The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted (13 page)

Still, the meetings do work for getting me motivated over and over again. They make me feel like when I was a 98

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d little girl and went to confession every week. All the way home, I used to walk so slow and tight to keep my soul spotless, but as soon as I came in the door, there was my brother. Same thing with the meetings: each time, I vow it’s going to be different this week, and then on the way home I see a Krispy Kreme, no line. Or, you know, my kitchen.

“It’s okay,” my leader always tells me. “We all slip up once in a while. You come to the meetings every week; that’s a
great start
!! Just try to eat less, now.” Her eyes are kind; her belt is cinched a bit too tight, but, hey, let her take credit where credit is due. One thing about those leaders: I always wonder about their personal lives. I mean, are they always like this? If so, do their co-workers at their real jobs want to slug them? Sometimes I wonder so hard about their personal lives it keeps me from paying attention to the meeting, which always has a little allegory of some kind, some story you’re listening to, wondering what does that have to do with anything, and then
whump!
A diet les-son has been delivered. I feel kind of sorry for my leader.

She tries so hard. So yesterday, just for her, I tried to eat right.

I began breakfast with coffee and skim milk. Do you know what drinking coffee with skim milk is like? It’s like asking for a dress and being handed a slip. Also I had toast, which was equally disgusting because it was toast made the new way, using diet bread, a.k.a. cardboard. Here is my recipe for toast made the old way: (1) Go to the bakery and buy a loaf of freshly baked white bread. (2) Take two slices from the middle of the loaf and toast them to just light brown. (3) Lay the toast out on a beautifully patterned antique china plate that has a rim of gold and must be
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washed by hand, but it’s worth it. (4) Saturate the toast with a rounded tablespoon of Plugrá butter (European-style, higher fat content), which has been melted in an old cast-iron skillet that your grandma gave you that never was and is not now all that clean. Just to be clear, that would be a rounded tablespoon of butter on each piece of toast. All the way to the corners and then some. (5) Cut the toast on the diagonal into four lovely pieces. (6) Dunk in hot chocolate you’ve made with Dutch-processed cocoa and cream, and over which you’ve sprinkled fifty or sixty little mini-marshmallows, very fresh and boingy ones.

(7) Eat, while dialing the number for the Buddha. When he answers, say, “You want contentment? I’ll show you contentment!” So that is toast, made the old way.

When you make toast the new way, you spray it with some chemical stuff that comes in a cheerful can and is colored yellow and that is supposed to make you think it tastes like butter, but it does not, it tastes like chemicals and it reminds you of jaundice.

Along with the toast, I had some fruit that I bought in a plastic container at a fancy health food store whose nick-name is Whole Paycheck, because I wanted a mix of fruit and didn’t want to spend a month’s rent on an assortment of whole melons and whole baskets of berries. So I bought this mix that looked very appealing, the cute little blueberries and raspberries mixed with other things like cantaloupe and honeydew (which, wait, what does “honeydew”
mean
?), but guess what? The fruit had
no taste.

Zero. It was all texture, no taste. And the texture was slimy.

And forget bringing the fruit back to the store. Because they are trained to make you feel bad. They say, Sure, we’ll give you a store credit, but look at their nostrils: flared.

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t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d Here is a quiz: What does the dieting woman have for lunch? Right! Salad! And what kind of dressing? Right again! Almost none!

It is said you can get used to salad with no dressing.

Well then, why call it a salad? Why not call it grazing? I will admit that sometimes a strip of red pepper can taste good. But that’s usually because you’ve added salt, which helps just about everything, even chocolate, as they have finally discovered. But when you’re dieting, what must you cut down on, in addition to everything else? Which reminds me: Have you tried air-popped popcorn? No butter, no oil, no salt? I believe it began as a practical joke, but then the diet people heard about it.

Okay, so I had salad with vinegar and an atom of oil. So boring. I had to make up a fantasy to get through it. Which was that I had to eat really fast because I was on my way to an all-expense-paid trip to Japan, where I have been wanting to go lately, so who cared what I was eating, it was just fuel (something else dieters are encouraged to think, that eating is just fuel rather than, oh, a reason to get up in the morning). I had to hurry and eat to catch the plane, where I had a first-class seat. But then my fantasy led to dangerous waters, like, hmmmm, first class, don’t they serve freshly baked chocolate chip cookies on those flights? I wanted to make some low-cal, low-fat coconut custard after that, which really is actually not too bad tasting except you feel like you’re in an old folks’ home when you eat it. But I didn’t make the custard because what usually happens is I eat all of it, not just one serving, and I was
not
going to cheat. One day at a time, as the AA people so wisely tell themselves every day. I modify this to: one meal at a time. So instead of coconut custard, I had an apple, which, like most apples these days because they’re stored
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for two hundred years, tasted like mush.
“Ummmmm!”

said I, to fake myself out. So appley, so not at
all
in need of baking with butter and sugar and cinnamon in a cunning little crust.

Oh, the hours before dinner. Made worse by the exercise obligation hovering over me.
“Get moving,”
said this one pamphlet I got at Weight Watchers. That really gets my dander up.
Get moving!
Like all I do is lie around. No. I do exercise.

My exercise plan, by Melody Peterson: Every day, take a walk unless you are too tired or it’s cold out. Do not pass grocery stores. Or bakeries. Or restaurants. Basically, walk in the woods and worry that someone will kill you for recreational sport before you’ve even come close to your target weight. You might try “Oh, Mr. Murderer, please don’t kill me, I have only fifteen pounds to go.” It
might
work. Because he has his own troubles, obviously, and he might relate.

The afternoon passed, the clock finally said four-thirty, and I could think about cooking dinner. I had to make something I didn’t like so as not to eat too much. What?

