Passing for Thin: Losing Half My Weight and Finding My Self

No one was there.

I was neither surprised nor unhappy to find myself alone at the Missoula airport. My parents had appointments that morning and had left the arrangements to my brother. Jim was late or the plane was early -- it didn't matter. I was glad for the time. I could absorb the differences between New York and Montana. I'd left New York at dawn under its August pall of heat and rusty horizons and emerged into air so finespun it vibrated. The smell of ozone, clover and cinnamon, lingered from thunder storms the night before, not yet evaporated in the dry desultory heat of midday; the cornflower sky glowed famously big, even in the valley. The Montanans milling around me at the curb were tall and blonde, speaking with nasal cadences that, pronounced with a looser jaw, were a perfect West Texas drawl. Conversations there were always, I was reminded again, about the weather. Ask a Montanan about his chemotherapy and he'd give you that evening's forecast. Gaits and gestures were just shy of torpid, the sky and mountains rambled on and on in their own sweet time. Montana was a slow place.

I watched the crowd with the furtiveness of a refugee, hoping fervently I wouldn't see anyone I knew. I wasn't ready.

I am 5'8", medium-framed. That Friday noon I weighed 168 pounds, my lowest weight since sixth grade. I didn't know who or what I was, as I braced myself for Jim's arrival. I had one history in that town, a mean one, of being a freak with a brain, allowed to watch but not play. A talking head on a mountain of formless flesh.

In second grade I weighed 115 pounds, by the end of sixth grade, 174 pounds. I lost a proud 36 pounds between my freshman and sophomore years in high school, getting down to 204 pounds. By college I struggled to stay at 248 pounds. I think. Our scale topped out at 245 so I was guesstimating. My top weight of all time: 338 pounds. I had begun this weight loss, 17 months earlier, in 1998, at 313 pounds, more or less -- I didn't purchase a scale until the second week of the diet. Jim had last seen me, the year before, a hundred pounds heavier.

And so I was glad for this pause, glad for the narrow opportunity of a cigarette, a five-year habit, before being thrust into my assiduously tobacco-free extended family. I was smoking at the curb when I saw Jim hurrying across the parking lot, scanning the clumps of people. Even my big brother's dash across a parking lot roused specters of the things he could do all those years that I could not.

Jim's eyes darted with worry as he paused for traffic. Had he missed me? Had the flight been delayed? He shook his head as he bolted around a pile of luggage, heading in to look for me at the carousel. I tossed my cigarette into the gutter, forming a joke about the life we've shared -- Wanna buzz the root beer stand before we go to lunch? He walked right past me.

"Jim," I called.

He panned the sidewalk, looked at me, the other people, searching for the voice.

"Uh. Jim? Over here?"

The look -- blank.

The second look -- questioning. "France? Francie? Oh my -- wow!" A beat as he took the measure of his reaction, then a conscious modulation. "I'm sorry. I didn't recognize you."

People ask, "Were you always fat?" The photographs are inconclusive.

There's one taken for my father's office desk, a studio portrait: my brothers with Brill Cream-slick hair and cotton shirts buttoned up to the necks, my mother looking like Madeline Kahn in black and pearls, me, the baby of the family, front and center in a dotted Swiss confection that must have itched horribly. At two, I fill the dress to capacity, my arms dough-ample and my face full. A year later, a photo shows me sprawled next to Dick, my oldest brother. I'm rangy. My long legs are dimpled a bit at the knees but I'm growing out of the baby fat of that earlier family portrait. A year or so later, I am stalky-legged, my stomach pushes at the buttons of my dress. In this last photo I am intently inventorying the contents of my and my cousin's Easter baskets; she, blonde and pixie-ish, is talking to the photographer.

Once in a while, a photograph distills a truth to its essence.

Everything about my next 37 years or so can be culled from that picture. Fat and thin, my total absorption in food no matter whose it is, other people's engagement with a world I blotted out.

I identified myself as fat at such an early age that for a long time there was no other adjective to follow. I held the strong suspicion that I was given my serious name because it echoed the word so closely: Fat Frances, Fatty Francie. I hated it. After my mother explained that only boys could be called "Junior," I decided I wanted to be named "Cathy."

