TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 212

[Tobie Shapiro]

May 2, 2000000007


Dear Thoy Popjoy,

	Thoy Popjoy is the actual name of someone 
in the Oakland phone book.  Feyna and I were 
perusing the pages to scout out notable names. 
Thoy gets a prize for his or her name.  Also 
appreciated greatly:  C. Dusterdick., Fadi 
Hanhan, and the rest of the list that is now 
pinned to the freezer with a magnet.  You, too, 
can partake of this enjoyable pastime.  Just get 
out your white pages and flip it open pretty much 
anywhere.  Go down the page, and you will find 
them.  If you're in the middle of Smith, Jones, 
or Wong, you can open up to another page.  Just 
keep your eyes open and the sparkling little 
miracles of the world will fall into your hands. 
Many years ago, many years, I said, many years 
ago, I was doing the same exercize with the 
Oakland phone book, and culled a crop of names 
that has lived on in my memory.  I think I've 
shared them here, before, but I am going to share 
them again.  Whom could it hurt?  These people 
are not reading this, and it was a long time ago. 
They may have assimilated and changed their names 
by now, except for the Drs. Puckeylowe who may 
have a Puckeylowe IV by now.

	Uglers Sisty
	Neely Slinkard
	Lucky J. Owyang
	Wanchai Chukasamsuk
	Dr. Harold D. Puckeylowe II
	Dr. Harold D. Puckeylowe III

	We have to be careful when we are giving 
our children their names.  In my stepson, Ben's, 
second grade class, there was a girl whose 
parents were recent immigrants to the United 
States.  She was born here.  They must have been 
looking for a pretty sounding word.  They named 
her Latrina.  This is not a name I would put on a 
list of funny names, because it isn't funny. 
Latrina will suffer, has suffered already, 
through school.  She probably changed her name.

	I don't particularly like the name, 
Tobie.  I don't hate it, but it always sounded 
too cute to me.  And I'm not cute.  What I do 
like about it is that whenever people call out, 
"Tobie!", I can be pretty sure they're talking 
about me.  A name is important.  Before Meyshe 
and Feyna were born, those who asked if we had 
names for the babies yet were told, "Oh, yes! 
The girl will be Feyna and the boy will be 
Meyshe."  The standard reaction was a slight 
pause and then a criticism.  We were told we 
couldn't name them that, that everyone would 
tease them, that they would fail because of their 
weird names, that these names were not suitable 
for human beings.  So we stopped telling people. 
After they were born, everyone complimented us on 
the names.  "Feyna?  Meyshe?  Such beautiful 
names!  What kind of names are those?" Meyshe may 
be one of the only people I know who likes his 
name.  We all have complicated relationships with 
our given names.  If I were to move to Tuva, 
would some Tuvan pick my name out of the 
phonebook and put it on a list that she tacked to 
the refrigerator with a magnet?




 
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Attempts at Shape-Shifting


	When I was a teenager, I was very 
concerned about my weight.  I was zaftig, which 
is good if you're in the old country.  In the old 
country, they wanted substantial women.  A 
scrawny, flat chested, narrow hipped woman was 
not good for anything.  Would she have the energy 
to pop out the babies every nine months, hold one 
in her arms, one on her hip, and one in her 
belly?  She had to be sturdy.  She practically 
had to pull the plow.  Just her having to keep up 
with all the Jewish laws was a monumental effort. 
We have words for women who can do all this: keep 
a clean house, keep the cupboards full, make the 
delectable dishes that had to be formed by hand 
for four hours when it took ten seconds to eat 
one, have the house perfect by nine in the 
morning.  She also had to raise intelligent 
children well versed in their duties as Jews and 
their behaviour as citizens of the world.  On top 
of that, she had to be patient with the husband, 
those irascible beings with their payess and 
beards, their constant prayer and davening, their 
moodiness, their arcane needs while they studied 
Torah in the back room, and the wife, this sturdy 
woman also had to earn the living.  We call these 
women Balabostas, sometimes not flatteringly. 
All these amazing feats a sylph doesn't do, can't 
do, would be an idiot to attempt to do, and so, 
her dowry would be small.  The shadchen would be 
hard pressed to find her a decent husband.

