Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (12 page)

Although I never persuaded myself that what I was doing was normal or meaningless, I was consoled by the fact that I seldom did it more than once every other day, and never twice on the same day. In a strange way I was consoled as well by my speed and efficiency when I did do it, by how undisruptive it was. It was a like a special talent, a nifty trick. I wondered: What other tricks might I try?

I’d read that bulimics sometimes took laxatives as well, and from those stories I’d wrung another unintended moral: managed correctly, this practice, too, could be useful. It could be smart—if deployed only in special circumstances, in emergencies.

An emergency came along. A big party was three days away, and the diet I’d vowed to start four days earlier hadn’t quite come together. So I bought bars of chocolate-flavored Ex-Lax and took twice the recommended dosage. I knew that it would eliminate only waste—food already digested—but that meant there’d be less mass in my body. Wouldn’t that make me look thinner? Or at least
feel
thinner?

It did, so I kept the Ex-Lax around for the next emergency, and then bought some more Ex-Lax for the emergency after that.

For this reason, too, it paid to know where the good bathrooms on campus were.

Before I’d arrived at Carolina, I’d vowed to stop doing one thing and start doing another. These twinned resolutions had a shared effect. My worry about my weight actually intensified.

What I was stopping was swimming. I just couldn’t stare anymore through foggy goggles at that thick black line on the bottom of the pool. And while I promised myself that I’d find some replacement exercise, I wasn’t sure what it would be, or how devoted to it I’d become. It certainly wouldn’t absorb as many hours a week—and burn as many calories a week—as swimming had, so I’d have to eat much less.

Especially because of what I was determined to start: dating. In prep school I’d told myself that once I got to college, I’d be candid about what I felt—about who I
was—
and keep an eye out for other young gay men. I was sure I’d find at least a few at a school as big as Carolina. And I assumed that the chances of a romance with one of them boiled down to how heavy I was. It was Häagen-Dazs or love. I couldn’t have both.

But in the first weeks at school, Häagen-Dazs wasn’t easy to avoid. There was a Häagen-Dazs parlor on Franklin Street, the commercial stretch that ran along one edge of the university, and Häagen-Dazs pints were sold in freezer cases scattered around campus. Pizza was even harder to get away from: one or another student in my dorm got a delivery from Pizza Hut or Domino’s seemingly every ten minutes after noon. On top of that there were fried-chicken biscuits, beer, egg and cheese biscuits, beer, pulled-pork sandwiches, beer, ramen noodles with jar tomato sauce, and beer. The freshman
fifteen
? By the end of two weeks of freshman orientation, I was on a pace to accomplish a freshman twenty-five, partly because the baseline of my post-Outward Bound weight was such an unusually slender one for me, but mostly because I was unsettled and anxious and seldom more than an arm’s length from something tasty and filling enough to calm me down.

I signed up for a physical education class, a twice-weekly regimen of calisthenics that had the additional benefit of fulfilling some requirement. At the first meeting of the class, the teacher talked about something called a body fat index, then produced a contraption with pinchers to grab and measure any folds of fat around our waists. We had to roll up our T-shirts so the measurement could be made. I registered a higher body fat index than half of the other students. And dropped the class later that same day.

Then I became a vegetarian, figuring I wouldn’t have to be vigilant about how much I ate if I limited the categories of food I allowed myself. When friends got hamburgers, I got grilled cheese. I ate plain pizza instead of pepperoni. Okay, so I sometimes ate five or six slices, but wasn’t the food I was giving my body supposed to be easier to digest than meat, and wouldn’t my body respond by digesting and getting rid of it more easily? I believed that for about four weeks, after which point it became clear that my particular approach to vegetarianism wasn’t making me thin. The size 33 pants that were loose on me just after Outward Bound had worked their way to the far back of my dorm-room closet.

One night about midway through the fall semester, I sat alone in my room—my roommate was away somewhere—and reeled from a night of too many and too much of
everything
: plastic cups of beer from a keg at some outdoor mixer for Morehead scholars; pizza with a few of them on Franklin Street; ice cream (three scoops) from the Häagen-Dazs parlor where I’d gone by myself, on an eating roll that I didn’t want to interrupt. I was angry at myself. I felt slightly queasy, the booze and the ice cream waging a little war with each other in my stomach. I worried that I’d throw up.

And then, a split second later, without any conscious transition, I
hoped
I’d throw up. It hit me: if I threw up, the evening’s eating would be expunged.

I was already on the precipice of getting sick. With a little effort, could I get myself over the edge?

Yes, yes, I could.

By the time the semester was over and I headed home for the holidays, I was terrific at it.

 

 

 

 

Do you want lasagna?” Mom asked me on my first day back in Avon. “I don’t really care,” I told her.

“I bet Mark will want lasagna,” she said. “Mark always wants lasagna.” In fact Mom had begun making lasagna for the entire Amherst College swimming team. Anytime the team had a competition anywhere near Avon, she insisted that Mark, his teammates and his coaches stop by for dinner on the way back to school. She made lasagna for forty to fifty. By carefully mapping out the process and doing much of the preparation in advance, she was able to watch all but the last thirty minutes of the competition, race home ahead of the swimmers and have the lasagna ready for them within forty-five minutes of the team’s bus pulling into our driveway. It was an impressive feat, and she knew it. She reveled in it.

“Lasagna’s fine,” I said.

“I’ll make enough for leftovers,” Mom said, “since you and Mark will be home for a while. What do
you
want? Do you want chicken divan? You must want chicken divan.”

