Hungry (22 page)

But how could I not go? I’d never been nominated before, and may never be again. Besides the journalism awards banquet, the rest of the weekend, through Monday night, offered chances to meet the luminaries of my field. And there were panel discussions at the renowned Institute of Culinary Education.
New York Times
writer R. W. Apple would be moderating an exchange with cookbook author Marion Cunningham,
Gourmet
editor Ruth Reichl, and Judith Jones, the editor who discovered Julia Child and Anne Frank. These legends of food writing do not pass through my town on their way to San Francisco.

The Monday night gala also has its legendary aspects. Like the Oscars, the Beards always run far too long. For years the food awards were held in a vertical ant colony, the Times Square Marriott Marquis. (In 2007 the fete moved to Lincoln Center.) Two thousand attendees warmed their auditorium seats for four hours, then streamed into another windowless ballroom, set up like the world’s tastiest trade show. As a restaurant critic I had been a regional judge for the restaurant awards, which got me a ticket to the gala every year. This time, Ned could go, too.

If you want to go and you’re not a member of the James Beard Foundation, no problem. What you get for $450 a head are fine wines matched to dishes made by world-famous chefs who stand there cooking and chatting. The food is fancy, but not necessarily the behavior. Go back for three servings of Hudson Valley Foie Gras with Caramelized Three-Pear Salad. Who’s going to know? As at a theme park, strangers swap suggestions about which culinary ride is worth standing in line for, and which to skip. There are very few tables, and if you sit down you might miss something. The 2003 awards marked the centenary of James Beard’s birth, with celebrity chefs including Daniel Boulud, Jacques Torres, Suzanne Goin, Jacques Pepin, and Andre Soltner. Wines would be poured by Cakebread, Far Niente, Domaine Drouin Oregon, and a dozen other top-notch wineries.

It would be fun. Are you allowed to have fun when your child is sick? Could there be circumstances that permit enthusiasm? Doubtful, but in thinking about it I remembered maxims of motherhood, such as: Children would always rather have you committing suicide in the next room than enjoying yourself away from them. And who can forget this one: You are only as happy as your most unhappy child. In the twenty-two years since our first child was born, the usual work-family conflicts had come up. Ned had a meeting so couldn’t get to the daycare center by 5:30 when they closed, but I had a deadline. Jacob or Lisa was sick—whose work could be done at home or whose boss was more understanding of childcare issues? But now, Lisa was always sick. Ned and I had eliminated most everything in our lives other than work that wasn’t about her care, but she wasn’t getting any better.

How could I go to New York? Lisa was very fragile and the prom was so important to her. I felt guilty about her whole life, way beyond the prom, that she had come to this sickness. I was also furious. All those years, focusing on the kids. In the past two years I’d done research, made appointments, stuck by Lisa’s bedside, and instead of getting better she had turned our home into a forcefield of fear and dread. She didn’t want to be sick. No one would choose to live this way. We know depression runs in the family, so certain genes stacked up against her, but the trigger wasn’t obvious. What part of it was my fault? Did I not applaud enough when she needed it, or did I applaud too much and let her feel entitled to endless praise? My job surely didn’t help; we talked about food all the time. Still, I felt manipulated and rotten for feeling that way. Children force us to be generous. No question, my kids made me a better person. But not perfect. If I didn’t go to New York, I might file it at the top of my Sacrifices Made for Children list and hold it against Lisa forever. Ned was dying to go, too. For him, it was the Super-bowl. We decided to change his ticket, so he could fly back Saturday to be there when Lisa got home from the prom. Jake and my cousin Peggy would be there till then.

 

lisa:
During the weeks leading up to the prom, I still couldn’t sleep. I kept setting goals for myself, like to be better by this date or try to eat an added fat with dinner, but every date passed and fats were left out. Prom was my new goal. Then Mom got this great news and I felt like shit. Her James Beard-award nomination meant she would have to fly to New York for a few days—and that just happened to be the same weekend as the prom. I didn’t think I could do it.

Without her, how was I going to prepare for the biggest night I would have in a long, long time? Dad was going with her. I felt abandoned. Every mother loves to be there when her daughter goes off to her senior prom, and Dad was supposed to pep-talk my date to make sure he would treat me well and get me home safe. They weren’t going to be there to take group pictures and hundreds of pictures of me, until I got sick of smiling and yelled, “That’s enough! I’m leaving now!”

