Tales From the Crib (21 page)

Chapter 25

“I have to cancel lunch today, Lucy. I’m sorry.” In the background of Candace’s apology was the cacophony of a household of multiple children. “Everything’s crazy right now. Manny’s been working late, I’m having family in this weekend, and Barbie’s having a fight with her imaginary friend.”

“A fight with her imaginary friend? “ I said, laughing.

“It’s kooky, I know, but what can you do? Last week, Nina wasn’t speaking to Barbie. Last month, Nina punched Barbie right in the face.”

“Nina?” I asked.

“The imaginary friend,” explained Candace matter-of-factly. An operator interrupted our call with an emergency breakthrough from Anjoli. “Oh dear!” Candace shrieked. “You’d better get that. I hope everything’s okay.”

“It’s fine,” I said, sure I sounded like the daughter with no compassion. It’d been decades since I was startled by my mother’s emergency breakthroughs. Once she interrupted my phone call to ask where I put the salad dressing. Another time, she wanted to know if I was hungry and wanted to grab a bite. (She lived in the same apartment building at the time, mind you.) Sometimes her motives were less selfish. A few times she’d called because she was at a sale and wanted to know if I’d like her to pick up an item she claimed was “to die for.” Then she’d ask if I was still a size twelve or if I’d “slimmed down any.” Back when I protested these interruptions, she reminded me that she wouldn’t have to break through if I just got call waiting. I suggested she call my cell phone, but she said she loved me too much to contribute to my ear cancer.

“Darling, it’s Mommy,” she sobbed into the phone. I knew this was for the benefit of the operator connecting the call. “There’s been a terrible, terrible emergency in the family,” she recited between sniffles. “Thank you, operator, that will be all.”

“What’s up?” I said, biting into an apple. Today reminded me of my days in grad school. Jack and Natalie were out with the baby so I had no childcare responsibilities. My morning of researching my article was highly productive. And my calendar was free for the next several hours.

Anjoli’s voice perked right up. “I did it!” she said.

“Did what?” I played along.

“I dumped Edward,” she sang. “I wanted to tell you just as soon as I hung up the phone with him because I knew you’d be proud of me. Oh, Lucy, I was so empowered. You should have seen me. I was magnificent.” And there I could see my free time being sucked up into the black hole of my mother’s ego. As I settled back into one of the avocado La-Z-Boys, I realized that every time Anjoli monopolized my time with her drama, I allowed her to. But I didn’t have to. Part of me wanted to hear her Edward story. And truth be told, I enjoyed feeling self-righteous and put upon as Anjoli’s one-woman audience.

“Mother, that’s wonderful,” I began. “I have about ten minutes for you, so give me the highlights.”

“Ten minutes?! Where are you going?” she demanded.

After a few moments of deliberation, I told her the truth. “I didn’t say I was going anywhere. What I said was that I have ten minutes for your story.”

“Since when are you so stingy with your time, darling? All your life I listened to your stories without putting time limits on it.”

“Mother!” I could not help jumping into her fray. “You had me tell stories to entertain your friends. Plus, you are the mother. You’re supposed to listen to me.”

“God, how I wish you had a daughter so she would visit this type of insensitivity on you some day!” Anjoli shrieked. “I can’t be held to some ludicrous deadline simply because you’ve taken some sort of boundaries workshop. I get quite anxious with time limits.”

I sighed, exhausted just by the thought of where to begin. “Mother, first, I haven’t been to a boundaries workshop, though now that you mention it, it seems like a good idea. Second, you deal with deadlines every day. You run a business in Times Square, not some little sweat lodge in North Dakota. Get on with it and tell me about dumping Dr. Comstock!”

Less than one second after I’d finished, Anjoli obliged. “So, as you know I’m off to Barbados this weekend, and Edward says he can’t go because his wife is on the committee for this Burn Victims Society Gala or what not, and the event is Saturday night. Now I care about burn victims just as much as the next person, but he’s already bought a table so what does it matter if he’s there or not ?”

“But his wife is on the- ” I started .

“This is about choosing
her
over me,” she said. “It’s about making one relationship a priority and the other some little side dish on the side!”

Side dish on the side?

