Hungry by Sheila Himmel

wrong with her legs.
    In the seat of power, the kitchen, Grandma Pancake (Sophie) was always baking, always something sweet. The other was Grandma Soup. Whether because of being intimidated or a lack of interest, and later, economic hard times, Elaine and Ned’s mother, Tilda, never really learned her way around food. She was a terrible cook. A common dinner for them growing up was Campbell’s soup, iceberg lettuce salad, and a can of string beans or creamed corn.
    Elaine was always chubby, everyone agrees. Sipping tea in our living room, she remembers, “When people looked at pictures of me as a baby, they would say, ‘Oh, look at those pulkies (fat legs)!’” At least that’s the part she heard. When people would say, “You have such a nice smile,” Elaine took it to mean, “It’s just too bad you’re so fat.”
    One day in fourth grade, Elaine’s whole class went to the cafeteria to be weighed. There was a scale in front and a teacher calling out each student’s name and weight. (Judith Moore recalls a similar torture in Fat Girl , but at her school it happened every month. Moore was the only second-grader who needed the metal one-hundred-pound weight to be clanked into place.) The day Elaine, age nine, saw that scale, she started crying and couldn’t stop. Her mother had to come pick her up from school. Also in fourth grade, Elaine started menstruating, which was considered very early at the time. By sixth grade, she came close to her full adult height, five-foot-six, and towered over her classmates. There was no place to hide.
    Like Lisa, Elaine sneaked food at night. Both ate ice cream out of the carton. And both resented the rest of the family. Everybody in the family loved sweets, but Elaine was the only “fat” one. When the Himmels went to their favorite restaurant in San Diego, Elaine longed for the “Fudge-anna,” a hot-fudge sundae with banana, but she knew not to ask for what she wanted. Every time, she ordered sherbet. Unlike Lisa, Elaine has always been compliant and anxious to please, anticipating what others desired of her.
    At age ten, Elaine was taken to a mysterious new doctor, with offices all the way downtown. Dr. De La Marquis prescribed the diet pills that Elaine took until she was at least twenty. She didn’t take them continuously, and they didn’t do much for her weight or self-esteem, but they did help her study. They were speed, after all.
    In high school, Elaine didn’t date, and in college, she didn’t get asked to join a sorority. She felt like a failure. All her social problems, she was sure, were caused by her weight. She told herself, “If only I could lose weight, I’d look better in clothes and have dates.” And then get married and have children and life would be beautiful.
    At twenty-four, Elaine was doing work she loved. She was born to teach. Still, she felt like a fat, old-maid schoolteacher. Her longtime best friend, Carol, a pretty little thing, had already been married and divorced.
    This was 1972, at the peak of the feminist movement. Economic self-sufficiency and equality in romantic relationships were all the rage, with women acting out the slogan “The personal is the political.” The landmark Supreme Court abortion decision in Roe v. Wade came in 1973. Elaine didn’t track any of that. She just wanted to be married and be a mom. When she met her husband, David, he not only made low-calorie foods for her, he thought she was cute. Nobody had ever thought she was cute.
    When did she stop taking the amphetamine diet pills? “I only remember starting things that made me thinner,” Elaine told us, sadly, “never how they ended.”
     
     
     
    While Elaine was talking in our living room, Ned had a hard time sitting still. He kept getting up to check the computer, then the refrigerator, then some piece of paperwork. Reliving his sister’s struggles in painful detail, Ned felt some responsibility for his role in the family drama. While she got stuck