Portia de Rossi

A fitting followed a week after the meeting, and with it all the excitement and beer drinking that came with celebrating my new, prestigious job. The fitting for the commercial took place at the Four Seasons again, and I figured the hotel served as a kind of L’Oréal office base away from the home office in New York. The executives took their meetings in the bar, conferred in a conference room, slept in their individual suites, and lavished their new star with a room full of beautiful clothes to try in the presidential suite. My manager came with me to the fitting and both of us were excited.

After the initial meetings and greetings of the stylist and her assistants and tailors, I wandered into the main room of the presidential suite wide-eyed and my mouth agape. All the furniture had been removed and the walls were lined with racks and racks of clothing. Hundreds of suits hung on the racks and on every rack, on the north, south, and west walls, was the same gray suit.

“Great. I was just looking for a gray suit! Now I know where they all are.”

The mood in the room was quiet and not jovial, so I put my smart-ass personality to rest and took out the pleasant, compliant, easygoing one I’ve been using at work since the day I started. I knew this kind of client, the kind where every little detail mattered; I’d modeled for them for years. I’d just never worked for this giant of a company at this level. My experience with clients who tested every little detail in a think tank of consumers who’d been randomly collected from shopping malls was limited to the smaller companies in Australia. And nothing says, “You’re in the big leagues” like two hundred near-identical suits in the presidential suite of the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills.

I looked at a gray suit with a short jacket and a pencil skirt with a side slit. Then I looked at a gray suit with a pencil skirt and a short jacket with a slightly different lapel than the one I’d looked at five minutes prior that had a pointier, larger lapel and a skirt that was slit on the opposite side. Some of the fabrics were a different weight than others with a different ratio of cotton to wool. It was clear to me that my opinion or preference of suits didn’t matter at all, and so I went into the dressing room and tried on jackets and skirts as they were handed to me.

Undressing in front of my manager was embarrassing. I didn’t feel quite thin enough to be standing around barefoot in my G-string, but I didn’t want to tell her to leave the room. After all, the only reason for her to be here was to help me navigate through the sea of suits, and I knew she’d have much preferred to be somewhere else with another of her bigger, more famous clients. She was a busy woman whose time was important, so I couldn’t have her wait in the living room. Besides, there was no furniture anywhere else in the hotel suite. Comfort had been cleared away for productivity. And the skirts that were passed in and out of that dressing room from the stylist’s assistant to the stylist to the tailor and then back to the stylist’s assistant to be hung back up on the rack of suits that didn’t fit looked like a production line in a factory—an unproductive factory. So far, not one of the suits had fit. The skirts either didn’t zip up in the back, or if they had Lycra or another synthetic fabric helping them to stretch, the skirt did that telltale bunching that looks like ripples on a lakeshore between two gently rolling hills that were my thighs. They didn’t fit. None of them. I tried on suit after suit until it was obvious to the stylist and the tailor that the fitting should take place skirt by skirt. It was pointless to try the jacket if the skirt was so small it couldn’t be zipped up in the back.

They were all a size 4. My modeling card measurements—34, 24, 35—had put me at a size 4. And it seemed like the more expensive the suit, the tighter it was. A size 4 in Prada was a size 2 in the type of clothes I’d wear for Ally. I could’ve argued that the European sizing was different. I could’ve made a case for myself, but none of that was important when I couldn’t zip up the fifteenth skirt in a row. None of what I could’ve said would be important.

You can put on a brave face for only so long. I put one on for about three hours before it cracked. After three hours I fell silent. There was nothing to say. We all knew what was going on. I was unprofessional. I didn’t deserve the campaign. My manager had slid down into her chair with her hand on the side of her face, exhausted, no longer willing to go to battle for me. The stylist, who had lacked a personality in the beginning, found one toward the fourth hour of the fitting, and it wasn’t pleasant to be around. She’d stopped addressing me directly. Everything she said in front of me was to her assistant or tailor: “Go get the Dolce skirt. Let’s see if she can fit into that.” Or “What if you let the skirt out as much as you can. She might be able to get away with it.”

She stopped cold as the door of the suite was knocked upon and opened simultaneously. It was the L’Oréal executives come to see what was taking so long. They had been in the conference room taking meetings but had been expecting to see some pictures of Portia de Rossi in several gray suits. We were supposed to have given them Polaroids of all the options by now. We had given them none.

“Hi.”

I didn’t bother to smile or go to them in the hallway. My manager didn’t even get up.

“What’s going on in here?” The female executive had a smiley yet accusatory voice. The kind of pissed-off yet polite voice one would expect from Hillary Clinton if she had the sneaking suspicion that someone was trying to pull the wool over her eyes.

There was an awful silence. It was a silence full of thwarted hopes, a stale-air kind of silence.

The explanation they were seeking was summed up with a simple statement from the stylist that everyone seemed to understand.

“Nobody told me she was a size eight.”

Like a dead man to the galley, I walked with my manager to the Four Seasons parking garage. When I’d driven in that morning, I’d been given the option to self-park or to valet park and, quite honestly, I didn’t know which one was the cool thing to do. I thought maybe it said more about the type of person I was if I did away with all the ceremony of a valet. It said that I was self-sufficient, that I could see through artifice, that I wasn’t falling for it. I was happy about that now because the vast gray parking structure was empty of people, except for my manager and me, the emptiness echoing the clicking of our heels as we walked through it. It occurred to me as I was walking miles to my car (valet parkers got all the good spaces) that the parking garage held up the rest of the building and was its true nature, that all the floral lounge chairs and Hollywood dealings were like costumes and a character to an actor; another kind of empty shell that needed a good stylist and a purpose. I’d been given another fitting two days from now, a time and address scratched on a piece of paper. That would give the stylist time to find bigger sizes. The second fitting would take place in the rented space of the stylist in a not-so-good part of Hollywood. That’s what you get for drinking beer.

My manager walked me as far as the elevators, but that was as far as she’d go. We’d come down the stairs, tried to find my car around that area, and then started walking because I thought that maybe my car was at the other end. I have no sense of direction. If I haven’t been to a place before, I’ll get lost. In the car, if I haven’t traveled the exact route, I’ll get lost and almost force myself to go the wrong way to prove that I knew it was the wrong way. I deliberately go the wrong way so I can predict the outcome with confidence.

At the elevators, as she was trying to leave me and get back to her pretty Jaguar and her pretty office with the ocean breeze, I showed her the big gray empty space inside me. I didn’t mean to; it’s just what happens if I disappoint someone I’m trying to impress. The crying seemed to come abruptly and from my stomach and as I cried, it folded in half and bent over and couldn’t be straightened back up. My head was somewhere past my knees and my heels could no longer balance the weight of my head and torso—all of it making heaving, sobbing motions and so I sank to the cold gray concrete. I was on the ground. It was a brief moment, but for that moment I was on the floor of the bottom floor of the Four Seasons: from the presidential suite to the floor of the bottom floor in four hours. My manager yanked me up by the arm with the super-human strength that comes with embarrassment, the way a mother yanks up a child who’s thrown a tantrum in a department store.

“I can’t do this, Joan. I’m too fat. They don’t want me. They want someone else. I think we should get out of it. I don’t want to do this anymore. Joan, I’m too fat. They told me that Heather Locklear was a size zero and Andie MacDowell was a two!”

She looked around to make sure no one could see us. She made sure none of her producer friends whose kids play soccer were anywhere around to see this spectacle and then she said:

“Honey. You have big legs.”

I stopped crying. I was shocked into stopping. I’d never heard that before in all my years of modeling. I was hoping for some bullshit reassurance about how the stylist should have had more sizes and how women my height shouldn’t be a size 2. Instead I was told the truth.

Yes. Of course, I have big legs. I have big thighs that make all the skirts tight no matter how much I weigh. Everything makes sense now. In fact, Anthony Nankervis, the boy who told me I had slitty, lizard eyes also told me I had footballer’s legs. I don’t know how I could’ve forgotten that.

With a dismissive hand gesture to punctuate her point, she said it again. She announced it with certainty, the way that any fact would be stated, requiring no qualification and inviting no rebuttal.

“Just face it, honey. You have big legs.”

• • •“What part of your body do you like?”The Jenny Craig counselor is talking to a jovial woman at the two o’clock spot in the group circle. She is a very fat woman with dull brown hair.“My hair?” Laughter all round.“Well, that’s not exactly a body part, now is it, Jan.”The circle has about twelve people in it, and I am at six o’clock. While Jan consults her list of several of her body parts that she likes, I look at the blank sheet in front of me and try to think of one of my own. Hands? No. I hate my hands.“I like my hands,” says Jan, looking down at her fatty, pasty hands. I wonder how she can like her hands because even if she thought that her right hand was graceful and slender, her wedding band on her left hand, barely visible through the mounds of flesh suffocating it, tells the story of the big fat body attached to it. As she waves them around to help her mouth make a point, I wonder who put that band on her finger with a promise of being true to her through thick and thin. I wonder if that promise is diminished now, relative to the sliver of band now visible: a once-thick gold band now seemingly thin: a seemingly happy bride now thick with disappointment. But I guess if you only looked at her right hand and heard her laughter, you might still think she was happy. And maybe her husband’s fat, too.Three o’clock likes her eyes. That would’ve been an obvious one for me because my eyes can’t gain weight, but I don’t like my eyes. They’re too small and close together. Four o’clock likes her calves. They’re strong and lean apparently, although I can’t see them through her pant leg so I’ll have to take her word for it. My calves are my least favorite part of my body because after years of treating my local ballet class like it was the Australian Ballet Company, they are enormous. You can’t see them, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Five o’clock likes her arms. Really?“Portia?”“Has everyone met Portia? She’s a newcomer to the group and is the youngest Jenny Craig member we’ve ever had. Tell us your favorite body part, Portia.”My workbook is blank. My mind is blank and yet racing through thoughts. I am fifteen years old and 130 pounds in a room filled with people twice my weight and age and yet I can’t think of a thing. My feet have crooked toes, my ankles are too thin, my calves are too thick, my knees are dimply, my thighs are too big, my ass is droopy, my hips are too wide, my stomach is round and has rolls, my rib cage . . . ? No. My ribs stick too far out at the bottom and that makes my whole torso look wide. My breasts are tiny and disproportionate to the rest of my body . . .“Portia?”“Umm. I don’t know.”What about my arms? My back? My shoulders? My wrists? Wrists. No, my wrists are too small for my forearms and my hands, and so because of my wrists, my hands and arms look bigger.“There’s nothing I like.”The room falls silent. We were all laughing a second ago and complimenting three o’clock on her mauve eyes that looked like Elizabeth Taylor’s and now we’re all silent, all around the clock. All the fat people sitting from twelve right back around to eleven are looking at me at six o’clock. I know that look. It’s the look of the thoughts that run through your mind when you’re looking at a smart-ass. I was the joke to them—the kind that makes you not want to laugh.“Come on, dear. There must be something that you like?”There was an ounce of anger to her tone. My lack of an answer probably looked like unwillingness to play along, but in truth I was still running through all my parts trying to find something to say.“Well, if you don’t think you have any good body parts, then I guess we’re all in trouble!”That was the kind of joke that makes people laugh.

PART TWO

15

I AWOKE TO a strange silence and shafts of light stabbing into the room from the corners of the blinds. The light carried millions of tiny dust particles, which I guess were always there yet only now visible because of the soupy, thick air with its beams of light illuminating them. I was eerily calm when I awoke. I was aware that I had cried myself to sleep over the L’Oréal incident; my eye sockets felt misshapen and waterlogged, as though they could barely keep my sore, dry eyes in my head. But it felt like I had cried for the last time. That I was never going to cry myself to sleep like that again. Despite the heaviness of my head, with its headache and sinus pressure, there was a levity to it, a lightness to it, like everything inside of it that made the world I lived in a place of peace or a place of torture, was weightless—quiet, floating. I felt overtaken by a sense of peace, by the feeling that today was truly a new day.

I got out of bed and immediately started stretching. An odd thing for me to do, but I wanted to feel my body. I wanted to “check in” with it, acknowledge it. As I stretched, there was a certain love I gave to it, an appreciation for its muscles straining and contracting. I liked the way it felt as I touched my toes and straightened my back. I felt like I was suddenly self-contained. Like the answers lay within me. Like my life was about to be lived within the confines of my body and would answer only to it. I didn’t give a shit what anyone thought of me.

As I stretched my arms out to the sides, I ran my fingers through the beams of light, cloudy with the dust that swirled around my bedroom. I saw the beauty of my messy bedroom and inhaled the summer air. All the clothes I’d tried on and discarded on the floor before going to my L’Oréal fitting were looking up at me, wondering what they had done wrong. Despite the mess and the dust, it smelled sweet and I felt myself smiling as I inhaled. I liked that smell. It was the smell of the imported Italian talc in the yellow plastic bottle that I had bought to pamper myself but only now enjoyed as talc and not a status symbol. As I walked barefoot on the painted concrete floor of my bedroom toward the bathroom scale I felt confident that what I was about to see would make me happy for the rest of the day. I felt empty and light and I didn’t care what number the scale told me I was, today I was not going to define myself by it. Today I knew that despite what it said, it was unimportant. Today I would start my new life.

I had the answer to my problems.

I would always be prepared.

I was about to make everything easier.

The scale confirmed what I’d suspected. It read 130. The weight I had always returned to no matter the effort to get beneath it. In the past, this number had invariably plummeted me into despair. It reminded me that no matter what I did, I could never win—that my body with its bones and its guts and its blood weighed in at what it felt comfortable being as a living organism with its own needs. It hated me and thought I was stupid for attempting to change it with my tortuous rituals of forcing regurgitation and starving it of food. It always had the upper hand, the last word. And the last word was 130.

Today being the first day of my brand-new life, with its sunshine and its soupy air, 130 was a beautiful weight. It was my weight. It was Portia, a straight-A student who earned a place at the most prestigious law school in Australia, who had an exciting modeling career and the courage to try her hand at acting in a foreign country. It was the weight of the girl who was a successful actress, who made money, who was independent. For the first time in my life, I didn’t view my body as the enemy. Today it was my friend, my partner in all the success I’d accomplished. As it stepped off the scale and over the pile of discarded clothes, onto the wooden floorboards and toward the food journal on the coffee table, it expressed its strength and joy by lunging, deep and controlled, thighs burning, stomach taut. And with an outstretched arm the hand flicked through the pages of lists of food items and calories and wrote in big, curly pen strokes something the journal had never before seen: my weight.

130

I was hungry and yet unusually unafraid of being hungry. I went to the fridge and then the pantry and proceeded to line up all the possible breakfast foods on the counter. Sitting on the counter in a row, equally spaced and looking like The Price Is Right game show items, were the foods Suzanne, my nutritionist, had given me to eat. The breakfast options of oatmeal, egg whites (you can buy them in a jar, you know), bran muffins, wheat toast, and yogurt were all looking at me and available, but Suzanne had preferred me to eat oatmeal and egg whites because the combination of the two gave good amounts of carbohydrates and protein and because the two-part process of cooking and eating, she believed, made you feel as though you were eating a big, satisfying meal. I made the decision to eat egg whites and oatmeal. I read the calorie contents of the single-serving prepackaged oatmeal sachet: 100 calories. I wondered what 100 calories meant to my body, what it would do with it. Would it use it just to drive to work today or could it drive to work, sit through hair and makeup, and act out a scene all on 100 calories? Would it gently prompt my mind to produce feelings of hunger when it was done burning the calories or would it ask for more food before it was done using the energy from the food I’d given it? If the body was so clever and knew what it needed for health and survival, how come obese people got hungry? The body should use the stored fat to sustain itself to prevent diabetes or heart failure. If it was so clever, it should take over the mind of a self-destructive obese person and send out brain signals of nausea instead of hunger. I came to the conclusion that no matter what my body said it needed, I could no longer trust it. I couldn’t rely on my body to tell me what I needed. From now on, I was in control. I was its captain and would make all the decisions.

I decided that I didn’t need the full 100-calorie oatmeal packet. It was clearly a common measurement for a normal common portion of food that ordinary people would eat. Obviously, it wasn’t a portion that was meant for a person who was dieting. If the average person who wasn’t going to lose weight ate a 100-calorie packet for breakfast, then I should eat less. I immediately felt so stupid that I hadn’t seen that before. Of course you couldn’t lose weight if you relied on Quaker to allot your portion; I had to take control of it. I calculated the grams of food that would deliver an 80-calorie serving on the kitchen scale, and after being careful to give myself the exact amount of oats, I poured it into a bowl. I added hot water and a sprinkling of Splenda. I ate it slowly, tasting every morsel of oatmeal and its claggy syrup. Then, instead of randomly pouring a generous dollop of egg whites from the jar into a hot pan coated in oil, I got out the measuring cup. I measured half a cup of egg whites and poured it into a pan coated with Pam—a no-calorie substitute for oil. I added a sprinkling of Mrs. Dash and salt. Next step was coffee. A mindless consumption of calories in the past would now be another thing ingested that needed measuring. How many additional calories I could spare in my coffee would be determined by the rest of my meal; if I was particularly hungry and needed a large portion of egg whites with my oatmeal, for example, I would take my coffee black, but if I came in under my allotted calorie consumption for the morning, I could measure out a tablespoon of Mocha Mix, a nondairy creamer, to add to it. In the past I would just randomly pour calories into a cup, not caring that a generous pouring of Mocha Mix could run 50 calories. Fifty calories. That was more than a third of my actual food for the morning. After drinking the coffee and eating the egg whites and the oatmeal, I had never felt more satisfied. I was full. I was clever. I had halved my morning calorie intake. I planned on readjusting my whole program. I would take my diary everywhere I went and record each calorie that went into my mouth. Suzanne had taught me to weigh, calculate, and document like a mathematician solving an equation, and with my new education I was ready to solve the weight problem.

Suzanne had set my calorie intake for optimum weight loss at 1,400 calories a day. I reset it to 1,000.

Problem solved.

16

“WELL, HELLO there. I’m a big fan of your show. What a delight to meet you.”

A middle-aged gray-haired man sat behind the desk of the Granville Towers lobby and practically sang his greeting to me in a gently lilting Southern accent. He seemed genuinely excited to meet me, and his happy demeanor was contagious. I shook his hand and smiled an involuntarily broad smile and I realized that I hadn’t really smiled in awhile, that his sparkly nature was in stark contrast to my dullness. Everything about the Granville made me happy. Situated at Sunset and Crescent Heights, the location was perfect, and the building was historic and beautiful. A true example of 1920s architecture, the penthouse apartment that I was about to see had the potential to saddle me with a mortgage. It was time to buy a home, to invest in my life in Los Angeles. I needed a place of my own and a penthouse apartment in an Old Hollywood building on Sunset Boulevard sounded like a place an actress should live.

As I waited in the lobby for the real estate agent to arrive, the doorman, who introduced himself as Jeff, got up from his station and walked around the desk, talking excitedly as if I was the only visitor he’d had in months.

“Mickey Rourke lived here. He just moved out, oh . . . what . . . it’d be a couple of months now. He had three little dogs, Chihuahuas I believe.” It annoyed me that people find celebrity so impressive that they have to talk about it. What annoyed me more was that I was impressed. Somehow the building was instantly more valuable to me just because a celebrity had lived in it.

“I’ll show you his apartment if you like, but don’t tell the agent—I’ll get in trouble.” Jeff spoke from the corner of his mouth in an exaggerated whisper even though there was no one else in the lobby to overhear. It was dramatic and I would usually have found it annoying, but I liked the fact that he’d invited me to share a secret with him. It felt warm, welcoming.