I hated when she made me explain to her the rules of an affair. I’d been faithful to my husband since our first date, and yet I was always called upon to give her the lowdown on the rules of adultery. “His family
is
his priority. You
are
a side dish on the side. I’m sorry, but it’s true.”

“So I gave him an ultimatum. I told him to come with me to Barbados or we were through.”

“Oh my God! What did he say?” My mother’s account of her dumping my son’s pediatrician was obviously just spin. He broke her cold, demented heart. Oddly, I felt protective of Anjoli.

“He said he was sorry I felt that way and that he wished things were different,” she sighed as if to say
Can you believe the nerve?
“Like I haven’t heard that one before!”
Uh, sorry, but whose fault is that?! Grown weary of your married lovers’ excuses? Cry me a river. My husband and his girlfriend now have a joint account at Blockbuster Video.
“Then he calls back after two hours and says he can’t stand to lose me and he’ll go. He confided in his partner who promised to vouch that Edward needs to go on some impromptu trip with Doctors Without Borders to do cleft palate repairs on kids.”

“Oh my God!” I shrieked. “This is the most awful thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I know, talk about being a day late and a dollar short!” Anjoli added.

“What?”

“How dare he jerk me around like that, making me think he couldn’t go when obviously he very well could have if he only was resourceful enough the first time I invited him. It wasn’t until I threatened him that he even tried to make this happen for us.”

“Mother, do you have any idea how horrible this sounds?”

“So I dumped him right there and then, darling. I said, ‘Edward, I refuse to be treated this way by you. We are through. Go have your little dinner for the burnt people and don’t ever call me again.’”

“Maybe he’ll spend his weekend actually helping kids with cleft palates,” I said.

“Oh no,” she replied, missing my sarcasm. “That was just an alibi, darling.”

“Well, I’m proud of you,” I said and meant it.

“I am too. I cannot wait to tell my Pilates class about this.”

You tell your Pilates class about this kind of stuff?

“Which reminds me,” Anjoli continued. “One of the girls in the class says she lost four inches from her waist just from Pilates. Do they have Pilates in New Jersey?”

“Yes, but it’s illegal,” I whispered. “Don’t tell anyone, but we have to go to the Pilates speakeasy because any thing that hip and cool is banned from New Jersey.”

“Just make sure it’s a real Pilates studio, not some second-rate gym trying to put one over on a bunch of uninformed suburban housewives.”

“Alrighty then,” I interrupted. “Gotta run, darling! Stay humble. And leave the married guys alone. We poor dumb suburban housewives don’t stand a chance against you.”

“I didn’t mean that- ” I heard her voice from the receiver as it was en route to its cradle.

Desdemona’s journey through the rain left her cold and sick. It was four days before she felt ready to face the world again. She promised herself she’d never walk in the rain again. As she closed her eyes to sleep, her mother burst into the room and decried her daughter’s foolish actions. “Never do this again, silly child!” Desdemona’s mother demanded. “I will walk wherever I please,” Desdemona replied defiantly. She muffled a cough and said she was fine.

The following week, I drove into the city to meet Zoe for the Blubber Flush class at the Ninety-Second Street Y. It was April and the winter snow had melted, giving me greater comfort in driving the evening highway and city streets. Still, I wore a knit poncho and boots to camouflage my weight as well as protect me from the slapping night air.

Zoe had saved us seats in a packed room of nearly 200 women ranging in size from two to twenty. The two women who taught the class sat motionless in the front of the room, like puppets waiting to be enlivened. In the back was a table with dozens of books written by the course facilitators.
Flush Your Blubber
was a
New York Times
best seller.
Flushing Blubber in the Kitchen
was their cook book coupled with
Flushercise,
an entire book dedicated to flushing blubber by jumping on a trampoline. Later that evening the woman announced the upcoming release,
Flush This!

The first woman looked like a porcelain doll. Her pale face was without a pore and was utterly motionless even as she spoke. It was not like my Bell’s palsy, but rather like someone Botoxed her entire face. Atop her freakish head was spiked ebony hair that was as frozen as her face. Olivia was the nutrition guru and standing beside her was her fitness counterpart, Randy. Like Olivia, Randy was in her forties, but taking every desperate measure to reverse the signs of aging. Their bodies were absolutely devoid of any fat and they both wore clothing that highlighted that fact, but there was something bizarre-looking about Randy’s eyes. She claimed to run one hundred miles a week and I wondered if this was why her eyes were bulging out of the sockets. As Olivia began speaking, Randy stood by her side, nodding her head and echoing choice inane phrases.

