The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted (18 page)

Marsha uses the toilet, takes off her pajamas, pushes all the air out of her lungs, and steps on the scale. Five pounds down! She steps off, gingerly, as if the scale might grab her by the arm, pull her back on, and show her her real weight. She dresses and brushes her teeth, thinks maybe she’ll skip breakfast, how about
that
! Give ’em the old one-two! She finds herself doing a little dance, and she laughs out loud. From out in the hall, she hears Tom ask what’s so funny.

She opens the bathroom door. “Have you lost much weight?”

“Twelve pounds,” he says, with something like wonder in his voice.

She stops smiling. Nods. Lifts the hair up off her neck and blows air out of her cheeks.

“You?” he asks.

“Uh-huh,” she says and shuts the door again.

Weeks later, at eleven A.M., which is close enough to noon, Marsha is about to sit down to a lunch of eggplant parm; fo-caccia, which she will dip into olive oil spiced with red pepper; and Caesar salad, extra dressing. She got takeout from her favorite Italian restaurant. You have to cheat sometimes or you crack up. At Weight Watchers, they know this; you 138

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d can bank points for just such an occasion. Tom’s diet is ridiculous; it thinks you’re an automaton who can just eat the same thing every day. When the phone rings, she answers in a voice meant to convey hurry; she wants to eat quickly and get rid of the evidence right away. Tom is out of town on business, but still. She didn’t even eat at the restaurant in case a mutual friend saw her and let it slip to Tom.

“Hello?” she says, breathlessly.

“Just landed,” Tom says. “Are you being good?”

Silence.

“Marsha?”

“Oh, Tom, I was going to cheat. I guess it’s good you called. I won’t now. I really won’t.”

“Good girl,” he says, like he’s talking to a dog. On a diet.

Nine pounds down, and they are out for Marsha’s birthday.

They have allowed themselves a steak, which they shared so as to have the proper-size portion, and even at that, there’s some left over. “I’ll bring it home for Ditzy,” Marsha says.

Tom raises an eyebrow. “You know what they say at the clinic?”

“What,” Marsha asks tiredly.

“The dog doesn’t need it, either.”

Marsha leaves the steak but tells Tom that she
will
be stopping for an ice cream on the way home, it is her
birthday
and she can have
ice cream
on her
birthday.

“You need to learn not to reward yourself with food,”

Tom says.

She stares at him.

“It’s true.”

She sits back in the booth. “So where’s my jewelry, then?”

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He grins, reaches in his jacket pocket, and pulls out a black velvet box. Marsha gasps and covers her mouth with her hands.

“See?” he says.

Down the street from Tom and Marsha live two sisters about seven and nine years old, entrepreneurial towheads who perform acrobatics on their front lawn between going in and out of various businesses. They were the Wonderful Weed Pullers until a person who hired them realized they were not so very expert at distinguishing a weed from a plant. They offered homemade greeting cards for every occasion, then porch washing. Now they have gone into the dog-walking business. Just this morning, Marsha found in her mailbox a hand-lettered flyer that began “Does your dog spend the whole day just lownging on the sofa?” But Marsha’s favorite part was at the end: “And of course the prices are always lower if you act right away. First person who calls will get to pay only twenty cents for a half hour of dog play. (Our charge for walking around the block will still be a quarter, sorry.)”

Marsha decides to bake brownies for them. She doesn’t want any, she truly doesn’t, but she wants to bake something, she just wants the smell, and she wants to use her professional-size Mixmaster and her beautiful heart-shaped stainless steel measuring cups and spoons, which she had just gotten at Williams-Sonoma on the very day Tom came home depressed from the doctor’s office. He is off golfing; he won’t be home for hours. Marsha had planned to pay the bills and clean, and when Tom got home they were going to try a new sushi restaurant. She’ll make and deliver the brownies—get them out of the house!—and then she’ll pay the bills while she breathes in that heavenly, lingering scent.

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t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d She finds the butter, the fancy chocolate, the nuts. She breaks eggs into the big metal bowl, adds salt and vanilla, which she inhales deeply before adding to the bowl. When the batter is done, she has one little taste to make sure there is enough salt, usually you have to add just a bit more salt to the batter than they say. A bit more salt, a bit more vanilla. You can only tell by tasting; you can’t rely completely on a recipe, it is really only an approximation. Baking is not a science; it’s an art.

Marsha is in the family room when Tom comes home. All the blinds are drawn, and the television is on and Marsha is lying on the sofa watching Bette Davis say, “It’s going to be a bumpy night.” Well. Truer words were never spoken.

Marsha sits up and uses the remote to turn off the television. Which is part of the problem. A nation of obese people who spend all their time designing labor-saving devices. When what everyone needs is to go out into the fields and walk behind the plow horse!

“Marsha?” Tom calls.

“Everything in this culture conspires against the dieter,” Marsha says.

Tom comes into the family room, his golf shirt tucked into his pants for the first time in . . . how long? Who knows. “Why’s it so dark in here?” He starts to raise the shades and Marsha says, “Don’t. I’m watching movies.”

Tom raises the shades anyway. “Marsha? What’s wrong?”

“Everything in this culture conspires against the dieter,” she repeats, and he sits in his La-Z-Boy recliner (see?) and asks again what’s wrong, and now Marsha begins to cry and blubber.

“You have a bad of owies?” Tom asks. “What does that mean?”

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“I
ate
a
pan
of
brownies,
” Marsha says.

Tom nods slowly. “I see.”

“Don’t say anything!”

“I didn’t. I won’t.”

