At the elevators, as she was trying to leave me and get back to her pretty Jaguar and her pretty office with the ocean breeze, I showed her the big gray empty space inside me. I didn’t mean to; it’s just what happens if I disappoint someone I’m trying to impress. The crying seemed to come abruptly and from my stomach and as I cried, it folded in half and bent over and couldn’t be straightened back up. My head was somewhere past my knees and my heels could no longer balance the weight of my head and torso—all of it making heaving, sobbing motions and so I sank to the cold gray concrete. I was on the ground. It was a brief moment, but for that moment I was on the floor of the bottom floor of the Four Seasons: from the presidential suite to the floor of the bottom floor in four hours. My manager yanked me up by the arm with the super-human strength that comes with embarrassment, the way a mother yanks up a child who’s thrown a tantrum in a department store.
“I can’t do this, Joan. I’m too fat. They don’t want me. They want someone else. I think we should get out of it. I don’t want to do this anymore. Joan, I’m too fat. They told me that Heather Locklear was a size zero and Andie MacDowell was a two!”
She looked around to make sure no one could see us. She made sure none of her producer friends whose kids play soccer were anywhere around to see this spectacle and then she said:
“Honey. You have big legs.”
I stopped crying. I was shocked into stopping. I’d never heard that before in all my years of modeling. I was hoping for some bullshit reassurance about how the stylist should have had more sizes and how women my height shouldn’t be a size 2. Instead I was told the truth.
Yes. Of course, I have big legs. I have big thighs that make all the skirts tight no matter how much I weigh. Everything makes sense now. In fact, Anthony Nankervis, the boy who told me I had slitty, lizard eyes also told me I had footballer’s legs. I don’t know how I could’ve forgotten that.
With a dismissive hand gesture to punctuate her point, she said it again. She announced it with certainty, the way that any fact would be stated, requiring no qualification and inviting no rebuttal.
“Just face it, honey. You have big legs.”
• • •“What part of your body do you like?”The Jenny Craig counselor is talking to a jovial woman at the two o’clock spot in the group circle. She is a very fat woman with dull brown hair.“My hair?” Laughter all round.“Well, that’s not exactly a body part, now is it, Jan.”The circle has about twelve people in it, and I am at six o’clock. While Jan consults her list of several of her body parts that she likes, I look at the blank sheet in front of me and try to think of one of my own. Hands? No. I hate my hands.“I like my hands,” says Jan, looking down at her fatty, pasty hands. I wonder how she can like her hands because even if she thought that her right hand was graceful and slender, her wedding band on her left hand, barely visible through the mounds of flesh suffocating it, tells the story of the big fat body attached to it. As she waves them around to help her mouth make a point, I wonder who put that band on her finger with a promise of being true to her through thick and thin. I wonder if that promise is diminished now, relative to the sliver of band now visible: a once-thick gold band now seemingly thin: a seemingly happy bride now thick with disappointment. But I guess if you only looked at her right hand and heard her laughter, you might still think she was happy. And maybe her husband’s fat, too.Three o’clock likes her eyes. That would’ve been an obvious one for me because my eyes can’t gain weight, but I don’t like my eyes. They’re too small and close together. Four o’clock likes her calves. They’re strong and lean apparently, although I can’t see them through her pant leg so I’ll have to take her word for it. My calves are my least favorite part of my body because after years of treating my local ballet class like it was the Australian Ballet Company, they are enormous. You can’t see them, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Five o’clock likes her arms. Really?“Portia?”“Has everyone met Portia? She’s a newcomer to the group and is the youngest Jenny Craig member we’ve ever had. Tell us your favorite body part, Portia.”My workbook is blank. My mind is blank and yet racing through thoughts. I am fifteen years old and 130 pounds in a room filled with people twice my weight and age and yet I can’t think of a thing. My feet have crooked toes, my ankles are too thin, my calves are too thick, my knees are dimply, my thighs are too big, my ass is droopy, my hips are too wide, my stomach is round and has rolls, my rib cage . . . ? No. My ribs stick too far out at the bottom and that makes my whole torso look wide. My breasts are tiny and disproportionate to the rest of my body . . .“Portia?”“Umm. I don’t know.”What about my arms? My back? My shoulders? My wrists? Wrists. No, my wrists are too small for my forearms and my hands, and so because of my wrists, my hands and arms look bigger.“There’s nothing I like.”The room falls silent. We were all laughing a second ago and complimenting three o’clock on her mauve eyes that looked like Elizabeth Taylor’s and now we’re all silent, all around the clock. All the fat people sitting from twelve right back around to eleven are looking at me at six o’clock. I know that look. It’s the look of the thoughts that run through your mind when you’re looking at a smart-ass. I was the joke to them—the kind that makes you not want to laugh.“Come on, dear. There must be something that you like?”There was an ounce of anger to her tone. My lack of an answer probably looked like unwillingness to play along, but in truth I was still running through all my parts trying to find something to say.“Well, if you don’t think you have any good body parts, then I guess we’re all in trouble!”That was the kind of joke that makes people laugh.
PART TWO
15
I AWOKE TO a strange silence and shafts of light stabbing into the room from the corners of the blinds. The light carried millions of tiny dust particles, which I guess were always there yet only now visible because of the soupy, thick air with its beams of light illuminating them. I was eerily calm when I awoke. I was aware that I had cried myself to sleep over the L’Oréal incident; my eye sockets felt misshapen and waterlogged, as though they could barely keep my sore, dry eyes in my head. But it felt like I had cried for the last time. That I was never going to cry myself to sleep like that again. Despite the heaviness of my head, with its headache and sinus pressure, there was a levity to it, a lightness to it, like everything inside of it that made the world I lived in a place of peace or a place of torture, was weightless—quiet, floating. I felt overtaken by a sense of peace, by the feeling that today was truly a new day.
I got out of bed and immediately started stretching. An odd thing for me to do, but I wanted to feel my body. I wanted to “check in” with it, acknowledge it. As I stretched, there was a certain love I gave to it, an appreciation for its muscles straining and contracting. I liked the way it felt as I touched my toes and straightened my back. I felt like I was suddenly self-contained. Like the answers lay within me. Like my life was about to be lived within the confines of my body and would answer only to it. I didn’t give a shit what anyone thought of me.
As I stretched my arms out to the sides, I ran my fingers through the beams of light, cloudy with the dust that swirled around my bedroom. I saw the beauty of my messy bedroom and inhaled the summer air. All the clothes I’d tried on and discarded on the floor before going to my L’Oréal fitting were looking up at me, wondering what they had done wrong. Despite the mess and the dust, it smelled sweet and I felt myself smiling as I inhaled. I liked that smell. It was the smell of the imported Italian talc in the yellow plastic bottle that I had bought to pamper myself but only now enjoyed as talc and not a status symbol. As I walked barefoot on the painted concrete floor of my bedroom toward the bathroom scale I felt confident that what I was about to see would make me happy for the rest of the day. I felt empty and light and I didn’t care what number the scale told me I was, today I was not going to define myself by it. Today I knew that despite what it said, it was unimportant. Today I would start my new life.