They weren’t even going to be there to embarrass me.

 

sheila:
I didn’t even go to my high school prom. In 1968, I wasn’t the only one in the country who skipped the prom. What with Vietnam War protests, the continuing Soviet nuclear threat, and the assassination that spring of Martin Luther King Jr., the prom seemed silly. But in my town, debutante balls were big deals and so was the prom. Two boys asked me to go. Two boys even nerdier than me, and I was the frizzy-haired editor of the school newspaper. No way was I going to be stuck for a very long evening in uncomfortable clothes with either of them. I’d rather stay home and watch
Rocky & Bullwinkle
, and would still today.

At some point in the evolution of social etiquette between Lisa’s generation and mine, high school kids smartened up about proms. Now they go in groups, and their dates are often friends. During prom season, you see a lot of rented limos seating ten or twelve very dressed-up high school kids. They don’t stand around with one person all night. Prom is still a very big deal, maybe even bigger because just about everybody goes. Rituals include pre-prom photo shoots and dinner for the parents, and intricately planned after-parties. Girls pour energy into hair and makeup, but the really big thing is the dress.

 

lisa:
The dress I decided on was the only one that could really work with my body. My butt had been exercised into oblivion, and I had lost any sign of female curves. On one of many scouting trips to the mall, I found a black Jessica McClintock gown, with layers of lace and chiffon, and an empire waist decorated with a maroon rose on the right side. It ended just above my ankles. In the dressing room I discovered the dress had perfect “twirlability.” For the short time I spent in that dress in that fitting room, I felt pretty.

But that was a month before the prom. I was supposed to be gaining weight. Would it still fit?

 

sheila:
In the best of times, I am a terrible shopper. But that’s only one of the Mom skills I flunked. Hair was another. My method is wash and let dry, while Lisa collected ribbons and barrettes, and wanted her hair twisted into a French braid. She had to show me what she was talking about. My ideas for Lisa’s birthday parties lacked the pizzazz she sought, and I was not the soul of patience when other kids came over. Ned baked the cakes.

But by her teenage years, Lisa had either accepted my areas of incompetence or figured out how to maneuver me into position. For the prom, she wisely scoped out the mall on her own, so that I could come back with her, approve the dress, and pay. I even looked forward to it. We could spend a little time together outside the home battlefield, and the mall had a food court we could check out.

 

lisa:
A mall is the worst place for someone with severe anxiety. It was like somebody had slipped me a psychedelic. As sleep-deprived as I was, with all the mall’s sounds and colors, I felt detached from reality. I was overwhelmed by the crowds, and by the task at hand. I took Mom to the Jessica McClintock store, where I’d tried on the twirly dress. They didn’t have my size anymore. I knew that Macy’s carried Jessica McClintock, and they had the dress, but we could only find my size in a petite.

Now here’s what I feel is a difference between my anorexia and many others’. I looked emaciated and many people assumed I weighed less than 90 pounds, but I still weighed 110. In most clothing brands I had dropped to a size 0 or a 1, but Jessica McClintock dresses seemed to run small.

We grabbed a size 4P and a 6P, and one other possible dress. I tried on the 4 first, which fit just fine although there would not be much room to grow. Not that I wanted to, but this seemed to be a concern of Mom’s. I did a few sit-ups in the dressing room. The 6P allowed some room. I was scared of gaining weight before the prom, Mom was hoping that I would, and my friends tried to convince me that I wouldn’t. I wanted the 4P to work, to verify my success at restricting and losing weight. We settled on the dress with room to grow in it.

For shoes, Mom actually picked out pink strappy sandals to match the rose on the dress—shoes with a four-inch heel!

We ate lunch in the food court, which was torture for me. Mom had to pick a place to review and wanted to try a shrimp shack or something along those lines, with a menu of clam chowder and fried fish. Yeah, right.

The only place I let myself agree on served salads and sandwiches, and I was able to find something I thought would be okay: salad with chicken and low-cal raspberry dressing. I thought I ate too much. Mom pushed me to eat more. Either way, the salad wasn’t very good and I immediately felt fat and regretful and certain that the waist room on my dress now would be filled in.

