Finding It: And Finally Satisfying My Hunger for Life

And Satisfying My Hunger for Life
Without Opening the Fridge

VALERIE BERTINELLI

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First Free Press hardcover edition October 2009

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bertinelli, Valerie,

Finding it: and satisfying my hunger for life without opening the fridge / Valerie Bertinelli.
p. cm.
1. Bertinelli, Valerie, 2. Television actors and
actresses—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.B4379A3 2009
791.4502’8092—dc22
[B] 2009027256

ISBN 978-1-4391-4163-2
ISBN 978-1-4391-5909-5 (ebook)

To Tom
for finding me

I may change a few words in it here and there before it is finished,
But at the end it’s still “Amen.”

—Raymond Pettibon

Part One: Faith

Introduction

One:
The Sex Talk

Two:
The Driver’s Test

Three:
Getting Naked

Four:
Warning Lights

Five:
Blended, Not Stirred

Six:
Catch a Wave

Seven:
Forgiveness (Spring Cleaning)

Eight:
Birthday Cake

Nine:
The Clean Spot on the Ceiling

Ten:
It’s Not Fair

Eleven:
Checking the Mail

Twelve:
Continuing Education

Part Two:
Belief

Thirteen:
What Matters

Fourteen:
Back to Work

Fifteen:
Questions

Sixteen:
Heart of the Matter

Seventeen:
Yes, We Can

Eighteen:
Dexter

Nineteen:
Day Pass

Twenty:
Running

Twenty-one:
T.M.I.

Twenty-two:
Size Doesn’t Matter (It’s How You Use Your Equipment)

Twenty-three:
The Whole Muffaletta

Twenty-four:
Another Fifteen Minutes

Twenty-five:
My Grandmother’s Soup

Acknowledgments

I shouldn’t have been offended when my boyfriend Tom walked in on me and commented on my underwear. But I was. Most women would agree—and may even have had the same conversation. I was cleaning out my dresser drawers as I packed for a weekend trip to Laguna Beach for my forty-ninth birthday. Tom came in and began sifting through a pile of t-shirts, bras, and underwear that I put on the bed in a “discard” pile. Without asking what I was doing, he jumped into the middle of the process and came up holding a pair of skin-colored panties as if they were fresh roadkill.

“I hope you aren’t going to bring these to the beach,” he said.

“As a matter of fact, no, I wasn’t,” I said. “They’re being thrown out, along with everything else in that pile.” Still, I was curious what he had against them, a perfectly nice pair of underwear.

“What’s wrong with them?” I asked.

“They’re granny panties,” he said.

Granny panties? I gave him a look that said, “Oh, really, buster. You think so?” I had just spent nearly two years having lost 40
pounds; actually a little more at this time. I hadn’t gone through that effort to cover my rear end in drapes. My underwear drawer included bikini-style panties, sheer panties, white panties, black panties, a couple of pastel-colored panties, panties whose lines weren’t visible through pants, panties I wore to business meetings, panties I wore when I worked out, panties I wore on special occasions, and panties that said I was in the mood. I had panties for nearly every occasion. The one thing I didn’t have were granny panties.

I grabbed the pair in question from Tom. I studied them for a second or two and decided he had no idea what he was talking about.

“These are bikini-style, but with a wider waistband,” I explained. “If I had them on, you could still see my belly button.”

“V, I’m going to tell you something,” he said. “I hope you don’t take offense at hearing it. But you’ve had some nasty underwear, and these are at the top of the list.”

“Oh. My. God,” I said, tossing the undies back in the throw-out pile. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Quite the contrary,” he said. “I’m a guy. I know about women’s underwear.”

A dozen different responses came to mind, none of them nice. I chose a response that is rarely part of my repertoire: I bit my tongue and said nothing. I knew Tom’s theory about women’s underwear was typical of most men. It consisted of grand expectations (my undies were supposed to be chosen for his pleasure, not my convenience or comfort), disappointment (they could never be small enough), and something I’ll call “lack-of-string theory”— basically, they increased in size with age until they got so large that women needed the local fire department’s hook and ladder brigade to pull them up (not true of mine in any way, shape, or size, thank you very much!).