I told Suzanne that I had asked my mother to help me. Every time I was booked for a job that I had to drop pounds quickly for, I’d beg her to help me the next time so I’d never again be in the predicament of having to starve before a job. I’d say, “Please don’t let me eat chocolate.” And, “If you see me eating too much of anything, just remind me what I go through every time.” This request bothered my mother because, like an addict, when I was in the throes of eating, I could get quite angry and yell at her if she commented on my habit. “You don’t want to eat that,” was the most common thing she’d say as I was stuffing a chocolate-covered cookie in my mouth. She was wrong. At that moment, eating that cookie was all I wanted to do and I told her so in many different ways over the course of that little experiment. In sober moments, I’d apologize for my hurtful words and plead with her to continue to help me. I told her to hide the cookies. Then when I found them underneath the living room sofa, I’d angrily eat them, saying that all she cared about was how thin I was. That she didn’t really care about me. That all she cared about was my modeling career.
“That sounds like a difficult situation for both you and your mother.”
“It was.”
Using my mother’s watchful eye as a deterrent to bingeing was probably the worst thing I could have done. While I’d always binged, it had never disappointed my mother as much as it did during this time. It had worried her greatly that I had left school to model, and if I wasn’t thin enough to book jobs, then leaving school didn’t serve any purpose. Since I’d asked her to help me maintain my weight, we were in it together. We had a problem that we could overcome together. The list of taboo foods got a lot bigger, too. In the past, while I may’ve hidden the occasional chocolate candy bar, now eating any food that wasn’t diet food sent the message that I was not helping myself. That I’d given up. It was simply heartbreaking to see the disappointment on her face as I sat the plate down on the dinner table piled high with the same food she’d once encouraged me to eat to make me big and strong. It disappointed me, too. Because a simple meal that my brother, mother, and grandmother would eat was never something I could eat. Models don’t eat mashed potatoes with butter. And as my mother kept pointing out, I was the one who wanted to be a model.
So I stopped eating in front of her. In front of her, I’d eat steamed vegetables. In the back alleys of restaurants, sitting in between two Dumpsters, I’d eat anything I liked. If my mother wasn’t home and lack of pocket money forced me to make do with the food that was in the kitchen pantry, I’d keep one eye on my grandmother as she sat in the living room and hastily get to work on half a loaf of bread and butter with apricot jam. I’d then walk to the supermarket with a butter knife, buy bread, butter, and apricot jam, throw away the few slices of bread to make it look like the untouched original loaf, then use the knife to remove the portions of the butter and jam to make it look like everything was just how I found them. Or I should say, just as she left them.
My mother thought there might be a medical solution to the weight problem in the form of a prescribed appetite suppressant. A drug called Duromine was well known in Australia. It is phentermine, the phen in Fen-phen, and was similarly heralded for its effectiveness in weight control. I was prescribed Duromine after a physical examination by a doctor and started taking the drug.
I lost weight. I lost weight and was thin—bony, even. I was ready for any modeling job without concern and was the envy of my school peers. The only problem with the drug was that I couldn’t sleep. If I took it every morning with a cup of tea, I felt jittery all day long, speedy almost, and that feeling of restlessness and anxiety stayed with me throughout the day and continued into the night. I could take it daily for only a couple of weeks before I felt like I needed a break from it. Instead of being the answer to helping me with consistent, steady dieting, the Duromine became like a yo-yo in itself. It became another wagon to fall off. It was yet another way to disappoint myself with my lack of willpower, of toughing it out. I just couldn’t hack it, just like I couldn’t hack dieting. I’d stop taking it, claiming that it affected my studies and my overall health, but secretly I missed eating. I missed the comfort that tasting and chewing and swallowing gave me. I missed the warmth in my belly and the feeling of wholeness; I was incomplete on Duromine, and on food, I was whole.
I realized during the sessions with Suzanne that it almost didn’t matter who I was talking to, it was good to talk. And while I talked, she listened. She gave me my program for the week, gave me some helpful tips for the upcoming holidays, and sent me back into the world with my homework.
13
I SURVIVED SEASON TWO OF ALLY MCBEAL!
THAT WAS the slogan on a T-shirt that was given out to the cast and crew by a cast member. I survived season two—but barely. Since beginning the show I had felt a constant indescribable pressure, a lurking threat of being fired, even though there was no evidence to suggest that I was displeasing the executive producer. While it was a good place to work and people were generally respectful, there was an eerie stillness and a certain kind of silence to the set that felt like a breezeless summer day, and while there were no insects, there were no birds chirping either. During the last four weeks of the season, every night after wrap, I would get into my car, smile and wave good night to hair and makeup, and like clockwork, I would burst into tears once I made the right turn from Manhattan Beach Studios onto Rosecrans Boulevard. And I would sob, not just cry. I made loud wailing noises that sounded more like “ahhhhhh” than the kind of crying I’d done over other things. In fact, I sounded like Lucille Ball as Lucy Ricardo when she would cry loudly, embarrassing Ricky to the point where he’d do anything she wanted just to shut her up. No one could hear my wailing, however. I wasn’t doing it for effect. I was doing it to soothe myself, to comfort myself. And I didn’t know why I was crying either. I would cry just as loudly if I’d spent the day performing a wordy two-page closing argument to a jury as if I’d been propped up on a chair in the background of the law office with no dialogue at all.
With the end of the season came the holidays. I had booked the trip with Sacha to St. Barths. While I was excited to realize my dreams of being with her, there was no doubt that I was nervous to see it through. I was worried that by embarking on a romantic journey with Sacha, the journey could come to an end, taking my romantic fantasies with it; the daydreams that lulled me to sleep smiling, the fantasies that filled otherwise empty hours, and the soothing thoughts that took pain and loneliness away would all go with it. These thoughts gave me both anxiety and hope toward the end of the season. Finally, for better or worse, our romance would become a reality.
In St. Barths, however, reality was shocking. It ruined romance like an annoying little brother. It was a pestering ever-present element in our conversations, especially as the conversations featured her boyfriend, Matt, to whom she was considering getting married. Our precious time alone in that tropical paradise was not filled with longing glances and passionate lovemaking, but rather it was spent with our heads stuck in our respective books and in arguments. A conversation about the book I was reading, in fact, ended all arguing, as reality punched me in the face and knocked illusion out cold.
“What’s that book you’re reading?”
“Ellen DeGeneres’s mother, Betty, wrote it. She tells her story about what it’s like to have a gay daughter.”
“Who’s Ellen DeGeneres?”
Her having a fiancé in Australia didn’t deter my quest to make Sacha my girlfriend, but not knowing who Ellen was two years after she made international headlines for coming out on her show suggested to me that being gay wasn’t even on Sacha’s radar, despite her willingness to make out with me on a dance floor from time to time. From that moment on, I knew that I was alone without my imaginary life to keep me company. So I swallowed my disillusionment in the form of cream sauces, piña coladas, and pastries, served up to me by the private chef I’d hired to help me seduce Sacha into a life of lesbianism. Now the chef’s role was to reward me for my hard work on Ally for the season. I ate my way into relaxation in St. Barths. And I got really fat.