The Secret I was Given

I said that this would be about a woman I knew in grad school, and that's not quite true. She was in grad school, I was a postdoc, and we worked in a relatively large lab for a very well-known inorganic chemist. There were several labs in our warren, and we were in a small one, so it was just the two of us. I need to give her a name, and since she looked like one, all blond and buxom and bouncy, I'll call her Barbie. Very energetic, and surface-friendly, Barbie had an all-consuming inferiority complex, one that focussed on her size.

Like many people from the east coast (and I'm sorry, it's true. I'm not extraordinarily small, but I was told all too often while living there that I was far too thin. Even my physician, who weighed the same as me and who was a good six inches taller, thought that maybe I was too thin. When I asked her what she weighed and then compared it to my weight, she realized that eight years on the east coast had skewed her perceptions. I digress.) Barbie was not particularly small-boned, and yet, after years of exercising continuously and running obsessively, she was as thin as she would ever get. She binge-ate, but only "things in little packages". Go for breakfast? Great. Little peanut butter and jam packets on the table? Super. One minute you're enjoying your toast, the next minute Barbie is eating the peanut butter out of the little packages with her finger. And then the jam. And then the sugar. And then you don't enjoy your toast any more, because even small children aren't usually allowed to do this, never mind an adult woman. Later you would find out that Barbie had squirrelled away eight or ten packets of peanut butter and you'd catch her eating it in the lab. I'd yell at her for this, since you're never supposed to eat in the lab and certainly not with your fingers. After that she'd do it when I wasn't around.

She would actually buy boxes of packages of peanut butter.

She had become bulimic in high school because she went from a skinny, flat-chested 12-year old to a curvy bombshell over a summer, and this shocked her. I do understand eating disorders, don't get me wrong. Food is a powerful thing and we focus on it, we control it, we abuse ourselves with it...and I had just come through a particularly bad bout of food abuse myself while on my previous postdoc and while getting rid of the dickhead known as my first husband. So while I understand that things can get out of hand, if you say that you're over the obsession, then you're over it. You shouldn't lie about being over it, if you're not. If you bring it up in conversation, and say everything is fine, and then go and puke your guts out? You're lying. You can keep lying about it, or you can say that it's not as easy as you thought and you're trying to be okay and sometimes you slip up. Or you can lie because you still need to, I guess. Or you could try to cover it up and hide it. Or I don't know.....you could quit bloody looking for attention all the time. The long and the short of it is that I didn't feel sorry for her obsessions, because I don't respect lying and I hate weakness. This is my own issue though and I realize it sounds particularly hard-hearted but I didn't say I was nice.

Barbie needed to be everyone's fashion consultant. I know what I like and I know what I look good in, and I know that I don't need or want anyone else's opinion on how I should supplement my wardrobe. Barbie took it upon herself to apply her fashion ministrations to all us poor soles who couldn't quite keep up with the latest trends, or who weren't aware that attention to a short waist needs to be diverted, and that big boobs should always be put forward: you need to accentuate your best traits. On the subject of fashion, I didn't need a mentor. She always looked pretty good, and would announce to anyone that she was a winter, a blond winter, isn't that unusual? Many a female chemist would end up with glazed eyes after a chat about their seasonal colours and what they should be wearing. Many of us were really pretty busy and just didn't give a damn.

She tried hard to be a good person, but was so caught up in herself and how she looked and whether or not she was fat, that she didn't have a lot of room to be really caring or concerned about anyone else. She wanted a man, he had to be tall, over six feet, he had to weigh at least 200 pounds, he had to have red hair, he should be Scottish or of Scottish origin, and it would be helpful if he had money, although that wasn't critical since she was going to be a dentist. (She did finish her masters degree and then go to dentistry.) I was actually invited to her wedding six years later, and you bet I went. How could one avoid the extravaganza? Book smart but not a whip of common sense, Barbie is as materialistic and concerned with appearances as you'd expect her to be. On the inside she may have been a bucket of turmoil, but that was only for her to know.

Why do I know all this? Because I hung out with her when she was interested in having me around. I found her amusing, but I am outspoken and I don't often bite my tongue, so I wasn't always the most fun person for her to be with. Plus I was older than her by about eight years, so I didn't care for bar-hopping or the like, and I didn't exercise, and, horror of horrors, I ate what I wanted, when I wanted.

I edited her thesis. The word "circumfrential" doesn't exist, except as the name of a highway around the city that she's from, and I had a difficult argument with her when I wanted to get rid of this particular word. Her abuse of the English language was shocking, even ignoring this particular transgression.

One day, after I'd moved into a new lab in the basement and Barbie was still writing up her thesis prior to dental school, she came down to see me. "I need you to do something for me," she said, "And you can't tell anyone, ever, and you have to prommmmmisssse that you'll never tell anyone that you're doing this, okay?" So I looked at her, and I thought, "Well, I could make this promise and then find out what the deal is. Or I could say forget it, you need someone other than me to do whatever this deed is, and I don't want to be involved," and as usual, despite my misgivings, I promised that I wouldn't tell anyone what it was. Why would I do this? Why would anyone do this? For the sake of doing it. For the experience of whatever it was, because knowing Barbie, it was going to be something (that I thought was) insane. Of course, one would also say yes to a request like this for the sake of gathering information. I don't understand the anxieties that people carry around...I mean, I have my own of course, but I don't understand everyone else's, and I'm always researching how people behave. So I'm mentally taking notes, trying to figure out what on earth she's going to ask me to do. What request carries a caveat of never, ever, telling another living soul? This is especially intriguing because even though Barbie and I are hanging out now and again, I know full well that we aren't friends. She claims we are, but I know we aren't, I wouldn't trust her as far as I could throw her. I didn't even like her very much.

Tomorrow: The Weekly Meet-up