Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (20 page)

Renee says what you know she’ll say, because it’s the inevitable response: “But he’s already seen you. He asked you out after having already seen you. Why do you need to lose weight?”

You’re ready for this, and glad for the opportunity to educate her. “He wasn’t looking at me as closely as he will be next time out. For starters, it was a big party. It wasn’t just me and him. I was framed in an entirely different way. There were visual distractions.” You don’t entirely believe this, but you believe it could be 15 percent true, and even if it’s just 10 percent true, you want to factor it in.

“In addition,” you add, your voice growing louder as your case grows stronger, “I was wearing these brown brushed-cotton pants that are the single most flattering pants I own, at least three pounds more flattering than the next most flattering pair, and of course I’ve searched high and low to find them in another color, in two or three or even
five
other colors, but I haven’t, and so I’ve shot my most-flattering-pants wad, and I can’t wear those pants a second time, in case he’s the type of person who notices that stuff.”

When you take a breath she almost butts in.

“Not finished!” you admonish her. “Also, when he saw me at the barbecue, there wasn’t the possibility of sex in just a few hours, the way there would be on a date, so he might not have been sizing up my body the way he will next time out.” This last part you believe to be at least 80 percent true. And maybe as high as 95 percent.

“
On top of which,
” you continue, rushing the phrase out because you’re on a roll, “he wasn’t thinking: ‘boyfriend material or not boyfriend material?’ I just piqued his curiosity. On an honest-to-goodness date, he’s going to be looking a lot more closely and assessing a lot more critically.” You’re 100 percent sure of this.

“Brilliantly reasoned,” Renee says. “Wow. I’m blown away. You
do
know, by the way, that the company medical insurance provides partial reimbursement for therapy?”

“What’s playing at the Eastland Mall multiplex?” you say, ignoring her.

On Wednesday, the day after his call, you’re supposed to be doing one of your healthy, I’m-being-good-today lunches, maybe a sandwich of turkey, lettuce and tomato on whole wheat, no mayonnaise, no chips on the side.

But the special at one of the popular lunch places near the office is the chicken Caesar salad, which is more like chicken Caesar soup, on account of how heavily it’s dressed. It’s an unconscionable chicken Caesar. You worship it.

And since you’re not always in town or in the office on the day it’s a special, shouldn’t you have it? After all, you’ve pushed your date back to next week, which will probably turn out to mean that weekend, which means you have something like ten days—eleven if you schedule the date for Sunday instead of Saturday night—to lose the four to five pounds you hope to.

You eat the chicken Caesar.

You get stuck in the office until nine p.m., ruining your plan for a run around six thirty. Two colleagues are leaving the building as you are, and they suggest dipping into a nearby bar for a few beers. It’s past dinnertime and it’s not wise to drink on an empty stomach, so you allow yourself a hamburger and fries. Tomorrow will be all about turkey and running.

Tomorrow comes. It
is
all about turkey and running. It’s a good day, a great day, but at this point it’s merely compensation for a bad day, so by Friday you’re sort of back to where you were on Wednesday. You’ve got eight or nine days until the likely date. Better get cracking.

Renee suggests that before the movie on Saturday you stop by her house for a bite. She’s made a big batch of pesto. She’s always making pesto, and it’s a damned fine pesto, nearly as good as Mom’s, and pesto happens to be one of your Top Five Most Beloved Ways to sauce pasta, especially if the pasta is fusilli, because the pesto works its way into the grooves of the corkscrew and there’s more pesto per noodle. Renee often uses fusilli.

You stop by for a bowl. You wind up having two. It’s not the very end of the world—you skip dessert, and you don’t have popcorn at the movie. But it’s also not the deprivation plan you had hoped to follow, and that’s pretty much how the entire weekend goes, so by Monday morning you haven’t made much progress. If you’re any lighter than you were on Friday, it’s by half a pound at most.

You call him on Tuesday. It’s a day later than you said you’d call, but that’s intentional: it conveys the proper air of distraction and aloofness. You’re prepared to ask him about the coming Sunday night, which you now wish wasn’t coming quite so soon, but something ghastly and unthinkable happens.

