This scene begins on a pretty spring afternoon, with golden light falling in the windows and mother and daughter in the filthy but homey kitchen. Mom is making coffee, and daughter, about age ten (that’s me) is watching her move about purposefully, with no real goal of her own other than being near her mother.

I was sitting on an old red wooden chair whose paint had been peeling since before I could remember, but whose color was still gypsy-bright. I sat with my arms propped on the big wooden foldout table, my stubby legs and bare feet dangling above the dirty linoleum floor. Either she or I had found an old picture of her—I think from college. She said something about how she had looked a lot like me when she was little, and then added that she was really fat. I turned over what she’d said in my head, round and round, trying to put the pieces together, and then asked something along the lines of   “...but you didn’t look A LOT like me then right?” and she countered that we really did—we looked very similar.

I paused, and then asked if she was really fat or just a little uncomfortable because she was REALLY skinny now, and maybe she thought a little chubby was actually fat—because her perceptions of what fat was were different from normal people since she was so very slender now. She said that no, she was really fat. (I saw a photo later of her as a kid—she was TOTALLY normal, barely even what you might call plump) I screwed up my little face in thought and put two and two together.

I said, “So you think I’m fat?”

She looked aghast and whirled around. “Oh, no honey, that’s not what I meant”.

I was baffled... “But that’s what you SAID”.   

I don’t remember our conversation after that, and at the time I didn’t show how much that upset me. I just sort of held it in my gut to think about later.  It was at that point I think this all started. At the time this conversation took place, I was rather chubby, but not what I would call fat by any means.

I DO NOT blame her. Not at all, though I truly believe that she suffered from an undiagnosed case of orthorexia. She’d spend hours at the gym every day, swimming hundreds of laps in the pool, lifting weights, working the machines like a madwoman. Her fervor for fitness was unrivaled. She subscribed to nearly every fitness magazine you could think of; oiled-up muscle-bound women and men staring blankly up at me from the mail table every week like clockwork. She virtually lived off of steamed asparagus and nonfat mozzarella cheese, and would spend her weekends running up and down the endless flights of stairs at Mt. Tabor Park by the reservoirs with a big rock in each hand like barbells. I don’t think she realized it really, or if she did, she never admitted it.

It wasn’t clear if it really made her unhappy, but I know that it was her single mode of absolute control in an out-of-control life, so I think she got some enjoyment out of it. It never seemed to harm her. On the contrary, she looked better in a bikini at 40 that I ever have or will. It was the complete abandon to an obsession about her body, though, that I inherited, the desperate fear of becoming obese, and the willingness to go to absurd lengths to prevent it.

Once we were walking around together and we stopped in a chocolate shop. I got some silver-colored Jordan almonds, and I remember her buying a few wonderful dark chocolates and looking at them almost passionately. She didn’t eat one of them.
 

I asked her later about it and she told me that she would do this—sometimes buy something bad for her, or even just consider doing it, whereupon the universe would see fit to drop a 300 lb. analogy of herself on the corner, or at the bus stop, or standing next to her buying the same kind of chocolates she was. She would see this woman, and she would feel as though some force was reminding her that this was the consequence of eating too much chocolate. So she would stuff them in her bag and store them for weeks, until they were brittle and stale and she didn’t want them anymore. She did eat them sometimes, if she was feeling bold, but I remember more of them going uneaten than not.