I Do It with the Lights On Read online

  Front and center during parent observation day at Miss Cindy’s (1990).

  My parents dutifully enrolled me in ballet, tap, jazz, and gymnastics classes at the Cindy Gill School of Dance. I was at my happiest when I was suiting up in my tights and leotard twice a week, and I thrived at Miss Cindy’s, where classes were small and full of personal attention. My parents were as supportive as I was excited. Each day I rehearsed the dances I had learned at Miss Cindy’s, with my mother repeatedly reminding me that sitting with my legs wide open in second position was not “ladylike.” (And even twenty-six years later, my mother still hasn’t given up hope that I will learn to be ladylike. At this point, I’m doubtful.)

  Because of my natural ability and unnatural enthusiasm, I quickly became Miss Cindy’s star student. Three or four times a year Miss Cindy invited parents to observe the progress their children were making. Both my mother and father attended these classes, my dad lugging the briefcase-size box that contained his camcorder every time. Our VHS collection, which my dad meticulously organized, boasted titles like, “Whitney Dancing at Miss Cindy’s Sept. 1990,” “Whitney Dancing at Beach Cove Resort,” and “Whitney Dancing in Backyard,” separated by horizontal lines on the spines. He proudly documented every moment of my childhood dance career, including everything from an improvisational shimmy down a hallway to our annual dance recitals each May.

  In one home movie, my dad zooms in on my face and asks me, “What did Hunter say you were going to be when you grow up?”

  “He said he’s supposed to be an actor and I’m supposed to be a singer and a dancer.”

  “And what do you want to be when you grow up?” he prompts.

  I giggle and say, “I want to work at McDonald’s.”

  My early childhood was picture-perfect, complete with a doting set of parents and a playroom full of toys in our middle-class suburban home. I was so psyched to start school that on the first day I leapt off the front porch and boarded the school bus without giving my parents a kiss goodbye. Heartbroken, they jumped in the station wagon and followed, sheepishly appearing in the doorway of my kindergarten classroom faced with a teacher who assured them that they—not I—would be okay. When the school bus dropped me off again that afternoon, my mom noticed that I looked forlorn.

  “Did you make any friends?” she asked.

  “Katie P., Katie L., Stephanie, Lindsay, Ashley…” I rattled the names off. I wasn’t recounting actual people; I had just memorized the names off of the lockers.

  “Well, then why are you sad?” Mom implored.

  “Because,” I sniffled. “We don’t get homework until second grade!”

  I remedied this disappointment by developing a voracious reading habit, one that my parents grounded me from if I misbehaved at home. Naturally, I circumvented this punishment by squirreling away a flashlight underneath my pillow, and after my dad gave me my nightly back scratch, it was just Dr. Seuss and I staying up late into the night like a couple of lawbreakers.

  At school, I was a teacher’s pet through and through; I was chosen for student council, placed in the academically gifted program, and named editor of our school newspaper. I was punished only once, and my outrage over the incident has never dwindled. My class had lined up in the cafeteria after lunch in preparation for the walk back to our classroom, when I bent over at the waist to retrieve my pencil from the floor. A male classmate took this opportunity to (literally) kiss my ass and I whipped around upright and slapped him in the face. But when we got back to our classroom, I was the one who got punished. I wailed over the injustice for more than an hour and refused my nap time as a form of protest. It seems that, even then, I had all the feisty makings of a feminist.

  In fifth grade at Miss Cindy’s, I was chosen to dance the lead in our recital piece, based on The Wizard of Oz. Since I was Dorothy, I braided my long brown hair into pigtails, wore the blue-and-white checked dress, ruby slippers, and carried a stuffed dog in a picnic basket.

  But most important, I got to dance in every dancer’s most coveted spot: front and center. And when I was front and center, because of my attention to detail in dance class, I began to observe more than just my own reflection moving in the mirror. I started comparing my body to those of the girls beside me, and I couldn’t help but notice that I was larger, both in height and weight, than the rest of my classmates. There was Audrey, who competed in pageants on the weekends. She had long chestnut hair that she refused to pull back, but when she repeatedly whacked me in the face with it, I couldn’t even be annoyed; I was too enamored with the grown-up-shampoo smell it had. There was our assistant teacher’s niece Brittany, a diminutive wisp of a girl with white-blond curls, who always suspiciously ended up on the front row beside me even though her coordination left a lot to be desired. You could be certain that if we were going right, Brittany was going left. And, of course, I was jealous of my best friend, Nicole, who’d been dancing with me ever since we first started at Miss Cindy’s and was in my fifth-grade class at school. I couldn’t help wishing I had her thick, curly hair, slight stature, and olive complexion instead of what I deemed my awkward, bottom-heavy figure, lackluster hair, and paler skin.

  From my fifth-grade dance recital—the same year I earned the title “Baby Beluga” (1995).

