Nursey

I think I should make “one thing perfectly clear” (I am old enough to have lived through Nixon as Veep and as Prez), I wanted to be a nurse when I was a kid – at least I thought I could be a nurse because I wanted to be a doctor until I learned how much it cost to go to med school. Hell, forget about med school, Pop had told me I couldn’t go to college.
So there I was, sometimes interested in science and sometimes not and wanting to do something with my life – because in the early years of the decade now known as the Swinging Sixties, who was going to marry a fat girl and make her a housewife. And, anyway, Pop had logically explained to me that I needed a career – “just in case my husband died.” That was, of course, if some poor slob did decide to marry this fat girl – which, we were all sure wouldn’t happen.
But in high school I discovered I had a talent: I could write. And not just doggerel or little stories about puppies and girlfriends (I didn’t have a puppy and had few real girlfriends). I could write satire. I had a wit – something that must have been born out of years of being teased about my weight – having been fat since I was eight years old.
Let’s get this over with now – the weight thing. Because the weight – my weight – or the issue of my weight – my issue and others’ issues with my weight – is an important part of the story. It’s an important part because it defines me. And any story about me – even one that hinges basically on me and my profession – must eventually deal with the weight. So, like I said – let’s get this over with now.
The story goes in my family – at least it did when my parents were still alive and continues with me – that I was a skinny kid. I can validate this with pictures from my childhood. I am a normal, if not slightly smaller, 4, 5, 6 year old and then suddenly around the age of 7 or 8, I chubbed up. My mother would tell me that I had always been what all parents of the 50’s era dreaded, “The Picky Eater.” I would eat only bits of what was placed in front of me and meal times became a battlefield. There were the pleadings, the threats, the tales of children in other countries – usually China and India – who were starving and wasn’t I just the most selfish child, because, in the wake of all this hunger, I wanted to waste food. If I had only known my parents own histories – of growing up poor in the backwoods of West Virginia, both having hard scrabble lives through the Depression, I would have understood there concern over “throwing away perfectly good food.” Hell, I would have understood the bacon grease can that my mother kept. But I was a kid. I just knew that I was going to put into my mouth something that looked dead or something that was green and overcooked to a pasty substance.
And so, I was a skinny kid. And then I became a sickly kid. And I was taken to doctors. I was admitted to a hospital around the age of 6 or 7 – doctors thinking that I had some kind of dreaded disease – like leukemia or something. I didn’t. So finally, my father, who had not gone past eighth grade, hit upon the way to get his daughter to eat.
“You must not love me or your mother. You’re not eating the food I worked hard to buy and your mother took the time to cook.”
There is - was – the best motivator – guilt. And he poured it on like maple syrup on pancakes. And within a few years, mom and dad were begging me NOT to eat.
I became a fat kid, then a fat adolescent and then a fat teenager.
I never went to a prom or a dance – never had a date and never was kissed. All of that was me when I arrived at nursing school.
That and more.
By the time I was senior in high school, I had realized that I didn’t want to be a nurse. Oh, I knew what I wanted to be. I wanted to write. I wanted to be a reporter for the Washington Post. In the early sixties I read the Post from cover to cover – not just the funnies – but they were good, too.
I grew up reading a liberal rag so at the age of 13 I was a liberal – although I didn’t exactly know what that term was. I did know that my father was wrong about “the coloreds” – in fact he was wrong about the term, “the coloreds” – they were Negroes – at least in 1960, they were Negroes. I don’t how I knew he was wrong – God knows that up until then I had thought my father right about everything else in the world –but by 1960 everything changed. I was thirteen and Kennedy was president and civil rights was becoming an issue.
And so I wanted to write for the Washington Post. Throughout middle school and high school I wrote for the school papers. I wrote short stories and poems – pounding away on an old typewriter in my “office”, the basement of the little house on Lyon Avenue in Howard County Maryland. Pop had given me the little Royal portable as a Christmas present, hoping that it would inspire me to learn to type – so I could earn my living as a secretary. Oh, it inspired me alright – it inspired me to write. I can still remember seeing the picture of Grace Metallious sitting at a typewriter at her kitchen table, a chubby woman in jeans. Grace had written one of the biggest bestsellers of the 60’s, Peyton Place. She was my idol. Grace was chubby and she was a writer. I was chubby and wanted to be a writer.
Now, those of you who’ve come this far may be wondering, “Why is she so obsessed about her weight?” Anyone thinking that thought has been slender their entire life – or for the formative part of their life. I could be 110 pounds and still think of myself as fat. As I said in the beginning, weight for a fat child, especially a girl, defines her personality. So deal with it!

To be continued