Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (15 page)

I spent most of that summer working for one writer, David Gates, who was in charge of a feature of the magazine called “Update.” He had big eyeglasses, a sprawling mane of frizzy hair and a talent for speaking in slowly unfurling, irony-inflected, gorgeously sculpted sentences that instantly sealed my admiration for him. When I learned more about him—or rather one detail in particular—that admiration turned to awe. He had been married to Ann Beattie, whose short stories, every single one of them, I’d read when I was avoiding Chaucer, Petrarch and Coleridge.

He was now involved with another writer, Elizabeth Kaye, who did long celebrity profiles for
Rolling Stone
. Could a couple be any cooler? When they asked me to dinner one night, I was light-headed with glee, until it hit me: while there might, among the clothes with me that summer, be a button-down nicer (albeit tighter) than the ones I’d been wearing regularly to the office, my choice of pants was, well, the burgundy or the forest green corduroys. I cursed every oversize meal I’d eaten on every day of every week of the last month. I made an irrevocable, unequivocal decision not to eat another oversize meal for the rest of the summer.

And then I sat down in a Chinese restaurant with David and Elizabeth and had multiple helpings of one of the dishes in front of us. How could I not? The dish was cold noodles in sesame paste. It looked like spaghetti sauced with peanut butter. It tasted like that, too, and if chemists had gone into a laboratory to hatch a calorie-ridden Kryptonite just for me, this is precisely what they would have come up with: a sort of pasta, my vulnerability to which was encoded in my genes, smothered with an analogue to peanut butter, my vulnerability to which was documented by a trail of empty jars in the cupboards and waste bins of my childhood.

Before that night with David and Elizabeth, I’d never eaten this, but I would eat it again and again in the months and years to come. I’d eat it with strands of cucumber on top, because some Chinese restaurants served it that way. I’d eat it with chopped peanuts on top, which was the way of other restaurants. I’d eat it with scallions in the mix, and I’d eat it when the sesame paste was really more of a sesame splash, pooling beneath the noodles instead of clinging to them. Restaurants that served the dish in this overly wet fashion were restaurants I didn’t patronize again.

I also tried to hook Beth on cold noodles with sesame paste, at least the few times I saw her that summer. With so much distance between Carolina and Yale, we weren’t doing a good job of keeping in touch, but I met her for dinner after leaving the
Newsweek
offices one night. I suggested Chinese. She suggested some macrobiotic nonsense. I relented. Later, when I returned to my Downtown loft, I called for Chinese delivery. And I ate the cold noodles in sesame paste straight from their paper carton, which I emptied.

 

 

 

 

The noodles were the real legacy of my first internship with
Newsweek
. The legacy of my second internship with
Newsweek
—I returned the next summer—was different, and in fact didn’t involve food. It involved the murder of Mary Tyler Moore.

I was floating through the magazine that summer, which meant I was contributing reporting to, and doing fact-checking for, different sections on different weeks. My best buddy among my fellow interns was a bubbly, chirpy young woman named Karen. She enjoyed playing the naïf, so I enjoyed playing tricks on her. One week, when she was doing fact-checking for the magazine’s Transitions page, I played a foolish one.

Fact-checking the Transitions page involved rounding up, for the page’s writer, the most important biographical milestones of the week: which famous people had given birth or won big lawsuits or celebrated a wedding or, most important of all, died.

“If there were any deaths this week I don’t know about, make sure to tell me!” Karen said to me via an electronic message from her computer terminal to mine. I couldn’t tell if she was serious. But even if she was, I decided, I’d have a moment’s fun.

“Well,” I wrote back, “Mary Tyler Moore died this morning, but of course you know that.” Mary’s name just came to me, from nowhere. I plucked it from the air.

Karen asked if I was kidding.

I said I wasn’t.

Then I waited for what I was sure would be one more inquiry, via electronic message, about my seriousness, upon receipt of which I’d admit the joke.

Five minutes later, I hadn’t heard back from her.

I sent her a new message: Just kidding, pulling your leg, I’m sure you know that, please tell me you got this, please please please.

