Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (5 page)

I knew that Amy’s mom kept chocolate-covered Oreos in the door of the refrigerator.

“Did you eat all my mom’s cookies?” Amy asked me on the phone one night.

“Oh. Those Oreos? No, I had like one.”

“Because they’re all gone now. It’s just the empty wrapper.”

“Oh geez, no. I don’t know what happened, but I only had a couple.”

“It’s fine if you ate them.”

“No, I know! But I seriously just had a few of them. There were like three left.”

“Okay. They’re good, right?”

“Yeah, they’re okay.”

I was good, but not perfect. And each time I got caught the shame was so great, my blush so quick and searing that I thought I might physically burn. Being busted by a friend was one thing—I could just avoid Amy for a few days, fantasize about transferring to a new school, perhaps in Eastern Europe. But with Mom, each infraction was a mark, indelible and damning. Take too big a slice of my little brother’s birthday cake, and she would turn her face from me, her words clipped and brief for the rest of the meal. Later, I might jump to help clear the table without being asked; it wouldn’t make up for my mistake, but it would give me an excuse to go into the kitchen where she angrily scraped plates into the trash.

“I’m really sorry.” I went quiet as an orphan, Oliver Twist with his hands out. But it was the wrong play. She dropped a plate into the sink.

“I just don’t understand. I am doing my damnedest to help you here, and you just want to eat cake all night.”

I had become a seasoned sneak, a spy in a school uniform. There were napkin-wrapped cookies slipped into the inner pockets of my winter coat and Halloween candy folded up inside my sweaters at the top of my closet. In front of others I ate properly portioned, unbuttered vegetables and asked for seconds only on salad. Alone, I honed my skills at soundlessly opening wrappers and letting a potato chip dissolve on my tongue without any visible chewing.

In all my months of secret pantry snacking, I’d never once been caught. So, that evening when my mother swung open the door just as my fingers had plunged into the Toll House container, we were both stunned into silence. We held the tableau for an endless moment, such a brazen violation: my hand was caught in the cookie jar. My dad’s tin-can voice called through the receiver (“Hello?! Did you drop the phone?!”). Mom looked from my hand to my pale, ever-rounding face.

“I’m done.”

The door flew shut. And I ate the chips.

To be clear: I know I’m not Oliver Twist. I don’t have nearly enough fucked-upness for a Fucked-Up Family memoir—at least not one I haven’t already read five times. My mom wasn’t Joan Crawford, my dad wasn’t a deadbeat, and my grandmother didn’t keep us hidden in the attic for three years in a secret incest plot. I didn’t have it
that
bad. I just didn’t have it great.

My parents split up when I was two years old. Having no actual memories of their marriage, I didn’t feel so much like a “child of divorce” than a child who’d been erroneously assigned to two people who couldn’t stand to be in the same room. I was fascinated to hear stories from the time they’d been a couple and marveled at their engagement photos in the albums on my grandparents’ shelves. But when I daydreamed about my young, happy parents, it wasn’t with the secret yearning for Mommy and Daddy to get back together. I just wondered how the hell they’d even been a couple in the first place.

My version of their story is one pasted together from other peoples’ anecdotes, filtered through the lens of nostalgia and New York City lore. I could take a walking tour of my parents’ romance, starting with a brownstone basement on East Thirty-Seventh Street, where they met. Next would be Grace Church, the Gothic revival landmark on Broadway, where they married a few years later. From there it’s just a five-minute walk over to East Seventeenth Street, where they lived in a fifth-floor walk-up next to Stuyvesant Square. They’d both been the renegade kids from nice families. Mom had grown up in Gramercy Park, calling herself “the blonde sheep.” Dad was a musician from Washington, DC, and had defected to New York in the late ’60s from a childhood of white gloves and English boarding schools. She was younger, he was older, and together they set out to build a family and get it right. They moved to the suburbs and had me, and shortly thereafter it all went wrong.

No one ever told me just how or why, and I suppose that’s the decent thing to do. There were a lot of things no one ever told me about: the wild ups and downs my mother had been cycling through since childhood. All I knew was when she was fun, she was the
most
fun, telling colorful stories and showering me in adoration. Sometimes it would last for months and I relished every moment, filling up on her love. Because when she got quiet and tired and angry, it was as if her darkness would swallow us both. There were clinical names and diagnoses for this cycle, but no one told me that back then. Why would they? What would a toddler do with words like
borderline
and
bipolar
?

There was another word I didn’t know until much later. That brownstone basement where my parents met was the site of a local AA meeting. My dad’s sobriety would remain intact, but my mother had two demons to contend with. Mental illness and alcoholism mix all too well. As a child, I didn’t know when she was sober or off the wagon, stable or symptomatic. She was just my mom.

My mother was twenty-five when they divorced, and we moved into a rented duplex on the grounds of a country club in Sleepy Hollow. (See: aforementioned not-that-badness. Even when we were broke we were broke at a country club.) She had just finished a degree at the Culinary Institute of America and worked as an editor and food stylist at
Gourmet
while I attended the local preschool. I’d bop around the magazine offices a few times a month, the editorial department keeping half an eye on me as I colored with their marker sets and smushed my face onto the Xerox machine, making color copies for everyone.

