Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (18 page)

The journalism program at Columbia was only nine months long and seemingly over even before it began, an uneventful whirl of practice deadline writing and roasted cashews from the bodega nearest my dorm room, of lectures in journalism ethics and Middle Eastern delivery in the one-bedroom apartment where my best friend at school, Elli, lived. While I was one of the youngest students in the program, Elli was the oldest, two decades my senior, a tenured history professor at a Maryland university who was using her sabbatical to study journalism. We spent at least three nights a week together in her apartment pretending to do homework but really watching TV, especially
L.A. Law
. I turned her into a surrogate Mom.

I took advantage of my proximity to White Plains to see Grandma more often than I’d been able to during the previous few years, and I could always count on her response to my arrival to dissipate any anxiety I was feeling over pretty much anything, including my weight. Her excitement was so enormous, it didn’t leave room for darker emotions.

Sometimes she wouldn’t even speak for the first few minutes, because she had to get through the kissing, a fusillade of twenty smacks on the nearest cheek, and then she had to proceed to the scurrying. She’d scurry to a cabinet to get a bag of M&M’S with peanuts, which she knew I loved, then to the side-by-side refrigerator/freezer, where she kept parfaits of vanilla ice cream, crème de menthe and Cool Whip in tall, fluted glasses. She’d put the M&M’s and one (or two) of the parfaits on the table, then scurry back to the refrigerator for something else.

Yanking open the refrigerator door, she might pluck out a shell steak and hold it high. Steak was fancy. Steak was a statement.

She’d beam.

“I’ll make steak?” she’d ask.

I’d look at the M&M’S and the parfait, and I’d think about the
frits
that I knew would appear any minute. Inwardly I’d groan but also rejoice.

“Well,” I’d say, pointlessly. “I don’t know . . .”

“I’ll make steak!” she’d decide, the offer becoming a command. Within ten seconds the meat would be on a broiler pan in the oven, and two minutes later she’d produce the
frits,
cooked in—and retrieved from—the basement kitchen. As she got on in years, Grandma’s smorgasbords became less coherent but no less abundant. I’d never be entirely sure which item on her menu to tackle first, and I’d find myself moving dishes and platters this way and that, a food traffic controller arranging food-planes on a food-tarmac.

I’d usually wind up favoring the
frits
, because she’d usually make only stuffed ones for me.

“They came good?” she’d ask, as preposition-challenged as ever.

“Mmmm,” I’d murmur as I continued to chew, as if too focused on the food to pause.

“Quanto sei bello!”
she’d yelp. It meant, “How beautiful you are!” Then she’d cup my face in her hands and commence another fusillade of kisses.

When my nine-month program at Columbia ended in the late spring, I got an internship at the
New York Post
, which was then trying to change its image in the media world, to be less of a racy tabloid and more of a comprehensive—although spirited—newspaper. The internship morphed within weeks into a full-time job, compelling me to look for an apartment, because my Columbia dorm room was being taken by someone else. I searched the
Village Voice
listings, went to a building on West Eightieth Street near Columbus Avenue and met Martin, who needed someone to share his two-bedroom apartment with him.

We didn’t get to talk much at the start of our first meeting. He was distracted by the disappearance of his cat.

“Is she there?” he yelled out an open window and up toward the sky. I assumed there was someone searching for the cat on the roof, though I couldn’t see the other person. In fact I couldn’t see much of Martin, either. His head was all the way out the window.

“Areeeeeeeeetha!” he bellowed, and at this point I assumed he was addressing not the cat searcher but the wayward roof-clambering pet herself.

So his cat was named Aretha?

Promising.

I agreed to split the rent with him, took the extra bedroom and got to know this Aretha, a calico with a relatively placid disposition, along with Sasha, a black Labrador retriever mix. And within a matter of months I met and got to know Audrey, also a calico, found wandering across the grass outside the American Museum of Natural History, where Martin took Sasha for walks. He just came in the door with Audrey, plopped her on the carpet and informed me that our family had grown. He chose the name Audrey because he liked the assonance of “Aretha and Audrey,” but when he addressed the two cats directly, he just said “you young ladies,” a real kindness to Aretha, who was getting on in years and had lost her girlish figure.

Martin sometimes seemed determined to stock our second-story walk-up with as many living organisms as possible, returning home one night from work—he was a food purchaser for a small group of restaurants—with four crawfish. They’d been a dinner special, apparently not a popular one. Martin found these dwarf lobsters adorable and thought they’d make a kooky, festive addition to his living room aquarium, stocked with eight fish.

A few days later I counted seven fish and said something to Martin, who expressed confidence that the one I couldn’t see was just obscured by an underwater plant or the ceramic scuba diver. Later I counted six, then five, the aquarium’s inhabitants disappearing like characters in an Agatha Christie novel. And was it just my imagination, or were the crawfish looking strangely robust?

When Martin finally figured out what was going on—it took him about a week—he grew so enraged about the murders that he sentenced the killers to a flight out the window, down two stories and into a concrete alley. The hideous crunch reverberated in my nightmares for weeks.

Martin’s silliness made me feel relatively sane. But an even bigger reason I enjoyed and got along with him was our shared weakness around food, accompanied by our shared vows, relentlessly articulated and repeatedly abandoned, to get ourselves into shape.

Martin had blue eyes and blond hair and a lightness of spirit as well as coloring that drew people to him. He was a few inches shorter than average, with shoulders that stooped slightly. And like me he toggled between being as little as five or as many as fifteen or so pounds overweight. Together we entered into short-lived exercise pacts in an effort to stay at the low end of that range.

