“Fine, fine,” he said. “Let’s continue with the Dead White Men tour.” He shook his head sadly. “I have to say, though, I expected better of you.”
Just for that, Abby walked him back to City Hall, and the statue of Octavius Catto, a Black athlete and activist who’d desegregated the city’s trolleys and who was assassinated on Election Day in 1871 while he tried to bring Black voters to the polls. They walked east, to the mural of a young Black woman’s face on Eleventh and Sansom, which had been done by Amy Sherald, whose painting of Michelle Obama hung in the National Portrait Gallery, and Abby told Mark there was a tour he could take of the city’s many murals.
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “Or shall we continue on to the Betsy Ross House?”
“I could eat,” Mark said.
Can you? Abby wondered. She’d never known anyone who’d had the surgery and didn’t know what Mark’s limitations were.
“I can,” he said when she asked. “Most foods. As long as I don’t eat too much, and I chew everything really carefully.”
Awesome, Abby thought, and hoped she’d kept her face expressionless. They walked east, toward the Delaware River, trading stories of the last decade and a half.
“This was my favorite place to take the kids when I was a nanny,” Abby told him. “There’s a skating rink at the end of the pier. You can ice-skate in the winter and roller-skate in the summer. And there’s a dog park past that. And you can ride the ferry over to Camden and back again. Which little kids are surprisingly into.”
Mark nodded. They’d gotten fried chicken sandwiches at Federal Donuts after all, and they sat on the ledge by the water to eat them. Abby had devoured half of her sandwich before Mark had even tasted his. She watched, trying not to be obvious about it, as he pulled off the bun and the pickles and painstakingly removed every bit of breading from his chicken breast.
“Are you sure this is okay for you?” she finally asked. “We can go someplace else. There’s great sushi. And there’s an amazing place where they make fresh hummus…”
“No, no,” he’d said firmly. “This is fine.” He’d taken a big bite of bare chicken to prove it. Abby had watched his jaw work as he chewed. She remembered how he’d looked when he’d told her about his surgery. “Nothing was working,” he’d said, his head bent and his voice so quiet it was almost inaudible, as if what he was confessing—being fat and unable to become otherwise—was worse than being a criminal, or a sex offender. “And nothing was going to work.”
“Yeah, most diets don’t work, in the long term,” Abby said. “And Camp Golden Hills probably did us more harm than good.” By then, she’d done plenty of reading about shows like The Biggest Loser and places like Camp Golden Hills, and how the science showed that radically restrictive diets and hours of vigorous exercise yielded short-term loss that was almost inevitably followed by the dieter regaining every pound they’d shed and then some. She’d learned that losing the weight a second, or third, or fourth time was complicated by the way the dieter’s metabolism slowed down, the dieter’s body determined to hang on to the pounds the next time it was threatened with starvation. She knew about the weight-loss drugs, and the surgical options—mostly because Eileen insisted on mailing her links every few weeks, usually with a note attached that said something like Gary and I would be more than happy to help with this! She had done a lot of reading, and listened to a lot of podcasts about body positivity and health at every size, and how diet culture and Western beauty standards contributed to, and were fed by, capitalism and racism and misogyny in an endless loop that left women hungry and unhappy with empty bellies and depleted bank accounts, starving and tractable, too weak to change the world, or the way they had to move through it.
Hating yourself took a toll: on your finances, your self-esteem, your time. That afternoon, Abby told Mark that she’d decided to stop dieting and to focus on her health; that she did her best to practice intuitive eating honoring her body’s appetites.
“My doctor doesn’t even have a scale in her office. Which is refreshing. I can remember going to see my pediatrician for ear infections, and getting a lecture about being more active and eating more fruits and vegetables,” Abby said. She told Mark that she exercised, only she did it for strength and endurance and flexibility and maintaining her sanity, not weight loss. She told him that her doctor thought that the BMI was garbage, that yo-yo dieting was worse than being quote-unquote overweight or obese, and that any body could be a healthy body, whether or not it fit current definitions of what was beautiful. She said that she was mostly okay—or that she was trying, every day, to be okay—at her current size and had no intention of trying to make herself smaller.