Part 2

But there is no denying the fact that there was that period when my secret absorption upon the subject of food (food denied me) became shamefully dominant. Not the fierce legitimate hunger pangs of one starving for lack of the ability to obtain food, but the flabby, rather shameful spectacle of one in the midst of the plentiful prerogatives of three meals a day, self-denied them.

Frightening, mental traits began to creep upon me.

* * * * *

Living chiefly upon myself, stoked on the low fuel values of lean meats and five-per-cent vegetables boiled in water, going through my pallid days always conscious of a catherine wheel of desire spinning somewhere within the center of my denied and shrinking anatomy, I began to take on a quite horrible and private pleasure in watching other people eat, or preferably, overeat.

Myself relentless in passing up a toothsome dish, often as not especially prepared by a gracious hostess, I showed neither mercy nor consideration. But let that same hostess sit down at my own board and I became sly and spider-like, luring my victim into my gastronomic den of rich foods.

Eat and overeat, something devilish within me seemed to shout. Eat, in order that I may all the more exultantly deny and work myself up into the ecstasies of martyrdom. How the saints must have learned to love their sweet agonies!

Nor were these macabre mental processes to remain unsuspected. Chilly laughter began to greet the dreadful might of my hospitality. Glances flashed between my guests as sawing away at a thin slice of especially prepared lean beef, fried in mineral oil, I importuned, nay commanded, my futilely resisting guests to more of this and that richly devised concoction; pressed upon them the au gratin potato, the sherry-flavored tart, while I tinkled ice water against denied but omnivorous teeth, dallied with my chaste unused dessert spoon and rammed persuasion and second helpings of pistachio Melba down my friends.

“Dammit,” cried one of my obese guests one night, goaded (and tempted) beyond endurance, “I won’t overstuff myself with another helping of this delicious bouillabaisse in order to enhance your lean inner spirit of self-righteousness! Dammit, I tell you, no! Well, just a little more--just a damn little more.”

Reader, as they used to say in the days when ladies “padded,” my friend, alas! spoke too truly. Hungry, whetted with a desire for foods that hitherto had never interested nor particularly tempted me, I schemed for the obesity of my lean friends and the greater obesity of my obese ones. Schemed, Reader! The sense of rising from my board, feebly stoked on lean meats broiled in mineral oil, five-per-cent vegetables (the ones that grow on the wrong side of the gastronomic railroad tracks; parsnips, cabbage, spinach, beets, greens, leeks, dandelions) brought me the strange sadistic martyr-like delights herein elsewhere described. I began to lose my friends.

Neither, alas! did it stop here. As week by week, under a scientifically ordered regime which I partially defeated by overdoing my doctor’s dietary orders, the coverage began to diminish too rapidly to please him, and the strange psychology of a lady in the throes of a too rigid diet continued its baffling manifestations.

* * * * *

About the time that my slimming success began to be apparent to the appraising eyes of the sisterhood, my entrance into a room was the occasion for a gust of Oh’s and Ah’s, How-did-you-do-it? Why, I wouldn’t have known you! My dear, you’re marvelous! The heady wine of my success (on an empty stomach) began to induce giddiness.

Hollow-eyed and a bit necky, I began to indulge in the private procedure of posing before my mirror, pinning in my loose waistband and twisting about a slightly loose-fleshed neck for the Jean Harlow angle or the Hepburn line of jaw. The first faint knob pushing out through my neck was something on which to hang high hope.

It was during this period that, after having goaded her with food, I would remark maliciously to a friend: “Look over there at that spectacle! It is enough to cause a scientist to faint! A stout woman eating a potato!”

Oh, I was the subject for inclusion in the rows of introspective ladies waiting in the outer rooms of smart Park Avenue psychoanalysts, I can tell you!

It enraged me to see my friends eat, or, for that matter, drink, although a taste for alcohol or spirituous liquors had never made them part of my problem. It enraged me to see them eat; I could not bear not to see them overstuff.

I now pitied obesity in others, and did all in my power to either induce or encourage it.

Smoldering rage began within me if my entrance into a group of friends failed to elicit pæans of surprised admiration. In the twelvemonth of fanatical defiance of my doctor’s admonitions for temperance, I became a narrow-looking, bony individual with a disproportionately large head, wide, uninhabited-looking shoulders, old-looking hands, and a cold kind of chic.

There was not a laugh in a carload of me.

I had been through a grim, hungry, cold, and lonely fight, and always to that insistent tom-tom of rhythm, relentless as a drum-beat: What-of-it-what-of-it-what-of-it.

I had won my spurs and they stuck out all over me.

People with two chins and plenty of laughter above and below them said, without rue, that I had character. Friends, to my face at least, said I had “looks,” although toward the end even some of them began to admit that they had liked me better “before.”

I had lost pounds and my sense of humor.

