Sputterpub's Blog

She started to diet. She bought calorie counters, exercise books, and magazines. She tried to fast but found it too punishing. She tried to exercise but it was boring and uncomfortable. She loved starting diets, because it was easy to be perfect at first, and early progress came quickly. She could lose 10 pounds in four days; it may have been water but it was still a result. When progress slowed she broke the diet, returned with relief to unrestrained reading-and-eating, and got ready to start over. Her mother supported her attempts, rewarded her successes with desserts, and otherwise paid constant attention to what Sheila ate. Her father didn’t. He tried to bait, egg, lure her into exercise. She put on 15 to 40 pounds a year.

Even though she was steadily gaining on a long-term basis, some of the diets produced a loss for awhile. There were whole weeks, once even months, when Sheila went far enough down to notice all the differences. And then back up, noticing again. Above a certain weight, she really couldn’t cross her legs knee over knee. Above a certain weight she wouldn’t hug herself. Above a certain weight, she developed the rash.

She breached 200 by the time she was 14 and 5’4.” That’s when the itch began, under her breasts and on her belly. The problem worsened until she had to complain to her mother. The doctor told them it was because of the airless moist conditions under her breasts and between the folds of her stomach; she was actually hosting a fungus. “Gross!” Sheila thought. “That’s it: I’m definitely taking this weight off now.” The doctor advised her to use talcum powder and sent them to a nutritionist.

Unfortunately she made no progress. She started a new diet almost every day but she continued to gain. The rate of gain slowed, but she was 243 by her junior year of high school, and she had stopped adding height to her 5’6″ frame. She had beautiful red hair and baby-fine skin, but her attitude seesawed between quiet and anger, and her grades suffered because she wouldn’t read anything except fiction. She still had the rash, and she had developed an allergy to talc.

Her mother took her to a new doctor when Sheila was 19. That was after a rough year that doesn’t get talked about, when Sheila wasn’t having much to do with her immediate or extended family and was spending most of her time in a church. She went on a medically-supervised diet. It wasn’t one of those liquid regimes, but it was strict. This doctor explained to her that each pound is 3500 calories, so if she’d eat 500 calories less a day, she’d lose one pound a week. She’d lose more if she exercised, the doctor added, but not much more, which comforted her and also made the program seem credible.

He put her on a 600 calorie daily diet at first. He said he’d be practical; he told her she could actually have 800 calories if she needed, and he prescribed appetite suppressants at least for the beginning. He explained that her calories were to consist of proteins and eight vegetables, but no other carbohydrates. She ate chicken, she ate fish, and she ate spinach, carrots, broccoli, parsley, green beans, lettuce, cucumbers, peppers.

She dropped weight fast. At the rate of almost 10 pounds a month, it took her a year to get near 130, but that’s how she stood when she went to college. She still missed reading-and-eating (and thought she always would), but she was delighted with her figure. Her mother bought her a new wardrobe and her father started talking about the dangers of boys.

The doctor put Sheila on “maintenance.” She was allowed 1200 calories a day, and up to 30% of them could come from the carbohydrates she’d been denied. He told her she could maintain her new weight forever as long as she didn’t eat more than 1200 calories a day. Sheila calculated that she could have about three ounces of salted sunflower seeds for 300 calories, and they’d provide little carb and an hour a day of reading-and-eating. Since she had been taking in around 800 calories a day before she went on maintenance, she used up most of her new allowance with daily bouts of seeds and an occasional cookie.

For 94% of her life, Sheila has been fat. She started out extremely small but she caught up and passed the growth chart averages by the time she crawled.

Hers was a premature birth, in 1975. She surprised everyone by emerging from her mother almost a trimester early, a frightening little bug of three pounds, and by surviving.

At six months she was a chubby infant. For wrists and ankles she had deeper creases than the other babies, and as she grew her thighs seemed to lengthen less than others in her play group. Her mom had some trouble toting her around after Sheila topped 25 pounds at nine months, but she was so pink-and-white and cute that her mother didn’t complain. In fact, and unlike other babies, Sheila could wear 12-month size then, so she was more fun to dress.

She didn’t know she was fat till she was five, and it didn’t start to bother her until her eighth birthday. That’s when she overheard Jimmy Williams tell Doug Ames that he could never like her because she was a Tubbo. This was at Sheila’s birthday party, the last one her mother made for her.

Sheila really liked Jimmy. She thought he looked cute in the cub scout uniform he wore each Thursday; she always chased him in the playground and tried to grab him by his yellow neckerchief. His words devastated her. She knew he didn’t mean for her to overhear, so they stuck her like blows.