"Fat" is a powerful word to a child. It's one of the first words we learn to read and spell, right up there with "cat" and "dog." It yields similes so easily that it prods the teaser to greater flights of fancy. Where pigs are invoked, whales, elephants, and Sherman tanks are sure to follow.

The average preschooler is not often categorized with any degree of finality, as mathematical or musical or athletic. She is "cute," "good," "bright." Even disparaging descriptions are carefully phrased for further evolution. "A difficult child." "A plain child." "A clumsy child." "A slow child." I was a "fat." A noun, not a modification, to my ears, my definition and destiny. Not remedial but remediless. It was not a matter of not living up to my potential or being on probation for further measurement, but a fait accompli, an irrevocable pronouncement. Right up there with "crippled," "mentally retarded" or "deformed."

Worse-squared were the terms that came later. One evening, in fourth grade, sitting companionably with my father as he ate dinner after late rounds at the hospital, I picked up a Journal of the American Medical Association and flipped idly through it. My father rarely initiated conversation, so questions were a good way to get him talking. "How does penicillin work?" might prompt 10 minutes of explanation I didn't understand, but it was hearing his voice that I wanted most.

I paused over a photograph of glistening marbled guck, parted neatly by a retractor to display a cluster of pebbles. "Eee-ewe," I squealed with lascivious horror as I studied the caption. "What does -- I paused to spell out the unfamiliar word -- "' o-bee-sess' mean, Daddy?"

"'Obese'," he grunted. "That's you."

I knew exactly what he meant. The word tocked across my head like a cuckoo clock.

"That's you. That's you. That's you."

The next question I'm asked is why I got fat. It's a remarkably Victorian question, the nexus of Mendel and Freud. Were my parents fat? Is it genetic? The answer yes holds the possibility of a kind of forgiveness born of inevitability. Oh, well, in that case… But my parents were not fat. And I am adopted so I don't know whether this is the trajectory of my forebears or an anomalous burp of biology. Lack of information turns the question to nurture versus nature. I can hear the interrogator's mental calliope churning, what happened?

Food happened. Food in conjunction with circumstances. My obesity snowballed. A few motivations for eating -- safety, satisfaction -- prompted half a lifetime's compulsive eating, which in turn made me a Fat Girl/Woman to the world and a whore to food in my own heart. Compare it to alcoholism. If bourbon helped Joe Doe ask a girl to dance one night, does that justify being drunk twenty years later?

Still, people want to know what lay behind the first compulsive bite.

I don't know; I don't remember.

I suspect I had the first bite hardwired into me, that anything could have gotten the snowball rolling. Maybe I wandered into the kitchen after Topo Gigio one Sunday night, and the worm turned. That was the cookie that was one too many, the first of thousands that wasn't enough.

I don't know why I started overeating, but I do know that food was animate, a completely mutual and unfailingly loyal friend. I ate not only because at that particular moment I was bored, but because it had comforted me when I was frightened by The Twilight Zone the night before, and excluded from ice skating last Saturday, and bereft when my parents went to a convention in Vancouver last year. My reasons snowballed as much as my weight did. Take any event or crisis and it included all those before it and any I could imagine for my future.

At 5:30 it had been dark for an hour, despite my father's daily announcement that the days were getting longer. Given the afternoon we'd been through they couldn't stay short enough. It was all-hands-on-deck, and we'd been cleaning since we'd gotten home from school. After 18 months of building and endless finishing touches, our house, in a cul-de-sac of what would be ten classic 60's ranch houses owned by university professors, local business owners and doctors was done. Green shag wall-to-wall carpets, built-in's straight out of The Jetsons, paneling in every room. It was perfect. It was time to have The Monsignor to dinner.

Monsignor Meade was, as far as I could tell, 250 years old. He had been The Monsignor when my father went to St. Anthony's in the '30's. No matter was too small for The Monsignor. We all knew the story of how he chastised Dad about his high school girlfriend -- "What's the matter, Leonard, Catholic girls aren't fast enough for ye?" He gave thundering sermons ("`Stacy' is no name for a Catholic baby!"), checked us third graders' collection envelopes and showed up in school to hand out grades, which he read and commented on. He had baptized me, heard my First Confession and administered my First Communion the year before. My brothers had gone the same grade school course, as well as serving Mass for him. The Monsignor was known to scold or compliment altar boys on the altar, out loud, forming a crowded congregation's impression of said-lad.

