Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (16 page)

In fact Mom seldom cut on the snowy white Corian she chose, because it soon occurred to her that while she
could
sand it down to repair it, she’d be a fool to incur that mess with any frequency, to have Corian dust coating the new wallpaper—eggshell-colored, with subtle gray-blue stripes—or the new dark wood cabinets with which she’d replaced the turquoise metal ones or the wood-paneled surface of the mammoth Sub-Zero refrigerator she’d installed. Back then almost no one had a Sub-Zero, but Mom did. She said she needed the storage capacity, even though she continued to keep an additional refrigerator and freezer in the garage and even though, during the La Jolla years, her household was usually just three people. Mark was finishing up at Amherst and would then take a job in Boston. I was halfway through Carolina and spent summers away, honing my journalistic skills and offing American icons. Harry was doing a senior year at Loomis as a boarding student, after which he would head to Dartmouth.

With just her, Dad and Adelle around the house most of the time, she cooked less frequently, more simply and, this being southern California, with more of an eye toward balanced, healthy meals. She tossed spaghetti with broccoli, olive oil and almond slivers. She made enormous salads. I got the sense that Mom had become so practiced at cooking for larger numbers of people that she couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for putting together elaborate meals for a household of three. A meal for three was child’s play. It was beneath her.

 

 

 

 

C
hristmas was pretty much the only time of year when all six of us reliably converged on La Jolla and were together there. We were determined to come up with a special ritual, because we were no longer within driving distance of White Plains and couldn’t descend on Grandma’s Fifth Street house for
strascinat
and the birth of baby Jesus. We replaced the Christ child with twenty-four-ounce cuts of prime rib. Medium-rare beef—along with medium-rare veal and oceans of lobster bisque and baked potatoes the size of Nerf footballs—became the God and the cynosure of our holy night.

Dad had discovered this restaurant, Remington’s, that he revered. It was in Del Mar, where it catered in large part to the big spenders who laid down big money on the ponies at the nearby racetrack. And it catered to them with mind-boggling portions. Even we had never seen anything like them.

The smallest cut of prime rib was a pound, and the options went up, up, up from there. The veal chop was Flintstonian. An appetizer portion of the lobster bisque could fill a punch bowl. Remington’s was the upscale restaurant world’s equivalent of a big & tall shop, except it needed more extreme adjectives: titanic & alpine.

We treated it as a dare. How much of his prime rib would Mark get through? Would Harry do better? Would I polish off my entire veal chop, and if so would I be able to handle the quintuple scoop of cappuccino crunch ice cream with which a meal at Remington’s typically ended? Mom would get a fillet of salmon or swordfish, just to be perverse. It easily weighed more than twelve ounces.

In the weeks before this meal, it was all any of us could talk about on the phone.

“All pumped up for the Remington’s munch?” Mark would ask me, calling down to Chapel Hill from Amherst.

“Eight days and counting,” I’d say.

“Are you thinking veal chop?”

“Maybe,” I’d answer. “Or the pepper steak.” It was a solid pound of sirloin encrusted with not only peppercorns but also bacon. It appealed to me more than prime rib, which to my mind didn’t have enough tender-crisp contrast—it was too cushiony and flabby through and through.

“I’m going with the prime rib,” said Mark. He always went with the prime rib.

On the big night, we’d gather in the living room for a cocktail hour and we’d make vodka-and-tonics, less because they were our favorite drinks than because they gave us something to garnish with lemon and lime from trees in the backyard. We couldn’t believe we had actual citrus trees in our very own backyard. Plucking fruit from them just minutes before we sliced it for the drinks was a way to embrace the strange experience of California, where Christmas was always snowless and what we’d see outside the house’s windows weren’t little children riding sleds but teenagers lugging surf boards.

Cocktails in hand, we’d call Grandma around six p.m. West Coast time. We’d reach her just as she and our uncles and aunts were finishing their long dinner. Whoever talked to her first would confront a brief, palpable frostiness: if moving to Connecticut had been a cruelty, moving to California was an act of such florid hostility that, to Grandma’s thinking, she had every right to disown us, and never to press thumb to pasta dough for our benefit again. But of course she never exercised that right.

Mom or Dad would pass the phone to Mark, who would pass it to me. I’d pass it to Harry and he’d pass it to Adelle. Each of us would say “I love you” to the same sound track of Grandma’s sobs.

“I pray for next Christmas,” she’d tell whoever happened to be on the phone at the moment when she was catching a breath between those sobs, and what she meant was that she was praying she’d be around, because she was sure the chances were slim. Her conviction was unshaken by the fact that she’d survived what was by this point at least a decade of such predictions. She wasn’t about to surrender the drama of it all.

After the call it was off to Remington’s, where we always had the same waiter and always shocked him by how much we ordered: the bowls of bisque; the hunks of meat; the potatoes, slathered with sour cream; onion rings, deep-fried; corn, just scraped off the cob; ice cream. It was Christmas Eve! A time for unbound revelry!

Mark and Harry would dig in to the feast with every bit as much enthusiasm as Dad and I did. They were Brunis, after all, attuned to the imperative of going overboard on special occasions, and when they chose to, they could just about keep pace with Dad and me. They just didn’t have my habit of bingeing in between these big nights, my way of turning everyday eating into a warped science experiment.

By both swimming and playing water polo at Amherst, Mark was staying in decent shape. He’d get a little chunky one semester, then wouldn’t be chunky at all the next. But he was only barely conscious of these fluctuations. He had his girlfriends, he had his fraternity mates, he was easily getting Bs and As in his courses: Why worry about anything else? A mirror was what you consulted when you had to shave or comb your hair. Otherwise, there wasn’t much cause to look into it for long.