“It’s on the ground floor, but I like it more than the penthouse you’re going to see because it has the beautiful coffered ceilings, you know.”

On our way see Mickey Rourke’s apartment, Jeff told me of other celebrities who had lived at the Granville: Brendan Fraser, David Bowie, and Amy Locane. Michael Michele, an actress on ER, was a current resident.

“You know, the place was built in 1929 and it was called the Voltaire. It was a hotel back then, but sometime after that it was made into apartments and apparently, though there’s no real proof of this, Marilyn Monroe lived here with Joe DiMaggio.”

Jeff wore a jacket and tie. In fact, everything about him was old-fashioned. He seemed to be part of the history he so loved to talk about, as if he lived in a black-and-white movie. If he weren’t so enamored with movie stars, I could also picture him living in the South before the Civil War. I could see him as a gentleman on a plantation in Georgia in his hunter green library dwarfed by ceiling-high shelves filled with leather-bound books. But Jeff clearly loved Hollywood, and he loved his job. He was the doorman, the gatekeeper of the Granville Towers, and his excitement over me made me feel as though I could be one of his movie star stories, just as Mickey Rourke and his dogs and his ceilings will forever be one of his stories.

The penthouse apartment wasn’t spectacular. It didn’t have the molding on the baseboards or the high coffered ceiling that Mickey’s had. It wasn’t particularly spacious, and the views, although beautiful from the east window, were blocked on the north side by the Virgin Megastore building at Sunset 5, the shopping complex next door to the Granville. In fact, from the first floor of the apartment, looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows on the north side created the optical illusion of a scorching desert. The yellow paint on the Sunset 5 building looked like sand and the heat that spewed out from the air conditioning vents on the roof created that warped-air look of a heat wave. After seeing the small galley kitchen and the modest bedroom and living room, we took the staircase next to the public elevator that led to the attic above the penthouse apartment, while the real estate agent explained to me the resale potential if I connected the penthouse apartment to the attic with an interior staircase. I hadn’t planned on renovating, but when I saw the view from the spacious high-ceilinged attic I no longer had a choice. I had never been so excited in my life. On the north wall were thirty or so large windows in rows of three, pitched in an A-frame, and beyond the windows, instead of the desert that I saw from the floor below, was the vast industrial roof of the Sunset 5. Clouds of smoke billowed from the metal chimneys and swirled in the wind, occasionally clearing to show the enormous steel tubes in a cross-section of right angles looking like the indecipherable circuit boards my brother as a kid used to spend hours soldering wires onto to make LEDs light up. The space was currently being used as a studio for the portrait photographer who owned the unit, and the tungsten lights and paper backdrops clamped onto C-stands made the apartment even more loftlike. I felt as though I had been transported to an artist’s loft in a city like Philadelphia, which was much more exciting to me than where I actually was. Where I was, was predictable. But the apartment made me think there was more to life than being an actress on a David Kelley show. It made me remember who I used to be and where I had wanted to live if I had stayed in law school in Melbourne: in a nongentrified artist neighborhood off Brunswick Street, the place that made me happier than any other place on earth. For on Brunswick Street I was gay. I wore motorcycle boots, had slightly dreadlocked hair, and wrapped leather around my wrists. I drank beer at the Provincial and ate penne Amatriciana at Mario’s and saw indie bands with my best friend, Bill.

“I’ll take it.”

I left my new apartment with its own industrial city and flew past Jeff, the doorman, in a hurry. I had to get back to my sublet in Hancock Park in time to make dinner. Since lowering my calorie intake to exactly 1,000 calories a day, I discovered that the best time to eat dinner was at exactly six o’clock to give my body a head start in burning the calories. If I ate at six, I still had five or six hours to move around before I lay still for six hours. If I ate any later than that, I worried that overnight the unused calories would turn to fat. I discovered that although I didn’t want to lower my calorie intake to under 1,000, as anything lower would be the equivalent of crash dieting, I could speed up the weight loss by increasing the amount of exercise and eating at the right times. Occasionally, if I felt particularly energetic, I could squeeze in a quick workout before bed and if I didn’t actually get on the treadmill, I would do sit-ups and leg lifts on the floor next to my bed.

When I got home, I prepared four ounces of lean ground turkey and a spattering of ketchup, cooked with Pam and lightly sprayed with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray. As annoying as the name of the product was, every time I doused my food with the stuff I would silently congratulate the marketing team behind the brand. For yes, I too, couldn’t believe it wasn’t butter. More than that, I couldn’t believe something that delicious didn’t have any calories. I sprayed it on everything. It tasted great with my morning oatmeal, mixed into my tuna at lunch, and was a perfect partner for my ground turkey with ketchup at dinner. It even tasted delicious as an ingredient of a dessert I concocted: Jell-O, Splenda, and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray all mixed together. At 10 calories per serving, it satisfied my sweet tooth and was my favorite new recipe that I had created. I had never thought of myself as a chef before, but I was quite impressed with my cooking. I was impressed that I had the ability to take foods that weren’t usually paired and put them together for a delicious, low-calorie meal.

I picked up the phone before deciding which number to dial. Kali? Erik? Would either of them care about my new apartment? I had originally wanted to live with Erik. I wanted to buy an apartment that was big enough so I could have Erik as my roommate. But the thought of what the pantry in the kitchen would look like stopped me from pursuing it. Erik would buy food. All kinds of food would assault me as I opened the cupboard to reach in for a can of tuna. And I would have to prepare myself mentally every time I opened the refrigerator, as maybe one of those foods would tempt me enough to trigger a binge. On Sundays he might invite friends over to watch a game, eat pizza, and I would be left alone cleaning up the kitchen with the tortuous decision of whether to eat the remaining slice or throw it in the trash. Even if I threw it in the trash I couldn’t be certain that the thought of eating it wouldn’t keep me up all night, worried that I would retrieve it and eat the cold discarded piece despite the fact that it smelled of cigarette ash and beer. I would certainly get up out of bed and eat it. Then, knowing that I’d blown it, I’d have to keep going. I’d eat every bit of his food, his potato chips, and his leftover Chinese food, his breakfast cereal, and those chocolate cookies he eats when he needs to be comforted. My kitchen would be a dangerous temptress—and she would constantly flirt with the fat slob inside.

In my new apartment my fridge will be sparse. My cupboard will be bare. My house will be safe.

I picked up the phone to dial Ann in New York. I couldn’t help but feel like a conversation with her would feel more like the second round of a boxing match than a celebration of my new apartment. Since the underwear episode on the show, Ann and I had barely spoken. Upon further evaluation of her comment about my looking like a normal woman in my underwear, I was quite sure she wasn’t aware that she was insulting me. However, I was sure she was careful not to compliment me, either. She had expressed her opinions about not emphasizing looks and weight and had tried to get me to read feminist literature like Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. No, Ann didn’t mean anything by it. Nevertheless, I couldn’t let a comment like that slip by again without retaliation. My gloves were on, ready to strike if Ann was being insensitive.

“AC. PdR”

“PdR!”

For some reason, when Ann and I first became friends, I had to call her by her full name, Ann Catrina, when I was referring to her. Then I had to say her full name to her face. Eventually it got so tedious to call her Ann Catrina, I shortened it to AC. She reciprocated by calling me PdR. So now we have that.

I excitedly told her about my new place while pouring my fourth Diet Coke; a low-calorie substitute for the wine I used to drink with dinner. Not drinking was yet another healthy change I had made since taking nutrition and fitness seriously. I told her about what had happened in St. Barths with Sacha. She said she was glad because she seemed to think there was a great gay girl out there who could really love me. That if I kept chasing Sacha as she was busy chasing men, I would miss this wonderful, proud-to-be-gay girl as I ran right by. What she couldn’t quite tell me was how this self-confident, happy gay woman was going to meet a closeted Portia and be perfectly okay with going back into the closet to be her secret girlfriend. Where would I meet her? Would it occur at a supermarket when our shopping carts accidentally collided and we telepathically exchanged the information that we were gay, available, and interested? Ann Catrina needed to understand that there wasn’t a solution to this problem. To shut her up, I told her the most disturbing information:

“There’s a morality clause in the L’Oréal contract.”

“A . . . what now?”

“It states that if I’m caught doing something that damages the image of the company, I’ll have to pay all the money back. I’ll have to pay back the advance, everything.”

My agent and manager had called me to go over the contract just before the fitting. Remembering how I sat in the car with the cell phone to my ear, having to pull over in order to calm myself, I felt as sick telling Ann about it as I had when it was told to me. The clause cited examples like public drunkenness, arrests, et cetera, but I knew that it would include homosexuality. The wording of the contract was vague, and I was unsure exactly what would constitute a breach of the contract and how “morality” was defined. The whole thing made me sick. I was so scared about the morality clause I didn’t want to even talk about it. I just wanted her to stop talking about how easy it would be for me to live my life openly. I just wanted her to shut up about it.

Before she could ask any questions or try to reason with me, I told her about my nutritionist.

“She has you on one thousand calories a day?”

“Yes. Well, no. I modified the diet a little. She told me to eat fourteen hundred for weight loss, but I wasn’t really losing weight so I got rid of some extra calories here and there.”

“She thinks you need to lose weight?”

“Yes. Oh. I don’t know. We haven’t really talked about that.”

“What do you talk about, then?”

“Eating healthily. You know. Not gaining and losing all the time like I’ve been doing.”

The more I talked, the more concern I could hear in her voice. Which annoyed me. She didn’t understand the pressures of being an actress, of showing up to a photo shoot where the wardrobe was nothing but handcuffs and a strip of chainmail. She didn’t know what it was like to try to find a dress for the Golden Globes and having only one good option because it was the only sample size dress that fit your portly body. She didn’t know what it was like to hear that you have a normal-looking body after starving for weeks to get a thin-looking one, hoping that your friends would admire it. “Normal” isn’t an adjective you wish to hear after putting that much effort into making sure it was spectacular.

“Ann. I gotta go.”

“Go pour yourself a glass of wine and relax about it all. You’ve always looked great, PdR. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Right. Like I was going to drink wine two days before the L’Oréal shoot.

“Okay, AC. See you later.”

“Oh! Before you go, can I stay with you in a couple of weeks? I’ll be in town for a few days. A friend from UCLA just got engaged, so I thought I’d come to LA for the party.”

No. No, you can’t stay. Even if you come after I shoot L’Oréal, I need to keep going now this diet has started working for me. I need to eat at exactly six o’clock every night, and I can’t drink alcohol with you like we used to. I can’t go out to dinner anymore. I don’t get to take a night or two off where I can eat whatever I want. I’m about to look good for the first time in my life, and for the first time I know I’m never going to gain it back again. So I can’t take a few days off. If I eat and drink, I’ll gain again. Besides, I don’t even have the room anymore. I need to work out on my treadmill at 10:00 at night and 6:00 in the morning in the spare bedroom where you’re expecting to stay.

“Yes. Of course you can. When?”

“Around the fifteenth. I’ll email you.”

I hung up the phone. The fifteenth was twelve days away. So I gave myself a new goal. Over the next twelve days, I would eat 800 calories a day. I needed to give myself a cushion so I could enjoy my time with Ann and not worry about gaining weight. If I lost a little more than I’d originally planned to lose, I would regulate my weight loss again after she left because I knew that weight lost too quickly was sure to return. Suzanne told me that. So I opened my journal and in the top right-hand corner of every dated page for the next twelve days I wrote 800. I would be ready for Ann’s visit. I even looked forward to it.

I weighed myself first thing. I was 120 pounds. Actually I was probably a pound more, but my mother once showed me a trick to play on the scale where you set the dial a couple of pounds below the zero, but in a way that isn’t very obvious to the logical part of your brain—especially from standing height looking down. If the needle sidles up to the zero, sitting next to it but not quite touching it, your brain is tricked into thinking that the needle needs to start in that position or the reading will be inaccurate. In fact, if you tap your toe on the scale the needle often resets itself to zero anyway, so to me lining up the dial perfectly with the zero was like sitting on a fence. Like I should’ve picked a side. Shall I choose denial of truth on the side that reads heavier but with the comfort of knowing that in reality I’m lighter, or shall I choose the immediate thrill of weighing in under the real number, to help with incentive?

I hated that zero. The zero is the worst part of the scale because the zero holds all the hope and excitement for what could be. It tells you that you can be anything you want if you work hard; that you make your own destiny. It tells you that every day is a new beginning. But that hadn’t been true for me until recently. Because no matter what I did, no matter how much weight I lost, I always seemed to end up in the same place; standing on a scale looking down past my naked protruding belly and round thighs at 130 pounds.

But I was 120. It was the day of the L’Oréal commercial shoot. I should’ve been happy and yet I felt disturbed. My stomach was protruding very badly. It looked distended, almost. Or as my mother would put it, it looked like a poisoned pup. I hated it when stupid phrases like that popped into my mind. I hated that I had no control over my thoughts. But I especially hated that my stomach looked bloated and yet the rest of my body felt thinner. What was the point of dieting like I’d been doing, if on the most important day, my stomach was sticking out like a sore thumb?

I walked to the shower and punched my stupid stomach as I went. What could have caused this? The night before I ate only 200 calories of tuna with butter spray and mustard. How could I still see so much fat on my stomach? I stood under the shower and watched the water run between my breasts and over my stomach, cascading onto the shower floor from just past my navel because of the shelf that the protrusion of bulging fat had made. I picked up inches of fat with my fingers. It wasn’t just bloat, it was fat. It was real fat; not something that I could take away by drinking water and sitting in a sauna. I’d ignorantly thought I wouldn’t have any fat at 120 pounds.

I felt sick. I felt like I couldn’t face the L’Oréal executives and the stylist again after what had happened last time. My suits were at least bigger, but with my stomach puffed out like this, I didn’t know if that would even matter. What if I didn’t fit into anything again? I started to cry. Stupid weakling that I am, I had to cry and make my eyes puffy to match my puffy body. I had finished shampooing my head when I realized that I used the wrong shampoo. With all the crying and obsessing about my stomach, I accidentally used cheap shampoo instead of the L’Oréal shampoo I was supposed to use the morning of the commercial. Now I would have red puffy eyes, a fat stomach, and hair that felt like straw to bring to the set. A derisive laugh escaped my throat as I realized that I was the spokesperson for the new shampoo but didn’t use the shampoo that I’m selling because subconsciously I didn’t believe the famous L’Oréal slogan, “Because I’m worth it.”

“Because I’m not worth it.” I said it out loud looking at a zit on my chin in the mirror using the same inflection the other L’Oréal girls use to tell the world that they are worth it: the same inflection that I’d use that day. It sounded funny so I kept saying it as I walked around the house.

“Because I’m not worth it,” as I looked for pretty underwear that I didn’t have among the ugly, stretched-out panties in my drawer. That I didn’t think to buy some pretty, new underwear for the shoot was unbelievable to me.

“Because I’m not worth it,” I said as I sipped my black coffee, wishing I were thin enough to have creamer in it because the strong black coffee tasted putrid and assaulted my taste buds. I skipped breakfast altogether because I wasn’t worth it.

As I picked up my cell phone and walked to the door, I was aware of the time for the first time that morning. I was late. I should’ve been at the set already, and I didn’t even know where I was going. With a surge of adrenaline, I rushed out the door and down the stairs, trying to decipher directions from the map. I was the star of the commercial and I was going to be late. All those people would be waiting for me. The L’Oréal executives, the director, the hairstylist and makeup artist who were both so renowned they had published books and signature product lines—all of them were waiting for me. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe that’s what stars were supposed to do. They’re supposed to display their power by making other people wait for them. As I caught one red light after another, I had a choice to be in a frenzy of anxiety or relax into a character that keeps people waiting—like an R&B diva or a rock star. The lyrics of “Pennyroyal Tea” came to my mind. “I’m on my time with everyone.” It was easier to play that character than to care.

17

WHEN ANN arrived I was still not at my goal weight. Although I had worked hard and I was ready to eat and drink with her, I still had weight to lose. I was 115 pounds and my goal was 110. I still had big thighs. I still saw round bulging thighs when I looked in the mirror. I didn’t know if getting to 110 would take the bulges and the roundness away, but it was worth losing the extra pounds to try to make them straight. I just wanted them to look straight. Still, I needed to at least allow myself to have a drink with Ann Catrina, as it had been a while since I had seen any of my friends and I needed to have a little fun. Besides, I knew that depression caused weight gain because of some kind of chemical in your body that is released if you’re unhappy and that can slow down your metabolism. Cortisol? Something like that.

Eating 800 calories a day was difficult. Not because it was too little food but because it was too much. One thousand calories divided perfectly into my daily meals, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t quite get 800 to fit. I removed the egg whites from the breakfast menu, opting to eat a serving midmorning, which left me with just the oatmeal. I had gotten used to eating the reduced portion of the prepackaged single serving of oatmeal and now it weighed in at 60 calories a serving. I added some blueberries, Splenda, and the butter spray so with the teaspoon of Mocha Mix I got my 100-calorie breakfast. I ate 60 calories of egg whites at around ten o’clock. One hundred and fifty calories of tuna with 50 additional calories for tomatoes, pickles, and lettuce was ample for lunch. Three ounces of turkey with butternut squash was around 300 calories and then an additional 40 calories for miscellaneous things—like gum or Crystal Light and coffee throughout the day—brought my total in at around 700. Quite often, if I was working and didn’t have time to prepare the egg whites, then the daily total would be somewhere in the low six hundreds.

I fine-tuned my workout regimen. On days when I didn’t have to go to the studio, I would begin my workout at exactly 6:00. On days I worked, I got out of bed at 4:15. I ran for forty-five minutes on the treadmill at 6.0 on a 1 incline. I didn’t like running uphill. It did something weird to my lower back, but I felt I had to run harder and with my stomach tight to make up for it as most people run on an incline. I did sit-ups after my run. I did exactly 105 sit-ups. I wanted to do 100, but the 5 extra sit-ups allowed for some sloppy ones during my ten sets of ten reps. If I had time, I would do leg lifts: 105 with each leg. In addition to my workouts at home, I went to Mari Windsor Pilates and got a Pilates trainer. A costar had gone there and I’d read about Pilates in magazines so I thought I’d try it. It seemed that most celebrities were doing it, and I felt it was a particularly appropriate body-sculpting workout for me because it was originally designed for dancers and I used to be a dancer. It was slightly intimidating, however, because the other clients there were so thin and toned. It was a new goal to be thinner and more muscular than the other women at the Pilates studio, which ultimately was a good thing, because I have always thrived on healthy competition. After I was confident that I had the best body of all the paying customers, I would set my sights on the trainers.

Round Three: I was in my corner and Ann was in hers. Ann, a featherweight from New York City takes on Portia, the middleweight from sunny Southern California. Ann rang the bell by saying:

“Okay, I understand that you want to lose weight, but you should have some perspective on how much you’re losing—like some way of measuring that isn’t necessarily a scale. I know for me, there are clothes that are tight when I’ve gained weight and a little loose when I’ve lost weight. Certainly you have that, too. Like if you can fit comfortably into your skinny jeans, or if they’re just a little loose, you’re done losing weight, right?” She took a sip of wine, stroked my dog sitting in her lap, and waited for my response. I could tell that this conversation wasn’t easy for her. And while I was quite chuffed that she’d care enough to have it with me, I wished she’d just shut up.

