Hungry (18 page)

What great timing, this restaurant gig seemed at first. The kids were old enough that I could ease off Mommy Brain, school committees, and the family GPS, constantly tracking where everyone was or needed to be. Jake and Lisa were moving forward, on their way to college. Our bookcases reflected the transition. We had the usual
Get Out of My Life, But First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall?: A Parent’s Guide to the New Teenager
and
Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls
. But these were sources read once and maybe picked up again, not studied and memorized, like
Your Baby’s First Year
. I finally got rid of Penelope Leach, T. Berry Brazelton, and Dr. Spock. Relying on their popular child-rearing books required swallowing a whiff of disdain, or pity, for mothers who worked outside the home. As if it were a lifestyle choice. Now our shelves were getting populated by life-affirming food writers like Elizabeth David, M.F.K. Fisher, and John Thorne, who planted the idea that you don’t have to be a great chef, or even a good one, to enjoy cooking (your own food or someone else’s).

We never went nuts about nutrition. White sugar, chocolate chips, Pepperidge Farm fish crackers, and the beloved Kraft Macaroni & Cheese all lived happily in our house. Jake and Lisa usually made better food choices than most of their peers, without being prohibited from enjoying the pizza and burger staples of the teen diet. Often, though, days went by when we didn’t eat together as a family. Jake had lots of schoolwork. He and Lisa had been making their own lunches and doing their own laundry since fourth grade. We made sure they had something nourishing for breakfast, but our power over dinner was starting to disintegrate in the face of their activities, my job, and Ned’s promotion to library management, upping his travel time and nighttime meetings. Only our two dogs could be sure of eating at the same hour every night.

During Lisa’s first year in high school, she started to get interested in nutritional science, possibly as a career. Despite what was seething underneath, she understood what a body needed to grow and stay healthy. She took copious notes in Biology 1A:

Words about balance and nutrients went into her freshman notebook and, then, out of her life.

 

 

lisa:
As my sophomore year wound down, I knew I needed to change my lifestyle. I had become all too comfortable gorging on super burritos and making late-night stops at the donut shop. I felt bombarded by diet ads and pictures of thin women, a mold I didn’t fit. I was still playing “the chubby girl,” overweight and undervalued. I wanted my peers to want to look like
me
, for once, to compliment my figure, and to be told by guys that I was pretty. I grew tired of feeling so average in every way (looks, academics, athletics, talent) and wanted to be better, if not “the best” at something.

As we lived no more than a three-minute walk from the YMCA, I decided to go to that gym after school. I’d never been attracted to the Y before, and at first I dragged myself there and vowed to come back every day. That’s when the weight really started to fall off. All I had to do was thirty minutes of cardio daily and alter my diet a bit, and I started to develop a curvaceous yet lean figure. My friends praised my motivation and dedication. And, finally, I was being told I was skinny!

That summer, my friend Feyi introduced me to the Yogurt Stop, and it became my next obsession. There were plenty of frozen yogurt places in Palo Alto, but only the Yogurt Stop would do for me. It was way out of the way in Menlo Park, but had eight flavors to choose from daily, and the option of having two nonfat flavors swirled in harmony. I felt pleased with myself for getting this great deal: half the calories of ice cream for the same price. The Yogurt Stop took the dessert position on the shortlist of places where I would eat out, as the majority of frozen yogurt flavors came as fat free, some even sugar free and therefore low calorie. Even with the Atkins Diet taking off and fat-free/sugar-free labels appearing everywhere, there weren’t many restaurants that worked for me. I couldn’t eat Mexican anymore as everything seemed to shout out “starch” and “lard” and “massive caloric intake!” Italian was well-known to be an indulgent cuisine. American offered mainly burgers and fries and milkshakes. If I went out at all, it had to be a Japanese restaurant, where still I feared the unknown ingredients and additives and mainly had salad without dressing and a little teriyaki chicken, delicately pulling off any ounce of fat.