  It didn’t matter who I was looking at in dance class, because all the girls were smaller than me. They had spaces in between their thighs where I had only flesh; they were as flat as a board from their collarbones to their knees, but my stomach was rounded and my upper thighs protruded with thickness; these girls wore a size small in our dance costumes, but I wore a large. Already five feet tall and weighing 100 pounds, I wasn’t skinny, nor was I muscled. Although my body was strong and flexible, it still appeared soft, in stark contrast to my friends in class who were nothing but skin and bones tacked onto petite frames. As if on cue, I’d gotten underarm and pubic hair the year before, immediately after we’d taken the “What’s Happening to My Body?” class in school. When my brother noticed, he told me: “Boys don’t like girls with armpit hair!”—an assertion I wouldn’t challenge until my midtwenties.

  It was no surprise to me when Nicole was the first of my friends to start “going out” with some of the boys in our class. I hungered for this rite of passage, too, so I exchanged phone numbers with some of the popular boys and began a ritual of talking to them every day after school. I would take the landline phone from my dad’s nightstand, pull the cord out of the doorway and around the corner into my room, and shut the door. I talked about different things with each of them, tailoring the conversation to what interested them the most. One mostly wanted to talk about soccer, while another was more into music. I impressed him with my knowledge of Nirvana, Weezer, Pearl Jam, and Green Day. I relished having access to my brother’s cassette tapes, and we’d spend hours listening to music through the phone together, all the while guessing what the lyrics meant. I expected the same friendship, flirtation, and familiarity at school, but I was rebuffed, while they continued to giggle and pass notes with the more popular girls. At recess, when we took to the soccer field, they started mocking me with a song called “Baby Beluga,” that ended with, “She’s got a whale of a tail!”

  My best childhood friend, Nicole, and me (1994).

  When that refrain finds its way into my mind these days, it’s excruciating to reconcile the fact that they were taunting a 100-pound girl who I would not consider even the slightest bit chubby if I saw a photo of her today. I’d already had my first inklings of self-doubt in the dance studio, and this song proved my negative opinion of my body true. The consensus was that my body was too big. And so the first feeling I ever connected to my body was shame. My body embarrassed me. It caused people to treat me differently in public than they did in private. My body was the kind of thing that inspired schoolboys to sing jeering songs; and it made me feel bad about myself and intensely jealous of others. I started to notice subtle things, like how my soccer shorts bunched up in the
middle of my thighs and how they rode up high on my waist if I had my shirt tucked in. I started sitting on the playground equipment during recess, observing instead of participating, afraid of being subjected to that awful song that kept me from feeling happy—and from being who I wanted to be.

  Today, this feels a tad melodramatic. All kids are made fun of from time to time, right? It wasn’t as though I was an outcast; I still had friends to play with and supportive parents who packed napkins with handwritten notes in my lunch bag and who loved me unconditionally. I was an exemplary student and dancer, and I had the accolades to prove it. But all of this knowledge is tinged with melancholy, because the feelings that burden a young girl when she first becomes conscious of how others view her body don’t just disappear one day. They don’t fade away when she finally gets a boyfriend or loses five pounds. These insecurities become ingrained in her psyche, piling up like mementos from trips she never wanted to take in the first place and certainly doesn’t want to remember.

  One night, when I was sleeping over at Nicole’s house, we decided to shave our legs for the first time. Afterward, as I sat in front of her mirror, patting tissue against the bloody cuts on my skin, I peered at my reflection. I ran my hand across my face as Nicole stood behind me curling my hair. I picked up a tube of red lipstick and applied it as I’d seen my mother do, smacking my waxy lips together. Later we were being silly, jumping up and down on her bed, and I caught a glimpse of myself in the trifold mirror of her vanity set and thought I was so beautiful.

  “If only the boys could see me now!” I squealed as we collapsed in a heap onto the covers. When I stood in front of a mirror, looking only at myself, I could genuinely see my physical beauty. But when I stood in front of the mirrors that lined my dance class, or looked at myself reflected in the eyes of the boys who enjoyed my company but wouldn’t go out with me, I felt inferior. They say that comparison is the thief of joy, and this was undeniably true for me. Comparison meant that I couldn’t appreciate the fact that I thought I was pretty, and by extension, valuable. Because even in fifth grade, I knew that it didn’t matter what I thought. It was what my friends thought, what adults thought, and what boys thought, that mattered.

  Not long after that sleepover, I saw a TV commercial for an eating disorder clinic. It showed an emaciated woman running on a treadmill, wearing hot pink bike shorts and a shiny blue leotard; the clothes that should have been clinging to her frame hung loosely. Then it cut to a black-and-white shot of a different girl with frizzy brown hair in a baggy sweater slumped against a toilet. The image of the woman with anorexia with her jutting jaw and sunken eyes terrified me, while the bulimic girl looked more or less healthy, if a little sad. And as I lay in bed that night, I prayed to God to make me bulimic, not anorexic. I’m sure I didn’t have any realistic concept of what eating disorders were, and I have no explanation for why I thought it was inevitable that I would have one. Or even why I wanted to choose which one would afflict me.