Mom had this ridiculous recipe for chicken divan—involving not just sherry and sour cream but also cans of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup and buttered Ritz cracker crumbs—that had an effect on me not unlike that of violin music on the Frankenstein monster. Whenever she made chicken divan, the rest of the family ate about half the pan. Over the course of dinner and then a snack two hours later and then another snack two hours after that, I took care of the rest. Chicken divan didn’t have a shelf life in our house. I saw to that.

Since Mark and I were now in college and couldn’t avail ourselves regularly of her food, Mom treated our holiday visits as Make-A-Wish Foundation moments, only all the wishes involved eating. She cooked anything and everything she assumed we wanted: lasagna, chicken divan, club sandwiches, chicken livers wrapped in bacon, scallops wrapped in bacon, and her newest experiment in bacon wrapping,
hot dogs
wrapped in bacon, which were arguably as close as she could come to wrapping bacon in bacon without being flagrantly redundant. Before she would wrap the hot dogs in bacon, she’d use a knife to carve grooves in them and fill the grooves with cheese. Her pig-on-pig action apparently needed a little cow.

Something else, too, had joined her repertoire: homemade Egg McMuffins. One of the glories of Mom’s approach to cooking was that she could get just as excited by lowbrow dishes as highbrow ones, bringing as much passion and precision to a faithful, by-the-numbers replica of a fast-food classic as to something torn from the pages of Julia Child. Although her beef Wellington was superb, her
coquilles St. Jacques
estimable, and her manicotti so fluffy and light they were fit for angels, she felt no greater vanity about these dishes than about her chicken divan or her bacon-wrapped hot dogs.

Or her Egg McMuffins. She thought it was a kick on weekend mornings to have an electric warming basket—the kind used for dinner rolls—filled with the foil-wrapped egg and Canadian bacon sandwiches associated with on-the-run, on-the-road breakfasts of extreme convenience.

“Aren’t mine
better
?” she’d ask my siblings and me or our friends—she especially liked to make Egg McMuffins if friends had slept over. She’d note that the English muffins on her Egg McMuffins were crisper than those on the ones at McDonald’s, and the egg in one of hers was less flat and dried out, as if besting a fast-food chain were a laudable triumph. Sometimes she’d offer to poach the egg to order, so that it had a firm yolk or a soft, runny one: take your pick!

“You don’t have to have one of the McMuffins from the warmer,” she’d tell an overnight guest—overnight guests always got extra-special culinary treatment—as she gestured to the basket in which the already-made McMuffins sat. “I’ll make a fresh one!”

While waiting for an answer, she’d tilt her head back and take a long swig of Diet Rite, from her third can in two hours.

Dad, overhearing the conversation from his desk in the nearby study, would shout: “I ate
my
McMuffin from the warmer!” He was shading the truth. He hadn’t stopped at just one McMuffin.

Mom would pretend not to hear him. “Soft yolk or hard yolk?” she’d ask the guest, sometimes adding, gratuitously: “McDonald’s doesn’t give you that choice.”

After the guest departed, as Mom tidied the kitchen, she’d say, “I bet your friend doesn’t get McMuffins like that at home.”

Dad, taking a break from his work in the study, would wrap her in a hug and say, “Nobody has a mom like your mom, huh? Nobody.”

Then he’d ask her if she’d decided what we were having for dinner. It was already ten a.m., after all. How could he plan the day’s eating if he didn’t know?

On my winter break from Carolina, I ate whatever Mom made, because this was vacation, and because the bathroom that connected my and Mark’s bedrooms was a very safe place. I’d lock the door on his side, so he wouldn’t walk in. I’d turn on the stereo in my room and set the volume to a level slightly louder than usual, to conceal any gagging or choking, but not so loud that Mom would show up to complain. I’d heave to the strains of Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf”—the cheeky choice was deliberate—or Tom Petty’s “Don’t Do Me Like That.”

At Grandma’s house on Christmas Eve, she asked me if I missed her all the way down in North Carolina.

“Constantly,” I said.

She put another cutlet on my plate.

Aunt Vicki asked me how I liked my roommate.

“He’s OK,” I said.

She gave me a tin of brownies for the road.

Aunt Carolyn asked me what I was going to major in.

“English, probably,” I said.

She wrapped up an assortment of Christmas cookies for me.

 

 

 

 

Almost a month into the spring semester, by which time I’d almost forgotten about him, Scott called.

I had met him—sort of—just before the Christmas break, at a party in the offices of the
Daily Tar Heel
. He’d come with two of the women on staff, and all night long we’d thrown looks at each other, but we’d never managed to talk. I’d subsequently learned his name from the women, and he’d apparently learned mine, along with my phone number. Because here he was, on the other end of the line, asking me if I wanted to come over to his apartment for a drink sometime.

I did, and made a point of setting the date a solid week into the future, so I could get ready for it. Every day leading up to it, I went to the track, and each time I ran more than two miles, pushing myself up to three, even three and a half.

I took Ex-Lax. One day I took too much—nearly quadruple the recommended dose—and a few hours later, while walking across campus, had to stop, steady myself against a tree and press every relevant muscle into the service of warding off catastrophe. This was crazy, I told myself. I had gone too far. I had to shape up. From now on, I pledged, never more than three times the recommended dose.

With the date approaching, I didn’t just want to be smaller. I
had
to be smaller, because if I got my wish and got to see and feel another person’s body in the way I wanted to, I’d have to let him see and feel mine. I’d be more exposed than I’d been in a Speedo; I’d have no floppy T-shirt or billowing towel to run to. I was as terrified as I was excited.

By date night I didn’t feel as thin as I’d hoped to, so I wore a bulky black Windbreaker over my clothes.

“Let me take your coat,” Scott said.

“That’s OK,” I said, insisting that I was cold.