According to her laws, I guess I had no perspective. But what’s perspective when you started out fat? Why would I ever want those jeans to be a little loose when they were a 28 waist? I couldn’t tell her this, of course, because then we’d have to talk about how now I was on TV and that the “normal” life I lived at my “normal” weight no longer applied. I couldn’t sit there and brag about how I was different now because I was on TV. I just wished she understood that without me having to explain it.

I was losing weight, though. I ordered a pair of 26 waist pants that took four weeks to arrive, and they were too big, too big by at least a size, maybe even two. I was really disturbed by this because I thought I’d looked good four weeks ago. God, I did a photo shoot for Flair four weeks ago and the magazine hadn’t even come out yet. How disgusting that that was what people would think I looked like.

I guess some time had slid by without a response and Ann didn’t like silence in a conversation, so she continued:

“I have to tell you something.”

Here it comes, I thought. Here comes the part where she tells me I drink too much and right now I’m too drunk to take it well.

“You’re too thin.”

It was all I could do not to laugh. Really. The laughter was in my torso somewhere waiting to escape, but I stuffed it down because her face was so serious, plus I was enjoying it so much—the thought of being too thin. That’s funny: too thin. Just this morning on the set I had to clench my buttocks as I walked through the law office on a full-length lens because if I walked normally the part where my hips meet my thighs bulged out rhythmically with each step: left fat bulge, right fat bulge, left fat bulge, and cue dialogue, “You wanted to see me?” Too thin. She continued talking about my arms being sinewy and veiny and how I looked like an eleven-year-old and that it wasn’t attractive, but I just wanted to laugh. Oh, why not just enjoy this surreal moment and laugh? My face was contorting to control it from escaping anyway. I knew my face well enough to know that it’s a traitor to my mind. It gives away all my secrets. And so I laughed. I laughed really hard.

“I’m sorry. It’s not funny. I don’t know why I’m finding it funny. It’s not funny. It’s just . . . you’re so serious!”

“This is serious! You didn’t have dinner tonight. And you don’t look good, P. I think you’ve lost perspective.”

My laughter died away. Not because what she was saying made sense to me but because I knew it was just an illusion created by my clothes or the way I was sitting.

It’s not real. I’m not really thin. Should I show her my stomach and the rolls of fat? Or do I sit here on the floor and keep the pose that’s making her think that I am thin so I can enjoy this moment longer?

I never wanted it to go away. I knew the minute I stood, it would be over. Or when I changed out of these magical jeans and into my pajamas. I was jutting out my collarbone subtly and separating my arm from my body to make her not feel stupid or wrong. She was going to realize it tomorrow, but for right now I knew she needed to be right and I needed to hear that I was thin. So I kept posing as a poor, starved waif until she stopped talking.

“Does any of what I’m saying make sense to you?”

What could I do? Answer her honestly? Say, no, AC, none of this makes sense because none of it is true. Even if you think you are telling me the truth, that I’m too thin, it’s just your truth, your perspective. It’s not society’s perspective, the clothing designers’ perspective. If it was, then models would have curves and actresses would have round faces and designers would make sample dresses bigger. What did she know? She was at NYU getting her master’s in . . . something. Business? Besides, I’d never gotten so much attention for having a good body. I had just been featured in In Style for having the “Look of the Week.” US Weekly gave me the “Best Dressed” accolade for the Rick Owens dress I wore to the Fox party. And last week Vera told me that I was her favorite actress to dress. I’d never gotten so many compliments. Everyone told me I looked fantastic.

“P, I’m just concerned, that’s all.”

“And I appreciate it, but there’s nothing to worry about. I ate dinner.”

“You didn’t have dinner.”

I had dinner. I ate grilled vegetables. I did stop eating them, though, because I could tell that they had used a lot of olive oil to cook them. I didn’t wear any lip balm because I wanted to make sure I could detect if anything I ate was cooked with oil. I couldn’t tell how much oil was used unless I had nothing waxy or oily on my lips. Besides, who knew whether the shea butter in lip balm contained calories that you could accidentally ingest? I had to worry about all the incidental calories, the hidden calories. Oil has a lot of calories and is a hidden ingredient in so many foods.

Oil is really my main problem right now.

“Look.” I thrust my wineglass in her face. “I’m drinking alcohol! Plenty of calories in that.”

God. I’ve drunk my weight in wine and she thinks I have a problem?

Ann shifted Bean slightly on her lap and looked around the room. She looked intently into each of the living room’s corners as if searching for a way to change the subject. Her eyes settled on the open kitchen door. They remained there and I realized that my kitchen scale and a calorie counter were probably what she was looking at. While it occurred to me that there was a slim chance she actually thought I was too thin, I had decided moments ago that she was just jealous. Who wouldn’t be? While I knew I wasn’t skinny, it was obvious that I had gained control over my weight, which is a huge feat worthy of jealousy. Everyone wants to be in control of their weight.

“So. How was the L’Oréal shoot?”

“Great . . . really fun, actually. I think it’ll be a pretty good commercial. I had to do that classic ‘hair shot.’ You know, where they fan out your hair? I felt pretty stupid doing that, but it should turn out okay.” I took a sip of my wine. I wanted to tell her that I fit into my clothes and that most of them were even too big, but I couldn’t. Usually, that would be the kind of thing we’d talk about, but after her rant about my being too thin, I had to keep quiet about the one thing that made me really happy. I wanted to tell her that they kept testing me by telling a PA to ask me if I wanted to eat or drink anything, like lunch or coffee, and I passed the test. I didn’t eat all day and everyone was really impressed because they kept talking about it and asking me over and over again if I wanted food. I wanted to tell her that I got back at that bitch of a stylist for announcing to the L’Oréal executives that I was a size 8, by being too thin for her precious clothes. I wanted to describe the tailor’s facial expression when she had to rush to take in the skirts that she once said didn’t have “enough in the seam” to take out. But I couldn’t. So I told her that I had fun and everyone was really nice. It was the kind of answer I’d give in an interview.

Just as I began to feel sorry for myself for having to lie to everyone, including my best friend, I remembered something that I thought she’d find funny.

“Well, there was one thing that was pretty funny. At one point the makeup guy and his assistant started talking about whether I could do makeup as well as the hair products—if I had good enough facial features . . .”

“That’s great,” she interrupted. “L’Oréal wants you to sell makeup as well?”

“No. No. They don’t. My God, Ann—it was hilarious. They went through every part of my face—in front of me—tearing each feature apart like, ‘What about lips?’ And then the assistant would say, ‘Well, she has lovely lips, but her teeth are a little crooked and not that white.’ And then they got to my eyes. They almost agreed on mascara because I have really thick eyelashes until one of them mentioned that my eyes were too small.”

I already knew that I had small eyes. Us Weekly told me. Thank God for that because before the article I thought my eyes were fairly normal and I treated them as such. Without their proper diagnosis, I couldn’t apply the correct antidote to disguise this flaw. It was a piece on beauty and how the reader, if she identified with a particular flaw that could be seen on a celebrity, could deemphasize the problem. I had, “small, close-together eyes.” I took their advice and have since applied dark swooping upward lines at the corners to lessen the appearance of the smallness and roundness of my close-together, beady little eyes.

“Anyway. It was pretty funny.”

“That doesn’t sound funny to me.”

By the furrow in her brow, I could tell that unless I left the room I would be listening to another lecture—this time about how the L’Oréal executives aren’t the experts and how I’m perfect the way I am. I would have had to nod my head and pretend to agree with her even though we both knew that I wasn’t perfect and that L’Oréal clearly are the experts.

“I’m so sorry, AC, but I gotta go to bed because I have to get up early. You got everything you need? You good?”

“Yeah. I’ll go to bed in a minute. And I won’t see you before I leave, I guess, but I’m here if you want to talk. Call me anytime, okay?”

“Okay. Good night.” I bent down and hugged her. I adored AC. She had only ever wanted the best for me. Unfortunately, she didn’t understand that what was best for me before getting the show and what was best for me now were two different things.

I glanced at the treadmill as I passed the guest bedroom door on my way to the bathroom. Get on the treadmill. I couldn’t even imagine how many calories were in those three glasses of wine. The voice in my head told me that I was lazy, that I didn’t deserve a day off, but there was nothing I could do about it and so I brushed my teeth and slipped into bed.

Lying in bed was always the worst time of the day. If I hadn’t done all that I could do to help myself, I imagined what the insides of my body were doing. As I lay motionless and waiting for sleep, I stared at the ceiling and imagined molecular energy like the scientific renditions I’d seen in science class as a kid, shaped like hectagons and forming blocks of fat in my body—honeycomb parasites attaching to my thighs. Or I’d see fat in a cooling frying pan and imagined the once vital liquid energy slowly coagulating into cold, white fat, coating the red walls in my body like a virus. The unused calories in my body caused me anxiety because I was just lying there, passively allowing the fat to happen, just as I had passively allowed myself to keep ballooning to 130 pounds. But did I have the energy to get out of bed and do sit-ups? The wine had made me lazy. I had the anxiety, but I was too lethargic to relieve myself of it by working out. I could’ve thrown up. But if I threw up the wine, Ann might have heard and then she’d never get off my case. If I threw up, then she’d feel validated and I’d feel stupid because that’s not what I did anymore. I was healthy now. I had the willpower not to crash diet and then binge and purge. I had solved that problem.

I got out of bed and onto the floor to start my sit-ups. I couldn’t think that I had solved the problem of my weight fluctuating if I just lay in bed allowing the sugar in the wine to turn into fat. As I began my crunches, I heard Ann getting ready for bed. I could hear her checking her messages on her cell phone and I could vaguely make out a man’s voice on the other end. As she turned out the light and got into the bed that I’d moved against the wall to make way for the treadmill, I couldn’t help but wish I were her. I wished I were a student living in New York, dating and going to parties. I wished I could travel to another city and stay over at a friend’s house without worrying about what I was going to eat. I wished I could just eat because I was hungry. I wished my life wasn’t about how I looked especially because how I looked was my least favorite part of myself. I wished I had a life where I could meet someone I could marry.

18

What did you eat last night?

I awoke to this question in a room that was still slightly unfamiliar even though I had lived in the new apartment for over a month. As I calmed myself by running through the list of foods I’d eaten the day before, I noticed a crack on the bedroom ceiling where it met the wall and was beginning to run toward the window that faced the yellow desert that was the wall of the Sunset 5. Not only was the bedroom still slightly unfamiliar to me, but the whole downstairs level also, as I only ate and slept on the first floor, spending most of my waking hours upstairs in the attic. My treadmill was upstairs in the attic and it was beckoning me as it always did after I had completed my mental calculations of calories in and out. The treadmill was really the only thing up there and was perfectly centered in the attic, between the wall of windows that showcased the industrial city that was the roof of the Sunset 5 and the east windows through which I could see all the way downtown. The wall opposite the smokestacks acted as a bulletin board where I had taped pieces of paper. Because the walls would soon be replastered and repainted, they were not precious; they had no value other than as a place to put my thoughts. Mostly the pieces of paper were exaggerated to-do lists. I say “exaggerated” because they said things that were more like goals that I wanted to achieve than things that needed to be done. The largest piece of paper with the boldest writing stated, I WILL BE 105 POUNDS BY CHRISTMAS. Another stated, I WILL STAR IN A BIG-BUDGET MOVIE NEXT SUMMER.

Starring in a movie had only recently become important to me, as Lucy Liu had just gotten Charlie’s Angels. Suddenly being a cast member on Ally McBeal didn’t seem to be enough anymore. Everyone at work was reading movie scripts and going on auditions. I often recited my audition lines while I was on the treadmill. I recited them out loud, loudly, over the noisy whirring and the thud of my footfall as I jogged at a 5.5/1 incline. I also put a TV up there with a VCR so I could run and watch movies, which was so much better than sitting to watch them. I had discovered that I could do a lot on the treadmill. I could read books and scripts and knit on the treadmill.

As I began my morning workout, I looked over at the cards on the left of the to-do list which ran down the length of the wall.

111

110

109

108

107

106

105

I was 111 pounds. Each time I lost a pound I took the card off the wall. It helped keep me focused and it helped me to remember that once I’d achieved the new lower weight and the card stating my previous weight was gone, that I could never weigh that much again; that the old weight was gone. It was no longer who I was. It was getting more difficult to lose weight as I got thinner, so I needed all the incentive and motivation I could muster. Putting my weight on the wall was a clever thing to do as it always needed to be in the forefront of my mind, otherwise I might’ve forgotten and walked on the treadmill instead of run, sat instead of paced. I once saw a loft where a famous writer lived, and all over the wall was his research for the novel he was writing. He described the book to me as his life’s work, his magnum opus. I felt like controlling my weight was my magnum opus, the most important product of my brain and was worthy of devoting a wall to its success.

I liked doing my morning workout in the attic even though I lived next to a Crunch gym. When I first moved into the apartment I went to Crunch often, but I discovered that I didn’t like showing my body to the other patrons who were no doubt looking at me as critically as I was looking at them. I hated the thought of them recognizing me and telling their friends that Nelle Porter had a round stomach or that when I walked on the treadmill the tops of my thighs bulged out from side to side. What I hated most about going next door to Crunch was the possibility of paparazzi finding me on the way home after a workout, when I looked bloated and my sweatpants were clinging to my thighs. So instead of subjecting myself to the worry of being seen by people and cameras, I preferred to use my treadmill in the attic or to run up and down the stairs next to the elevator for exercise. Sometimes, if I felt particularly energetic, I would time myself as I ran the six flights that connected all the floors of my apartment building. I would run up and down, all the way from the penthouse to the ground floor and back. I could do this mostly unseen by the other tenants, as most of them were lazy and only ever took the elevator.

As I ran on the treadmill in my attic, however, I occasionally felt paranoid. Although it wasn’t very likely, I sometimes felt that it was possible that a photographer was taking pictures of me from the industrial roof, that through the smoke he could get clear shots of Portia running on the treadmill in a big empty room. Or he would take video of me lunging from one side of the room to the other, as I had decided I would lunge instead of walk, since lunging would maximize the number of calories I could burn and help tone my legs at the same time. What made the possibility of paparazzi finding me in my loft even more frightening was that I wore only my underwear when I was at home because I liked to stay as cold as possible to burn calories and because, since I was always running when I was home, if I wore workout gear I’d just have more laundry to do. It terrified me to think of that tabloid picture: Portia in just her underwear, running and lunging, a wall of numbers and weight loss goals behind her.

My paranoid thoughts were interrupted by the shrill sound of Bean’s bark. Although I would’ve loved to ignore her and finish my workout, I knew she needed to be taken out. I had only been running for forty-five minutes and I had to leave for work very soon. Reluctantly, I got off the treadmill and went back downstairs to clothe myself and collect her. Having to travel between floors in my underwear using the exterior public staircase was interesting. I had planned on renovating shortly after owning the apartment, connecting the floors and making it more my taste, but I couldn’t find the time to search for the perfect architect and designer in between working and working out. I kind of liked it separated, too. I liked that I was hard to find in this secret room that no one, not even a housekeeper, knew existed. I could hide in the attic. And while I didn’t like the beige carpet and the previous owner’s bed frame and cheap dining table on the first floor, I couldn’t be judged for my apartment’s decor since it wasn’t mine, it wasn’t my taste. It was liberating, actually, to live in a space that I owned yet it didn’t announce my personality. I could still be anything I liked. I didn’t have to live with my previous conclusions of who I was reflected all around me in furnishings and paintings, fabric and stainless steel appliances. I lived in a blank canvas, albeit an old and sullied blank canvas, upon which one day I could create a tasteful masterpiece. While I waited to create my space, however, I had barely any furniture. I had no chairs and no sofa, no coffee table. The only indication that someone lived there was my large collection of antique mannequins that were propped up around the living room. While I had always enjoyed them as an expression of the female form, the mannequins became useful as sometimes I measured them and compared my body measurements. I had just started measuring my body parts as a more accurate indication of my weight loss. Mannequins represented the ideal form. By comparing myself to the mannequins, I could take an honest look at how I measured up to that ideal. But mostly I just liked to look at their thin, hard limbs.

As I pulled out of the parking garage of my apartment, I checked the time. It was 9:02. It took a long time to drive to work from anywhere in Los Angeles, since Manhattan Beach was far from the city. I didn’t get to finish my workout, as Bean took an inordinately long time to go to the bathroom on the lawn of the garden terrace on the second floor. While I could have left her there on her own and come back to collect her on my way down to the parking garage, I decided to wait with her, however impatiently. Although the garden was walled and looked quite safe, I couldn’t risk losing her. She was my best friend.

I seemed to catch every traffic light on Crescent Heights Boulevard. As I sat and waited, staring at the big red light that was preventing me from moving, I began to feel lightheaded. My palms were sweaty. I was feeling nervous and anxious and yet I couldn’t attribute these feelings to being late for work—I’d given myself plenty of time for the long drive. I realized that I felt anxious solely because I wasn’t moving. When the light finally turned green, my stomach continued to feel fluttery, my palms still slipping slightly on the steering wheel, my sweaty hands unable to grip it firmly. Sitting behind the steering wheel, pinned to the seat with a tight strap, I felt as though the cabin were closing in on me; the faux-suede roof was barely tall enough for the loose knot of thick hair that was held on top of my head by a chopstick. As I turned my head to the right to check on Bean who had jumped from the passenger seat and into the back, the chopstick scraped against the window; a sound that shot through my nerves, filling my mouth with saliva that tasted like metal. I tried to shake it off. I shook my hands and pumped my arms. I made circles with the foot on my left leg. I lit a cigarette to counteract the metallic taste and to calm my nerves, but the wisps of blue smoke curling up into the windshield looked poisonous, which cigarette smoke sometimes did to me when I was in confined spaces and forced to look at what I was actually inhaling. It looked very blue trapped between steering wheel and the windshield before turning white and making its way through the front, turning clear as it reached Bean in the back. I painstakingly extinguished the cigarette, careful to be sure that it was completely out, and I wondered when I was going to use up the calories I’d eaten for breakfast as I hadn’t had time to do my full one-hour run. As I followed the last wisp of smoke from the ashtray as it meandered upward and collided with the passenger window, I saw a beautiful tree-lined street on my right named Commodore Sloat. The name struck me as being very odd as it sounded more like a street name you’d come across in London than where I was, south of Wilshire in Los Angeles. I checked the time: 9:20. It occurred to me in a flash of excitement that I had time to get out of the car and away from this anxious feeling of being trapped, stale, and inactive. I would take a quick run up and down that street.

“Good morning, Portia.” Vera smiled as I walked into the fitting room. She smiled and shook her head. “Could you get any thinner? Look at you! Every time I see you, you just keep looking better and better. I hate you!” Vera laughed and wheeled in a rack of clothing. I started to undress in front of her and stood proudly in only a G-string and platform shoes. I felt liberated. I felt free because I no longer had to worry about how I looked, or whether the clothes would fit, or if I deserved to be on a hit TV show. I didn’t have to worry what people were saying about me. Anyone who looked at me could see that I was professional.

The first suit was too big, as were the second and the third. My mind didn’t wander to a happier time and place like it usually did during a fitting. I simply couldn’t have been happier than I was in the present moment.

“Can you get twos and fours for the Skinny Minnie from now on,” Vera called out to her assistant. “And maybe get her some shorter skirts. Let’s show off those long legs of hers.”