  The summer following fifth grade, Nicole and I decided to stop dancing at Miss Cindy’s, so when a couple of my friends on our neighborhood swim team suggested that I join, too, I was enthusiastic about learning something new. Even though my swimming skills were limited to the doggie-paddle, I thought it would be fun to be part of the team, and I dove in headfirst. I mastered the basic aspects of freestyle, backstroke, butterfly, and my forte, the breaststroke. When it came time for competition, I was sent to the shark meet, reserved for the second-string swimmers, where multiple swim teams competed against one another at a large community pool. My first event was the fifty-meter breaststroke. Right out of the gate I was the weakest swimmer and the last to slap the tiled wall at the end of the first lap. As I turned and began swimming back toward the diving block, I saw the blurry image of my father, with his signature white hair, standing directly at the end of my lane behind the chain-link fence. As I swam, pumping my legs in the frog position and gasping for air, I knew I didn’t want to disappoint him and I didn’t want to disappoint myself. I didn’t want to come in last. In the final few seconds of the race, I pushed past my closest competitor and finished second to last.

  My first swim meet (1995).

  It was a victory my dad and I celebrated after the meet, as we rehashed the event in his classic Jaguar convertible with the top down, me sitting on top of a towel, his favorite oldies compilation CD underscoring the conversation. We shared a cardboard to-go box of cheesy tater tots from Sonic and had one of those life talks that I’ll never forget. My dad beamed as he told me how remarkable it was that even in a sport in which I was not naturally talented, I had the drive to better myself and push myself further.

  I was proud of myself, but I had mixed feelings about being on the swim team. I loved the water and I loved competing, but I was only happy when I was actually in the water. All of the other parts were stressful. When I had to line up for an event without a T-shirt covering my body, I felt naked. My thighs and bum jiggled, and I was sure everyone was staring at me. Sometimes I snuck a T-shirt with me to the diving block, which I would take off only at the very last second to minimize the embarrassment of being seen without one.

  I liked hanging out by the pool after early morning swim practice was over, but while many of my friends would change into bikinis and lie out on the lounge chairs that bordered the pool, I never would have dreamed of wearing anything but my sporty TYR suit—a one-piece with thick straps that crisscrossed in the back. I was sure that my parents wouldn’t approve of me wearing anything remotely sexy or mature, as I was only eleven, and I also thought those sorts of suits were reserved for girls who had bodies much different than mine. Just like in dance class, I saw exaggerated differences between everyone else’s body and mine. Some girls were taller than me by then, and some were more developed, but all were leaner. Then there were the older sisters who also lounged by the pool, their skin darkened by the sun, who never got their hair wet and plopped grown-up magazines over their faces while they worked on their tans. These girls, with their breasts, hips, and painted nails, were fascinating to me, and I spent a lot of time sitting on the edge of my chair, towel wrapped around me as if I’d just emerged from a shower, analyzing their very being.

  That summer I got an invitation to a friend’s pool party, and so did lots of boys. Lying on my back atop my parents’ bed, I discussed the invite with Nicole, twisting the curly phone cord around my fingers while trying to wrap my head around a pool party that had both boys and girls present.

  “But I’d have to wear a bathing suit,” I told my mother, when she asked if I planned to go to the party. “In front of boys.” My mother didn’t object to my reasoning for not wanting to go, and since she validated my apprehension, I stayed home. Now I can’t help but wonder if my mother’s own body-image issues caused her to accept my decision without a fight.

  The most gorgeous woman in the world: my mommy (1979).

  At five-four and naturally stick-thin, my mother had been captain of her college synchronized swimming team and had always looked like she sashayed straight out of a magazine. But these days her figure was changing. She had always been a vixen, and I can still picture her in my mind, against the backdrop of our hideous seventies seashell wallpaper, poised in a terry-cloth robe with a turban-wrapped towel on her head, holding a cigarette in between her long red fingernails, flicking ashes into an empty Coke can on the bathroom sink. On one unfortunate occasion I picked up a Coke can to have a swallow, and instead of delicious carbonated syrup, I got dusty ashes. When I told her in kindergarten (with all the tactlessness one expects from a five-year-old) that her smoking habit embarrassed me, she stopped, cold turkey. In the years after she quit, she’d gained a small amount of weight that filled out her hourglass figure a bit but never caused her to look heavy.

  However, five years after she’d quit, she was packing on the pounds in a serious way and, for the first time in her life, found herself significantly overweight. My mother had never revealed how much she w
eighed, even when she was waiflike, and because she quit posing for photos after her weight gain, I’ve forgotten how big she actually got. Recently, I was sifting through hundreds of family photos when I came across one of my mom, my brother, and me on vacation when I was a preteen. It was rare photographic evidence of my mother at her heaviest, and I was floored at how large she was. She has since lost a ton of weight, more than a hundred pounds, I would guess, and I didn’t have this image of my fat, puffy-faced mother in my memory.

  “Mom!” I yelled. “Come look at this!” She walked into the dining room and saw the piles of photos littering the table. She leaned over to inspect the one I was holding, and stared at me stone-faced.