* * * * *

The miracle of it, cheating my doctor as I did, was that I had not lost my health. Perhaps the funniness of me came rushing over me just in time to avert that. Perhaps the spectacle on all sides of women almost deliberately throwing the incomparable asset of their health away upon the absurd altar of slimming, for no other reason than the desire to be slim, helped, Reader, to snatch me from the jaws of a dieting lady novelist’s more or less untimely death.

Not that I have come far enough along the line of mental readjustment to relinquish my diet. Slimming is a battle that is never won. But at least I am on to myself. I can laugh it off. And the spectacle of me to myself in the mirror is really nothing to leave home about, nor, so far as I can see, has there been the impulse on anyone’s part to indulge in that drastic measure in my behalf. I have not observed that those nearest and dearest, or that friends in general, like me any the more or less. If anything, you may deduce, less.

Now this is not to convey that all diets for æsthetic ends are pernicious and that all slimming is vicious.

On the contrary, excess baggage of flesh is not only unwieldy and unbeautiful, but it is more usually a health liability than an asset (see life-insurance-risk charts).

As a matter of fact, undereating may generally be counted as a cardinal virtue. A wise and disturbing man it was who first passed out the golden advice to always leave the dinner table a little unsatisfied. Particularly since nature has seen fit to pester the human race with various appetites which are so far and away beyond requirements, are food and drink restraints to be regarded on the benign side.

Moderation is one of the nicer practices.

It is upon the widespread perils of the abuses of moderation in reduction diets that I would dwell.

My average daily allotment of food allowed by a careful dietitian might not have always been to my liking, but it was ample to accomplish the slimming desire and at the same time maintain and nourish.

Here is an average day’s menu; a menu which I advise no one to emulate without first consulting a physician. It is simple to understand its component parts. Proteins and minerals are emphasized; carbohydrates, fats, minimized:

_Breakfast_

1/2 small grapefruit 2 eggs (boiled poached) 1 tablespoon milk for coffee.

_Lunch_

1 portion lean meat, fish, or fowl (3 oz.) 5 per cent vegetables (the wrong-side-of-the-railroad-track ones).

_Dinner_

Same as lunch.

Six to eight glasses of water per day.

Do not take additional foods unless otherwise specified.

“Not so bad,” you observe, “more than I usually consume during an average day.”

Perhaps more food, but not more nourishment. But the point is that on this prescribed diet, with certain highly conservative expeditions after appreciable reduction had taken place, over into carbohydrates and fats, results would almost undoubtedly have been achieved. In time! But as the poundage begins shyly to retreat, the frantic psychology, characteristic of the thousands of the slimming women, present company included, sets in.

Ours not to reason why. Ours but to diet and sometimes die.

Despite physician’s admonitions to the contrary, fascinated by the gradual retreat of a hitherto more or less immutable, excess poundage; egged on by the appraising women; goaded by the diminishing story of the bathroom scales--the fascination for speed began to cause this eye to glitter.

More pounds per week. Faster. Quicker. Slimmer!

* * * * *

The daily menu, about which I not infrequently lied to my doctor, began to read something like this:

_Breakfast_

Black unsweetened coffee 1/2 small orange.

_Eleven A. M._

Black unsweetened coffee.

_Lunch_

1 head lettuce or 1/2 head cabbage-slaw, mineral-oil dressing.

_Three P. M._

Black unsweetened coffee.

_Dinner_

1 portion lean meat, fish, or fowl (3 oz.) 5 per cent vegetables.

Lean pallid days had arrived along about now; days when I went about with the strained face of a plucked fowl, brittle-looking skin sagging for want of some place to go.

No conversation survived my entrance into a room. The men might struggle a bit to carry forward with a bit of technocracy, Muscle Shoals or World Series, but the following two or three minutes carried a guarantee that one subject alone would predominate.

How did you do it? Tell me what you eat. Are you taking medicine? Awfully dangerous, you know. Now tell me what you had for breakfast. Do you mix your starches and proteins? Awfully bad for you! Now isn’t that curious, somebody told me you were living on some sort of a reduction tea made by an East Indian and had not touched solid food for two months. But my dear, you mustn’t let yourself get haggard. Not that you are!

Oh no, not that I was.

Sometimes dragging myself to bed, triumphant, faint, cold, tired, uncertain whether to laugh or cry, with not quite the energy to do either, I dared not glance at the white rattletrap my mirror would have revealed to me.

Instead I crept to rest, gladly, exhaustedly, and, to keep from laughing or crying or both, fell to contemplating the slight ridge my body made beneath the coverings, or trying to crowd back across my darkness not, “fancies freed, transient and exploring,” but fancies of a froth of café parfait foaming down the flank of a long slim goblet or of a slice of four-layer cream cake in which to sink teeth was denied, in order to remove taste and memory of liver fried in mineral oil and lettuce with its cutting dash of lemon juice.

