Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (17 page)

“He has some business trip near here,” she answered, “and he said he wanted to come into town and take us to dinner. He asked me about restaurants. He asked me what your favorite food was.”

She paused, clearly for effect.

“I told him,” she continued, “that he should just mix you some Metamucil and toast you some Branola. I apologize: I forgot about the Shedd’s Spread.”

Of course she hadn’t said that, and when he came he took us to the nicest French restaurant in town. We had steak au poivre—the portion, he and I both noted, wasn’t anything like the one at Remington’s—and roasted duck. We had chocolate mousse.

It was a terrific meal, and I relished it for a while before ruing it for a whole lot longer. The next afternoon I took a little yellow pill and a four-mile run. And hours after that I ate a dinner of Metamucil, Branola and Shedd’s Spread, though I applied the Shedd’s Spread in a portion much more stinting than usual.

 

 

 

 

The fiber got boring. The speed, like the throwing up, started to scare me. But I wasn’t out of ideas, not nearly. I had this theory that repetitive eating was potentially dietetic eating: that if I ate the same abbreviated spectrum of things over and over again, my body would become so practiced at digesting them that they would be less fattening than their caloric equivalents. It was a reprise and refinement of my vegetarian logic, and was seductive in part because it suited me so well. Unlike most other people I knew, I could consume a boring, set meal—Branola toast with orange-flavored Metamucil, for example—day after day and night after night for weeks on end.

And that’s what I often did on my first trip to Europe, which I took shortly after my graduation from Carolina. In a land of thrilling culinary traditions and vibrant produce, I subsisted for a period on bread alone. In an eater’s paradise, I elected a purgatory of feta and tomato followed by tomato and feta.

I was in Europe on a three-thousand-dollar grant from the Morehead Foundation, a reward, given to most of the Morehead scholars, for finishing school with a respectable grade point average and for completing prior Morehead-related summer activities and internships with distinction (the foundation didn’t know about Mary Tyler Moore). To get the money you just had to come with up with an edifying script and educational justification for your proposed journey, and mine was this: I was going to trace, loosely, the voyages of Aeneas as described in
The Aeneid
. The plan reflected—or, rather, was superimposed on—my desires to visit Italy and Greece. To make the proposal credible I threw Tunisia into the mix, because that was where Aeneas had shacked up with Dido, lighting her fire (somewhat too literally, as it were).

Although Aeneas had hit Greece before Italy, I wanted to proceed in the opposite order, and couldn’t see the harm in rewriting his itinerary ever so slightly. Although Aeneas had never made it up to Florence or Venice, at least not according to my research, I decided that those cities were spiritually of a piece with his other stops and could in good conscience be visited. I began my adventure in Venice and went from there to Florence and then to Rome, by which point I realized I had to find some remedy for all the spaghetti alla carbonara,
bucatini all’amatriciana
, pizza and gelato I’d been consuming, some method for managing Italy from that point forward. The one I adopted was born in part of penury, or at least thrift.

To save money, I limited my dinner one night to a variety of breads purchased from a brick-oven bakery in Rome. I loved them all, the crunchy and the soft breads, the salty buns and the rolls flecked with seeds, and so I went back to the same brick-oven bakery the next night and got another array of bread. The bread was all I ate, no cheese or meat or butter or oil on it.

The morning after, my stomach felt emptier than usual, and my jeans were loose. Was I on to something here? Sure, I had walked at least ten miles each of the previous days—from the Baths of Caracalla to Saint Peter’s; up and down Via del Corso and Via Venti Settembre and Via Veneto—and that might have a little something to do with my feeling of newfound litheness. But I was crediting the bread. I was crediting a virtually no-fat, monochromatic meal that must have been a breeze to digest.

So I did an all-bread lunch the next day, followed by an all-bread dinner. And I just kept on going like that, for at least a week. I made just one alteration, adding beer to the nightly routine. I figured beer, like bread, was made from grain, so I was essentially
drinking
bread while I ate bread and keeping the meal both fat-free and confined to a strictly limited group of ingredients. A strictly limited group of nutrients, too. Halfway through the week, I began to experience periodic moments of dizziness. By week’s end the moments weren’t so periodic, and I was forced to acknowledge the good sense of an occasional hunk of mozzarella or bite of veal
saltimbocca.
Bread couldn’t give a body all that it needed.