 

sheila:
At first, Lisa’s restrictions seemed weird but not red-alert worrisome. She was eating more healthily, happier with how her body was taking shape, and still active in soccer and choir. She was not pleased when I volunteered to chaperone the high school choir trip to New York City, which seemed like a great opportunity to hang around her and watch, without being in her face. As outstanding high school choirs bounced “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” off the walls of historic Riverside Church, choir director Bill Liberatore coached, “Altos and sopranos, I don’t hear your entrance clearly. Please be aggressive on the attack.” Amid the evening dews and damps, the sound was gorgeous. Liberatore also talked about the social responsibility of being in a large choir, and I wondered if Lisa was listening. More often, she seemed to be just mouthing the words. Liberatore had heard the buzz about a Broadway show in previews, so we got to see
The Producers
with Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane, before the show broke records in box office receipts and Tony Awards.
The Producers
later became a touchstone for me and Lisa, a special moment we shared.

One afternoon while the students were practicing, I had the fun of introducing some fellow chaperones to Original Ray’s Pizza and then to Zabar’s temple of gastronomy. On a free afternoon, Lisa and I met a
Mercury News
friend in Brooklyn for coal-fired pizza at Grimaldi’s. She’d agreed to do what I wanted—eat and visit—and then we’d do a little shopping along Fifth Avenue. Bribery. I bought time with her, and she got a few blouses.

Lisa had way more than enough clothes. She would weed her collection, selecting blouses she may never have worn, when we took boxes to Goodwill, but her room never lost its just-slept-in look. Wasn’t this normal? Even the occasional whiff of rotting food wasn’t out of the range of reason for teenagers.

I tried chaperoning one more time, when Lisa’s soccer team went to a tournament in Las Vegas. Again the more adventurous parents deputized me to pick a restaurant. For something we really didn’t have at home, we went to Red Square. The duded-up Russian food was less the attraction than the décor, a post-Communist May Day parade of hammers and sickles, and the vault of two hundred frozen vodkas for drinks with names like the Cuban Missile Crisis. Dinner was fun, but I had the feeling that, more so than the other kids didn’t want their parents along, Lisa really didn’t want me there.

 

lisa:
I had soccer practice twice a week, which never wore me out. So, after practice I either went back to the gym or ran a few miles. I felt like a failure if I didn’t burn at least eight hundred calories. I even left practice early to go to the gym. Occasionally I would cut class if I knew ahead of time that I would not be able to fit the gym in that day. Weight dripped off me like a melting ice cream cone. I had to have been losing three or more pounds a week but I never really weighed myself. I could just tell by how my previously flattering pants hung on my bony hips and sagged, barely nearing my tiny legs. I went from a healthy size 5 to a size 3 but wanted to be a 1, and then that turned into a 0 and even a 0 did not seem quite right. Eventually I got to 00.

My friends really noticed my efforts and complimented me, praised me, and even showed their jealousy. Some wondered how I spent so long at the gym. For a little while, I actually felt very pleased and content in my lean yet fit figure. At the start of my senior year I came back to school with such an obviously flat stomach and toned legs that I got even more praise. At that time I was actually eating well and balanced, exercising daily, and even starting to feel (kind of) pretty. Yet, internally, I still felt insufficient. I continued to dislike what I saw in the mirror. I took my lifestyle restrictions a step further: less food, more exercise, and this continued past my spring break until I had gone too far and couldn’t go back. The energetic self I had created a few months prior became replaced by a lethargic and listless little girl.