He says, “What are you up to tonight?”

“Tonight?” you repeat back to him. You’re buying time. He’s wandered off script, and you have to get your bearings.

“Yeah,” he says, “I’m going to this cocktail party fund-raiser and I have an extra ticket.”

“That would be fun,” you say. “But I have to work late tonight.” Having to work late is the only excuse that comes to mind. Having to work late seems credible, unimpeachable.

“On what?” he says. It’s not a challenge. It’s more like an effort to express interest in what you’re doing. What a sweet, good guy. What a catch. That cinches it: he’s not seeing you until you look as close to perfection as possible.

You mumble something about a “boring feature story due tomorrow,” taking care to be vague enough that he won’t be able to connect anything you’ve just said to anything that does or doesn’t appear in the newspaper over the coming week, in case he’s a reader. Then, to move the conversation elsewhere, you bring up Sunday night.

“Are you free?” you ask.

He’s not. In fact he’s leaving Friday afternoon on a two-week vacation. So when he says that he could have a drink or dinner on either of the next two nights, Wednesday or Thursday, you’re stuck. You have to be able to produce two excuses at once, serial lies, and you don’t have them ready. Even if you did, you’d then be pushing the date more than two weeks away, and you realize that that may be too heavy a tax on his patience.

“Thursday,” you say, “could work.”

But can it?

It’s eight p.m. You took a run at six thirty p.m. But you ran only 2.5 miles, because you just weren’t feeling it. You should have run another two. You
will
run another two. You get back into shorts and a T-shirt, grab your Walkman, rewind the mix tape with the Psychedelic Furs and Madonna, and off you go. You do the same 2.5 miles all over again.

In the morning you feel lighter. You feel like helium! You skip breakfast and you gnaw on an apple and a pear for lunch and you’re feeling a bit woozy by the time you get out of work. When you factor that into the stiffness you feel from running twice the previous night, you decide against another run. You don’t need it tonight. Your calorie count for the day is tiny. You just need to keep any eating before bedtime to a minimum. You’ll just make a salad or something.

When you get home you realize there’s nothing in the fridge. You’re too tired and lazy to go out, so you treat this as an opportunity: you’re done eating for the day. And what a net-loss day it’s been, or will be. Just two pieces of fruit.

By nine forty-five p.m. you’re crazy starving. All you can think about is how empty your stomach is. It’s so empty it’s forlorn. Angry. Your stomach seems to have its own range of emotions, all negative and needy.

You call your favorite pizza delivery place and order the smallest pizza, which isn’t really that small, but you resolve not to eat the whole of it, then do.

And then it’s Thursday. Dear God, it’s Thursday.

You call an editor at work to say you have an important personal errand and will be in late. You say this in a tentative, embarrassed, please-don’t-pry voice, eliminating any chance you’ll be asked what the errand is. The errand is a run. You have to take a last-ditch run.

You do, and you overdress for extra sweating. Then, at work, you’re turkey-sandwich virtuous at lunchtime. At about three thirty you go into the bathroom. You look in the mirror. You’re wearing khakis, and you’ll surely find something darker in your closet for the evening. You’re wearing a button-down chosen more for comfort than midriff flattery. But still. You don’t look thin, and you’re not going to look thin in four hours, with a change of clothes.

You suck in your gut. It does not produce as striking an effect as you had hoped.

You call his home number, not his work number, because it’s easier to tell a lie to a machine.

“I can’t believe this and I can’t tell you how bummed I am about it, but I’ve been sneezing all afternoon and I can feel that my head’s really stuffed up,” you say. You’re using the clogged-nose voice just about anyone can affect when necessary. You’re hoping yours doesn’t sound too fake. “I think I’m getting sick, and I’d hate to get
you
sick.” No, no! That last part was too much. It could be read as a presumptuous assertion that major germs would be exchanged.

You can’t go back and delete the words, so you forge ahead. “As much as I hate to kick this too far into the future,” you conclude, “I guess we’ll have to wait until you get back into town. Let’s touch base then.”