We went to a local gym together. We got on side-by-side stair-climbing machines, not the StairMasters that would become popular a few years later, but those truncated escalators to nowhere, whose steps descended and disappeared and then circled back around, forcing you to walk up and up lest you be dragged down. The machines measured the number of stories you supposedly rose in your ascent to the top of some imaginary building. You could set a goal. Both of us always chose a hundred stories. Martin seldom made it past sixty. I usually quit around forty.

Sometimes we’d run in Central Park, sometimes at nine or ten p.m., when we knew it wasn’t smart or safe, though we’d tell ourselves that by bringing Sasha—the least aggressive, sweetest love muffin of a dog ever to unravel a rawhide bone—we were taking care of our protection. We’d let Sasha off her leash, and as Martin and I circled the reservoir in the middle of the park, she’d dart toward and away from us, spending most of her time in nearby clusters of trees, where she could be heard but not seen.

I’d take advantage of her invisibility to cast her in a more ferocious light, just in case muggers were lying in wait and listening.

“That’s a good girl,
Psycho
,” I’d say. “That’s a good, good Doberman pinscher.”

At least three nights a week we ate Chinese delivery, almost always the same meal: cold noodles in sesame paste, broccoli in garlic sauce and either chicken with cashew nuts or kung pao chicken, which had peanuts. We congratulated ourselves because this meal didn’t have any red meat in it. Come to think of it, it was practically vegetarian! Pleased with our imagined virtue, we rewarded ourselves by calling the corner bodega and having ice cream delivered.

For the year and a half we lived together, which was the year and a half I worked at the
Post
, neither of us really dated much. I’d had a boyfriend for most of my spring semester at Columbia, and had grown attached enough to him to feel bitter about the breakup, the reasons for which hadn’t been clear to me, and to avoid men for a while. But occasionally I’d drop into a bar for a drink, and on one of these nights I met Arthur, a strapping Australian with a chiseled jaw, sandy hair and pale blue eyes framed by the kind of slight, happy wrinkles that don’t suggest age so much as time outdoors, staring at waves and squinting at sunsets. He was about ten years older than I was, and I assumed my youth must be compensating for my flaws, chief among them my untoned body.

About three weeks after we met, on Valentine’s Day, he gave me a box of chocolates.

“Where is it?” asked Martin when I told him about the gift. I’d just come home from Arthur’s and was giving Martin a rundown of the date.

“Oh, I threw it in a trash can on the way home,” I said.

“You
what
?” Martin yelped, incredulous. “Why did you do that?”

“Well, I didn’t want to eat it,” I said. “If I’d brought it back here and put it on the kitchen counter, five minutes later you and I would have been drinking bourbon and scarfing down chocolates while we surfed the channels for a show with bird sounds.” Audrey loved television nature programs with bird sounds. She’d jump up to the arm of the chair nearest the TV, stare at it and meow.

“But that’s so rude,” Martin said. “What are you going to tell Arthur?”

“That the chocolates were delicious.”

“Maybe I would have liked one,” Martin said.

“Maybe you would have eaten ten,” I said.

“Maybe you would have, too!” he said.

“I rest my case.”

Of course the chocolates wouldn’t have been any worse than the ice cream we would surely order in on one of our next Chinese delivery nights, but that wasn’t the way I thought things through.

I hadn’t trusted Arthur before the chocolates; I trusted him even less after. He obviously wasn’t seeing me clearly—how could he give someone like
me
a present of chocolates?—but at some point he might start to, and I didn’t want to stick around for that. I broke it off before March arrived.

And then questioned whether I should have.

“I miss Arthur,” I told Martin.

“But you blew him off,” Martin said. “You threw away his chocolates.” He made those two acts sound like equal sins. Actually, he made the throwing away of the chocolates sound worse.

“I shouldn’t have broken up with him,” I said, but that wasn’t my real regret. My real regret was that I wasn’t fitter, in which case I wouldn’t have had to break up with him. I’d been at least six pounds lighter during that spring semester at Columbia. That’s when I’d had a boyfriend who lasted months, not weeks.

I needed to pull myself together. And there was a perfect starting point for that: the move I was set to make. Eager to write longer stories about a broader range of topics than I could at the
Post
, I’d accepted a job at a more conventional newspaper in a different city. I hated leaving Martin. But I vowed to compensate for it by leaving behind some of our sloppy, reclusive ways as well.

 

 

 

 

Sometime around 1990 several concerned citizens of Detroit launched a major initiative to improve the city’s fortunes, and it was based on a curious premise. According to these citizens, Detroit’s problem wasn’t its crime rate. Detroit’s problem wasn’t whole neighborhoods of abandoned and crumbling houses, thousands upon thousands of them. Detroit’s problem wasn’t the absence of a full-service, full-scale department store anywhere within the city limits, or the fact that the only first-run movie theaters were so deep inside the impenetrable maze of the downtown Renaissance Center that almost no one who found his or her way to them could find the way back out.

No, Detroit’s problem was an epidemic of naysaying. Residents simply talked too much trash about it. So this bold urban initiative exhorted them to do the opposite. Placards, bumper stickers and the like were emblazoned with the slogan SAY NICE THINGS ABOUT DETROIT.

I’ll say this about Detroit: there wasn’t a lot of traffic in the city center. Also this: the Detroit River, cleaned up in the 1970s and 1980s, was bluer than anyone who hadn’t seen it could imagine, and Detroit’s main public park, Belle Isle, was smack in the middle of that river, rivaling the main public park of any other American city in terms of picturesque setting. I was grateful for that, because it motivated many a run of about five miles, the island’s circumference.