	That was over a hundred twenty years ago. 
And I might ad, that is part of what my ancestors 
were trying to escape, at least the women.  In 
the new Goldeneh Medinah, the Golden Land, all 
the rules were different, and the perfect woman 
was different, too.  By the time I got to 
physical womanhood, the ideal was thin; soft 
spoken and thin, obedient and thin.  I was 
neither.  I was blessed and cursed with 
curvaceousness.  What was I going to do about it? 
I could feel grotesque about it.  I could 
celebrate it while others intoned that I was 
overweight and should drop ten or twenty pounds. 
I could try to lose weight.  I could go on diets.

	This I did with remarkable fervour.  If 
the idea was to attract a man, even a bloated 
one, a beef, cheese and pizza guy, then I had to 
eliminate some of this perfection that I owned in 
one cultural setting, and lacked in the other. 
What luck.  The diets were available.  Almost all 
of them involved a determined denial of pleasure. 
One would have to bid any kind of satiety adieu. 
The  problem was also that I had no idea what was 
supposed to be the perfect weight for me. 
Indeed, given that I was perfect in my inherited 
culture, how was I to alter myself to fit the 
specifications of the other?

	I tried eliminating all second helpings, 
reducing lunch to a cup of coffee, chewing on 
sugarless gum to keep the mouth and teeth 
occupied.  I thought there must be a certain 
amount of chewing that the body required in a 
day.  Satisfy that quota and I'd be able to wave 
away the treats, the fat on the edge of the lamb 
chop, the second, maybe even third helping of 
noodles, the stacks of protein, the great clumps 
of calorific lubricants.  Just chew enough and 
all temptation gone.  But this was a failure. 
Gum made my stomach growl.  Gum left me sore but 
not satisfied.  Gum looked awful being worked 
over in the mouth.  Gum's flavour wore off after 
a few minutes.  Gum made me hate gum.

	I was not good at denying myself the 
desired quantities of food.  It was easier to eat 
nothing at all than to limit myself to one 
peanut, one raisin, one eighth of a slice of 
meat.  So I tried the special formula diets.  All 
fruit.  Fill  yourself up on fruit: a pile of 
berries and a half a grapefruit for breakfast, an 
apple, a pear and a nectarine for lunch.  For 
dinner, a tangerine, half a cantaloupe, and an 
orange.  This was the sort of diet that could 
take off quite a few pounds but was only 
temporary.  You couldn't eat like that forever. 
You wouldn't get scurvy, but your hair might fall 
out, and you might get an attack of vertigo so 
spinning that you wouldn't know where you'd be 
set down.  So I'd drop a few pounds, feel awfully 
good for a week or so.  Then, of course, I'd have 
to go off the diet, and that would bring on the 
romance with edible lubricants, sweet whipped 
things, our friend the side of beef.  And a week 
later, it would be back to choosing from a crazy 
list of diets.

	"How to lose ten ugly pounds in just ten 
minutes:  cut off your head."  After groaning at 
the old worn out joke, I considered it.  The 
beauty of this was that it eliminated the concern 
about appearance.

	The all you can eat diets:  eat as much 
cake as you want.  But that's all you can have. 
Eat vegetables without butter or oil.  Eat them 
by the vat, three or four helpings of parsnips 
for a meal.  But nothing else.  The all booze 
diet.  Get drunk and forget about the whole 
thing, including how to get home or if you are 
actually already at home and you just don't know 
it.

	My friend, Mike Gold, the one who 
followed me around for eight years, moonstruck, 
upon realizing my self loathing, looked up some 
efficacious diets and came up with a diet that 
included huge amounts of protein and fat.  Bacon 
for breakfast, steak for lunch and dinner, meat 
ball sandwiches without the bread, and 
grapefruit.  That was the key: the grapefruit.

