New York Magazine Story (6)

Even though Susie’s health was unraveling—grave back problems, severe diabetes, high blood pressure, eroded knees—the procedure was not an easy sell. She was nervous about giving up her old eating habits, and she’d just watched her sister go through a long, painful recovery. Cahill didn’t push. But as Cahill began to shed pounds and move with more confidence through the world, Susie’s interest began to wax. She and her husband had just bought a new condo, and Susie could barely climb the stairs. And then she had a heart attack.

Susie decided to start attending support- group meetings with Cahill. Eventually, she booked doctors’ appointments. “I’ll never forget the day she went for her consultation with the nutritionist,” says Cahill. “She was struggling to walk. When we got to the middle of the block, there was a railing. She held on to it, started to cry, and said, ‘My biggest fear isn’t the surgery; it’s having them telling me I’m too sick to have it.’ ”

She was told nothing of the sort. On June 13, 2002, just fifteen months after Cahill had her own operation, Susie checked into Lenox Hill, whose reputation in the field of bariatrics is among the finest and whose mortality rates are among the lowest.

The complications started from almost the moment she entered the operating room. Some were routine; others were not. (The hospital, for legal reasons, will not elaborate.) For seventeen nights, Cahill sat beside her sister’s hospital bed, talking to her, playing her music, reading to her from Jane Goodall’s Reason for Hope, even though her sister was in a coma. “I kept saying, ‘If you can hear me, I know this is probably annoying you, and you want me to shut up about the monkeys,’ ” says Cahill. Then she laughs. “But I’m sorry. It’s a wonderful book. It’s about the challenge of being a person of science and faith.”

On the eighteenth night, Cahill, a practicing Catholic, went to the church by the hospital, where she’d already spent a great deal of time those last two weeks. “The words ‘Thy will be done’ are a covenant,” says Cahill. “You better not pray that prayer unless you’re ready to deal with it. That night, when I knew Susie was dying and I said ‘Thy will be done,’ it was probably the most heartfelt prayer I’ve ever said.”

After losing weight, some bariatric patients develop almost an angularity to their personality. It’s not just their jaws and cheekbones that leap out, but a certain sharpness and assertiveness of character. Not Cahill. There’s something about her aspect that remains, to me anyway, very round. It’s the softness of her personality, surely, that accounts for some of it. But one wonders if the rest has to do with a deep identification with her sister. Three years later, Cahill says it’s still difficult to succumb to the awful logic of the situation—that if she hadn’t lost the weight, there’s a chance her sister may not have died right then. “This is the thing I’ll probably carry to the grave,” she says. “Even though it’s not rational, even though I know that if Susie were sitting here, she’d say, ‘Get over it. And don’t give yourself that much credit. I make my own decisions.’ ” She sips some of her coffee.

“The day she went for her consultation,” she continues, “the doctor said, ‘I want you to understand that you’re not going to come out of this looking like Gloria. I can’t promise you’re going to be a size 8.’ And that was fine. She was not doing this to get skinny. And yet . . . when I see myself at 135 pounds, I see part of what Susie died for. By no means all of it. But part.”

Cahill’s crying now, discreetly but steadily. “It would be very easy for me to say, ‘This surgery killed my sister, and it’s the worst thing in the world,’ ” she says. “And her last moments of consciousness may have been imbued with terrible fear . . . ” She looks away. “But also hope,” she resumes, looking directly at me. “This gave my sister hope, and nothing else did.”

She takes her cloth napkin, wipes her eyes, and in the process of setting it down, grazes her blazer across her plate. She laughs it off, declaring the thing indestructible.

“It just amazes me to see how much power comes with prettiness.”

Meanwhile, Sohr’s mother awaits approval for her own gastric band, a far less dangerous procedure, though one not without risks. She seems prepared to take them. Few things have thrilled or inspired her more than watching her daughter’s transformation. In fact, before Sohr made her grand entrance through the floor of the Normandy Room, wearing that Ian Stuart dress and a tiara on her head, she exchanged vows in her mother’s old wedding gown. “To see her, at 35, fit into a dress I wore at 20 . . . that was a very awesome thing for me,” says her mother, Linda Bajada. “The beautiful young girl who once was had come back.”

Sohr met Bari in February 2004, while on vacation in Fort Lauderdale. Her third-to-last day, she popped into a beachfront store to buy a bikini, figuring her body deserved it. A handsome salesman approached and asked if he could be of assistance. She said he could, and he was. As she yo-yo’d in and out of the dressing room, they struck up a conversation. He asked if she’d been out dancing in the area; she mistakenly heard him ask if she wanted to go dancing with him—a mistake that only a woman with renewed confidence in her body would probably make. “Is that an invitation?” she asked. “Sure,” he said, figuring, Why not?

“I gotta be honest with ya,” says Sohr. “I thought he was gonna be a one-night stand.”

It wasn’t, as we all now know. She spent the next 72 hours with him and left on February 12. On Valentine’s Day, Bari spent all day on the phone with his future wife. Six days later, she caught a midnight flight back to Florida and found an apartment with Bari. In May, they moved back to New York. This April, they got married. Almost the entire staff of Long Island Bariatric Center attended, as did her surgeon.

I ask Sohr if she thinks Bari would have considered dating her when she was heavy.

She releases a long stream of smoke. “He’d have been nice to me,” she says. “He’s got friends who are heavy. But dated me? Probably not.” Bari opens his mouth to protest. She waves him off. “Let’s face it, the guy could be a GQ model. He is gorgeous”—gawgeous—“but during that period, I was different—very down, very drab personality. I wouldn’t have talked to myself.”

Bari doesn’t buy it. “I just saw the eyes,” he says. “That’s why I married her—so I could look into those eyes for the rest of my life. The body, it’s just the outside. What’s it gonna be twenty years from now? What I look for in a woman is a good personality and a friend.”

Sohr still keeps a picture of her old self in her wallet. It’s “a really gross one,” as she calls it. She wants everyone in the world to know that a similar transformation is available to them. “Anyone I see who’s overweight, I start a conversation about it,” she says. “I never forget where I came from.”

She also shows me a picture of herself in the bikini she bought from Bari. She looks staggeringly skinny in it. She says she’s gained weight since.

“But I was a size zero once in my life,” she says. “I hit my goal. I blew past my goal. I was there.”

Bari pipes up. “And I didn’t like it,” he says. “There was nothing to grab. Nothing! No meat.”