Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (19 page)

I moved to Detroit in the spring of 1990, when I was twenty-five, to start work as a metropolitan desk reporter with the
Detroit Free Press
, the most respected daily newspaper in Michigan and the one with the highest circulation. I found a spacious loft-style one-bedroom apartment with eighteen-foot ceilings and windows that were more than six feet tall in a former paint factory, and I paid less than six hundred dollars a month for it, including parking for the used red Ford Tempo I bought. In Manhattan I’d been paying seven hundred dollars for half of a two-bedroom that wasn’t much bigger and didn’t have any light. A very, very nice thing I’ll say about Detroit is that you get a lot of apartment for your money there.

Then again, my neighborhood had its shortcomings. It was a redevelopment zone on the edge of downtown that still lacked some fundamental services. It lacked fundamental
foods.
I couldn’t locate a proximal source of cold noodles in sesame paste. I didn’t even dare to dream of pad Thai. Pretty much the only dinner I could order by telephone and have deposited at my doorstep was pizza, and that, over time, wasn’t enough. I couldn’t live on delivery the way I had in New York.

So I took up serious grocery shopping. I could drive just a half mile to the relatively new Harbortown Market, which gleamed in the way that optimistic bellwethers of an intended urban renaissance gleam, and which was reasonably well stocked. I’d bring home salad greens, other salad fixings, asparagus, broccoli, scallops, shrimp, turkey burgers—all sorts of sensible, responsible food. In my airy, dashing apartment, without Martin around to enable me, I was going to make my own dinners and make sure they were healthy, low-fat, and low-cal.

The problem was, I remained an impatient cook. Once I’d embraced the thought that dinner was in the offing I didn’t want the offing to mean ninety minutes or even thirty minutes down the road. I didn’t want an offing at all.

Then I noticed, or rather focused on, the precooked Tyson chicken pieces in shrink-wrapped packages that spread out across an enormous refrigerated case in the market. These called to me in a way that roasted whole chickens in supermarkets didn’t, because a whole chicken was messy, and purchasing a whole chicken might increase the possibility of
eating
a whole chicken. Pieces were better. I could eat just one or two, or at least start out with that intention and without having already stacked the deck against myself.

This wasn’t great chicken, or even good chicken. I knew that even then. But it had a thick, fatty layer of skin that had been marinated in, or brushed with, some sort of vaguely sweet sauce. It had a barbecued-but-not-really quality that I liked. And it was meaty, in an unnatural but not altogether unappealing way: the breasts looked and felt as if the chickens they’d come from had been given silicone implants. It called to me and somehow demanded that I answer right away.

I would typically hurry from the checkout line to the parking lot, slip into my car and, before I put the key in the ignition, use it to puncture and peel off the shrink-wrap. Then, using only my left hand to steer, I’d use my right hand to eat one of those suspiciously gigantic breasts
.
I almost always started with a breast, and almost always finished it in less than a minute. And then, before the three-minute drive from the supermarket to the parking deck opposite my building was done, I’d confront a sequence of difficult decisions.

Should I go for another of the shrink-wrapped breasts in the grocery bags clustered on the passenger seat beside me? Or should I try a thigh? Or a drumstick? Or maybe a thigh
and
a drumstick? It was only chicken, after all: no starch, no carbohydrates, except maybe just the barest traces of them, in whatever was coating the skin, and that was just a
coating
, just a seasoning, like salt.

Nine times out of ten, I went for another piece—usually another two. With the car in motion and the key in the ignition, I would use my teeth to bite through the shrink-wrap. If I needed to liberate both hands, I used my left knee to steer.

Then there’d be a final question, a final complication: What to do with the empty packages, and more precisely with the bones on top or inside of them? I wouldn’t want to put them back into the bags with the other, unused, unsullied groceries. I didn’t have a trash bag in the car, despite the number of times I’d reminded myself to put one there. So I’d sweep them onto the floor in front of the front passenger seat. And I’d make a mental note to get them later, certainly before someone sat in the seat.

