The Weight
THE WEIGHT
BEANIE
I cannot have a fat daughter.
—MIRIAM ROSEN TO THE FAMILY PHYSICIAN
1971–1975
Beanie’s happiest memories revolved around food, and gatherings on warm summer evenings when her parents seemed happy, and everything was delicious. Sometimes they’d go to potlucks at friends’ houses, where there would be barbecues with sloppy joes and hot dogs and chips and s’mores and all the foods her mother didn’t keep in the house because she was always watching her father’s weight.
Her father’s brothers were morbidly obese—emphasis, at least for Miriam, on morbidly —and Miriam was determined not to let that happen to her Harry. But Beanie’s father, less concerned and certainly less cautious, would wait until Miriam left the house every Sunday for her Sisterhood meeting, and rush to make fudge with Beanie, hiding it in the back of the deep freeze in the garage where both would stealthily sneak pieces out during the week while watching All in the Family or M*A*S*H. Food equaled love.
So, when her parents would turn on each other, she would turn to love.
Beanie had a “just in case” drawer under her bed. It was a Steinway shoebox filled with Sugar Babies, Chic-O-Sticks, M&M’s, licorice, and Butterfingers. Late at night when harsh words escalated to shouting matches, she would reach for the box and quiet the noise.
Miriam found it once and confronted her in shock. “What is this ?” she said accusatorially, as if each piece of candy were illegal contraband that Beanie had hidden from authorities.
Beanie hung her head in shame and listened as her mother compared her to her father. “You’re two of a kind,” she said, as if that wasn’t something to be proud of. But Beanie well knew what her mother meant. Her father also squirreled away candy and chips and other foods he wasn’t supposed to eat. Miriam confiscated all hidden boxes with haste. “If it’s something to be hidden, it’s something to be stopped,” she told them both, ending the discussion and the habit, she hoped for good.
But Beanie soon found another container and began rebuilding reserves, hiding it better this time, a box within a box within a suitcase that she could retrieve, just in case… She was more careful from then on, opening wrappers ever so quietly, hiding the contraband inside pockets, under blankets, or balled up in her fist. But she didn’t need to be so vigilant.
No one was paying attention to Beanie, or the candy hidden in a box within a box within a suitcase. Her parents were too busy fighting. Sometimes she could hear them all the way down the street. She’d be walking home from school with friends who would make comments or make fun, and she would join in, praying no one would discover that it was coming from her home.
And when fights broke out spontaneously at dinner or on weekends she’d run outside, embarrassed, leaning against the garage door, willing them to stop. Her parents would scream hurtful things, their words vile and nasty while Beanie would gird her soul and guard her house, making sure no one nearby commented, and if they did, when they did, she’d challenge them with a look that said, Go away.
The truth was most of the families on her block fought. They were all young couples, barely out of their twenties, who had borrowed their down payments, raced to have kids, and then found themselves saddled with dreams that didn’t match reality, and bills that didn’t match bank accounts. They were scared, unprepared, and ill equipped to raise children. And the children, equally frightened, never spoke of it, not to each other at least. But they would steel themselves when their houses flared up, and everyone around would cut them a wide berth, hoping the words and the anger weren’t contagious.
But the fighting at the Rosens’ became more frequent, which frightened Beanie. She’d heard of families that had gotten divorced, and she wouldn’t let that happen. Not to hers. Divorce was a no you couldn’t turn into a yes. Divorce was unthinkable.
Beanie would close her eyes, waiting for them to finish, and eat to recapture some sense of calm. They love each other, she told herself soothingly, hoping that her father would do something truly spectacular to make her mother happy. But in truth, he couldn’t. Not really. He’d promised her the world but they lived in the valley, the undesirable part. And Miriam never let him forget it.
“What do you want?” Harry asked one night as the three of them sat at a restaurant, about to order.
“More,” Miriam said, not referring to the menu.
So her father borrowed money from her rich uncles and moved them all to a large ranch house with a small built-in pool in Sepulveda.
Her mother called it Northridge.
In “Northridge,” the yelling stopped. Beanie wasn’t sure if it was because her parents were finally happy or just tired of fighting.
She chose to believe they were happy.
She chose wrong.
In April 1975, Miriam got a job working for Dr. Leonard Spitz, a dermatologist in the Encino Hills, who was toying with the idea of getting into plastic surgery because that was where the money was.
He was singing Miriam’s tune. And they began harmonizing. Often.
