I'm prancing around the house in black pantyhose and a short skirt that would be longer if it wasn't too tight around my stomach and on what I called to my mother "knock off" black boots.
"Was that skirt twenty pounds ago?" My mother comments when she takes a look at me in my bedroom.
I nervously pull at the skirt, "Fifteen or twenty pounds, yeah." I bought it months ago, and it was loose then.
"Let me look at you," she says as I spin around. She insists that I go to a New Year's Eve party in either dress pants or a skirt, even though the get-together is for recovering addicts who are essentially homeless. A bit like going to the Christmas party for the other people with severe mental illness who make up my current therapeutic program. No one is going to dress up. People can barely afford Walmart jeans and t-shirts. "What else do you have?"She runs her hands over the small selection of clothes I have, much of which I can't fit into. I have more pairs of jeans and dress pants in sizes four and six than I could ever need--buying them out of vanity that I could actually fit into something that small. Now, they are useless, and the odds are fairly good that I will never be able to dress myself in them again, as our body is just organized on the imperative that we need to keep all the weight we gain, and therefore we mustn't lose those precious pounds which could save us in a famine.
"That's all I have, I can't fit into anything else, the rest of my clothes are in the garage," I answer. I have two rows of clothes in a closed room in a shop.
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