A few months after these chicken runs began, I volunteered to be the chauffeur for a movie outing with my friend Renee, an editor at the
Free Press
. She opened the passenger-side door, began to step into the car and recoiled.

“Um,” she said, backing up another step.

“You know,” she said, still at a loss for words.

“I think,” she said, an expression of confusion and utter revulsion on her face. “Um, I wonder . . .”

I looked where she was looking, at the floor of the car, and winced. I had somehow forgotten about the pile of skeletons in my little chicken graveyard.

“Oh!” I said. “That’s just chicken! I mean it was chicken. I mean I ate it.”

“Obviously,” Renee said.

“It’s just sometimes I snack on chicken when I’m driving,” I explained.

She said nothing.

“My apartment’s pretty clean,” I said, trying to salvage some dignity. It was true. There were no chicken bones lying around, though if you looked deep in the cracks between the cushions of the living room sectional, especially on the day right before my weekly cleaning lady came, you’d find some stray kernels of buttery stovetop popcorn.

Without a trash bag I couldn’t sanitize the car for Renee, who lowered her body into her seat carefully, leaving her legs outside of the car until the last moment, then pulling them in just far enough to close the door, but not so far that they brushed against the bones.

“Sorry,” I said, and meant it. I was also mortified.

Two weeks later I happened to offer a ride to another friend, Robin, a fellow writer at the
Free Press
. And as soon as we reached my slovenly Tempo, I realized my mistake. The graveyard wasn’t gone. It was more populous still, and even if Robin kept her legs far, far to the side, pressed hard against the door, she wasn’t safe. She rode with her feet up on the dashboard. It was the only sure way to protect her shoes, and Robin wore nice shoes. She was the newspaper’s fashion critic.

Years later her work as the fashion critic for the
Washington Post
would win her a Pulitzer Prize in criticism. And I’d tell people: I’ve known her for many years! We used to hang out in Detroit. She came over all the time to watch
L.A. Law
!

I’d leave out the part about how she refused, after a time, to set well-shod foot in my car.

 

 

 

 

One morning I stumbled out of bed, walked groggily to the kitchen, started to make my morning coffee and, as I poured water into the machine, realized that something wasn’t right. The kitchen was a sty, and there wasn’t any reason or explanation for that. I hadn’t cooked the night before, or the night before that, and my cleaning lady had been around—when was it?—just yesterday morning.

And yet there, in the sink: the colander I used for draining pasta, with a few strands of linguine glued to it. And there, on the stove: the big pot I used for boiling pasta. The white stovetop and the patch of white Formica counter beside it had a Pollock’s worth of tomato red streaks, smudges and swirls: marinara expressionism.

The only one who could have created it was me.

I thought hard:
When had I done it?
I took several hasty gulps of coffee, trying to understand.

And then I did, sort of, in a fractured way, images flashing in my brain: I’m getting out of bed, roused by the certainty that I need to eat. Now I’m staring into the refrigerator. Now I’m at the stovetop, where I can feel heat rising and hear water boiling. Now I’m sitting cross-legged on the sectional, an enormous bowl in my lap, the insides of my legs warmed by it, my mouth full of sauced noodles. Now I’m chewing. Now I’m chewing some more.

Each flash was like a piece of a puzzle that, fragment by fragment, became easier to put together. I took a look at the living room and, sure enough, the bowl from one of those flashes was on the coffee table, and it was empty. As I looked at it I knew, which wasn’t quite the same thing as remembering. At some ungodly hour between bedtime and dawn, I had prepared and consumed a gigantic, if one-note, meal. I’d done this in some state of quarter-consciousness that had left me with these fragments but without a fluid narrative of events.

Over the next year this sort of thing happened again and again. Sometimes I’d conduct these middle-of-the-night binges in something closer to half consciousness, dimly aware of my actions but feeling more like a witness to them than their perpetrator. I wouldn’t pause in what I was doing or question it or even realize I had any alternative. It was motion without volition, and it had a drugged, liquid, underwater quality to it.