I must have been as easy to live with, during that period before I lost both appetite and desire for the foods that used to haunt me, as a lady in a padded cell.

* * * * *

Strangely, the vigor for work did not desert. It was an escape, to sit down at a desk and throw off the gnawing awareness of the human envelope. One can almost concoct the fantastic doctrine that the brain is a favorite child of the human body and before any other part is fed, is given the cream (or in this case skimmed milk) of the intake.

However, just what mental processes might have resulted from that same period, corn fed, must remain forever, to those who palpitatingly would know, in the limbo of the hypothetical.

Like almost everything else in moderation, slimming has its points. Its excellent points. Outside moderation, and ’tis of thee I sing, it takes on the proportion of menace to that half of the race which is intrusted with incubation and delivery of the species.

Biological years move slowly and science does not pretend to offer up prematurely compiled data to prove that slenderized women are necessarily better or worse breeding-machines.

Besides, my own paternal ninety-eight-pound grandmother, who produced six two-hundred-pound sons was remarked, but scarcely remarkable, for it.

On the other hand, it requires no barrage of data to logically assume and conclude that a race of undernourished, highly nervous women with a low resistance to disease and an abhorrence of bust measurements, is going to leave its mark upon tomorrow’s child.

* * * * *

In Italy, Il Duce openly commands that women be big, ripe, fecund, intimating, with no particular authority for it, that these processes go together. As a rule he assumes, and rightly, that women who have many children stop being slender in the process. And so he extols the robust mother who concedes that her beauty lies not in her shape, but in her rôle as mother.

I see no reason why it cannot lie in both, unless the beauty standards of the female of an era drop so low that the proportions of a fertile adult woman must hover around those of a fourteen-year-old boy....

To be sure, for the moment, in America at least, the movement away from the boyish figure seems to be on the up and up, although the Mae West atavism seems to be little more than a half-hearted fad, and millions lie waiting for the chemist or alchemist who can present the human race with the miracle of a slimming serum.

Perhaps after that day comes we will be a happier and a healthier race and the laugh will be on nature, who for thousands of years had made us the butt of her old joke on the fats and the thins, plying some of us with her too, too ample coverage, condemning others to an immutable destiny of skin and bones.

Of the two evils, the latter, by insurance companies at least, is reckoned the least hazardous.

For myself, alas! I cannot even claim that I feel better slim than I did, not so slim. I felt vigorous then. I feel almost as vigorous now. Overweight in excess is beyond controversy an undesirable and dangerous state. If the male more easily escapes its æsthetic menace, he falls rigidly within its pathological perils. The female of the species, more’s the pity, is its social, biological and æsthetic victim.

But now that the laugh has come back to me, I want to reach out a deterring, an ancient-looking hand, to the hordes of slimming women as I observe them nibbling at celery stalks over lunch tables, swapping their diets across bridge tables, baring their backs to the rolling-machine and their breasts to camphor rubs.

And even to those who are dieting for good and authentic reason of one sort or another, I want to reach out that same ancient-looking hand to impress upon them the danger of the short-cut food fad; of following any diet regime outside a physician’s prescribed one; of succumbing to the perils of the pineapple and lamb-chop group of fantasies; of the terrible risks involved in accepting what is almost certain to be the he-says and the she-says dietary word of their not always thoughtful dieting sisters; of the falseness of current æsthetic values as they fluctuate to the season’s fashion; of the absurdity of a woman weighing one hundred and nine pounds undernourishing herself on boiled green tissue-paper.

Whether it is to his credit or due to just plain lack of self-discipline, the fact remains that with his middle-aged susceptibility to embonpoint, the male has not gone to extremes in combating his foe. True, too often he self-indulgently tolerates its perilous and heavy folds about his heartbeat, and rather than suffer the weary battle of reduction, allows himself to take on the convexity of a barrel. The spas are crowded with him, he is not beautiful, and one doubts if he is as happy as he pretends to look. But at least he had not reduced the dietary habits of a nation to roughage, bulk and greens. In fact, watching his women totter past him on their fanatical way to the altar of the emaciated false goddess of their passion, he is apt to look back rather wistfully upon the good old days when Pauline Hall was the hour-glass beauty of his dreams.

Observe the shopkeeper catering to this psychological invalidism of his women customers. The gown he hangs in his show window is shrewdly pinned back at the waist line to one third its natural size, thereby capturing with its suggestion of anemia, the eye of the woman who visualizes herself commensurate with it.

The measurements of the mannequins upon whom are draped the models of the couturières and by way of whom the measurement standards for women are devilishly established, are usually those of underdeveloped boys.

The woman of average proportion who enters such a shop in the hope of finding a ready-to-wear gown is apt to depart feeling herself Gargantuan in a land of Lilliputians.