Liver? No, I
extremely
don’t like liver, plus it can’t be good for you if its role is to filter out toxins, can it? I never got that. Why would you ever eat liver once you’ve seen and touched it? My mom used to make liver and onions, which I have to tell you made me feel like committing suicide. I would walk in the door after coming home from high school, with all its troubles of where to sit in the cafeteria and pimples and physical education teachers, and say,

“What’s for dinner?” and my mom would say, “Liver and onions!” all cheerful like Avon calling, and I would just de-flate like a cheap balloon.

For dinner, I decided on plain chicken, not even oven-

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t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d roasted, which just carries that buttery connotation plus when you roast a whole chicken you get crispy skin, which no one can resist except New York women. I think the French women do eat it. But their secret is they eat a little tiny bit of it and then a little tiny bit of chocolate and a lot of wine and they go off and have affairs, which of course burns off all the fat.

Crispy chicken skin being the worst for you, it tastes the best. It is just diabolical, how this is all set up, that the best-tasting things are the worst for you. Isn’t it hard enough here? I hear all the time that once I make the change and get used to eating right, an orange will taste like dessert.

“It really will!” they say. To which I silently respond, “Are you talking to me?”

This is a true story. One time I met a chef from a really fancy restaurant, a really expensive one, too. And I asked her what her favorite food was. You know what she said?

“Pork rinds. But homemade ones, which are greasier.”

Which just goes to prove all kinds of points.

So. A plain baked chicken breast, I thought, maybe a little barbecue sauce, even though barbecue sauce makes me think of baked potatoes, loaded, which is the natural accompaniment, the Mrs. to the Mr. of baked chicken. No.

No loaded potato! A plain baked potato, one half, with that damn spray again. Yellow spray. Maybe it doubles as insect repellent, it certainly could, a mosquito would hold up its hand(s), coughing, and say, in its high little whine, “Okay, okay, I surrender, jeez, what
is
that?”

For my vegetable, I would have broccoli, all the broccoli I could eat. Here is my recipe for broccoli: Cook it any way you want, it doesn’t matter, it will never taste really good without hollandaise sauce. Chew it fast with your nose plugged. Done. I did squeeze some lemon on the broccoli,
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which kind of helped. So I squeezed on some more. Quite a bit more. Basically, my vegetable was green lemonade.

So that was dinner. Time, after I was finished? Five-seventeen.
Now what, now what,
I was thinking.
I can’t go
to bed yet.
I went to a double feature at the local theater, two movies I really didn’t care that much about, so I made a game of how many times does someone in the movie wear red? Not often, it turns out, not counting lipstick. I had a big Diet Coke (which I believe kills lab rats) in there with me, and every time someone in the movie ate, I drank. My treat. My “popcorn” and “Junior mints.” Then I came home and took some NyQuil and went to sleep.

And now look. I ought to change the name of this story.

Because that NyQuil? It was
good.

mrs. ethel menafee and

mrs. birdie stoltz

“Seasoned pepper steak over rice,” Birdie says. “And Oriental-blend vegetables.”

“What’s that mean?” Ethel asks.

“What’s what mean?”

“
Oriental-
blend vegetables. What was Oriental about them?”

“Oh. Well, I haven’t an idea in the world.”

“Were there snow peas in there or something? Water chestnuts? Bok choy? Daikon?”

“No. Just peas and carrots. And stop showing off.”

“I’m not showing off! But then . . . was there at least soy sauce over them?”

“Soy sauce? Hold on.” A moment, and then Birdie comes back to the phone. “No. No soy sauce. No butter. No white sauce. No hollandaise. Nothing but peas and carrots,
M r s . E t h e l M e n a f e e a n d M r s . B i r d i e S t o l t z
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and the peas are all wrinkled.” Her voice is fainter now; she’s not speaking into the mouthpiece.

“Birdie, dear, hold the phone up to your mouth.”

“I am.”

“Well, closer.”

“I
am
.”

Ethel turns her head away from the phone to sigh.

Birdie Stoltz. Stubborn as the day is long. It’s a wonder they’ve been friends for over fifty years. “Do you need me to bring anything today?”

“No.”

“
Think
first, Birdie. You might need me to bring something.”

“I don’t need a thing.” She sniffs, punctuating herself.

“All right, then. I’ll see you at one.” Ethel hangs up the phone and stares out the window. Her kitchen curtains need washing and starching. They hang limply inclined toward each other, loose in their tiebacks. They look like matching beggar girls, each asking the other for a crumb to put in her basket.

Ethel wishes that Birdie would just once request something. Bed socks. A bar of rose-scented soap. A
TV Guide
or a
Reader’s Digest.
French fries from McDonald’s, a box of Good & Plenty. Anything to show that she still has an interest in something. She needs to show an interest in something, or this time she won’t come home, Ethel just knows it. And then what. Then it will be Ethel’s turn to wait for the Great Inevitable all by herself.

Ethel considers bringing Birdie something anyway but then decides against it. Too many times she has handed her friend a package, saying, “Surprise!” or “This is for you because I love you” or “Now, don’t get all excited, really, this is nothing,” only to be met by the flat, nearly ac-

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t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d cusatory expression on her friend’s face. Birdie doesn’t like to get gifts when she’s in the hospital. As near as Ethel can tell, it’s because they remind Birdie of where she is and of other things she prefers not to think about. Gifts make her think people feel sorry for her. And she will not be felt sorry for. Birdie spends most of her time in the hospital staring straight ahead, waiting for the doctor to tell her she can go home. If anyone calls her Birdie, she says emphati-cally, “My name is Mrs.
Stoltz.
”