So, too, The Monsignor had taken a hand in fashioning my father's career, informing him that he would join the Knights of Columbus and take his Fourth Degree as a signal that he was a Sanctioned Catholic Doctor. The Monsignor referred and conferred with his professional cadre, often late at night over a bottle of Bushmill's, laying out the needs he was privy to that a lawyer or G.P might not be. "`Missus Ma-Guire, now'," my father chuckled to my mother at breakfast one morning, in an Irish brogue he'd been imitating for thirty years. "`She's got ten kids and Mister Ma-Guire outta work. I believe her menses are terribly painful. What are we goin' t' do ab' t'at, Lenahrd?' 'There's The Pill,' I said, 'but you know what the Vatican says about that.' 'It's not about babies, it's about crahmps, Leonard!'" Pastorally sorry as he was when Dad left general practice, he beamed with paternal satisfaction that one of his flock became the first anesthesiologist in Missoula. There wasn't anyone else who could take paternal pride -- The Monsignor had buried my father's parents.

No one took this dinner lightly.

"You will come in when The Monsignor arrives," my father instructed Dick and Jim. "No horseplay. Afterwards, you can go downstairs until supper, but keep it to a soft roar, understood?"

"And put your shoes on," my mother added. "Tell them to put their shoes on, Leonard."

"Shoes. On," my father ordered. You could ignore Mom; you risked your ass if you didn't obey Dad. This was not abuse, it was justice. He stated the rules and gave fair warning. We'd each tested him once or twice and never needed to again.

"And double-check your rooms." Mom addended now that she had Daddy's backing. "We'll be giving The Monsignor The Tour of the House."

"All happy families resemble one another," Anna Karenina opens, as everyone knows, "but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

We were an apparently happy family.

My brothers looked like Dobie Gillis teenagers. They were popular and talented athletes with girlfriends and part-time jobs, well-loved jalopies and letter jackets. The boys and I were bit players in the Dinner for The Monsignor, rounding out the cast of the Happy Catholic Family, but, at 17 and 15, they had their own dramas, downstairs and after dessert. Rosalie and Helen, Scott and Don, shoot-`em-up TV and Leslie Gore awaited them. I was on stage for the whole she-bang, in my green plaid school uniform, properly shod, performing the tasks delegated by my parents, my passions nervily in heat. My affair with food, unlike my brothers' friends and girlfriends, didn't come after anything. It was with me all the time.

I was swooning in the promiscuous smells of company coming. Sterno and the buttery, clean laundry waft of cheese dip in the chaffing dish drifted under the beef Wellington in the oven, layered with carnations and candle wax, Mother's Chanel and the acrid steam of the dishwasher. Freshly ironed white linen, the cold gleam of Lenox and my grandmother's crystal, the satin swirl of sterling. I loved to put the sugar spoon in my mouth, broad and whorled. It should not be overlooked, in the why's of compulsive eating, that food can be a raw flood of the five senses. My synapses crackled as I waited for the orgy to begin.

"Francie," my father interrupted my flirtations with the Wheat Thins. I was arranging the cold cut plate by taking care of the broken crackers. "I need you to hold the match."

My shoulder blades pinched. Every night we tested my mettle against Dad's martinis and I flinched as he twisted a lemon peel over the flame. I was pleased by having a ritual with him and by my temerity, and I marveled at how the lemon oil flared, more smells, of burning and citrus, sulfur and juniper. Most of all I marveled at my father. Who else used pyrotechnics so casually?

He turned to mix Mom's Robb Roy next. "Honey," he said, stumped in front of the refrigerator shelves, "are we out of maraschino cherries?"

"We can't be," she said over the grinding beaters. She was whipping cream for the horseradish sauce. "Didn't I get a jar when the neighbors came over last week?"

Frowning with preoccupation, I backed out of the kitchen. It was one of a brace of phrases I dreaded. "I thought we had…" "Wasn't there a whole…" "I was planning on…" I would have a sudden urge to pee or look up the population of Egypt in the encyclopedia. I was gone, vamoose, away from the discussion of if-when-who, taking the box of Wheat Thins and The Little House in the Big Woods for good measure.