Her party was ruined for her, and she couldn’t wait for it to end. When guests cleared out an hour later, she sat in the kitchen nibbling leftovers. She read the backs of food packages while she munched. She drifted into the words and tastes, and didn’t hear her mother enter the room.

“Sheila! What are you doing?” Her mom whisked behind her to the sink with a load of party garbage. “You’ve had enough to eat; come help me clean up. And wipe off that sour face! I don’t know what’s gotten into you …” Anger shot through Sheila as her mother left the room. “Come!”

Sheila learned. After that event she began smuggling snacks to her room. She loved to sit back on the part of her bed that tucked into the corner of the walls, rereading classic comics or one of a dozen Nancy Drews, eating sunflower seeds or nibbling Triscuits row by row, lost to her family. In time she came to think of the activity as reading-and-eating, two functions indivisible: comfort.

As each year passed she grew taller, heavier, and more likely to stay in her room. Her mother harped: “It’s not that you need to lose weight, honey; you’ll be just fine if you don’t gain any. You’re growing so fast you’ll shed this baby fat in no time.” Her father didn’t harass her about food – she resembled him in coloring and skeleton and appetite – but he nagged her to exercise. “You’re a vegetable,” he said. “No, you’re worse than a vegetable! Get out of here and enjoy the day.”

She was just five feet tall when she entered junior high at age 11. She weighed 120 pounds. That’s not obese, but it’s plump. Too plump for the pants she wore.

She had a sort-of date with Jimmy Williams. He was becoming “Jim” then. They got together to ride bikes one Saturday and ended up picnicking on the side lawn of the school. They were sitting around after their meal when Doug Ames pedaled up on his bike and joined their conversation. Jim imitated their English teacher and they all cracked up. Sheila’s pants were so tight that she passed gas when she laughed. Doug whooped as if it were the funniest joke he’d heard in years. “Sheila farted! Sheila farted!” he sang like a fourth grader. And Sheila was humiliated. She knew it never would have happened if she weren’t fat.

My father is a reactionary man. I don’t mean that politically – he’s quite unpolitical really, except that he’s obnoxiously cynical. I mean Dad is always expending his energy reacting to something; he never initiates a process or steps back and makes a plan for himself.

His wife, my cracker stepmother, is not really more high maintenance than anyone else. She’s transplanted so she doesn’t have the network of local friends and family that would take some domestic pressure off her spouse, but really, when I think of it amid unground axes, she’s no more demanding than most wives. The thing is that Dad can’t shine her on, won’t ignore her, always tries to do what she asks and even some of what she doesn’t ask, and I’m realizing as I say this that his curmudgeonly attitude can actually be ascribed to the sort of bitterness that accompanies a complaint about ingratitude. I wonder could his worldview be this infantile: I’m nice to you so you better be nice to me or else I’m going to pout and take my ball home?

Mom says Dad has a hole in his soul, and he tries to plug it with a mate. Any mate. Keeping the mate is the most important thing. And I have to admit his vital stats support that view. Dad is apparently very, very motivated to be married.

Maybe Mom and I are hitting at the same thing. He stays mated by being nice to his mate. This approach looks like a kindergarten survival strategy. When his mate is less than perfectly grateful, as has to occur, his resentment and bitterness begin.

What we seem to have here is a failure, on my father’s part, of imagination. He’s in his mid-50s. Clearly his old survival strategy could use a review.

(The odd thing in all this is my mother’s irrational belief that someday, somehow, Dad will get back on track and rediscover the creative path to self-fulfillment. She holds this romantic notion in spite of her fairly wide observation of half a century on this planet. She cherishes this idea even though she watched my paternal grandfather shuffle off his mortal coil without ever really speaking his mind…)

I visited a gigantic flea market last week and I went a little wild with purchases. Filled my trunk with old LPs and crammed the back seat with adornments and appliances that I just couldn’t resist. Most will go into found-object sculptures and collages, and I can use some for the interactive curtains I’m designing for my study, but there’s one little statuette I bought to keep intact.

It’s an ivory-colored resin object, plastic made to look like marble. It’s the blocky figure of a man, and the placard sloping against his lower legs says “World’s Greatest Dad.” The man is short but solid, a prototypical father-block of warm-looking protection. Mom says the style is of the type known as a “nebbish” in the late 50s/early 60s.

When I put down my $2, I thought I was buying an early Christmas gift. But I realized when I got home that I can’t give this thing to my father. It wouldn’t even be funny.

It’s a sturdy little block of resin. Built like a father. I can’t give it to mine. He’s not substantial enough. Too unhappy. I guess I can only hope. Not like my mother: I have no illusions that my dad will see the light and come around. I guess I hope I’ll do a good enough job selecting that, someday, my kid will want to give this little statue to hers.

