She didn’t know what to expect, but what she got was a room of women of all shapes and sizes, ranging from dangerously skinny (not so different from most of the women on the fitness retreat) to much larger. She was late, but the counselor, a cheery man in his mid-to late forties wearing a sweater vest and steel-rimmed glasses, gave her a wide smile and beckoned her to take a seat in the circle. The group was held in a little-trafficked corner of the cafeteria, an irony that wasn’t lost on Janey. Maybe it was a form of aversion therapy. The smell of the day’s special, meatloaf, mingled in the air with the hospital-grade disinfectant they used to clean the floors.
“You must be Janey. Dr. Knots told me to keep an eye out for a pretty brunette. Thanks for coming. I don’t know how much you know about our group, but this is really just a place where we talk about different issues surrounding weight and our feelings and our lives. No judgment here. You can say whatever you want. This week we’re talking about confidence. Alice was just talking about what makes her feel good about herself.” The counselor gave two happy snaps and gestured over to a woman sitting across the room in a loud yellow top and tight black jeans, a brown felt fedora cocked jauntily on her head. She was tall and broad, like Janey, but bigger. Janey guessed her weight to be more than 250 pounds.
“I’ll catch up the new girl,” Alice said with a kind smile in Janey’s direction. “You all know this already, but I used to be a thin girl. Well, first I was a fat girl and then I was a thin girl and now I’m a fat girl again, but the difference is I’m a fat and happy girl. I lost more than a hundred pounds five years ago. I was as skinny as Charlotte over there.” Alice pointed across the room to a frail-looking woman with a thick cardigan wrapped around her slight shoulders. “The world was my oyster. All of a sudden men loved me. Men who’d never even looked at me before began asking me out on dates and buying me presents. But I felt like shit. If I wanted to stay that skinny I had to take a handful of diet pills every day and only eat lettuce. Just lettuce. Like a rabbit.” She made a little munching noise that elicited titters from the rest of the group. “And I didn’t feel like me, not the real me. So I stopped pretending and I let my body do what my body wanted to do.” She stood up and twirled, gave a little bow. “I don’t hide my body anymore. I love it. I’m fat and I’m happy.”
The room erupted in applause. Alice was clearly the shining star of therapy, a woman so comfortable with herself that Janey was a little afraid of her.
Charlotte, the skinny girl in the cardigan, timidly raised her hand.
“We don’t need to raise our hands, Charlotte. Just jump in if you have something to say.” The therapist gave a double thumbs-up in the woman’s direction, incongruous in a circle of adults.
Charlotte’s voice was little, just like her, barely a whisper.
“Thanks, Alice. You’re so inspiring.” She looked at Janey. “I know you. I follow you on Instagram. I follow B and Beau too.”
Janey was taken aback. She’d assumed this group was supposed to be anonymous. She had nothing to base that on except for a couple of AA meetings she’d attended with Beau the first time he got out of rehab.
Charlotte continued. “I wanted to wear a B dress for my wedding. That’s when I started following you. I actually did end up buying one. It’s the Eliza. It’s beautiful.” Charlotte looked around the room. Everyone leaned in closer to the center of the circle.
“I was a big girl too. Like Alice. But I was never very confident. I used to shop online so I would never have to go into clothing stores and endure the judgey faces of the salesgirls who thought I wouldn’t fit into anything. What if I just wanted to buy a hat? Anyone can wear a hat! They always looked at me like they were scared I’d put on a pair of pants and split them right down the back. I would Google restaurants before I met up with friends to make sure there was enough room between the tables that it wouldn’t be embarrassing to get up and go to the bathroom. I inspected the chairs at the restaurants too, made sure they were wide and strong. My worst nightmare was a chair breaking in the middle of dinner.”
Janey’s heart broke for Charlotte.
“I met a guy. Online. That’s how I had to date. I didn’t meet men in real life. And he was wonderful. I thought he was wonderful. We emailed and talked every day for a year. I sent him pictures of my skinny cousin, who looks like me, but not like me, you know. He was a soldier. Over in Iraq for two years.”
The rest of the group nodded.
“But I figured I could look like my cousin if I tried so I drained my bank account. I spent my entire savings on two things. I got a surgery that stapled my stomach and I bought a B wedding dress.” She made direct eye contact with Janey as if she were the only person in the room. “The biggest size for the Eliza dress was a four. So the four was my goal. In a year I reached it and David, that was his name, proposed to me. He was still based in Iraq and we talked over Skype, but we never did video. His bandwidth wasn’t good enough. Thank god. He had no idea about the surgery or the weight loss or anything. He was about to come home and we were finally going to meet in person. I know what you’re thinking. He’s not real? Right? The fat girl got catfished. But guess what? He was real! And he was just as handsome as his picture. I wanted to tell him every day about what I’d been doing to get ready to meet him, but I couldn’t. I just felt so lucky. He was back for a month when I started getting really bad headaches and fainting. The diet wasn’t sustainable. It was bad news. After the surgery I could only eat like four ounces of food a day. That’s how I ended up in the hospital. And that’s how I found the group. That’s all.”
More applause. Two women stood and walked over to Charlotte to wrap her in a hug. Now that the girl had called attention to Janey, and the fact that Janey was complicit in an industry that only made wedding dresses for impossibly skinny women, she felt like she had to speak up.