Harry was getting buff. Over the course of high school his interests had moved well beyond
Star Trek
, and as those interests expanded to include girls, he decided to put more muscle on what had been a slender, unimposing frame. Around the time Mom and Dad moved to La Jolla, he’d started lifting weights. In the La Jolla garage, which Mom and Dad never used, he set up a gym of free weights and inclined boards for sit-ups, and he spent hours there on holiday and summer breaks from school. He set a fitness goal of passing the grueling physical test required to work as a public beach lifeguard in La Jolla. And he indeed passed it, doing that job for a summer during which his skin turned bronzer than it ever had—both he and Mark, unlike me, could tan—and his hair turned blond.

Mark sometimes joined Harry in the garage gym, but I didn’t. I found it too dark and depressing. I also knew I’d never manage even half as many sit-ups as they did, and I knew each of them would cock an eyebrow at the other as they watched me struggle. So I wouldn’t give them the pleasure. Instead I’d head down to Mexico, where I’d found my own, different antidote to the Remington’s munch.

 

 

 

 

I
n addition to its ocean breezes, gorgeous sunsets and seemingly limitless reserves of guacamole, San Diego had the virtue of proximity to Tijuana. I’d made it a point to head there on one of my first visits to La Jolla, because I’d heard that in Mexico the kinds of drugs that required a prescription in the U.S. could be bought over the counter. I dipped into a pharmacy and asked for diet pills, not sure what I’d get but certain that it was at least worth trying. The ones the pharmacist gave me were small and yellow and—
woooooeeeee!!!
—made my scalp tingle and my heart thump faster and louder. They were speed, pure and simple. I remembered it from high school, and I put it to renewed good use, stocking up on the pills whenever I visited La Jolla and could make my way south of the border.

Back at Carolina, I’d take one in the late afternoon or early evening, on a day when I’d eaten little or nothing, so that I could quiet my hunger and simultaneously summon the energy for a four-mile run.

If I did this just two or three days a week, I balanced out the overeating on other days. At one point toward the end of my junior year, I jammed my way into size 33 pants. I’d been up to 35 that first summer at
Newsweek
.

Thank you, my Mexican speed! I love you, my Mexican speed!

But I was wary of it, and not just because I knew that it wasn’t going to serve as a permanent solution to my eating and weight problems, that it wasn’t a viable, or at least sensible, long-term strategy. I was wary of its side effects in real time. I had to develop and abide by certain guidelines for my Mexican speed.

 

GUIDELINE ONE: Do not take it on a day of heavy coffee drinking. If I did, I noticed that the scalp tingling became, instead, a burning, flushing sensation suffusing the entirety of my cranium: what I imagined a hot flash would be. I had to take deep breaths, splash cold water on my face, close my eyes, say a calming mantra, ride it out. My heart seemed not merely to beat but to do jumping jacks in my chest.

 

GUIDELINE TWO: Do not take it after nine p.m. I enjoyed nighttime runs—enjoyed the sense of no one getting a good look at me as I lumbered down the road, love handles jiggling—and was indeed temped to do this. But I learned my lesson fast. My Mexican speed didn’t just quit when I wanted it to and couldn’t be dissipated with a concentrated burst of activity. It lingered, and so there was the risk of being bright-eyed and bouncy at three a.m. My close friend Nancy, with whom I lived off campus during both my junior and senior years, could always tell when I’d taken my Mexican speed too late in the evening. The apartment would be miraculously clean the next morning, because I’d take to vacuuming floors and scrubbing counters in the dead of night, just to channel, and get rid of, my extra energy.

Me
(upper right)
with my parents and siblings at Remington’s
on Christmas Eve. The Mexican speed is working.

 

GUIDELINE THREE:
Do not take it on a stomach that feels volatile, or after spicy food, or after large quantities of cheese or milk, if it’s to be followed by a vigorous run. Certain urgent needs could present themselves during that run. Certain involuntary, convulsive and exceedingly embarrassing things could happen.

So I followed my guidelines, paced myself and reassured myself that this was a healthier alternative to throwing up. It was also just a temporary measure, intended to whip me into a state of fitness and thinness so rewarding I would discover the discipline to maintain it without any pharmacological assistance. My Mexican speed would get me there.

My Mexican speed, that is, and my Metamucil. I noticed Metamucil in a drugstore during my senior year and I read the packaging, which identified it as a gentle, “natural” laxative.
Maybe
, I thought,
this was what I should have been using instead of Ex-Lax.
And maybe it was something I should use now, a way not of falling back into old habits but of resurrecting whatever good there had been in them while steering clear of the bad. I started buying Metamucil or Fiberall, both fiber-rich, orange-colored powders that dissolved—less thoroughly than one might hope—in water. And I started drinking these grainy concoctions regularly, though never too close to the time when I might take some of my Mexican speed and go out for a run.

I berated myself: Why hadn’t I paid attention to fiber before? Fiber was obviously crucial, and fiber was going to save me. By making sure there was an unusually high concentration of fiber in my system, I’d feel too full to overeat, and anything I did eat would be digested too quickly to become fat. I deemed this science no less compelling for the fact that I’d more or less invented it.

With fiber as my focus, I ate the following dinner, night after night: a sludgy glass of three times the recommended dosage of orange Metamucil or Fiberall and four pieces of toasted Branola bread, slathered with low-cholesterol Shedd’s Spread, a pathetic butter imposter marketed as less fattening.

The ritual appalled Nancy but also amused her.

“Your dad called,” she announced one night when I came in from a late run.

“What did he want?” I asked.