The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted (2 page)

But the Portillo’s are not as close to the airport, you might not have time. Although if you said to anyone who knew Chicago, “I missed my flight because I had to go to Portillo’s,” they would say, “Oh, I know, did you get a tamale?”

If you’re debating, which should I go to?, pick Superdawg, because they are not a chain. Always pick the thing that is not a chain, is one way to try to save the world.

I decided I’d go for lunch to this café I know where the butter is real and the syrup is real and the waitresses do not in any way judge what you order. I got there at 12:30 and got a table in a good booth because it was across from where Ivy was sitting. Ivy is a regular in her nineties, and she wears a little old lady dress and a sweater and sneakers
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and a white baseball hat turned frontways. Long gray hair tied back in a skinny ponytail. She orders a little something and then falls asleep before it comes and then after about half an hour her home health aide comes to wake her up and take her back home.

I ordered a bacon cheeseburger, fries, and a chocolate malted, and I loaded up the fries with salt and made a neat pile of catsup. I had whipped cream on the malt and I ate some by itself and then mixed the rest in. When the waitress asked, “Will there be anything else?” I
almost
ordered two over easy with hash browns because I just wanted one bite of the potatoes mixed with yolk, but no, that would have been too much wastefulness in one day.

But. Because this was a day purposefully given over to gluttony and greed, I walked over to a bookstore, where I looked at cookbooks. You may think, Right, she looked at dessert books, but that’s where you would be wrong. Because guess what? Vegetarian. And some Mediterranean and Indian. And okay, then I found this one? The cake doctor? Which so made me in the mood for a piece of cake, not a fancy one, just a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. And vanilla ice cream, vanilla enough to be a bit yellow in color. So I went and got that at another café, but I could only fit in half.

By now I was feeling the shame but also defiance. Like here, I’m carrying the banner for all of you who cut off a little piece wanting a big one, who spend a good third of your waking hours feeling bad about your desires, who infect those with whom you work and live with your judgments and pronouncements, you on the program who tally points all day long, every day, let’s see, 7 for breakfast, I’m going to need only 3 or 4 for lunch, what the hell can I have for so little, oh, I know, broth and a salad with very 10

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 little dressing. And broth is good! Yes! So chickeny! That’s what we tell ourselves, we who cannot eat air without gaining, we who eat the asparagus longing for the potatoes au gratin, for the fettuccine Alfredo, for the pecan pie. And if you’re one of those who doesn’t, stop right here, you are not invited to the rest of this story.

In the afternoon, I rented two movies.
Big Night
and
Tortilla Soup.
Which made me starving again even though I wasn’t. How many people went
running
out for Italian food after
Big Night
? Hands? I think movies like those are very beautiful, because in addition to food as art, you get love of the family variety and more. I returned the movies, stopped at the very famous Petersen’s ice cream parlor for a turtle sundae, extra caramel sauce, and made out my grocery list on a napkin. When I paid at the cashier, I got a bag of Cheetos because there was one of those chip racks and every time I see a chip rack I want some chips. I love Cheetos so much it kind of makes my butt hurt. Every time I fly, I buy a bag of Cheetos (not the puffy kind, eww) because you never know, and if I go down, I’m going to at least have had a bag of Cheetos.

Okay. Dinner. I was going to make dinner. I was going to have steak and mushrooms and a loaded baked potato and Caesar salad because I make better Caesar salad than any restaurant I’ve ever been to. And apple crisp and crumb-topped cherry pie. And a baguette with that European butter that starts with a “P.” After I got it almost ready, I was going to sit on my front porch with a martini with blue-cheese-stuffed olives, and potato chips with Lip-ton onion soup mix dip, which I love, it has that same thing going for it as Kraft macaroni and cheese. The cheese in the envelope in the box, I should say, the old kind
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in the box where you yourself must mix the milk and butter and powdered cheese in. Here is my favorite recipe: Buy two boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese. Make one box of macaroni but use both cheeses. Telling you this, I just remembered this woman I really liked a lot who died and she loved egg salad more than anything and didn’t eat it for years because it was
bad for her
and then when she was on her deathbed and could have anything she wanted, she was given an egg salad sandwich and she couldn’t eat it anymore.

