February 4, 2006
Saturday 

It happens a lot. I’ll see myself reflected in the glass doors of the shopping center as I approach, or captured in the background in somebody’s Vacation Bible School pictures. It even happens sometimes when I see my shadow preceding me down the driveway to the mailbox. These days, it seems, I’m sporting the look my mother would have called “matronly,” and I’m astonished at how bulky I appear. That can’t be me, I’ll say. That’s not what I look like!

My mother was concerned about my appearance when I was in high school. I even have the letter she wrote to my doctor just before the physical I needed to enroll in college. She refers to me as a “blob of blubber” and asks him to talk to me about weight control, although she notes that “the condition is obvious” and as a health professional he certainly has noticed it himself. The doctor’s records indicate that I stood 5’4″ tall and weighed 140 pounds.

Many of the letters I used to get from my former students during their first year at college wail about the “freshman fifteen,” the weight gain experienced by some young women away from home for the first time. Some of them eat to help manage the anxiety of being on their own and solely responsible for the management of their time. Some of them share apartments with others whose collective cooking skills are at best rudimentary, so there’s a lot of dependence on Pizza Hut and McDonald’s. They come home at spring break a little more filled out than before, which in some cases is an improvement.

My own “freshman fifteen” was, to my mother’s delight (and my own, I must admit), a loss. By the end of sophomore year in 1967, I was down to 120 pounds.

That August I got a call from a young man I had known for two years. He was part of the crowd I hung out with. I’d dated a friend of his, but we’d broken up.

He invited me to spend a Sunday afternoon with him and his family at their vacation house a few miles down the Susquehanna. There’d be swimming and water skiing, grilled steaks and fresh corn. What a proper, polite thing — your first date is a family event, chaperoned, protected. I accepted the invitation and immediately began to pray for rain.

Not only was I not adept at water sports, I was worried about my appearance. Even though I’d known this young man casually for quite some time, I was horrified at the thought of being with him while wearing a bathing suit. I felt too dumpy and awkward. How could I have a conversation with him or his parents with my breasts and stomach outlined under a thin and close-fitting cover of lycra, my legs all bare?

As it happened, it did rain or something, and we wound up going out for dinner, where I could wear a dress and stockings and real shoes. I didn’t have to expose the shame of my ungainly body and my woeful athletic skills.

I was 20 years old. I weighed 117 pounds.

The young man and I dated occasionally for a year. Eventually we lost interest in each other and I never saw him again. In the late 1990s, his niece graduated from the school where I taught. He knew I was teaching there and he asked about me through her. As I processed down the aisle at her commencement, swathed in academic regalia and a hundred pounds heavier than I’d been when I last saw him, I wondered if he might be among the spectators. But I didn’t hang around afterward to find out. In truth, I imagined him the way he was back then, and myself having to tell him who I was.

A few weeks ago I was cleaning up the kitchen after dinner with the NBC Nightly News in the background. The NBC channel broadcasts the Pennsylvania Lottery drawings live right after the news. I picked up the remote to switch the tv off when I heard the names of that night’s lottery official and the “senior citizen witness” announced. The witness was the young man I knew nearly forty years ago.

I peered hard at the screen. What I saw was a tall man with gray hair and much softer contours than I remembered. Just like me. I wouldn’t have recognized him.

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If I saw the 20-year-old me walking down the street, would I recognize her?