Free Eating Ice Cream With My Dog by Frances Kuffel Page B

intellectually. “But did it ever occur to you that it wasn’t because you were so passive, that you never stood up for yourself, that she fired you? Because you did. She pushed you and pushed you, and you finally pushed back. That’s how I interpret it. If you’d kept your mouth shut, you’d have had another two or three years there.”
    Two or three more years? I could feel my toes turning cold.
    It could be, of course, that she was right. Alix didn’t want a peer in the office. She wanted to be the reigning diva, and brag and storm to a waiting frisson of envy and fear.
    When it came to standing up for myself, I was a sentry asleep at the gate.
    “All you probably need to do is send her a letter,” Doctor Miller said. “She’s a bully, Frances. Most bullies will back down when faced with another bully. Wouldn’t you enjoy scaring her?” She clapped one hand over her mouth and shook her head. “I didn’t say that, did I?”
    I like my fluffy-haired, plump shrink best when she is being mildly vindictive.
    I didn’t sue. I went on eating and raging.
    Right up to March 9, when I stepped on the scale and was bitch-slapped with the hundred pounds I’d gained.
    In 2002, when I put on my first pair of size 8 trousers, I did not think that I had “graduated,” although I described reaching goal weight as the first project I’d ever finished. The problem was, I hadn’t come close to finishing myself. Perhaps “initiating” is the better word choice for the blob of self I was left with in the Ann Taylor dressing room.
    The problem of the unfinished or unstarted self is that what we once used to compensate for its gaps—food and weight, and then the focused expectation of dieting—is gone, with an unfamiliar body left to absorb the nicks and dings of being alive. That unpadded body and our confusions about it and the new possibilities open to us can, in themselves, cause some of those dings.
    “I’m not paying you to shop for clothes!” Alix raged at me one day for a reason I don’t remember. Another day she hustled into my office, shut the door behind her, and rushed up to me, stripping off her jacket. “Look at these arms!” she demanded. “Look at them! Do they look like the arms of a fifty-seven-year-old woman?”
    Such comments preyed upon the vulnerability I felt in my new body. She would not have said them to me if I weighed 220 pounds or had weighed 150 pounds for a long time. She wouldn’t have said them if I hadn’t been so vocal about my physical insecurities. Nor would she have said them if I’d told her to cut it the fuck out.
    From 1999 to 2003, I’d lived in a normal-sized body, much of that time devoted to learning how to walk and run and dress, reviving my writing life, practicing smiling and speaking less stridently and more quietly. These are all necessary, but I had not acquired the certainty of that ineffable Frances who does not depend on other people’s opinions of her to create a self. Both the process of losing weight and the Stepfords teach one to wait, a good skill in many ways but sometimes a stance that delays necessary actions. Nor had I come into adulthood with a sense of safety or future.
    Did I set out to gain weight? Most days, I am one of those women who want to be thin and want to eat. Although I’ve used laxatives at intervals, I found them more punishing than my disappointed hopes of getting abstinent. I am a failed bulimic.
    On the other hand, perhaps I did want to get fat, to brutalize myself beyond the abasement of gobbling and gorging, the hangovers of sugar, the depression and waking shame of being fired and out of control. I may have needed the full monte, food and distorting my body, to finish getting rid of the self I had fixed cosmetically but not, adequately, metaphysically. In interfering with my precarious self, Alix and others had done a laughably inadequate job. I would show them how it should be done. In this, I am supremely competent.
    Two years