(old Weight Watcher recipe card)
Of all matters concerning weight and appearance, I lagged behind all young 14-year-old girls. While most others were busy brushing their hair, doing nails and thumbing through thick fashion magazines, I perused the back of baseball cards, memorize statistics and overcame my fear and loathing of math to calculate batting averages.
All this was not well and good for a young girl blossoming into her teenage years, and it stung my mother a bit to find that I still had tomboy interests. She was far more concerned with my appearance, which exhibited a horrible fashion sense when I mixed and matched hand-me-downs and U.S.E. discount bin clothes, fashion items that included a set of linen knickers and jeans with flower press-ons. My philosophy in fashion was simple: San Francisco Giants t-shirts, jeans and some sort of jacket to combat the fog.
This gave my mother the idea that she was in free control of the feminine aspects of my life, especially when it came to dieting. She envisioned that I was some sort of fat circus act, because every conversation seemed to end with the phrase, “…diet. You’re too fat.” This chorus became like a death ray mantra in my teenage years. When someone told her about Weight Watchers, she forced me to attend meeting with my friend Diane.
My own doctor warned my mother against sending me to Weight Watchers. He told her that I was still growing, something my mother translated to mean “growing fatter”. He also warned that going to such classes at an early age would lead to endless trend dieting, when all my doctor really wanted to make sure that I stayed away from junk food.
I would, of course, agree with my doctor. Our family was on food stamps and my mother already cooked all of my meals. I visited friends, however, and their household owned potato chips. I had to be taught.
Diane and I would be driven to the old Sears Roebucks on Geary Street for our Weight Watchers meeting every Wednesday, and we would make our way to a secret back room where we were weighed in for the day. Why someone chose this particular room in this building was beyond me. This particular Sears was known for its exceptional candy counter, where the smell of warm nuts and chocolate, sugars and caramel would assault the senses, enticing shoppers to binge snack while shopping. I mostly ignored the smells as a youth, because there was no point becoming tempted by snacks that would never make its way into my little grubby hands.
However, these smells to a 14-year-old with a $5 a month allowance became the seductive food siren for a dieter.
Diane and I soon figured out the Weight Watchers routine. We would weigh ourselves in, then go off into the store to “explore” before the meetings began. Our adventure would begin at the candy counter, where Diane would be on lookout duty while I bought a pound of malt balls. I would tuck the bag into my jacket, and we would ride escalators up and down the floors, memorizing details of the male mannequins with the glue on heavy sideburns and milquetoast polyester and plaid pimp clothes. We would eventually make our way back to the meeting, where we would pretend to listen as our instructor, a very tall and grumpy woman with a giant blonde afro, related touching diet stories while sneaking in fistful of maltballs into our mouths.
This was our routine for the requisite ten weeks of classes, and I lost all nine pounds that I was required to lose by the Weight Watchers Dieties. Diane was equally successful, and we celebrated by buying an actual candy bar at the counter. I placed that candy wrapper in my Weight Watchers book as a memento, because I thought we were finally done with those awful meetings.
For my mother, however, weight maintenance was far too simple a goal. I was already getting uncomfortable with cat calls from drive by Sacred Heart High School boys, and it was not necessary to be fashionably thin when there were no new clothes in my immediate future. However, my mother wanted me to lose more. Everyone in her circle of friends, mothers of close childhood friends, had an obsession with weight. Like them, my mother wanted me to be fashionably underweight. Had this sort of thing happened today, of course, my mother and I would be on course to star in our own Lifetime Movie.
So off Diane and I went, on to our usual routine for the eleventh week. I handed my weigh-in book to my instructor, and she immediately pulled out my celebratory candy wrapper from the previous week. The instructor gave me a stern look, pulled the wrapper out and waved it in my face, attracting the attention of all the other Weight Watcher members standing in line, waiting to be weighed. The instructor began to a diatribe of epic proportion while I remained standing on the scale, which was the teenage of equivalent of standing naked in front of your classmates.
Once the instructor was done with her rant, she looked at me, gauging my emotions. I was stone faced as I looked at her, especially since the scale showed that I still managed to lose weight. This is what losing weight meant to me at 14, and still means to me although I now try very hard to break free of this way of thinking. Dieting might have meant something more if I were not still in the minor leagues of 14-year-old girls. Instead, dieting becomes a game, a way to discover how much cheating was possible while still managing to lose weight. I wanted to game the system.
In the interim, I would not satisfy the instructor’s fury with any show of contrition or embarrassment. She was still a rank amateur to any child reared in a Catholic School setting.
Instead, I told my mother what took place at the meeting. After getting in trouble, my mother never sent me back to the meetings. I had embarrassed her too much. In her world, there were still a few things far worse than having a weighty daughter.
(c) 2014 Slow Suburban Death. All rights reserved.
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