DIED 1976
I WENT TO HEBREW school with a delicate redhead who had two older sisters. While the younger girls took after their angular, elegant Mama, the eldest had inherited Papa Bear’s body type and, as in my household, the disappearance of unwanted portions of her flesh was a vigorous family project. Whether at the beach club or Thanksgiving dinner, the mothers who had chubby daughters always had something to talk about, new diet plans and weight-loss tips and doctors’ names traded over zero-calorie iced coffee whips, proud reports of sixteen pounds lost in six weeks—or perhaps a relapse, whispered behind a hand. The older fat girls were in more serious trouble than I was, but I knew I would be there soon enough if the diets did not work. The chins. The arms. The bunched white tubers of thigh, like feral daikon radishes left too long to burgeon underground.
There is no good time for a fat girl, but the sixties and early seventies were particularly hard. One of the sweetest and most talented, a singer with the voice of a nightingale, would die young from heart failure and be said to have choked on a ham sandwich, as if people couldn’t get enough of calling her a pig. Even at a good women’s college in New York City like the one my friend’s sister went to, I doubt smart girls were any kinder than stupid girls. That morning she struggled into the subway station in her woolen suit and stylishly bobbed hair, carrying her heavy book bag. No one knew, when she toppled in front of a subway car, whether it was because she had eaten only a piece of dry toast since the day before, whether her head was swimming from the don’t-eat pills, or whether she just decided to lay that body down. Forty-some years later, it’s the skinny girls who are dying. My Twelve-Grape Diet: A Model Confesses. If she were here, we could order a pizza and cluck our tongues.