I sat on the toilet and placed one perfect cracker in mouth, like the Communion wafer, and sucked the salt off, waited for it to soften into goo. My heart settled and my stomach relaxed its clench against accusations. For a half a box of crackers, I was occupied against any consequences. I might make it through a second or third repetition of this slow savoring before I stream-munched the rest of the box. I then had three problems. 1) the evidence of the box (toss under my bed for now rather than the bathroom trash), 2) salt-swollen lips and gummy teeth, and 3) the possibility that The Monsignor would turn out to like Wheat Thins as much as I did. Then we'd be back to the awful sentences. We had a whole box, Leonard…

Thank God for Khrushchev. My mother was prepared for atomic war. From the interstices of the pantry, among jars of stale bay leaves and tins of smoked oysters, another bottle of cherries was found. I helped myself before taking the crackers and mortadella into the living room. My lips were now swollen and a lively cherry red. Years later, I would be tempted to spend money for this look.

My walk-on, as Francie, The Kuffels' Youngest, seen but not much heard, came in the choking duty of answering the doorbell. "Good evening, Monsignor," I sing-songed, parroting the classroom greeting. "Please come in and let me take your coat."

He shrugged out of his massive overcoat and handed me his pompommed berretta, before arranging his purple-trimmed cassock with its thousand buttons. "Ahrre ye helpin' yer mother tonight like a good gel?"

"Yes, Monsignor." I staggled off to my parents' bedroom with his coat, the beanie perched on top like a widow hen, holding my breath against crushing it. To do this, I passed the two-foot statue of the Blessed Virgin that my mother had commissioned for the stained glass altar in the entry hall, by the bas relief of Christ in Gethsemane, a gift from a dying patient, in the bedroom hallway, to my parents' bed, where I laid out the Monsignor's things under the crucifix that cunningly housed holy water and chrism in case of a sudden need of Last Rites. "Extree Munction," I shivered with a delicious gothic frisson. For whom would we need it? The voices were safely three, safely distant. I had time, alone, to dip into Dad's stash of almond roca. When saying hello to a guest was a matter of life, death and afterlife, fuel was called for.

First I scraped the almond bits off with my front teeth, chipmunk-style. I let the chocolate melt and the toffee soften. Chomp, chomp, chomp -- exactly three -- and suck the toffee fillings out of my tender new molars. It was a few weeks after Christmas, Dad's stash was full. I took another and this time I was not patient. I went straight to chomp-and-suck.

And so it went. For every task I carried out, there was food to cadge, despite the sad entr&eacutee of beef Wellington, the slices calibrated numerous nervous times to feed six diners. I skimmed as I carried out Mom's instructions. A bite of mortadella as I filled the water pitcher, a mint melting on each side of my mouth as I carried in condiments; half a roll squirreled against my cheek, pillow-safe, when I opened the packages for heating, the other half after I shut the oven door. This was Dutch courage eating. There would be scrutiny passed with the bread basket. It was also the desperate last forage before I had to act like the food didn't matter as much as the company. No seconds of meat would be forthcoming. I couldn't understand why my parents considered this a menu fit for the greatest personage in our lives.

I hovered with each dinner plate, which I'd arranged with its compliment of Parmesan roasted potatoes and peas and onions, as Mother carved. I adored those potatoes. Canned new potatoes, they were soft and firm under the skin of butter and cheese they'd been fired in. I left a half dozen in the pan, a wise number. Mom could say, "yes, we have more but not many," and the request would drop out of deference to The Monsignor's possible desire for another helping. I crossed my fingers and watched as the heels of the roast rocked back, too much pastry to serve at the table but that was my favorite part, and my hand shot out for the orphans. When Mom goofed and a slice slid to the floor, the dogs jumped to their feet under the carving board where they were parked, an exuberant tangle of black and yellow Labrador anticipation knocking heads as they untwisted themselves. I was faster, although I nobly allowed them some of the meat. The Monsignor was watching the table attentively as I passed back and forth with the plates. An entire portion of roast beef was a hard thing to conceal in my mouth.

Safely cradled and mollified in the arms of carbohydrates, stimulated just enough from that sleepy place by sugar, maintaining the delicate balance with protein, I was a nine year-old drunk, as proficient at mixing cocktails as my father. I did not misbehave. I did not fight with my brothers. I did not have any I'm-a-little-teapot moments of showing off. I was helpful, obedient and absolutely oblivious to the grown-up conversation and dynamics.