Dr. Spitz, a thirty-six-year-old divorcé whom Miriam had met at Temple Beth Torah, was a good-looking man who found her engaging and fun. At first she was flattered, then intrigued, as nine-to-five became nine-to-seven, becoming nine-to-weekends.
It was inevitable, Beanie thought, looking back. Miriam Rosen felt that life had cheated her from the go, and she would not be silenced by her husband’s acceptance of mediocrity. Beanie’s mother was a fighter and her father a dreamer, and together they produced a daughter fueled by a sense of injustice and the belief that she could do anything in the world except keep her parents together.
When Harry confronted Miriam about her relationship with the dermatologist, she didn’t deny it. He moved out, she moved on, and they were done. Just like that. They sold the Sepulveda house and split the proceeds, with Miriam taking the good china and the Admiral Color TV with remote control.
“The rest is crap,” she said, with an all-encompassing gesture that made Beanie wonder if she was included.
Beanie was numb. And it wasn’t just because her mother had moved on. It was because her father had. “You didn’t fight to keep me,” she said to him, disbelieving.
And though he tried to explain about mothers getting custody and that he would see her on weekends, it was all just noise and emptiness that she later ate to quiet. The man who had taught her to keep trying until you get the yes had held at no. And that rearranged her.
After that, the just-in-case box got bigger, and the eating escalated.
In November of 1975, Miriam and Beanie moved into Dr. Spitz’s two-bedroom condo in the Encino Flats. He had previously given his wife the fancy home in the Hills, and his daughters—twins Esther and Sarah, who he’d see every other weekend and two days a week—shared the second bedroom. Beanie moved into his office with the convertible sofa and no door.
A scorekeeper by nature, Miriam wouldn’t allow her daughter to have less than his. “We just need to get a new place,” she told him, leveraging the inequity into a new home and a firm wedding date. Miriam booked the Terrace Room at the Sportsmen’s Lodge in Sherman Oaks for July 4, 1976.
“The two hundredth anniversary of the United States and the beginning of the rest of your life,” Dr. Spitz said wistfully.
“The beginning of the best of my life,” Miriam corrected, never considering her daughter who sat between them at the kitchen table.
She began looking for houses. Not his. Not hers. Theirs. Though her budget was not a penny over $75,000, Miriam took Beanie to look at several $110,000 homes on Mulholland Drive with acres of land, koi ponds, and guest houses with security gates.
Beanie cringed at the thought of what Dr. Spitz would say, but he just laughed at Miriam’s ambition, redirecting her to a sprawling four-bedroom, three-bath Spanish hacienda in the hills of Sherman Oaks that was $81,000, proving to Beanie that her mother always won, if only by degree.
In January 1976 they moved into the 4,614-square-foot home Dr. Spitz had purchased as a wedding gift for his wife. Finally Miriam Rosen, soon to be Spitz, had her own maid scrubbing her own floors, and she didn’t need to pretend to live anywhere else anymore.
“But I do like Bel Air,” she told the Realtor, with an eye to her next push.
In Sherman Oaks, Beanie had her own room with Peter Max bedsheets, posters of Andy Gibb and David Cassidy, and sliding glass doors that overlooked the lanai and the built-in pool with a distant view of her old life north of the Boulevard. She would have to change schools, Miriam told her, and since it was the middle of the year, they would skip her a grade. But the good news for her, at least according to Miriam, was that she’d be in the same grade as the Spitz twins.
“They’ll introduce you to all of their friends,” she told Beanie. And though the twins never did, Beanie didn’t want to burst Miriam’s south-of-the-Boulevard bubble. She had worked too hard to get it. And so, that January, Beanie Rosen left her friends behind and started school at Sinai a year younger than her classmates, and feeling, at least initially, quite alone.
Food became the elixir, the panacea that comforted, calmed, and narcotized her until all she felt was full and, afterward, guilty. It was a vicious cycle that she promised each night to end, then would start again the next day, wondering what she could eat to stop the noise. She’d plan out her meals and make sure her just-in-case stash was well stocked and well hidden.
Since the twins were at the house infrequently, and Dr. Spitz and the soon-to-be Mrs. Spitz were out every night, Beanie would break open the box within a box hiding the contraband, usually peanut M&M’s, underneath Jiffy Pop popcorn in case anyone came home unexpectedly. Then she’d curl up on the couch in front of the television, wearing her Lanz of Salzburg nightgown, which was flannel and flowery and tented just enough to hide the growing evidence of her binge, and lull herself into a kind of hypnotic state, eating robotically as she escaped into Little House on the Prairie, The Brady Bunch , or The Waltons : a triptych of family, harmony, and love.