Skinny Minnie. As stupid as that name was, I felt delighted that someone would attach it to me. She handed me sweaters rather than jackets because, as she explained, the jackets she pulled for me would all be too big. To my amazement and delight, everything was too big. We set a time for another fitting the following day.

She shook her head again. “I wish I had a tenth of your discipline.”

“Well, I had help. I have a great nutritionist.” I looked at Vera’s body. She was chubby. I’d never noticed before. “You don’t need to lose weight. You look great.”

Conversations about weight are practically scripted. There are only a couple of things to say in response to a woman complaining about her weight, and the response I just gave Vera was probably the most popular.

“I need to lose twenty pounds—at least! Seriously, will you tell me how you did it? Like, what do you eat? What’s, like, your average day?”

She admired me. She really looked as though she was a little in awe. She thought I could teach her how to be disciplined, which was ridiculous. You can’t teach someone self-control any more than you can teach them common sense.

“I’d love to, but it’s really tailor-made to what my body responds best to. I really don’t think it would work for you.”

I wouldn’t have ever told her my secrets. This was mine. I was successful at the one thing almost everyone wants to be good at, dieting. Besides, I couldn’t tell anyone what I ate. I could just imagine her face when I told her that if she wanted to achieve this level of success then she’d have to eat two-thirds of an oatmeal sachet for breakfast, tuna with butter spray for lunch, a spoonful of ground turkey with butter spray for dinner, and for a treat, Jell-O mixed with butter spray.

“Okay then, Skinny Minnie. Fine. You’re done losing weight now though, right? ’Cause you look perfect—but any more and you’ll be too thin.”

“Yep. Hard part’s over. It’s all about maintaining it now.”

I wasn’t done losing weight. Although I thought I looked good, I knew I could look even better. When I turned sideways to a mirror, I could see that the front of my thighs were shaped like a banana from my knee to my hips. At 105 pounds, my goal weight, they would look straight. I still had six more pounds to go.

“Gotta go to work. They need me on set. See you tomorrow.” I left the wardrobe rooms feeling elated. I didn’t even need to smoke a cigarette. As I walked to the set, I felt calm and in control.

“Morning, Portia.” Peter greeted me as I walked into the unisex bathroom set where my one half-page scene would take place. I didn’t have any dialogue. I seemed to be used less and less, which was annoying because I’d never looked more camera-ready. I’d never looked more like an actress should look.

“Hi. Good morning. How’s it going here?”

“You know. Same old stuff. I’m in court again this episode.” He rolled his eyes. He was always in court.

“Better you than me.” I said it, but I didn’t mean it. I was extremely jealous that David Kelley gave Peter his clever cross-examinations, his brilliant closing arguments. I thought that I had proven my chops as an attorney the previous season, and yet I was relegated to the odd scene in the background of the law office. I had even lost my status as the sexy, untouchable love interest that had me revealing myself in my underwear. It seemed ironic that since I had spent hours a day sculpting my body, preparing myself for scenes that I used to be unprepared for, I no longer had the scenes.

Although I was acting in the scene with him, it felt like I was watching Peter perform, just as the crew was watching him perform. He walked into the unisex bathroom, saw me in the character of Nelle, yelped, and walked back out. In every take he was hilarious. I did nothing. I just had to stand still and in a very specific spot so the mirrors in the unisex set didn’t reflect my face into the lens. I was told that if the camera saw me, I would ruin the joke.

After I finished my one scene that morning, I met my brother for lunch at Koo Koo Roo. I usually ate lunch alone, preferring to eat my canned tuna and butter spray in the privacy of my dressing room. I had made a makeshift kitchen in the shower of my bathroom where I stocked spices and bottles of Bragg Liquid Aminos, canned tuna, and Jell-O. I also kept all the tools I needed—a can opener, chopsticks, and bowls. One bowl, however, I had to take back and forth with me because I used it to help me measure portions. It was a cheap Chinese-looking footed bowl with fake pottery wheel rings on the inside, and the first ring served as a marker to show me how much tuna I should eat. If for some reason, when I was mixing my portion of tuna with the seasoning and butter spray it went over the first ring, I tended to throw it away and start over. Usually, if it went over the first ring when I was mixing it meant I was too anxious to eat and I was hurrying out of sheer greed. As I ate approximately a third of a can of tuna per meal, there were three chances to get it right.

I didn’t like to eat out or with other people, but I hadn’t seen my brother in a while and so I made an exception. He had been asking me to celebrate with him for some time as he had quit working for the biomedical product company and started his own helicopter company, Los Angeles Helicopters. I chose the venue. Koo Koo Roo was the only restaurant I would go to, as they seemed to use very little oil or fat. When I walked in, my brother was already sitting down, a plate full of food in front of him.

“Sorry, Sissy.” He gestured to his food. “I have a meeting at two o’clock.” He reached into my bag where he knew he’d find a silky white head to pet. “Hi, Beany.” He whispered his hello to my dog who illegally went everywhere with me in that bag.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “Clearly Mr. Bigshot Pilot is too important to wait for his sister.”

My brother is a pilot and I am an actress, I thought. Two kids from Australia and here we are in LA, both living our dreams.

“I’ll go order.”

I was secretly very relieved that he had gotten his lunch before me. Ordering the four-ounce turkey dinner at Koo Koo Roo in Manhattan Beach could be tricky. Only the one in Hancock Park near my old apartment weighed my turkey under the four-ounce portion because they knew I liked it that way. At other locations, like this one, the people behind the counters argued that I would have to pay the same price for the full four ounces so I might as well have the full four ounces. It was a tiring argument for me and a confusing one for them as they thought I was presenting them with some kind of riddle. I liked the restaurant chain, but because the one closest to my home was difficult for me to frequent, I tended to eat there less. I couldn’t go to the Koo Koo Roo on Santa Monica near my home because it was in the middle of boys’ town, the gay part of town, and I was terrified that if I were seen there, people would know I was gay. Although sometimes I thought that was ridiculous, mostly I thought staying away was the right thing to do. After all, everyone in there was gay, so why wouldn’t I also be gay? Would I be the only heterosexual in the whole place looking for turkey? Would the customers look at me with surprise and concern, having had a rare sighting of a heterosexual who has clearly lost her way, and offer to give me directions to get back to the straight side of town? Or would they quietly snigger and congratulate themselves for having a finely tuned gaydar, for knowing that I was gay all along, as they stood in line to place their orders?

I sat down with my plate of turkey—all four ounces of it despite asking for three—and immediately began feeding Bean from the plate. She loved turkey and she helped keep my portions down. She loved Koo Koo Roo as much as I did. I was so busy feeding Bean, it wasn’t until my brother spoke that I realized that he had been watching me in silence for quite some time.

“You gonna eat any of that yourself?” I looked up at my brother and was surprised to see that he looked almost angry. His arms were folded tightly across his chest. His lips looked thinner than usual and his eyes seemed shallow, like he’d put an invisible shield behind them that blocked out the kindness in his soul that he’d shown me only moments before.

“You’re giving your lunch to your dog, Porshe.” Now my brother sounded angry. He never called me anything but Sissy unless he was pissed.

“Chill out, would ya? What’s wrong with you?” Now I was getting pissed. “I don’t eat all four ounces of it because it has too many calories, okay?”

“And how many calories do you eat?”

“Fourteen hundred a day, like everyone else.” I hated lying. I found myself doing so much of it lately. I couldn’t tell anyone the truth anymore.

“Bullshit. You can’t be eating that much. You look really thin.”

It was all I could do not to smile. What with Vera calling me Skinny Minnie and now this, I had had a really great day.

“That’s not a compliment, idiot.”

Damn. I must have smirked.

“I know.” I knew he didn’t mean it as a compliment because of the tone of his voice, but how could anyone ever take “you look really thin” as anything but a compliment?

“Okay—I’ll gain a little weight. Jesus.” When attacked, defend by lying. “It’s not deliberate. I’ve just been working too hard lately.” I was watching him become more relieved, but there was obviously something more that he needed to hear.

“I know I’m too skinny.”

That did it. He looked happier, his lips fuller, his eyes not so cold. His arms fell to his side.

“Don’t you have a meeting?” I asked him.

He nodded.

“Okay then. Bugger off.” I kissed his cheek and smiled.

He reached into my bag to pet Bean. He started to leave but then turned back toward me.

“Just because you work with someone who’s skinny, doesn’t mean you have to be skinny, too.”

19

I SAT ON Suzanne’s couch. Seeing Suzanne had become a pretty exciting ritual for me as I got to show her how well this little student was doing with her homework. I had certainly lost weight on her program, even though I had to lie about how many calories I was eating. I never went back to 1,400 calories a day because I didn’t need to. After Ann’s visit, I actually never went back to 1,000. There was no point in increasing my daily calorie intake when 600 to 700 was working so well for me. My weight loss had slowed down slightly since going under 110 pounds, and that was even more reason to stick with the lower calorie consumption.

“How many calories are you eating, Portia?”

“Fourteen hundred.” I answered her with a slightly incredulous tone in my voice, hoping that the tone would convince her that I was telling the truth.

“Can I see your diary?”

I reached into my bag for the journal, careful to pull out the right one. There were two journals in my bag at all times, the real one and the one for Suzanne. Not only did the real one show my actual calorie consumption, it had notes and messages in it as incentive for me to stay on track. I used the same motivating techniques in my diary as I did when I was a kid striving for high honors in my ballet exams, but whereas I wrote, “You will not get honors” on a sheet of paper for the ballet exams, now I wrote “You are nothing,” on every page of my diary. I don’t know why, but that statement filled me with fear and then the desire to be “something.” I always used the thoughts of being nothing and going nowhere to help me achieve goals. When I was a teenager studying to get into law school, I would repeatedly listen to a Sonic Youth song called “Song for Karen” about Karen Carpenter, who died from anorexia. In the song, the phrase that Kim Gordon repeats, “You aren’t never going anywhere. I ain’t never going anywhere” was like a mantra for me and pushed me to study longer, to try harder.

But I knew my motivating techniques weren’t conventional and I couldn’t share them with Suzanne. Especially because in my diary I referred to my homosexuality, which was something she didn’t know about. I could imagine how horrified Suzanne would be if by accident I pulled out the real diary and she saw YOU ARE A FAT UGLY DYKE written all over it. She probably thought she’d never even met a lesbian. It made me smile just thinking about the expression on her face if she’d known there was one in her living room.

I handed her the fake journal. It was very time-consuming having to make up the “proper” amount of food with its weight and calories. Thank God for the calorie counter. But the most annoying thing was putting variation in my pretend diet. I had to pretend to be interested in a wide variety of foods, which I wasn’t. Most people aren’t. My mother ate practically the same thing every day. In fact, I only ate seven things: turkey, lettuce, tuna, oatmeal, blueberries, egg whites, and yogurt; eight if you included Jell-O. She looked over it as I sat opposite her feeling like a schoolkid who cheated on a test. Only when she handed it back to me was I aware that I had been holding my breath.

“What does your exercise program look like, Portia?”

“You didn’t tell me to write it down.” Even though I had wanted to brag to her about the amount of exercise I did, I didn’t write it down. At least not in the fake diary I made especially for her.

“No. I’m just curious. What kind of exercise do you do?”

“I run, mainly. Pilates, sometimes. But running, I guess.” I told her about the amount of time I spent on the treadmill and that I’d found a way to run on it for my entire lunch break at work without ruining my makeup. I told her about my long drive to work and how I liked to break it up with a run. I knew she’d be proud of me. It must be heartbreaking for a nutritionist if her clients are too lazy to increase their exercise to help her do her job. I bet they’d blame her, too, if they didn’t lose weight.

“I found this nice, tree-lined block just south of Wilshire where I can run because sitting for too long kills me.”

“What do you think will happen if you sit for too long?”

“I’ll get fat, Suzanne! Diet is only half of it, you know.”

She looked concerned. The look didn’t surprise me because she always looked concerned when I spoke. I had decided that that was just how she looked all the time. I learned to ignore it.

“Portia, can I ask, do you get your period regularly?” She looked slightly embarrassed at having to ask the question.

“Sure, I guess.” I’d never really thought about it. Because I wasn’t scared of getting pregnant, I didn’t really pay attention to it. I thought back over the last couple of months and realized that I couldn’t remember having it.

“No, actually. Now I think about it, I can’t remember the last time I had it.”

She nodded her head repeatedly, but the movement was so small it was almost imperceptible. If I hadn’t have been looking directly at her, I wouldn’t have seen it. But her silence commanded my attention. I found myself breathlessly waiting for her next word, yet I didn’t know why.

“Portia, have you ever seen anyone . . . like . . . a counselor . . . who could help you deal with your weight issues?”

I was confused. Wasn’t she helping me deal with my weight issues?

“You mean, in the past?”

“Yes. Did your mother have you see anyone when you were a teenager?”

I went to Jenny Craig and Gloria Marshall. I guessed I could tell her about that.

“When I was fifteen—the year off school to model—I went to a couple of weight-loss centers.”

I told her that after the Fen-phen-type drug didn’t work, my mother and I decided to consult the dieting professionals. Jenny Craig was first, with its eating plan and meals in cans purchasable at the counter after each group session with fat women in chairs sitting in a circle. I didn’t lose weight. I gained it. I stopped eating the canned food and became too busy with homework to attend the scheduled meetings. But my mother and I discovered Gloria Marshall, with its flexible schedule and gymlike atmosphere and so I joined that as well.

The Gloria Marshall center closest to my house was two train stops and a short walk away and I could go there any time I liked. I would pack loose-fitting clothing into my bag and stop by on my way home from a modeling go-see. I would change, weigh in, and get to work, kneeling on one knee while placing the length of my thigh on a wooden trundle machine that looked more like a wheel used for spinning wool than workout equipment. While my thigh was being pummeled by the wooden spinning wheel, the radio would play “A Horse with No Name.” Always. There was no exception. The song made me very depressed that the man was a nomad with no attachment, no home. I didn’t think he was free and had chosen to forgo all the other ways humans make themselves feel falsely purposeful and safe. I thought he was lost. And that his survival depended on the horse and that he could care for the horse but not have attachment to it scared me and made me feel empty. But I’ve always read too much into songs. When I was eight years old, the song that would play to call us in from the playground at the end of afternoon recess was, “Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end,” and every day I became instantly nostalgic for the moment that had just ended, knowing that I’d never be eight again, that I’d soon be burdened with knowing more than I did at that moment when I had two loving parents and no responsibility.

I was received by the patrons of Gloria Marshall in a similar way to those at Jenny Craig, with disdain, only the Gloria Marshall counselor used me as an example of how effective their program was so the ladies regarded me with hope and a little awe. They didn’t know that 128 pounds, the “target” weight to which most of them were aspiring, was my starting weight. When I became the model Gloria Marshall client, I hadn’t even started the program.

It was clear by the look on Suzanne’s face that what she was hearing wasn’t normal to her. I had never before thought of myself as abnormal in my approach to food and weight. As a young teenager I was surrounded by models who would drink only watermelon juice for two days before a shoot, or eat a big dinner, do cocaine, and go wild on the dance floor of a nightclub to burn the calories from the food. But I didn’t need to be a model to surround myself with diet-obsessed unhealthy people. School was full of them. Suzanne’s shock made me think she lived in another world, an unrealistic world where teenage girls were happy with their bodies just the way God made them and nourished them with the home-cooked meals their mothers made so they could grow up to pursue a career knowing that what a girl accomplished was of far greater importance than how she looked. And maybe that world did exist, although I have never even briefly visited, much less lived in it. There was a moment in the session with Suzanne when I thought about law school, how everyone seemed to place value only on grades, not looks, and how I had carried over from high school the idea that somehow my personality would help my grades. That if I mooted with sarcasm and wit, I would win the mock trial by being the most entertaining. I also thought that hair, makeup, and wardrobe would win quite a few points. I thought that if I rolled into a lecture on Rollerblades flush from a modeling job, I could be the teacher’s pet, that I’d get more attention, more private tutoring. None of that happened for me. Instead I felt vacuous, frivolous, a dumb blonde who didn’t belong. There was nothing cute about an obnoxious girl flitting around from modeling jobs to lectures on Rollerblades. I became deeply ashamed just thinking about it.

It felt strange, all of a sudden: sitting there, exposed and abnormal. I’d said too much. After all, Suzanne was just a nutritionist. I had come to learn what to eat and how to stay on track with my diet, not to spill my guts about my childhood and my insecurities. I realized at that moment what she was referring to when she asked if I’d seen a counselor at the beginning of the session. And in the silence following my rambling, I could see by her smug expression that I had confirmed to her that I was in the wrong place.

“Portia. I want you to be healthy and happy, but I don’t know if I’m helping you achieve that. I don’t think I’m qualified to help you.”

I looked down past my manly hands that were sitting on my lap to a stain on the carpet.

Of course you can’t help me. I’m losing weight on my own.

The fact that I had to write a pretend journal should’ve been an indication to me that I knew more than she did on the subject of weight loss.

I looked at her and smiled sweetly.

She went on to tell me that I had issues that were best handled by a specialist. She told me she would research eating disorder therapists. Then she asked for my mother’s phone number in Australia.

20

WITHOUT HAVING an assistant go to the Beverly Center to run my errands for me, I was forced to pull into the parking structure of the dreadful shopping mall on my way home from work to take care of a couple of items myself. I had been contemplating whether to get an assistant, but it was hard to justify such a self-aggrandizing hire. I could certainly afford one, but I wondered how that would look to my friends and family. How would it look to my co-stars when most of them didn’t have one even though they worked a lot more than me? As my character seemed to be appearing in fewer and fewer scenes as the weeks and episodes rolled on, Nelle Porter required hardly any of my time at all, which gave me all the time in the world to shop.

I hated going shopping. I always tended to feel lonely, even with Bean in a bag by my side. I hated being surrounded by people and yet having no one to help me make a purchase other than the person trying to sell it to me. I hated feeling the desperation of sales assistants and knowing that the commission from my purchase could make or break their day. I also hated people looking at me, I hated children screaming, I hated loud, distracting music, I hated the pet stores with the sick tiny puppies in hot glass cages, and I hated who I was. I discovered how pathetic I was in a store. I defined myself by the items I chose. I could find what I was looking for in black and in pink, and for twenty minutes I would try to decide if I wanted the black one or the pink one. I would think that I was more of a “black” person but that getting it in black was too ordinary. It made me wish that I were a “pink” person when I’m not a “pink” person. This kind of thinking was amplified in a clothing store because invariably I would be overwhelmed by everything I was not only to discover that who I was didn’t even have a place in the store. That in all of Barneys, there wasn’t a tank top or a pair of cargo pants that let me know that I was a welcome member of their society; that they have covered the fashion needs of the upwardly mobile young women who can afford to shop there while sending a message to me that I was not welcome. I didn’t belong there. It told me that their young women wore short skirts and heels and delicate tops with small straps and elegant, tiny necklaces. Their young women were delicate, with soft manners and good bone structure because these young women had inherited the delicate, tall, thin gene from their beautiful mothers who, twenty years prior, were seduced into making offspring by their wealthy, powerful fathers. The Barney’s clientele had no need for tanks with thick straps, boots, and cargo pants. “Go to the Gap with the average, ordinary, people” is the message the store was sending. “You’ll find something for yourself there.”

