The Year I Went Pear-Shaped (4 page)

“Thanks Arabella,” we all mumbled as we stood up and left her office, taking our drink cans, pads and pens with us.

My phone was already ringing as I got back to my desk. “Please God, don’t let it be a PR consultant pushing a ‘new, exciting’ breakfast cereal or some ‘amazing’ new yogurt,” I whispered under my breath.

I took a deep breath and lifted the receiver to my ear.

“Hello, Darla speaking.”

“Hi Angel, it’s me Mummy!”

“Mum! Hi, how are you doing?”

“I’m very good, I won’t keep you long, I know you’re at work, I just wanted to remind you that it was Uncle Bert’s 70th birthday next week, you will send him a card won’t you?”

Mum was always ringing to remind me about someone’s birthday or anniversary, which was lucky because I would’ve never remembered otherwise. I had tried to keep a birthday book for a while but find they don’t work unless you actually look in them more than once a year.

“Sure Mum,” I said as I wrote a note to myself in my diary to buy a card. “I’ll do it today.”

“Good girl. Anyway, how are you? Any news?”

“Not really, same old. Work is good, living with Anita is good fun but not much to report really.”

“Seeing anyone.”

Oh God.

“No Mum, no one special.”

I was pretty sure Mum didn’t want to know about the quickie I’d had at a pub gig last week with the bass player in the headline band during their 15 minute break. There’s something about a man on stage. Unfortunately once you get them off stage much of that disappears so I was soon thanking the heavens it was a 15 minute break and not half an hour. Still, it was better than spending the time being crushed at the bar in the small hope of managing to attract the attention of one of the two bar staff who were trying to serve the 600 people who rushed up at once -- one of whom you could pretty much bet had just started that night.

“Oh dear, well, how’s your weight going then?”

“That’s the same too, no change.”

“Are you trying to diet Darla?”

“Mum, you know that I am constantly, permanently trying to diet.”

“Yes, but are you trying hard enough? Your Aunty Gladys just lost 12 kilos on some blood group diet where you only eat certain foods based on what your blood group is, she’s looking fantastic, do you want me to send it to you?”

“Sure, why not. I’ll give it a bash.”

“Good, I think I might try it for a while too, we can do it together.”

“Yep, great, that’ll be good.” Even though Mum had hardly an ounce of fat to spare from her long, lean frame, she was always on some diet or other.

And maybe it would be good. Maybe this diet would be the one that provided the magic key that unlocked the secret of losing ten kilos. This time it just might work.

“Ok, well, must fly, my yoga class up at the gym starts in an hour.”

“Sure, talk soon then Mum, love you.”

“Love you too Darling.”

And she hung up. I imagined her whizzing around the house on her designer high heels getting ready for her yoga class. She went to the most exclusive women-only gym on the Gold Coast, one that let it’s well-shod clients not only leave their toddlers at the inhouse creche but also leave their spoilt pooches at the inhouse kennel. It was a testament to the clientele that the creche was usually empty while the kennel was permanently stuffed with dogs of every description, all wearing designer collars from Dogue, the store that did high fashion for canines.

Mum never went anywhere without Triska, her tiny, pure white pekinese. Despite being spoilt rotten, Triska was the sweetest little dog. I teased Mum that she was a replacement grandchild and it was probably true.

Over the years Mum and Joseph had risen up the social ladder on the Gold Coast and now were like minor royalty. They had made a fortune in clever property investment plus a sideline in swimming pool installation. Their latest business was a chain of surf schools up the coast to satisfy the never-ending demand from tourists and travellers wanting to learn how to ‘catch a wave’.

With financial success well under their belts, they were now looking for new challenges and Joseph had recently launched a campaign to run for local government. Mum, on the other hand, used her power for good through lobbying -- not to mention bribing when necessary -- the local government members who were already in power.

Her heart was in the right place though, she was a strong and vocal supporter of environmental issues and animal rights. She’d virtually singlehandedly saved a rare species of tree frog by campaigning against the construction of a highway through the one area where the frogs still lived. But, rather than chain herself to a tree, as was the usual modus operandi of green activists, she had entertained, charmed and seduced -- platonically speaking of course -- the local councillor in charge of making a decision on the highway.