	I thanked Mike.  I took this on for a 
week.  I was religious about it.  Meat and 
grapefruit.  Why not?  So there were no bread 
puddings or chocolate eclairs.  I could go 
without.  This diet was supposed to be able to 
sustain you for months.  After my week was up, I 
toddled into the bathroom to weigh myself.  I'd 
gained eight pounds.  Mike hid in a corner.  I 
vented.  Then my mother sent me to the infamous 
doctor Haskill.  His clientele were exclusively 
oversized women who wanted to be undersized. 
They had all gone through the repertoire of 
methods: diets, starvation, heinous exercize, 
hypnosis, channeling Audrey Hepburn, diet pills, 
filling the stomach with foam rubber to trick 
themselves into believing they were full, all 
manner of S & M, all manner of incentives, all 
manner of threats, prayer, levitation, astrology, 
phrenology, mystics calling upon spirit guides to 
guide the food from their mouths, the gambler's 
diet, the drinker's diet, the miser's diet, the 
complete and total idiot's diet, the twelve step 
diet, the necrophiliac's diet, the Des Moines 
diet, the back forty diet, the little pischer's 
diet, the celebrity diet, the Olympic Gold 
medalist diet, the astronaut's diet, the Johnny 
Weissmuller diet, the ghetto diet, the posthumous 
diet, the Edgar Allen Poe diet, the insecure poor 
body image diet, the world's simplest diet, the 
caviar and champaign diet, the Haile Selassie 
diet, the J. Edgar Hoover diet, the wisdom of the 
ancients diet, the short wave radio diet, the 
innocent bystander's diet, the salt lick diet, 
the lard and lemon juice diet, the last diet 
you'll ever need diet, the Mensa diet, the beer 
and chips diet, the Karl Marx diet, the 
stewardess's diet, the cowpoke's diet, the lock 
jaw diet, the last ditch diet, the shining silver 
path diet, the 100% cotton diet, the DDT diet, 
the garlic and jalapeño diet, the altered state 
diet, the  Klingon diet, the tool shed diet, the 
leaky roof diet, the phlegm releasing diet. 
These people had tried them all and finally 
decided to hand their problem over to a 
physician, someone who had gone through medical 
school, the torture of internship and residency. 
This highly disciplined, highly educated, highly 
paid doctor would have the cure to their body 
image illness.  Put yourself in the hands of the 
person of ultimate authority.  A doctor.  Beyond 
doctor, there was only God.  But first, something 
real, a doctor.

	Doctor Haskill weighed me every time I 
came in, once a month.  He doled out a fistful of 
pills and I swallowed them every day.  What they 
did was probably a good example of the placebo 
effect.  Dr. Haskill administered mystery pills 
to some, injections to others.  No one was privy 
to any one else's information.  No comparing 
notes.  Haskill had it all figured out.  Along 
with the pills he had us on diets.  It was pretty 
severe.  I wondered at the time why we needed all 
those pills when the caloric intake on his plan 
was so miniscule that we would lose weight from 
the restrictive diet alone.  What were the pills 
for?  They didn't seem to make it easier to cut 
back on the food.  They were perhaps vitamins and 
minerals to make up for what we weren't ingesting 
by fork, spoon and knife?  Maybe they were clever 
pills that could find the exact places on my body 
that needed reduction, and have the diet work 
only on those places.  Maybe they were powerful 
molecular restructuring medications.  Maybe they 
were powerful placebos.  That was my guess.

	Dr. Haskill's professionally supervised 
diet went on for six months.  For six months I'd 
had no sugar, no bread, no butter, no starch, no 
fat, absolutely no birthday cake.  I didn't lose 
an ounce.  This was not Haskill's responsibility. 
Haskill did not have to live up to any standards. 
If I didn't lose weight on his diet with the 
pared down calories and the secret psycho-soma 
pills, I had no one to thank but myself.  There 
was one lasting effect.  I ceased liking candy of 
any kind.  After six months of no candy, when I 
got off his no luck diet, I could no longer 
tolerate candy.  Too sweet.  Too rich.  I pass. 
You will not find my thumbprint in the bottom of 
all the chocolates in the two layer candy box.  I 
am off somewhere else, lusting after animal fat.



 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net