Summer 1951

LOSING FIFTEEN POUNDS: PART FOUR

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[…continued from previous three posts.]

My nights were hungry. Often I had to drink two glasses of water to fill me up long enough to fall asleep, but then I would wake at two in the morning to pee. One night, the empty gnawing in my stomach after a bathroom trip was intolerable. Barefoot, I felt my way into the kitchen without turning on the light, opened the box of Social Tea biscuits my mother had left on the kitchen table as quietly as I could, and reluctantly put one between my lips.

But somehow I found the will to keep from biting into it, and after a while was able to put it back in the box, close the lid and drink more water before feeling my way along the wall back to my room. There I lay in the dark, listening to the tick tick tick of my bedside clock. Where had she hidden the European fig sandwich cookies? They had to be in the kitchen. Behind something, where they couldn’t be seen. And probably high up, not easy to get to. I really needed to know.

Returning again to the kitchen, I carefully lifted one of the chairs out from under the kitchen table, set it softly down in front of the grocery cabinet and climbed up to find out what was in the back of the top shelf. A very faint light that was almost no light came through the window from a street lamp around the corner, so that I could just make out oatmeal, sugar cubes, and bags of rice and coffee along the front of the top shelf. I took them all out, leaning over the back of the chair to set them on the counter. Now I could see the back row: baking soda, cornstarch, tapioca pudding, Jell-O, and – aha! – the package of cookies, unopened.

I had to do it. Had to.

Quietly I removed the whole box from its hiding place, arranged the coffee, sugar and rice so as to conceal the gap in the back row, replaced the kitchen chair under the table, tucked the box under my arm, felt my way back to my room, silently closed the door and took a deep breath. And now, quickly quickly, to bed again.

It would have been easier if she had already eaten one or two. Without prior experience in stealing crackers or cookies undetected from unopened boxes, I had to improvise. No thought now of the seven or eight pounds already lost with such difficulty or how I might feel tomorrow. There was only the box with me in the dark under the sheet, and my fingers carefully prying open the glued-together folds of paper at one end without tearing them, so as to make a paper sleeve, and sliding the sleeve from the cardboard box, and feeling for its opening, and reaching the first double cookie, and trembling as I brought it to my lips in the dark and tasted it. I chewed slowly and swallowed, and oh the pleasure of it. Then the cookie was gone. So I felt for another and then another and ate faster and was happy, and felt for more double cookies and ate them, and went on eating and eating, and then could it be there were no more left in the box?

I felt around in the paper cups. Empty. All of them. What to do now? I had to get the box out of my bed. That was the first thing. Best to return it to its original place, so that everything would look as it had when my mother reached up for the coffee and sugar in the morning.  I closed the empty paper sleeve, licked and pressed shut the folds at the end as best I could, slid it into its box and tiptoed the box into the kitchen again. Up behind the sugar, rice and coffee it went, very light with nothing in it. But it would probably look all right up there.

Back in bed for the fifth time that night, I made careful plans for next morning. I would have to buy a replacement box when I went out and smuggle it back into the apartment. Also I would have to double the length of my daily walk for the rest of the week at least, to make up for all those cookie calories. That solved, I had no trouble falling asleep.

Everything went like clockwork. I carried another package home from the A&P in a large straw handbag, and while my mother was in the bathtub after her housework had plenty of time to get it up into place at the back of the top shelf and dispose of the empty package in the incinerator at the end of the third floor hallway. And I walked so furiously and dieted so conscientiously that by the end of the week I had even lost another pound! So where was the harm if I did it all again a week later, when midnight hunger gnawed once more? None, apparently.

Wrong. What I had left out of my calculations was the possibility there would be no more packages of European fig sandwich cookies in the A&P when I turned up a second time to replace the box emptied the night before. I asked for the store manager. No, they didn’t stock those on a regular basis, he said. They were something new, which the company might or might not order again, but how about Fig Newtons? They always had Fig Newtons. Frightened, I rushed to “Alice’s – Delicacies from Around the World.” Double fig cookies in an oblong box were not anything from around the world the snooty saleslady in “Alice’s” had ever heard of.

Maybe my mother would forget about the cookies. I didn’t think so. She never forgot a thing. Or maybe she wouldn’t open the box till I was safely in school again. So as not to tempt me. Maybe, maybe. Days and then weeks passed, and she said nothing. Did she know? Did she not know? How could she not know? I lost more pounds. By the middle of August, the bathroom scale read 130. I had done it: I was fifteen pounds lighter than I’d been at the beginning of June! But there were still three weeks to go. Could I reach (and hold) 128 by the time I went back to school? Two more pounds in three weeks: why not? Now that would make the whole wretched summer worthwhile!

[To be continued…..]

LOSING FIFTEEN POUNDS: PART TWO

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[…continued from previous post.]

I began my summer of staying home to lose weight by immediately leaving home again.  I had been invited to accompany a new college friend to Atlantic City for four or five days.  Amy was a graduating senior whom I’d always secretly admired but never before gotten to know, as we had neither friends nor academic interests in common. We came together during her last semester on the basis of a shared reluctance to go home on weekends.