As I boarded the escalator and rode down into the bowels of the Beverly Center shopping mall, I became paranoid that my activities might be recorded by the paparazzi. It wasn’t that I feared being caught doing something wrong, it was that I feared being caught doing something so ordinary. I hated paparazzi. Paparazzi made me feel like I was a criminal under investigation for insurance fraud, stalked by photographers who were hired to provide the evidence. Paparazzi are the ultimate hunters. They are patient, prepared, and precise. There’s a wordless exchange that occurs between the hunter and the hunted. They tell you that while you may have gotten away with your life this time, they’ll take away your life next time. They’ll ruin the illusion that is your fake life—the life that you show to the world while keeping all the secrets of your real life hidden. The photographers and you both know that it’s only a matter of time; that with persistence they will expose you for the fraud you are. They told me with one glance that they knew I was gay, that I was fat under the flattering shirt I was wearing, that I was Amanda Rogers, a no one from nowhere. Having an assistant would lessen the chance of being caught as I tended to play the “maybe I can get away with it” game. I would let my guard down, feeling stupid for having an over-inflated ego and thinking that people cared about me enough to take my photo, only to discover that indeed they did.

As far as I could tell, there were no paparazzi at the Beverly Center. After buying a black exercise mat and nude underwear, I headed back to the car. I decided that because I hadn’t eaten for many hours and my calorie count was fairly low that day, I would allow myself to have a piece of Extra chewing gum. I always allowed myself to have the gum, but at 5 calories a stick, I had to add it to my daily calorie allowance because it was these kinds of unrecorded calories that could build up and cause you to gain weight. I put my seat belt on, reached into my bag for a piece of gum, and put it in my mouth. The sweetness and coolness of it filled my body with a current of ecstasy, and a rush of syrupy water flooded my mouth and my belly. After what seemed like only seconds of chewing, the initial surge was over and I could almost feel my endorphins screaming for survival as they slowly faded back into the blackness of my empty body. Worse than feeling depressed that the rush was over was the feeling of ravenous hunger ripping through my head and my gut. It was a pain that I had never experienced. As if under hypnosis, I reached into my bag again. Robotically, I unwrapped the gum and fed a piece into my mouth. I fed another piece into my mouth. I spat the wad of chewed gum into the ashtray and fed one more piece into my mouth. And then I shoved the pieces into my mouth two at a time. I spat them out. I repeated the frenzied feeding, chewing, and spitting. And then it was done. There were no more sticks of Winterfresh gum left. I slowly came back into my mind only to realize that I’d just consumed 60 calories. I sat in the car unable to turn the key, terrified by what had happened. There was no reason for it, no upsetting situation that had sometimes triggered me to binge in the past, nor was it a conscious decision to blow my intake for the day. It was a normal day, pleasant even. Without an indication, how would I know when this might happen again? What if it happened once a day? How the hell was I not in control of the only thing I thought was possible to control in my life?

I had been abducted. I was not in control. Now I would live in this state of constant anxiety that I would be overtaken by this vacancy of mind. I would hover there, in this place of helplessness and uncertainty, waiting to be abducted again.

A surge of fear and anger rushed through my body, and I ripped off my seat belt and got out of the car. In the crowded parking structure of the Beverly Center, I started running. If I couldn’t control the intake, I could control what happened next. I could eliminate it. I could run it off. I started sprinting. I ran as fast as I could to the concrete wall at the end of the parking structure, slapped the wall with my hand like a swimmer at the end of a lap, and like a swimmer I used the energy to turn back in the direction I came with ferocious speed, getting faster and faster with each pump of my arms and legs. When I ran past my car, I could hear my dog barking, her barking getting fainter as I sprinted to the other end of the parking structure, dodging the occasional car that pulled out of a space, and slapped the opposite wall, catapulting myself off the wall in the other direction to repeat the exercise. I was aware of loud screeching noises as cars passed me, their tires making that sound as they struggled to grip onto the slick concrete through the turns, some of them bulging into the oncoming lane to avoid running into me as I sprinted from end to end. But I couldn’t worry about that. I had to stay focused and keep running. I could eliminate half of these calories if I kept running.

“Stop running!”

A young man holding the arm of an elderly woman on a ventilator yelled at me as he crossed my path and attempted to put her in a medical van. He was angry. Maybe my running made him angry because seeing someone freely express their desires by doing whatever took their fancy made him feel trapped, tethered to the ventilator as if he himself depended upon it for life and not the old woman. Although I thought he was very rude to yell at me so loudly, there was something about the tone in his voice that startled me and made me slow down. Once I slowed down it was hard to get the speed back in my sprint.

I became aware of my footwear, too, and wondered how I could have reached that speed in five-inch rubber platforms. They were my work shoes, my “off-camera” shoes. They were purchased, as the name “off-camera” suggests, for use on the set of Ally McBeal when the camera couldn’t see my character’s feet, but I had given them a leading role. For although they were plain and from Payless, they made my legs look thin. Because their height gave my body the perfect proportion, they were the last things I took off before bed and the first things I put on in the morning. I’d started not to wear any other shoes, even to workout or hike, and I never walked barefoot in my house anymore for fear of passing a reflection of myself in a window. But to be able to sprint in them . . . that’s something that I didn’t think I could do.

I hated that stupid nurse for breaking my concentration. How dare he interrupt me as I was trying to fix this awful situation I found myself in. It was hard to understand the importance of something like this unless you were desperately trying to lose weight, but I couldn’t say that to anyone for fear of it sounding trivial. No one knew that my whole career hinged on its success.

I got in the car to drive home. I was angry and riddled with anxiety. If I waited too long to finish burning off the calories consumed by chewing the gum, the calories might turn into fat. At the red lights, I took my hands off the steering wheel and pumped my arms furiously while holding my stomach tight. I alternated putting my left foot and my right foot on the brake so as to bend and straighten my legs an equal number of repetitions. I sang loudly the whole way home while thrashing my head around. I was not a huge fan of Monster Magnet, but there was one song I played repeatedly in the car because it helped me expend energy while driving. I couldn’t get home fast enough. I turned onto Crescent Heights from Beverly and started thinking about a strategy to burn the excess calories. I would park, take the elevator to my apartment, drop Bean off, change into workout gear, and go next door to the gym. No. I would park, drop Bean off in the garden, run up the six flights of stairs, take the elevator back to the garden floor, get Bean, run back up, and then get on the treadmill at home.

I got myself and Bean out of the car as quickly as I could and started running with her to the garden floor. I hurriedly put Bean outside in the walled garden and took off up the stairs. She would be okay there for a minute. It was an enclosed garden and she needed to stretch her legs. I took the stairs two at a time so I could feel the burn on my thighs. When I reached the fifth floor, I went back to running one stair at a time, but fast, so it felt like I was running in place. I admired my coordination and athleticism. Running that fast up stairs is tricky, especially in platform wedges. I liked wearing the shoes for these tasks, though. I felt as though they burned more calories because I was forced to be aware of protecting my ankles from spraining. Perfect balance was required to land each step with my weight spread evenly on the balls of my feet between my big toe and my little toe, and perfect balance, as I had learned at Pilates, requires energy. And after putting 60 unwanted calories into my body, I had energy to spare.

When I reached the top of the seventh floor and there were no more stairs to climb, I faced a decision. Would I take the stairs back down to the second floor to get Bean? Or would I take the elevator down and run up the whole staircase one more time? Going down stair by stair couldn’t really do much to burn calories, and it seemed that it would be smarter to take the elevator down and run back up in the time that I had to burn it off before it settled on my stomach and thighs. I got into the elevator, hoping Bean would forgive me for leaving her out there alone for another five minutes, but I had no choice. In the quiet space inside the elevator, I started to comprehend what had just happened to me. I’d binged without reason. I had lost control. I’d lost control and I could do it again without warning. If I lost control again, I could get fat again. I would have to start this thing over again. I would fail at the one thing I knew I was good at.

I went all the way down. I was at the bottom floor and I ran fast, two stairs at a time, past Bean, past exhaustion, past the memory of what happened in the parking structure of the Beverly Center. I took my hands off the rail and just used my legs to propel me two at a time up the tubelike staircase, with its forgotten wallpaper and its unappreciated carpet. I reached the top, hit the elevator button, and furiously ran in place, crying now as I figured that crying has to burn more calories than not crying. The elevator door opened and I rushed in. I realized after I was in the elevator that a man had been exiting. Could that have been my only neighbor? I’d never met him. The doors closed and my crying seemed to get louder perhaps due to the confined space or the fact that I had stopped jumping up and down for fear that the jumping would cause the rickety old elevator to break down. I shook my hands and twisted my torso from side to side. I thought about the fact that I had to eat again soon. It was getting dark outside probably, and I liked to eat dinner before it got dark so I could digest my food before I went to bed. If I just ate egg whites, just pure protein, I’d probably be okay. But I should do it soon. I should run again and go make food.

I started back up the stairs, a little more tired now, and took them one at a time. It was still better than sitting on my sofa, worrying. I started a breathing exercise. Inhale four stairs, exhale four stairs, inhale four stairs, exhale four stairs. It helped me keep the pace I needed to reach the top of the seventh floor in two minutes. I started noticing how long it took to get from the bottom to the top on my second trip up the stairs and I could still do it in the same time as it took when I first started. Since I was obviously not as tired as I thought I was, I decided to do it again. Dinner could wait five more minutes. This time in the elevator, I visualized the food entries in my notebook and calculated my calories for the day. My heart leapt out of my chest not because it was straining to pump oxygen to my overworked body but with panic. My notebook was still in the car! My bag was still in the car! Where were my keys? Did I leave them in my bag?

When the elevator hit the bottom floor I ran past Jeff, the doorman, and into the parking garage in search of my bag. As I opened the heavy steel door of the parking structure I saw my black Porsche, the driver’s door wide open. I was embarrassed running to get my things and close it, but there was no need for my embarrassment because no one was around. I felt stupid anyway. I felt stupid because I was sure someone saw that I’d forgotten to close my car door. Everyone in the building knew whose car that was and now someone who lived near me knew that I was “scatty.” Scatty was the word my second-grade teacher used to describe me to my mother. “Amanda is a bright girl, and has potential to be a good student, but has trouble focusing in class and is scatty.” I was scatty, unfocused, forgetful. I was the kind of girl who would drop out of law school to pursue acting, the kind of girl who would leave her car door open with her keys in the ignition and her purse on the seat. The kind of girl that couldn’t maintain her weight.

I could see through the barred windows of the above-ground parking structure that it was dark outside, and although it would be harder to run up the stairs with my heavy bag, I knew it was my last chance before I had to start preparing food. I started back up the stairs again, two by two again, this time using my bag as a weight to add difficulty to the climb and to make balancing on my platform shoes harder. I held the bag with both arms out from my chest and climbed the stairwell with its ugly lighting and stained wallpaper. I climbed slower this time but because of the weight I could feel the burn and so as I got to the top I decided to repeat the whole exercise one last time. It was the only time I had used a weight to aid in burning the calories, and if I did it one more time I felt pretty confident that I could forget that the little mishap with the gum had ever happened.

I arrived at my front door. It had beckoned me at the end of the climb all six times in the last thirty minutes and now, because of my hard work and determination, I got to walk through it. I got to be home. I could finally rest. I turned the lights on in my cold apartment without furniture and threw my bag on the floor. Under the glare of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, I saw all the little round stains on the carpet where Bean had previously gone to the bathroom. It wasn’t her fault, and I was just about to pull up that carpet anyway. She was a good dog. It’s just that sometimes I didn’t have time to take her out.

Shit! I had forgotten Bean.

I ran out the door, and down the stairs frantically hoping that I would find her where I left her thirty minutes ago in the garden on the second floor. Bean! My sweet little friend was alone and in danger of being stolen or of getting out onto the busy street and I was the idiot who left her there. God! I hated myself! As I ran down the hallway to the glass door that led to the garden I saw my little Bean. I saw a little white face with big black eyes, scared and shivering from cold and fear, squished onto the glass of the door as if trying to push through it to be in the safety and warmth of the hallway on the other side. I scooped her up and held her close to my chest as I slid down the hallway wall and onto the floor with relief. She was my baby and I had left her. My obsession with weight loss had made me neglectful of the things I cared about. I looked in her big, trusting eyes and stroked her silky white head and said:

“Beany. I’m so sorry. I’ll never do that again. I love you so much.” I noticed for the first time in weeks that her eye stain had gotten really bad. There were mats in her fur.

“Come on. Let’s go home.”

Clutching Bean and with tears streaming down my cheeks, I was again faced with the choice of taking the stairs to my penthouse apartment or the elevator. I found myself in a small crowd of people who were waiting for the elevator, some of whom had acknowledged me by asking, “Are you okay?” I knew the elevator would be more comfortable for Bean and I really should’ve been thinking just about her. She needed to feel calm and safe, not jolted around as I ran up stairs. But it might be quicker to take the stairs and what Bean really needed was to eat and feel safely tucked away in her bed at home, and so I started the journey up the seven flights of stairs. I watched her head bob up and down with each stair and I felt so bad, but it would be over soon.

As I reached my apartment door, left wide open, I remembered that my purchase from the Beverly Center was still in the trunk of my car. A black exercise mat lay in the trunk of my car. How typical of me to buy exercise equipment and never use it. How typically disorganized of me to forget that I bought it so I could begin my workouts with my trainer at home. She would be here first thing in the morning.

It was clear I needed an assistant. I was overwhelmed with all the things that needed to be done. I needed an assistant to help me remember Bean, that she needed to be groomed, walked, and taken downstairs so she wouldn’t go to the bathroom on my rug. I needed an assistant to go to the convenience store and to remind me of my workouts. But mainly I needed an assistant to go to the Beverly Center so that this would never happen again.

21

THE NOISE of the escalators as they took people to the gym was a strange one. It was dull and barely there, like the hum of a refrigerator. It was a backdrop to the screaming of the coffee grinder coming from within Buzz Coffee and the music that would blurt out of the Virgin Megastore as its glass doors spat out another customer or sucked one in. But the escalators were beckoning me, politely but relentlessly inviting me to the gym as I sat and waited to interview an assistant. Now that my body was thinner, I wondered if I wouldn’t mind the other women in the gym seeing it. Maybe I could ignore their critical looks long enough to work at defining my muscles now that they’re not buried underneath layers of fat? As I waited for her to arrive, I watched the escalators go up and down regardless of whether there are people on them or not. They took people to the gym and then they took nobody to the gym. The movie theater was on the second floor also, and I was trying to spot the people who were going to the midday movie, wondering whether the blackness of the theater would fill the void or exasperate it. I would never see a movie on a Tuesday afternoon. Everyone knows workdays are for working.

By the time Carolyn arrived I had come up with a few immediate reasons for needing her, although sitting motionless and watching people go to the gym had made me quietly anxious. I had begun to move my legs up and down to get rid of some of that anxiety, but I found that most of it was thrust at Carolyn, as I began telling her what I needed even before she had time to settle into one of the uncomfortable iron chairs that circled the bolted-down outdoor table. She responded immediately by whipping out her notebook and pen and seemingly matched my anxiety by writing hurriedly and responding to every grocery list item with “What else?” I’m not sure we really made eye contact until the frenzied listing and recording of the to dos was over.

“I need for you to go to a Ralphs to get the yogurt because only Ralphs carries the brand that I eat.” “What else?” “I need you to take Bean to the groomer’s.” “What else?” “I need you to schedule Pilates.” “What else?” “I need you to oversee the renovation of my apartment.” “What else?” “I need you to go hiking with me because I hate being alone.” “What else?”

I’m gay and I need you to be okay with that. What else? I need you to make me okay with that. What else? I need you to keep all my secrets and not tell anyone that I’m a phony.

“That all?”

She signed a confidentiality agreement drafted by my business manager, who knew of no real reason why I should need one, and became my assistant.

“I like to work out. Do you?”

“Yes. I do.”

When Carolyn and I finally sat back and breathed each other in, we were already committed. I noticed a few striking things about her. Carolyn was colorless. She had depth to her hair because it wasn’t white, yet it had no color. She had a pale, colorless face. She had thin, bony hands that were also colorless except for a thin blue vein that meandered its way from the end of her wrist across the back of her hand to the start of her little finger. Her bony hands matched her thin, bony frame. Among all the round people on the escalators and at Buzz Coffee, Carolyn struck me as straight. I wasn’t envious of Carolyn’s weight, but instead appreciated it. I appreciated that someone other than me cared about weight loss, and as I instinctively knew that weight loss wasn’t a new thing to her, I appreciated that she cared about weight-loss maintenance. And so from that moment on, Carolyn and I would be united in our goal to maintain. With her help, I would maintain my hair color, my nail length, my dog’s whiteness, and my car’s cleanliness. I would maintain my clothes and my friendships by politely remembering to send apology notes to Kali or Erik explaining how my work schedule conflicted with their dinner parties. And because Carolyn would bring me food and schedule my workouts with my trainers, I would easily maintain my weight.

I returned home after my meeting with Carolyn and was immediately struck by the cold that had crept into my apartment through a crack in the window. I usually left the window slightly open because I liked the idea of fresh air. Actually, it was more than just the air I was wanting. It was the sounds of traffic on Sunset Boulevard, the noise of the industrial air conditioner on top of the Sunset 5. I could sit in my dining room to face another meal alone and yet feel connected to the world around me. I could imagine the actresses rushing to auditions reciting their lines as they waited for the light to turn green at the intersection of Sunset and Crescent Heights. Thinking about actresses driving around to auditions prompted me remember my favorite quote from Mae West when she was asked if she had any advice to give young actresses in Hollywood. “Take Fountain,” she said exhaling the smoke from her cigarette. There was so much traffic outside my apartment on Sunset, I wished more actresses took her advice.

I walked into the kitchen to prepare my meal. I would eat 50 calories of egg whites. I found that alternating the egg whites and the tuna for lunch helped with weight loss, as egg whites would cut my lunchtime calorie intake in half. I had been eating egg whites instead of tuna a lot more lately for this reason. Plus, I liked to cook. I never really enjoyed it before, but it was very satisfying preparing a meal, cooking and eating it. I felt quite obsessed with food. It was all I ever really thought about. I was worried that my passion for it would lead to my failure to abstain from overindulging, but I took comfort in the knowledge that people who love to cook are quite often obsessed with food. Cooking was a hobby, an artistic expression, and for me, the ultimate control of what I put in my body. I washed the small mustard plate with the black swirl pattern that I used for egg whites. I washed all the dishes before I ate from them to make sure they were clean. Occasionally the dishes felt greasy when I took them out of the dishwasher and I wanted to ensure that I wasn’t ingesting any residual grease or oil that might be on them.

Dishes and utensils were very important. I couldn’t just eat from any dish. Each dish had meaning. Each dish helped me in my quest to achieve the perfect body. If I felt anxious about eating, my anxiety was always instantly allayed when I saw my little white bowl with the green flowers, as it had a faint hairline crack that helped me to figure out portions. I had to see the crack at the bottom of the bowl at all times, plus the crack is particularly helpful when I didn’t want foods to touch. I also ate every meal with my second favorite tool—chopsticks. Chopsticks were useful for obvious reasons. I’m not Asian, nor am I coordinated. They were unnatural and awkward for me and as a result, the food fell through the little obtuse triangles making me eat slower. If I ate slowly, I didn’t eat as much.