“Welcome to Blubber Flush, where miracles happen,” Olivia said, moving only her bottom lip.

“Miracles happen,” Randy repeated, nodding frantically and smiling like a game show contestant on a winning streak.

“If you want to shed blubber, live a healthier lifestyle, and look like a million bucks, you have come to the right place!”

“Oh, you
have
come to the right place.”

“I am so excited to be here with you ladies tonight,” Olivia continued with the enthusiasm of a mortician on Prozac. “We are going to flush blubber right off your body and you are going to love looking in the mirror.”

“I like looking in the mirror,” Randy added. The more she spoke, the more she looked like a mole rat begging for food. Her short red pigtails bounced around as she nodded in agreement and her hands were even clawing under her chin.

For the next half hour the women showed us before and after photos of some of their Blubber Flusher success stories. “We have a cruise every holiday season where we literally take you away on a ship so you’re not tempted by cookies and cake.” Zoe shot me a look as if to apologize.

“We
literally
take you away on a ship?” I whispered, not able to control a laugh. “Is that unusual for a cruise?” She elbowed me, urging me to behave.

“No cookies, no cake,” Randy said, nodding to every corner of the room. “You’re on a boat.”

“And we have Camp Blubber Flush, which is our spa,” Olivia said, advancing the next slide to their fat camp.

“Remember her?” she asked Rand y as they showed an unbelievably unflattering photo of an obese woman. “Oh yeah,” Randy snickered. “Blubberella.”

The next photo was a studio portrait of the same woman after she lost forty pounds at the three-week Camp Blubber Flush. And on and on the slide show went until I looked at my watch and noticed that forty-five minutes had gone by without their imparting any of their blubber-flushing wisdom on us. It was the closest I’d ever come to sitting on the set of an infomercial—and paying one hundred dollars for the privilege. No one else seemed bothered by this. They were all taking copious notes. Of what, I’ll never know.

“You’re probably asking yourself, okay so how do I become a Blubber Flusher? “ Olivia noted.

“You want to do it, don’t you?” Randy added. I’d never understood the impulse to kill another human before this evening.

“It’s all about food—combining, drinking enough water and longevity cocktail, the right vitamins, and eliminating no-no foods,” Olivia said.

No-no foods?

“We can leave at the break if you want,” Zoe whispered.

“Shh, they’re finally getting to the good stuff,” I assured her.

“To flush blubber you need to cut out all dairy products, wheat and gluten, fruits, and carbohydrates,” Olivia said.

I had to raise my hand. “What
can
we eat? I mean, can you give me an example of a blubber-flushing dinner?” I couldn’t believe I was using this ridiculous terminology.

“It’s in the book,” Olivia answered.

Another woman shot up her hand. “You mentioned we need to take vitamins. Can you tell us which ones, please?”

“In the book,” Olivia snapped again.

“All in the book,” Randy echoed.

Another hand shot up. This woman looked pissed-off to have spent one hundred dollars to keep hearing that she’d have to buy a book. “Uh, yes,” Olivia smiled and pointed to the rough-looking woman.

“Don’t tell me this is in the book. I want to know what the hell a longlivity cocktail is.”

“Longevity,” Randy corrected, nodding her head. I realized that the constant head bobbing had injured her brain. “Means long life. Lon-gev-ity.”

“What’s in the shit? “ the woman snapped.

“Okay, calm down. Deep breathing is also a part of flushing blubber so let’s all take some deep, blubber-flushing breaths.”

“You bitches better tell us what the fuck is in this cocktail!” The woman stood. I was seriously rooting for her to go and knock an expression onto Olivia’s face. Preferably replacing it with one that communicated
Ouch!

“A longevity cocktail is a patented weight-loss formula consisting of ...” Olivia said, pausing for us to take notes, “hot purified water with lemon juice and psyllium husks. Stirred briskly.”