Part 3

Overnight, as it were, that quick barometer, the show girl, achieved the biological phenomenon of shedding her hips, and measurements fluctuated more violently than a falling stock market. Figures began to slump and tip the scales at far below the Venus de Milo par. The way to compute your approach to the norm of the current ideal of beauty was to divide Lillian Russell’s adult weight by two, her measurements by three, and her vitality by four.

A favorite hypothesis has it that, in the main, women dress and adorn themselves primarily for the appraising eye of women. It is then also fair to assume that women reduce for women. Until his eye and arm became trained to the lesser lines of his womanhood, the male-in-the-streets’ reaction was scarcely nothing at all.

You’re all right as you are. What you want to reduce for? What’s the idea? You look good to me. Never did like skinny women. Cut out the dieting.

The very new crop of adult young men, a generation born and reared in the slimming era, probably cerebrates about it not at all, except that by now our new male adults are trained to like their fair sex, should they stop to think at all, slab-like, flat-chested, hipless, and with skin tones of emacia carefully smeared over with sunburn, real or artificial.

Next, starting from proportions which at first had seemed no more ominous than that cloud no larger than a man’s hand, the home-wrecking, nerve-wracking noun of the age burst explosively upon the scene. Calories! And the counting of the women within the shadow of a guillotine became as naught, compared with the counting of the dieting women.

Five medium slices pickled beet 25 calories One cup black unsweetened coffee 0 calories One medium-sweet pickle 25 calories Two tablespoons lemon juice 10 calories Average helping lettuce, no oil 0 calories One plum 30 calories One-half one small peach 30 calories Five strawberries 25 calories One stalk celery 3 calories One slice cucumber 1 calorie Four ounces consommé, no fat 15 calories

It was along about then, free, white, and over twenty-one, that the rabies-like foam of the slimming phobia of my era began to fleck me.

In fact, it is possible to lay finger upon the very occasion of my surrender to the caloric age.

Suddenly, and at one fell swoop, as they would have put it back in the days when Venus de Milo was not considered a stylish stout, all the inchoate unease of my overweight lifetime burst forth.

* * * * *

A slim and lovely woman invited me to lunch with her at one of the town’s smart hostelries. As we walked through crowded dining-rooms, heads turned to the rhythm of her svelte grace. With the prerogative of the guest, I ordered first, off a menu the size of a tabloid newspaper. About my usual. A creamed celery soup (specialty of this particular hotel). A grilled chop rolled around a kidney. Green salad with an oil dressing. A sweet and coffee. Mine hostess, whose neck, so slim, was like a swan’s, ordered plain spinach (en branch please--not even buttered) and a demi-tasse.

“Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m dieting. Came back from White Sulphur last week one hundred and nine pounds, which is just exactly nine more pounds than this five-feet-nine is going to drag around. I’m foul with overweight.”

Reader, as they would say back in the days when Lillian Russell attached her corset strings to the bed post and took three deep breaths, I died that day. Of shame. Suddenly it seemed to me, sitting there in the abundant coverage of thrice nine pounds overweight, that of grossness I must perish before the very eyes of the waiter so solicitously placing my four hundred calories of cream of celery before me. The hand with which I toyed at the tablespoon designed to convey them to my stiffened lips became as a pale and flaccid ham. The dead hammish hand of a lady who had suddenly died of the shame of her overweight. From every corner of that opulent dining-room, there appeared the delusion of the slim hands of slim ladies mocking at one of their sex who permitted indenture space for dimples on the backs of her hands, whose neck seemed shorter than it need have, who was fair, fat, and alas! size forty.

And all the while, the waiter never even suspected that the lady toying with her cream-of-celery soup was dead. Of shame. And neither did her rodential hostess, nibbling at her spinach with her quivering little upper lip.

So out of this moment of this dream of slenderness honing herself still further on a diet of a concoction that looked like a small portion of boiled green tissue paper, was born resolution.

Mine no longer to reason why, mine but to do and diet.

To be sure, over a period of years dating back to days when a college senior who detested basket ball had played it vociferously, and had swapped her cream pie at dormitory for abominated jello, there had been varied and expensive attempts at reduction.

Subsequently, one unsuccessful experiment followed another. I had eighteen-dayed, counted calories, lamb-chopped-and-pineappled, sat in an elegant electric cabinet, and been treated exactly like a fowl in a Dutch oven; taken punishment from a famed Hollywood masseuse, that put me in the red, the black and blue; immersed my too, too solid self in baths of paraffine and mud; walked around reservoirs in sweat shirts; and without making appreciable inroads, had indulged in every out-and-indoor sport dear to funny-paper compilers.

But this day of the spectacle of the dream of slenderness honing herself down on boiled green tissue-paper, something toward which the not inconsiderable bulk of me had doubtless sub- or unconsciously been traveling since the basket-ball-jello days, was suddenly bang up in front of me.

* * * * *

Life, except on the basis of a lesser me, was no longer endurable. The fulsome sensation of being me, of having the vendeuse in the shop smear me, as I approached, with her appraising eye: “Blouse? Er--yes--er--size forty?” had reached its limit.

Invalid, suddenly intolerable, were the years of the benignity of friends: “But you are really not too stout, my dear. You’re just plump. Nonsense! You wouldn’t be you, thin. Don’t you go dieting and ruin your health. Why, my sister-in-law got herself down to a bag of bones and died of getting herself there, that’s what happened to my sister-in-law. Yes, of course I diet, but I wouldn’t if my weight was as becoming to me as yours is.”

Apple sauce! I found myself hissing to myself in the days when that elegant compound noun was eloquent. Apple sauce! (without sugar in it).

Suddenly the too, too solid flesh and I were in the death grapple.

Latently, beneath my poor numbed powers of logic where this faddistic subject of diet was concerned, there stirred insurrection.

Beneath the superficial layers of puerile and sometimes pernicious panaceas, eighteen-day ones, rolling-machine ones, sweat-shirt and hair-shirt ones, must somewhere lurk a fundamental truth.

Casting aside, except as subsidiaries, the dumbbells, the static bicycle in its sweat-cabinet, the vibratory machine, the rowing-machine, the electric horse, I set up a fundamental truth for myself.

Food makes fat.