 

sheila:
Lisa and I had shopped together at the Valley Fair Center’s Jessica McClintock store once before, a time I now remembered as impossibly happy, buying her a dress to wear as flower girl in my sister’s wedding. She was four years old and everything about being a flower girl filled her with joy. Fourteen years later I waited in a chair for a sullen, sunken young woman to come out of the dressing room and model the dress she had already chosen. Lisa conferred with the saleswoman and found out her size wasn’t in stock. They could get it from another store, but Lisa didn’t want to wait. She didn’t have a meltdown. Instead, she took me to Macy’s, which had the right size and a shoe department where Lisa liked the shoes I picked out—a miracle.

At Victoria’s Secret, Lisa tried on strapless bras while I went on an anthropological dig through sections of the store labeled Sexy Little Things and Bustiers & Merry Widows. And then I suggested lunch. The mall had recently expanded to accommodate a nine-hundred-seat food court, on the second floor near the stores most frequented by teenagers. It looks like a stone mountain lodge. I needed to check out some of the new eateries, and Lisa would have been the perfect companion—had she eaten. Instead we argued. Ivar’s Seafood, Rubio’s Tacos, no way. Finally she agreed to try California Crisp, which offered made-to-order salads and sandwiches. Lisa picked at her chopped salad and piece of grilled chicken breast, drizzling a fine mist of no-fat raspberry vinaigrette from its side dish. Her side of the table was an empty desert with one green oasis. My half was Mount Everest, piled with a bowl of minestrone soup, a turkey sandwich, a vegetarian panino, and a cheddar cheese-stuffed baked potato. Most of it came home for dinner.

 

lisa:
My parents went to New York a few days before the prom, and I was left alone at home. My brother came home from Berkeley to stay with me, but he provided nothing more than a sleeping body on the couch in front of the TV with the History Channel turned on low. I don’t know what my parents thought he was going to do. He had problems of his own, and taking care of his anorexic sister was not going to be his call to greatness.

My doctor had finally prescribed a sleeping pill. On Ambien I was awarded a few nights of six or seven hours of sleep, but it was barely enough to feel rested. I had developed astigmatism in one eye, so even on nights when I did get some sleep, I still had blurry vision. Wearing my glasses made me feel disconnected, but my contacts were very uncomfortable. I dreaded the idea of wearing glasses to the prom.

Thursday and Friday before the prom were two of my worst days. The Ambien had either stopped working, or I was too anxious about the prom and couldn’t sleep. Sometimes on particularly bad nights Mom had even come into my room to sleep on my floor, like I was a child again, afraid of the dark. In a way I was afraid of the dark, and I had become afraid of my room. It had established itself as a doomed chamber, stripped of slumber. Sometimes having Mom there quieted my mind and I felt safe. But she was gone.

Thursday night I took two Ambien and woke up to a spinning room, falling out of bed as I was trying to get to the bathroom. I was so dizzy, I softly yelped: “Too much Ambien. It didn’t work.”

Friday was torture. I stayed home sick from school. At that point, my teachers knew I was going through something traumatic. They pardoned most of my absences. I don’t remember much from that day except lying on the couch in the family room, staring at the wall and crying. I saw no way I could make it to the prom. And I don’t think there could have been a way if Peggy hadn’t shown up.

 

sheila:
On the Friday before the journalism awards, I had my nails done, for probably the third time in my life. The technology had improved a lot from the old days of poking pointed sticks into cuticles. Now it was all about comfort, warmth, and massage. I stepped back onto Sixth Avenue with hot pink nails to jazz up my little black Ralph Lauren cocktail dress. We had a fabulous lunch at Le Bernardin, showcasing a James Beard Rising Star Chef nominee from the Bay Area.

Lisa called us in New York so many times that Ned and I still shudder when we hear that particular Nokia cell-phone tone. The pressure of the prom was too much. She hadn’t been out late at night in months. She wasn’t ready. She talked and talked, and whatever we said was either hideously stupid or just vapor, it didn’t really exist. She would calm down and then call again. She behaved like our friend’s elderly mother, who phoned thirty times a day.