A minute passed. No response.

Another minute. No word.

I picked up the phone and dialed her extension.

No answer.

About a minute later, I heard a rumble at the far end of the corridor along which my cubicle sat. The rumble became more of a thunder: the sound of several people walking heavily and hurriedly in my direction. I poked my head out of my cubicle and saw them: Karen and Elsie, who was in charge of all the fact-checkers for the features sections, bearing down on me. Each of them was riffling through and staring at a long roll of printed Associated Press and United Press International copy that unspooled from her arms. Each of them looked frantic.

“Where,” Elsie asked me, “did you hear that Mary Tyler Moore died?”

I did a quick survey. I made a mental measurement. And to my considerable distress, the space just under my computer keyboard was not quite tall and broad enough for me to crawl into.

“Um,” I said, trying to make my voice sound bright and unbowed. “Nowhere! I was just playing! Come on, you know I was just playing, don’t you?”

Elsie actually smiled. She poked Karen in the ribs. “I
told
you,” she said. She laughed.

Karen, her face reddening, laughed, too.

They went away, and I went back to work, oblivious for the next two hours to the full chain of events I had set off.

Before appearing at my cubicle, Karen had messaged the Transitions writer to alert her to Mary Tyler Moore’s death. That writer had messaged or called some midlevel editor. That editor had in turn notified the top brass, who sent word out to the Los Angeles bureau that the magazine might have to open up a few pages in its coming issue for a major story, something like “Death of an American Icon.”

Word of Mary’s passing had left the building, reaching enough reporters at enough news organizations who made enough calls to some publicist of Mary’s that the publicist began reaching out to news organizations that hadn’t called to deny this metastasizing rumor and make clear that Mary was alive and well.

I learned most of this as I received a stern talking-to in the office of the editor in charge of summer interns. The rest of it I pieced together from various other sources, including the next morning’s
New York Post
. It contained an entire article about Mary having to dispel some strange rumor that she had died.

I figured my career was over. I figured my
life
was over. They were done with, wasted: all the hours at the Carolina newspaper, both summer internships at
Newsweek
. Some High Central Committee of Journalism, learning of my irresponsible behavior and taking special offense at its injury to
an American icon
, was going to ban me from the profession forever more. No newspaper work. Certainly no
Newsweek
ly work. I’d return to college without a backup plan, without direction, another superfluous English major who could rattle off lines of Shakespearean sonnets but had no social utility or marketable skill. I’d fall victim to a fatal case of purposelessness and, unlike Mary, die an early and unmentioned death.

But as the
Post
story made a point of noting, Mary and her publicist had no idea where the death rumor had come from, and that turned out to be my saving grace. I hadn’t directly embarrassed
Newsweek.
In a few days’ time, I was forgiven.

Before it was entirely clear that I would be, as I wondered if it weren’t too late to tailor my classes at Carolina for a new career in telemarketing or taxidermy, I took advantage of a day off to get out of the city and away from
Newsweek
, journalism or any reminder of either. I went to Grandma’s summer house in Madison, and I ate. I ate pizza she baked in the oven and steak that Uncle Mario cooked on the grill and anything else put in front of me.

I would have gone even farther, all the way to Avon, and let Mom tend to me, but she and Dad weren’t there anymore. Between my sophomore and junior years at Carolina, Dad had been transferred from Hartford to San Diego, far enough from the Northeast that they were no longer dependable attendees of family holidays and other get-togethers. They settled in La Jolla, a wealthy oceanfront community about a twenty-minute drive north of the city center. The house they bought there was a stunner. It should come as no surprise that the most stunning room in it was the kitchen.

The wallpaper has to go!” Mom told me during the first of our many telephone conversations about the house in La Jolla, which absorbed her attentions like no house before it. She was referring to the wallpaper in the kitchen, which absorbed her attentions like no other room. “It’s hideous,” she said. “Garish! Purple, turquoise, shiny, metallic. Very dated. Very
seventies
.”