I sat down at the dining table to my mustard-colored plate of egg whites. Then I got up and closed the window. The wind had kicked up making it colder, and now the sounds of Sunset Boulevard, once soothing and connecting me to the world at large, were intrusive and grating on my nerves. Horns blasting and muscle cars accelerating reminded me of all the impatience, pretension, and aggression in society that lay beneath my penthouse loft apartment. I was very safe in there with my scale and my schedule. I closed the window, but I turned the air conditioner down to sixty degrees. I hadn’t really proven my theory, but it just made sense that if you were shivering and trying to stay warm, your body was burning excess calories. It had to. As I hadn’t yet begun to eat the egg whites, it occurred to me that maybe my body was burning fat, not calories, as I probably used up the 100 calories from breakfast on my morning Pilates workout. I liked that thought. Although I didn’t have to lose more weight, I definitely had a little more fat to burn. My thighs were still big. My stomach still had about an inch of fat on it and, as it was summer during Christmas in Australia, I wanted my stomach to be flat and perfect when I went home. If it wasn’t flat, then all that effort would’ve been in vain. When I went to Australia for Christmas, I wanted my mother to see a determined girl, a girl in control of her life, and a fat stomach doesn’t exactly convey that message. A fat stomach said that no matter how hard I tried, it got the better of me. I failed. I couldn’t finish the job.

I decided not to eat the egg whites. I didn’t need them. As they slid off the plate and into the trash, I felt a surge of adrenaline. I felt invincible, powerful. Not eating them was incredibly difficult and by not eating them I had just proven to myself that I was stronger than my basic instincts, that I could deny them. I wouldn’t give in to the desire to eat, because after all, isn’t that what fat people do? They give in to desire? They know they shouldn’t eat the brownie, but they just can’t help themselves. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was helping myself. Although I didn’t want to lose any more weight, I certainly couldn’t gain any back, especially before Christmas. I wanted to go back to Australia, the hero my mother wanted me to be. I wanted to show my mom that I’d finally conquered the demon. I’d wrestled the beast that threatened our sanity, our relationship, and our self-worth, and I conquered it. We would no longer go to a photo shoot with a sick, sinking feeling in our guts hoping that I was good enough to pass; pass as thin, pass as pretty, pass as a model, pass as a TV actress, pass as worthy of getting attention. Now when I got attention, I knew I deserved it. I’d worked very hard for it.

The kind of attention I had been getting from the press was widespread—from high-end fashion magazines to supermarket rags. I was almost always included in big, splashy tabloid stories about “stars in their dieting hell!” Paparazzi were everywhere I went all of a sudden and I knew the only reason for that was because I was thin. They had been including me in these cover stories about thin actresses and almost every week was another story. Society is obsessed with being thin and a handful of actresses, me included, were showing them that with hard work, it was an achievable goal.

Some of them said that I was anorexic. It wasn’t true. At 100 pounds I was way too heavy to be anorexic.

I’d achieved 100 two days earlier. It was a crazy feeling of elation. I wanted to take pictures of my naked body to document it but decided against it just in case I hadn’t reached my lowest weight. I didn’t want to look at pictures in the future knowing that the image I saw in them wasn’t how I’d really looked. I didn’t want to have to remind myself that I was actually thinner than the picture showed.

I wanted to document my success because I secretly knew that I couldn’t keep this up forever. I knew that one day I’d be looking at those pictures talking about my thinness in the past tense. I just knew that the fat, lazy, overeating piece of shit with her period and her sweat glands and her body odor lurked under the surface of this clean, pristine machine of a girl that I was currently.

With the three hours between lunch and my snack of Jell-O, I had planned to check out a local ballet class in a little courtyard off Sunset. I had seen the studio the previous week when I walked into the courtyard to smoke a cigarette where the Sunset Boulevard traffic couldn’t see me. Through the window, I could see that the instructor was an old Russian man with a cane that he banged on the floor in time with the music. I could see his mouth opening wide and his neck straining as he instructed his students: fat, sloppy, middle-aged women in full makeup and tights. I could see an old woman in black on the piano belting out the music, keeping time, playing a two-handed chord to accompany a tondue and a plié. I wanted to go talk to him about joining the class. It would be a good way to exercise and socialize. But mainly I wanted to join it because it would remind me of a time when I was happy, when life was simple and uncomplicated. I could be eight years old again: a skinny, happy girl in a leotard, joking with her best friend behind the instructor’s back, our friendship pure and untarnished by sexual desire. It would remind me of a time when I was the best. And I would definitely be the best—and the thinnest.

Look at that inch of fat.

I changed my mind about going to the ballet school when I changed my clothes. When I was naked I could see fat on my stomach and I couldn’t imagine showing it to people through a leotard. I knew that I was thinner than the ladies in the class—I was thinner than most people—but also had imperfections, and I just didn’t want to reveal them to the other women. It was so bizarre to me to think that these women were extending their big fat legs in the air and prancing around half naked when most of them wouldn’t be caught dead in a bathing suit at their next-door neighbor’s pool. Or maybe they didn’t care. Maybe I was the only one who cared. In any case, going to ballet class would be something I could do when I no longer had to worry about feeling the fat fold over at the junction of where my hips met my thighs in an arabesque. I’d go when I knew that if hypercritical paparazzi found me in the little glass box of a studio, I would be prepared. I would know that they couldn’t get a shot of the fat that sat just above my hip bones. I’d go when I knew that the worst the press could say was that I was too thin.

As I lunged my way across the floor to my treadmill to run down the time to my next meal, I wondered if you could really ever be thin enough to be too thin. Even if the tabloid headlines pretended to be disapproving of a girl who was supposedly “too thin,” I could always detect envy in the text—that in the tone of the article, there was always the underlying element of awe. And I knew the readers were reading it jealously, wishing that they could be just like us—determined, controlled, not needing anything or anyone to feel special or successful; we’d created our own ultimate success. We had won the battle that the whole world was fighting.

22

“WOULD YOU like anything to drink, Ms. de Rossi?”

The airline stewardess spoke softly as if to conserve energy, no doubt gearing up for the ensuing fourteen-hour flight to Melbourne. She already looked tired and we hadn’t even taken off yet. She looked old, too. And fat.

“Water, please.” I was extremely proud of myself that I was no longer a gross, disgusting pig of a bulimic, downing Baileys Irish Cream and throwing it up in an airplane toilet. I was so glad that I wasn’t doing that.

I waved away the mixed nuts that accompanied the water (I asked for water, and yet they assumed I meant water and nuts?), leaned back in my chair, and took out my food journal. There would be no tears on the plane today. I would return home to Melbourne in triumph. I opened the journal and wrote the date, December 19, 1999, and underneath, in big curly writing I wrote something that impressed even me—and I was the one who accomplished it.

95

On December 19, I hit 95 pounds. It was poetic, really, that the day I returned home was the exact day I accomplished this amazing feat. Ninety-five pounds gave me the cushion that I needed to go home for Christmas and eat and drink with my family. Ninety-five pounds would impress them. It might also slightly concern some of them, no doubt, as I had recently become aware that there are certain body parts that looked a little strange. I was okay with that, though. They needed to know that my life wasn’t a never-ending Hollywood party; that my money wasn’t just given to me, that I had to work hard for all of it. I had been worried that my friends and family might feel jealous of my success. As long as I worked really hard and made sacrifices that were obvious to other people, I wouldn’t feel guilty that I made more money than my brother or had a more exciting life than my Australian friends could ever dream of having. Mostly though, they seemed to be more interested in Hollywood at large than they were in my success. I was tired of telling stories about the celebrities I’d met. I’d started to feel like my mother had sent me out as a spy or an undercover reporter to mingle with the special people and bring back the news of what it was that made them special when all I really wanted was for her to think that I was special. Sometimes, if I found a celebrity to be abrasive or rude, she’d disagree with me, citing a tabloid story about the kind acts they did or the fact that other people seemed to like them. She’d always laugh and agree when I told her how ridiculous it was that because of a tabloid she thought she knew better than I did, but her comments came with a subliminal warning: the written word is a powerful thing. The perception of who you are is more important than who are. You are what other people think of you.

The aging stewardess came back, eyes cast downward at her notepad while surfing the tide of turbulence like a pro.

“Can I take your lunch order?”

Something happened to me when flying. I felt that either the calories were impossible to quantify and so that meant that the food had no energy or matter so I could eat everything, or because the calories were impossible to quantify, I could eat nothing at all. Another factor was time. If y equaled 300 calories consumed over a 24-hour period, then what was x if I left Los Angeles at 10:00 p.m. and after fourteen hours of travel I arrived in Melbourne at 6:00 a.m. two days later? How many calories and how many days should I account for? Eating nothing was really my only option.

“I’m not eating lunch today. I had a big meal already.”

Why I had to tell her about having a big meal I don’t know. I hate it when I do things like that.

When the stewardess came around to deliver the meals, she asked again if I wanted anything, perhaps thinking that the smell of hot beef would send me into a frenzy of regret that it wasn’t going to be plopped down in front of me. I reassured her that no, I really didn’t want anything. I could resist dead rotting cow on a plastic plate.

After lunch the stewardess rolled a silver tray of cookies and ice cream down the isle.

“Dessert, sir? Would you like some dessert today, ma’am? Dessert, sir?”

She made her way through the seated strangers up the aisle to where I was sitting. She stood in front of me with her cart full of sugar and lard and instead of simply asking me if I would like dessert, she decided to inject some personality into it.

“I’m sure you don’t, but . . .” Her sentence trailed off. She had an apologetic look on her face like she was sorry for me that I didn’t get to partake in this joyous activity, that being an actress precluded me from all the fun that cookies and ice cream bring. Her droopy eyes seemed to say, “I’m sorry you can’t have this. Actresses don’t eat cookies.” Maybe she was sure I didn’t want a cookie just because I’d not eaten any lunch. Then again, what if I had skipped lunch just so I could eat the cookie? How could she have known what I wanted?

By the time dinner came around, I was asleep. Actually, I pretended to be asleep. I didn’t want anyone to know that I didn’t eat anything during the fourteen-hour flight. Something like that could leak into a tabloid. And while I enjoyed the speculation that I was too thin, I didn’t want them thinking I was sick. I wanted people to admire my tenacity and self-control, not to feel sorry for me for starving myself into the shape of an actress.

The long, sleepless night of listening to the drone of the engines was punctuated by the stewardess asking if I’d like to have anything to eat with a cute smile and a “How about now?” in half-hour intervals, which finally trickled down to a raised eyebrow and a quick glance every two or three hours. As breakfast was being served and I asked for black coffee, she could no longer contain herself. I could see that she was gearing up to say something and I thought it would be along the lines of how in her twenty-year career as a mile-high waitress, she’d never before seen a person refuse food. I had clearly made an impression on her and that was something I really didn’t want to do. I didn’t want her telling anyone that the Australian actress on Ally McBeal, the “thin one” (I could just hear it now, “No, not Calista, the other one!”) didn’t eat and is therefore sick. But to my surprise, her expression changed as she leaned in slightly to speak to me. Her face went from a tired, concerned expression to a hint of a smile. Her droopy eyes became animated.

“You’re being so good!”

Yes, lady. I’m always this good.

“Oh! No. I’d love to eat, believe me, but I have this slight stomach virus and you know how awkward that could get on a plane!”

She laughed. Why does everyone think toilets and what goes on in them are funny?

“Well, I hope you feel better.” She refilled my coffee cup and I wondered if someone with stomach flu would drink black coffee. I wondered if I’d blown my cover. I pulled out my diary and wrote an entry. I told it that I had eaten nothing and if I weighed more than 100 pounds in Australia it was because of water retention. That’s what happens with plane travel. It was good to write it down to remind myself, and the explanation could come in handy if I found myself in a panic in my mother’s bathroom on her old pink and black scale.

To say that I hit the ground running isn’t an overstatement. When I got off the plane, I began a slow, steady jog through the terminal. There was nothing wrong with that, I thought, as I could just as easily be running to make a connecting flight as exercising my body, limp from sitting for fourteen exercise-less hours. I ran to the airport bathroom to begin my ritual of trying to look fabulous for my mother. I always tried to make a good impression with my hair, makeup, and wardrobe for my mother, as I knew that seeing me looking great always made her happy. But this time was even more special because this time I was skinny. I had the thinnest body I’d ever had to show off to her and so I didn’t feel as though I needed the extra-special hair and makeup to counteract my ordinary, girl-next-door body. The package had to say “star” and now my body was helping me deliver that message. After I changed out of my loose clothing and into my skinny jeans and a tight tank, I headed home.

“Mama!” I got out of the cab and ran into my mother’s arms, leaving my luggage in the trunk for the cab driver to deal with.

“Bubbles!” My mother dubbed me that when I was a little kid. She still calls me that sometimes. I really like it.

“Darling.” She pulled away from the hug and looked me up and down. “You’re too thin!” She blurted it out in a way that seemed uncontrolled yet premeditated, like her nervousness had built with hours of rehearsal and had culminated in an explosive delivery.

Clearly, she had been lying in wait for me. She was ready for me, armed with evidence. A month ago, Suzanne had called her and tipped her off to my weight loss. According to my mother, Suzanne said my weight loss was extreme and that due to her lack of being qualified in the field of eating disorders, she was racked with guilt and feeling responsible that she had helped cause me to have one. I told my mother that if Suzanne admitted that she was not qualified in the field of eating disorders, how could she possibly diagnose them? It was my mother’s lack of common sense that irritated me at that moment standing before her in the driveway, because I knew that she couldn’t possibly be concerned by how I looked, only by what she’d heard. Even if I convinced her that Suzanne was wrong, then she would eat up those goddamn tabloid stories about how I was starving myself. She was just waiting for me to arrive so she could levy the insult after a cursory up-and-down glance, a feel of my back when she hugged me, a quick confirmation that the tabloid journalists had once again got it right. This was not the reaction I was hoping for. I wanted her to hug me and look me up and down and tell me that I looked great. I wanted her to tell me that it was obvious that I was working hard, that I had finally got it together after all the years of hell my weight had put the two of us through. Instead she looked horrified.

“Miss?” The cab driver was waiting for me to collect my luggage or pay him or something.

“Sorry. Here.” My mother put a bright yellow plastic, Australian fifty-dollar bill in his hand and waved her thank-you at him as he pulled away. She turned to face me as a tram rattled down the busy main road just past the iron gate of our driveway. Several cars sped past in both directions, and the noise and speed of the background made my mother’s stillness and silence in the foreground quite surreal. She became aware that she was looking at me strangely and for too long and so she averted her gaze; she wanted to look at me and yet she knew that she shouldn’t, as if she were passing a roadside accident. She stood there in silence looking like a little child, her arms dangling limply by her side.

It was clear to me then that she was very worried. I was no longer irritated or angry or disappointed. I was shocked. Did I look emaciated? There had been times when I looked in the mirror and thought I was too thin, but most times all I could see were the inches I still had to lose. If I still had fat on my thighs and hips, surely there was nothing to be concerned about. But her reaction did make me wonder because worry was something that I had rarely felt from her. While I was sure she had a lot of it while raising two kids as a single parent, she never wanted my brother and me to see it. When our dad died and left us in chaos, she rebuilt order with a stiff upper lip. She told me that I was smart and that she had nothing to worry about with me. I made sure I didn’t do anything to make her worry. When I was a teenager and all my friends were smoking pot and sneaking out of their bedroom windows to go to nightclubs, I told her that I tried pot, hated it, and in which club she could find me. I was never the kid that gave her trouble. I was the mature and independent one who aced the test and won the race. I was the entertainer, the one who made things exciting with my modeling jobs and my acting and my overseas adventures.

Now, at twenty-five years old, I had made her worry. I took a deep breath, and my eyes welled up with tears. I hated seeing her so uncomfortable, not knowing where to look or what to say, and yet simultaneously, it felt good. I had traveled thousands of miles in search of the opposite reaction, yet I suddenly felt myself preferring the one I’d received. Her concern felt warm, comforting. It seemed as though she was afraid of losing something very precious, and that something was me. Because I’d always been so strong and independent, her concern about me prior to this moment mainly seemed to be about the things I could produce, like a modeling job or a beauty contract. I felt so happy I wondered if I had deliberately lost this much weight in search of that reaction. All of a sudden, I felt worthy of care. I was the one to worry about. Caring for a weak, sick child required a different kind of love. And in that moment in the driveway, I discovered that that was the kind of love I preferred.

I love you too, Mom.

I didn’t say that. I really wanted to, but it was too abstract, too heavy and emotional.

Sometimes it’s better to keep things happy and superficial.

She obviously thought the same thing because she straightened up and put a smile back on her face as if the incident had never happened.

“Bubbles, you’re home!” She’d been looking forward to my return for weeks, getting her petunias in the garden ready for the holiday. Christmas was a special time for her since my brother and I moved to LA. She wanted to dismiss her worry so she could enjoy her daughter’s homecoming.

“Let’s go inside and see Gran. She’s been looking forward to seeing you for weeks.” I walked up the back steps and into the house, putting my bags down on the checkered green linoleum floor of the kitchen. I ran over to the rocking chair in the living room to hug my Gran.

“Now, then.” My mother glanced at me and then walked away, as if attempting to downplay the importance of whatever she was about to tell me. Not one for confrontation, she chose an upbeat, clipped voice and delivered her message in a tone that enabled me to choose whether to dismiss it or take it seriously.

“What’s all this silly business with being skinny? Stop all this silly rot, all this carrying on and eat normally like everyone else, girl!”

A surge of anger bitter like acid flooded my empty body.

Silly? She calls your hard work “silly?” She doesn’t care about you. She thinks you did it for attention. You’re exhausting to her. You’re pathetic for trying to get sympathy. She’s not concerned about you, she’s sick of you.

“I’m going for a run.”

And with that I exploded out the door. I ran down the busy main street of Camberwell, narrowly avoiding cars as they were pulling out of their driveways. I picked up my pace and charged up the hill, past the old people’s home and the church and held my stomach tight and twisted from side to side as I ran down the hill toward the shops at Camberwell junction. If my Pilates instructor likened this movement to wringing water out of a towel, then I was wringing out all the acidic anger from my organs that became flooded with it when my mother dismissively called my hard work silly. I waited for the walk signal at the busy intersection and jogged in place to keep my muscles warm, to keep my brain from thinking I was done with my workout or done with the anger that fueled it, since I could use the anger to propel me forward. I sprinted up the busy shopping street, past people walking in and out of the bakery, past the sidewalk café, dodging dogs tied to outdoor tables. I ran past my favorite bookstore, past deathly still people who were standing and reading blurbs of books that promised to help them, entertain them, teach them who they were. It seemed that all the people shopping on that street turned to look at the fool who was sprinting in jeans and platform heels. But I didn’t let their obvious disapproval of my running slow me down. I ran fast, right by all of them. I ran until I couldn’t run anymore.

I stopped at the train station opposite the doctor’s office where my mother used to work. I stood at the corner of Stanhope Grove and watched the trains as they exploded into the station and heaved their way back out once they’d stopped to deliver people and receive people. I watched a green tram putter up the hill. I watched teenagers walk in and out of McDonald’s. I was watching my memories. I sat down on the wooden bench next to the taxicab rank and imagined myself in a navy blue school uniform with permed hair, walking out of the train station and across the street to my mother’s work, where I would wait for her to take me home. I smiled at that thought. Why I would wait for an hour for my mother to take me home when home was only one more train stop away was something my adult brain couldn’t fathom. Maybe it was because I could use the time to sneak off to McDonald’s and eat fries and a vanilla milk shake, pretending I was waiting for someone to disguise my embarrassment of being in there alone when all the other tables were full of kids from other schools. I was a model and so I could never go to McDonald’s with my friends. I couldn’t go with anyone, not only because I thought models shouldn’t eat McDonald’s but also because I constantly complained about being overweight. I could never eat in front of anyone because it would be evidence. It would confirm suspicions that I wasn’t helping myself and was unworthy of their sympathy. Only a crazy person would console someone for being distressed about her weight and then take her out for McDonald’s fries to cheer her up.

