The Reform synagogue I’d attended growing up in Short Hills, New Jersey, was way more Chanel bag Jew than Torah Jew. I felt most Jewish when my grandparents, also Reform but deeply obsessed with Jewish food, would drive me to New York and take me on a tour of all the old culinary haunts of our tribe. My grandparents were considered medically obese. They’d both developed diabetes as a result of their weight, but food remained something to be celebrated. There were delicious warm buttered onion rolls and creamed herring at the kosher dairy restaurants, cabbage borscht and hot pastrami sandwiches at Second Avenue Deli. There were black-and-white cookies from William Greenberg Desserts, pints and quarts of pickles—sour, half sour, and sweet—from Guss’ on Essex Street.
When I got back from New York, my mother would ask for a full report of all I had eaten. “Do you want to be a chubby or do you want boys to like you?” she’d say.
My grandparents were only a brief respite from the universe. My mother was what the universe was really about. My mother the sun, my mother the rules, my mother, god herself! My mother the high priestess of food, the religion of our household: abstain, abstain, abstain! My mother with her archaic ideas about dieting: melon and cottage cheese, tuna and carrot sticks, melba toast. My mother the judge storming into the dressing room at the children’s clothing shop, me age six, her whispering, “Look at Amy Dickstein in that dress. Now look at you.” It was a whisper that implanted itself in me, a whisper that stuck.
I was softly plump, like a dumpling, and short. She feared the shortness would lead to more weight gain, that it would make the weight show. She saw future pain, frightened that I would grow up to be like her parents, whose obesity had caused her shame, or her fat cousin Wendy, who was unhappy. I wondered, if I could go back and rescue myself from that dressing room, would I do it? I probably wouldn’t. I thought that soft little girl was disgusting too.
The more my mother restricted my food intake, the more I binged in secret. She didn’t understand why I was expanding, that I was stealing candy from convenience stores, eating other kids’ lunches in the coatroom. She eyed me from across a birthday party as I chewed a bite of cake. She threatened to ask my teachers what I was eating if I gained more weight. Once a month I was weighed on a scale at the YMCA. She didn’t yell in public, but in the car I would cry in the back seat.
At sixteen I began restricting my food intake for myself. I developed an arsenal of tricks: Diet Coke, cigarettes, fake-sweetened everything, meal delay, steamed vegetables, never eating with others. My grandparents and I took our trip to New York, but the restaurants that were once my temples had become a threat. I fended off cheese blintzes, knishes, and schnecken, replaced cherry hamantaschen with Dr. Brown’s diet soda. I slurped around matzo balls, set boundaries with bagels, found safety in pickles—so low-calorie, baruch hashem.
For years I couldn’t be thin enough. Then, in an instant, I was too thin. If I had 20 pounds to lose, I lost 45. I wanted to stay there forever. I pared my food back further: spinach, broccoli, steamed chicken. I called it my Spartan regimen. I felt high on my sacrifice.
But I was freezing all the time. I lived in the bathtub. A downy fur grew on my body. My period stopped. At night I dreamt of wild buffets. My hip bones chafed against the bed. At school there were whispers. My mother said nothing.
One night, I was shivering so badly I got scared I would die.
“I have to tell you something,” I said to my mother. “I think I have an eating disorder, anorexia maybe.”
“Anorexics are much skinnier than you,” she said. “They look like concentration camp victims. They have to be hospitalized. You aren’t anorexic.”
“I haven’t gotten my period in months.”
This troubled her. My fertility was important; she wanted grandchildren one day. She sent me to a nutritionist, who helped me increase my daily calorie intake. We did it slowly, methodically, with charts and lists that reduced every food to its serving size and caloric value.
I went from freezing to just cold. The shaking stopped. The fur disappeared. I could sleep on my stomach. The whispers got quiet. I bled again. But I remained engrossed in calories. The constant mathematics in my head never went away.