Marsha gets off the sofa and moves to the window. Earlier in the day, there had been a beautiful cardinal at the feeder; now no birds are there. “I am fifty-seven years old,” she tells Tom.

“Yes. I know.”

“Once, many years ago when I was in New York City, I saw a woman on the elevator and she looked really familiar, and I said, ‘Are you Helen Gurley Brown?’ and she lowered her head kind of shyly and nodded that she was. And then I said something inane, like ‘Oh, nice to meet you,’

but I was mostly just staring at how thin she was. She was so thin, and really, she was kind of old then. And I had just recently read that she wore makeup to bed, that her husband didn’t know this, but that she actually wore makeup to bed because she would never let him see her without it.

And I remember thinking,
God, is that dumb. I will never
be so dumb.
But you know what, Tom? I am that dumb.”

“You wear makeup to bed?” He’s very nearly whispering.

“No! But I keep dieting and dieting and dieting and I just . . . I just . . . It doesn’t work! I diet; I lose; it comes back on. I diet; I lose; it comes back on. I just can’t keep it off, and now
especially
I can’t because my body does not
want
me to, estrogen is stored in fat cells, and I need to get estrogen some way because I don’t make it anymore because I don’t have any more periods, I haven’t menstruated for years, I don’t even have a single tampon in the whole house!”

“Whoa,” Tom says, laughing. “This might be TMI, too much information.”

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t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d Marsha spins around angrily. “I know what TMI is! And don’t say that! Don’t
say
it! You don’t talk that way, you never used to say things like that! That’s a girl thing to say!”

“No, it isn’t,” Tom says. “Guys at work—”

“Well, you say other things you never used to say, and they are just girl things. I’m sorry, but they are.”

“Fine,” Tom says.

“And I just also want to say that this is partly your fault.”

“ ‘This’ being . . . ?”

“This dieting! I mean, I try very hard to stay attractive to you, and I know I’m just not attractive to you anymore!”

“Yes you are!”

“Oh, don’t you dare. Don’t you dare. Let’s just tell the truth. I know you love me, but you no longer find me attractive like you used to!”

“Well, Marsha. Come on, do you find
me
attractive like you used to?”

“Yes!” This is not so, actually. But she finds, oddly, that at this time of demanding the truth, she herself cannot offer it. She doesn’t want to hurt his feelings. And anyway, she doesn’t want to talk about him. She wants to talk about her.

She moves to sit on the sofa and leans forward earnestly, just like her stupid therapist. She says, “I look in the mirror now, and even if I lost weight, there’s just . . . There’s nothing I can do. It’s over. My bodyness. My attractiveness in my body. I can diet forever but it will never make me like I was. I’m . . . Well, I’ve gotten kind of square and melty-looking. I will never be attractive like I was again.

In the bodily way of before, which is impossible.” Oh, she hates it when she gets this way. When her emotions gobble up her reason, making her wildly inarticulate.

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“So why try?” Tom asks, and she wants so very much to go and get the yellow pages and bring it squarely down on his head.

“Because you want me to! You respond to me differently when I lose weight! I can see it in your eyes that you find me more attractive when I’m thinner! My husband!

So I feel I have to keep trying and trying—”

“But you
don’t
have to keep trying.”

“Tom. Do you or do you not find me more attractive when I’m thinner.”

He frowns, thinking. Then he says, “Well, I guess you might look a little nicer when you’re thinner. I mean your clothes aren’t as tight and everything. But, Marsha, don’t you know this? I don’t care. Do I notice a beautiful woman on the street, even if I try very hard not to look at her? Sure.

But do I
care
about her? No. I care about you, sweetheart: then, now, forever. Marsha. I love you. I love you with all my heart, and I always will. Look, I’m overweight, too.”

“Not anymore,” Marsha says, bitterly.

“No, not anymore. But it will come back, I can’t keep this up forever.”

“You can’t?”

“No! And I don’t want to! I’ll be reasonable; I don’t want to create health problems. But I’m not going to go to that clinic or follow diets or count points or any of that crap.”

Oh, Tom,
she thinks.
You’re back.

He comes over and embraces her. “Listen, if I don’t put the moves on you, it’s because . . . Well, sometimes the dog just won’t come to the whistle.”

She doesn’t answer. She knows this.

“But also, I guess I just don’t think so much about that anymore. I think about other things. You know?”

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t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d Buried against his shoulder, she nods. She feels the bodywide relief of having had a good cry without having had a good cry.

“Suppose we agree to try to be a healthy weight, and that’s all,” Tom says.

“Okay.” She wipes under her nose, pulls away to smile at him. “Okay.”

“And suppose we agree to go and get a pizza right now.”

“I’m kind of full,” she says. “But I guess I could eat a little.”

“There you go. And I brought something home for dessert that would make the girls at my clinic hold the sides of their heads and scream.” He takes Marsha’s hand and leads her to the kitchen, where there is a bakery box on the table from Butterflake, their favorite. He lifts the lid to show her a cake that must have been beautiful before.

But it appears the cake must have slid sideways, for it is smashed on one side, and the frosting is smeared so that none of the pretty designs are intact.

“Uh-oh,” Tom says.

“What happened?”

“Well, I dropped it.”

She laughs. “It’s fine. It’s better.”

“Forget the pizza,” Tom says. “Let’s eat this.”

“We can have pizza for dessert!”

Marsha goes to the cupboard for plates, she knows just the ones she wants to use, the ones she got at an antiques store; they have scalloped edges, and they feature bouquets of violets at the center. Cake forks, of course, they’ll use them, too. The very name thrills her: cake forks.

She pulls down the plates and then stands still for a moment, remembering the day she and Tom brought their first child home from the hospital. They were so young,
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