* * * * *

What thousands of normal healthy women have been driven to starvation, illness, even death, in order to more nearly conform to the adolescent standards established by the pale little mannequins who stand hours in workrooms while the standardizers and glorifiers of their puniness, drape their poor little flat chests, wind around the knobs of their sparrow-like hips, and wrap their little concave stomachs in fabrics designed to accent emacia!

One wonders what place the boyish-breasted flapper of half a decade ago, or the scarcely less spare female of today, will ultimately have alongside the respective ideals of Ruth among the corn, Mme. de Staël, Signorina Mona Lisa, Laura, Venus, Winged Victory, Lillian Russell.

More and more, today’s standards of American Beauty are being set up and authorized by the bizarre little so-called civilization known as Hollywood, home of the eighteen-day diet, the orange juice, the skimmed-milk-and-baked-potato, the liquid bread, the thyrodic bath salt, the paraffin sweat, the holy rolling-machine, the pugilistic massage, and almost every reduction fad known to this tormented year of our Lord.

By way of Hollywood, the young man is thereby automatically trained to accept his female of the species slinky, low in vitality, and concave in curve. In fact, a plump débutante in the family is more of a problem than a mental delinquent.

And meanwhile, the slimmed, the irritable, the hungry woman takes on the proportion of one of our minor menaces. She does not add to the gaiety of the nation or of the home; she is no healthier, she is prettier only according to the frail standards of a papier-maché city on the west coast where the human envelope is the stock in trade. She is a success chiefly to herself and to her sister of similar standards.

Now I am aware of a certain perverse psychology which you may suspect I am beginning to manifest. My definition of white hair is something you admire only when it is on another woman.

This is not a plea for the tolerance or toleration of excess weight, just so it is on the other fellow. It is a plea for intolerance of excess underweight.

I am personally too infected with this slimming phobia to hope for complete redemption. I may come back, but probably not all the way. As a matter of fact, I would not come all the way. My struggle is to find the moral courage to make the partial return. The slimming years have been so long. I have won my battle knowing that it is a battle that is never truly won and that the helmet and the spurs cannot be laid aside.

* * * * *

It remains practically impossible for me to sit down whole-heartedly to a meal among whole-hearted folk. What has long since become the more or less rare spectacle of an American woman partaking of potato is still sufficient to send chills down this spine. By now, expert in that strange branch of lower mathematics, the counting of the calories, I can compute on sight the heat and food value of a helping of filet of sole (3 × 2-1/2) or of one slice of zwieback (3-1/2 × 1-1/2 × 1/2).

To violate by one calorie is to invite regrets out of all proportion to the delights of the transgression. One suck off the sugared sides of a candy sour-ball can cause one to scuttle to the scales in fear and trembling, or one spoonful off the side of the pyramid of ice-cream on your dinner partner’s dessert plate, transform you into a distrait and regretful guest.

But at least mine hungry eyes have a certain sharpened clarity which enables them to see the funniness and the menace of the spectacle of the slimming women.

We are funny. Realizing that, we might long since have learned to laugh it off, except, alas! laughter is supposed to be fattening!

It is not a simple matter to get a laugh out of a slimming woman. It is the easiest thing she does not do.

My laughs have come back slowly, mere spurts at first, as from a spring gone dry but about to yield again.

It means that even while, with me, meal-time still remains largely a process of omission and elimination, I am at least on to myself. Ladies, really, it is to laugh.

* * * * *

Today, four unrelenting years after the episode of the boiled tissue paper, I now enter a shop to have a vendeuse glide up to me with: “For yourself? Misses department across the aisle.”

Well, what of it?

This much of it! If a slimmer, a sadder, and perhaps a wiser me has succeeded in helping to convey to the slimmers of today and the potential slimmers of tomorrow some of the ridiculousness and some of the perils of the slimming age, then the public sacrifice of myself upon the altar of mine own absurdities will not have been in vain.

Would I do it all over again?

“Well,” I reply, as I continue to count my calories, “well--er----”

In conclusion, Reader, as they used to say in the days when ladies munched chocolates in bed, I desire to make public the following acknowledgments:

To a husband who bore with me during a period when a snapping-turtle shared roof with him.

To my doctor to whom I lied.

To my many friends upon whom at my supposedly hospitable board, my greenly glittering eye rested in one hatred or another.

To a cook who learned to defile her art in order to brew me dishes unwanted and unsavory.

To the books written during this period which abound perhaps unduly in foods coveted by their author.

To hosts and hostesses who offered me their hospitality only that I might wave aside with supercilious celery stalk their good meat and wassail.

To my comfortably stout friends upon whom my disdainful eye rested not kindly.

To my slender friends upon whom my good-as-you-now gaze has assailingly glared.

To the human race for bearing with me.

To myself for finally realizing that I am funnier than any character I have ever succeeded in depicting in fiction.

THE END

=Transcriber’s Notes=

Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.