And when they weren’t on, she’d find old movies or watch reruns of To Tell the Truth or What’s My Line? where famous people, dressed in minks and pearls, exchanged witty repartee and inside jokes about theater, literature, and all things terribly important. Beanie would slip into their world, laughing along with them, because she too, as long as the food lasted, would be in on the joke.
In early February 1976, five months before the wedding, Miriam took Beanie, just fifteen, along with Esther and Sarah, who were sixteen and a half and twenty-five pounds thinner, to Miss Jane’s on Ventura Boulevard.
Miss Jane’s was a boutique in Encino where wealthy mothers shopped for their wealthy daughters, buying Bat Mitzvah gowns or other special-occasion dresses. Miss Jane, rail thin and bird-like, was impeccably dressed in vintage Chanel with big white pearls hugging her neck and heels high enough to make her eye level with fifteen-year-old Beanie.
She looks like a sandpiper, Beanie thought, referring to the tiny birds that run up and down the shore at Zuma Beach.
Miniscule and meticulous, Miss Jane gave hushed instructions to the salesgirls who brought out sample dresses with matching hats and shoes.
“The twins,” Miriam said, indicating Esther and Sarah, who wore coordinating halter tops, high-waisted jeans, and platform sandals to show off their tiny waists and elongated frames, “will be my junior bridesmaids, and my Beanie”—she put her arm around her daughter, adjusting Beanie’s poncho which hung low over her faded jeans and Wallabees—“my maid of honor.”
Miss Jane smiled as the salesgirl pulled sample dresses. “Let’s just try these on for size,” she said, leading the girls toward the dressing rooms.
But when Beanie took off her poncho and Miss Jane noted the girth around the middle, she pulled Miriam aside. “We only go up to size twelve,” she whispered.
Miriam looked at Miss Jane quizzically, then snapped her head to her daughter, moving her eyes up and down Beanie’s body, now uncloaked by the heavy poncho. Beanie, her Beanie, was FAT , like her father and her uncles and their wives. How had she not noticed?
“This all stops now,” Miriam told her once they got home and the skinny twins, in bikinis, were lying by the pool, sunbathing though it was February and overcast.
Freaks , Beanie thought, watching them from her bedroom view until her mother and her vitriol snapped her out of it.
“You get this from your father’s side,” Miriam said, spitting out the words as if the fat gene might be contagious. Beanie, like her father, was reminded that she was never enough, or in this case was too much. “We have five months, for God’s sakes,” she said, pointing to the calendar with the big red heart around the fourth of July. “You simply must take off the weight. ”
Miriam, who vacillated between a size four and size six, enrolled her daughter in “Chubby Checkers, Sherman Oaks,” a diet program designed for overweight youth, south of the Boulevard. At their suggestion, she had the bathroom scale moved into the kitchen so Beanie could visualize her weight before opening the fridge.
“It’ll make you think twice,” Miriam said, and reminded Beanie that they were all in this together.
“Leggs goes to queen size,” Esther whispered to Beanie that night, reminding her that they weren’t.
By the middle of May, with Beanie still hovering at 151 pounds, Miriam decided to have a dress custom made.
“Perfect,” said Miss Jane after taking Beanie’s measurements and noting that the material for her dress would be slightly different. “Now your maid of honor will stand out!”
“Yes, she will,” said Miriam, unable to hide the double meaning. Beanie’s weight was a reminder of all the promises broken, the years of disappointment, and the fat uncles with their fat wives.
“She’s going to be just like them,” Miriam told Dr. Spitz a few nights later when she thought her daughter was asleep, sending Beanie into her just-in-case stash to self-fulfill the prophecy.
Finally, to quell or perhaps silence Miriam’s dissatisfaction, Dr. Spitz prescribed diet pills once a day, which quickly helped Beanie lose some water weight.
“Take two,” Miriam told her, hoping they would miraculously trim her down.
They didn’t.
At the wedding, Beanie wore a custom-made A-line lavender granny dress, dyed-to-match lavender satin pumps with enough of a lift to elongate her frame, and, at Miriam’s insistence, her first girdle.
“All women wear them,” Miriam said, ignoring the fact that neither she nor the twins needed to. Beanie’s dirty-blond hair had been straightened and flattened, and a wreath of flowers encircled the crown of her head, with lavender ribbons flowing down her back. “You are beautiful,” Miriam said, reassuring Beanie and perhaps herself. “You just needed a little help.”