Part 8

I am personally too infected with this slimming phobia to hope for complete redemption. I may come back, but probably not all the way. As a matter of fact, I would not come all the way. My struggle is to find the moral courage to make the partial return. The slimming years have been so long. I have won my battle knowing that it is a battle that is never truly won and that the helmet and the spurs cannot be laid aside.

* * * * *

It remains practically impossible for me to sit down whole-heartedly to a meal among whole-hearted folk. What has long since become the more or less rare spectacle of an American woman partaking of potato is still sufficient to send chills down this spine. By now, expert in that strange branch of lower mathematics, the counting of the calories, I can compute on sight the heat and food value of a helping of filet of sole (3 × 2-1/2) or of one slice of zwieback (3-1/2 × 1-1/2 × 1/2).

To violate by one calorie is to invite regrets out of all proportion to the delights of the transgression. One suck off the sugared sides of a candy sour-ball can cause one to scuttle to the scales in fear and trembling, or one spoonful off the side of the pyramid of ice-cream on your dinner partner’s dessert plate, transform you into a distrait and regretful guest.

But at least mine hungry eyes have a certain sharpened clarity which enables them to see the funniness and the menace of the spectacle of the slimming women.

We are funny. Realizing that, we might long since have learned to laugh it off, except, alas! laughter is supposed to be fattening!

It is not a simple matter to get a laugh out of a slimming woman. It is the easiest thing she does not do.

My laughs have come back slowly, mere spurts at first, as from a spring gone dry but about to yield again.

It means that even while, with me, meal-time still remains largely a process of omission and elimination, I am at least on to myself. Ladies, really, it is to laugh.

* * * * *

Today, four unrelenting years after the episode of the boiled tissue paper, I now enter a shop to have a vendeuse glide up to me with: “For yourself? Misses department across the aisle.”

Well, what of it?

This much of it! If a slimmer, a sadder, and perhaps a wiser me has succeeded in helping to convey to the slimmers of today and the potential slimmers of tomorrow some of the ridiculousness and some of the perils of the slimming age, then the public sacrifice of myself upon the altar of mine own absurdities will not have been in vain.

Would I do it all over again?

“Well,” I reply, as I continue to count my calories, “well--er----”

In conclusion, Reader, as they used to say in the days when ladies munched chocolates in bed, I desire to make public the following acknowledgments:

To a husband who bore with me during a period when a snapping-turtle shared roof with him.

To my doctor to whom I lied.

To my many friends upon whom at my supposedly hospitable board, my greenly glittering eye rested in one hatred or another.

To a cook who learned to defile her art in order to brew me dishes unwanted and unsavory.

To the books written during this period which abound perhaps unduly in foods coveted by their author.

To hosts and hostesses who offered me their hospitality only that I might wave aside with supercilious celery stalk their good meat and wassail.

To my comfortably stout friends upon whom my disdainful eye rested not kindly.

To my slender friends upon whom my good-as-you-now gaze has assailingly glared.

To the human race for bearing with me.

To myself for finally realizing that I am funnier than any character I have ever succeeded in depicting in fiction.

THE END

=Transcriber’s Notes=