I was extremely cold at night and tired all the time. I barely went out on the weekends because I had no energy after 10:00 p.m. Even when I did go to a party or somebody’s house, my mind was elsewhere, focused on returning to my safety net at home and the audible rumblings coming from my belly. I turned down any invites that included food in the plans, which severely decreased my social life. Every weekend, my friends went to eat and hang out downtown, or to the nearby
taqueria
. If I did go out, I didn’t eat. I hated the thought of anyone else seeing me eat as I assumed they were assessing each bite I took, examining my plate thinking how fat I was. I mean these were my friends and I knew in my right mind they
wanted
me to join them—sometimes begging—but my sick mind overpowered everything. I opted instead to remain at home to nurture my stringent meal plans. My friends and schoolmates were starting to notice how much weight I lost and many were concerned. Some would say they were afraid I was going to break if they touched me. Others, more in an effort to comfort me, said I was looking great and really skinny. I felt trapped in a conundrum. Was I really doing right by restricting and overexercising? I felt sick all the time, lethargic, and fatigued and yet I still received compliments. Now I look back and know these people were just trying to be nice and probably felt scared to say what they really thought: that I had become much too thin.

On the rare occasion that I went out to eat with Mom I often became upset, thinking she was going to force me to eat too much food.

 

sheila:
Indeed, I did. But “force” to her was “ask” to me. As in, “Hmm, this looks good. Would you like to try the crispy boneless chicken with mango in a lemongrass-garlic sauce?”

“No! Crispy always means fried.”

“Ah, how about . . .” I cast about, pathetically, for some food Lisa would accept. Lisa’s restrictions had become set in cement, not quirks that we could wish away. As she moved into red-alert territory, Ned and I felt sick, not knowing where to find help. I have to admit that part of me was also annoyed. Here I had this great job that everyone else in the universe envied, and even Lisa still liked telling people about, but she was spitting on it. Of course I didn’t expect her to want to go out with us a lot, but couldn’t she enjoy it just a little? Even pretend to?

One of our descents into hell occurred in a stylish Malaysian-Singaporean-Thai restaurant. Lisa hadn’t wanted to go, no surprise, but Banyan Garden would have lots of vegetarian dishes, salads, and stir-fries (more sauté than deep-fry), and I couldn’t help pointing out, “You used to love this kind of food.” Desperate to reignite the connection to happier times, I whined until she finally said okay. But I felt like my daughter was leaving the dock in a rickety little boat, and I was barely hanging on to the sides while she pulled away.

So that she would come with us this time, I didn’t mention where Banyan Garden was—across the bay, a thirty-minute drive if the rush-hour traffic wasn’t too bad and there weren’t any accidents. The location could have been a deal-breaker.

In the armpit of a gangly shopping center, “Banyan Garden hides its charms under a bushel of Chinese restaurants. Even its exterior looks darkly forbidding,” my review would observe. But it often happens in Silicon Valley that good food lurks in ugly strip malls, where new immigrants are able to pay the rent. Banyan Garden’s deep red interior gave it a touch of class, and the ambitious, hundred-item menu leaped from Roti Canai to Malaysia Bean Curd, String Beans, Lady Fingers, and Eggplant on to Fish Head Curry Casserole. Ordering was going to take a while.

“We try to satisfy all customers,” the manager-owner told me when I called later to set up an appointment for the photographer. Jimmy Cheng had majored in hospitality management in college. Banyan Garden’s owners were two Taiwanese Chinese, one Filipino Chinese, one Indonesian, and the Malaysian chef. They wanted to design a menu that appealed to those populations, their base, but also that didn’t scare away novices, who in the long run would make or break the restaurant. Thus the very long menu and options like Curry Mix and Match (pick a curry and a meat, seafood, or vegetable). It was like a flowchart or an outline of your meal. Lisa allowed as how the mixed broccoli, green beans, and potatoes were nicely cooked, and bathed in the hot-sweet-sour flavors of Malaysian dry curry. But the Aromatic Chicken and the Siam Jumbo Prawns with Shell both turned out to be deep-fried. Lisa wouldn’t touch them or their luscious sauces.

Part of my job was to evaluate the beverages, to determine whether they were appropriate for the menu. Banyan Garden had a brief but helpfully annotated beer and wine list, including two bargain-priced California gewürztraminers friendly to spicy foods and a pinot grigio noted for being especially good with noodle dishes. Ned and I tested a few of their wine suggestions and were studying the desserts when Lisa went to the bathroom for the second time.