As I sat on the wooden bench I became aware of how much pain I was feeling. I pushed down onto the palms of my hands that had been limply resting on either side of my seated legs, elevating my seat bones away from the bench. That immediately alleviated the pain that was caused by my full weight resting on the hard wooden bench. I briefly wondered if it hurt because I was too heavy, that my seat bones couldn’t support the weight of my upper body, but quickly dismissed the thought as crazy. Fat people sit on hard things all the time. The pain of being seated and the exhaustion it took to keep me slightly off the bench made me stand. I needed to stand anyway. Standing burns more calories than sitting, and I had forgotten that rule while I had temporarily lost my mind to nostalgia. But standing there, I found myself stuck. I had run quite far and was a long way from home. If I’d had money I could have taken the train or the tram, but since I left the house without any, walking was my only option. After the long flight with no food at all, running back home was out of the question. I should never have stopped. I was not angry anymore and without any motivation I could now only walk. Losing weight really wasn’t enough motivation either. My mother’s reaction was confusing and it made me wonder whether I had taken this whole thing too far. As I started the long journey home, I wished I could just walk across the street to find my mother behind the desk in the doctor’s waiting room, waiting for me. Then she could take me home.
By the time I arrived back at the house, I had completely forgiven Mom. I had thought about her dismissive attitude toward my weight loss and understood it from many different angles. She grew up in the Marilyn Monroe era and liked women to have curves, so she simply didn’t appreciate how I looked. She called my efforts “skinny business and rot” because she no doubt realized that she’d completely overreacted. But even if she incorrectly thought that I was emaciated and sick, I understood why she downplayed her feelings about it, because it was her worry that she was dismissing, not the supposed sickness. My mother often tried to make light of heavy things. When I was a little girl with a gash on my knee, she’d tell me it was just a scratch. If I felt too sick to go to school, she’d tell me that it was in my head, that I just needed a change of scenery. She’d tell me to go to school and if I still felt sick, I could come home. She was usually right; once I got to school I forgot about being sick. She was usually right to ignore it because ignoring it often did make it go away.
When I returned, my gran told me that Mom had gone to the supermarket to get groceries. She yelled this information out to me as she was quite deaf and since she had to yell to hear herself, she assumed she needed to yell to be heard.
“Marg said you could meet her there if you wanted anything!”
“Thanks, Gran!” I yelled back at her.
I grabbed a knitted shrug and headed out to the supermarket to find my mother. The sleeves covered up my skinny arms, and with them the evidence that achieving a nice all-over body was an effort. My arms were the only giveaway that my weight should have been something other than it was. If you just saw my waist and my legs, you’d have thought I was in terrific shape. You’d have thought that I was just naturally thin. Besides, my legs weren’t even skinny. They were very average in size. I had to be extreme just to achieve average-size thighs.
I wore the knitted sleeves in an effort retreat from the front line, to surrender from the battle, to silently apologize to her for exploding out of the house in anger. I wanted her to feel proud of me as we shopped together, and she wouldn’t have been proud if the other grocery shoppers and shopkeepers had seen my arms. I didn’t have to hear that from her, I just knew it. She had bragged about me to everyone in the neighborhood and now I had to live up to the image of me she’d been presenting. Everyone wants to see effortless beauty, ease, and confidence. Every script I read described the female leads as “beautiful yet doesn’t know it” or “naturally thin and muscular and doesn’t have to work at it.” Effortlessness is an attractive thing. And it takes a lot of effort to achieve it. “Never let ’em see you sweat” was a principle I’d adopted, and so actual effort was yet another thing for me to hide from the people I was trying to impress. The list of unacceptable things about me that I had to cover up was getting longer. My arms had just made that list.
When I saw my mother she was taking a jar of peanut butter off a shelf in the condiment aisle. She looked so small from where I was standing that I suddenly didn’t want her to see me. I felt like a giant. I felt like I was taller and wider than all the people in there and the grocery aisles themselves. I was a big, fat, gluttonous American in comparison to the petite Australians. The shopping carts were small. The boxes of food on the shelves looked like they belonged to a children’s tea set. The jam jars were the size of shot glasses, the “family-sized” bags of chips looked like they contained a single serving. When she saw me standing at the end of the aisle, she smiled and waved me over. She had forgotten about her worry, my reaction, her reaction, and my thinness. It’s amazing what sleeves can do.
“Hi, Bubbles! I thought we could get some food for you. I don’t know what you like to eat now.”
As we walked up and down the aisles, she made food suggestions like, “How about I make you a Ki Si Ming? You used to love that.” Or, “Should I get some Tim Tams? You always loved Tim Tams.” Tim Tams were the chocolate-covered cookies that she’d had to hide from me if she wanted any for the rest of the family.
“Ma. Just let me do my own thing, okay? I eat differently now.”
I had finally understood that I couldn’t eat normally like everyone else if I wanted to be an actress. Couldn’t she see that? Couldn’t she see that I’d finally figured out that I had to sacrifice Tim Tams and casseroles and happy family dinners so I could give her something to brag about? As a child model I learned that success and money came when I refused the casseroles and the Tim Tams, and as an adult actress, the rules were still the same. Why would she suggest I eat all the foods that would make me fat?
I did briefly think about eating the Ki Si Ming because I loved it. But I quickly dismissed the thought. I wouldn’t deviate from my regular routine. I wouldn’t dare. If I ate the curried rice and stir-fry vegetable dish, I worried that I would gain weight. More than gaining a pound I worried that I would keep gaining pound after pound after that; that if I stopped for a moment, got off the train, maybe I couldn’t get back on. If I suspended the belief that dieting was the only way for me to be a success in all aspects of life, then in that small window of time it took to eat Ki Si Ming, my desire not to diet would overtake me again. If I ate the Ki Si Ming, I would have to start over, and I knew how much harder it was to start something than to maintain it. Maybe I just had enough willpower to start it one time and if I stopped I would become very fat? I worried that this time the bingeing to make up for all the things I denied myself would never end.