But could Greek salads? That’s what I ate, meal after meal, in Athens and on Santorini and on Mykonos. For the classics scholars now crying foul, I admit I had no proof Aeneas docked on Mykonos, nothing I could point to in the historical or literary records. But it’s a beautiful island and a crazy amount of fun, and Aeneas sailed the seas nearby. He surely
would
have hit Mykonos, if the weather had been right and the winds had been advantageous and there had been half-price cocktails during happy hour at Super Paradise Beach that day. I felt certain of it.

The Greek salad in our country tends to get distracted with vapid and unnecessary lettuce. But in its birthplace it sticks for the most part to juicy cucumbers and juicier tomatoes and a sheep’s worth of feta, which isn’t crumbled but presented in thick rectangular slabs. If there are olives, they’re dark and robust. It’s as much a cheese and crudité plate as it is an actual salad, and if it’s large enough, it can definitely pass for a meal.

I made sure it did and, during about three weeks in Greece, ate at least two dozen Greek salads. I washed them down with Dutch, Belgian or Italian beer. There weren’t any Greek beers to speak of, and retsina and ouzo weren’t my thing.

The Greek salads served me well. Near the beginning of my week on Mykonos I spent a night with a good-looking Scotsman from Glasgow; toward the end of it I spent two nights with an even better looking Frenchman from Lyon. My good fortune didn’t go to my head: when the Frenchman suggested, in between those two nights, that I accompany him to the nude gay beach on the island, I made a slew of excuses—shopping to do, clothes to wash, postcards to write, a hard-to-get appointment with a local oracle to attend—and told him to enjoy himself, though not too much. I wasn’t about to disrobe in public in the bright Mediterranean sun, even though all the walking and monochromatic eating I’d been doing since Rome had definitely reduced my weight.

Which was . . .
what?

As always, I didn’t know, and as always, I didn’t want to find out. I had my guesses, based on the one or two times over the past four years when curiosity—or dread—had got the better of me and I had tentatively stepped on a scale. I was no doubt somewhere in my usual 180-to-195-pound range, and likely toward the bottom of it. I certainly wasn’t the 177 pounds that those medical charts said a five-foot, eleven-inch man—I was now nearly that tall—should be, because I’d never managed that. Maybe that’s what I’d been right after Outward Bound, but I hadn’t checked then, too fearful of disappointment.

And I wasn’t going to check now. I preferred not knowing. I preferred assuming from the attentions of the Scotsman and the Frenchman that whatever the number, it was low enough not to be an embarrassment, though surely higher than it should be.

 

 

 

“
I
think Jill Eikenberry is just terrific,” Mom said. “Don’t you?”

“She’s fine,” I answered, taking another bite of one of the avocado and Cheddar sandwiches we often had for lunch in La Jolla. We got them from a sandwich shop just six blocks away. “But I’m more of a Susan Dey person.”

“And if I’d singled out Susan Dey, you would have gone with Jill Eikenberry, because you always have to contradict me,” Mom said, sounding genuinely wounded. She was right that I liked to contradict her, wrong that I could switch positions so easily on this particular matter. For one thing, I took
L.A. Law
very seriously. For another, Susan Dey was a prior Partridge who had reportedly had an eating disorder, wore her blond hair in a sleek cut, and was involved onscreen with Harry Hamlin. Jill Eikenberry wore her hair in a blandly voluminous style and bestowed her affections, in both the show and real life, on a short, balding mensch
.
There wasn’t any contest here.

I was back in La Jolla, having decided to hang out there for the eight months between the end of my European travels and the start of journalism graduate school at Columbia University in New York in the fall of 1987. Mom had taped all the
L.A. Law
episodes I’d missed while in Europe. And as I caught up on them, she watched them a second time, if not a third. When she loved something, she loved it passionately and without any possibility of boredom, whether it was the prose stylings of Sidney Sheldon; Giorgio Beverly Hills perfume, which became as essential to California Mom as Guerlain’s Shalimar had been to Connecticut Mom; linguine with a basil and pine nut pesto, her default pasta dish of this particular period; or the legal and romantic melodrama performed by Jill Eikenberry and Susan Dey, among other actors and actresses, on
L.A. Law
.

