I already knew that I had small eyes. Us Weekly told me. Thank God for that because before the article I thought my eyes were fairly normal and I treated them as such. Without their proper diagnosis, I couldn’t apply the correct antidote to disguise this flaw. It was a piece on beauty and how the reader, if she identified with a particular flaw that could be seen on a celebrity, could deemphasize the problem. I had, “small, close-together eyes.” I took their advice and have since applied dark swooping upward lines at the corners to lessen the appearance of the smallness and roundness of my close-together, beady little eyes.
“Anyway. It was pretty funny.”
“That doesn’t sound funny to me.”
By the furrow in her brow, I could tell that unless I left the room I would be listening to another lecture—this time about how the L’Oréal executives aren’t the experts and how I’m perfect the way I am. I would have had to nod my head and pretend to agree with her even though we both knew that I wasn’t perfect and that L’Oréal clearly are the experts.
“I’m so sorry, AC, but I gotta go to bed because I have to get up early. You got everything you need? You good?”
“Yeah. I’ll go to bed in a minute. And I won’t see you before I leave, I guess, but I’m here if you want to talk. Call me anytime, okay?”
“Okay. Good night.” I bent down and hugged her. I adored AC. She had only ever wanted the best for me. Unfortunately, she didn’t understand that what was best for me before getting the show and what was best for me now were two different things.
I glanced at the treadmill as I passed the guest bedroom door on my way to the bathroom. Get on the treadmill. I couldn’t even imagine how many calories were in those three glasses of wine. The voice in my head told me that I was lazy, that I didn’t deserve a day off, but there was nothing I could do about it and so I brushed my teeth and slipped into bed.
Lying in bed was always the worst time of the day. If I hadn’t done all that I could do to help myself, I imagined what the insides of my body were doing. As I lay motionless and waiting for sleep, I stared at the ceiling and imagined molecular energy like the scientific renditions I’d seen in science class as a kid, shaped like hectagons and forming blocks of fat in my body—honeycomb parasites attaching to my thighs. Or I’d see fat in a cooling frying pan and imagined the once vital liquid energy slowly coagulating into cold, white fat, coating the red walls in my body like a virus. The unused calories in my body caused me anxiety because I was just lying there, passively allowing the fat to happen, just as I had passively allowed myself to keep ballooning to 130 pounds. But did I have the energy to get out of bed and do sit-ups? The wine had made me lazy. I had the anxiety, but I was too lethargic to relieve myself of it by working out. I could’ve thrown up. But if I threw up the wine, Ann might have heard and then she’d never get off my case. If I threw up, then she’d feel validated and I’d feel stupid because that’s not what I did anymore. I was healthy now. I had the willpower not to crash diet and then binge and purge. I had solved that problem.
I got out of bed and onto the floor to start my sit-ups. I couldn’t think that I had solved the problem of my weight fluctuating if I just lay in bed allowing the sugar in the wine to turn into fat. As I began my crunches, I heard Ann getting ready for bed. I could hear her checking her messages on her cell phone and I could vaguely make out a man’s voice on the other end. As she turned out the light and got into the bed that I’d moved against the wall to make way for the treadmill, I couldn’t help but wish I were her. I wished I were a student living in New York, dating and going to parties. I wished I could travel to another city and stay over at a friend’s house without worrying about what I was going to eat. I wished I could just eat because I was hungry. I wished my life wasn’t about how I looked especially because how I looked was my least favorite part of myself. I wished I had a life where I could meet someone I could marry.
18
What did you eat last night?
I awoke to this question in a room that was still slightly unfamiliar even though I had lived in the new apartment for over a month. As I calmed myself by running through the list of foods I’d eaten the day before, I noticed a crack on the bedroom ceiling where it met the wall and was beginning to run toward the window that faced the yellow desert that was the wall of the Sunset 5. Not only was the bedroom still slightly unfamiliar to me, but the whole downstairs level also, as I only ate and slept on the first floor, spending most of my waking hours upstairs in the attic. My treadmill was upstairs in the attic and it was beckoning me as it always did after I had completed my mental calculations of calories in and out. The treadmill was really the only thing up there and was perfectly centered in the attic, between the wall of windows that showcased the industrial city that was the roof of the Sunset 5 and the east windows through which I could see all the way downtown. The wall opposite the smokestacks acted as a bulletin board where I had taped pieces of paper. Because the walls would soon be replastered and repainted, they were not precious; they had no value other than as a place to put my thoughts. Mostly the pieces of paper were exaggerated to-do lists. I say “exaggerated” because they said things that were more like goals that I wanted to achieve than things that needed to be done. The largest piece of paper with the boldest writing stated, I WILL BE 105 POUNDS BY CHRISTMAS. Another stated, I WILL STAR IN A BIG-BUDGET MOVIE NEXT SUMMER.
Starring in a movie had only recently become important to me, as Lucy Liu had just gotten Charlie’s Angels. Suddenly being a cast member on Ally McBeal didn’t seem to be enough anymore. Everyone at work was reading movie scripts and going on auditions. I often recited my audition lines while I was on the treadmill. I recited them out loud, loudly, over the noisy whirring and the thud of my footfall as I jogged at a 5.5/1 incline. I also put a TV up there with a VCR so I could run and watch movies, which was so much better than sitting to watch them. I had discovered that I could do a lot on the treadmill. I could read books and scripts and knit on the treadmill.
As I began my morning workout, I looked over at the cards on the left of the to-do list which ran down the length of the wall.
111
110
109
108
107
106
105
I was 111 pounds. Each time I lost a pound I took the card off the wall. It helped keep me focused and it helped me to remember that once I’d achieved the new lower weight and the card stating my previous weight was gone, that I could never weigh that much again; that the old weight was gone. It was no longer who I was. It was getting more difficult to lose weight as I got thinner, so I needed all the incentive and motivation I could muster. Putting my weight on the wall was a clever thing to do as it always needed to be in the forefront of my mind, otherwise I might’ve forgotten and walked on the treadmill instead of run, sat instead of paced. I once saw a loft where a famous writer lived, and all over the wall was his research for the novel he was writing. He described the book to me as his life’s work, his magnum opus. I felt like controlling my weight was my magnum opus, the most important product of my brain and was worthy of devoting a wall to its success.
I liked doing my morning workout in the attic even though I lived next to a Crunch gym. When I first moved into the apartment I went to Crunch often, but I discovered that I didn’t like showing my body to the other patrons who were no doubt looking at me as critically as I was looking at them. I hated the thought of them recognizing me and telling their friends that Nelle Porter had a round stomach or that when I walked on the treadmill the tops of my thighs bulged out from side to side. What I hated most about going next door to Crunch was the possibility of paparazzi finding me on the way home after a workout, when I looked bloated and my sweatpants were clinging to my thighs. So instead of subjecting myself to the worry of being seen by people and cameras, I preferred to use my treadmill in the attic or to run up and down the stairs next to the elevator for exercise. Sometimes, if I felt particularly energetic, I would time myself as I ran the six flights that connected all the floors of my apartment building. I would run up and down, all the way from the penthouse to the ground floor and back. I could do this mostly unseen by the other tenants, as most of them were lazy and only ever took the elevator.