She says it was her brandy and dark chocolate trifle that won the day and saved the frogs. As the final attack in her plan of action, Mum had thrown yet another dinner for the councillor, Tom Beveridge, and his wife Yvonne. After Tom’s seventh glass of port, specially imported from Portugal, a large crystal bowl of Mum’s famous trifle and some gentle flirting, she says he would’ve left his wife and eloped with her to Slovenia if she’d suggested it.

The frogs were saved.

Chapter 5: Food as a Drug

Dear Darla,

Sometimes during sex I just want it to be over and I know I’m not going to orgasm so I fake it. Is that really bad?

Dear Lindsay,

In a perfect world, you wouldn’t have to fake it. You wouldn’t have to lie about something that is at the very heart of the most intimate act two people can share. But, lets get real about it shall we Lindsay, the truth is that orgasms have been faked by millions of women for millions of reasons ever since the human race took its first breath all those centuries ago. Maybe you don’t want to hurt his feelings, or you want to finish up in time to watch the Sunday night movie, or you don’t want him to think you’re frigid…the list is endless. Personally, I think if you fake it once in a while, big hairy deal. Put it in the same basket as lying about the price of those shoes and keeping Mars Bars hidden in your car for sneaky treats. But if you’re faking all the time, that’s a problem because you’re denying yourself a wonderful and satisfying sex life. If that’s the case, your next question is whether it’s him, you, or a bit of both? Is he crap in the sack -- ‘doona dysfunctional’ as I like to put it? Or are you the one with the sexual hang-ups? From here the answers could lie in sex therapy, counselling, or a good long chat. Just don’t ignore it. All the best!

In my last year at Rosewarne High, when Gordon Worsley had diligently worked his way through three quarters of the females in the senior year, I reached my fat peak of 94kgs. The only clothes I could wear were kaftan-like dresses bought from shops that specialised in ‘larger ladies’. For some reason, all the clothes made for us ‘big girls’ came in exactly the same style, i.e., box-like, and covered in the patterns so loud you could hear them scream.

Thin girls, on the other hand, had a world of choice spread out in front of them! Everything from soft silks to figure-hugging Lycra, floaty chiffon, satins and lace, clinging woollens, stretch knits, gabardine, denim, polyester, cotton…the list was endless! But for us big girls the only option was the kind of canvas that they make circus tents out of. I used to have nightmares about trapeze artists swinging from the gusset of my knickers. And the people who ‘designed’ - and I use that word loosely - clothes for us ‘big girls’ all seemed to have a penchant for violent oranges, puce greens, and vomit yellow. Colours that clashed like cymbals played by a roomful of toddlers.

And if the pattern didn't resemble a psychedelic nightmare brought on by an LSD flashback, then it would be vertical stripes, which, according to all the weight loss magazines, were ‘slimming’. Yeah right, like painting vertical stripes on an elephant means the other animals of the jungle will keep mistaking it for a gazelle.

I always wondered if these ‘designers’ for "larger ladies" optimistically hoped they could deflect the onlookers’ attention away from the fact that the person beneath the satanic rainbow tent-dress was the size of a house. Well, let me tell you, it didn’t work. All the orange and green floral swirls, or vertical stripes, in the world couldn’t have hidden the fact that I had enough blubber hanging off my arms, thighs, breasts, chin and stomach to feed an Eskimo tribe throughout a tough winter and halfway into the following spring. And was I happy? What do you think? My self-esteem was zero; I hated my body and often cried myself to sleep at night. I couldn’t bear seeing myself naked and would even hang a towel over the bathroom mirror whenever I had to take a shower but even then there was no escaping myself. I would look down helplessly at breasts that hung like huge balloons filled with water, resting on a huge, white expanse of flabby tummy. To see my pubic hair I needed to bend forward and lift up the edge of my stomach but I didn’t do that very often. There was no need - what did I need to see it for since nobody else ever did? It may as well have been boarded up with a ‘closed till hell freezes over’ sign.