So dinner. You can imagine it, can’t you? The mushrooms sautéed in butter lying seductively over the steak.

The potato, buried under butter, bacon, green onion, and sour cream. The two desserts sitting side by side, can you see them? I knew after the day was over, I’d have to go back to the plan, go back and confess at my meeting. Which is okay, it’s fine, you can say anything at a meeting. Once someone said she had cheesecake left in her refrigerator from a family dinner and everyone was saying, “Oh, my God, get rid of it, give it away.” Someone else said, “Just
throw
it away.” And this other woman said, “Well, I’m sort of embarrassed to admit this but I have actually taken food out of my garbage and now I’ve learned that I have to pour water on it before I throw it away.”

I myself put coffee grounds over food I throw away, that’ll do it. Sometimes at a meeting, a person will take up practically the whole time telling how she fell off the wagon. And all of us at the edges of our seats, eating it all with her in our imaginations. And also feeling a little bit smug that we didn’t fall off the wagon. This time.

I ate the dinner, the whole thing, just like I said. And then I took a wooden mallet and I beat the shit out of my 12

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 scale. I wanted springs to pop out like they might in a cartoon, but all that happened was it didn’t work anymore and it had a few dents. Still.

The next day I went to a Weight Watchers meeting, and the blind lady was there again. “How are you doing?”

I said to her and she said, “Okay. How about you?” “Okay,”

I said. I never confessed. I got weighed and I was four pounds up and they were just like, “Well, that happens,”

and I bought another scale and that night I had turkey burgers for dinner. Seven points and actually very good and I had spinach and a two-point ice cream thing though I don’t think it’s really ice cream, it’s probably chemicals that kill you faster than fat. And I drank lots of water.

I have to tell you this funny story about water and Weight Watchers that our leader told us. She said she was telling a new member the rules and she guessed she talked too fast. Because she told the woman be sure to drink six to eight glasses of water a day. And the woman came back the next week saying, “I did everything you said, but I just can’t drink sixty-eight glasses of water a day.” Imagine her at the sink, upending yet another glass of water, wide-eyed and discouraged:
This program is
hard
!

I would like to end this by saying that it felt really good to cheat all day, to eat whatever I wanted. But it didn’t. All that happened was that I felt hollow-eyed. I felt like one time when I was a little girl and I sat on the porch steps one summer evening with my dad. We were watching the neighborhood kids riding bikes with no hands or roller-skating or turning one-handed cartwheels three in a row or chasing each other up and down the block at breakneck speed. “Some of them are real athletes, huh?” he said. And I stared at my knees and said, “All of them are.”

“Well,” he said. And he took my hand.

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I was already really chubby and he was a very fat man with pretty blue eyes. A couple of times I was with him when people made jokes about how fat he was. He would laugh like he thought it was funny and his belly would shake, it went up and down when it shook, but their remarks hurt him, I could see it—he registered pain in those instances by one quick jerk of his right eyelid. But that night he took my hand and I moved closer to him. Inside the house, hidden between my mattresses, was a stockpile of Butterfingers, and I couldn’t wait for bedtime. I thought there was a delicacy to the way I licked the chocolate off my fingers. I thought it was beautiful. I wished someone could see.

returns and

exchanges

It wasn’t until she got outside into the sunlight that she realized her socks didn’t match. At least one of them was navy and the other black. Only last week, she’d crossed her legs and realized she was wearing one kneesock and one ankle sock. It was not Alzheimer’s, causing this. It was not a senior moment. It was not menopause or peri-menopause and it certainly was not PMS. PMS was years ago, and she remembered it now as rather charming, uniquely and daintily feminine, all ribbons and lace, though of course it was not. Rather, it was her coming home from the grocery store, slamming innocent cans down onto cupboard shelves, tearing into a party-size bag of Ripple chips and finishing half of it before she realized what she was doing, then bursting into tears because she was a fat pig. Ho. That was a laugh, thinking of herself as
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a fat pig when she weighed 126. Now she was a fat pig at 1
7
6. Recently, in a hotel room with an unfortunately positioned bathroom mirror, she’d seen herself sitting naked on the toilet and thought she looked just like Buddha.

