enough chocolate in her mouth to make herself sick. One spring break when I went home with Alice to her parents’ mansion in Great Neck, New York, I watched as she freed a gallon tub of chocolate mint chip ice cream from the packed freezer. Then, using a tablespoon, Alice shoveled green ice cream from the tub into her mouth, enough for at least ten, double-scoop waffle cones.
At the time, I didn’t realize that Alice forced herself to throw up after every one of these binges. I assumed all the food – and gobbling it down so fast – had made her sick. I did know that if Alice couldn’t rid herself of enough food throwing up, she would chew a handful of laxatives to make sure the job of flushing out her system got done.
We were the first generation of women dying to be thin. Twiggy was our role model. By today’s standards, Twiggy could probably stand to shed a few pounds. But in the late sixties when Twiggy emerged, her cappellini-thin legs stretching to infinity beneath the micro-miniest of skirts, she was the most angular woman any of us had ever seen.
Almost more than her body, we were in love with her face. Thinking back now, I can see that Twiggy had the face of a child – with huge eyes and a tiny mouth in the shape of a bow. It was the same face Goldie Hawn would popularize later on Laugh-In, under her moppy blond hair. It’s the same face, Goldie attempts to maintain all these years later, through plastic surgery or Botox, even while she’s settling into her sixties.
That ideal face, I can see now, was the face of a doll. And maybe that’s what we wanted to be then – dolls, with our shoulder-length, shag haircuts that always looked a little mussed, dark eyeliner and long curled lashes we glued on.
Unlike my role models, my mother had always been fat. As a child, on interminable rides across country in the car, I loved to sit in the front seat with my head resting on her lap. She felt like a huge pillow, her thighs soft and plump, her stomach squishy. I remember her arms in the sleeveless blouses she’d wear on those hot summer drives – round and soft.
Of course, my mother didn’t want to be fat, nor did she resign herself to a fat fate. She dieted all the time. For lunch, she would fix herself a little plate of cottage cheese with peach quarters from the can. Later, when they started coming out with diet versions of everything, the fruit she ate was sweetened with chemicals and the syrup tasted like bathroom cleanser. For dinner, she broiled plain chicken and ate it with iceberg lettuce salads doused with low-cal dressing. And for dessert, she smoked L & M cigarettes.
While my mother had always seemed fat, strangely enough, I never recall witnessing her overeat. What she did to excess was drink. Most of the time, she drank alone, and always the same concoction -- Canada Dry ginger ale with Seagram’s Seven whisky over ice.