Mom began dating an investment banker named Steve, and soon our group of Sleepy Hollow friends grew. They always seemed to be throwing casual dinner parties at one another’s houses, each night ending in a cozy cloud of cigar smoke and the Grateful Dead. Sometimes there were other kids around, but I didn’t mind it when I was the only one. Some nights, I’d be allowed to stay up late and play with the warm and tipsy guests who put their lipstick on me or braided my hair, goofing around until I fell asleep somewhere that wasn’t my bed.

When I think about those boisterous evenings now, I blame everyone for what happened. Yes, my mother should have seen it first, but I could burst with molten outrage at each of the adults in that house who cooed over how precocious I was and then turned away, bored. I want to shake them by their selfish shoulders and shout over the stereo, “I can see you’re just trying to enjoy your twenties, but isn’t it a school night?” Surely, I would have sulked and screamed at being treated like a child. After all, I was a member of the gang and they were
my
friends, too. And so, a few years later, when one of them began to put his hands on me, it never occurred to me to tell my mother or anyone else. None of them seemed to notice it that first time or the second or the third. No matter how my skin went hot with fear and revulsion at his touch, I knew that nothing could be really wrong here. He was just being friendly.

It would be years before I said anything and many years before I said it using the right words. I didn’t want that to be part of my story. Instead, I told the funny bits of my childhood: the time I pushed aside my plate at Indochine and conked out at the table, and other quirky anecdotes starring Mom as the WASP-y bohemian and me as her little smart-mouthed sidekick.

With Dad, I was back in the stroller. He’d moved back to the city after the divorce, and most weekends, we tooled around Manhattan, frequenting our favorite playgrounds in Central Park and strolling past the other, far inferior ones that didn’t have swings or monkey bars. Every morning, we got poppy seed bagels and cartons of orange juice, discussing what movie we might catch that afternoon. At night, we ate heaps of Daddy’s Famous Spaghetti before I’d play with his cassette recorder, singing commercial jingles into one end and delighting to hear my own voice come out the other.

Dad was a singer-songwriter, and having been on the front lines of the music scene in the ’60s and ’70s, he’d already lived the kind of life most of us will only hear about in Bob Dylan lyrics. He’d lived on Saint Mark’s Place when the rent was fifty dollars, and seen the Beatles play club gigs in Paris before they hit the US. I might have fallen asleep at Indochine, but he bussed tables at Max’s Kansas City. No matter how many restaurants I pass out in, I’ll never story-top my dad.

But that had happened twenty years and twelve steps before I was born. He’d been sober for years when he met my mom, and all those juicy tales were part of a history he was trying to leave behind. By now, Dad was burned out on New York and the music business, visibly gutted by the breakup of his marriage, and always so desperately sad when I waved good-bye to him. Even as a toddler, I just wanted so badly to make him feel better. I think I succeeded, sometimes.

Dad left New York and moved to Paris when I was five, taking an apartment not far from where his sister lived with her French husband and children. Knowing him, he must have explained it to me over and over again, but I don’t remember the details. I was sad and scared to see him go, but I believed him when he said he
had
to. In my mind, it wasn’t a decision. How could it be when I was the most important thing in the world to him? He didn’t have a choice; he simply could not live in New York anymore, and the only place he had to go was three thousand miles away. I took it as a given, just as I had always understood my parents’ divorce was just a thing that happened. Shortly after his move, I flew over for a lengthy summer stay. It was wonderful, having months of unbroken time together, but every night I dreamt of my mom and woke up in tears.

“You were always very attached to your mother,” Dad now likes to say, recalling my childhood and his ever-present distance in it. Perhaps because I dearly love my father, I hear this not so much as an excuse as a lament. If only I hadn’t been so anxious and sorrowful without my mother. Then what, I don’t know. There’s only the “if only.”

I flew back to New York, pudgy with Nutella sandwiches and
pommes frites
from my aunt’s kitchen. Mom was engaged to the guy she’d been dating, and shortly thereafter, pregnant, too.

Dad came back to the States a couple years later—not to New York, but to Washington, DC, where he’d grown up. Now we were back to long-weekend visits, or even just day trips, when he’d drive up early in the morning to take me to lunch and a movie, and then head back down I-95 before dark.

My mom and I had left the country club and moved in with my new stepfather, Steve, into his little riverside house in Croton-on-Hudson. He’d lived there since his college days, and the place remained littered with relics of the party-cum-crash-pad it had been.

“Is this for closing potato chip bags?” I once asked, fishing the roach clip out of a drawer.

Mom smirked and laughed, taking it from me and shouting to Steve, “Honey, guess what Kelsey just said!” Another little story I like to tell.

The days of
Gourmet
were over, but our house was still full of people—two more than before, with the arrival of my new baby brother and sister, born eighteen months apart.

My dad’s place, by contrast, was sparse and unlived in. When I came down to DC for visits, he’d pull out the convertible loveseat he’d tucked away behind a bookshelf with a little bedside table to give some sense of a bedroom. Our visits were regular and comfortably routine. I’d fly down from Westchester Airport, rocking an Unaccompanied Minor pin on my jacket. It was usually just me and four to seven extremely suited businessmen on the otherwise empty shuttle. I was the only one on those flights who didn’t look like I was heading down to Washington to give the president a piece of my mind. Dad met me on the other end, waiting at the gate. He’d always have downed a giant coffee while waiting for me, so he’d park me at a bench near the men’s room and instruct me to scream if anyone came near me.