and brown markings on his long, spindly legs. He weighs precisely ten pounds and looks like an anorexic and extremely high-strung Jack Russell, with a Doberman pinscher’s ears, pointing permanently upright, tacked onto his head. He’s a secondhand dog. I inherited him from three sportswriters I knew at my first paper. They were renting a house, and they decided that a house required a dog. So they got Nifkin from the pound believing that he was actually a Doberman pinscher puppy. Of course, he was no such thing… just a full-grown rat terrier with oversized ears. Truthfully, he looks like pieces of a few different dogs that someone put together as a joke. And he’s got a permanent, Elvis-like sneer on his face— the result, the story goes, from when his mother bit him when he was a puppy. But I refrain from remarking on his shortcomings when he’s within earshot. He’s also very sensitive about his looks. Just like his mother.
The sportswriters spent six months alternately showering him with attention, letting him lap beer out of his water bowl, or leaving him penned up in their kitchen, completely ignored, all the while waiting for him to grow into his Doberman pinscher-hood. Then one of them got a job at the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, and the other two decided to split up and move to their own apartments. Neither one wanted to take along anxious little Nifkin, who did not in any way resemble a Doberman pinscher.
Employees could run free classified ads in the paper, and their ad, “One dog, small, spotted, free to a good home” ran for two weeks with no takers. Desperate, with their bags packed and security deposits already paid on their new places, the sportswriters double-teamed me in the company cafeteria. “It’s you or the pound again,” they said.