Dad was warm and affectionate and easy to be with, and he always seemed glad to me. It’s a bit jarring for me to hear how unhappy he then was. I can’t exactly argue about it, since he agrees with Mom that he was miserable during those years, but I keep wanting to tell my parents it isn’t as simple as they describe. There’s no way he could have given me so many genuine-seeming smiles and never meant any of them.

Then he got married. He found his new wife on the other side of the country, where he often went on business trips, and he brought her west with him when I was eleven and a half.

My stepmother and I were not congenial. Maybe it was our different cultures; she was from a poor white Southern family and my heritage is antsy Jew mixed with diligent Mormon. Maybe it was the sexual competition I’ve heard about, between mother and daughter types; it didn’t feel that way to me, but I guess it wouldn’t feel that way, if that were what was happening. I don’t know how to count all the ways of our mutual contempt, but looking back I see unremitting quiet enmity. She greeted me with some kind of spiel about how, where she came from, children addressed their elders as “sir” and “ma’am.” I hadn’t done anything to merit that talk. I hadn’t shown any disrespect, yet. She no sooner moved in than she rearranged the kitchen where Dad and I had run all our “blue food” experiments with tuna and pasta and milk and food coloring. She pulled down the muslin curtains I’d worked so hard to hem, and she hung gross bright printed things in their place (“café curtains,” I learned they were called, with their scalloped tops riding on loud brass rings).

I had a room of my own in the old apartment, and I started with a bedroom when they moved to the house, but then my stepsister showed up. Candy is three years older than I am, and she was having trouble in school back east, where she lived with her dad, so she moved out here. She shared my room, but she was there all the time and I was only around every other weekend, so before long it was her room, and I was the trespasser.

I remember feeling like Cinderella. Dad was totally oblivious. He was happy then, so he walked around hunched over, not hearing us.

Mom tells a story about choosing a husband. She dated another guy during college but maintained some kind of relationship with Dad, and there came a time when she had to choose between Tim (the other guy) and my own father. She says she can even remember pacing around a circular drive on the kibbutz where she stayed in Israel, mentally listing the respective strengths and weaknesses of Tim and Dad. But that exercise didn’t help her decide.

She says she had to return home first. She had to actually spend some time with each of them. It was only after those visits, when she found herself considering how she loved Tim but didn’t want to be with him, and how she didn’t really love Dad but wanted to spend every second in his company and making plans together, it was only then, she says, that she got in touch with her own feelings. More like: got hit over the head with her own emotional reality, she asserts, but Mom is the first to admit that she always knows what she thinks and seldom has a clue about how she feels (her body sneaks up on her and tells her sometimes, by making her cry at silly love songs or sad ads, or making her stub her toe so bad she has to sit down for awhile, or making her downright ill).

Somehow, Mom figured out who she loved at 23, but Dad never seemed to figure out when he was happy. (It’s not that simple. I wonder if Mom agrees now that she figured it out correctly then?)

My mother swears my father used to be happy. She points at the old black-and-white photo on her picture wall, as evidence. She says they shot it about a year before I was born: probably in late 1975, right after purchasing their box of an old house. She and Dad are standing in the tiny back yard, in front of a tangle of whatever bushes were surviving the drought. Mom is wearing a dark turtleneck and light pants, crease-pulled across her hips and suggesting a flare below the frame of the picture. Her face is at three-quarters profile to the camera and she’s smiling at Dad. She’s holding a roll of what are probably the house plans. He is dressed in cords and a Henley shirt, in some dark color that was probably brown. His right leg is bent a bit forward and his arms are extended out from his sides. His hands aren’t in the picture but they must have been open, palms up. He’s looking straight at the camera. It’s obvious that he’s dancing a bit. And he’s grinning with every muscle in his face.

Really. His eyes sparkle behind wire-rimmed glasses. His teeth gleam from within his beard. In fact, Dad’s eyes are weak, pale blue, sparse-lashed, and skeptical. Not his best feature. He was never one for oral hygiene, and his teeth are soft and dull. But he’s radiant in that picture.

A year before I was born.

Mom catalogues his skills as a young man, but I don’t remember most of them. She says he rode a unicycle and could pilot a small plane. He was an untrained musician who could pick out a tune on anything, and he composed ditties on his concertina, his electric piano, or the cherrywood clavichord he lovingly built from a kit. He liked to laugh, and she says it was almost annoying how willing he was to help anyone with anything, how often he wasn’t available to play, because he was assisting his parents or neighbors or even a needy stranger by the side of the road. He answered so many questions his friends called him Mr. Science. He helped so many move that they called him Mr. Fixit. And he was always tinkering, with models or verses or dot-drawings inked all night with his Rapidograph pen. He made containers out of old cigarbox wood. He performed electronic miracles with speaker wire and old amplifiers. I don’t know if my father was ingeniously creative, but it certainly sounds like he was crafty.