So, in the summer of my final high school year, when all the other girls were planning dresses for the end-of-year formal, hanging out on the beach all weekend in tiny bikinis, flirting with guys, and carefully pruning their pubic hair into heart shapes, I was at home watching my Love On The Wards video tapes over and over again, or dreaming about Gordon Worsley while sitting in McDonald’s reading a Mills & Boon romance carefully covered by the jacket of some worthy novel from my parent’s book shelf. McDonald’s is a fat girl’s heaven. Not just because of the endless supply of dirt-cheap burgers and ice-cream sundaes but also because it's air-conditioned. A girl of my size couldn’t be out in the heat of a Sydney summer for more than ten minutes at a time without drowning small animals in the sweat that ran off my hulking frame.

That summer, the summer when my fatness peaked, it was even hotter than usual and in a desperate attempt to cool down, I took one of Mum’s king-size bed sheets, cut a hole in the top for a head and wore it around the house like a huge poncho. Whenever I came into the room in my sheet-dress, Joseph used to shout out,  ‘Man the hatches! Iceberg ahoy!’ and pretend he was on the Titanic. After he’d done this every day for 24 days straight I told him to shut up which was all the excuse he needed to fly into a rage. Shouting about what an ungrateful little bitch I was and how I couldn’t take a joke.

Other times he’d call me the Great White Mope. I think he picked that one up from telly, he couldn’t have come with it by himself.

‘Don’t tell me you’re eating again?’ he’d bellow out from the lounge if he heard me trying to tiptoe around the kitchen. Like a malicious mosquito, he never let up.

‘Who ate that leftover chicken breast?’ he’d demand, looking at me. ‘Who’s eaten one of the biscuits?you'll never find a man if you stay so fat! Are you one of them lesbians?’

Joseph was a food Nazi. He was obsessive in keeping a record of everything in the kitchen and with a thick, black felt-pen would mark the level on bottles of chocolate sauce, lemonade or whatever, so he could tell if anyone (me) had sneaked some behind his back. He claimed that he only did it for my own good. He’d count the slices of bread in the bag, weigh the container of ice cream after any had been eaten and write the new weight on the lid. He would count the number of chocolates in a box and how many biscuits were in the tin, making a note of it all.

The hate between us raged as this food war. He might’ve been older and more powerful but I was smarter than him and took great pleasure in cleverly hiding my tracks and fooling him so he didn’t know I’d eaten an entire loaf of bread and half a kilo of peanut butter virtually under his nose. Yeah, did I ever show him! I'd be fat and miserable just to spite him.

Apart from snide swipes and insults, Joseph and I generally didn’t speak to each other unless there was no other option.

He thought I was lazy, greedy, fat and ugly.

I thought he was a stupid, small-minded, bullying control freak.

Suffice to say my teen years weren’t the happiest in the world. And as the food war raged with Joseph, I got fatter and fatter. My life totally sucked and I was convinced it would continue to suck until I lost weight.

But for some reason -- call it desperate hope -- I honestly believed that I was in some kind of ‘waiting room’ for life and just beyond the door was my real, happy, successful life, which would begin as soon as I lost that pesky 40kgs. Then I’d get the great boyfriend, the fabulous job involving overseas travel and tons of money, the amazing friends, and invitations to all the coolest parties.

With this in mind, I would get up every morning determined that that was the day everything would change.  That was the day it would all just click into place and I’d start losing weight.

But I couldn’t lose an ounce. Even though when I wasn’t sneaking food from under Joseph’s nose, I’d be earnestly trying to stick to whichever diet Mum had me on that week. And even though every morning Mum would weigh me and give me a pep talk about how it was going to be different that day, how today was a new beginning, how today I really could do it! And even though every morning I’d resolve to stick to the diet and lose weight so that finally my real life could begin. I never did. It was never different. Every day wound up the same. I’d start with a tiny, calorie controlled breakfast and miniscule lunch but the minute I got in the door from school at 3.45pm, tired and starving, the binge monster took over. And in the evenings, the food war with Joseph took hold.

I was a dieting Jekyll and Hyde, religiously good while anyone was looking but as soon as I was alone I would uncontrollably shovel food into my mouth with my hands, so fast that I couldn’t even taste it. While I shovelled, everything else was forgotten - there was nothing in the world except me and that packet of biscuits, or container of ice cream. The problem was, and every addict will tell you this, as soon as I came down back to planet Earth when the last bite had been swallowed, reality rushed back bringing with it even more guilt and self-disgust. What else was there to do but start eating again?