She was tall, slender, and classy looking: long shiny dark hair, long shapely legs, and a soft, well-rounded bosom of movie star proportions. She was also an astonishingly good classical violinist and, equally impressive to me, owned thirty-five cashmere sweaters (some formerly her mother’s), which she didn’t save for special occasions but wore every day, in rotation, with jeans.

Amy was now suffering through the end of what she declared was the most profound love affair she would ever have in all her life. He was a genius, she said quietly. He was also married, unhappily of course, and could not leave his wife, a Catholic. Although he had many times led beautiful Amy gently (ever so gently) to the brink of consummation over the course of their two years together, professor and student in erotic endeavor as well as in her musical studies, he had steadfastly declined to rob her of her technical virginity; it would be both unfair to her and an act of infidelity to his wife.

He wanted to preserve her purity because he loved her. (“And he does, I know he does,” she whispered, her cheeks pink with recollected passion.) The most he would permit, during their clandestine after-hours meetings in his office, was for her to express her desire by gratifying his, on her knees on a small oriental rug with which he had thoughtfully decorated his office for that purpose.

Now she was graduating and wouldn’t see him again. How was she going to survive, back with her parents in their Upper East Side apartment facing the park? They didn’t know about this life-altering relationship and wouldn’t understand if they did. She simply couldn’t leave campus those last few weekends while there was a chance he might be able to plead some unfinished work in the office (he composed as well as taught) and call her on the dormitory phone Saturday or Sunday afternoon to meet him there.

I listened with shining eyes. Why was I not the heroine of such a heartbreaking drama? Well, I knew why. Who could possibly love my plump cheeks, round chin, round stomach and thighs? But hearing about a love like that was second best to suffering it myself. I eagerly accepted her invitation to come with her on the four- or five-day Atlantic City trip after her graduation. She needed to get away, she said, before the many dreary and loveless years of living at home. [How, she asked rhetorically, could she ever love again, after Him?]  I too needed some time away to shrink my stomach in preparation for spending the whole summer with my hypercritical mother, who had occasionally begun asking the heavens what would become of me after college.  What better place and company for that than the seaside in June with lovely heartbroken Amy?

“You won’t meet anyone in Atlantic City,” said my mother. Did she mean no eligible man would cross my path, or no man would be interested? Meeting men was absolutely not the purpose of this trip, I declared. We were just going to get some sun while Amy recovered from an unhappy love affair. No, I couldn’t answer any more questions because the man was married and rather famous in musical circles.

We went by bus. As we emerged from the Atlantic City terminal, it began to rain. We’d rented a small furnished room, bath down the hall, on the second floor of a rooming house near the Boardwalk – the idea being we wouldn’t be in the room much so why spend money to stay somewhere fancy? Fancy it wasn’t: two single beds, one bedstand with lamp, a single bureau, a shallow closet and a sink. We unpacked and peered out the window behind the headboards. The rain was now a downpour.

“Good thing we brought books and umbrellas,” said Amy. “We can go sit in a nice hotel lobby and read.” I had no better ideas. After a modest lunch at the nearest cafeteria on Pacific Avenue, we put up our wet umbrellas and fought the winds coming from the Boardwalk to reach a hotel. In deep lobby chairs we read all afternoon. Early dinner in the same hotel. Then up with the umbrellas again to struggle back to the rooming house. I finished my book in bed.

It continued to pour for four more days. No beach. No healthful walks on the Boardwalk. I didn’t regret the loss of beach; I had no bathing suit that fit and had brought only shorts and a few short-sleeve shirts left over from high school summers in case we were going to do a lot of lying around on the sand getting tan. But I had counted on the walks, to begin burning up the multiple thousands of excess calories I must have deposited on my person since the last time I had been, briefly, at what I considered a desirable weight.

Instead, we had to read on our beds for as long as we could after coming back from breakfast in the coffee shop around the corner — our wet umbrellas propped open on the floor to dry – before venturing out for a repeat of the first day’s activities. Amy didn’t mind. She enjoyed observing hotel guests from the depths of a comfortable fauteuil in each hotel lobby we visited, and even began to develop a preference in lobbies, based on some perceived distinction between the clientele on view. She said it helped take her mind off Him.

Not having a Him on my mind, I soon lost interest in gazing at wet strangers hurrying into hotels and began to resent having spent what little cash I had on such a vapid travel experience. I suggested finding a movie. Atlantic City couldn’t be without movie theaters. Amy thought movies inappropriate in light of her grief and asked me to be more understanding. I grew increasingly hungry. I had been eating very little at our meals in hopes of maybe losing a pound or two even without the walks. The unfamiliar abdominal emptiness, coupled with so much sitting and listening to her now tiresome ruminations about what He might be doing at any particular moment, was tempered only by the growing certitude my stomach was shrinking.

On the fifth day, the sun came out. Amy pulled on her bathing suit, in which she looked gorgeous. I buttoned my shorts, with effort. And off we went – to the beach, to the beach! — bearing towels, baby oil and sunglasses. We had about six hours before having to slip old cotton dresses over the beachwear, collect our bags from the rooming house and catch the bus back to New York. It was enough to achieve what we’d allegedly come for.

“Mmmm, you got a nice tan,” said my mother as I unlocked the door that evening. “And it looks as if you lost a pound or two. You want to eat something?”

I began at once to work at losing more.

[To be continued….]