Free A Round-Heeled Woman by Jane Juska Page A

this important birthday, of the lavish buffet, the fully stocked bar, the hors d’oeuvres, the gifts, and of me. What he did was a kind of intervention. Nobody knew how to tell me I was out of control. So Rob did this: he put those photographs, carefully selected so that I was in every one of them, into an album, and a few days later, he gave the album to me. There I was, multiple images of me on every single page for pages and pages. Dreadful, absolutely dreadful. My color was high, like my blood pressure, which is to say, my cheeks were flushed; my chins rolled over the collar of my dress. (Yes, I had found a dress at the store for large women, which is where I shopped when absolute necessity made me do it; otherwise, I went to school to teach in one of three muumuus a friend had run up on her sewing machine.) My front self stuck out, way out, my breasts were enormous of course—surely you know by now—and I looked awful. So I never looked anywhere that might show my reflection—not in a mirror, not into a store window, and never into the faces of people I saw coming toward me on the street; their quick glances, their quicker turning away, telling me everything I did not want to know.
    Still, public humiliations were there to remind me. One day, I took my son, then about seven, to the little train up in Tilden Park. The little train is a miniature train in which kids and their parents may ride along a miniature track through the leafiness of the park. My son and I sat in one of the cars, my bulk overflowing its sides. Behind us sat a child who could talk and sing and who did. About me. “Lady, lady,” he chanted singsong over and over, “fat old lady.” It was the longest ride of my life. My son laughed—what else could he do? I was devastated. When I got the courage to face the facts of my obesity, I would realize that, in the four years since leaving my husband, I had gained seventy pounds. I was safe from men, to be sure, but not from children and other living things.
    I was also not safe from illness. In my forties I began to get sick every so often and then regularly. At least once a year, during the Christmas holidays usually, I could count on a severe bronchitis attacking my lungs and staying there for months. I lost time from school, went to school sick, and was exhausted well into spring. I continued to smoke. When school ended in June, and I was able to force myself to look back on my year, I had to admit that it had been lousy: half of it I had spent dragging myself to school, half of it getting ready to drag myself there. And I am not accounting here—you can figure this out for yourself—for the quality of my mothering.
    Then came the year the bronchitis turned into pneumonia. I coughed blood and I got scared. So, put it all together— my health, my appearance, my all-too-soon-to-be-orphaned son—and I changed my life.
    At Alta Bates hospital in Berkeley, with the help of a nutritionist, a psychologist, an exercise physiologist, many aerobics teachers—every one of them heroic, every one of them memorable—I lost weight, one hundred pounds of it. My goals were three: (1) run the Bay to Breakers (seven miles through San Francisco to the Pacific Ocean, a hundred thousand people dressed in serious running shorts, dressed in costumes to shock and amuse, or dressed in nothing at all; (2) fit into 501 Levi’s; and (3) go to the Black and White Ball (a benefit for the symphony in the middle of San Francisco, when all of the Civic Center—the enormous plaza bordered by the opera house, the symphony hall, City Hall, the library—becomes a dance floor where jazz bands and polka bands and rock bands and the San Francisco Symphony play music while men in black and white tuxedos and women in black and white ball gowns dance into the wee hours of the morning). It is the most romantic event in the city. In May I ran my first Bay to Breakers, and I ran