The point was to keep getting as much as I wanted without anyone catching me.

My chances increased when I cleared the table. And the plates.

I had no witnesses.

Hence those scraps of roast beef and half-moons of pastry, along with the uneaten potatoes and Parker House rolls that had been "too much, Mahree: ev'rything is delicious, always delicious!" were neatly recycled into me. Even vegetables, the onions a nice counterpoint to the bland bread and potatoes, even cold peas. I licked the dessert plates of their whipped cream and graham cracker and walnut crumbs down to the satin china, vanished the evening's beginnings by fetching the chaffing dish and cracker tray with its dried and curling cold cuts from the living room where the grown-ups were talking parish business and parish gossip.

The boys careened by to make peanut butter sandwiches, adding to the mess, adding to the food I got to handle. "Too bad, Chunky," Dick snickered. His part was over, he could resume his swaggering. "Stuck with the dishes and kissing up to Monsignor. We get the dogs and we're goin' downstairs."

Jimmie took a jar of jelly out of the refrigerator. "I want to say good night to The Monsignor."

"Well, I know who the fattest kiss-up is, I just didn't know you were the most pathetic," Dick said.

Jimmie was one of The Monsignor's favorite altar boys, singled out to teach altar boydom to fifth graders. I sat in on these sessions -- he used my old Playskool xylophone to mark the consecrations, after all, and I'd dreamed up how to make fake hosts from Wonder Bread flattened by the heal of a glass. It was one of the few things Jim and I did alone together besides fend off Dick when he was gunning for both of us at once. Mom always said Jim was the most devout of us kids. Dick was the least but I was there at dinner when he bragged to The Monsignor about playing varsity football for Loyola, and I knew how long it took him to make his confession and to say his penance prayers.

"You wanna ask The Monsignor for his blessing, Jim-Wit?" Dick badgered on. "Maybe find out when the Sodality girls are meeting next?" He waggled his blond eyebrows leeringly.

"Ah, Dick, shut up, willya?"

Jim and I froze in place, my hand in the sudsy water, his knife making a faint ping as it dropped against the jelly jar.

"What did you say?"

Jim remained silent and still. He was smaller than Dick by a couple of inches and forty pounds, but lots faster. If he got away, we might have a hostage situation on our hands. I wouldn't go down without a fight. My fingers curled around the carving fork in the sink. Pushed to it, Jim and I would -- and had -- fought Dick with weapons. Broomsticks, forks, sneakers, textbooks and tennis rackets sometimes slowed him down enough to get away, or cornered him until Dad could sort us out into our demilitarized zones.

I turned my head slowly toward Jim, who said nothing. He was looking blankly at the smeared bread on the counter.

Like a grizzly bear interrupted in a feast of maggots, Dick sensed the motion of my head. Whatever moved had "dessert" written all over it. "What did he say, Chunky?"

"Jimmie wants to say goodbye to The Monsignor," I answered. "Daddy won't like it if you don't go too, and then The Monsignor will want to go downstairs." Jimmie exhaled softly. I'd saved us. Dick would not want to be responsible for a 250-year-old priest's heart attack. How long would Dad ground him for that? I resumed washing up, wondering what I could needle out of Jim for my quick thinking. A ride to Woolworth's? Money for Hostess Cupcakes? We'd have a pay-back skirmish a time of my choosing but for now I kept the peanut butter jar in sight.

Did Jim leave the sandwich stuff out for me to clean up after them? Was it his way of saying thanks or mea culpa for the slap upside the head Dick gave me as he stalked off to the living room? I held my temples between my wet hands and pressed hard at the spiraling pain, then let go to drag a finger through the jelly. Mom's plum jelly was winefully rich.

"G'night," Jim said on his way back from the living room, scooping up the stack of sandwiches.

"Don't let the bed bugs bite," Dick smirked. "Although maybe they'd chew off some of your big ass." He tee-hee'd down the hall, a drunken rooster. I took another dollop of jelly, let it dissolve on my tongue as I hefted the carving fork to put it in the knife drawer, wanting to use it, wanting to tell Mom or Dad and knowing I'd get in trouble for interrupting, not knowing what I wanted to tell them, knowing I'd be branded a tattler.

Copyright © 2004 by Frances Kuffel.