It was only the mideighties, mind you, and Mom had never before focused on interior design. The financial demands of four Bruni kids and six Bruni stomachs hadn’t left her and Dad with a lavish budget for keeping current with décor trends. In our living room in Avon the furniture was the same set that my parents had purchased for, and used in, the first house they had ever owned. It was very
fifties.
Mom and Dad didn’t drive fancy cars or wear fancy clothes or take especially fancy vacations. They paid the high mortgages on spacious houses with individual bedrooms for each kid. They paid private school tuition and swimming-related travel costs. And they bought enough food for a small country: Liechtenstein for sure, and quite possibly Andorra. They didn’t sweat the bathroom fixtures.

Until La Jolla. Dad’s transfer was a big promotion accompanied by a big salary hike and a sizable housing allowance, and Mom suddenly went real estate mad. “Suddenly” isn’t quite right: she had always had a voyeuristic curiosity about other people’s houses, floor plans and asking prices, and there was a period in Connecticut when, on weekends, she’d tote me with her to open houses, telling the Realtor at the door that we were relocating to the area from Cleveland or Kansas City or Saint Louis. She’d always cite a city in the Midwest, perhaps reasoning that the Midwest was regionally vague enough that we could pass as Midwesterners. Sometimes she’d even invent a new profession for her absent husband: doctor, lawyer, nuclear physicist. If we spotted someone we knew upon entering the house, she’d switch strategies and say she was there on a scouting mission for a doctor, lawyer or nuclear physicist who was a close family friend and about to relocate. Upon leaving, she’d turn to me and commence her review: the master bath was too cramped, the family room too remote, the marble tiles in the foyer too imperial. But the second-floor laundry room? She craved one of those. Life, she frequently said, would be complete with a second-floor laundry room, just outside the master bedroom, eliminating the need for a hamper or for hauling armfuls of dirty socks and bedsheets down a flight of stairs.

The house in La Jolla was all on one level, a contemporary beauty with all sorts of neat facets and tricks: a fireplace that lighted itself; blinds that could be raised or lowered with the flicks of switches; “central vacuum.” The kitchen was gadget central. On the vast center island, there was a separate sink with a special faucet for instant hot water, and there was an appliance dedicated solely to the constant production and storage of ice, a production attended by a faint whirring and plopping and crunching that never quite ceased. On a long counter nearby was an “appliance dock,” into which you placed the specially designed can opener and the specially designed blender, neither of which needed to be plugged into sockets. And against the wall separating the kitchen from the family room was an old-fashioned soda fountain, with bays and spigots for different syrups, a wand that produced carbonated water and deep, temperature-controlled compartments for tubs of ice cream.

Mom and Dad weren’t about to let this soda fountain lie fallow, so they’d go to the local Baskin-Robbins and get the workers there to cut those broad cylindrical columns of ice cream beneath the glass display cases in half. They’d lug home these squat, frozen tree stumps and, with much huffing and moaning and griping about back strain, lower the stumps into the proper recesses of the soda fountain. There was room for three kinds of ice cream: usually Rocky Road (Dad’s favorite), Pralines ’n Cream (Mom’s favorite) and one other (Peanut Butter ’n Chocolate if I was visiting). To get at this treasure, you had to reach deep with a real ice cream scoop, as if you were at a real ice cream parlor.

Mom adored this kitchen, which was so spacious you could run laps around that island and sleep on the counters that skirted it—they were that long. The actual countertops, though, weren’t acceptable. While Formica had been good enough for Connecticut Mom, it wasn’t for California Mom, who coveted Corian, a matte marble-emulating synthetic that had just come into vogue. One of its selling points was that if it got nicked or dinged badly over time, its top layer could be sanded down, and it would be good as new.

“You can cut on it!” Mom exulted, a detail that so transfixed her she couldn’t stop mentioning it. Talking for the umpteenth time about the various color options she was considering for her new countertops, she’d pause to interject: “You can cut on these countertops, did you know that?” Yes, yes, I did. And I began to worry: given her apparent zeal to exploit this virtue of Corian, would we henceforth stand in a phalanx at the kitchen counter to eat plateless steak dinners, so that we could just slice right through the gristle and sinew to the sandable surface beneath?