We tended to watch the videotapes at lunchtime, because my days were free until about four p.m., when I would head to a French bistro where I’d landed a job waiting tables. It served the smoothest, creamiest chocolate mousse I’d ever tasted, and every time I hustled to the kitchen to drop an order ticket, I stopped en route to steal a gigantic spoonful of it from the refrigerator along the path. I caromed between the tables in the dining room with mousse on my breath. I went home at night with mousse coming out of my pores.

Mom and Dad would be asleep by then, but Adelle would usually be up. She was in high school, and the hours between eleven p.m. and one a.m. were crucial telephone time, though she’d sometimes take a five- or ten-minute break between calls to acknowledge my existence and ask me for a bit of advice, sometimes something involving guys and sex. Mom had taken it upon herself to clue Adelle, too, into my sexuality. (In fact the only close family member Mom shied away from telling—and I was glad for this—was Grandma.) Adelle treated the news as an interesting opportunity. She wasn’t about to let an older gay brother—and any knowledge about dealing with men that he might have picked up—go to waste.

She had a tall, handsome boyfriend and a place in the most popular posse of girls at school, and she carefully watched her eating in the interest of holding on to both. Broad-shouldered, big-chested and barely five foot three, she was never going to look willowy, but she had accomplished something close to slenderness. It hadn’t been easy. Like me she had a way of tumbling headlong into tubs of ice cream or bowls of pasta, a tropism toward calories. Like me she’d been fat between the ages of four and eight. And like me she’d emerged from that experience with an anxious, nervous relationship with food, which she alternately surrendered to and swore off, almost always going to one extreme or the other.

Were there reasons beyond our shared histories of heaviness—and beyond, possibly, our genes—that she and I approached food differently than Mark and Harry did, and worried more about being or not being thin? I wondered if there was something to the fact that she and I both sought the romantic favor of men, and that movies and magazines and so much else signaled that the most powerful, handsome, magnetic bachelors responded, in a fashion much narrower than the most desirable women did, to a potential mate’s looks. If you wanted your pick of men, beauty was your best weapon, and beauty began with thinness.

Adelle had followed Mark’s, Harry’s and my lead into swimming, but hadn’t been as dedicated to it, in part because Mom hadn’t pushed her. She also played basketball and dabbled in a few other sports. Her shortness and thickness prevented her from being a standout at any of them in an athletic sense, but she would nonetheless find herself voted the team captain, because she had Mark’s charisma. As a student she more closely resembled me. She was better with words than with numbers.

And she had a wicked sense of humor, which came out whenever Mom, in a down mood, went on about all she’d sacrificed and done for us: the laundry, the traveling to swim meets, the marathon cooking.

“I’ve come up with the title of the biography of Mom you’ll write someday,” she told me, with Mom listening in. “You should call it ‘My Mother and Other Christian Martyrs.’”

One weekend day Adelle and I neglected to get up from watching television as Mom, grunting theatrically, hauled grocery bags from the car into the kitchen.

“Don’t help!” Mom facetiously instructed us. “Please don’t even think about helping!”

“Maybe,” Adelle observed, “the book should be called ‘My Mother and Other Beasts of Burden.’”

But she revisited and revised the title once more when Mom, furious about our lack of appreciation for some errand she’d run or meal she’d made, launched into an uncharacteristically foulmouthed tirade.

“You people,” Mom bellowed, “just shit on me and shit on me and shit on me some more!”

“I have a new title for the book,” Adelle interjected. “Call it ‘My Mother and Other Flush Toilets.’”

Mom rushed out of the room, because even she had started laughing, and she didn’t want to let go of her outrage and let us off the hook.

New York suited me better than California. It had seasons, which I appreciated less for the variety they presented—the coming and going of foliage, the possibility of snow—than for the wardrobe options. In New York it was cold enough at least six months of the year for coats, which covered a multitude of sins. In New York I wasn’t surrounded by so many tan, blond, shirtless rebukes to my own appearance. I felt thinner.