As I sat on the wooden bench I became aware of how much pain I was feeling. I pushed down onto the palms of my hands that had been limply resting on either side of my seated legs, elevating my seat bones away from the bench. That immediately alleviated the pain that was caused by my full weight resting on the hard wooden bench. I briefly wondered if it hurt because I was too heavy, that my seat bones couldn’t support the weight of my upper body, but quickly dismissed the thought as crazy. Fat people sit on hard things all the time. The pain of being seated and the exhaustion it took to keep me slightly off the bench made me stand. I needed to stand anyway. Standing burns more calories than sitting, and I had forgotten that rule while I had temporarily lost my mind to nostalgia. But standing there, I found myself stuck. I had run quite far and was a long way from home. If I’d had money I could have taken the train or the tram, but since I left the house without any, walking was my only option. After the long flight with no food at all, running back home was out of the question. I should never have stopped. I was not angry anymore and without any motivation I could now only walk. Losing weight really wasn’t enough motivation either. My mother’s reaction was confusing and it made me wonder whether I had taken this whole thing too far. As I started the long journey home, I wished I could just walk across the street to find my mother behind the desk in the doctor’s waiting room, waiting for me. Then she could take me home.

By the time I arrived back at the house, I had completely forgiven Mom. I had thought about her dismissive attitude toward my weight loss and understood it from many different angles. She grew up in the Marilyn Monroe era and liked women to have curves, so she simply didn’t appreciate how I looked. She called my efforts “skinny business and rot” because she no doubt realized that she’d completely overreacted. But even if she incorrectly thought that I was emaciated and sick, I understood why she downplayed her feelings about it, because it was her worry that she was dismissing, not the supposed sickness. My mother often tried to make light of heavy things. When I was a little girl with a gash on my knee, she’d tell me it was just a scratch. If I felt too sick to go to school, she’d tell me that it was in my head, that I just needed a change of scenery. She’d tell me to go to school and if I still felt sick, I could come home. She was usually right; once I got to school I forgot about being sick. She was usually right to ignore it because ignoring it often did make it go away.

When I returned, my gran told me that Mom had gone to the supermarket to get groceries. She yelled this information out to me as she was quite deaf and since she had to yell to hear herself, she assumed she needed to yell to be heard.

“Marg said you could meet her there if you wanted anything!”

“Thanks, Gran!” I yelled back at her.

I grabbed a knitted shrug and headed out to the supermarket to find my mother. The sleeves covered up my skinny arms, and with them the evidence that achieving a nice all-over body was an effort. My arms were the only giveaway that my weight should have been something other than it was. If you just saw my waist and my legs, you’d have thought I was in terrific shape. You’d have thought that I was just naturally thin. Besides, my legs weren’t even skinny. They were very average in size. I had to be extreme just to achieve average-size thighs.

I wore the knitted sleeves in an effort retreat from the front line, to surrender from the battle, to silently apologize to her for exploding out of the house in anger. I wanted her to feel proud of me as we shopped together, and she wouldn’t have been proud if the other grocery shoppers and shopkeepers had seen my arms. I didn’t have to hear that from her, I just knew it. She had bragged about me to everyone in the neighborhood and now I had to live up to the image of me she’d been presenting. Everyone wants to see effortless beauty, ease, and confidence. Every script I read described the female leads as “beautiful yet doesn’t know it” or “naturally thin and muscular and doesn’t have to work at it.” Effortlessness is an attractive thing. And it takes a lot of effort to achieve it. “Never let ’em see you sweat” was a principle I’d adopted, and so actual effort was yet another thing for me to hide from the people I was trying to impress. The list of unacceptable things about me that I had to cover up was getting longer. My arms had just made that list.

When I saw my mother she was taking a jar of peanut butter off a shelf in the condiment aisle. She looked so small from where I was standing that I suddenly didn’t want her to see me. I felt like a giant. I felt like I was taller and wider than all the people in there and the grocery aisles themselves. I was a big, fat, gluttonous American in comparison to the petite Australians. The shopping carts were small. The boxes of food on the shelves looked like they belonged to a children’s tea set. The jam jars were the size of shot glasses, the “family-sized” bags of chips looked like they contained a single serving. When she saw me standing at the end of the aisle, she smiled and waved me over. She had forgotten about her worry, my reaction, her reaction, and my thinness. It’s amazing what sleeves can do.

“Hi, Bubbles! I thought we could get some food for you. I don’t know what you like to eat now.”

As we walked up and down the aisles, she made food suggestions like, “How about I make you a Ki Si Ming? You used to love that.” Or, “Should I get some Tim Tams? You always loved Tim Tams.” Tim Tams were the chocolate-covered cookies that she’d had to hide from me if she wanted any for the rest of the family.

“Ma. Just let me do my own thing, okay? I eat differently now.”

I had finally understood that I couldn’t eat normally like everyone else if I wanted to be an actress. Couldn’t she see that? Couldn’t she see that I’d finally figured out that I had to sacrifice Tim Tams and casseroles and happy family dinners so I could give her something to brag about? As a child model I learned that success and money came when I refused the casseroles and the Tim Tams, and as an adult actress, the rules were still the same. Why would she suggest I eat all the foods that would make me fat?

I did briefly think about eating the Ki Si Ming because I loved it. But I quickly dismissed the thought. I wouldn’t deviate from my regular routine. I wouldn’t dare. If I ate the curried rice and stir-fry vegetable dish, I worried that I would gain weight. More than gaining a pound I worried that I would keep gaining pound after pound after that; that if I stopped for a moment, got off the train, maybe I couldn’t get back on. If I suspended the belief that dieting was the only way for me to be a success in all aspects of life, then in that small window of time it took to eat Ki Si Ming, my desire not to diet would overtake me again. If I ate the Ki Si Ming, I would have to start over, and I knew how much harder it was to start something than to maintain it. Maybe I just had enough willpower to start it one time and if I stopped I would become very fat? I worried that this time the bingeing to make up for all the things I denied myself would never end.

All I ever thought about was the food that I couldn’t eat. Sometimes I even dreamt about it. Dieting is hard. That’s why everyone admires someone who is successful at it. I had thought my mother would be proud of my precision and my calculations, my self-control, but I had the sense that she thought I was out of control. As I sat down to a tablespoon of dry turkey and watched my mother and grandmother eat the dish they had always made to welcome me home, I wondered if her thoughts were correct. I wondered if I was out of control. If I couldn’t eat a scoop of stir-fry because I was terrified of getting fat, then who was in control?

23

What did you eat last night?

I WOKE UP at 5:00 a.m. to a quiet, dark house and rummaged through my suitcase for my gym shorts and sneakers. It was time to go running. I wanted to get my workout out of the way so I could see Sacha and my old friend Bill and spend some time with my brother, who was coming home later that morning. I ran down the same roads as I did the day before and thought about how proud Sacha would be when she saw me. The last time we’d seen each other was in St. Barths when I was fat and struggling—at first with her rejection of my advances toward her, but my struggle with my weight closely followed. Of the two issues, my weight problem was the more painful. Her rejection of me didn’t hurt my feelings; rather, it clarified my feelings toward her. I was never in love with her. I was merely in love with the idea of being in a relationship with a woman. Over piña coladas, she’d helped me arrive at the conclusion that my future girlfriend would have to be a gay woman, not a straight one. I knew that once I had made enough money where I no longer had to worry about losing my career, I would find a girlfriend. I needed a lot of money, however, because I had an apartment to renovate. But after that, I would find someone to love.

I ran with money in my shoe this time. I wasn’t going to be caught again. Besides, I thought it would be nice to eat breakfast at my favorite outdoor café. As well as money, I brought cigarettes so I could run and look forward to ending my workout with a cup of hot coffee and a cigarette. The workout gear I wore for the run made me invisible. It worked as a kind of disguise. No one looked at a girl running in spandex shorts and tennis shoes even if she was running up and down a busy shopping street. Unlike the day before, I could run past the bookstore and McDonald’s without turning a head. It is strange that clothes can make that much of a difference.

I stood at the counter of the café and waited to get the attention of the owner. When he finally saw me, I didn’t know whether to acknowledge him with a warm smile that suggested we knew each other or just skip the smile and get my coffee. I decided on the latter as it’s always very embarrassing when people don’t smile back because they are too busy wondering who you are. I used to go there a lot, and although we’d never officially met, he seemed to recognize me when I was with my mother. She’s the friendly one in the family.

“Black coffee, please.”

“Coming right up.” He turned his back to me to pour the coffee, but when he turned around again with a big smile on his face it was clear that he had remembered me.

“Back from America, are ya?”

“Yep. Back home for Christmas.”

“Geez!” He blatantly looked me up and down. “Don’t they feed ya in Hollywood?”

I couldn’t think of a joke. I didn’t know what to say.

“How much is that?”

“For you, love, it’s free.”

I thanked him and took my coffee outside. I found a spot in a cluster of iron tables and chairs separated from the parking lot by a potted boxwood hedge. A couple was sitting at the next table very close to mine, and as I took out the cigarette to light it, I wondered if I should be polite and ask for their approval or just do it and hope I could get a few drags in before they complained. Doing what I wanted without permission and then dealing with the fallout was the method I’d always used with my brother. If I wanted to wear his favorite sweater, the one that he’d never let me borrow in a million years, I’d just take it and deal with the consequences. I liked to think I had grown up a lot since then, but it occurred to me my lighting that cigarette was the same principle. As it turned out, the couple next to me didn’t mind the smoke and so I sat there, inhaling smoke and nicotine and feeling quite elated that I was home in Australia with its easygoing people and its trees and its birds with their raucous singing. I would see Sacha later in the day and . . .

“I thought you might like a good Aussie breakfast! Here’s some eggs, love. Put a little meat on your bones!”

The owner of the café shoved a white porcelain plate on the metal table in front of me, interrupting my thoughts. Then he dropped a knife and fork wrapped in a napkin next to the plate. On the plate were two eggs, two big orange eyeballs of yolk staring up at me confrontationally, as if looking for a fight. I was too shocked and speechless to send them back immediately and so I was left looking at the eggs as they looked back at me, challenging me to make them disappear. I looked at the planter box filled with the boxwood hedge and wondered if eggs would somehow dissolve into the soil, or if the dirt was loose enough that I could cover up the evidence, but upon feeling the soil I found that it was too tightly packed and almost to the top of the planter. Besides, even if I could cut them up into millions of pieces, how could I get them in there without people seeing me? The café owner came back out to the patio again to deliver food to another table. He winked at me. “On the house,” he said quietly so the other customers couldn’t hear. For a brief moment I considered eating them just to save him from hurt feelings as he clearly liked his self-appointed role of a nurturing café owner who derived pleasure from seeing people enjoy his food. But that thought was ridiculous. I wasn’t going to break my diet for a man who, only moments before, I’d been scared to acknowledge with a nod for fear he wouldn’t remember me. I wasn’t going to break my diet for that guy.

Disposing of the eggs into the planter wasn’t an option and there was no trash can on the patio, so I was left with either cutting the eggs up into tiny pieces and moving the pieces around on the plate to make it look like I’d eaten some or leaving them whole and coming up with a reason for not wanting them, other than the obvious one, which was that I didn’t order them. The longer I was confronted with this unsolicited situation, his so-called generosity, the angrier I became. It was quite disrespectful of him, actually, to feed me like this, as if I were a child. I was an adult capable of making my own decisions about what went into my body. I decided that I wasn’t even going to attempt to please him. I was going to leave the eggs exactly as they were delivered to me. Now he could deal with not knowing what to do with the two monstrous, confrontational eyelike yolks. My only dilemma was how to appear normal, and as normal people are greedy and love receiving free things, how would I spin this? Who wouldn’t want free food? Who wouldn’t want free deliciously fresh eggs with their coffee? I found the perfect answer to this riddle just as he came out to check on me.

“Thank you so much for the eggs, but I’m vegan. I don’t eat any animal products.”

“Vegan.” He said the word like he was hearing it for the first time, repeating it as if to get it right. He shook his head. “God, you Hollywood people are a bunch of weirdos.”

I laughed at what I assumed was a joke and got up from the table to end this awkward interaction where I was force-fed and called a skinny weirdo. All I had wanted was to sit peacefully and bask in the joy of being home and instead I was ambushed by this Australian weirdo who thought he knew better than I did about what I needed. I jogged home and arrived just as a cab delivered my brother from the airport to the house where we had spent our teenage years ignoring each other.

“Hey!” I hugged my brother as he was collecting his luggage. “God, you stink.”

“So do you.”

No I don’t. I don’t stink anymore. I don’t get my period. My hair hardly ever gets greasy and I don’t sweat, either.

He looked me up and down. “You look awful, Porshe.”

“Yeah, well, so do you.”

“I’m not joking. You look like a skeleton.”

Usually any comment about my thinness made me happy, but being called a skeleton hurt my feelings. My brother and I were always so jokingly sarcastic with each other, sometimes we took it too far. Usually I would’ve told him that he was being rude, but I didn’t want to bring attention to it. I needed to make the conversation casual so that he would let it go. I had to appease everyone lately.

“It’s just ’cause I’m in my running clothes.”

“You’ve been running already? It’s so early. Why don’t you take a break from it? I think you’re thin enough, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

It was strange that all of a sudden it seemed like I had to lie constantly just to be left alone.

“I know I’m too thin. I’m gaining weight. And I wouldn’t have gone running if I weren’t this jet-lagged. I was going crazy lying there—although your bed is really comfortable.”

“What?”

“First come, first served, Brother.”

I walked into the house through the back door and found my mother in the kitchen.

“Good morning, Bubbles. Do you want some breakfast?”

Jesus.

“No. That man at the café we go to all the time gave me eggs this morning.”

That wasn’t a lie.

“Michael’s here.”

My mother ran to the kitchen door and hugged him.

“Mike’s home! Look, Gran,” she yelled, “it’s Mike!”

“Hi, Ma.”

As I slipped through the kitchen and down the hall I heard him say, “Hey, you didn’t give her my room, did you?”

My brother’s arrival diverted mom’s attention away from my breakfast, thank God, and I escaped into my bedroom where I had lived my teenage years listening to records loudly and smoking cigarettes, believing that neither noise nor smoke could penetrate my bedroom door. It continued to act as a magic shield from the demands of my family, for when I emerged from my room, dressed in long sleeves and a full, long skirt, breakfast was over and I was greeted with easy smiles. No one seemed to care if I was running or eating. I was wearing a lot of makeup, too, and I think that helped.

“Porshe, you wanna go shopping?”

“Seriously?” I said incredulously. “Again?”

My brother had an enviable ability to dismiss any thoughts of Christmas gifts for the family until Christmas Eve, and I was always dragged along to help shop for them. Strangely enough, though, he never needed my help. He had an uncanny knack for finding the perfect thing, the most thoughtful gift at the last possible second. I loathed him for it and admired him for it. Most times, I secretly enjoyed the ritual, too, because it ended with a trip to our favorite pub. The ritual had a rhythm to it: I had to start out with being pissed off and pretend to have my own plans. He’d beg me to help him although he didn’t need it, and I’d grudgingly agree, telling him he owed me a beer. Then it’d end with him asking me to wrap the gifts, which really did piss me off. That was the way it always went. But to my surprise, today I actually was agitated. I was anxiously wondering how and when I was going to eat. I had been waiting for the moment my mother left the house to weigh and eat my turkey, as I wanted to avoid any possible comments that weighing out a portion of turkey might elicit. Then, after that, I thought I could cook and eat egg whites before going to the Hyatt hotel. I had decided to book the presidential suite of the Hyatt and spend Christmas Eve there with my brother to decorate the Christmas tree and to ready the room for our family Christmas dinner the following day. Getting the hotel suite was a gift that I was giving my family, since cooking Christmas dinner in the small kitchen of my mother’s house always seemed to be challenging. But leaving my mother’s house for the hotel earlier than I’d planned was worrying. Traveling and dieting was hard enough, but without access to my mother’s kitchen all day, I began to fret, wondering when I would next eat.

“Why can’t you get your shit together like everyone else? I have plans, too, you know. I wanted to see Sacha today.”

“I’m not going to carry a whole bunch of crap from LA in a suitcase. Come on, it’ll take an hour.”

“No it won’t.” I grabbed my bag, got in the car, and shrugged off my irritation enough to continue the banter. “You owe me a beer.” It sounded fun to say it, but I had no intention of holding him to it. I would never drink my entire day’s calories in a beer, even if it is Victoria Bitter.

“Hey, what do you think of this?”

Michael was standing in front of a full-length mirror in Myer, Melbourne’s largest department store, wearing a purse.

“Who for?” I barely even looked at it. I really didn’t care at that point. I hated shopping—especially department store shopping, and I’d been with him in that store for hours. He’d bought about ten gifts so I’d thought we were done.

“It’s for me. I need something to carry my work stuff in.”

That made me look. My brother, as serious as I’d ever seen him, was checking himself out in the mirror, a thin strap over his right shoulder that connected to a shiny black leather rectangular pouch that was at waist height due to the shortness of the strap. I stared at him, expressionless.

“Guys have bags now! I saw it in In Flight magazine on the plane.” He turned to me and modeled it a little and by his swagger it was obvious that he thought he looked pretty good.

The ground floor of this department store where we were standing sold shoes and accessories. There was a side that sold men’s accessories and a side that sold women’s. The two departments were separated with an aisle. While he was certainly standing near a couple of large satchel-type man-bags, he had picked up a bag from the wrong side of the aisle. I waited for him to realize his mistake. After staring at my expressionless face for many moments, he gestured for me to hurry up with my opinion.

“It’s a purse.”

A look of panic flooded his face as he spun back to face the mirror. He looked at himself and regained his composure, the purse still over his shoulder. He calmly read the tag attached to it.

“Yes,” he said simply. “Yes, it is.”

We cracked up. We laughed so hard we were snorting. Nearby Christmas shoppers saw us laughing and couldn’t help but laugh, too. We left the store and were cracking up all the way to the parking garage, dropping shopping bags as we doubled over. Even after we’d recovered for several minutes, I’d burst out laughing again on our drive to the pub, thinking about my macho helicopter pilot brother wearing a purse. That would set him off again, too, and as I laughed with my brother and drove past red brick Victorian terrace houses and through the eucalyptus-lined streets of my hometown, I felt that I was truly home.

When we arrived at the Great Britain, GB for short, Michael went to the bar and I settled in at a high-top table. I looked around my favorite pub. There was a goldfish above the bar in an old black-and-white TV set and tableaus of mini living rooms, with vintage floor lamps lighting worn sofas and mismatched coffee tables. I never felt more myself as I did in that grungy pub. Bill, an old school friend whom I rarely went anywhere at night without, used to drive me to the GB where we’d meet Sacha and friends from law school. Occasionally I was introduced to girls. Although I was too shy to really do much about it, I loved feeling that excitement of getting dressed to go out thinking that perhaps that night I could meet someone and fall in love. The hope of falling in love was a lot to sacrifice for the sake of my career. Apart from that feeling, I missed being able to relax in public without fear of being noticed, and talking to whomever I chose without worrying about people finding out my big secret.