That night you join friends at a Middle Eastern restaurant, where you set world records for hummus consumption. No reason to diet tonight. Any rescheduled date is more than two weeks away.

They’re a relatively disciplined two weeks: Frequent runs. Infrequent binges. You don’t shed four to five pounds, but it’s possible you shed two.

You think,
If he calls, I’ll go out with him. Whichever night he suggests. No chickening out.

But you leave it to him to call. His call is the necessary proof that he’s interested enough to overlook your physical flaws. His call is the reassurance you need.

What a surprise: it never comes.

 

 

 

 

Somehow, some way, thanks to unpredictable bursts of determination and unexpected stretches of levelheadedness, I did manage to date, and my desire for those dates to go well—along with my hope for additional dates beyond them—kept me in decent shape. It propelled me out to Belle Isle for long runs. It helped prevent binges too frequent or florid.

But I achieved actual, indisputable slimness only twice, and in neither case did the credit belong to better habits or more rationally marshaled willpower. It belonged to a minor war and a major athletic endeavor.

A few days after Christmas 1990, the newspaper sent me to Saudi Arabia to write about soldiers, sailors, pilots and marines who were there in preparation for the first Gulf War. I arrived in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, in time for New Year’s Eve with the troops, and stayed for nearly three months.

Using my hotel room as a base, I’d take day trips and overnight trips out into the desert, near the border of southern Iraq, to spend as much time as military officials would let me interviewing the men camped out there. I’d sleep the way they slept, on hard cots inside tents, and eat the way they’d eat, which often meant those prepackaged, processed wonders known as Meals Ready-to-Eat. MREs were designed to provide maximum calories with minimum substance. They were compact energy bombs for soldiers on the go, with envelopes of rice stews or ham slabs or meat-flecked gruels. I was horrified, and not on epicurean grounds. I couldn’t believe I was having extra-fattening food forced on me, especially when I was doing nothing more aerobic than scribbling in a notepad and banging on a laptop.

It was food so charmless that even I couldn’t get through more than about half of an MRE a day. And when military officials finally permitted me more than overnight trips, assigning me to a cavalry regiment positioned along the tall sand berm separating northern Saudi Arabia and southern Iraq, MREs were the sum and summary of my diet. I picked at them joylessly as I waited for the ground war to begin.

When it did, I was given an empty seat in the rear of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle that had four soldiers inside, instead of the usual five. Our regiment was on the leading edge of troops moving into Iraq, and I might have been petrified had I not been too cramped, knotted and achy to feel anything else. A Bradley Fighting Vehicle isn’t designed with such niceties as leg room and lumbar support in mind. It’s a heavily fortified steamer trunk on wheels, with more room for armaments than anything else. I sat with my knees against my chest and my head banging against the low, hard ceiling. My only view of the landscape was through a small, smudgy rectangle of bulletproof glass. It was like watching
Lawrence of Arabia
on a microscope slide.

I ate less than ever as we trundled toward whatever awaited us, my appetite killed by my discomfort and something else: a determination not to go to the bathroom much. Because of the Army’s concern about land mines, we were forbidden to step out of the vehicle, which didn’t have a toilet of any kind. The solution was to lower the Bradley’s rear hatch, crouch on its far edge and aim for the desert floor. I didn’t have the thigh muscles for it. Or the immodesty.

We drove across the desert for five days without seeing combat, then got the news that the ground war was over. Brief as this trek was, it thinned me even further than my prior months in Saudi Arabia had, and when Renee met me at the Detroit airport in mid-March, she jokingly wondered if I’d been away at a spa. I suggested we head straight for a pub that had an oversize cheeseburger I loved. I’d never found a decent burger in Saudi Arabia and figured I was due and could afford one, calorically speaking.

Many months and more than a few regained pounds later one of my editors asked me if I’d be willing to pedal a bicycle across the breadth of Michigan. The newspaper was a principal sponsor of a group ride that publicized the Rails-to-Trails project, a campaign to turn train tracks that were no longer being used into bicycle routes. To chronicle the bikers’ adventures on the first annual ride, the newspaper had sent a fit staffer along for the six-day trek from the edge of Lake Michigan eastward to Detroit.