And when I’d wake to the mayonnaise-smeared knife in the sink or the open can of tuna atop the garbage or the stray cornflakes that had fallen to the kitchen floor or whatever else it was, I’d be surprised and yet not surprised. I’d travel in my incrementally dawning, incomplete memory to a point hours earlier and retrieve anything from a tiny fraction of what had happened to the whole of it, accompanied by the unequivocal knowledge that I hadn’t decided on—hadn’t chosen—the fumbling, makeshift meal I’d assembled. It had chosen me.

As far as I knew, I’d never sleepwalked in the past. But I guessed that what I was doing now was akin to sleepwalking, and that it was best described as sleep-eating, a phenomenon I later saw mentioned in an article or two but had never heard of at the time.

My sleep-eating, in fact, encompassed sleepwalking, inasmuch as I had to get to the kitchen, along with sleep-toasting, sleep-slicing, sleep-chopping and sleep-broiling, all required for the tuna melts I made during a few of these episodes. It encompassed sleep-boiling and sleep-stirring, in the case of pasta, which seemed to be a favorite of my somnolent self. Sometimes it confined itself to sleep-pouring, the only requisite for a bowl (or two or three) of cereal with milk. It never branched out to sleep-cleaning. The dirty instruments and leftover ingredients of my dreamtime feasting always awaited me in the morning.

The sleep-eating alarmed me only slightly, because I knew what was prompting it, the same thing that prompted those driver’s-seat chicken feasts. Both happened when I’d gone too many hours, or even a whole day, eating next to nothing, or when I’d markedly ramped up my exercise without permitting myself anything close to the necessary calories to fuel it. Both underscored my inability to find any balance or moderation in my frequent pushes to be lighter for an imminent family photograph, an upcoming beach vacation or, of course, a date.

During my first years in Detroit, I went out on plenty of dates. I was in my midtwenties and horny, and guys recognized my name from articles in the newspaper. My apartment, with its ceilings and windows, impressed visitors. But I certainly dated less than I might have and with more petty melodrama than most people do, because dating while flabby, no matter what percentage of that flabbiness is real and what percentage mental, isn’t a smooth, easy process, and that first date with Scott in college wasn’t a one-time example of extreme neurosis.

It was foreshadowing.

You meet a cute guy at a Sunday night barbecue that an acquaintance is having. He glances your way more often than strangers typically do and, when you glance back, holds your gaze longer than he should. Then he cuts in on a conversation you’re having with two other people. In response to a comment you make to one of them about a restaurant you want to check out, he says, “I’d totally be up for going there.” Point is: he’s flirting. He’s interested. Only a moron would miss that. You’re not a moron, at least not in that way.

He calls two days later. You’re thrilled. You’re panicked. When he asks if you have plans for the coming weekend, you tell him you have an out-of-town friend visiting, even though you don’t. You just can’t see him this weekend. More accurately, you can’t let him see you. The weekend is only three days away, four if you sign up for Saturday as opposed to Friday night, and that’s not enough time. In four days you might be able to lose three pounds, tops, and that’s assuming several five-mile runs. You’d like to lose four to five.

You tell him you’ll give him a call next Monday, about doing something that week.

You mention to one of your best friends—let’s call her Renee—that you met someone promising and that you’ll probably be seeing him again soon.

“Have you asked him to do something?” she says.

“No, he asked me,” you say.

“So you’ve scheduled a date?” she asks.

“Not exactly. I told him I’m busy this weekend.”

“What are you doing this weekend?” she asks.

“Not much,” you say. “Do you want to see a movie?”

She’s confused. It’s understandable. She’s a thin person. She’s always been a thin person. Thin people—God bless them, God curse them—don’t get it: if you’re not thin, you need to be careful and conscious about when and how your suitors initially see you. You should never, for example, start dating somebody in July or, worse yet, August, because in August you can’t wear as much clothing as in other months. Your wardrobe options are the most limited, and the few that exist aren’t good at disguising little pouches and protuberances. August is a hell of a lot crueler than April. August is a sadist.

Right now it’s October. But the issue is your distance from your goal weight, that mythic land to which you’ve been traveling as directly and expeditiously as Odysseus on the voyage home. And the distance is too great.