So, no, there was nothing to blame this forgetfulness on.

Absentmindedness was . . . well, it was just
her.
In kinder-garten, she’d once forgotten to wear underpants. When the children had spread their blankets out for nap time, Agnes had lain down, stuck her thumb in her mouth, and, when the breeze coming through the open window had blown her little blue dress up, revealing her nakedness and making Sister Theresa gasp and the girls giggle and the boys shout, when that had happened, she had meekly followed her teacher to the principal’s office, imagining her white soul stained by sin. The principal, frowning, had phoned her mother, who’d soon arrived at the school with a pair of underpants stuffed into a plastic bag, which was stuffed into a brown bag, which was stuffed into her purse, which was stuffed into a gently deteriorating large floral tote.

“I’m so sorry,” she’d told the principal. And then, “Agnes, did you apologize to your principal?” “No,” Agnes had said, and her mother had said, “Well,
apologize
to your
principal.
”

“I’m sorry I forgot my underpants,” Agnes had said, and something about it had struck her as funny, and she’d smiled.

“Do you find this
amusing
?” Sister Mary Catherine had asked, but she had not been looking at Agnes when she said it. She had been looking at Agnes’s mother, who’d been looking at Agnes. “Apologize
right,
” Agnes’s mother had said, and so Agnes had said, “I’m sorry I forgot my underpants” with a deeply sorrowful face, achieved by imagining her kitten smashed under the front wheel of her 16

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 father’s car. It was something she occasionally worried about.

“All right, then,” Sister Mary Catherine had said, and Agnes’s mother had said stiffly, “I’ll see you at home, Agnes.” Agnes knew what that tone of voice meant. Sometimes it meant that her raven-haired doll, Veronica, would be put on the high shelf in Agnes’s mother’s bedroom closet. Sometimes it meant no
Mickey Mouse Club.
And sometimes it meant a spanking with her grandmother’s ivory hairbrush. Occasionally Agnes was allowed to pick her own punishment, and always she picked not watching
The Mickey Mouse Club,
even though she had a big crush on Jimmie. She’d had a crush on Jimmie for a long time, with his manly torso under his tight T-shirt. These days, she would go for Buffalo Bob, with his funky leather outfit and cozy paunch. “Buy me a drink, Buffalo Bob?” she might say. In heaven, perhaps, this could happen, she could sit on a barstool between Buffalo Bob and Elvis.

Agnes believed in heaven, though she was too shy to tell anyone, especially her husband, Harold, who believed in nothing but believing in nothing. His favorite thing to say was “You believe that? What, are you nuts? You
believe
that?” She had stopped going to church on account of Harold, a difficult thing for her to do at first, but in the end she had not minded so much. She actually preferred celebrating the glory of God in other ways. Sometimes, aware of some transcendent moment disguised as ordinary life, she would whisper to herself, “Hallelujah.”

But Agnes still liked believing in heaven, liked imagining a starry firmament as background at night, and clouds infused with pastel colors during the day. She liked imagining a sense of perfect contentment, as well as an ability to reach those still on earth, should one desire to do so. No
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harp music—who could bear to listen to harp music unless you were having high tea at the Palm Court? No, the music would be jazz, Diana Krall style. And endless trays of fried foods floating by, garnished with pink magnolias, with white peonies, with deep purple orchids slashed by lines of gold and freckled with black. A million house-trained puppies who stayed puppies, and children who never got older than five. That was heaven.