There was no real reason why I hadn’t told my brother that I was gay. Then again, I just didn’t really have a reason to tell him. I wasn’t dating anyone, and because none of his friends had any idea that I was gay, I wasn’t worried that he’d find out from someone other than me. I knew Mom wouldn’t tell him. She didn’t want anyone to know.

I could hear my brother talking to the bartender about how he just arrived from LA and the old-fashioned cash register make the ding sound as it popped open its drawer to swallow up the gold two-dollar coins. I took a drag of my cigarette and found it hard to breathe the smoke back out of my mouth. My throat had constricted with anxiety, trapping the smoke in my lungs. It was time to reveal myself to my brother. I was sure he’d be confused and have a lot of questions, but I had to tell him how alone and misunderstood I’ve felt. I could no longer keep this secret from him and I just had to hope that he would understand.

He returned with the beers. He put them down on the table. He sat down. He took a sip.

“Brother. There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a long time. Something I’ve known since I was a kid, really. Well, teenager, I guess. Umm . . .” I took a deep breath and looked at him in his eyes. “I’m gay.”

There was an eruption of laughter at the pool table. One man had apparently scratched by sinking the white ball in behind the black to lose the game. The man who won was yelling and walking backward with his arms spread wide, a pool cue in his right hand. He was coming dangerously close to our table. To my surprise, my brother didn’t seem to notice and to my even bigger surprise he looked angry. He’d been staring at the table for what seemed like an eternity and for a brief moment I wondered if he’d even heard what I’d said.

“What did you think I would say, Porshe? Why would you think that I’d care about something like that? I’m not some narrow-minded bigot that you’d have to hide this from. I mean, who do you think I am?”

Of all the feelings I thought he would have, betrayal had never crossed my mind. I had betrayed him by hiding the person I really was from him for fear that he would reject me. I had insulted him by insinuating that he harbored thoughts of discrimination and bigotry. His reaction was so surprising to me and it left me feeling ashamed for judging him. And yet I couldn’t remember feeling happier. I could tell by his expression that once he got over his anger at me for keeping this secret from him, there was nothing left to talk about. He wasn’t confused. He didn’t need questions answered. He didn’t ask why or how or with whom or whether I thought maybe it might just be a phase. He didn’t ask who knew and who didn’t know or whether I thought it might ruin my career. I was his sister and he didn’t care whether I was straight or gay; it simply didn’t matter to him. I’d been worried that he wouldn’t believe me, but he didn’t even question me. All that mattered to him was that I had been struggling with this tortuous secret without his help.

His phone rang. It was a work call from LA; it wasn’t yet Christmas Eve over there—it was just the twenty-third of the month, a day like any other. He took the call and spoke in a tone that was all business. In his voice there was no evidence of anger or betrayal—it was light and friendly without a hint of emotion. He spoke and chugged down his beer.

“You ready?” He didn’t even look at my untouched beer.

“Let’s go.”

As we walked side by side down the Melbourne street in the late-afternoon heat of summer, he put his arm around my shoulder. He understood. He still loved me. We sauntered down the city street listening to the magpies that squarked so loudly we couldn’t have heard each other even if we had needed to talk. But we didn’t. We just needed to silently acknowledge that we were home, that we were where we came from, that for that moment we didn’t need to live in another country just to feel accomplished. We were okay just as we were. Our silence was broken by the remote unlocking the rental car. He uncharacteristically opened my side first, like a gentleman, and just as I was about to thank him for his valor he said:

“You’re good at wrapping gifts, aren’t you?”

24

CHRISTMAS MORNING, like every other morning since I’d arrived in Melbourne, began in the dark, as jet lag, the discomfort of an unfamiliar bed, and hunger prevented me from sleeping past 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. I lay in the darkness of the master bedroom of my two-bedroom hotel suite and ran through my calorie consumption and calorie burn of the day before. This mental calculation had become a ritual, and it was done with precision and some urgency. Only when I could solve the equation of calories in and calories out could I feel relief and begin my day. There was a scale in the bathroom. I saw it when I arrived the night before. It was digital and measured weight in pounds, unlike other Australian scales, which measured in kilograms. Could I possibly stand on it? Could I weigh myself? I’d been too scared to check my weight since arriving in Australia because of the water retention that can occur during plane travel, and I didn’t want to upset myself. But lying in bed Christmas morning, I felt thin. I could feel my hip bones and my ribs. I lay on my side with my legs slightly bent with one knee on top of the other for the ultimate test of weight loss: if the fat on my top thigh didn’t touch my bottom thigh, if there was a gap between my thighs even when I was lying down, then my thighs had to be thin. There was a wide gap and I made a mental note to measure that gap with one of those stiff metal tape measures when I got back home. I felt as though I could get on that digital scale and give myself the Christmas present of a good number, a number that would show my hard work; a number that would congratulate me for dieting successfully for eight months.

For eight months, I hadn’t gained a pound. I’d stayed the same for a few days at a time, but I hadn’t gained. My initial goal weight was 115 pounds. My mistake was that I set a goal weight thinking that 115 pounds would feel different from how it really felt. I thought I would look thinner than I did at that weight. At 115 pounds, although my stomach was flatter and my arms looked good, my thighs were still too big. At 110 pounds, I was happy. I really liked how I looked. I only went under that weight because I needed a cushion in case that uncontrollable urge to binge happened again and it wasn’t chewing gum, but ice cream, candy, or potato chips that abducted me.

The only thing I cared about now was not gaining. As long as I never gained, weight loss was no longer that important. But seeing a new low on the scale did give me a high. And the lower the number, the bigger the high.

I walked into the bathroom and used the toilet. I then held my breath as I eased onto the scale, my arms holding me up on the bathroom counter, holding my weight off the scale for as long as it took to gently add weight pound by pound until I could let go of the counter and stand with my arms by my side. In this hotel bathroom, naked and vulnerable, I closed my eyes and prayed. The red digital number in between and just in front of my feet would determine whether I had a happy Christmas or a miserable one. To no one in particular I said out loud, “Please let me be in the nineties. I’ll take ninety-five, I’m not greedy, just don’t let it be in the hundreds. I’d rather die than be in the hundreds. Please, please, please, please.” I started to cry with anxiety, but I quickly calmed myself down as I was worried the jerkiness my body makes when I cry might have caused the number on the scale to shoot up and not come down again. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I needed to start over, to ease back on the scale again just to make sure that the number I saw would be the accurate one. As I got off the scale looking straight ahead at my reflection in the mirror, I felt as though I needed to use the bathroom again and I did so hoping that I’d gotten all the excess water out of my body. I eased myself back onto the scale feeling fortunate that I hadn’t read the first number, that God had whispered in my ear and told me to get off the scale and use the bathroom so I could avoid the pain that the false read would’ve given me. I stood now with my hands by my side. I was empty. I was no longer crying. I was ready to receive my Christmas present, the gift of health and self-love that I’d given myself this year. With complete calmness and acceptance, I looked down at my feet.

89

“Merry Christmas, Portia.”

“Merry Christmas, Portia.” My aunt Gwen and Uncle Len walked through the door of the hotel suite bearing gifts and my uncle’s famous Christmas fruit cake. Frank Sinatra was crooning carols in the background, a giant, fully trimmed Christmas tree was the centerpiece of the spacious living room, and my grandmother and mother were sitting on chairs together in front of it, talking. Moments later, my cousins wandered in and the tableau was complete. I silently congratulated myself for providing this lovely experience for my family. This was what I could do with the money that was given to me in exchange for my freedom. I could create a Christmas where they could all relax and enjoy one another without having to worry about anything. I could create the perfect holiday.

The day started out perfect for me, too. I did sit-ups and leg lifts with renewed energy and vigor. I was eighty-nine pounds. It sounded so mysterious and magical I could barely say it out loud. It was special. Who weighed eighty-nine pounds? It was an accomplishment that felt uniquely mine, uniquely special. I went to the gym at 5:30 and ran up and down the hall for thirty minutes, waiting for it to open at six. I was the only one in the gym on Christmas morning, as I was the only one who took health and fitness seriously. In a way, working hard in the gym Christmas morning was the answer to the question I had asked of myself when I began this journey six months prior. This wasn’t a passing phase. This was my new way of life. On the day when everyone else slacked off, I worked because being thin was what I liked more than anything else. But something else happened in there, too. I felt lonely. For a brief moment, as I pressed the up arrow on the treadmill until the speed climbed to 7.0, I felt very alone. I heard the thud of my feet as they found the rhythm of the belt and wondered why I had a demanding taskmaster of a voice in my head that could be silenced only if I ran instead of slept, when everyone else in this hotel was waking up gently to a quiet voice that was telling them to stay in bed, that it’s only six, it’s not time to think just yet.

“Have some champagne, Porshe.”

“I don’t drink anymore, Ma. You know that.”

“Oh, come on. It won’t hurt you.”

My mother likes tradition and the idea that the family clan will pass on all the same habits and morals and ideas, generation after generation. A tradition in our family was to drink champagne with a pureed strawberry liqueur concoction my cousin made especially for Christmas morning. I felt that I couldn’t refuse.

I drank the champagne and my mother instantly looked relieved. I’m not sure if it was the alcohol from the champagne that loosened my tight grip on my diet, but the simple act of drinking a glass of champagne with my family was exhilarating. I was happier in that moment than I had been in eight months. For just that one day, I was going to put the “cushion” theory in play. Seeing my family relax as I drank the champagne encouraged me to continue to drink and eat and be merry. Next I ate turkey meat and my mother smiled. Then, at my family’s urging, I ate potatoes. They relaxed. They laughed. It seemed that my eating potatoes gave them more pleasure than opening gifts, not having to cook, and Christmas Day itself. So I ate some more. I felt invincible at eighty-nine pounds. And I loved that for the first time since I was a small child, I could just be like everyone else. I wasn’t a model or an actress who had to eat special food, nor was I an overweight girl who complained about her weight, making everyone else bored and uncomfortable. I was just one of the family at that dining table, partaking in their rituals, their food.

By the time everyone but my brother and my cousin, Megan, had left, however, I was no longer happy or relaxed. I was in shock. I had drunk a glass of champagne. I had eaten turkey roasted in its own fat. I had eaten beans glazed with oil. But what shocked me the most was that I had eaten potatoes. I had eaten two medium-sized roasted potatoes with oil and rosemary and salt. I started to panic. I clenched and unclenched my fists and started circling my wrists in an attempt to take the horror of what was digesting in my gut away from my mind’s eye. My body was shaking. I couldn’t control the shaking because the panic that was setting in to make it shake felt like itching. Somehow I had to get relief. I raised my arms above my head and shook out my hands as if to expel the energy. My cousin and my brother were still in the living room, sitting by the Christmas tree, but I no longer cared. In front of my cousin and my brother, I started jumping up and down with my arms above my head and shaking my hands to try to get rid of the calories in the potatoes.

“Porshe, what are you doing?” Megan asked me in a tone that suggested she wasn’t waiting for an answer. She had something to say to me. She was quite emotional. I could tell because when Australians are emotional, sometimes they can sound bossy.

“I pigged out at lunch and I’m just trying to work some of it off.” To downplay the fact that I was jumping up and down and shaking, I tried to sound nonchalant and used a smiley voice that was on a frequency that sat high above the panic. I smiled and in between bounces shrugged my shoulders in a “you know how it is” way that I was sure all women would understand. But I didn’t really care if I was understood. I just had to get rid of all that crap in my stomach. I felt so panicked I couldn’t be still.

“Portia. You ate potatoes, just some potatoes. They’re not going to make you fat, okay? What’s the big deal?”

They will make me fat because it’s not just some potatoes that I just ate, it’s the potatoes I know I’m going to eat in the future now I’ve allowed myself to eat those. That by eating those potatoes I could get back on the same old yo-yo dieting pattern and suffer in the way that I’d suffered from age twelve to twenty-five. Eating those potatoes could cost me my career, money, and my ability to make money. Eating those potatoes will make me poor. So eating those potatoes will make me fat. Because without any money or a career, I will definitely end up fat.

“I’m going for a run.” I quickly walked past her and my brother to the bedroom, changed into gym clothes, and strode past them again and out the front door. Compared to the earlier laughing and talking and singing, the suite was eerily quiet. I don’t think they spoke to each other the whole time I was changing. As I jogged down the hall, I replayed the scene in my mind. I knew I’d end up ruining Christmas no matter how hard I tried to make it perfect. I knew I’d end up upsetting the people I love with my selfishness and my lack of thought for others. I had tried so hard to make everyone happy and yet I just couldn’t lie well enough to do it. Lying was too hard. As I ran out of the elevator and through the lobby, I could sense that people were staring.

I wasn’t like everyone else. I was an actress. I changed my name, my accent, my nationality. I was gay. It was time to stop even trying to pretend.

25

IT GOT quiet at night on the streets of Camberwell. It was always quiet with Bill unless I was prepared to talk. Sitting on the stoop of the fish and chip shop next to 7-Eleven was something that we liked to do after we’d done everything else. After we drove across town to the less gentrified neighborhood, where the architecture was better but where the people who lived in it were generally poorer, had coffee, drank beer, played pool, saw a band, and drove back across town to the middle-class suburban neighborhood where my mother lived, we’d sit on the stoop of the Camberwell fish and chips shop enjoying the balmy weather and the freedom of not having to look at a clock. There were as many hours as we needed in the middle of the night, if in fact, 2:00 a.m. was considered the middle of it. Usually with these free hours I would tell Bill my troubles, my plans, my desires, but tonight I really didn’t have any. I was just sitting there, living. Living was in stark contrast to dreaming about living. Usually I would tell him my plan to make Sacha fall in love with me, the directors I had hopes to meet, why being in Los Angeles was better than being in Australia. When I was bored of talking about myself, I would talk about him, challenge him about why he didn’t have a girlfriend, a job, an escape plan from his life. But I was still really just talking about me, talking myself into the reasons why I didn’t have a girlfriend, a job that I liked, but mostly, I was trying to find a reason for having had to escape from the place that was my home. To convince myself of my choice, I had to make it a place that everyone should want to escape from. But tonight I really had nothing to say. I wasn’t excited about anything. I realized that in stark contrast to Christmases past, I had no drive, no reason to propel me forward. I had nothing to say. And because Bill doesn’t really like to talk, Camberwell at 2:00 a.m. was pretty quiet.

Although there were several more days before I had to return to LA, it felt like the holiday was over. The excitement of seeing my family after many months and the thrill of showing off my new body was over. My cousins, my uncles, and my aunts all saw my body. They were all seemingly unimpressed. No one mentioned that I had lost weight or that I looked good or that I was thin. It was baffling to me that they didn’t say anything. I didn’t even try to hide my arms anymore. I took my sleeves off, put my gym clothes on, and called Sacha. She would be impressed. She would understand the work it had taken to achieve this body. I called her and convinced her to take me to her gym. I told her that she and I were going to work off our indulgences over the holidays. I couldn’t wait to see her, to make sure I still had my best friend after what I’d put her through in St. Barths.

I walked past my brother in my gym clothes, my bag slung over my shoulder.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m meeting Sacha at her gym in Prahran.”

He looked simultaneously disappointed and determined as he said, “I’ll drive you.”

I knew I couldn’t argue with him. Not when his face looked like that.

My brother pulled into the parking lot at the gym but instead of leaving to go do whatever he’d come into town to do, he parked and shut the engine down.

“Aren’t you going to run errands or something?”

“No. I thought I might come in with you.”

“To the gym?”

“Yeah.”

Shit. I’d told Sacha to meet me at noon. It was only ten. I wanted to give myself a good solid two-hour workout before she arrived.

“Why do you want to go to the gym? I thought you were just dropping me off. You know what me and Sacha are like, we’ll be goofing around for hours.” Goofing around? Geez.

Now it looked like it was his turn scan his brain for a reason in the form of a rational-sounding lie. But why? What was he doing?

“I thought I might like to see Sacha. I haven’t seen her in ages.”

Bullshit. Jesus. I wished I’d taken the tram. I didn’t know how to get around the fact that Sacha wasn’t going to be at the gym for two more hours. As I walked into the almost empty gym with my brother trailing behind me, I decided to cover the lie by acting annoyed at Sacha’s lateness. That would do.

“What are you going to do in here? Stand around like a pervert?” He was wearing jeans and boots. He looked like a total weirdo.

“I’m just gonna check it out. Don’t worry about me. Do your thing.”

I took his direction and stopped worrying about him. I didn’t care about the whole Sacha lie either. Once I checked in to the gym I got to work. I did what I came to do. I got on the treadmill and started sprinting for twenty minutes. Then I got on the elliptical. I did twenty minutes and burned 137 calories on that, which I counted as 100. In my mind, twenty minutes on any cardio machine gave me a 100-calorie burn even if the red digital digits said otherwise. I couldn’t trust machines. They were all different. By the time I was done with cardio (I felt okay about only doing forty minutes because I’d run for over an hour that morning) and moved to the mats on the floor to begin the glorified sit-ups they call Pilates, I noticed my brother still standing in the corner. I had forgotten him completely.

“Why are you still here?” I had to speak loudly over the whirr of the machines and the yelling of the sports commentators on the TVs.

“Oh. Ahh . . . I dunno. Just do your thing. I’ll wait for you.” He was acting strangely. He had his head down and was avoiding eye contact, which was so unlike him. He was a helicopter pilot. He loved eye contact. He’d have laughed if he could have seen himself like I did. He really looked creepy standing around in the darkest corner of the gym in jeans and boots. I hoped all the women in there didn’t know he was with me.

I did my thing. I finished my forty-minute mat workout (so many reps to be effective!) and moved to the weights. I occasionally did weights to tone my arms and back, and I figured that since I wasn’t doing a photo shoot or appearing on camera for a couple of weeks, the muscles would have time to deflate if by accident I somehow pumped them up. I would’ve hated to look fat because I’d worked out too hard and my muscles added the inches I’d painstakingly taken away.

After I’d worked my bi’s, tri’s and deltoids, I saw that my brother had found a friend. It was Sacha. My desire to run to her was curbed by the seriousness of the conversation she was having with my policeman of a brother, creepily brooding in the dark corner. I wondered what the hell they could be talking about. Could they be talking about my having come out to him? It seemed unlikely, as I doubted that either of them would betray my confidence. Surely it couldn’t be my weight. I knew I was a little thin in places, but not enough to have a serious conversation about it. I started to worry, like perhaps their somber mood had nothing to do with me, and so I went over to them in a hurry. As I approached, I realized they were talking about me because Sacha’s mood immediately changed when she realized I was within earshot.

“Peeeee!” She squealed my name and hugged me all at once, leaving me deaf in my right ear. But my brother didn’t smile. He stayed the same. He looked at me, this time in the eyes.

“Porshe, can I see you outside?” He turned away from me and walked out of the gym.

The seriousness of his tone made me follow him, leaving Sacha alone, but I got the feeling that she was fine with me following him, too. It was exciting almost. It was so different. My brother had never pulled me away to talk to me seriously about anything before. I couldn’t help but be excited because it was so different. I could tell that he wasn’t angry, but I couldn’t quite figure out what he was feeling and why his feelings were so important that he would pull me away from my best friend whom I hadn’t seen for months.

We got all the way to the car before we stopped. The longer we walked, the more concerned I became. By the time he spoke, my stomach was in knots. He leaned on the hood of the car with both hands, his broad back to me, blocking his face from mine. I couldn’t see where this was going. I started to get really scared.