In my new apartment my fridge will be sparse. My cupboard will be bare. My house will be safe.
I picked up the phone to dial Ann in New York. I couldn’t help but feel like a conversation with her would feel more like the second round of a boxing match than a celebration of my new apartment. Since the underwear episode on the show, Ann and I had barely spoken. Upon further evaluation of her comment about my looking like a normal woman in my underwear, I was quite sure she wasn’t aware that she was insulting me. However, I was sure she was careful not to compliment me, either. She had expressed her opinions about not emphasizing looks and weight and had tried to get me to read feminist literature like Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. No, Ann didn’t mean anything by it. Nevertheless, I couldn’t let a comment like that slip by again without retaliation. My gloves were on, ready to strike if Ann was being insensitive.
“AC. PdR”
“PdR!”
For some reason, when Ann and I first became friends, I had to call her by her full name, Ann Catrina, when I was referring to her. Then I had to say her full name to her face. Eventually it got so tedious to call her Ann Catrina, I shortened it to AC. She reciprocated by calling me PdR. So now we have that.
I excitedly told her about my new place while pouring my fourth Diet Coke; a low-calorie substitute for the wine I used to drink with dinner. Not drinking was yet another healthy change I had made since taking nutrition and fitness seriously. I told her about what had happened in St. Barths with Sacha. She said she was glad because she seemed to think there was a great gay girl out there who could really love me. That if I kept chasing Sacha as she was busy chasing men, I would miss this wonderful, proud-to-be-gay girl as I ran right by. What she couldn’t quite tell me was how this self-confident, happy gay woman was going to meet a closeted Portia and be perfectly okay with going back into the closet to be her secret girlfriend. Where would I meet her? Would it occur at a supermarket when our shopping carts accidentally collided and we telepathically exchanged the information that we were gay, available, and interested? Ann Catrina needed to understand that there wasn’t a solution to this problem. To shut her up, I told her the most disturbing information:
“There’s a morality clause in the L’Oréal contract.”
“A . . . what now?”
“It states that if I’m caught doing something that damages the image of the company, I’ll have to pay all the money back. I’ll have to pay back the advance, everything.”
My agent and manager had called me to go over the contract just before the fitting. Remembering how I sat in the car with the cell phone to my ear, having to pull over in order to calm myself, I felt as sick telling Ann about it as I had when it was told to me. The clause cited examples like public drunkenness, arrests, et cetera, but I knew that it would include homosexuality. The wording of the contract was vague, and I was unsure exactly what would constitute a breach of the contract and how “morality” was defined. The whole thing made me sick. I was so scared about the morality clause I didn’t want to even talk about it. I just wanted her to stop talking about how easy it would be for me to live my life openly. I just wanted her to shut up about it.
Before she could ask any questions or try to reason with me, I told her about my nutritionist.
“She has you on one thousand calories a day?”
“Yes. Well, no. I modified the diet a little. She told me to eat fourteen hundred for weight loss, but I wasn’t really losing weight so I got rid of some extra calories here and there.”
“She thinks you need to lose weight?”
“Yes. Oh. I don’t know. We haven’t really talked about that.”
“What do you talk about, then?”
“Eating healthily. You know. Not gaining and losing all the time like I’ve been doing.”
The more I talked, the more concern I could hear in her voice. Which annoyed me. She didn’t understand the pressures of being an actress, of showing up to a photo shoot where the wardrobe was nothing but handcuffs and a strip of chainmail. She didn’t know what it was like to try to find a dress for the Golden Globes and having only one good option because it was the only sample size dress that fit your portly body. She didn’t know what it was like to hear that you have a normal-looking body after starving for weeks to get a thin-looking one, hoping that your friends would admire it. “Normal” isn’t an adjective you wish to hear after putting that much effort into making sure it was spectacular.
“Ann. I gotta go.”
“Go pour yourself a glass of wine and relax about it all. You’ve always looked great, PdR. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Right. Like I was going to drink wine two days before the L’Oréal shoot.
“Okay, AC. See you later.”
“Oh! Before you go, can I stay with you in a couple of weeks? I’ll be in town for a few days. A friend from UCLA just got engaged, so I thought I’d come to LA for the party.”
No. No, you can’t stay. Even if you come after I shoot L’Oréal, I need to keep going now this diet has started working for me. I need to eat at exactly six o’clock every night, and I can’t drink alcohol with you like we used to. I can’t go out to dinner anymore. I don’t get to take a night or two off where I can eat whatever I want. I’m about to look good for the first time in my life, and for the first time I know I’m never going to gain it back again. So I can’t take a few days off. If I eat and drink, I’ll gain again. Besides, I don’t even have the room anymore. I need to work out on my treadmill at 10:00 at night and 6:00 in the morning in the spare bedroom where you’re expecting to stay.
“Yes. Of course you can. When?”
“Around the fifteenth. I’ll email you.”
I hung up the phone. The fifteenth was twelve days away. So I gave myself a new goal. Over the next twelve days, I would eat 800 calories a day. I needed to give myself a cushion so I could enjoy my time with Ann and not worry about gaining weight. If I lost a little more than I’d originally planned to lose, I would regulate my weight loss again after she left because I knew that weight lost too quickly was sure to return. Suzanne told me that. So I opened my journal and in the top right-hand corner of every dated page for the next twelve days I wrote 800. I would be ready for Ann’s visit. I even looked forward to it.
I weighed myself first thing. I was 120 pounds. Actually I was probably a pound more, but my mother once showed me a trick to play on the scale where you set the dial a couple of pounds below the zero, but in a way that isn’t very obvious to the logical part of your brain—especially from standing height looking down. If the needle sidles up to the zero, sitting next to it but not quite touching it, your brain is tricked into thinking that the needle needs to start in that position or the reading will be inaccurate. In fact, if you tap your toe on the scale the needle often resets itself to zero anyway, so to me lining up the dial perfectly with the zero was like sitting on a fence. Like I should’ve picked a side. Shall I choose denial of truth on the side that reads heavier but with the comfort of knowing that in reality I’m lighter, or shall I choose the immediate thrill of weighing in under the real number, to help with incentive?
I hated that zero. The zero is the worst part of the scale because the zero holds all the hope and excitement for what could be. It tells you that you can be anything you want if you work hard; that you make your own destiny. It tells you that every day is a new beginning. But that hadn’t been true for me until recently. Because no matter what I did, no matter how much weight I lost, I always seemed to end up in the same place; standing on a scale looking down past my naked protruding belly and round thighs at 130 pounds.