They used to say, Mom recalls, that when they walked into a room she immediately thought of ways to improve it, while he was busy appreciating what worked in it. Apparently she’d describe her ideas and he’d winnow out the unfeasible ones, and what remained he often tried to build. That’s how they came to have the little mini-kitchen upstairs. And how they didn’t come to have the hot tub, which design idea was never practical enough to construct, never doomed enough to discard, and a source of some chronic strife between them, as I recall.

I was almost six when they split up, so I ought to have memories of him happy when they were together, but I don’t. I suspect there were some good times – I still have the activity box he built for me, with its bells and lights and all the lovely switches – but maybe there were too many bitter arguments between my parents then, drowning out the good moments and muting all of the memories to misty scenes I can handle. My first six years observed through sheer curtains. Pale yellow, they seem to me now.

I remember Dad happiest during the four years between his marriages. History insists he was then quite depressed, prone to drinking too much Jack Daniels and a practitioner of bizarre sleep habits, but I recall nothing but good times and sweet adventures from those years in his apartment.

We did everything together. Unlike Mom, he let me stay up late on Saturday nights, sitting by him on the couch watching TV, laughing at his sardonic comments. He was always ready to help me build forts, make kites, and buy toys. He liked to eat fast food. He liked to shop. Mom didn’t.

Juley was frustrated by the Sunday School debate and irked about Aaron’s harassment by Keith and Steve. He felt protective toward his friend and he stopped being as cooperative at school and at home. He became difficult. He waxed disruptive and funny in class. With increasing frequency he was sent to detention. Even there he cut up. He began to be friends with some other bad boys. With Billy who was fat and rather smart and always rocking back and forth in his chair. With Doug, red-haired like Keith but nicer, mischievous and hyperactive, a prankster.

Aaron and Juley lived in the northern, newer part of town. Billy and Doug came from neighborhoods on the other side of the transit tracks. It’s not at all certain they would have met but for the detention room. As it was, they formed an early posse.

Most of the time Juley did the deciding for them. They all helped with the thinking, but Juley had the strongest will. Aaron recorded, Billy protected, Doug sparked from indignation to chuckles, and Juley declared. For a number of years that delegation worked.

They weren’t bothered any more by Keith and Steve. Although they were never in classes all together and seldom even in pairs, Juley received courage for his convictions from his friendships with the other three, and the other three got their individual measures of support. Billy grew large and coarse-featured, but he never knew he was unattractive so his peers didn’t either. Aaron and Doug were appreciated even when they discovered their homosexuality, together at first, and then with their respective and individual domesticity and promiscuity. The four helped each other through the years of dead boredom in their suburban community, through the seasons of raging impatience awaiting their lives.

Usually Juley spurred them. Sometimes they all led others in reasoned acts of disobedience. The causes were often big, like saving the planet and ending world hunger, and occasionally as small as a personal experiment. Once Juley made a mess of his mother’s kitchen counter by trying to pour milk into three abutting glasses without righting the bottle between them. That was a simple physics experiment. Another time he threw a bowl of rice into his sister’s offending face. She had been arguing in favor of cars and corporations while he had just finished reading The Silent Spring. He grew indignant and wanted to see what his parents would do. His father smacked him and his mother made him clean up the mess. Juley amassed information and drew conclusions.

For a time he was almost uncivil in his disobedience. In his late twenties, consumed with dismay about the sprawl of suburbs and the metastasis of cars, Juley moved with his second wife Sharon, sister Ruth, Billy and four dogs to the backwoods of Colorado, retreated behind the thick walls of a bermed lab, and built a few bombs. But he veered from that course before any detonation; he got his revenge on the world like he did on his former wives, by doing nothing at all. Just as his exes tripped on their own nurtured delusions, so Juley got the dubious satisfaction of witnessing the world wobble as his predictions were realized. Of course he would rather have been wrong. He lived long enough to see his children sickened by the simian viruses that swam in required vaccines. He watched his olive-skinned grandchildren grow cataracts and melanomas in thin-filtered sunlight. But the phenomenon that really bothered him, the one that Juley always knew could have been fixed quickest, was the continuing tendency for suburban teens, emotionally abandoned by their parents and maddened by safety, to take automatic weapons to schoolyards and slaughter their peers.